Why You Can't Take the Middle Ground in Politics Anymore

Malcolm and Simone discuss how political polarization makes it impossible to take a neutral stance today. Malcolm argues progressives force moderates into extremism by demanding endless concessions. He cites education reformers branded far right for helping disadvantaged kids.

Simone notes many organizations now prioritize self-preservation over their mission, leading to tribal dynamics. Malcolm adds conservative spaces permit diverse views while progressives enforce narrow dogma, even lying about opponents. He believes their incompetence and false attacks will galvanize the public against them.

Overall they conclude you must pick a side as the left doesn't allow middle ground. But the right welcomed them despite differing views, valuing truth-seeking over signaling status. They encourage watching for the progressive coalition's coming collapse.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] Scott Alexander, right?

Malcolm: Who writes Slate Star Codex. And him just talking like as truly neutral as possible. It's important to understand that in a society where the academic system and most media centers are controlled by one faction, if you talk neutrally, you are a threat to them because you weigh things. Towards the, the faction that's not in power, which is the conservative faction.

Malcolm: And so he very famously just really tries to give the truth in like the most non extremist, non hyperbolic way possible.

Malcolm: So, you know, he got outed by the New York Times and they did this really mean piece on him and

Malcolm: to me that even somebody as honestly, I think pretty progressive in terms of his sensibilities as him is now pretty solidly grouped with conservatives in terms of the online intellectual movement.

.Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, you beautiful human being.

Malcolm: Simone, you are the most beautiful human being who's ever [00:01:00] lived, and I love you to death. Now, today we are going to talk about political polarization, because this is an issue that has bedeviled us where we keep having people come to us and they're like, I'm going to start a nonpartisan version of your foundation, like the Prenatalist Foundation, because we Pretty openly aligned conservative.

Malcolm: And we're like, that's not going to go well for you or they'll even try to start a, a full on progressive one. And I'm like, that might go better than an unaligned one. But the question is, is why? So one, I mean, I think the easy answer for a lot of people is truth has become a team sport in our society.

Malcolm: Where people care less, you know, when they hear a piece of like, they can hear a piece of like research data, right? Which is just like. Furthering their understanding of reality, and they might become upset because it makes their side less likely to win.

Simone: Yeah, I'm fuzzy on this, but I think even some psychology studies have demonstrated that people, when presented with evidence that runs against their [00:02:00] political beliefs and their political party's belief will become even more trenched in their belief.

Simone: They won't be convinced or change their mind by that. So it, it does imply that truth is indeed a team

Malcolm: sport. And this is really damaging implications on reality. I mean, like, for example Germany, because of the environmentalists, shut down all its nuclear power plants? Not good. What were you thinking?

Malcolm: Like... This is a, you know, when we complain about like aesthetic conservatism versus real conservatism, this is the perfect example of aesthetic environmentalism versus real environmentalism, nuclear power, bad, dirty, big nuclear silos and deformed people living near them. You know, it's like, okay, that's like a weird, like aesthetic of environmentalism from the 1980s, but like, we should know better now.

Malcolm: Especially if you don't have any other way than to generate that power than Russian oil, which it turned out you didn't have any backup plan for, it was [00:03:00] profoundly stupid. And so I should say, we don't just have this problem on the right of like this, like, I'm going to be, you know, aesthetically and I'm, I'm, I'll link the video here or you can check it out, like aesthetic conservative versus real conservative, because we do have this problem on the right, but the left has it as well.

Malcolm: Where they just stop caring about reality, and it's just about whether or not their team is winning. So I'd say that there's sort of a few reasons why this doesn't work. But I think one of the most important was when Simone went over with me, and I want to have early in our video here, you know, because I watched some watch time on these, and I'm like, well, let's at least get the good ideas to people faster, right?

Malcolm: Which was, do you want to go into it, Simone?

Simone: I don't remember it. What, what, can you remind me and I'll

Malcolm: explain it? Okay, your idea was that if you try to hold the middle ground, the progressives will just keep pushing you further and further and further to extreme positions. Oh, okay,

Simone: okay. Okay, I think I remember the argument I made and I think you can make this more nuanced thing, but I remember what I'd said to you

Malcolm: at least.

Malcolm: So progressives [00:04:00] essentially don't allow individuals to hold the middle ground ideologically. Well,

Simone: specifically, I think what happens is, They more center people, even if they are progressive, get increasingly pushed progressive because if they attempt to apologize or correct their behavior, if their behavior is pointed out as being problematic, they will, they will be further punished and then further forced to go in a very, very Thank you.

Simone: extreme position. So yeah, you basically don't get rewarded for deviating even slightly from the most extreme positions and in many circles at least. And then if you apologize, if you, if you engage in any way in a way that, that signals, no, I really still do want to be a part of this community, you are forced to become more extreme.

Simone: Does that make sense?

Malcolm: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So, so you can think about it this way. The progressive community it basically will say, okay, you, you want to be a part of multiple communities. You want to be a part of the conservative world, you want to be a part of the progressive world. That's what you're really saying.

Malcolm: Like, I want to [00:05:00] be, Broadly accepted within both these communities. That's what a person is saying when they're politically neutral. You can't just say, oh, I'm not engaging with either, right? And then the progressive community comes to you and they'll be like, well, you need to change what you did here. You need to change what you did here.

Malcolm: You need to apologize for this. The moment you do that. You have lost because then they, they make their demands more extreme and you get no reward for conceding. But if you do not concede, if you do not change your behavior based on what they're saying, then you are said to be a far right outsider or a racist or a Nazi or eugenicists, you know, all the sorts of accusations we have appointed at us.

Malcolm: But they get pointed at literally anyone who disagrees with progressives. If you just disagree with progressives and it's. Irrelevant what the facts are. I mean, one of my favorite things was a guy was like, look, I'm obviously not a racist, I have a black wife, and I have black children. And they were like, well that's extra sign of your racism because you disagree with us, and you're around black people, so you must be victimizing them.

Malcolm: And it's [00:06:00] like, come on guys, like, get it together, that's, all you're showing there is that you're just using the word as a bludgeon. For your political enemies and people who want to be seen within your group, and they know if they get this label of racist or this label of, you know, Nazi or fascist or whatever, that they're not going to be able to engage with your community.

Malcolm: And so you use that, you, you, you spread this, you know, as we've said. Hilariously progressives who call us eugenicists are like, yes, you, eugenicists, you're dirtying the gene pool and I want to use the government to limit your reproductive rights in terms of the technology that you're engaging with so that you don't dirty the gene pool with all of this weird stuff you're doing.

Malcolm: And I'm like, that is literally exactly eugenics. And yet you use the title of eugenics. And the accusation of eugenics on us to try to force us to engage with your way. But this is one reason, but it's not the only reason why you really can't take the middle ground anymore. [00:07:00] Another reason is that you just will have no one to support you.

Malcolm: So if we tried to take the middle ground, we could be othered by progressives while not having a conservative line of support, which is really, really, really damaging. Another thing I'd label, and it's a little sad thing that progressives have so taken control of the narratives that even some conservative influencers believe this, but and we have a whole video on this, it's called like the greatest lie in history, which is that the progressive base is actually as racist or more racist than the conservative base.

Malcolm: And I don't mean like in like vague wishy washy, like affirmative action is racist. I mean, until Obama was erect. Elected president. Fewer Democrats in the U. S. said they would vote for a black president than conservatives. Like, literally, it's still the party of the Klan. They just have hidden that because they control the media.

Malcolm: And, and then they use like a few clowns in like the public to try to connect racists with conservatives. When the, the [00:08:00] Democratic Party is and always has been the party of the Klan. They just... Do things a little differently now and and you can see this in the actual data. So so check that video.

Malcolm: But it is it is really sad. So can you tell us why you that things have to be so politically entrenched these days?

Malcolm: Well, I can go over one if you want me to go further, which is to say that if you look at something like the educational system, like we came at this and this is actually a problem that Teach for America has, because, you know, we have a lot of friends and like high up in Teach for America you can not make meaningful reforms in the educational system and sideways progressives at all.

Malcolm: So Teach for America basically attempted to do this and a lot of people don't know, but they're basically about to die now because they can't get any new recruits. They became known despite being the. One former number one employer for Ivy League graduates and to an incredibly efficacious organization work.

Malcolm: They did really made a difference, but it made things harder for, like, long term [00:09:00] union paying teachers because they had to change things to adopt to these new strategies and they had to compete with Young, educated people who were like, actually, what you're doing is causing long term damage and they're like, I don't want to change what I'm doing.

Malcolm: I'm going to the union about this. And because the union then turned against Teach for America or the unions turned against Teach for America now became not cool, like it becomes known as not cool among progressive circles to work for them. And I'm like, you know, you could just brand yourself as a conservative organization and you'd be, you'd have a, Whole fresh recruit of people you could take from and they would actually be interested in your mission because it's actually helping kids.

Malcolm: And this is something where if you do any sort of like charter school advocacy, voucher program advocacy, anyone who looks at the statistics on this would obviously see that it helps students. Like it's just like reality is. Disintermediating in the education system is good for students, but it hurts teachers unions and teachers unions are an incredibly important voting bloc for Democrats.

Malcolm: Like they would not, if they lost, if a, if a Democratic candidate lost the teachers unions, they could not win an election just period, like any election. [00:10:00] And because the progressive movement is so tied with the Democratic, U. S. Democratic politics, they have to then shape reality and truth around. The, the interest of those political interests, i.

Malcolm: e. even if it's hurting children, even if it's disproportionately hurting poor children, well, the truth needs to be that charter schools are bad that even if pretending this is hurting children because it's Or, or, at least that it's still open to debate, at least that scientists go both ways on the issues and economics researchers go both ways, they do not.

Malcolm: They're just like strictly a good thing. If you actually look at the data, not like what people are publishing, because obviously people, you know, like keep their jobs and stuff like that. But I mean, like, just look at the data. It's just like so overwhelmingly obvious. And, and this is one of those things where it's an interesting thing for a lot of people who want to like.

Malcolm: Help with education, especially if they want to help with education in lower income communities. Cause a lot of people, they're like, yeah, this could really help these people. And they realize the minute they actually try to change anything, they get [00:11:00] branded as like far right activists or far right extremists.

Malcolm: And it's always. It's somewhat humorous to me because it's like either you can take that branding and you can continue and continue to fix things or you can bend over backwards to try to, you know, accommodate them. And this is why stuff was like, you know, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg, right? He donated a hundred million dollars.

Malcolm: To the Newark school system and over half of the money went to a bribe to the teachers unions to allow them to pay teachers more with the pittance that was left for good performance. That was the thing that teachers unions didn't want to happen for teachers to be paid more for good performance. And when I say a bribe, of course, it, it went to like unpaid something, something, basically it went just as a cash payout to members of the union in the local area to allow them to make these other changes.

Malcolm: And this is what happens when in an issue like education, you're like, okay, I'm going to try to go at this from a politically neutral or even progressively favorable position. And it is created [00:12:00] that way. It is structured that way to prevent things from ever getting better. Because if things got better, they would have to change and unions.

Malcolm: axiomatically hate change, right? Like they are about maintaining the existing power hierarchy within a field.

Simone: Well, but I mean, to that, to your point there, that's not just unions. That's pretty much, I think we've gotten to a point where many political and governmental organizations have become extremely strong and entrenched and organizationally.

Simone: Ossified but also very powerful and they've gotten to the point where they've essentially grown tumorous cancers that we talk about in the pragmatist guide to governance that are more interested in self perpetuation than in doing their job. So the focus then becomes Really protecting and entrenching rather than working.

Simone: And so it would make sense that there's a lot of, you know, team sports and alliance creating and, and sort of power mongering and protecting, right? Because, you know, the, [00:13:00] the imperative of many, many organizations, both political and governmental are to just survive. Like they're not, as we learned from doing work in the political space, they're not effective.

Simone: They're not actually really doing their job. They're putting most of their money and time and effort. and skill into raising money and telling a certain story that will lead to more donations or more support or larger budgets. But then I also think that the larger phenomenon with the way that internet communities work contributes to this as well.

Simone: And that, you know, in a dominance hierarchy, as you say, in the pragmatist guide to governance, the way that you show your dominance in many cases is through your extremism vis a vis the special interest of whatever group there is. So I think because so much of political action has become really dislodged from like, oh, helping a community, helping policy, you know, changing this, I think the economy would work a little bit more efficiently this way.

Simone: It's really become what team are you on? That therefore the most easy way to show your status in these communities isn't [00:14:00] by writing policy or by working with a politician or doing local issues like making progress on local issues, but rather. By showing how extreme you are in your views, because that makes you even more Democratic or even more

Malcolm: Republican.

Malcolm: That's such a good point. And I really want to, you know, explore this point that you're making more here, because I think it's very important for our viewers. You know, that the democratic party does self eat itself due to this weird dominance fight. And you keep seeing this in local elections. Like I've heard from people in local elections.

Malcolm: Yeah, we're out rating the Republicans, but due to these internal dominant struggles and these hierarchy fights we have within our local offices over stuff like, are we hiring, you know, the right. Makeup of ethnic groups. Are we hiring the right makeup of disabilities? Are we properly? Because that's how you show your dominance.

Malcolm: Wording. Yeah. These are all dominance fights, but you know, they're, they're, they're, they're absolutely so infesting the progressive side that they are preventing efficacious work. Whereas we do have these problems on the conservative side as well. Absolutely. We have [00:15:00] these problems. I believe that we can overcome them.

Malcolm: I believe that the dominant faction of the conservative group can prevent these sort of virtue spirals from happening. And we do this through shaming, which you constantly see on this channel, individuals who engage with this type of conservatism. This is not us, like being anti conservative when we're like, you know, you flexing your aesthetic conservatism is a problem and will lead to virtue spirals and will lead to problems.

Malcolm: It is actually a problem. It actually causes. Problems. It is stupid and a waste of time. And don't do it. Like, just don't do it. But the other thing that you mentioned there and you were citing something that was actually really concrete that we have information on that your average person wouldn't have information on.

Malcolm: So we ran the selection thing that had us, we were being funded by conservatives, but it, it had us aligned with progressives a few times. And so we got internal access to some of their data. Yeah. Like these big democratic get out to vote organizations. And we learned that they [00:16:00] performed literally 6, 000 percent worse than us on a per dollar spent level.

Malcolm: And the core innovation we had was just AB testing. Well, and a few other really sophisticated things we were doing. But the point being is that it appeared that they hadn't like, they would send these emails, which you might've seen was political emails was like borders on the email. And then like internal texts that was like.

Malcolm: A page and a half of like text was like images and stuff. And I'm like, this looks like a spam email from the nineties. Like you guys know the reason why all the companies stopped doing this is because it doesn't work. And they were like, yeah, but we don't want to risk experimenting with things. If you looked at the emails that our org was sending.

Malcolm: They never went above three sentences, usually one to two sentences, simple action items meant to emotionally engage people. That's our consulting thing. If you want to like get all the information that other people pay a lot of money for when we're talking about these sources of political things.

Malcolm: But yeah, that's literally how we did it. And it, [00:17:00] it, to me was not. Shocking to me. I was thinking about like, what gets me to act on an email? Like it has to basically piss me off. Like if it's a spam email, it needs to be short. Like people only read one to two sentences. They don't read anything long form.

Malcolm: They don't read anything that has these fancy images on it. So take all that out. And emotionally engage them as quickly as you can and that will get them to act in the way that you, you want them to act but that they, that they hadn't even considered this because, and what we realized, if their emails were not about doing what people, when they said we're taking donations to do X or Y, they weren't about doing X or Y, they were about In raising more money.

Malcolm: They were about doing what seemed like plausibly an okay thing to be doing with the money so that they could raise more money so that they could pay more salaries. And this is a, you know, the word you use is, is wicked problem, Simone, because it's a very difficult problem to fight at the level of a nonprofit if you're not giving to a nonprofit that's not like,

Malcolm: Which [00:18:00] is, well, that's the thing is

Simone: it's really hard to find a nonprofit like that because nonprofits like that do their job and either fix the problem or disassemble as soon as their specific job is done and, or fail to raise money because they were so busy doing their job. And then basically the only nonprofits that persistently exist over time are extremely good.

Simone: And making money at raising money and making the problem seem bigger, which frankly is a lot easier when the problem doesn't go away. So I just, I think it's, it's, it's going to be really hard for people to find any. Long lasting organization that is not ossified to at least some extent by this level of corruption.

Simone: And I mean, I, I used to use organizations like Charity Navigator to try to figure out like the percentage of spending that was program spending, but even those numbers are really fudged. So I think now, like, if I were to donate, I mean, like the way we donate money now is actually how I would always donate money, which is like.[00:19:00]

Simone: Put money toward a very specific discreet project with a start and an end. And metrics that enable me to see if it did its job, period. Like nothing, you know, see no organization that is going to have staff members that is going to have people who, you know, depend on it for a salary. Because those people are going to be incentivized to keep the organization alive much more than they're going to be incentivized to solve the

Malcolm: problem.

Malcolm: I mean, our nonprofit spending goes to our own projects, largely speaking, and It goes to our own projects where we also have the secondary nonprofit goal of you should never be donating to anything that can't become self sustaining. And by that what I mean that can't become because when something provides something of value to other people in our society they pay for it.

Malcolm: Like that's what that's what efficiency gains are. Right? And so if you have actually created something that's providing value, eventually people will pay for that value. And if they're not paying for that value, well, then you're not creating value. You're not actually helping people. There is always a way to profit when you're making people's [00:20:00] lives better.

Malcolm: And so we look for ways that we can put, you know, some money down now to create something that then spins up itself and improves the quality of a lot of people's lives. But this is very different than the way traditional nonprofit organizations work. Yeah. But it's really sad. I'd say another thing is you know, if you, one thing that I've been very surprised about is.

Malcolm: You know, coming from a world where you're in the progressive community is how narrow they are in the ideas that they accept and will allow to be voiced yet how diverse the ideas in the conservative community are almost to a fault today, which is very interesting to me. You know, it's, it's a community where you can have a conservative Muslim and a conservative Jew in, in the same.

Malcolm: organization who have almost literally nothing similar about their world perspectives. And, and then people like us who are, you know, conservative atheists, I guess you could call it, or, or secular Christians. Which, [00:21:00] which have pretty unique views, yet we've been pretty Accepted by most of the, the voices in the movement, except for some where we could like disrupt their power hierarchy.

Malcolm: Like, who was the guy who called us like nerds that no one should listen to? Oh, Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro. Yeah. But other than that, you know, it's, it's, it's been pretty interesting. I also think that if you want to look at an example of why you can't take the middle ground, a great example that happened pretty publicly, which was the guy we were just meeting was last week was Scott Alexander, right?

Malcolm: Who writes Slate Star Codex. And him just talking like as truly neutral as possible. It's important to understand that in a society where the academic system and most media centers are controlled by one faction, if you talk neutrally, you are a threat to them because you weigh things. Towards the, the faction that's not in power, which is the conservative faction.

Malcolm: And so he very famously just really tries to give the truth in like the most non extremist, non hyperbolic way possible. He always, anything we care about, he's always like, [00:22:00] well, you may be worrying a bit more. Everything's always less. And as we point out, you know, you're talking about prediction markets, because we're at this prediction market event.

Malcolm: We're like, look, if you always bet that any extremely alarmist prediction is wrong. Generally, you are going to make money or you are going to make prediction market points on average. However, You are also going to do less meaningful things because you are going to miss the things that actually turn out to be right in terms of outrageous predictions.

Malcolm: So, you know, he got outed by the New York Times and they did this really mean piece on him and it sort of forced him in many ways to, to become, it, it, it helped his, his public rise a lot because

Malcolm: to me that even somebody as honestly, I think pretty progressive in terms of his sensibilities as him is now pretty solidly grouped with conservatives in terms of the online intellectual movement.

Simone: Yeah. But again, I, I think that [00:23:00] that's actually a really great example of what it's like when you are punished, you know, for for being insufficiently progressive. That, you know, there's like nothing you can do. It's, it's really crazy. And, and also the accusations that were made about him were so tentative that it's, it's almost a joke.

Simone: Like they, they were really accusing him of things that weren't even true. But it was enough to endanger his professional practice to make him extremely uncomfortable, of course, and to sort of like really disrupt his life. So it is. But you know what? He didn't apologize. And I think he did the

Malcolm: right thing.

Malcolm: He did the right thing, and it helped him.

Simone: Yeah, well, I mean, there's nothing

Malcolm: to apologize for. Like, I'm not, I'm not backing down from these positions. You guys are being unrealistic and unreasonable. And you're being little turds basically. And it ended up helping him. Now, of course, he's not hyperbolic like us.

Malcolm: Like our whole public image is based on being kind of bombastic and combative a little bit. I mean, not in like a mean way. I mean, [00:24:00] unless you're talking about Yad, then it's in a mean way, but other than that, not in a mean way. And. His is not. His is not. He is genuinely, like, very middle line, and it was shocking to me, and this is actually interesting to me, and it's how I know the progressives are going to eventually lose, is in this power consolidation play, They are kicking out many allies through potential allies through very tentative in a way that makes it increasingly obvious to the general public that one, these groups control the positions of power in our society to they are willing to lie to them pretty aggressively.

Malcolm: And three, they do not have their best interest at heart. And I think at this

Simone: point, there's no way to win also. I think it's,

Malcolm: it's just, yeah, there's no way to win. And if you're not in the cult, you know, I, I think it's pretty obvious that it is a cult and that it's a cult that doesn't have your best interest at heart anymore.

Malcolm: And that the only way to fight them is, is to unfortunately align yourself. I won't say unfortunately, fortunately, because they have so many [00:25:00] beliefs that are aligned with us. You know, since Trump was elected, we're really like, well, Now we sort of agree with almost everything the conservative party stands for which is pretty interesting because before him, you know, before this major political realignment, now we had a lot of pretty major disagreements with the way the conservative party was structured.

Malcolm: And it's, it's a lot less of a, a, a smelly pill to, to target and sort of the Trump and post Trump, especially the post Trump era. Although I do think Trump will probably be our next president. So it's, it's not post Trump yet. Right.

Simone: We're in for it. An interesting future. Well, unless they have a change, cause I don't see how in the age of the internet it can change.

Simone: But I, I think it would be really great

Malcolm: if it did. Here's how I think it's, it's one of those things where it's, it's slow in the background until it's all at once. I think anyone who is engaged with like, what is actually true about reality. When they investigate the data, it's really obvious that many positions.

Malcolm: That you would come to are not [00:26:00] positions that progressives allowed. They will kick you out of your community, their community for having, which means that anyone who's interested in like actually what's true about reality, not what helps me signal my status to other people that they will side with the conservative party.

Malcolm: I mean, this is what the intellectual dark web really is when people talk about this. And, and because of that, that means we get the best talent. When I talk with smart young people, they're like, yeah, I mean, I want to stay under the radar, but secretly I identify as this, this, and this conservatively speaking.

Simone: Oh man, the number of times we hear that.

Malcolm: Yeah. And it's because they have made themselves the big boogeyman, the big oppressor, the big, you know, we do this, this and this. And the accusations they are leveling at conservatives with little research, like the racism episodes that the progressive base is actually as racist or more racist than the conservative based in like the most traditional sense, the accusations like, Oh, these conservatives are racist.

Malcolm: They're just obviously not true from the data. [00:27:00] And, and, and then they use these words to be like, why would you associate with these racist conservatives? And when you look at the data and you don't see this as being true, you're like, wait, have I been lied to? And nothing galvanizes people against you like lying to them, like convincing them to malign or hate somebody based on something that turns out to be entirely fictional.

Malcolm: And . That is exactly the stance and tactics at the progressive party is using so aggressively right now. And then on top of all of this, when you're in this status signal, you know, fight, you know, within the Progressive Party to be accepted by this community, you know, desperately something to be accepted by this completely narcissistic.

Malcolm: unrealistic demigod that you won't have kids because that's not what you're focused on. Right. And it's sad, but it's, it's, it's sad that so many people have been caught up by it, that it has so many positions of power in our society, but it's just so astoundingly inefficient. Now, of course we have the fear that they then use AI or they use government control in a way similar to like what [00:28:00] China is doing.

Malcolm: They, they, they shut down people's Ways to make income like they did with the trucker protest, like anyone who is even like reasonable on the trucker protest, they would like literally shut down their bank accounts in Canada. Like, we have seen how far they have had to go to keep control when they are obviously not on the average citizen side, when they are not on the working classes side anymore, when they are the party of racism now.

Malcolm: And yet they need to hide all of this when they have organizations like Antifa that literally act like, like Nazi fascist goons. Like you look at what the people were doing in the lead up to the election of Hitler and you look at like these goons who would go out and rough up people and like agitate was in protest and they, they like dress, they act, they talk like Antifa.

Malcolm: Antifa's goals are like literally actually fascism. And yet they, they call themselves anti fascist and you see pretty quickly, Oh, these guys are actually like transparently evil. And actually transparently support fascism and what they want from a government, the government that fascist [00:29:00] reinforces their values on anyone who thinks differently than them.

Malcolm: I mean, I think that this is all pretty transparent to people and that they're going to lose the control they have now. Yeah,

Simone: we'll see. I think that it can get a lot worse first.

Malcolm: But we'll, we'll, we'll fight. We're here. We we'll win. We've got plans in action across many domains and we know other people who do too.

Malcolm: And as we always say, if this podcast had a motto, it would be thank God the forces arrayed against us are not as competent as they are malevolent. If we lived in that timeline where they were competent as well, Oh, I wouldn't want to be there. But they are wildly incompetent.

Malcolm: And when our money goes 6, 000 fold further per dollar spent to things like our foundation versus theirs they just can't compete. They're not nimble enough because they don't get people who relate to truth. They get to people [00:30:00] who relate to status seeking. Yeah.

Simone: So it goes. Well, I love you and I love, you know, not being on the oppressive, not allowed to talk about certain things side of the spectrum because I guess I, I kind of grew up there and it, it wasn't just not being allowed to talk about certain things.

Simone: It was not being allowed to admit certain things about yourself. And. That wasn't great for me. I really like it on the other side. So thanks for bringing me over there for showing me I had the right

Malcolm: to do that. It reminds me of a scene from Madagascar where they have the fun side of the island and then the not fun side of the island and they're like, you're always welcome on the fun side of the island.

Malcolm: Just come over. It's a party over here. You don't need to be so sad and angry at everyone. And, and this is true. Progressives on average are much sadder than Republicans. They haven't since Pew started recording this [00:31:00] data. And, and I, and I just love that scene. And I've even gone back to watch it cause I'm like.

Malcolm: The, the, the the fun side of the island scene, because that's the way it is when you, when you join the conservative side and you realize that all the fun people are already over here and we're all having fun and you're welcome over here and we are not the boogeyman that you have been told.

Simone: Yeah.

Simone: Well, speaking of fun, let's go play with our kids. Yeah. I love you. I love you too.

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