Buck Sexton

Like, did you, you know, you deadnamed somebody?

And again, on the transgender thing, you can do this on a whole range of things.

Or, you know, you said something

that was in some way racially offensive that you didn't mean to, you for a time were supposed to go out and profess how steeply sorry you were to everybody, even if you didn't think you did anything wrong.

Because again, that is degrading and undermining and part of the process of rewiring your thinking and changing your thinking so that you'll fall within this framework that they're building of this is how you think about it, this is how you act.

Well, that's absolutely true.

You're seeing this with the rise of, and I would say, Ben, an expectation that you, meaning anyone who's following events, believes whatever the conspiracy theory of the moment may be.

In fact, you cannot be trusted in the online discourse these days unless you're somebody who goes, oh, that crazy conspiracy?

That's got to be true, right?

As long as it's anti-establishment or in some way breaking from whatever the dominant paradigm may be,

And I think a lot of people are taking advantage of this.

Political movements, podcasters, a whole range of folks are deciding that their move right now is to take a point of view that is just contrary to fact, but somehow because it is subversive,

It's inherently more honest or they present it as inherently more honest.

And you mentioned also in the defense against this, when you see the way that technology is moving so rapidly right now, such that people are able to create more and more effective technologies.

deep fakes, whatever you want to call them, and to use those to shift the narrative, we're going to get to a point, Ben, very soon, if we're not already there, where people will just say, oh, no, that's AI.

And you'll say, well, no, it's not.

Well, maybe it is, right?

And these are all subtle ways

to try to shape narratives toward things that are false.

And in terms of the defense of this, because that's something very important I thought about the whole time, like, why didn't I, why didn't you, why didn't so many people just fall hook, line, and sinker for COVID stuff, for example, or some of the COVID stuff, you know, Fauci on masks and all this other nonsense that ended up happening.