[CLIP] Liz Wheeler: The Grip of Technocracy and How Self-Avowed Marxists Enforce Social Coercion

You look at some of these cities like, say, San Francisco, LA, other places where, for example, there's these open-air drug markets. That's one way to describe the scene. There's this radical libertarianism that's promoted where you say, well, this person who's addicted to this drug, we can't impose ourselves on them and prevent them from taking this somehow, because for some reason that would be imposing on their rights, but it's perfectly fine for them to kill themselves with the drug. It's weird. It's like our priorities have become inverted. We lost that guiding principle that you're outlining here. It's very interesting because this problem that I am discussing isn't just relegated to legislatures and statutes and the boring stuff. This is evident in our culture. It's evident actually in the back and forth that I've been having with Andrew Tate for the past few weeks. Andrew Tate, obviously, is this Mascubro influencer. He was the most Googled man in the world a year ago. He tells young men that they are under attack by our society. He accurately actually diagnoses this cultural ill that our society vilifies men. Then he prescribes as the antidote materialism and pornography and exploitation of women and worship of self, this very self-destructive prescription for a problem that he accurately diagnoses. This is perfectly emblematic of what has happened in our political cultural environment. It's fairly easy to look at something that's wrong and identify it as wrong, but what's not as easy is to define what's right. It's easy to point out what's wrong, but it's not easy to define what's right. What happens in our culture and what has happened culturally and politically is exactly what has happened with Andrew Tate, where you have someone who, to his credit, is courageous enough to point out a bad thing that's happening in culture, even when that is unpopular to point out. It resonates with a lot of people who are the victims, who are being victimized by this assault, in this case, on their masculinity. But then because we as a culture and as a political body, as a nation, have surrendered the idea that objective truth exists, that natural law must reign if we want society to be well-ordered, we fall prey to a false diagnosis. We fall prey to a self-destructive diagnosis as a solution to the problem, even if the problem was correctly identified. This has happened in politics, too. It's really libertarianism. Libertarianism doesn't want to define what's right. They want that to be a morally relativistic, individual truth. They want everyone to have the license to make those decisions about morality themselves, even when it impacts the larger society. That is not conservatism. The Republican Party has embraced libertarianism as conservatism, but it's not. In fact, the framers of our Constitution rejected libertarianism because that's essentially what the Articles of Confederation were. The Articles of Confederation were a libertarian document. It didn't work. It created chaos for the first years of our country. So the Constitutional Convention was convened, and they came up with a document that was not libertarian, a document that understood the necessity of a moral order in society and gave government the just authority to recognize objective reality, to recognize natural law. When I say it's not a new idea, it's not even a new practice. We have laws in our nation right now, for example, where children are not allowed to even walk across the floor of a casino. Why is that? It's not because they're going to be physically harmed walking across the floor of a casino, walking through slot machines. It's because we as a society acknowledge that that's immoral. It's morally harmful for a child, not physically harmful, morally harmful. That's just one example of many. We have laws that govern morality, even if it doesn't dictate religious practice. The left would like us to believe that those two things are the same thing, and those two things are not the same thing. The people at home, entrusted as the protectors, meaning our elected officials, they willingly surrendered the definition of words. Again, I know it's incredibly unpopular, even among Republicans, to talk about gay marriage, but gay marriage was the beginning of the redefinition of words that Republicans allowed. There was no limiting principle on it at the time, and we're seeing the repercussions of that. It's an incredibly important battle that Republicans simply surrendered because they were like, oh, I don't care what you do in your own home. I don't want to define for someone what happiness might mean. Who am I to boss someone around? Separation of church and state, blah, blah, blah. They willingly surrendered this definition, not realizing the power that it would give to the other side. We're suffering from it today. I wasn't thinking about any of these implications at the time. The people at the time who spoke out against the efforts to legalize gay marriage, who warned about the repercussions, were accused of engaging in slippery slope fallacies. They were called Bible thumpers. They were castigated as the religious right, things that a lot of conservatives didn't want to be associated with those names, and so they backed off. But I think we're such a prosperous society. We have enjoyed such immense freedom and wealth and opportunity, just this amazing life that we have in the United States of America that we forget, or it's not tangible, we can't feel it, that there are people who want to take it away from us, who have the ability to take it away from us, and that if we don't constantly fight back against it, not just defensively holding it at bay, but if we don't hold down the fort, then someone else is going to occupy it. People call it the politics of personal destruction. Another way to talk about it is heckler's veto. This has been such an incredibly powerful tool of this authoritarian left. It is. The heckler's veto is, I'm going to intimidate you into silence, even if the law doesn't require it. I'm going to socially coerce you into compliance. We've seen this everywhere from on college campuses. I went to speak at James Madison University this past April, and there were a thousand radical trans activists. The speech was literally titled The Ideology of Transgenderism. I was talking about where did this idea of the gender spectrum come from? Where did the idea that if you identify as a woman, you can be a woman, where did this come from? Of course, the answer to that is queer theory. It's a critical theory that begot of the Frankfurt School. I was talking about the intellectual roots of this, and the debate team was so objected to hearing a discussion on this that they condemned my appearance at this school. Now, I'm pretty used to being protested. I've been in this work for a long time. I understand it, and I understand how to respond. But they were hoping to intimidate me away from being able to speak. They were hoping that threats of violence against me and my family and against the facility and the students that we're hosting would cause my viewpoint not to be discussed. I'm saying this because I care so much about our children and our families and our country and these cultural institutions, but we've become so worried about uncomfortable conversations that even on the personal level, let alone the governmental level or the cultural level, we bow to the hecklers veto quite often, and it empowers them. You have this impression that a much larger group than just the people that are very, very loud, that's agreeing to that position, so you back down. I talk about this a little bit in one of the chapters of my book about technocracy. Technocracy is ruled by the experts. A lot of us became more familiar with this during COVID when it was like, oh, all hail King Fauci. Listen to what he says. He is the predominant expert. Therefore, we are not allowed to question or dissent or have opinions that differ from his. He's a perfect example of technocracy, although he's far from the only example. It's not an isolated individual here or there that makes up the technocratic class. This is an idea. I was researching this for my book, and what I found is the idea of technocracy goes all the way back to French socialists or this Russian Bolshevik scientist physician who accurately described technocracy ruled by the experts, which is kind of the heckler's veto, right? If we make enough noise, you're not allowed to dissent. He described it as a stepping stone. Technocracy is a stepping stone from capitalism to communism, because once individuals who maybe aren't in positions of elected power are unable to dissent, unable to question, then they have sacrificed their ability to identify objective truth, and they've surrendered that power to redefine words to someone arbitrary who's claiming to be an expert.