We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Make sure
to subscribe to the premium version of our website too. We're joined today by
the one and only Liz Wheeler, who's here in person at the Federalist headquarters,
Liz, host of the Liz Wheeler Show. Of course, thank you
for joining us, Thank you for having me. You guys have a cool
set up here. Cool is one word for it. Ramshackle might be another.
But you have a crazy situation unfolding right now. Not surprising, not
unpredictable, but crazy. Nonetheless, because you're slated to speak at James Madison
Universe City on the twenty sixth of April, and as you just mentioned,
already not just like the day before, which is typical of campus lectures,
but already a week before. As we're talking today, things are getting really,
really heated. The speech is titled the Ideology of Transgenderism in Disclosure.
I think it is sponsored by a Young America's Foundation where I work part time,
and they just do such a fantastic job with these events. Liz,
what is already happening a week before You're supposed to come to campus and give
a perfectly reasonable speech with a dissenting viewpoint from the campus I guess consensus on
what transgenderism is. Yeah, this is going to be a really fun event.
There is a lot of discussion, there's a lot of protests that are
already cropping up. We will be streaming it live online just for anybody who
is not able to be there in person. So it'll be next Wednesday,
April twenty sixth at six pm. I did just get to strike against my
YouTube channel, so TBD where this will be live stream but you can go
to YAFTV that their YouTube channel to watch to watch it live streaming. Yeah,
this, this speech is so it's so funny to hear the response from
the transgender activists on campus. We have the James Madison University Debate team issued
a statement condemning me and condemning this conversation. That was my particular favorite because
it's the debate team. It's the debate team in their excuse. I read
their whole statement. It was very long. It would not have if I'm
the coach of their debate team, I would not have been proud of the
statement. And the reason that they don't want me to come to campus is
because they say I'm not a good faith I'm not taking a good faith position
here, and I'm really truly interested. I hope they show up to the
speech. I'm really truly interested to ask them what they mean by that.
There's of course a lot of transgender activists who are saying that I'm hateful.
I don't. I don't hate anyone. I don't hate transgender people or people
who identify as transgender. I don't hate people who suffer from genders. For
you, I actually cared deeply about these people. That's why I want to
go and talk to them. There was a state representative actually from Connecticut who
is an alumni of JMU, I believe, who accuse me of saying that
I want to that I want to eradicate transgender people or I want them not
to exist. And this is my question for the For all the people who
are going to be outside, I think there's going to be this this quote
unquote queer safe space with maybe um with with some transgender people there. I
don't know if it's exactly a drag show, I'm not. I'm not super
clear on what that protest is going to be, but there's there's clearly going
to be some protests. But my question for the students, especially given the
lies that are being being told, I of course never said any such thing,
is this woman is willing to tell you this lie. It's the monster
Billy falls. If she's willing to tell you this lie, what else has
she lied to you about? What else have the has the left lied to
you about? What else is queer theory lying to you about? Because you
and I know that that the transgender ideology is a lie. We know that
men or men and women or women, and you can't A man can't be
a woman just because he feels like one, and a woman can't be a
man just because she wants to identify as a man. That's just that's not
based in reality. It's not real. And so when you step back,
you step back from this, you realize, Okay, well, somebody's telling
a lie here right. I'm sitting here and saying I don't hate transgender people.
Of course I don't. I'm saying I actually care deeply about you.
I love you as as fellow children of God. The transgender ideology, the
activists are saying the same thing to these people. They're saying, we love
you, we want to take care of you, we have the best interest.
Both things can't be true because what we want for these people are radically
different. They're an opposite ends of the spectrum. So what that leaves is
a situation where one of us is lying it's either me or it's them.
And what I want to talk to these these students, both the students that
already agree with me, these wonderful students from the Young America's Foundation who have
courageously put on this event despite the intense backlash from their fellow students, and
also all of those people who are so upset who feel that my presence on
their campus is a form of quote unquote violence, which, of course I
say this laughingly, because of course it's not. Of course it's not violence
at all. It's it's of course free speech. But it's more than that,
I'm there because I care about I care about you. I'm there because
I want the best for your life and if you're given this situation where one
of us is lying to you, I want to make the case that the
people lying to the students are the queer theorists. In that case, of
course, between you and I know is a very easy case to make.
But I want to reach the hearts of these students. I want to reach
the minds of these students who are being exploited by queer theorists. Queer theory,
as we know, is not just the idea of tolerance and inclusion and
equality under the law. We all agree with that, we all want equal
rights for all people. We don't want people discriminated against and deprive basic human
rights based on their lifestyle choices. But queer theory is not inclusion, intolerance,
and equality. Queer theory is a Marxist ideology. Some people listening maybe
like, well, that's a little bit extreme. It's not queer theory if
you look into the origins. It poses this idea that lgbt QIA people are
so marginalized that they need to revolt against their so called oppressors. This is
the classic Marxist dialectic, and the oppressors in this situation are painted to be
the white, straight ciss Christian people. And so when we see this agitation
on campus, these transgender activists that are claiming that my words are violence and
claiming that they need to do something to stop my hate speech, this is
exactly what queer theory is calling for. And I'm that's why I'm going to
campus to tell them the truth. It's so important when people accuse you of
being hateful to say no, you're thinking of Michael Knowles kidding, of course,
Michael did a great job in the side debate this week between him.
Yeah, that stuff was crazy, huh, fantastic. I actually was going
to ask you about queer theory next, because you've been talking about it a
lot recently, which is helpful because I think if people haven't been on a
college campus in the last ten fifteen years, they may have never encountered queer
theory by that name. It's seeped into pop culture, of course, but
queer theories you've been looking into it tell us more about the kind of cultural
Marxism that's behind it, and tell us more about where we have seen it
start to take over popular culture, academia and the way that we approach each
other as human beings. Basically yes, yeah, So, Emily, I
gotta tell you this is such a black hole, like this black hole of
nastiness to go down. I've read the founding documents, I've read the quote
unquote academic academic dissertations on queer theory, and would what I would how I
would explain it to people? How would I explain to the people that we're
talking to today. Is five years ago, maybe not even five years ago,
two years ago, three years ago, when critical race theory started to
become prominent, we didn't know what critical race theory was. Right, we
understood that this poisonous idea that was being taught to our children, that white
children are racist just inherently based on the fact that they're white, and black
children are pressed based just on their skin color. That we understood that this
was bad, that this was wrong. We didn't want this to be taught
to our children. And meanwhile, as we were recognizing that this was bad
and asking well, where did this come from? What is this and how
did it become so pervasive in our schools and in our corporations, in our
culture, at the same time, the left was telling us that critical race
theory was just teaching history accurately. You know, they said, oh,
if critical race theory is nothing more than making sure that students are educated and
knowing that some things that happened in the United States around race before the Civil
rights movement and obviously slavery the founding of our country were not good things to
happen. And so you had this confusing ball of a narrative that needed to
be untangled, and eventually we were able to completely disentangle truth from falsehood,
and we were able to establish that note that the principle that was being taught
to children that white kids are racist and black kids are oppressed, that's critical
race theory. It's not history. Critical race theory is a neo Marxist ideology
that's actually in the intent of it. The goal of it is the same
thing as queer theory. The goal of it is to pit one demographic of
people, black people, against another demographic, white people, in order to
create this revolution. So queer theory is the same thing. It is a
neo Marxist critical theory. And if you read the founding document, it's called
Thinking Sex. It's written by a big fat lesbian named Gale Ruben. It's
the most disturbing document, Queer Theory, posits all of the things that children
are being taught about gender identity. It contends that there is no such thing
as biological sex, that gender is a spectrum, that it is how you
identify all of these things that are associated. We see this in schools now
too, and parents are like, wait a second, we don't want children
taught about this stuff. We don't want neo pronouns, they themses or none
of that stuff. And we're at the exact same point with queer theory as
we were with critical race theory, where parents are like, that's bad,
that's wrong, we don't want it with our children, and we're untangling where
it came from. So where it came from, Like critical race theory,
the fund the ideological underpinning of the transgender ideology is queer theory. But queer
theory doesn't just stop at the destructive narratives around the reality of sex and gender.
Queer theory advocates for the sexualization of children. Queer theory advocates defends the
authoress of this founding document of queer theory, defends child pornography, defends outright
pedophilia, expresses sympathy for pedophiles who are put in prison and says that we
as a culture, twenty years down the road, are going to regret imprisoning
men who quote unquote love underage youth, Like, does that just make your
stomach turn? It's absolutely disgusting. And the point of this, the point
of this queer of this queer theory, is not what the left says.
Just like the left says, oh, critical race theory is teaching about slavery,
teaching history. The left says, queer theory is about inclusion and tolerance
and equality. It is not. It is about creating one demographic, agitating
one demographic, telling them that they're so marginalized. We saw this trans Day
of Visibility, the Transday of Vengeance. They're telling them that they're on the
verge of a genocide. They're telling them that they they're not safe in spaces.
They're putting the fear of an existential extinction in their bodies and their hearts
and their minds. And we all know what that feels like to feel that
it's it's awful, and it does It creates desperation, and that's exactly what
queer theorists want. They want that fear, that that exploitation of a vulnerability
of the mental health issues that these children and young people feel, and they
want those people to revolt. They want those LGBTQ identifying people to revolt against
our conventional narrative. And I say conventional narrative because that's a prevailing narrative.
Is the Marxist term for it. Against the prevailing narrative on sex and gender,
which is reality, it's biology, it's oriented in Judeo Christian values,
it is what our society is built on. The goal, the ultimate goal
of queer theory, like critical race theory, is the destruction of our society.
And this is a really important point and why I really like the title
of your speech, the ideology of transgenderism, because there is an ideology behind
it. Now tell us how it's I think this is crucial. They get
from point A to point B when it comes to sex and gender and then
child pornography, normalizing pedophilia. Ideologically, take us on that train that they
go down to get from point A to point B, because that, I
think is at the heart of everything here. It is that's why we're seeing
the drag queen story hours right at public libraries where men dressed up as women
and not just as normal women. In these sexualized caricatures of women, often
scantily clad, are reading and performing for toddlers and preschoolers. That's why we
see the drag shows for children. I mean everyone has seen this. This
is this is the controversy of the day. States across the country or even
like banning these banning these drag shows for children because it's inappropriate. You wouldn't
take your child to a strip club, you're not allowed. You wouldn't take
your child into a into a bar, you're not allowed. You wouldn't take
your child to a casino, You're not allowed. Why are you allowed to
take your child to this? Well, Queer theory hinges on the complete destruction
of all social sexual morays, right, and so they specifically target the sexual
innocence of children, the innocence overall of children. They understand that in order
to in order to transform children, transform children from what they are right now,
which is a part of a family unit, a nuclear family unit,
and they are they are being taught and formed and shaped by their parents and
their parents' values. In order to separate children from parents, which is a
communist Marxist thing. Right, that's the tenant of communism and Marxism is the
collective rearing of children is the destruction of the nuclear family. They understand that.
In order to do that, they first have to tell children that their
identity is inherently bad. This is what they do with critical race theory.
They tell children, listen, you're white, and it's not because of anything
you've done, anything you've said, anything you feel. It's just because the
sins of other white people who lived hundreds of years before you, and you
benefit from the privilege of the oppression that they inflicted on black people. You're
irredeemable. There's nothing you can do to escape the privilege that you experience.
And the privilege meaning what they mean when they say privilege, is that you're
perpetuating that oppression to this day on other people. But there's nothing you can
do about it because the institutional structures are in place. So they come in
and they create this literal identity crisis in children. Right, Children have this
self loathing and they turn against their parents. They hate their parents for this
because who made them in this bad identity? Their parents did their parents made
them in this bad identity. So then queer theory comes in and offers them
redemption, offers to pick these children up off the floor after their identity has
been destroyed, and it says, listen, you don't have to be an
oppressor, you don't have to be a bad person. You can choose to
be part of the marginalized, which, as we know, for a long
time in our culture, victims have been elevated. The left is celebrated victimhood.
They've made that a badge of honor. It's not something that you overcome,
it's not something that you are proud to have abandon. It becomes part
of your identity. In leftist ideology, queer theory comes in and tells these
young children, if you just choose to be queer, if you reject the
institutional norms that your parents and your grandparents have handed down, these same people
that the children are told have been oppressing people throughout the ages, then you
can actually be redeemed. And in the course of doing this, the only
thing that you have, the only thing that children have to give up,
it's fealty to their family, to their God, and to their country.
And so through I call it a one two punch first comes critical race theory,
then comes queer theory, and it is an incredibly effective grooming tactic to
transform children into um into Marxist revolutionaries. And so the destruction of the innocence
of children is a key part of this. So can we talk about why
moral relativism and the destruction of truth that comes with moral relativism is absolutely the
key block. It was like the first domino to fall that led us to
right now, because it seems like when you really probe queer theory, you
end up at that same spot that there is no one truth. Yeah,
well, I mean, and this has been something that we've seen in our
culture for decades. For a couple of decades, moral relativism. I mean
in the early two thousands, now, wasn't that was the culture war,
right, like, don't don't that's moral, morally relativistic, Like that was
the worst insult that you could get. But that's just a precursor. They
were. They were paving the way for the destruction of truth. Without destruction
of truth, critical race theory wouldn't be possible, Queer theory wouldn't be possible,
and Marxism wouldn't be possible. That's why you can go all the way
back to Marx and Engles, the original Marxists to look at what they wanted
to do. They knew they had to destroy objective reality, they knew they
had to destroys. I mean, Marxism is at its core an atheistic,
an atheistic ideology, and it's it's it's maybe even worse than an atheistic ideology,
because it's not just a repudiation of Christianity and of God, it's a
reputa. It's in some ways a Satanic, a satanic ideology because it has
to be right. It has to be in order to reject natural law,
our our nation. And I know this is really unpopular with libertarians. In
full disclosure, I have had such a transformation from my previously libertarian roots.
I think we all write embrace libertarianism in our early twenties when we were like,
yeah, I don't do anything, get off my lawn, and I
realized that that's that's a historical in our country, right, Historically in our
country, Yes, the Declaration of Independence might have been based in a more
libertarian idea that the government should be as absolutely as limited as possible and less
and their role is only to protect our country from foreign threat, to protect
people's rights. But truthfully, the constitution is not based in libertarianism at all.
It's based more in an Edmund Burke philosophy, and Edmund Burke's philosophy was
that liberty ordered liberty. He defined liberty as as not absolute liberty, but
as justice that a society rooted in ordered liberty is a society that pursues justice.
And so the natural question there is to ask, okay, but what
is justice then? Well? Edmund Burke defined justice as uppercase original justice,
justice that derives from the author of original justice, which is an acknowledgement that
natural law exists within us. All. So our nation was actually founded.
Our constitution is rooted in the idea that we as a people, you don't
have to worship God if you don't want, you're free to do that.
We're not a theocracy. But our nation was rooted in the acknowledgement of natural
law, the acknowledgment in the reality of a creator and reality that the Creator
created for us. And so I know this is a long circle. But
bringing it back to moral relativism, moral relativism when I say it's atheistic,
when I say it's satanic when when you have an ideology that has in its
in its object the destruction of reality, that that ideology is actually trying to
destroy natural law. And the only the only thing that tries to destroy natural
law and knowing that it is of God, is the one who hates God.
And so our country. I mean this, I know, this is
how we stuff. I know people a lot of times don't want to mix
religion in politics. They want to say, like, yeah, great,
let's protect religious liberty, but politics should be as secular as possible. I
just don't. I don't believe in that anymore. I don't believe that that's
possible to have a thriving, prosperous nation where we've completely we've completely rejected reality.
Because when you reject reality, this is what you get. You get
queer theory, you get critical race theory. And the only actual way to
build a society around reality is to examine what is reality. And when you
examine it without bias, you find that the answer to what reality is is
natural law, which is from God. Yeah, there's no consensus in a
morally relativistic world. There's either a consensus that there is no consensus an anarchy
or the government has a monopoly on everything, right, And I always call
that if politicians, just through voting have the power to redefine words, then
there they become the arbiters of truth. And if they're the arbiters of truth,
if that isn't even is such a thing, then that's authoritarian, yeah,
which is exactly what they want, right right, exactly. And this
is really interesting because I think there's something to be said about taking a message
like this onto a college campus that is different than the way that I think
maybe conservatives of generation before us we're communicating. And that's not to say some
people were doing I mean there are a lot of people that were doing this
very well, but coming in and saying I don't hate you, this ideology
hates you, yes, and this is bad for you. This is not
compassionate. That I think is really powerful right now, And I want to
ask about your experience, not just on campus, but as someone who's super
popular online talking in stark, bold terms about these problems. Is that drawing
you think, more people, more people's curiosity, and more people who maybe
have been saturated in this secular culture to say, you know, there's like
a truth shaped hole inside of me, not just a God shaped hole,
but also truth shaped hole, right right, yes, yes, yes,
yeah, I think Listen, there are a lot of people and I don't
I don't necessarily mean this, mean this negatively, but there are a lot
of people in politics who are sensationalists. They say things just to be bombastic,
just to get clicks. And this is true on both sides of the
aisle. And I have always from the beginning of my career committed to letting
the truth be sensational and not not to engage in sensationalism or bombastic behavior because
I don't think that that's an honest way too. I don't think that that's
the way that I want to be have in in what I'm doing. Um
that being said, I am very blunt. That's how I am in my
regular life, right like outside of Politiday. You could just ask my husband,
ask my sisters. She just corrected Chris Bedford on some tenets of Catholicism
before we started taping, and Bedford is an audience favorite, so listeners will
be glad to know that. Well, we'll have to do an episode on
that because I'm pretty sure he's wrong. But I'll be and I'm Catholic too,
by the way, Um, we were arguing about confession. This is
going to go off on a tangent in real quay. It was awesome.
I love to watch him be wrong. He could be right, he could
be right, but on that remains to be seen. Pregnant pause. Um,
but yeah, that's the Oh, the boldness, the boldness, bluntness
in the bombassade. Guess Um it's more compassionate, it is, But I
think it's I think it's worth doing at the same time because it's true,
right. I talk about this often, like when we were talking about this
speech. When we were preparing for this speech, my team and I preparing
for the speech, what we do is we talk about what's the purpose of
us being there? What do we what do we You know, these these
wonderful students that invite us from YAF what do they want to hear? What
do they want from their campus? Why are they fighting this fight? Who
is the opposition and what are they opposed to? Where is their misunderstanding?
Where is their pain? Where is their trauma? Um? The Left has
been very effective at harnessing and weaponizing emotion and pain in people to point people
towards towards political policies, politicians and personal ideology that's ultimately self destructive. And
I mean, I know that this is an age old tactic to exploit people's
emotions, but these these young people are hurting. You don't you don't engage
in queer theory. You don't mutilate your body in the in the name of
the transgender ideology. You don't reject the fund the basis of who you are,
if you haven't already been violated, if you haven't already been traumatized.
I mean, my heart breaks for these for these young people because often they're
suffering from other coal morbidities, right They're suffering from anxiety and depression and bipolar
and maybe schizophrenia and gender disorders, disassociative disorders. I can't imagine that.
I do try to put myself in the shoes of people who are suffering and
people who have embraced a different ideology, because I want to understand why they
did that, why they embrace that, And the more I look into it,
it makes me feel emotional, actually because the more I look into it.
Oftentimes, these young people who take on these new identities have been horribly
abused. They've been sexually abused, they've been physically abused. And what often
happens in those situations is that creates and this is like a post traumatic reaction,
is that creates this self loathing. They hate this body that betrayed them.
They hate this body that was abused by someone else because it was violated
and rejected by someone else, and they feel gross, they feel used,
they feel damage, And what ends up happening as a coping mechanism is they
try to disassociate from that body. If only they could escape this body,
they wouldn't have been violated. If only they could escape this body, they
wouldn't have been abused. Someone else did it. That means it makes them
feel dirty, It makes them feel bad, like it breaks my heart to
think of these young people feeling like this. And so what they do is
they're vulnerable because they're already wanting to disassociate from this trauma that's been inflicted on
them. And here comes this evil ideology, these evil people propagating queer theory,
telling them that the answer to their trauma is to actually reject their body
and to mutilate their body with pharmaceuticals and surgery and that's so evil. It's
so evil to use those children that have been hurting. And so I'm not
just saying that I care about these students because I want to surprise them by
saying that. I'm not just saying, oh, someone's lying to you because
I'm trying to win a political debate. I cared deeply about these young people.
I cared deeply about their bodies and their minds and their souls. And
they're being used, they're being harmed, they're being irrevocably damaged. And the
truth of the matter is it's never going to make them feel physically better,
it's never going to make them feel emotionally better, it's never going to make
them spiritually better. What's going to happen is the left is going to use
them as as essentially cultural kama causes and discard them, discard them. We
see this with the young people who have transitioned and regret the detransitioners. Queer
theorists just abandoned them. They don't care about the feelings that they're feeling now,
they don't care about this identity crisis they're suffering. Now. They've already
use them and abuse them and discarded them, and that's so evil. I
can't stand by and let that happened. I want to talk directly to these
students who have been hurt and tell them that there's a better way. This
reminds me of a point you've also been making about the bud Light boycotts,
because the media has treated this as a silly side show conservatives famenting the culture
war, of course, completely missing that Conservats are in response or we're on
our heels. We're responding to something that the left at bud Light did,
the left at this massive corporation did. But on that note, why is
it so important from your perspective for conservatives to take this seriously, even though
it's as unserious as an actual man in a dress pretending to be a woman
in a very offensive way, sponsored of course by a major corporation, many
major corporations. In fact, what in this particular case when it comes to
bud Light is important for conservatives to understand. Yeah, and this is a
really interesting one. I'm glad you brought this up because this is another area
that I've changed my mind in the lats ten years. I used to think
that when conservatives boycotted businesses and corporations. I used think it was kind of
a waste of time. I actually tell the story that when I was this
might have been when I was in like late high school or early college,
when I kind of just started dipping my toe and political activism. There was
this list that went around of corporations and companies that were donating to Planned Parenthood.
Like behind the scenes, and this is gonna maybe sound like such a
dork, but I shopped at Coles a lot back then, and I and
Coles was one of the one of the companies that donated to Planned Parenthood.
And the first political activism I did was pro life activism. That's like the
you know what right is more important than your right to life? And I
remember thinking, well, I'm not going to boycott Coals, not just because
I was like in love with their stuff, but just because the amount of
time that it would have taken me to establish like brands that fit and stores
that I liked, because I'm not like a natural shopper, so that wasn't
something enjoyable for me. The amount of time that it would have taken for
me to actually boycott them and to find in research which businesses didn't do that
stuff. I was like, the opportunity cost doesn't make sense to me,
because I could spend that much time in more doing direct political activism for pro
life causes that would be more effective. And so I generally thought that that
was true for a lot of this stuff, right. I generally thought like,
I don't know if your time is being well spent trying to boycott a
grocery store, having to go to five or six different grocery stores when you
could actually spend those three hours out a crisis pregnancy center or work and donate
that money to something that would be a little bit more direct change. That's
my old view, and I've discarded it for the most parts because I no
longer think that it's just this fractional part of these corporations. We are.
We are at a very serious pivotal point in our culture right now where these
large corporations like Annheuser Busch, the parent company of Budweiser, of bud Light,
are choosing to propagate this neo Marxist ideology that we talked about, and
we, as of the American people, can sit back and we can say,
well, they're doing this because they care more about their esg rating than
they do about their bottom line. But there is a certain point that you
can acknowledge that, well, yes, they do care about their ESG rating,
and they may be willing to sacrifze some of their bottom line. But
we have not gone over the edge to ESG so far that businesses don't care
at all about their esg rting. I mean, look at Disney, right
like, they obviously care about their ESG rating. They obviously care about their
corporate Equality Index or whatever that. I think that's the specific metric for transactivism.
But they wouldn't have changed their CEO, right, Disney if they didn't
care at all about the actual business part. They wouldn't care like they cared
when they lost two millions of gribers from Disney plus like they cared. Even
if they also care about the other stuff, they still care. That's the
same. That's the same with ann Heuser bush Like this is an important moment
not to change Annheuser Busch's mind. They're already entrenched in this and they would
just take unbelievable cultural pummeling from the left if they walked it back. But
what this is going to do is it's going to tell every other corporation in
this country. Listen, if you embrace a neo mark societyology, if you
put an actual dude wearing a sports braw as you're in pretending he's a girl
taking that opportunity away from a woman who could have gotten that job. If
you do that, you can it's a free country. But we're not going
to buy your stuff, and you're going to see your stock price plummet.
What was at six billion dollars. It was a lode of money, a
lot of money. And so other other corporations are gonna be a little bit
slower to do that, because how are you going to justify that? How's
the ceo? How's the CEO going to justify that to the board when walking
into it, you know what it costs your business? That would have to
be a specific calculation, a risk analysis, a risk benefit analysis, And
I think I think it's served as should keep it up, like what are
we willing to sell these children's bodies for a small amount of money that Anaheiser
Busch gives to Republican politicians. They don't even donate exclusively to Republicans. It's
like sixty percent to Republicans, forty percent to Democrats and it was like five
hundred thousand dollars in one election cycle. Yeah, like, I'm sorry,
that's not that much money for an election. I am not willing to sell
children's bodies and our country to Marxism for half a million dollars. Please.
And also, by the way, an important point this is in response to
some people on the right who have said Annheiser Busch is one of the good
guys because they do give to Republicans and they have somewhat resisted the temptation to
dive headfirst into the pool of wokism. First of all, I don't think
that's true. They have been sponsoring pride stuff for a really long time.
Secondly, that's how corporations advertise now. It's how they get you, is
they do this stuff superficially, and then they complete they'll give money to Republicans
and completely undermine Republican ideas precisely so that you defend them in moments like this
one. It's how they commercial that they release right in the right after Dylan
Wolva. Did you see their pro America commercial. It was beautiful, by
the way, cinematic masterpiece of an advertisement, very moving, very touching,
but I just felt grossed out after. I was like, don't pander to
me. Don't pretend that you actually appreciate American values when what you're doing on
a much larger scale by hiring the most prominent transgender activists in our country who
actually went to the White House to ask the President whether states should be allowed
to ban surgical or bodily mutilation the transgender surgeries on children, Like this is
a political activist. We're talking about a powerful, influential political activist. Don't
hire that person and make them in the face of your company and then pretend
that you embrace American values. That's not true. It's also, by the
way, if you want to like zoom out and be philosophical about it,
it doesn't matter if you have a history in your life as an individual or
history as a corporation of acting one way. Like every day is a new
choice, right, So maybe they were a little bit more Republican, are
a little bit more conservative in the past, but it doesn't mean that's what
they're doing now. They've made a bad choice now, and they shouldn't.
We shouldn't ignore that just because they give a little bit of money to Republican
candidates, or just because they made good choices in the past and they have
a marketing VP who's out there on the circuit talking about how important it is
to be conclusive or whatever. She just sounded like completely ridiculous, sounded like
a college professor, like a queer theory professor. Oh maybe that could be
her next job. Yes, on that note, Liz, I just want
to sort of close out this conversation by asking if you're hopeful because what you
mentioned about how many of us have undergone this transformation from sort of live and
let live and left let live libertarianism. That's the best way to sort of
protect our family, protect our community is to get the federal government out of
our business, etc. Etc. To an understanding that there are some truths,
we need to have consensus, we need to have legal consensus, and
we need to have constitutional protections for Does that lead you to a point where
you feel like the tide is turning, there's plenty of reason for optimism,
or is it the case that these Budweiser examples that crop up every single day
it seems like there's a new corporation sponsoring Dylan Mulvane or whatever else. Does
that you know, are you feeling in the aggregate optimistic or pessimistic. Well,
if I were too pessimistic, I wouldn't be doing what I was doing
right like this is it. I wouldn't be fighting a fight if I thought
it was a losing battle. So I think we can win. But I
don't think it's as easy as a lot of people assume. I don't think
it's as easy as a lot of Conservatives and Republicans assume it is. It's
not. When we saw by the way this we saw an example of this
in the twenty twenty two mid terms, where we won Conservatives and Republicans one
public opinion against Joe Biden right because of inflation, gas prices, what he'd
done in Afghanistan, everything. People didn't like Joe Biden. There was a
high level of dissatisfaction even among Democrats when they went to the polls. And
yet Republicans did not accomplish the red tsunami that we were anticipating and that we
were hopeful that we would that we would experience. And the reason for that
is because people are no longer making decisions based on just their immediate day to
day, day to day experiences they're not saying, well, I guess Joe
Biden failed me on gas prices. It's costing me more for my family.
I'm going to vote Republican because the Republican brand has been so vilified politically and
culturally that we have a huge we have a huge deficit to fill. We
have a huge disadvantage there that if we don't address, if we don't address
the branding and the messaging of the Republican Party, then we're not going to
get very far, regardless of how bad the Democrats make our daily lives.
And in order to address that messaging, in order to rebrand Republicanism, we
have to sit down and ask ourselves a question, well, what is conservatism?
What is Republicanism? Are are we standing for libertarian ideology or are we
standing for true conservative ideology? Are we the intellectual descendants of John Locke or
are we the intellectual descendants of Edmund Burke? And if we don't have that
discussion, if we don't have the discussion that you and I had a couple
of minutes ago about what is liberty, Liberty being either absolute liberty as close
to at it's close to the wild of nature as possible that you can have
in a civilized society. It's more libertarian or an ordered society with liberty based
on the definition of justice deriving from natural law. If we don't sit down
and have this quite literal, come to Jesus moment for our country, then
no, we're not going to be able to defeat the left because libertarianism cannot
defeat the left. A republican party that abandons cultural issues and is too afraid
to fight the social issue battles, We're not going to defeat Marxism because Marxism
is committed. Marxism is unrelenting, and the only bulwark against that is a
society that embraces reality to its core. And this is not going to be
an easy thing for Republicans to do because you do have to understand that there's
a crossover then between religious truth and politics. If we want to win,
if we want to defeat the left, if we want to restore our country
to what it was when it was the greatest country that the the world has
ever known, then we have to do it the right way. If we
do, we'll win. If we don't, if we're too lazy, if
we're too cowardly, then I don't know if we can. And I do
have one more question, because you've just mentioned a lot of building blocks that
should be the foundation of our society. But it has to be tough to
even make the argument the case you've just made that most Americans would have agreed
on, you know, thirty years ago, when people don't even know what
you're talking about when you say things like ordered liberty. Yeah, I know,
I know, And that's why I on my show I talk about I
oftentimes try to structure these types of conversations into two part conversations where first we're
talking about the what it is. If we're talking about queer theory, we
say, well, listen, we don't want kids at drag shows, like
it's okay to say that. It's also okay to say that men aren't women
and can't be even if they identifies that, and first talk about those things
and then unpack the ideology behind it. Because there is a tremendous amount of
education. I'm very fortunate that this is my job. This is what I
do for a living, so I get to spell my days researching these things.
And what I do is I try to synthesize the information that I learn
into you know, these forty five minute podcasts that that air every day,
so that people who are out raising their families and building their futures and working
hard in their jobs and enjoying life can also understand what can understand the ideology
behind it, because it is these phrases are new right Edmund Burke and John
Luck, well, what do they believe? You probably couldn't define it.
Sometimes we even have a hard time defining what wlokeism is even if we recognize
it, and that's okay, that's okay. It doesn't mean that it's unknowable.
It doesn't mean that it's insurmountable. It does mean that it requires a
little bit more of us as conservatives and Republicans to become educated in these areas
so that we can properly not just diagnose the problem of society. We've already
done that, but prescribe a solution. So what I try to do is
after we've acknowledged the reality of the political enemy that we face, and we
have to first diagnose that, then we prescribe the solution. Part of that
solution is understanding um understanding some of them. I hate to use this phrase
because I think that it's been it was coined actually by a leftist. But
the political science of the thing, yes, right, the ideology, I
can't. I cannot stand that phrase. It's a very scientific world of politics,
yes, yes, kind of. They love to call everything political science,
they do, but it's more it's more political philosophy. I suppose that's
a better way to phrase it. But I think Hillsville calls their degree politics
and not political science because good instinct to quantify things that are not quantifiable.
Yeah, and I don't want to I don't want to say this because I'm
only ninety eight percent sure here, but I'm pretty sure the guy who coined
the term political science was a technical was an actual proponent of technocracy. Yeah,
I think that's correct. Um, but who knows. We're just we're
just talking here. Yeah. Two things I have to fact check. I
have to fact check Chris Bedford on his confession was on his list of mortal
sins, and then um, they trying to think who it was. But
that's normal for the show's fact checking Backford. We have to do it after
every episode that was on every week. So this is us at all.
Well, we can't recommend the Loz Wheelers Show. Enough here because exactly like
everything you just said, Liz, you really break things down for people.
So make sure to check out the Liz Wheelers Show if you're in the area.
Liz is going to be at James Madison University on April twenty sixth giving
the speech called the Ideology of Transgenderism super super interesting. We can't wait to
see how it goes down, and we hope you stay safe. List Thank
you, thank you. It's gonna be a great time. I hope everyone
who's in the area could come. If you're not in the area, please
watch. We're gonna live stream it. You can go to YouTube dot com
slash yaf TV. It'll be six pm Eastern at James Madison University on Wednesday,
April twenty six It's gonna be a good time. Thanks for joining the
show, Liz. Thanks Emily. All right, you've been listening to another
edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilejashnski, culture editor here at The
Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, belovers of freedom
and anxious for the Freight he o