josh slocum
Joshua Slocum hosts Disaffected - the best new podcast on the market. Our society isn't just getting crazier - it's getting Cluster B crazy: borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial personality disorders and their traits are off the charts. In the universities, media, social media, and the Democratic establishment - something is happening, but few can put their finger on it. Josh can and does, and he's not afraid to tell it like it is. He can see it because he has lived through it, and we can all learn from his hard-won experience and painful disillusionment at what his political party has become.

Disaffected liberals, horrified observers of the state of North American social trends and ideology, and those just wondering what is going on should tune in, and check out Josh's podcast and videos. Check him out on Twitter and subscribe to his show. You won't regret it.

Disaffected Podcast:

Running Time: 01:54:34

Download: MP3 — 105 MB


Here is the transcript:

Harrison: Alright. Welcome back everyone. This is Mind Matters. Today we have a special guest. We have Josh Slocum who's the host of his new podcast Disaffected. Josh, can you tell us really quickly how to find your stuff, what your social media is?

Josh: Yes. You can find podcasts anywhere you get your podcasts or on iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Rumble, YouTube. Just look for Disaffected podcasts. I think the search terms are still working themselves out a little bit because it's so new. I will say I know that YouTube is very convenient for people and they like to find a lot of things through there but if you find the show and you're interested in it, please as a favour, subscribe on some alternative platforms like Rumble because my show, I predict will not last long on YouTube.

Harrison: Yes.

Josh: I will run afoul of their content because I'm anti-SJW and they will get rid of it. So I don't expect that it's going to have a long run there.

Harrison: Well we will include links in the show description to your YouTube channel, Twitter and maybe Rumble, anywhere to find you. So I will recommend right away that all of our viewers, especially if you like this show, our show and this episode, to subscribe because Disaffected may be new - I think you've had seven episodes out so far Josh?

Josh: Correct. Seven.

Harrison: And they're all great and it is my new favorite podcast.

Josh: Thank you.

Harrison: So I just want to say that Josh. When I found you - we talked before the show previously and I mentioned to you that from the trailer that you did for your shows, just about two minutes, I knew it was going to be good and you didn't disappoint because we've been talking about this stuff for years as Elan was saying before we started recording, and it is so great to find someone who sees the same things, sees what's going on. It's one of those moments where you think, "Okay, we're not the only crazy ones or maybe we're not crazy." Did you have the same reaction? How do you see...

Josh: Yes. Just the fact that you guys got in touch with me, I hadn't heard of your show before but of course I'm listening to it now. I'm through, I think, two or three episodes and I just get this sense of relief. I go, {big sigh}. I mean, really, when I see somebody else who sees what I see and what I see is we are living in a cluster B World, right? I assume that your listeners - well maybe I shouldn't assume - I assume that your listeners and viewers are familiar with the term cluster B or do I need to explain that?

Harrison: Let's just give a really brief rundown of it. I'm sure it'll jog the memory.

Josh: Right. I think we're all talking about the same psychological subject matter but we may use slightly different nomenclature. Some terms are useful in some contexts and not others. So cluster B personality disorders is an American diagnostic scheme. There are clusters A, B and C. There are 10 personality disorders among the three clusters. I'm specifically talking about cluster B. These are borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. And antisocial is what your viewers and listeners know as psychopathy or sociopathy. Some people define those things differently. I use them interchangeably. So there is not actually a consensus agreed-on definition. I'm just telling you that in my definition when you hear antisocial please also hear sociopath or psychopath.

Personality disorders are, as you know, and as I said in one of my episodes, they're a kind of mental illness. I think 'disorder' I'm a little more comfortable with. They're not like the kind of mental illness that people generally think of. We're not talking about something like clinical depression, acute or long standing anxiety. We're not even talking about something like schizophrenia when people are not in touch with reality and are actually psychotic.

We used to call these personality disorders moral insanity and frankly I think we ought to have a renaissance of that term. What we're describing are not people with an otherwise normal and stable temperament and emotional disposition who just happen to be temporarily afflicted with a strong depression, okay? We're not talking about people who are normally easy to get along with, straightforward, stable people who are just temporarily handicapped by a bad bout. We're talking about people whose very personality, the very things that make them them, are fundamentally distorted.

In my view, what binds cluster B together, as I said, there are four of them, and I think actually it may be more accurate to talk - if we're going to look at somebody and say, "I think this person has histrionic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder" - I think it may be more accurate to say, "This person has a cluster B personality disorder with strong features of borderline, narcissistic, etc. etc."

Harrison: Yeah.

Josh: We'll talk about comorbidity, but I think the root that you can boil this down to is cluster B and that people can be different combinations of flavors.

Harrison: Let me comment on that a bit because you mention the DSM is the American standard. So what the WHO has done in the ICD - International Classification of Disease - they've gone to pretty much a five factor model. So our listeners will be familiar with the big 5 personality test. You've got extroversion, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism and I always forget what the fifth one is. I always forget what the four that I've already said are. {laughter}

Josh: Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion...

Harrison: Extroversion.

Josh: Agreeableness.

Harrison: Agreeableness.

Josh: And neuroticism.

Harrison: And neuroticism, right.

Josh: Remember the acronym OCEAN. I got that from Dr. Todd Grande.

Harrison: Okay, great. There's been a lot of research on just how problematic - I'll borrow a term from the SJW's - the diagnostic system is. It has been in psychiatry for years because we have all these problems with comorbidity and a lot of researchers have wondered, 'What are we actually measuring? Are we measuring something? Is there a better way we can be doing this?'

So what many researchers have found out is that with a lot of these personality disorders, it looks like a better way to measure them and understand them is in terms of almost like a dysfunction of one of those big 5 personality traits and the way I've read it described, which I think is really good, is that there's an underlying personality disorder construct. Whatever it is, whatever causes it, there's an underlying personality disorder construct that manifests through the personality. It's actually four out of the big five that they've managed to associate with personality disorders. So on the agreeableness dimension, they've used the word dissociality for a certain dysfunction in that aspect of personality and that's the one that encompasses cluster B.

So what they might call them is dissocial personalities. And then you can tweak other personality features to get the different cluster B personality disorders. So if you up the extroversion that's when you're going to get your histrionic personality, the over-emotional, 'look at me'...

Josh: And borderlines.

Harrison: And borderlines, yup. But borderlines is also a negative affect. So negative affectivity is the neuroticism dimension. So when you add some neuroticism in there you've got borderline and disinhibitions. So the fifth personality disorder dimension that they have is disinhibition which kind of falls under a negative conscientiousness thing but it doesn't correlate perfectly.

Josh: That sounds like it may fit under talking about the extreme impulsivity of the borderlines particularly, although psychopaths as well sometimes.

Harrison: Right. So that's one way of thinking of it. There's this underlying personality dysfunction. I came into this through psychopathy so with psychopathy there's just a total deficit in emotion, the capacity to experience certain emotions and that has an effect on the entire personality and the way that psychopaths interact with each other because they don't feel and they can't feel remorse or empathy. It's laughable to them.

Josh: Yes.

Harrison: To them, people are just tools to be used and thrown away or destroyed.

Josh: We're all NPCs. We're objects.

Harrison: Which is funny because they're the NPCs. They don't really have anything really going on in them. One of the things about psychopaths is that they seem like a cardboard cut out of each other. They're pretty similar. They don't really have personalities. Any personality they have is usually just a show that they're putting on for others and that's how they get what they want, by pretending to be what you want them to be.

Josh: That's a really good point. I would say that I find it among all of the cluster B's as well, the interchangeability. One of the things that struck me when I finally realized what was wrong with my mother - and if you want, I can tell the quick story of what brought me to these conclusions.

Harrison: Yes.

Josh: But when I started visiting online forums for children of borderline parents particularly, I was immediately struck by the fact that almost all of the anecdotes that these adult children were telling could have been stories literally out of my living room in childhood, down to the same phrasing. The actual WORDS were sometimes exact duplicates.

With the cluster B personality, they're not all the same but there's a fine line to walk. First of all, there's a lot of apologia going on out there. There are a lot of people who are making excuses, particularly for borderlines. There's an entire cottage industry out there that, frankly I think is run by borderlines and their flying monkeys and their codependents, that is trying to make borderline personality disorder into something almost cuddly.
"We just feel more than other people. We're just extraordinarily sensitive. We're not like psychopaths at all, in fact it's almost a violation of our human rights to be put in the same psychiatric cluster." Well, okay.
Harrison: Let me just interject really briefly. There is something to that because it seems like borderline is almost like a catch-all and a bunch of people get included in borderline that probably shouldn't.

Josh: Correct.

Harrison: Or at the very least there are two different kinds of borderline, right? There are those who respond to treatment. There are those who don't. There are those who - how do they put it - have internalizing tendencies which are more like the neurotic, self-destructive tendencies and then there are the externalizing ones that attack other people. So it may actually be that there are some borderlines that probably shouldn't be categorized as borderline. I just wanted to throw that in there.

Josh: No, I think you're right. There's been a lot of misdiagnosis and there has been over-diagnosis but what mental health doesn't like to talk about is that there's a lot of under-diagnosis too.

Harrison: Yeah, sure.

Josh: A lot! In fact at this point any time somebody tells me that someone they know has bipolar disorder I immediately assume provisionally that they have borderline personality disorder until proven otherwise. And it has served me well as a rule of thumb. This is so common!

This is not my opinion. You can go into the literature. That's an extraordinarily common misdiagnosis. Someone who's a borderline gets labeled bipolar. Doctors make this mistake constantly and in some ways I call it a sympathy diagnosis because - well we can talk about this - but stigma, right? Everybody's worried about stigmatizing mental illness. There are a lot of behaviours that come from mental illness that I'm quite convinced need to be far more stigmatized than they are and that's part of the problem. That's part of why we're living in a cluster B world. There are some things that should be shamed. There are some things that are unacceptable.

But what borderline and bipolar share on the surface is the emotional lability, the mood swings, right? But in most bipolars, these take place over the course of days or weeks whereas with borderlines it tends to go by the hour, sometimes even by the couple of minutes, right? So if you've got somebody who's joyfully happy and seems manic to you one minute and then five minutes later they're crying hysterically, that's not bipolar folks! It's not necessarily borderline, but if there is a serious mental health problem, we're not talking about somebody who's intoxicated or someone who's under an acute stress that has driven them right to the edge. That can make any of us into a temporary borderline, right?

It's much more likely to be a borderline personality disorder case. But I agree with you that there's also disagreement over whether the construct complex post traumatic stress disorder, which is not recognized in the DSM. There are people who are saying it should be recognized. There are people who say no it shouldn't be. There's some legitimate disagreement over whether borderline and so-called CPTSD are shades or degrees of the same thing or if they're different constructs. I'm agnostic on that. I see good arguments for both.

Harrison: Well, you mentioned...

Josh: Sorry, we're getting a little abstruse probably.

Harrison: Yeah, yeah. Well let's take it in a different direction. You mentioned the extremely fast switching between states. Give us an example because your first episode was your story, how you came to a realization about your mother and the effect that had on your life, life-changing. It affected your understanding of your life until that moment and then it changed your life afterwards. Maybe you could give some examples. Tell us a bit about your story and maybe give some examples of exactly that, what that looks like.

Josh: Sure. I'm going to try to use a couple of pop culture examples that might help people frame this. I'm getting to the age now where I'm dating myself with these so I'm sure that you've got some young listeners who are like, what is that? Look it up. {laughter}

Elan: I'll probably understand.

Josh: Go to YouTube and look them up because you'll be glad you did. I describe my mother as - if we're going to use movie characters - I describe my mother as a cross between Joan Crawford in a trailer park. My mother is a poor man's version of Joan Crawford. She's neither beautiful nor rich. We were very poor. But she acted the way Joan Crawford did, both the real woman and the portrayal in the book and film Mommy Dearest, which of course is based on Christina Crawford, her adopted daughter's memoir. She was a cross between Joan Crawford and the character Margaret White in the movie Carrie. Are you guys familiar with the Stephen King movie Carrie? I don't mean the one in 2002. I mean the original from 1976.

Elan: Sure.

Josh: Religious fanatic. My mother was not a religious fanatic, but she had that mercurial temperament where she would almost get high on her own anger and anxiety and throw temper tantrums and throw herself around and scream at the top of her lungs to her children. My mother's a very frightening woman.

For my entire adult life, I had been in a caretaker role with my mother. My mother did what is called parentification. Even as a small child, even as a three or four year old, my mother depended on me for emotional support. She confessed her secrets to me. She treated me like a girlfriend, like a confessor, like a therapist. I knew far too much about her personal life than any child should have and I always felt that it was my responsibility to comfort my mother and literally let her cry on my shoulder and tell her, "Yes, mommy we love you. We'll never leave you the way all of those bad men have left you." This is how I was trained growing up. I haven't live with my mother since I was 12 years old because she institutionalized me when I was having a crisis and attempting suicide.

So I was taken out of the home by family court and I was placed in a temporary holding evaluation facility and then I was put into a group home in New York state and eventually became an emancipated minor at 16 and went out on my own. I have not lived with my mother since I was 12 years old and in my immediate family, the first person to go to four-year college, to have a professional career.

So I tried to build a life that was above the poverty and destruction that I grew up in. But for my entire adult life my mother has been calling me to solve every crisis. I have paid off back rent for her so she wouldn't get kicked out of houses. I've put her stuff on moving trucks. We moved I think I've counted 10 or 11 times we lived in different places and in different states from the time I was born until the time I was 12. And my mother continued that. She would use up her good will, not be able to pay her rent, not be able to pay her phone bill, thousand and thousands and thousands of dollars over the years I've spent bailing my mother out of her own financial mistakes.

And it got to a crisis point where she was going to be kicked out and homeless again seven years ago and foolishly - I hadn't woken up at this point, you have to understand. I was still in the cult of my mother. So I decided this is going to happen for the rest of my life. I'm the eldest of three children. I'm going to have a responsibility for her as she ages so I'd better do this in a way that makes financial sense. I bought a second house. I'm not a rich man. I work for a non-profit. I make $50,000 a year. It's not bad for a single guy but that's after 18 years and I live in the state of Vermont. So I don't have extra money.

I was able to buy a house that was in foreclosure. It had to be rehabbed. I put $35,000 into the house to rehab it so there were two apartments. It's a ranch duplex, upstairs and down. And I said "I'll move my mother in here. She'll live at below market rate rent and I will make the bills work by renting the second apartment at market rate."

So I basically solved my mother's financial problems. I solved them completely. She would never have to be homeless. I bought her two cars. I would never do this. I was very, very foolish. {laughter} Don't follow my example. But this is obviously a lesson I needed to learn. Within two years I was contemplating suicide, which I had not done seriously since I was 12 years old. I have been a depressive with anxiety. I've been diagnosed with something like complex post traumatic stress disorder, whether or not that's accepted I think that's the root. Over my life I've been diagnosed with major depression, obsessive/compulsive disorder, symptoms of Tourette's, panic disorder. At one point in my life it might have been fair to diagnose me with borderline personality disorder.

As I said in one of my episodes, I don't think that's the case now. My shrink now doesn't think it's the case. But these things get passed along and my life was an emotional turmoil like many children who come from this background.

In the two years that my mother was living with me, everything was a crisis. Her paranoia got intense. Things like if the light was out on the porch, my mother would call me whatever time of day or night it was and be in apparent terror that intruders were going to get into the house and she wouldn't be able to see them and I needed to fix the light and I needed to fix it right now. Small stuff like this. I'd get dozens of texts from her every day. She would spy on my tenants downstairs, go through their mailboxes to find out if they were getting welfare checks and then send me screeds about their filthy, urchin children, as she called them and how they were making her crazy and why they were ruining her life. It was just absolute insanity.

I would call my mother or visit her and I could hear her in the background screaming at her husband. I'd call on the phone and I'd talk to my mother and then I'd hear her turn around to her husband and say, "Get the fuck away from me! Get the fuck out of my living room!" I'm not exaggerating. This is my mother's affect, right.

She's extraordinarily verbally abusive and her husband actually has a congenital brain condition. He's not intellectually disabled. He was a newspaper reporter. He's a competent guy of at least average intelligence, probably higher but he does have vulnerabilities because of a congenital brain defect with memory and concentration. It didn't matter to her. "Get out of my face you retard! I had a retard sister growing up. I didn't intend to marry one." This is my mother.

A normal person who did not come from a background like I came from would have put a stop - well a normal person would not ever have moved his mother into the house, right? But anybody would see that this was insane behavior. To me, it was a regression to my childhood. I am an outspoken person. I'm self-confident. I know the worth of my intelligence. I know the worth of my work. But around my mother I'm a scared child and I would cry and vomit and have diarrhea and be unable to go to work with migraines. I would literally tremble when my mother called.

At first I thought it was Alzheimer's disease or some form of dementia because she had these paranoid fantasies about the house being broken into and odd things like that that just didn't make sense to me. Now I know what borderline personality disorder is and one of the criteria is transient stress-related paranoid ideation. That certainly describes my mother.

But my sister and I asked her to take a dementia test. You can well imagine that she was not happy about that, but she did and passed it with flying colors. I said, "Jesus Christ! If it's not this, what is it?!" And then one day my sister called me and she said, "Josh, I think our mother has a personality disorder. I think she's a clinical narcissist" and I started reading and within two days I had read very widely, as much as you can in two days, but I basically did nothing but read about cluster B personality disorders and my entire world came into focus clearly, immediately.

I realized that I did know what was wrong with my mother all my life but I did not know there was an epistemology to understand it. I did not know that there was a category to put it into. When I got the name of that category and when I saw that these character traits fit into this pathology, it was literally like watching my life rewind and everything that didn't make sense, every plot line was tied up, right?

So to end that, she would not leave voluntarily. I had to evict her in court. I had to hire a lawyer. And it was some bit of work getting my law firm to understand who they were dealing with. I'm not a cruel person. I want nothing to do with my mother. I'll never have contact with her again but I'm not actually cruel and unreasonable and I voluntarily gave her twice the legal statutory time limit to vacate my apartment that my state requires, plenty enough time. She blew through that, blew through court dates. We had to go to court many more times than was necessary.

During this time I had to get on top of my mother and her husband's attempt to launch a professional smear campaign to take my job from me. My mother began calling my colleagues. My mother is not unintelligent so she knows about the concept of plausible deniability. So she would call my colleagues and say, "I'm very concerned about Josh. He doesn't seem like himself." Because everyone in my life has always known that I've been on antidepressants. "I'm afraid he may not be taking his medicine. Could you check on him?"

This was not concern. This was an attempt at a smear campaign. I began to be afraid for her husband's safety because my sister sent me screenshots of texts with my mother where my mother confessed that she wanted to break his head open and she threw an iron skillet at him hoping to crack his head open. It missed his head and it put a hole in the wall of my apartment which my mother thought was hilarious and did smile emoji, laugh out loud, la, la, la, la. "At least it wasn't his head. Ha Ha Ha."

I was afraid she was going to hurt him or kill him and I called Adult Protective Services which naturally did nothing. One day when I knew my mother was out of the house I called him because I wanted to rescue him and I told him I knew what she was doing. I was afraid that she was going to hurt him, that I was there and I was ready to take him out of the house and take him to some place safe if he wanted to. He turned on me and became astonishingly vicious. I saw a side of him I'd never seen before. He said I was crazy. He said that my mother was not abusive but that I was the abuser, I was the narcissist.

I said to him, "Ed, I've heard the way she speaks to you. I see that she's throwing skillets at you! What the hell is wrong with you?!" {laughter} He said, "I'm starting up my own independent newspaper and just wait until I do this story about the charity executive in Vermont who is a clinical narcissist, shouldn't be trusted, is actually an abuser and is passing himself off as a guy who cares about charity." It was disgusting.

And of course none of that took, right? None of it took but I was so scared I literally thought - my mother threatened to call adult protective services and have me investigated for elder abuse for NOT agreeing to run marijuana to feed her addiction for her. I don't blame anybody right now who's getting a chuckle saying, "And you actually believed that bullshit?" because it is kind of funny. But I did. I'm not stupid, right? I'm not stupid and I'm not naïve, but this is what child abuse that continues into adulthood will do to a person. I was so frightened, I was emotionally back at 12 years old when I was literally institutionalized.

So that was the story of the divorce with my mother. It was funny because the law firm would do things like, "Well why don't you give her another chance? Why don't you give her another month to vacate?" I finally lost it and I said, "Listen! I have tried to explain this to you. I have printed out stuff from the Mayo Clinic. I have given you books. I have explained to you what cluster B personality disorders are. You are not dealing with a normal range person!" And one of the lawyers said, "This is more like a divorce." And I said, "That what this is!! That's what this is!! This is a high conflict divorce. You have met these people before. They're the ones who smear their partners in child custody cases. Connect the dots!!" Right?

Elan: Mm-hm.

Joshua: So very frustrating. It's intensely frustrating.

Harrison: It is.

Joshua: So that's the end of that story. Very shortly after that it became clear to me that I was swimming in an ecosystem that was nothing but cluster B. I've always been a partisan, I had always been a partisan democrat, a hard leftist. I'm a gay guy so I was for the welfare state and civil rights and for all this stuff. And of course naturally I'm for civil rights, but not in the uncomplicated way. I was shoveling a lot of bullshit for the political left and being used and didn't realize it.

But I was part of the so-called new atheist community. I'm sure you guys are at least passingly familiar with the Dawkins set. That had become my entire social world and as I looked around me, I said, "Oh my god! All these people around me have the same psychology as my mother and if they're not actually personality disordered themselves, they're flying monkeys. They're enablers. They're co-dependents. They're like my mother's husband.

I was my mother's flying monkey. For years and years my mother convinced me that my sister had a personality disorder. It was my sister who was the borderline. I didn't pay any attention to the details of this. I didn't think personality disorders were real. That just sounds like a catch-all diagnosis. {laughs} Ah!! But, I carried water for my mother and fought my sister. We're good friends now, but this is what can happen.

I could not ignore it any longer and the straw that broke the camel's back was the transgender issue. I woke up to the pathology in my family, my mother is one of a long line of cluster B. She's not the only one living in the family who has this disorder. Someone in my family is actually officially diagnosed as a borderline with strong sociopathic traits. I think her mother was also a borderline and it was everywhere around me.

I saw a good friend at the time have her paid writing gig snatched out from under her because she would not say trans women are women and I saw her subject to a slander and libel campaign whose viciousness took my breath away. I saw people that I had called friend, people who when I travelled I had stayed at their home and ate dinner at their table, people that I had shared rooms with at conferences, people who I had called up and we consoled each other over the phone when there was a death in the family, I saw these people treating this woman - no, not treating her badly, taking sadistic, almost sexual pleasure in tormenting her and ruining her reputation publicly and getting her drummed out of magazines, a blog writing collective and persona non grata a conferences and I said, "That's it! I have to get out of this."

I realized that I had been a cult member. This is a cult. Just because there's not a single charismatic leader does not mean that this is not a cult. I think it's time for us to revisit our definition of cult because everything that is descriptive of a cult is going on in the social justice world even though there is not one single personality around whom they orbit. I've just talked for a very long time. I'm sorry. {laughter} I didn't let you guys get a word in.

Elan: It was your origin story so it's...

Harrison: It's what gave you super powers. {laughter}

Joshua: Yeah I know.

Elan: And it's central to your purpose.

Joshua: As I say to people, "Oh stewardess, I speak borderline." {laughter}

Harrison: You know what? That reminds me of something. When we talked earlier Josh, I was telling you about one of my favorite books, Political Ponerology and I read a bit to you. I want to read something else here because this is what made me recognize you, not having heard what you had to say, I knew what was coming because I could see that there was something to you, a good thing. Let me just read a couple of passages here from this book and then we can talk about them maybe and I'll describe some stuff or explain it.

Joshua: Okay.

Harrison: First, this is written by Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski. He was a Polish psychologist. He writes,
"I was once referred a patient who had been an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. She came back from that hell in such exceptionally good condition that she was able to marry and bear three children. However, her child rearing methods were so extremely iron-fisted as to be reminiscent of the concentration camp life she so stubbornly persevered in, in former prisons. The children's reaction was neurotic protest and aggressiveness against other children.

During the mother's psychotherapy, we recalled the figures of male and female SS officers to her mind, pointing out their psychopathic characteristics. Such people were primary recruits. In order to help her eliminate their pathological material from her person, I furnished her with the approximate statistical data regarding the appearance of such individuals within the population as a whole. This helped her reach a more objective view of that reality and re-establish trust in the society of normal people.

During the next visit, the patient showed to me a little card on which she had written the names of local pathocratic notables (communist leaders in Poland at that time) and added her own diagnoses which were largely correct. So I made a hushing gesture with my finger and admonished her with emphasis that we were dealing only with her problems. The patient understood and I am sure she did not make her reflections on the matter known to the wrong places."
That's just a little anecdote to get to this next one.
"The specific role of certain individuals during such times..."
(and I'll explain such times afterwards - well it's the times we're living in partially)
"...during such times it is worth pointing out they participate in the discovery of the nature of this new reality and help others find the right path. They have a normal nature but experienced an unfortunate childhood being subjected very early to the domination of individuals with various psychological deviations including pathological egotism and methods of terrorizing others. The new rulership system strikes such people as a large scale societal multiplication of what they knew from personal experience. From the very outset, such individuals saw this reality much more prosaically, immediately treating the ideology in accordance with the paralogical stories well known to them whose purpose was to cloak the bitter reality of their youthful experiences."
This is the narrative, the cover story.
"They very soon reached the truth. Since the genesis and nature of evil are analogous, irrespective of the social scale in which it appears."
So that last point there is important, that what goes on in a family, what goes on between a mother and her children, between a mother and her husband and vice-versa, all types of interpersonal relationships, the same dynamics go on at all social levels, whether it's a school board, a corporate board or a company or a political party or a social movement or the government that controls an entire nation or empire. The same dynamics are at play.

Joshua: This is an illustration of two phrases that people like us now may have an initial negative reaction to because they've been co opted by the SJWs but I'd like to ask people to rehabilitate them a little bit. This is an illustration of 'fascism begins in the home' and 'the personal is political'. My thesis is we are living in a cluster B structured society and it is because it started in the home. That is where fascism and dictatorialism comes from.

People don't grow up normal and then become psychopaths. That's not a thing. It's not a thing! It doesn't happen. Yeah, sometimes people have a traumatic brain injury that really distorts their character but these are the rare exceptions. This comes from the home, domestic violence. We are living in a society, we are in a domestic abuse relationship with the social justice left and I would say more and more, with the left generally, the mainstream nice left. I take no pleasure in saying this, none at all. That has been my home my entire life. It's not anymore.

I understand why it's hard to see these things for people. I dedicated my book to my mother. I wrote a book 10 years ago related to the professional field I work in, consumer protection in a non-profit and I had a manual of relevant consumer protection laws in the field that I work in and I used to describe my mother as this incredibly strong, intelligent woman who had been through hell and back and who had managed to come out alive, had gotten out of an abusive marriage. I beatified my mother. I literally one time said to my best friend - we talked about this recently - a woman with immense patience for the person that I used to be and I'm grateful - she criticized my mother many, many years ago and I said, "My mother is a saint. My mother is a saint."

I needed that to be true because I could not face the reality but it wasn't true. And although I do not talk about him as much, my step-father back then - my mother had married a man and then had two other children by him so we share a mother but we do not share a father - she married an incredibly violent man. I think he's a borderline as well who beat the living shit out of me during childhood, and my mother. My mother was also a victim. Borderlines are often both victims and perpetrators. My mother was severely abused as a child. She grew up basically in the north's version of Appalachian poverty in the 1950s and 1960s, houses with only cold running water, no bathroom inside. Out house. Two alcoholic parents, a mother who had 11 or 12 children, 9 of whom lived and her last children she was having in her mid-40s in the 1950s, right.

Her father died when she was 11 or 12. They were both extreme alcoholics and her mother was promiscuous and would leave the children uncared for at the house while she went out to pick up men and bring them back home.

So this didn't come from nowhere with my mother. And the man she married tried to kill her. I watched him strangle her. He tried to kill her. I don't know how this is for most people but the damage that that man did doesn't loom as large for me as what my mother did because my mother was there before he came and she was there after he was gone. He was never my father. My brother and sister have a different emotional relationship to him and to that time, understandably.

But my mother's derangement was always there. That was always a constant and I colluded with her self-pitying presentation to the world. My mother is the world's biggest victim. Everyone, everyone - her family, her parents, her siblings, her in-laws, her bosses, her friends, her lovers - all of them have been the worst people in the world. They have all done her wrong. They have all sold her short. She never did anything to deserve any of the treatment she got. This is how my mother presents herself to the world.

But the fact is, my mother is a very damaged woman. She's certainly beyond retrieval, as most of them are. If you are younger, if you know somebody or if it's you yourself who has traits of borderline, histrionic - I have some of those traits. It takes a lot of work to work through them and I still have to keep them under control - if you are young enough and I don't know what character trait it takes and you are able to see that at some point the problem isn't everyone else, the problem is YOUR behaviour and that you are inviting these problems into your life, there is a chance for significant recovery.

I used to not believe this at all, once a cluster B, always a cluster B. There is evidence that at least certain types of borderline and maybe some kinds of narcissism are amenable to treatment, but - this is very, very important - just like I emphasize that cluster B personality disorders are not analogous to depression, they are not amenable to treatment as easily as something like depression is, and that itself is not always easy to treat, but cluster B is much harder.

Most cluster Bs aren't ever going to get better because in order for them to get better, they have to be reasonably young because our traits calcify over time. They harden. They become concrete and they have to meet a mental health professional who is very well schooled in trauma, very well schooled in character disorders and personality disorders and knows how to treat them. Most clinicians in my experience are not. They're woefully naïve, even those who have the best of intentions. When they approach a personality disordered client as if she were a normal range personality, not only do they not help her but they often end of validating her derangement and helping to concretize that derangement because they fall for her bullshit.

Most of them are not going to get better. So I always say if you are listening to someone like me talk about this and you have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, first of all, get a second opinion. Do you really have borderline personality disorder or do you have complex post traumatic stress disorder? Again, I know that these are blurry. I get it. Some people are over-diagnosed or misdiagnosed. But if you do think that this is true, please seek help and be discriminating in your choice of therapist. Be honest about the problem and be ready to hear some very difficult things about who you are. It's very hard to hear that a part of your personality is deranged but it's necessary to face the truth if you want to get through this.

So I do encourage people, if you have enough of a constitution that your ego strength is enough that you can bear to hear that you might have a personality disorder, you are so far ahead of most of them, there's reason to hope that there's treatment there. But as I've also said in my show, beyond that, I care about waking normal range people up because we are all dancing to these people's tunes. It's neither possible for us nor is it our duty to therapize people like this. What we need to do is separate ourselves. We need to isolate destructive people with this character derangement and we need to take their power away. We need to set up boundaries and I don't care whether it's in your household with your parents or with your husband or your wife and your political party.

Unfortunately, a lot of time the cluster Bs win. We're not guaranteed to get away from them. Sometimes this means you have to cut your family off. It means you have to quit your job. It means you have to quit your political party. Yes, sometimes this means that you will lose it all. That's reality. And I'm sure you guys agree that it's a reality that a lot of people don't want to wake up to. I'm sure that you know people like I do, who are still telling you, "It's just a few bad apples. Most people on the left aren't like that" or "It's only those real liberal, liberal arts colleges." I'm sure you hear that.

Harrison: Mm-hm.

Joshua: What do you think?

Elan: I think with voices like yourself, Douglas Murray, James Lindsay, Jordan Peterson, we now have a greater voice to help identify exactly what you're discussing here Josh.

Harrison: I will say really quickly that the reception to this kind of stuff, in my opinion, is a lot better now than it was 15 years ago. But part of that is because things have gotten a lot crazier since 15 years ago. We were seeing similar stuff during the Bush years and there was some personality disordered stuff going on with the whole war on terror and the politics of that time, but I think it has gotten so in your face nowadays that I'm finding at least, there to be at least a little bit more of a reception to these ideas.

Elan: It's kind of a counterbalance.

Harrison: The worse things get, the more receptive certain people get to it.

Elan: Yeah. And the more people feel individually called upon by themselves to take it upon themselves to underscore and define and help make this more understandable.

Joshua: How did you guys see this? What woke you guys up? Why are you interested in this?

Harrison: For me, initially it was my interest in psychopathy and just weird, abnormal psychology. "Serial killers are really interesting." It just seemed like such a cool, weird, dark idea. So that got me interested. And then came Ponerology. I read this book 15 years ago and that put a whole other perspective on it, that there's a whole political element to it and it has a hand in all kinds of stuff that goes on in human history and it's not just serial killers and it's not just abusive parents - but that's a big part of it - but there are societal implications.

Then one of the main points that Lobaczewski makes is that psychopaths that want political power use ideologies to get it and the ideology is their political mask of sanity. Just like a psychopath has a mask of sanity. If he's a con man, he's coming across as a guy you just love. He's fun to talk to. You get along with him and you just find yourself giving him your money and you don't realize what's happened until after the fact.

I got conned, not hugely, but I got conned by a common, low level, low life psycho on the street in a town I used to live in. He got me to pawn stuff for him and I thought I was being such a great guy doing him this favour and then afterwards I thought "What the hell did I just do? I just went in a pawn shop. He stole that stuff! What the hell was I doing?!" I felt like such an idiot afterwards.

But that mask of sanity, that illusion of whatever they want to show to you, on the political scale, that is ideology. So when this stuff started happening, when it started blowing up, when I first started noticing it was in the lead-up to the 2016 election and then everything that's happened after that. Initially I was with the liberals. Trump is totally evil. He's Hitler. Things are going to go bad. He's going to bring fascism to the US. That's where I was.

But before the election something switched and luckily I had people to talk about this with who were seeing the same things. We were saying, "Wait a second! Something's not right here." And part of it was just the amount of opposition he was getting and from where he was getting it. The types of people that didn't want Trump in power was just odd. That switched how I was looking at the situation. I think that was important for me to then be able to see all this stuff on the left. The way I put it, I have a leftist personality, high in agreeableness and openness. That's just where I naturally fit.

But I started seeing how absolutely crazy this stuff was; the stuff that was going on in the universities, Jordan Peterson getting cancelled for saying he was against enforced speech, forcing people to use certain pronouns and made up words. I was like, "What is going on here?!" Luckily, having read this book I had a framework. "Just wait a second. This is exactly what Lobaczewski talks about. This is a rhyming history of what went on in Russia prior to the revolution, what went on in China during the cultural revolution and beforehand. There is something very similar going on.

Joshua: It's happening now.

Harrison: Yeah, it's happening now.

Joshua: It's happening now. Yes, yes. That sounds like the same thought evolution that I've had too. I don't know how you guys feel, but to me it's perfectly obvious that yes, Clump is - Clump!! {laughter}

Elan: That's what it's come down to.

Joshua: Alright. I know. Trump to me is an obvious narcissistic personality disorder case.

Harrison: Yeah.

Joshua: Yet, yet, he is not the evil tyrant that I was convinced that he was. When I was able to calm the hell down and stop emoting about Trump and start thinking about Trump, when you look at his legislative record, at his executive record, it does not support the idea that this guy was bringing fascism in here. {Sighs}

Elan: Josh, I had every reason to hate Trump. I grew up in New York City, grew up reading satirical articles about the man, watching him promote himself, looking at all the crass buildings that he had put up. I just had a general distaste for him and a reaction, which I understand very well on the part of progressives and the left. He's on a very...

Joshua: Vulgar.

Elan: ...vulgar, exactly. Spy magazine called him a short fingered vulgarian from Queens. I was from Queens. So when he was running for President it was just like, "Yuck!" But there was a journey there and it was a rather big one. I had already known about Hillary Clinton's...

Harrison: That was another part of it, yeah.

Elan: She's basically an arch criminal, right? And so after a while it became clear to me that even Trump's track record of swindling contractors and doing shady business deals with the Port Authority in New York City, basically he was just a very - what's a nice way of putting it? - just a very 'smart' businessman who did things that skirted the grey of doing business, on his level of legality.

But similar to Harrison, the reaction, the demonization, the over-the-top labeling, the hysterical responses...

Harrison: Russiagate. That's one of the things that did it for me.

Elan: Basically. And of course it's jaw-dropping. So this is...

Joshua: Initially was taken in by it.

Elan: Well we watch the news and alternative media very closely so we were able to see things and truths come out many months before they became more public. But I have to say that at some point, I think in 2017, I woke up to this radicalization of the left because I too consider myself left-leaning or progressive. That was my choice way of describing myself to friends and others. I was a 'progressive'. Such a nice word. I realized everything had become inverted! Everything had become twisted and upside down.

So even if I had a background in understanding in narcissism and in working on my own narcissism to the extent that I could, and dissociating myself from people in my life who were toxic influences, what we were seeing was something that was happening on a level that I'm still, to be quite honest, looking at the cancel culture and all the vehemence that's being projected and unfairly foisted upon people and it's mind-boggling to me. But the good thing about it, the pleasure to the extent that you can call it pleasure, is to see how all of this madness is in fact, at the very least being used politically but at the most it's a political weapon to help bring in other much larger and damaging movements and changes that will ultimately not only injure and damage the people who are fighting for wokeism, but it's going to hurt everybody. It IS hurting everybody.

Joshua: Yes.

Elan: So it's been a remarkable...

Joshua: We're all going to be in the gulag together.

Harrison: Yeah. It is a totalitarian movement. I think before we were recording Josh you were saying that you've had people, knowing your story and knowing your life and looking at what you're saying - how did you put it, that you're a one issue guy? You've got mommy issues? List all those things. What are people saying about you?

Joshua: Okay. And then we'll talk about the feminists. {laughter} Yeah. I've had people tell me - and it got to me for a while because there's a grain of truth in the criticism - I do tend to be obsessive, right? I think about this stuff 24 hours a day. I have a job. I have a house. I have friends. I have kitty cats. I have my hobbies and stuff. But I think about this stuff all the time and I have thought about it nonstop for five years and I'm not going to stop thinking about it and I'm not going to stop talking about it because I'm scared. I'm scared for us.

But I've been told I'm obsessive, that I'm a hammer and I think everything is a nail, that I'm projecting, that I'm trying to work out my own personal experience by projecting it onto the world. Criticism, even when it stings, is worth examining because often there's something to be learned from it even if you decide in the end that most of the criticism is unfounded it is worth listening to your critics.

But I'm not going to apologize for this. I'm damn sure I'm right. I know I'm right. This is cluster B. I'm not wrong. You guys aren't wrong. And it has caused such a rupture it has caused me to re-examine every ideology and every philosophy that I have aligned myself with. Five years ago me, if he could stand there and listen to me talking to you right now, I would cancel myself, okay? I would cancel myself as a bigot and an unreconstructed troglodyte, all of these things. Like I said on my show and I think I said to you Harrison when we talked before the show, the trans issue is what really broke my mind on this. This is THE example of the big lie.

I've seen things on film. I've seen history. But in my life with my own eyes, I have never seen such a stunning lie, the entirety of it, forcing people to say that men are women and women are men by self-declaration is the Simon Pure example of the big lie. It is the demonstration of the fact that the content that you are being required to say makes no difference. We could be being forced to say that waffle irons are sea anemones or something equally ridiculous. It does not matter what it is.

Harrison: Two-plus-two is five.

Joshua: Yeah, 2+2 is 5, water is dry, water starts fires, when the sun comes up that means it's dark outside. It doesn't matter what it is, the purpose is to demonstrate that you can be compelled to say nonsense because it is a demonstration of absolute dominion and power over.

I'm aesthetically offended. I'm morally offended. I'm emotionally offended by this. It's hard to describe it. Some of the people, feminists for example, and there are many different definitions of feminism and I have friends who are feminists, some would call themselves radical feminists, some would call themselves liberal feminists. It's one of those, "Oh, you're only talking about da-da-da-da-da." I know it's a big messy category. I am very much against the transgender bullshit, obviously. I think that everybody should be equal before the law. Nobody should be harassed, nobody should be denied a job, nobody should be fired simply because they express themselves in a way that doesn't comport with sexual stereotypes.

I'm a gay guy, right? I was out there at the tail end of Act Up. I remember when we had no legal protections as homosexuals. I still believe in those fundamental liberal values. But men are not women and goddamn it, you will NOT make me say it! And it is infuriating to me that feminists are responsible for a great deal of this. I spent a whole show talking about the Trojan horse that is the Equality Act in the United States. It's basically going to strike out women's rights completely.

I'm protesting among many women who call themselves feminists and they are not connected to reality on this issue. They keep saying this is a men's rights movement, this is patriarchy. No it isn't sweetheart! Because just look out in front of you. Count the people who are cancelling other people, who are shunning them, who are calling their employers and saying, "Did you know that Josh doesn't believe that trans women are women? Do you really think you should have that kind of employee?" Who's doing it? Women are!

This is a white, young, liberal women's religious cult. That is what is driving trans. I'm sorry but it's the truth. There are at least eight women for every one to two men who are go-go trans, rah, rah, rah, rah. It's just a fact. You can deny it if you want but everybody can see it and I think that this is like that species of cuckoo that will go to a rival bird's nest and kick the robin's egg out and replace it with a cuckoo egg and coopt the mother robin into brooding the cuckoo's egg. That's exactly what's happened with feminism.

These women, many of whom mean well, are trying to out-mommy each other in public for credit and for points with other women. This is a competition between women to see who can be the most saintly maternal type, who can care about trans women the most, who can be the most expansive. It's competition. It's female-on-female competition and jockeying for position and it is leading us down a road to hell.

I am not denying that there are a lot of very powerful men who have this as their interest. There are some millionaires and billionaires out there, men, who are putting their money behind these initiatives that are going to destroy the legal foundation of sex-based rights, which are important. I recognize that as true but the vast majority demographically of the foot soldiers and the flying monkeys who carry it out are women. Women are doing this. Women are the ones who are driving cancellation campaigns. Women are the ones who are shunning people. It was women who came after me. I'm sorry, there's no way to talk about this without {laughter} - I find it so frustrating, find it so frustrating.

And you guys know this too.

Harrison: Yeah.

Joshua: You won't say it but I'll say it and that'll make it okay. You know that gay guys like me, we have a lot of women friends, right. Lots and lots of women friends. I have always had more women in my life than men. My confidantes, my mentors, have been women. Women are very important to me. But both sexes have, in general, both sexes have certain tendencies and certain traits and these bring advantages and disadvantages and the disadvantages with men, we're more aggressive. We are far more physically violent. If a murder's going to happen, a rape is going to happen, it's almost always a man. And some of the disadvantages of women is that their maternal reflexes and their interest in preserving relationships, building bridges and mending them rather than burning them, can be turned against them. And that is what has happened with trans.

It's frustrating because women in many ways stand to lose the most. If the Equality Act goes through in this country, it will be illegal for a corner gas station - no, that's not a good example - it will be illegal, let's go from small harms to big harms - it will be illegal for Macy's as a clothing store to have change rooms that are women only. They'll say women on them but they'll mean gender identity, which means as a man I can walk in and say "I'm a woman." Yes! Yes, that is exactly what will happen. This is the legislation! Gender identity trumps sex.

Okay, so that's just the Macy's changing room. What about the domestic violence shelter that's women only? What about the rape refuge for women and children? What about hospital wards? What about psych wards? What about your daughter's locker room in high school? Boys are going to be able to just waltz in there and say they're women. It's already happening. You can see it in the news. It's already happening. It's happening ahead of this law and it's been hard to watch this and hard to fight it,

I'm losing friends right now. Whenever this plays, I'm losing friends right now. I'm losing more women friends and that makes me sad. But it is the case. If we have any chance of overcoming this constructed reality, this pseudo-reality, the para-reality as James would put it or as the author of Ponerology would put it, we have to come to terms with reality and we have to come to terms with the tendencies of the sexes and they are there. They're real. I don't care whether you believe they're socially inculcated or genetic or a combination of the two. I do not give a shit. They're there and our weaknesses are being used against us to further the aims of people who would see us either silent or dead, preferably dead. That's where this ends.

Elan: Josh, in this recent video of yours about the Equality Act, you speak a lot about language and you use a lot of critical thinking to break down how things are defined. We just did a show on 1984, the film, and discussed a little bit of the book and how Orwellian, how that has become a way of describing how things are actually the opposite of the meaning as we understand it.

Joshua: Reversal.

Elan: Yes. Could you talk a little bit about the use of language and how these Orwellian twists have been put into certain definitions in the Equality Act?

Joshua: Yeah. Well as I said - if anybody's interested, it's episode 7 of my podcast Disaffected where I spend a lot of time going line-by-line through the Equality Act. Honestly, what I'm doing should not be difficult for anyone to do. I am an intelligent guy, but I'm not the most intelligent man on the face of the earth. I'm not the most highly educated man. I'm not doing anything that an adult of average, reasonable intelligence should not be able to see. That's what scares me about this so much. It's kind when people say, 'You're really right on target with that. Your analysis is great' or 'You're very brave.'

I don't think I'm extraordinarily brave. I think that most people are surprisingly cowardly and I think they've turned their brains off because I'm not doing high level shit here. I'm just reading English and when I read, the definition section of the bill which defines what sex and what gender identity is, is literally a circular definition. Gender identity means gender-related characteristics. Gender means gender.

And sex is even worse. It's not even circular. It's absurd! Sex means AT&T telephone systems. That makes as much sense as what this says. 'Sex means gender identity, it means pregnancy, it means a condition related to sex.' Okay, it just means whatever the hell you say it means!

So first off, language is used to disguise things but the reversals are the worst, the euphemistic reversals. So when people talk about what trans is and what medical care is for trans people, they don't want to talk about what it really is. On the milder end, on the MILDER end, it's merely poisonous cross-sex hormones that leave most people sterile. That's the MILD end, okay?

But if you go for the full surgery, on a man it means slicing open the scrotum and removing the testicles and then slicing open the penis and peeling it back and inverting the penis. I know this is hard to hear - this is what's happening - and making what I call a dead end flesh pocket. That is literally what this is. It is inverting the penis and making an open flesh wound that they call a vagina. This is what you're signing up for. And you know what they call it? Gender affirming care! Gender affirming care! Doesn't that sound nice? Doesn't that sound like something mommy would make for you to go to sleep at night? 'Let me give you some gender-affirming care with your Ovaltine.'

Harrison: Ministry of Love.

Joshua: This is sick! Yeah, Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth. It is literally psychopathic. This logic is psychopathic. I'll give you a small example. People talk about gas-lighting a lot and it's another one of those words that people like us, disaffected liberals, if you will, we react against this because histrionics, borderlines and narcissists constantly appropriate real things and wear them as a costume. Whenever anybody's getting attention for whatever seems dramatic, they make that their identity and thereby they cheapen and devalue the words to the point where people say, "Don't talk to me about gas-lighting! That's just some SJW bullshit!"

We can't let them take our language. We cannot let them take our language! We have to be able to describe this and we have to be able to describe it in plain and accurate terms. Gas-lighting is a real thing. Just because that gaggle of SJWs that annoyed the shit out of you say the word all the time does not mean that gas-lighting is now removed from our lexicon. Take it back. Gas-lighting is not just lying. Gas-lighting is lying or lying by omission or lying by embellishment in a larger system that is meant to make you crazy. It is meant to destabilize your sense of reality and make you question your judgment.

When I was going through the crisis with my mother, I was so gas-lit by my mother that I started writing down things that I did and said on particular days so that if she came back in a week and said I didn't, that I'd have an objective record. I would call my friends and I'd say, "I just talked to my mother. X happened. Will you please remember this because I'm so unstable right now that I'm questioning my sanity. I'm questioning if I'm hallucinating." And I think many people watching this right now know that feeling.

A stupid example but chilling to me nonetheless, in the spring of 2016, a few months before the crisis with my mother, she told me that the toilet seat was broken and she asked me to replace it and as the landlord of course that's my duty. Obviously, my tenant says the toilet seat's broken, I'll get it. Now really? My mother could have put her lazy ass into one of the two cars I bought for her and gone down to Walmart and gotten a toilet seat herself, but really it was easier for me just to do it.

So I went over, I bought a new toilet seat. I remembered this so clearly. I don't remember why, but I remember it. I remember kneeling on the floor in front of the toilet. I was shouting to my mom who was in the kitchen in the front of the house and I was saying, "Oh yeah, this one will fit. It's not the same colour" and she's like, "I don't care what colour it is as long as I can sit on it." I remember putting it on there. I remember taking the old one out and taking it outside to the recycling bin.

Three months later when the crisis occurred and I started eviction proceedings, I got a five-page single-spaced email from my mother at 4:30 in the morning. I suspect she was addled on valium. My sister and I repaired our relationship and met each other again as adults and started comparing notes. What I didn't realize was that my mother has been a benzodiazepine addict for decades, valium, Xanax. The things people can hide!

But she didn't really need chemicals to be as crazy as she was. So there was this five-page letter where she accused me of being a narcissist. She said I was crazy. She said I was an abuser. It was a stream of filth. Sometimes people have a hard time. Some people are very vulnerable to female cluster Bs because they don't believe that women can be as evil as men. They can be.

Elan: Mm-hm.

Joshua: They can be. They're not usually as physically dangerous. You're right, if you're worried about rape or getting killed, it's mostly likely going to be a man. But women can be just as psychologically deranged as men can. Some people had a hard time believing that a mother could say these things to her child but they can.

She literally accused me of being so cheap and mean and petty that I wouldn't even replace a broken toilet seat and that I was forcing her to sit on the porcelain. It gets down to this granular level where she would tell me that something stupid that we both stood there watching me do, never occurred! Never happened! And it just gets worse from there.

It's like the riots that occurred, the black lives matter riots and the antifa riots that occurred in American cities, most prominently in democrat-governed cities around this country. The billions of dollars in property damage, 25 people who were killed - was it about 25 people who lost their lives in connection with these riots? I don't know if I have that figure accurately but I think that's close. I'm watching people on the left say these things literally never happened and if they did happen we just saw a few examples of violence, mostly peaceful, right?

Harrison: Mm-hm.

Joshua: They set police stations on FIRE!! They set government buildings on FIRE! They beat people. They beat Andy Ngo, the journalist. I think that actually took place before the BLM stuff.

Harrison: That was a couple of years ago.

Joshua: But we have people who are saying that these things we can all see, did not happen! And if they can't convince us that the videotape is - if we show it to them on videotape and they have to say that it happened, they have to call it something else. They have to say that's not violence!

These reversals are running through this entire project. It's not violence. Words are violence. Saying that trans women aren't women is violence? But actually beating reporters, beating people on the street is not violence.

Harrison: This is a really interesting, strange and disturbing phenomenon. I read a book recently by Stanislav Vysotsky. He's an antifa scholar. He's a sociologist. I think this is the only academic book that's been published on antifa. It just came out this year I think and his story is he is a long-time anti-fascist. So from the sound of it, he came up in the antifa antifascist subculture which was largely in the punk scene. It was like this in the UK in the 1970s I believe, in the 1980s and it moved over to the states.

Basically...

Joshua: It's a honeypot for psychopaths.

Harrison: Yeah. So there was a punk scene and this is part of the legend and the story of antifa, or at least American antifa, that in the punk scene there are the neo-Nazis. There are the white supremacy skinheads. And then there are the antifascist skinheads. They were skinheads in the UK, but antifascist punk subculture people. They would be the ones protecting a venue at a concert to break up fights or to get into fights with fascists when they were there with the neo-Nazis.

It was basically a subcultural movement, a bunch of kids listening to punk music, or adults, who'd still listen to punk, getting fights at concerts. I think that was his background. It has escalated from there but he gives a really good rationale from the antifascist perspective. You get an understanding of "Okay, these guys really don't like fascists." But the two things that stick out, not just in the book but in the movement itself are that, he says antifascists reframe self-defence. They reframe violence. So when antifa attack people or are violent or destroy property, it is actually a form of self-defence, because they've got their definition for it.

So they're justified in violence because they are from their anti-authoritarian, anarchist perspective, showing and demonstrating that the state shouldn't and doesn't have a monopoly on force. So they've got philosophical and historical justifications for their behaviors, their attitude and their ideology, goals and aims. Whatever.

Okay, that's all fine and good, but it's not all fine and good because a) they're reframing something. b) Who's a fascist? The definition expands to the point where anyone's a fascist. Now everyone is a fascist because part of the antifa ideology is critical race theory where everyone, our entire culture, is white supremacist, so everyone can be classified as a fascist. But that's not even what I want to talk about.

What it is, is a justification for antisocial violence of an ideological nature. Now when you're reading it, when you're listening to what they're saying it can make sense and it does make sense. It does make sense to me intellectually and it makes sense to a lot of people just from a gut level when they're seeing it. But the way I try to inoculate myself against that is because it's absurd, imagine a ruffian, a thug, a guy on the street like we've seen recently in the uptick of attacks on Asian Americans, you see some guy coming out of nowhere and beating the crap out of a 70-year-old Asian woman on the street.

Now that is reprehensible, right? Everyone will look at that and say that's just inexcusable. That's a crime. That person should be punished, however we think he should be punished - go to prison, get charged, whatever. But when that person is antifa or a BLM activist, now all of a sudden it's ideological violence. It is self-defence in some way. It is a defence against the violence of the person that they are attacking, For some reason, ideological violence, revolutionary violence gets into people's head as being justifiable, as being somehow different when if you look at the personalities of the two different people, of the one person just beating someone up on the street for criminal reasons and the other person who has an ideological justification for it, it can be the same person doing it.

That's the danger. It often is the same person or type of person doing it. It's probably still an antisocial personality who is engaging in violence and is using the ideology as a mask, as a tool of getting away with it.

Joshua: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. This illustrates something else that I think is extremely important and that I wish people would think about more and that I would ask people to think about more consciously and monitor yourself and monitor your own reactions to these things and interrogate them.

There are two parts. I think that you're right that these are antisocial personalities. These movements like antifa, like I said, are honeypots, they're traps for psychopaths and antisocials. People need to know, one of the defining characteristics of psychopaths and sociopaths is that they have a very high threshold for stimulation. The things that would excite you or me sexually, food, thrill rides at an amusement park, they have to go three steps higher to get the same level of thrill that a normal person would get.

So with their impulsivity and their proclivity to engage in dangerous activities, they're trying to get a high and a thrill. That's part of the antisocial personality. They're tolerance meter is set very, very differently from the rest of us. This is a very handy excuse. There's a very simple explanation for this. It has nothing to do with ideology. It has everything to do with their personality disorder. This is how they feel alive. They need this level of stimulation in order to feel alive and that is what makes them dangerous.

We allow this stuff to happen. I don't know if it's our cultural etiquette. I don't know if it's that more and more of us today have been trained by abuse tactics in our childhood. I don't know what it is but we have got to stop extending the benefit of the doubt to people. This is a particular problem for intellectual leftists. I'm not to name names here, but I see this - and these are people I respect, okay - but they are very dangerously mistaken.

I see this is some of the stars of what people call the intellectual dark web. I watch people who can see so much of this but who still have not broken out of this mental idea. They think that they're debating Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. They think that their moral duty is to, "Steel man the other side, give them the most charitable possible explanation because they are true intellectuals and they're not going to strawman. They're going to debate these things on their merit." You are getting sucker punched!! And worse, you are getting ME sucker punched! You are getting Elan sucker punched and Sam and Harrison and people around you. STOP this bullshit. STOP extending charity to these people.

Taking the intellectual high ground is a merit in the right context but it is a handicap in others. And you are showing your soft belly. You are inviting psychopaths to stab you and they're stabbing you and they're stabbing all of us. We have to discern between an intellectual opponent, an adversary in good faith that we can sit on a debate stage and argue with, and somebody who wants us dead. A great number of very good thinkers who are fighting the same fight that you guys are fighting and that I'm trying to fight, are actually contributing to the problem. They don't mean to, but there are a couple of them out there and I'm sure you can think of them - again, I'm not going to name names - but there are several people who have been the victims of cancellation campaigns and have lost tenured academic jobs because of it, who are still calling trans women 'she'.

This is not a little thing. It's not just Josh's personal bugbear. This is serious. It's indicative of a serious handicap. We're past the time of respectability. I'm not suggesting that people be abusive or dishonest at all, but the time for this tea party crap is over! This is a fight now and these people are bringing knives. Stop bringing your butter knife. Stop bringing you pincushion. Stop bringing your tea cosy.

There is nothing inhumane about refusing to tell a lie. And when I see people who should know better, who are looking at a news story where yet another trans woman goes on a psychopathic rampage and axes somebody in a 7-Eleven, or rapes a 14-year-old girl in a UK bathroom, or nails a dead rat to the door of a women's refuge in the Pacific Northwest, what is wrong with you?! Why are you saying, "She. She did this?"

This bothers me so much more than most other things because it's so perverse. It's so perverse. You guys saw the episode of my show where I talked about the attempt to morally rehabilitate the image of the fictional serial killer Buffalo Bill?

Elan: Mm-hm.

Joshua: A trans woman saying, "Even Buffalo Bill deserves her gender to be respected!" This is psychopathic! This IS psychopathic.

Elan: You know what that reminded me of...?

Joshua: Stop it!

Elan: Josh, I want to say two things. One is it reminded me of all the women who had sent love letters to Jeffrey Dahmer.

Joshua: And Ted Bundy!!

Elan: And Ted Bundy.

Joshua: And Jeffrey Dahmer.

Elan: Yeah.

Joshua: Thank you! {laughter} Thank you for seeing it.

Elan: It's like, "What is WRONG with you!?!" "You're not understood?" All of these narratives for them pouring out their attention, energy and focus on monsters!

Joshua: Monsters!

Elan: Yeah, monsters. Plain and simple.

Joshua: Obviously not all trans people are monsters. I'm not saying that!

Elan: No, of course.

Joshua: I'm not saying that. But, it does not matter. It's not okay to tell lies just because this is the trans woman who you like or this is the trans woman who hasn't yet had a decompensating fit in front of you.

Another thing people don't want to get to, what they don't want to admit - and it's not everybody, but in my view there is nothing more cluster B than actually believing and being obsessed with the fact that you were born in the wrong body and that in order to live your life you need to not only alter your body OR you need to engineer your presentation and you need to engineer the politics around you so that your false self, your mask, this narcissistic mask, so that everyone else says it's real. I call this Tinkerbell ontology. {clapping} "I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies." That's what this is.

This is personality disorder stuff. Extraordinarily high rate of cluster B personality. Trans itself, pretty much sounds like a description of borderline personality disorder. And I do not mean this in a cruel way and I do not mean to say that that means trans people should be mistreated. But this is a mental abnormality. To the extent that people need care, they do need compassionate care but they need psychotherapy. They need trauma therapy.

Many of these people are this way because they have been traumatized. Some of them have been traumatized in ways that abused children like me have been traumatized. It's not that I lack empathy for these people. Stop colluding with their mental illness. That's not the right way to care about somebody. And think about duty of care too. Sometimes what one person needs is in direct conflict with a similarly legitimate need of another person. We have to make value judgments.

Why is the value judgment by default always whatever trans people say they need? Even if it harms women, even if it harms children, even if it starts to normalize mutilating surgery, why are their needs more important that other people's? Sorry. I won't go on about that any more. {laughter}

Elan: No, that was very enlightening. Just one more point, referring to the numbers of very smart people or intellectuals or writers out there who have totally lost the plot, completely, there are websites that I won't go to anymore for any kind of analysis because of the sheer number of wrong-headed, deranged in some cases, and just volumes and volumes of articles that are mostly wrong or wrong too many times for me to want to have to sift through and pull my hair out to understand.

So yes, there is...

Joshua: What would be an example of the subject matter that you'd see that on?

Elan: I kind of view a lot of the racism and the transgender issue and the gay issues as part of an even larger set of issues like climate change and other things. Many of them get clustered together or allude one to the other where - and I've said this before here on the show - there's a constellation of ideas that seems to be, "Well if you believe this, then you believe this. And if you believe this, then you must believe this."

Joshua: The bundle. You've got to take it all.

Elan: Yes! It's a whole package of wrong that gets shoved into the back of your neck, matrix-style. It's very insidious. Yes, we really have to parse out what people are saying.

Joshua: I think the root of this, I think the way to boil this down to its core component, like I've said about other things, every philosophy, every stance that a person can take toward the world, has pros and cons. It does some things very well and it has weaknesses that are just as pronounced as the good parts are good.

So we have to be aware of those. We have to know when the system we're using, when the vulnerabilities in that system might be used against us. I would say that one consistent failing - and I'm not saying that liberalism itself necessarily needs to be thrown out - but liberalism has a large failing and it's built in and it will always be a part of liberalism. The failing is the inability or unwillingness to confront human nature for what it really is. It is an artificially rosy picture of the human psyche, okay?

I call it unitarian syndrome. You go to a unitarian universalist church, they're all extremely left, they're all extremely social justice and almost to a person these people - and many of them are very kind people. I have a lot of friends who are unitarians. I've run in those circles a lot. However, they are desperately naïve and desperately Pollyannaish in such a way that they often put themselves and other people in danger. They welcome disordered personalities into their congregation and into the pulpit and they are led around like the children before the pied piper.

This is a problem broadly in liberalism. I have come to the conclusion - I don't have all the answers and my views are going to change over time, but I do believe that there is such a thing that we call human nature. I can't describe it fully. I don't think any of us know it fully but I believe it exists. We have a capacity for evil that is just as great as our capacity for good. Liberalism's problem is that it takes, as a core assumption, the stance that everyone is good deep down. Everyone is good at the core. No they're not! No they're NOT!

Most people are fundamentally decent. I think that's true. I may change my mind. But not everyone is good. Some people are evil. They are evil. And I don't care if that sounds religious to people. I don't care if that sounds metaphysical. We all know what I mean. There are bad people...

Elan: Yeah.

Joshua: ...who at the very core mean you harm. That is how they get pleasure. And until you face the reality that that is part of the human condition and that those of us who are probably fundamentally decent are capable of contextual evil, we are capable of cruelty and we are capable of being manipulated into hurting other people, until we see that, we will be in danger and I fear that is what is part of what is allowing the wokeism cultural revolution to take over; people's absolute unwillingness to confront the reality of human evil that is right in front of their face.

Harrison: Right. And as long as we or society adopts this woke model where we see things in terms of sex or gender or...

Elan: Race.

Harrison: ...race, as long as those are our most basic categories, you see where I'm going with this, right? Let's say good minorities and bad white people, bad majority.

Joshua: Bad white people. Bad straight people. Bad white people. TERRIBLE men!

Harrison: It messes up the categories completely when you say, "Well what about a black psychopath?" Okay there's white psychopath. White psychopath, black psychopath, Asian psychopath. Every culture, every race has psychopaths. You look at the trans issue. There's such a push for trans rights. As you say, I'm all for basic rights for everyone. I don't think people should be discriminated against for certain reasons. But when you take it to a certain level, I think I could get cancelled for saying "What about a psychopathic trans person? What about a person who's actually a psychopath but is just pretending to be trans because he knows he can use people, manipulate them, get them on his side, get them to defend him because nothing trumps being trans?"

Joshua: Exactly!

Harrison: What about all of these...

Joshua: Exactly. You hear it when people say - here's the naivete, here's the liberal naivete: "Why would a man go to all the trouble and all the discrimination and all of the surgery and all this and that just so that he could get access to women and children?"

First of all, number one, you have no trouble seeing it in the catholic priesthood. You have no trouble understanding why a priest would go all the way through seminary just to get access to kids, a pedophile, right? You already accept that that is a thing that humans do. So first of all, drop the full naivete, because you're not being consistent and you know that you're not being consistent.

Number two, what trouble? Like I said in my last show, what trouble? There aren't even any hoops to jump through to be a trans woman now. We don't have a scheme. The UK scheme is ridiculous. It's literally a rubber stamp, the gender recognition certificate, you are truly trans, the legal fiction they've created. That's literally an administrative process that costs I think about 75.£, maybe 150£. There are NO hoops to jump through! You simply assert that you are this person.

So there's no hoops to jump through, there's no trouble they have to go through. All they have to do is say it. And this should be obvious to anybody, right? This is what predators do. All women know this. Women know that they need to keep their guard up at bars and sorority parties and frat parties and other places like that. There's always going to be that guy who says that he's a feminist or he's a vegan or he loves animals or whatever it is that that woman feels an affinity for. He's going to don that disguise, in mild cases so that he can convince her and maneuver her into bed, right? Or on the malignant end, so that he can get her into a corner and rape her. We already know that predators assume the camouflage.

There is no better disguise than to do it in plain sight. This is why it should not surprise people that many of the helping professions have a disproportionate rate of personality disordered people in them, social workers, sociopathic surgeons. There are many examples like this. The best disguise is to assume the costume of people. That is why we should be skeptical of people who have reputations like pillars of the community. How many times have you seen the woman who is on the chamber of commerce, she's on the rotary club, she's president of the Jaycee club or the 4H, she's got a list of charitable contributions as long as her arm and then you come to find out that she's been embezzling from her company for 20 years and became a millionaire out of it. Substitute man or woman. This happens.

So whenever we create a sacred past, a sacralized as sacred identity - and right now trans people have a cultural halo around their head, black people have a cultural halo around their head. The people at BLM, that's a nest of psychopaths, borderlines and narcissists. The people who rise to the top of that organization are the character disordered people.

Harrison: And it's not just...

Joshua: It's just not discriminate by race.

Harrison: It's wider than that. I use the example of a psychopathic trans person, but it's not just that. It is woke because any psychopath can use woke ideology and just become part of the crowd because it's a very large crowd. It provides the anonymity. It provides the cover for these individuals to do whatever they want and what they want, as you put it, is for us to be silent or dead, they want power.

This is the historical example. This is what we can learn from history - what happens when this kind of process happens, a group like this will get power. They will get absolute power and then they will use it to silence and kill a whole bunch of people, including the ones that supported them on their way up.

Joshua: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. The good people, the normal range people who are deluded right now - I've been a deluded person, I was a cult member, I was a flying monkey, I'm not sitting in a judgmental position where I say I would never do that. I did all of that, right? I understand it because I've been there. Even the good-hearted people are going to starve to death in the camp, whatever the camp is, whether it's mild disenfranchisement or your career options are so narrow that you're not welcome in this town again, or if we end up getting to camps, as soon as you are no longer a useful idiot, you will be chum. They will eat you. They do not love you. They do not care about you and they will push you in front of the train. You will hurt too.

So when people listen to people like us - I know what my affect is like, I know that I come off as strident to people in many ways. I am strident. I am afraid. I am very afraid right now. I'm afraid of what's going to happen in the country economically. I am afraid that we are literally going to lose our constitution and we are going to lose our first world freedoms. I'm genuinely that scared. The time is now to say these things and I'm one of many, many people who are beginning to wake up to this. You all have been awake to this longer than I have.

We are not the boy who cried wolf. Don't treat us like Cassandra. Don't. We're not doing this because we're getting a kick out of it. We're doing it because we're fucking scared and when the shit hits the fan, it's not going to make any difference how much of a cheerleader you were. You're going to be sitting in the same camp that I'm sitting in and the strident people and the ones who are standing in the town square and yelling "The redcoats are coming", we're not your enemies. We can actually be your best friend. We care and we can see it and we can help you see it too. We're not the enemy. Don't let them make us the enemy.

Harrison: Well Josh, I think we'll end it there. On your show you have a tendency to joke about ending on the worse note possible or the most depressing note possible. {laughter} But I think you turned it around there at the end, so I think that's a good message to stop on. We've ran a long time, but we've had a great time talking.

Joshua: Thank you.

Harrison: It's been great.

Elan: Thank you Josh.

Harrison: I hope we can do it again.

Joshua: Thank you for listening to me go on and on and on. I do appreciate it and just personally, I'm so glad to meet you guys. It does me good mentally to know that you're there, to make your acquaintance, to know that you see what I see. It's really a relief and it's a relief I need, so thank you.

Harrison: It's our pleasure.