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The “fire hose” of all podcasts produced by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank.
Alright. We are live, ladies and gentlemen. The climate alarmist narrative is one that is underpinned by various groups with special interests. There's the politicians who use climate alarm to justify enhanced powers. There's businesses and firms that use climate alarm to pad their bottom lines.
Donald Kendal:There's the activist types that use climate alarm to gain clout, and there are those that use climate alarm to justify an anti humanist agenda. While all these groups help prop up the same climate narrative, they are all doing so for different reasons. And on this week's episode, we're gonna be taking a look at that last group on the list, the anti humanists. So join us as we talk about this topic and more on episode 454 of the In The Tank podcast. Alright.
Donald Kendal:Alright. Welcome to the end of the tank podcast. As always, I'm your host, Donald Kendall. And today, I've got a skeleton crew. It's just me.
Donald Kendal:Just me and Justin Haskins, senior fellow for the Socialism Research Center here at the Heartland Institute. How are you doing today, Good Sarah?
Justin Haskins:Well, yeah, I I I was you know, today today was a little bit of a rough day, little bit of a rough start. And then I I came into the show here, and there was nobody else here. Jim's gone. Chris is gone. Now I feel better.
Justin Haskins:So
Donald Kendal:Oh, shit.
Justin Haskins:I don't know. I don't know what the I don't know if there's a correlation there, connection. I, you know, I don't know, but things feel feel pretty good right now. Yeah.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, to even further elaborate on that, up until about an hour ago, I wasn't entirely sure whether or not you were gonna show up. So I thought it was just gonna be me flying solo, so at least I got a little backup, which is which is nice.
Donald Kendal:So I appreciate that. I
Justin Haskins:thought I I was half considering just not showing up. And then, like, 5, 10 minutes in, just sort of popping in.
Donald Kendal:You pop in. I'm just, like, sweating. Everything's falling apart around me, and, like, you come in and say the thing.
Justin Haskins:Would have been fine. Look. Rush Limbaugh made a whole, like, hall of fame career out of it. I think he could've you could you
Donald Kendal:could do it. Well, you know, the the trick the trick would be, for all of these, like, professional broadcasters and people that make a living on the radio. And yet they're interrupted by commercials and traffic updates and weather updates, like, every, like, 10 or 15 minutes. So they got it easy.
Justin Haskins:So Well, that's all you have to do is just give weather updates. Just stop yourself. Give some weather updates.
Donald Kendal:That's right.
Justin Haskins:Fake commercials. You know?
Donald Kendal:That's what I should do. That's what I should do. Yeah. But I did prep like I was going on solo, so I have got a lot of stuff to talk about. I went deep down this rabbit hole of anti humanism, in preparation for the show.
Donald Kendal:So everyone, buckle up for this one. It's gonna be one of those it's gonna be one of those podcast episodes. We do do some of these occasionally where you almost wanna, like, bookmark it and save it because it's just gonna be chock full of great information that you can reference a 1000000 times over. It's not gonna go out of date, but, yeah, you can almost, like, use this one as a resource. But before we get into any of that, I do wanna mention to all those audio only listeners that are probably catching the show on a Friday or later, leave a review for us on iTunes.
Donald Kendal:It would be greatly appreciated. And, also, you can consider joining us a day earlier on Thursdays at noon CST where we are live streaming this on Facebook and YouTube and Rumble and x, and you can join the conversation. Throw your comments and questions in the chat. Maybe we'll show your comments on the screen. Maybe we'll address your questions on the fly.
Donald Kendal:You could also help out the show by hitting that like button, sharing this content, subscribing if you haven't already, or just leaving a comment under the video. All those things help break through those big tech algorithms to prevent content like this from being shown to more people. And I would also mention the idea that we can do super chat functionality, but, no, we've been demonetized. Mentioned this last week. We have been demonetized, so, you're not gonna be able to support our show that way.
Donald Kendal:Although, we do have a new portal set up. And if you wanna support the show, you could just go to heartland.org/inthetank, and there is a specific donate to the Heartland Institute specifically for, supporting in the tank show. So, we made that live last week. We've gotten a couple of donations through that, so I want a big thumbs up to those that stepped up to the plate and help support the show that way. But YouTube and all of that, they're they're not gonna help us out.
Donald Kendal:So you need to you need to help us out. So that's, the situation that we are currently in. But like I said, we have got a lot to get into. Justin, any, anything that you wanna discuss before I just, like, dive into the meat of this topic?
Justin Haskins:No. I think, I think we should just we should get we should get going. There there's a lot of really crazy things in the notes that you sent me, and I don't wanna, you know, I don't I don't want we never seem to get through all the notes. So today, maybe today is the day. The day is the day.
Justin Haskins:Is finally the day. We've rid ourselves of the deadweight, and now it's just us. We can finally get through a show. So let's get let's currently give it a real shot here. Alright.
Justin Haskins:Let's let's just get straight straight to it and see how far we can go.
Donald Kendal:Well, you know, forgive me if I go on these little tangents here because, like I said, I went down a rabbit hole, and, this is a very kind of holistic view of this anti humanist kind of movement or whatever. I don't wanna just, like, you know, pick all the low hanging fruit. Like, I I wanted to kind of get into it and, like I said, went down a rabbit hole. So let's see where this conversation takes us. So the first thing that I wanna mention right off the bat is, just the concept of an intersubjective concept.
Donald Kendal:Okay? So you'll see where I'm going with all of this, but I want to start off the conversation talking about this idea of an intersubjective concept. So there, this is basically, the inter subjective concept is a is a subjective concept that's shared amongst the population. So this could apply to a whole bunch of things. It could apply to the idea of, like, what a country is or what a business is.
Donald Kendal:The concept of Ford Motors Vehicles, as an entity is an example of, like, an intersubjective concept. Right? So, this this is the idea that, there's people's combined kind of knowledge of something kind of creates an entity that's not actually physically there. Like, what is Ford Motor Vehicles? Like, is it the actual cars?
Donald Kendal:Is it the factories? Is it the workers? Is it the stock price? It's arguably all of those things kind of put together. So, this is an idea that's, like, something that's bolstered by the combined will of various populations.
Donald Kendal:So these populations don't necessarily have to line up in the way that they kind of uphold this idea of an intersubjective concept. So, like, if we're talking about Ford, right, like I mentioned Ford, the way that, like, a potential motorist looks at Ford might be completely different than the rubber manufacturer or an investor or an employee of Ford. They all have different ideas of what Ford is, but they all support this intersubjective concept of Ford. Climate change is also an intersubjective concept. Climate change, of course, is the idea that human action is driving a potentially catastrophic changes to the climate that will result in massive societal harm.
Donald Kendal:Climate change as a concept is bolstered, like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, by a vast array of special interests that all have certain agendas. K. You have the politicians that support the narrative because it justifies enhanced political power. You have industries that support the narrative, because it could be used to pad their bottom lines. Think of the ESG scheme that we've been talking about on the show for years now.
Donald Kendal:Activists and influencer types support the narrative because it can bring fame and clout. Media, bureaucrats, globalists, investment firms, banks. There are so many special interests that all have distinct as well as overlapping reasons to support, the climate alarmist narrative. And the group and worldview that I wanted to discuss in length here on this episode is the anti humanist. So I set this topic up this way for a couple of reasons.
Donald Kendal:One is that I wanna be as, like, nuanced on this topic as possible. I want to avoid all the accusations of, like, straw manning. I I'm not accusing all of those that propagate the idea of climate change, you know, and the climate change narrative as being anti humanist. And 2, I also wanna dispel the idea that there's some type of widespread climate hoax conspiracy, that all of these people that I just mentioned are all in on this conspiracy. And I want to quote one of my favorite comedians, George Carlin, who famously once said, you don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.
Donald Kendal:And that's what climate change is for all of these different groups that I outlined. It all has a a convergence, so they're all supporting this thing for those own various reasons, and the anti humanists are just one of those things. I'll circle back to all of this. There's there's another reason why I kind of wanted to set up all of this, but I'll get back to that. But before we go any further and before I let, Justin kind of enter the chat, I also wanna define our terms.
Donald Kendal:See, Justin, you could tell that I was planning on doing this solo. I've got a lot prepared here. So so let's define let's define our terms. Right? So this is another instance where I want to be nuanced, and that is what the definition of anti humanist is.
Donald Kendal:So it's very it would be way too easy for me to just kind of use anti humanist to mean, you know, people that just wanna, like, call humanity for the sake of the planet. And there's plenty of those people, and we'll get to that. Trust me. But the philosophy of anti humanism is actually much broader than that. And looking at it through this broader lens, I think, actually kind of helps us understand the larger impact of this corrosive worldview and all the ways that it's, you know, could be used.
Donald Kendal:So anti humanism is the philosophy that rejects the traditional human centric worldview. It challenges the ideas of human reason, autonomy, and inherent goodness. It argues that these concepts are all socially constructed and serve to obscure how humanity really operates, which is through nothing more than natural selection and environmental and social conditioning. So some of the primary positions of anti humanists. Anti humanists reject the idea that humans are inherently superior to other forms of life.
Donald Kendal:Anti humanists believe human behavior and identity are shaped by social structures and cultural practices exclusively and not by any individual autonomy or innate qualities. So if you recall a while back, I did an episode where I talked about Yuval Harari and how he, his rejection of the concept of free will. This is an example of the sort of anti humanist belief that I was just talking about. Flowing from that anti humanist belief, power dynamics are exclusively derived from just chance developments. If someone has power and influence, they only got to that position because of just luck of the draw.
Donald Kendal:They just happen to be molded in that position by a series of genetic and environmental conditioning. And this worldview then starts to flow into, like, basic, like, nihilism where truth and ethics and morality are all just social constructs that have no inherent value or meaning. Right? It's all just subjective. So that's, that that's kind of this this would be a good part for you to to jump in, Justin, kind of your thoughts of of how I'm kind of laying this out, just that baseline before we start getting into, like, the specific details of how this relates to climate change.
Donald Kendal:But any objections to kind of the the way I'm I'm I'm, setting up the foundation here?
Justin Haskins:No. No. I think I think this makes sense. I think too often, we have a tendency to think of, we have a tendency to to think about anti humanism as the sort of, like you said, the worst case scenario version of it. But in reality, there is a stream of antihumanism, even a very mild form of it, that runs through almost all environmentalism because sort of the the whole concept of environmentalism is that humans, harm the environment and the and and should not always put themselves over and above the environment in every single case.
Justin Haskins:And, that doesn't necessarily mean you're antihuman per se, in the worst case scenario of it. But I do think there's at least a a hint of it even in the most basic form of of environmentalism. Because, really, what an environmentalist is saying is that people shouldn't always put people first. Like, that's essentially what what that means is that there are times when we should put nature first because nature has more value than humans tend to give it. And then depending on how much value you wanna give nature, you get increasingly more radical in your environmentalism, right, and in your solutions to the environmentalism all the way up to not having people, you know, not having many people or or whatever.
Justin Haskins:So I I do think that that that is important to think of it that way. I think that makes sense. And we've seen this play out in public policy, for, you know, centuries. Like, we've seen varying degrees of this where you have, and it doesn't always necessarily correlate very well. It's kinda funny how, like, some of the more, anti humanist governments, for example, are also not necessarily, or or I should say the governments that are not necessarily respectful of human life are also, a lot of times, the governments that don't care about the environment either.
Justin Haskins:Oh, sure. Just don't care about anything. Right? And so there is this weird kind of thing. But on the left, you you see in America, the modern left, and, really, this goes back more than a 100 years here in the United States.
Justin Haskins:There's always been this sort of, bent towards we humans humans are causing too much problem too many problems. We can't just have, like, runaway growth, economic growth, societal growth, buildings, etcetera, people. We have to manage resources more carefully. And I guess you could argue that's that maybe they're suggesting there's a there's a sort of even a wing of that that's like they're doing it because they think in the long run, humans won't survive unless we do these things. Right?
Justin Haskins:But then there are other people who just think nature has a higher value than humans. And so it is a massive tent of people who are, to varying degrees, not putting human welfare, prosperity, etcetera, as at the forefront of it. And I think all of that can be labeled to some degree at least antihumanism even if it's just a little bit in some cases.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. And I kinda wanna address at least most of the points that I kind of outlined is, like, the positions of kind of that big tent, you know, anti humanist kind of movement or whatever. But let's start with the first one. So this is the idea that humans are not inherently superior to other forms of life. You know, some people might put, like, humans up here and, you know, itchy algae down here, but, for some of the more hardcore anti humanists, no.
Donald Kendal:They're on the same level. Itchy algae has the same claim to life as, you know, humans and all of that. And and first off, before I go any, like, deeper into this, I do want to address that, and and you kinda touched on this too when you were just talking there, Justin, that this position and like all the other positions, they all exist on a spectrum. This is not black and white. This is a lot of shades of gray.
Donald Kendal:So on one end, you might just advocate for, you know, forest preserves and national and state parks, and that's great. You know, I think that most people are on that side. But as you slide down the spectrum, you have those that talk about humanity as, like, a planetary cancer that's just killing its host. Okay? So first, I wanna just kind of go through a little bit of a history, and there's there's some links in the show notes.
Donald Kendal:We're running without a producer right now, so I'm not gonna probably bring up many of the stories that I'm talking about, but there are links to them in the show notes. Whatever you're listening or watching this on, you should be able to go down and kinda see in the description, and find the links to all the stuff that I'm talking about. So environmentalism, who knows how far back that goes? I mean, easily like the 1800, but I'm sure there was at least one Egyptian guy that was like, really, people? Do we really have to leave our papyrus laying around?
Donald Kendal:Like, there's a garbage can right there. So I don't know how far back environmentalism goes.
Justin Haskins:Well, and just just like and, like, a real just an interesting point just on that is Uh-huh. I mean, there there have been religions like an ancient civilization essentially worship nature.
Donald Kendal:Oh, sure.
Justin Haskins:And so, I mean, you could say that's a I mean, that is a form of environmentalism in a in a way. Right? Like, obviously, if you think nature is your god, then you're going to treat it differently than you're gonna treat people. Right? So it's been around for 1000 1000 of years to varying degrees.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. So I have an article in the show notes that's published by the, Mackinac Center, and they attribute the birth of modern day environmentalism movement to the publishing of the 1962 book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. So in this book, it, makes the case, she makes the case, that humanity represents an existential threat to nature. Carson wrote, quote, the control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance born to the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. And she goes on further elaborates, you know, just like, the travesty of humans trying to control nature and all of that different stuff.
Donald Kendal:So this book helped launch a movement in the environment in the environmental kind of wing that essentially pitted man as an enemy against nature. So downstream from all of this is like all of, like, the the fears of, resource depletion and rampant pollution and all of just poisoning the skies and everyone choking on smog, killing the planet, all of that sort of stuff. And this is what really kind of ushered in that whole idea of, like, human progress being seen as a blight to the planet. As the population grows, it moves into more areas. It cuts down more trees.
Donald Kendal:It builds more houses, pollutes more, poisons the ground and water. Population unchecked, metastasizes across the globe, and eventually leads to a mad max postapocalyptic future. Like, that that all pretty much stems from, at least according, according to this article, from this, like, 1962 Silent Spring book by Rachel Carson. And, you know, obviously, like, I think I think a lot of people even listening to this podcast can be you know, like, that idea of just, like, us just turning the planet into some, like, one giant city or something like that. Like, I could see people being like, yeah, we shouldn't do that.
Donald Kendal:Right? But, I I'm like, I'm pretty staunchly, especially after doing a lot of this research. Like, I'm pretty staunchly a humanist.
Justin Haskins:Okay?
Donald Kendal:I'm a I'm a human supremacist, and I'm not nearly as fatalistic about, like, the future prospects of humanity. I think it's very possible that our future will look more like Star Trek as opposed to, like, the Hunger Games, you know. So, that that's kinda where I come from. Like, I don't see this as, like, a zero sum game in the same way that we talk about, like, socialism and and, capitalism or something like that that, like, somebody's wealth is necessarily, at somebody else's expense. I don't buy that.
Donald Kendal:I I think that, you know, we can, we can develop as a a species so much that, like, the the the earth almost becomes secondary as we move out into the cosmos, like that sort of stuff. So that's kind of the world view that I come from. But, Justin, any, any any comments on kind of this section before I move forward?
Justin Haskins:Yeah. I mean, I I think that there is this there is this bizarre ideology on the left or the this bizarre framework that exists on the left when it comes to the environment. And the and this is and this is true probably in a lot of other areas too, like economics and other things. But it's especially true in the environment where they have an extremely linear way of looking at at things. And what they what they do is they say, well, we're consuming x amount of water, and if we project this out over a long period of time, like, we're running out of water.
Justin Haskins:And, oh, you know, sea levels are rising. We protect this out over a long enough time. Like, you know, every major city is underwater. And, there's too many people. Like, this is one of the big things that happened.
Justin Haskins:I don't know if we're gonna get to this at some point, but the whole population boom thing, that was a huge massive topic of concern, right, for for a couple of decades in the United States where they basically you had these environmentalists in the sixties seventies saying, like, there's so many people who are being added. Like, just project this out. Like, we'll never be able to feed everybody. Right?
Donald Kendal:Mhmm.
Justin Haskins:And they never they always make the same mistake. No matter how many times they're proven wrong, they continue to make the exact same mistake, which is that people figure out ways to solve problems. We don't all just sit here and watch as the cities get consumed by rising sea levels, assuming you even, you know, believe sea levels are rising significantly. We don't just sit around and and die from the heat. You know?
Justin Haskins:We make we create air conditioning. Like, we build buildings in a better way. We, you know, we figure out prop we we figure out solutions to problems, and they can be really hard problems related to our environment, and we do that. Actually, humans do that really well. Historically, that's one of the things that we have the best track record of doing is figuring out ways to survive problems in the environment.
Justin Haskins:That's, like, the the biggest source of progress that we've had in humanity, and the left never see seems to understand that. And so so much of this doomsdayism is related to this idea that, you know, we can't we can't really figure out a way. We just we just we're on this trajectory, this horrible trajectory without this sense of, like, no. Actually, there will be progress. We'll figure out really creative innovative ways.
Justin Haskins:I'm not worried that humanity a 100 years from now is dumber than we are right now, and they won't figure out anything between now and then to Mhmm. Feed more people. Like, they'll figure it out, and that's a lot of it a lot of the reason I'm saying all this is because a lot of these problems, a lot of the antihumanism problems, that's really the foundation of it is they have just this no faith that humanity can figure out how to solve the problems that they see off into the future because they don't know how to solve it. But it just it it no matter they've been proven time and time again that it's because it's a completely wrong way of looking at things, and yet they keep falling into that trap. So what they want us to do is all suffer today and for decades into the future so that we can avoid this problem off into the future that's supposedly unsolvable when in reality, there's never been an environmental problem that hasn't been solved.
Justin Haskins:Like, eventually, we've always solved these problems. And so that really is the root part of the problem is there's a lack of optimism on the left, about humanity. And I think that that stems with a lot of the other stuff. And so I think there's a lot of people on our side of things who have your hopeful vision for, you know, we'll think we'll we'll figure it out. You know, we're gonna be living in this incredible era in the future, not this horrible, you know, like, dark ages, modern dark ages or something where everybody is living in concrete cells, and we're all dying because we can't feed ourselves anymore and and that sort of thing.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. You know, it's a I think climate change kind of offers a very, like, convenient cause to rally around for the anti humanists Because you can kind of just like cloak yourself under this like, no, I I love everything how it is. I just want it to be powered by wind and solar, you know, like renewable resources. But everything else is great. Yeah.
Donald Kendal:You know, everything else is great. When in reality, I think, like, deeper down, especially on the anti humanist level and maybe even some of these, like, Greta Thunberg types. Or if you just, like, drill down a little bit, you start to see, like, the the the true beliefs of these people. And this, this Justin, I'm gonna reference your favorite reference of mine is, like, the first op ed that I ever wrote. It's only a couple op eds ago, but the first op ed that I ever wrote back in, like, 2015, and it was based around this idea, that eventually environmentalists will hate renewable energy.
Donald Kendal:And this was all based around, like, the the theoretical that I've kind of rejected ever since I wrote this, this article. This is based around the theoretical idea that, like, wind and solar would eventually, increase efficiency so much so that it would be like the best power source out there. Whatever. I don't believe that anymore. But if that were the case, an environmentalist would start to hate renewable energy.
Donald Kendal:That was the basis of my, of the op ed. And it was it was, most of that was supported by this development in the late eighties when there was 2 scientists at some university in, like, Utah or something where they announced that, like, oh, man. We just had a breakthrough. We just produced excess energy through the process of cold fusion. Like, this is gonna be massive, everybody.
Donald Kendal:We're gonna have limitless, inexpensive, clean energy. This is this is groundbreaking. We're gonna have free energy essentially. Like, this is this is gonna be amazing for everything. You know?
Donald Kendal:Like, forget climate change and c o two emissions. Like, this is gonna be amazing. Right? And you would think that environmentalists or people that are super concerned about climate change, if that was really their primary concern, would have rallied behind this and be like, yes. A new era.
Donald Kendal:Now we don't have to worry about, you know, polluting the skies and all of that sort of thing. But the opposite happened. A lot of the big name environmentalists of that era came out and just trashed these scientists for supposedly coming up with cold fusion.
Justin Haskins:Right.
Donald Kendal:A couple of the examples I included in the article was, Jeremy Rifkin, who was quoted by the LA Times as saying it's the worst thing that could happen to our planet. And he, like, started talking about how, like, this is just gonna lead to a world that's just, like, unconstrained by anything. We're just gonna fill the world with waste and use
Justin Haskins:up all the world's resources and all of that. I think,
Donald Kendal:was it was it Paul Ehrlich? I I I think it was Paul Ehrlich who said that, the idea of free energy is like giving an idiot child a machine gun. Because in their world view, the idea that, like, society is should be limited, by, like, lackluster like, let's be honest. Lackluster energy sources like wind and solar. If we're just having to power society by wind and solar, we our progress will be stunted.
Donald Kendal:Our growth as a society will be stunted. So if you take out those roadblocks and replace it by some magical cold fusion free energy thing, then all of a sudden there's no roadblocks anymore. Society will just grow and grow and grow, and it'll just, like a cancer, take over the planet and destroy everything. That is the anti humanist mindset when it comes to climate change right there. Comments on that, Justin?
Donald Kendal:I got a few more examples of those.
Justin Haskins:No. Keep going.
Donald Kendal:Okay. So, okay. So speeding up to today, okay, I've got an another one on top of this, but speeding up to today, I just saw shared in our one of our, like, Slack channels or whatever. There's an article that came out by The Daily Kos that was essentially a hit piece against Chris Talgo's, recent article published in the in the Hill where he talks about the issue that we've discussed on this podcast many times. The idea that the future of artificial intelligence and data centers and the increased digitalization of everything needs more reliable energy and can't sustain on wind and solar pipe dreams.
Donald Kendal:Like, it it just can't do it. We've talked about this on the podcast. So what was the take by this author of the daily coast after reading Chris's article in the hill? Well, it's explained in the headline. The headline is the right wants to sacrifice the planet for artificial intelligence.
Donald Kendal:That's what this guy was trying to claim. So he says, that, that basically that, you know, human innovation and development comes at the expense of the planet. Like, this this is the sky's mindset, and it should be stifled because of that threat. Right? So if we're gonna pursue artificial intelligence, but that's putting the planet in danger from the use of all of this, you know, fossil fuels and everything, then artificial intelligence can be sidelined.
Donald Kendal:And, you know, say what you will about artificial intelligence. I'm just talking about this in the terms of human innovation. And the real tell, if you actually read this article, the real tell is that Chris's article also discussed the idea of using nuclear power to supply extra needed energy to support this, you know, new developing industry of artificial intelligence. And the Daily Kos article completely ignores this. Why?
Donald Kendal:Because then he wouldn't be able to use the, but reliable energy will destroy the planet line. You know? Like, Chris
Justin Haskins:gave him an out gave these
Donald Kendal:people an out. If we'd need more energy to support all these new developing things, you know, it'd be great if we could just take the boot off the the the neck of, fossil fuels. But, hey, maybe we could just do nuclear power power like that. That'll supply some, non c o two, you know, energy or whatever. And this daily coast article ignores that because it kind of flies in the face of this narrative.
Donald Kendal:And, the last thing I'll oh, go ahead. No. No. No. I got one more thing that I wanna mention, but it's a little off topic.
Donald Kendal:Keep going.
Justin Haskins:Oh, okay. Well, the I, I think that that that is this theme is, you could you you it's not theoretical, and it's not even recent. I mean, you go back in time and you look at all the there's the the modern left, the progressive left in the United States, and the socialistic left in the United States have been making dire environmental arguments, well before they were concerned about climate change. They've been doing this forever, and the solutions, no matter what the problem is, is always the same. It's always very similar solutions to these constantly evolving problems.
Justin Haskins:And that when you see that over a long enough period of time so when you see in the 19 seventies, global cooling is the crisis, and there's only one solution, and it's, you know, this, more government interaction, more government power, more, limits on our energy consumption and, pollution because they believe that pollution was what was causing this global cooling. That was the theory at the time, one of the theories. You know, the population boom and and and all the issues that are related to population boom, the ozone layer thing, the I mean, there's been a 1000000 of these things. The the idea the whole the whole concept of Silent Spring, which you referenced earlier, was that humans would so pollute the earth that you would eventually have a spring that is silent. Like, you won't hear the animals and and that sort of thing.
Justin Haskins:Right? And and so it's like this concept has always existed no matter what the the problems are. And even when these problems get resolved and we don't we aren't worried about the ozone layer. We aren't worried about rivers being polluted. We aren't worried about these things that we used to be worried about to the degree that we were in the past.
Justin Haskins:Have they stopped making, like, the same radical demands? No. No. Like, they keep making their minds the same radical demands over and over and over again. And at some point, you say, well, either it's one of 2 things.
Justin Haskins:Either they don't actually care about any of these arguments, and they're just, you know, they're just looking for a reason to justify more government power. And I think in some cases, that's definitely true, or they're just looking for an excuse to get votes, or they're just looking for a way to fearmonger, you know, something like that. Or their real ideological environmental view is much more radical than any of these things. And I think that, you know, it's it's crazy to think, and this is often how these people are, presented, that, like, if we just had wind and solar everywhere, like, then we just we'd just all go home. Like, you'd never hear from us ever again.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Right.
Justin Haskins:And it's like, of course, that's it. Like, that they make it sound like that's the only thing they want. Like, we're just trying to save the planet from global, you know, catastrophe, and then we're we'll get out of everyone's way. We're it's like, no. You won't.
Justin Haskins:We know you won't because you before this crisis, you guys were still here making different accusations. And even if you so called solved this problem, you would have a whole set of new problems that you want environmental problems that need more government programs and all of this stuff. It's like you and I used to used to mock, like, this whole Bernie Sanders thing where like, when Bernie Sanders was kind of at his height recently of popularity, he was almost became, the Democratic nominee for president. And it was like, all, you know, all he wants is, a $15 minimum wage and, single payer health care. That's it.
Justin Haskins:And every country in the world other than us has single payer health care. And so, of course, we should have single payer health care and $15 minimum wage. That's it. And it's like, no. It isn't.
Justin Haskins:Like Right. No. It isn't. And his campaign, we couldn't even get through one campaign season when the $15 minimum wage, there were then people saying, well, it should be 20 or 25 or whatever. And then it's just going up and up and up.
Justin Haskins:And single payer health care is obviously not where it stops. Where because he's a socialist. The long term goal is something much bigger than all of this stuff. And with environmentalism, there is a strain of the environmental movement where it's like that that is they are true believers. They aren't doing this just because they want power and wealth and and or votes or something like that.
Justin Haskins:They're doing it because they they have they do have a bigger sort of utopian idea, but they can't say that out loud usually because that isn't no one's gonna be on board with that. So what they do is they pick an issue, and they and they focus on it, and they make it seem like this is all they're about. It's just about global cooling. It's just about the ozone layer. It's just about saving the sea otters.
Justin Haskins:Like, that's all it is. It's nothing else. And then and then you realize one day when you listen very, very carefully, when you actually start digging into it and reading what they say to each other behind the scenes, and you start to read things that say much more radical things than this. And you realize this really is not what this is about. This actually has really nothing to do with in the grand scheme of things, climate change.
Justin Haskins:It's just a pit stop on a much longer road that ends in a place that if they just started with that place, and they're like, you know what we should do? We should have this world over here, the one we want. Everyone would be like, oh my god. You guys are insane. And so they they did try to do this other thing to get us there.
Justin Haskins:And and and that's and that is like the red pill moment for a lot of people who actually take the time to look at it is you might be a person who's worried about climate change or whatever. But then once you actually start seeing what the long term vision is for these people, you realize, woah. Like, this is not at all what I signed up for.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. We I I know that, this is a little bit of a tangent, but it just you know, some of the things you're saying, reminds me of this. When we are doing, like, their work on socialism, and there was that, that idea that, like, all these socialist thought, this Marxist thought, communist thought, whatever, was based around this idea that if we keep pursuing this, like, capitalist system, that people are gonna get more and more exploited. Their wages are gonna continue to get down. It's just gonna continue to get, like, a a worst class gap and all of that stuff to a point where just, like, the workers are just just being marched on top of.
Donald Kendal:Right?
Justin Haskins:Right. Yeah.
Donald Kendal:And then there was a a, like, a I forget his name, but there was, like, a, like, a socialist, like, historian or whatever that noted that, like, as, you know, whatever the the 20th century progressed, we saw that there was actually the opposite was happening and that people's wages were getting better, and there was a growing middle class and all of this stuff and all these fears that were propagated under this idea of, like, the continued exploitation of the workers just kind of, like, vanished and went away. So what do they have to do instead of suggesting that, like, capitalism was just gonna be destroying the the working class? They had to morph that and change it into well, if we keep doing this capitalist system, it's gonna destroy the planet. There we go. We still need all the same stuff that we were advocating for, but just justified by a different thing.
Donald Kendal:So, yeah, that's that just reminded me of that. But, one other example of just this, this kind of environmentalist disdain for nuclear power was something I had mentioned, on this podcast a million times, but I know what I mentioned a couple of episodes ago. And this is the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club is one of the largest kind of environmental organizations out there, and they've had long standing opposition. Their their viewpoint has been long standing opposition to nuclear power.
Donald Kendal:And one of their things I remember going back, like, this is years ago, going to the Sierra Club website and looking up what their position on nuclear power was. And up until 2016 when they changed it, but up until 2016, it says that they the Sierra Club opposed the licensing, construction, and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the, fission process. It went on saying that they will continue opposition pending, quote, development of adequate national and global policies to curb energy overuse and unnecessary economic growth. Yep. So those those two things are just like the complete giveaway with all of this.
Donald Kendal:Yep. Energy overuse and unnecessary economic growth. Because if you were to talk to any of just like any politician that's out there talking about climate change, from Bernie Sanders, the AOC, Joe Biden, anybody. All of them are gonna just paint this idea that, well, if we just shift to wind and solar and everyone gets electric cars or whatever, society is just gonna be thriving, and we're gonna be able to do it cleanly or whatever. And this just shows that if we did do that, the places like the Sierra Club, which I think the last time I saw, they had, like, a, like, a yearly budget of, like, a $100,000,000 or something like that.
Donald Kendal:Right. They would still be staunchly against it because of this environmentalist, anti humanist concept that humanity is just a plague on the earth, and that without without anything stopping it, it would just metastasize and destroy the planet. Yeah. Well That's the anti humanist thing when it comes
Justin Haskins:to the you and I have so there's a there's a lot of people out there in the world who don't really know the downsides to wind and solar and all of that. They they don't understand it, really. Electric cars, all that stuff. They they but people who've actually looked into it, though, and and they know the cost issues. They know the infrastructure issues.
Justin Haskins:They know that more important than even that, all these issues are based on, like, a tiny fraction of the electric grid running on this energies right now and, not having a lot of electric cars in the marketplace right now. That when you scale all these things up, these problems become, like, essentially impossible to solve. And and people like us who have actually looked at those things know that's the situation. You're never going to be able to actually grow the economy on a wind and solar based energy system. It's literally impossible.
Justin Haskins:Like, it can't be done. And and so you have to ask yourself, the Sierra Club type people and the, big name politicians who are pushing for this stuff, Like, they know that. They've heard these arguments. They're well aware of this. It's not like no one's ever told them, hey.
Justin Haskins:You know, if we scaled this stuff up, like, it would be impossible for us to do this. And the amount of mining that we would have to do all over the world to get the resources to run a like, this isn't gonna work. They know that. So why are they why are they still advocating, especially when you start projecting out greater energy consumption over a longer period of time. Because, again, you have to account for the fact that our societies, generally speaking, are becoming more technology focused.
Justin Haskins:There are huge parts of the world huge parts of the world with billions of people in it that still are not really very well developed. And they're not watching television and have air conditioning and live in the modern world, but someday they probably will. And so what happens to the world when all of India has air conditioning? Like, what does that world look like in terms of energy consumption? Right?
Justin Haskins:Like, it's gonna be completely different world. Right? So they know all this. So then why are they still advocating for something that they know can never work? And you could make an argument that some of them are doing it just for expediency.
Justin Haskins:You know, some of them are doing it for political or ideological reasons related to government more government involved in your life and bigger government programs and stuff like that. Sure. But I think that on the environmental side, like these Sierra Club types, I think the reason that they're advocating for it is because it almost guarantees that our current energy consumption, it's like a ceiling. It's like an automatic ceiling on energy consumption because we already can't match current energy consumption just using wind and solar in a realistic way. Like, that just isn't possible around the world.
Justin Haskins:And then when you scale these things up and you say, what what happens when India runs has air conditioning? Like, everywhere in India, every house in India has air conditioning. Like, LaVent what? Well, they're they they know that can't be solved. So the when you if you it's an it's essentially an unofficial ceiling on the amount of energy that you will ever be able to produce, the amount of expansion that humans will ever be able to have, the amount of buildings and all this stuff that you can run on electricity, like, all of this stuff.
Justin Haskins:Because it is literally impossible to scale this up for a world that will likely exist 200 years from now. Like, it's just not possible. So so how do you how do you, but if you were to if you were to adopt the model of, no. What we need to do is find a different form of energy that's clean and is really cheap and widely available, like a coal fusion type thing or leaning more into nuclear energy or something like that, well, then, you know, all of these other things that they're saying suddenly become they can't control it anymore. Exactly.
Justin Haskins:The ceiling is gone forever.
Donald Kendal:Exactly right.
Justin Haskins:And they need the ceiling. They want the ceiling because most people do not agree with them that we should create an arbitrary or not an arbitrary, that we should create a cap on human prosperity, growth, expansion, etcetera. They want the environment. They they want you know, most people in the modern you know, in the, really high developed countries, like in Europe and Canada and America, like, people care about the environment. They want the environment to be, like, a a good place.
Justin Haskins:They don't want pollution everywhere and all of that, but they also want humans to be really wealthy and prosperous and and everybody is as healthy as possible and living as long as possible and all of that. And those goals don't fit with the really far left wing environmental goals. So let's lock in an energy system that can't ever get those goals. And then we could just blame it on, well, it's just not possible. It's not feasible.
Justin Haskins:There's just no way to do it. And now you've got this whole system in place where you've built out this massive failing terrible infrastructure. We gotta tear it all down so we can move the nuclear. Like, they're gonna say that, oh, we can't they'll have a reason for why we can't do that. It really I really do think there is a stream of them that that have thought this all the way out to this point and have come up with this idea.
Justin Haskins:I I really do. Because it doesn't make sense any in any other way.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Yeah. Suddenly, the environmentalists all of a sudden start caring about, the, what is it, like the juniper plants or whatever that are like torn up in the desert to put up new solar panels or they suddenly start caring about the birds. They're getting, like, whacked out of the skies by wind turbines. You know, they didn't care.
Donald Kendal:They're very quiet when they were developing all of this stuff and making sure that, you know, the support of of politicians mandating all of this stuff. But then once we would actually get that in place, suddenly they would care about it, and then you would see the that that ceiling that you're describing would start probably coming down after that. But, so another reason that I brought up the idea of, like, an intersubjective concept is because while there's varying different groups that have different reasons for supporting this, because they're all supporting the same narrative, you see a bleed over in some of the rhetoric and all of that, and suddenly you start seeing politicians or people in positions of power that are using the talking points of the anti humanists. And this is where it gets really dangerous. Right?
Donald Kendal:So, Justin, you mentioned the population control stuff, already earlier in the podcast. We did an entire episode on this. I think it was episode 407. That's another one of these episodes that you almost wanna, like, bookmark because it's just so full of information. I remember doing a lot of homework for that episode.
Donald Kendal:Episode 407, we did a whole section on the eugenics movement of, like, the fifties and the sixties. We talked about Paul Ehrlich's book, the population bomb that spurred a lot of this, you know, fretting over growth and population, how it's gonna lead to us running out of food and mass starvation and all that sort of thing. I remember we went through China's one child policy of, like, the eighties nineties and to a lesser degree going into today. An idea, by the way, that was endorsed by many or at least some environmentalists, including Paul Ehrlich, who as late as 2015 lamented China trying to move away from this barbaric practice. So this isn't just like, oh, yeah.
Donald Kendal:Back in the eighties, we are for it, but now we're enlightened. No. Or, Paul, like, 2015 was upset that China was moving away from its one child policy. We I remember we talked about the more contemporary zero population growth movements. So there's a whole lot of different, attempts at ushering in, population There was that one study.
Donald Kendal:I didn't put it in my notes, but it's I'm surprised I didn't because this is one that I always go back to. But it was a study just from a handful of years ago where they outlined the spectrum of coercion, in in terms of public policy of what you could do if you wanted to pursue population control starting from just, like, providing access to, like, you know, health care options, and I put quotes around that because they just mean abortion. And then beyond that, like, trying to, just indoctrinate people through, like, media and rhetoric and just, like, billboards that show happy families with 1 kid, that sort of stuff. And then moving beyond that, incentivizing people through the tax code to incentivize having less kids or disincentivize having many kids. And then the furthest part of that spectrum, which they said that they did not condone, was the the idea of just, like, straight up population control like in China.
Donald Kendal:And so that's that's not an old report either. That's just a couple of years old. And then even newer than that was, this letter that went around. This is several years ago. That was signed by, like, you know, 10,000 different scientists or something that was all calling for the declaration of a climate emergency.
Donald Kendal:It's got, like, a ton of headlines, I remember, saying, like, 10,000 scientists are encouraging, you know, climate, you know, catastrophe or something like that. Right? But if you actually went and read the letter, you see that there's some very troubling things in there. Under one section that was just labeled population, It says that, still increasing by roughly 80,000,000 people per year or more than 200,000 people per day. The world's population must be stabilized and ideally gradually reduced within a framework that ensures social integrity.
Donald Kendal:So this big letter that got all those headlines has some population control language in it. I've seen a couple of comments in here. I I'm not gonna be able to comb back for them, but, some of some of them talking about certain people calling for different ideal, populations for the world. I remember playing on this show several weeks ago. What's the lady Jane Goodall Jane Goodall that was saying, like, the ideal population is, like, 500,000,000?
Donald Kendal:Sterling brought up Sterling's in the chat. He's the host of the climate or, he's a panelist in the Climate Realist Show that takes place every Friday at noon, Heartland's channel. But he mentioned a couple of different people, environmentalists, that that set the ideal target at, like, 200,000,000 or 1,000,000,000 or something like that. So there's a lot of people out there that think that the world is already far too populated, and that needs to be reduced. So, Justin, I mean, I don't wanna, like, kind of rehash all of this, but we can't have an episode about anti humanism and climate change without addressing that there historically has been lots of calls for population control.
Donald Kendal:And more contemporary, there still are calls for it. I mean, even AOC talked about how, like, she is totally sympathetic to people that are questioning whether or not they should have kids nowadays because of the threat of climate change destroying our planet. Right. Any any any, further thoughts on the idea of population control?
Justin Haskins:Well, I mean, this is like it's this idea is playing out on a timeline that it we're we're in the midst of it, and, it sounds it still sounds like a crazy idea to people in the west, even though in other parts of the world, they have done this. You talked about the one child policy, the 2 child policy in China, and stuff like that. So this is this has already been instituted at times in other parts of the world. But here in the west, we think of this as just this inconceivable thing that this would ever be something that could be fully adopted even though there are people in the west right now. Like you said, Jane Goodall, she's not from China.
Justin Haskins:She's, you know, she's from the western world, and she has adopted this. There are other people, David Attenborough and stuff like that, who have who have said, you know, that they adopt at least some conception of this. And, it always starts as, like, this is the way everything on the left works. It always starts as, like, a suggestion. Like, you know, we should do this.
Justin Haskins:And then it becomes like, we should advocate for it, and then we should, you know, incentivize it. And then, you know, eventually, it's just when people aren't doing it, it it just becomes a full blown, you know, mandate. And and because well, we well, we have to because if we don't, then what's the consequences of that? Right? And and you can see that in almost every environmental cause that we've had in the last 50, 60 plus years.
Justin Haskins:It's always gone that way. Like Mhmm. Like, climate change started out that way. Right? It was it started out as like, well, people should just find ways to use less electricity and drive your car less and bike more.
Justin Haskins:And now it's like full blown. We're just gonna debank you and ruin your business and your life if you don't start making the transition by net you know, by 20, 30 or 40 or 50 or whichever one year, whoever depending on who you're talking to, to a full blown net zero economy because we don't have the luxury of waiting. We're all gonna die. You know? And it's like, that is true of almost even though even the small issues, like, don't use so much plastic.
Justin Haskins:And then what's, have a tax on plastic bags? And then, you know what? Let's just ban plastic bags. Like Right. This is how it always goes because what they realize is at some point and they may know it up front, but they just know they can't start with the authoritarian stuff.
Justin Haskins:But at some point, what ends up happening is the vast majority of people it becomes apparent that the vast majority of people do not agree with these radical environmental views. Even if they pay lip service to them sometimes, they don't actually agree with them. They're not willing to change their lives. They're not willing to stop driving their cars. They're not willing to make these gigantic sacrifices.
Justin Haskins:They're not willing to do as Greta Thunberg has done, you know, get on a boat and take a boat across the ocean because I don't like plane trip plane travels bad, but people aren't willing to do that. So Yeah. And so at some point, the only option is you either give up and throw your hands up in the air and say, well, I tried, and you go home, which is kind of how free pro liberty people handle things. Like, we we we often do end up doing that with a lot of stuff. We're like, well, I guess no one's gonna listen to us.
Justin Haskins:So, oh, well, like, what can we do? But this on the left, that's never how it ends. It always ends with, we're gonna we're gonna crack the whip. We're gonna slam down the hammer. We're gonna make sure that people do these things, and you end up with some kind of authoritarianism.
Justin Haskins:And when you're talking about humanity and you're talking about population control and you're talking about having too many people, too many mouths to feed, too many of it, like, that is a huge, huge problem. And then last point last point on that, though, is that historically, America that used to be like a common thing. Like, we're we're talking about this right now as though this is like a, like, oh, well, we're progressing, and eventually we're gonna get there, potentially. Like, that that seems to be the trajectory we're on, and I think that's true. But if you go back in time to, like, the early progressive era, like, the early 1900, that period of time, they were openly calling for eugenics, openly calling for population control, openly calling for killing the, quote, unquote, useless eaters and the disabled, the mentally handicapped.
Justin Haskins:Like, that was all out in the open. And then the Nazis happened, and it became politically, very bad to align yourself with those kinds of views. And so suddenly, the progressive left, like, started changing their tone on all of that stuff after decades. And I'm not talking about in in Europe. I'm talking about in America.
Justin Haskins:Like like, in America, we were openly advocating for all those policies on the left. And so this is not like this well, this could never happen here. It has happened here. They just they just stopped for a while. They took a break, and now they're working their way back up to a frenzy again.
Justin Haskins:And it's it's not at all surprising if we circle back around to the same crazy ideas that had a 100 years ago. It really wouldn't be that strange.
Donald Kendal:Oh, yeah. Yeah. No doubt. But this this is the part so when I was doing the research, this is like the rabbit hole that I was kind of, talking about earlier in the episode. So when I was doing the research for all this, I was laying out all my notes, and I was really spending a lot of time kind of, like, looking at that kind of anti humanist positions.
Donald Kendal:Right? Because I didn't want to straw man it, whatever. Right? But this this connection really kind of clicked for me, and, and I think you're right. You know, the idea that, you know, what first starts is like, oh, yeah.
Donald Kendal:Maybe you should consider this to, man, we're gonna incentivize this to we're gonna force this. That is definitely historically kind of the the way that, you know, authoritarian regimes go. That's kind of the pattern for all of this. But I think that what we're facing now is slightly different. I think in essence, it's exactly that.
Donald Kendal:But I think what we're facing now is slightly different. Because even with, like, the the population control stuff, some of the other stuff that we've talked about, environmental, whatever stuff that we've talked about, especially, like, in China, whatever, it was like it was it all still kind of adhered to this idea that, you know, the government is gonna set some rules, and if you break those rules, you're gonna be punished. Okay? And this is kind of like a recognition that, like, people have agency. They have autonomy.
Donald Kendal:They have, like they they they know what they're doing when they're making the choices. Therefore, they're making a choice whether or not to break those rules, or not break those rules and be punished for breaking those rules or not. Right? And I think what we're seeing now is a shift towards more social engineering as opposed to just like the heavy hand of of government. And I think that this is all wrapped up into those kind of anti humanist ideas that there is no, autonomy.
Donald Kendal:There is no agency. Everyone is just a, a result of just their genetics and cultural upbringing and all of that, and they're not actually exercising free will. So, therefore, you can't really be punished for doing something that you're predestined to do anyways. So what the people in power are doing is, like I said, shifting to that idea of social engineering. If people can't if people can't actually make the choice of whether or not they're breaking the rules, then we'll just craft society where it just guides them around certain things, that we want them to go around.
Donald Kendal:We're not gonna just straight up punish them for it. We're just gonna craft the systems where they have to do it whether they want to or not. And, basically, all the things that we've been talking about in in, regards to kind of the emerging issues that we keep track of at the Socialism Research Center, all kind of conform to this idea. And this is like the ESG. Right?
Donald Kendal:This is this is just like we're going to craft this system so that you have to play by these rules know, being green or socially conscious or whatever, you're just gonna, you know, being green or socially conscious or whatever, you're just gonna, you know, fail compared to the people that are adhering to those rules. 15 minute cities, that's like another example of this, are just gonna craft your landscape so that you have to adhere to this more environmentally protective version of reality that we're trying to to put together. CBDCs is another one of those where it's just they were just setting up the the the playbook so that people just have to operate, under the the worldview that we're constructing. And we know, you know, Justin, you've already talked about this, but we know the world view that they're trying to construct. We've talked about the c forty cities plan, their outlined ambitious targets that drastically reduce people's consumption of meat or buying clothes or buying new electronics or owning cars or traveling by plane.
Donald Kendal:But what is more effective, I think the the the kind of the powers that b types are are learning this, what's more effective isn't just punishing people for taking an extra, plane flight or something. It's just wrapping them up in a system that's governed by CBDCs and 15 minute c, cities and ESG where they don't even have the option to break those rules anyways. So it's this whole giant social engineered structure that they're trying to create that I think goes completely hand in hand with that anti humanist concepts that I laid out at the very beginning of this, podcast. This is the mindset that ties directly into the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, the Yuval Harari, the threat of digital dictatorships, and the control that could be ushered in using 4th industrial revolution technologies. I think that is the realm that we've moved into, and it is overwhelmingly a mindset that correlates very strongly with, anti humanist, perspective.
Donald Kendal:So that that's that's kind of the grand vision that I've had for this podcast is kind of laying all of that out. It once it clicked last night when I was putting my notes together, I was just like, oh, yeah. This is something right here. So, Justin, are you following me? Did I lose you?
Donald Kendal:What are
Justin Haskins:your thoughts? I think this makes sense. And I think that I think that the the, you know, the safeguard in the United States was always that you had a fundamentally prohuman constitutional framework that was a safeguard against government actions going too far, you know, trying to be too manipulative of people for whatever reason. That's why, you know, you have all you have the bill of rights. Like, the like, the the whole constitutional system we have in the United States is set up to, protect individuals from a centralized national government coming in and imposing its will on people or even silencing them or, or imprisoning them unjustly or threatening them and in some sort like, all of it is designed for that purpose.
Justin Haskins:Right? And so the social engineering I think, ideally, what the left would do is they would just impose a lot of this very directly in a very in a very authoritarian way through the government. But the our government our government system is not set up to pass laws easily, number 1, so it's really hard for them to pass anything. But then on top of it, they have to get through this constitution, which is very prohuman and puts the individual at the center protecting the individual's rights over and above the good of the collective and all this other stuff. And so the ESG way of dealing with things is is the end run around that protection.
Justin Haskins:We we have to socially engineer, not through the government, but else not only because this isn't working, you know, through the government, because we're not even getting the the laws we want passed that are mild versions of what we really want. But in addition to that, we we eventually, we're gonna run into this roadblock of the the bill of rights and stuff like that. So we have to figure out a way to engineer society around that. And you and I talked for a long time about how this is why modern monetary theory and the endless printing of money and the masses the massive amounts of government money that's coming into the system, why it matters so much, because how do you get the private businesses to socially engineer on your behalf? You gotta buy them off because they're they're businesses after all.
Justin Haskins:They're gonna chase the dollar. So if you control the dollar, you can get them to do anything you want. And, of course, if your dollars are coming from taxpayers, well, now you've got another roadblock. You've got these stupid taxpayers. They're gonna come in and say, no more taxes.
Justin Haskins:I've been taxed enough already. Right? Like, that whole tea party thing. So what do they have to do? We have to come up with a way to come up with dollars without having to take it from taxpayers, more of it from taxpayers, and that's what the endless money printing thing has has become.
Justin Haskins:It's a way of it's all part of the same machine. And what's really interesting, we talked about this recently in another episode, is, even this is not working as well as they wanted. Right? They're doing this socially engine social engineering thing, and they're doing it through ESG, but now there's all this pushback on ESG. And there's all this pushback from consumers saying, we don't like that every time I go to Target, it's like walking into a Democratic party convention.
Justin Haskins:I don't like that. I wanna change things. Right? And so there's this pushback. The social engineering isn't going as smoothly as they wanted through this ESG system.
Justin Haskins:So what do you do? Because you can't just pass the laws. They've tried that. You can't have this, this ESG system as the sole mechanism for doing this without running into all these headaches. So what's the solution?
Justin Haskins:Well, you know what'd be really convenient is if some foreign government somewhere out in the world started imposing the social engineering metrics on these businesses who then impose them on everybody else, and now it doesn't even matter what people in America think anymore. And that's what we that's exactly what's going on in Europe. That's what the European Union mandated ESG system is. It's another end run around market forces in the America. Now market forces don't even matter as it pertains to ESG.
Justin Haskins:So we've just it is constantly, the what the progressive, system there were the progressive ideology is we are constantly stumbling around seeking for this way of socially engineering, and we're running into Roblox all the time, and we just gotta keep we don't ever give up. That's not how progressives operate. You just keep figuring out ways around the system. And and depending on what era you're in, they either just change the rules so that the system works for them. They amass enough government power that they're able to ram these things through, which should be considered illegal, or there's a crisis big enough that people are willing to suspend their liberty in order to give power to these, you know, crazy progressives, or they manipulate the market through ESG and go and and money printing, or they allow foreign governments to essentially control them in order to accomplish some progressive goal, on and on and on and on and on.
Justin Haskins:There is always this endless attempt to get to this social engineering utopia that they are that they're after. And what people need to remember is, fundamentally, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with some of their goals or whatever, you think that maybe you are concerned about climate change, you are concerned about the environment, whatever. The most important thing is this. Fundamentally, none of this would be necessary if most people wanted what they want because we would all just do it voluntarily. The only reason you have to have social engineering and coercion is because most people in a democratic republic the only reason you have to do that is because most people don't want what they want.
Justin Haskins:And so the very essence of all of this is we need to control the masses who are not doing what we want them to do. It is fundamentally in opposition to the what the regular person wants. That's the soul and every person should be offended by it. They should be offended by it. Like, when you think about ESG and you think about progressivism, these are offensive concepts.
Justin Haskins:Ascent what they're saying is, you people, you dumb people in society won't just buy the right products and services. You won't just do or say the right things. You won't just censor your ideas on your own. So we have to figure out all these complicated ways to censor you, but you got that stupid constitution, so we can't just ram it through government. So instead, we gotta come up with all these elaborate ways of doing it outside of that system.
Justin Haskins:And instead of being offended, like, half the country is like, yeah. We should be doing that. And it's like, don't you don't you realize they're talking about you too? That we're you know, it's only a tiny fraction of society that really believes in all of these progressive goals all the way to their logical ends. It's it's incredible that we're not all just outraged by the very notion of social engineering, and yet that is, that that is exactly where we should be and hopefully someday will be.
Justin Haskins:And that's the whole purpose of this organization and shows like this. It's to shed light on what's going on, to really discover these plans that are going on constantly behind the scenes that most people have no idea about. And, and and that's really the the only way that people can push back against this if they know what's going on. Otherwise, they're gonna get away with it, and they almost have on ESG and a whole bunch of other things if it weren't for shows like this, if it weren't for organizations like the Heartland Institute.
Donald Kendal:Very well said, Justin. And, and, yeah, I mean, that that's once I started putting the research together on this and getting my notes together and really looking into kind of the anti humanist thing, and that's that's why I really, like, made a focus at the beginning of the episode to to say that I was gonna look at it as broadly, as a philosophy as possible. And I'm glad I did that because it really, to me, just gave insight into just everything that we've been talking about on this show, for the last multiple years, that it all ties into this anti humanist kind of perspective of things. And that was very eye opening to me. I think kind of reducing it down to just like, you know, they wanna reduce the population, doesn't do it justice.
Donald Kendal:It's it's way bigger, and it's warm way more insidious than that. So, Justin, unless you have any anything that you wanna say, anything you wanna go get off your chest, I'm gonna wrap it up here for this week's episode.
Justin Haskins:I'm good.
Donald Kendal:Alright. Fantastic. Well, thank you all for tuning in to this episode of the in the tank podcast. Join us every week for a new episode. Audio only listeners that are probably catching the show on a Friday or later.
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Donald Kendal:Maybe we will, you know, address your questions on the fly. And if you would like to support the show, you can financially by, going to heartland.org/inthetank where you can support the show directly, or you could help us out by not spending a dollar just by, spending a couple of seconds, hitting that like button, sharing this content, subscribing if you haven't already, or just leaving a comment under the video. All those things help break through those big tech algorithms and prevent content like this from being shown to more people. If you'd like, you can follow us on x at in the tank pod, or you can send us your comments, questions, and suggestions to the show by emailing us at in the tank podcast atgmail.com. Justin, where can the find people find you?
Justin Haskins:Justin z Haskins on, on x. That's the primary way. Of course, go to stopping socialism.com if you wanna learn about the history of socialism, some of the best arguments about socialism, and heartland.org, of course, always a good place to go for all things Heartland Institute.
Donald Kendal:Fantastic. Alright. Thank you all for tuning in. Join us next week. Have a good one.
Donald Kendal:Oh, forgot the outro video, everybody.
Justin Haskins:He's a lion dog based porn soldier.