EXPOSING the MARXISTS Behind the Attack on America’s Kids, Plus Republicans’ MASSIVE Mistake

Liz Wheeler Show episode 433, take one. 

Guys. I’m floating outside of my body right now. That kind of the surreal feeling where you just feel like you can hear yourself, you can almost see yourself, but you feel like disembodied. That’s what I feel like today because this book, I cannot tell you how long this has been in the works. I have been working on this book since April of 2022, a year and a half, and it is finally released day. So first of all, I just want to thank everyone who has already bought their copy of this book. I know a lot of you already have this in your hands because you pre-ordered it and it was sent to you on release day. So thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting this. I want to hear everybody’s feedback, everyone’s opinions, even if you disagree with the points I make in this book, I’m actually maybe more interested in the people that disagree than the people that agree. 

But thank you so much to everyone who has bought it. Anybody who hasn’t, please go get your copy. Go to hide your Children book.com or to Amazon or Barnes and Noble. It’s now in stores so you can walk in a physical bookstore if you want and get this book. I’m so excited about it. We’re going to talk a little bit more about the book later in the show, but there’s a video I want to watch with you first, and I will tell you I had a hard time deciding whether or not to show you this video. It’s of me, and it exists publicly on YouTube so you could find it if you wanted. People have seen it, I think it’s been viewed maybe 35,000 times. So not a huge number of people that have watched this. And this video of me is from 2016. So what is that? 

16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22. That’s seven years ago. I actually wish it was from more than seven years ago. I could distance myself from it more. But this video happened at CPAC in 2016. I had spoken at CPAC and afterwards I went out into the lobby and there were people that wanted to take pictures and some different journalists or news reporters that wanted to ask questions. And one of the journalists that came up to me had a video camera and wanted to do a video interview, and I was like, sure, that sounds fun. Cool. I sat down with him. It was a pretty long interview for this situation. Usually the interviews after a speech are like two minutes long. It was probably like 20 minutes long and I thought it went fine. It was was neither here nor there. But then the next day after this, after cpac, I had flown home. 

I think I had taken a red eye home. I lived in California at the time, and I get a Google alert on my name. I do have my name under Google Alert so that if people write hit peeps on me or something shows up under my name, I see what it is. I get a Google alert on my name that says that this guy had uploaded this video to YouTube, which again was fine. I don’t care about that. But he had uploaded it under the title Liz Wheeler, a Abandons, her Principles. I was fairly new to politics and media at the time. I think I’d been working, I’d been hosting my old show for almost a year, so pretty much in my infancy of broadcasting. And I remember feeling very bad about the title of that YouTube video. I was like, oh my gosh, what if people actually think that I abandoned my principles? 

This is so misleading. This is so unfair. And I tell this story. You’ve probably heard me tell this story before. It’s not a story. It is a story that I tell, but I’ve never shown the video while I tell this story because it’s like listening to yourself on a voicemail. It just makes my skin absolutely crawl to see little baby Liz in this situation because obviously now I would do and say everything completely differently. But I want to show you part of this video, even though while you watch it, I will be sitting here closing my eyes and plugging my ears because this video marked the beginning a transformation for me. It marked the beginning of something that I changed my mind on something really serious that I changed my mind on that inform my entire political philosophy. I had no idea that it would be the beginning of this transformation at the time. 

But this journalist asked me about the legalization of marijuana. And don’t worry, this episode’s not going to be about marijuana. So everyone who always gives me a hard time for talking about pot, that’s not what we’re talking about today. But this journalist asked me about the legalization of marijuana, and this is what I responded to him. I told him that the definition of freedom was everyone had individual rights and the government was only supposed to serve the role of protecting those rights. So states could ban marijuana, but it wasn’t the role of the federal government. And I had the absolute worst feeling in my gut for this entire interview. And afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about it because I realized that what I said in this video was completely wrong. Now, I didn’t realize that walking away from the video or the next day, but after a while of obsessively thinking about this, I realized that there was a huge contradiction in what I said. 

So I want to show you this video and then break it down if you will. Promise not to mock little baby Liz and her bangs too much. Okay, so this video makes me cringe so hard. You can laugh all you want. Please throw your best mocking at me. It’s kind of fun and funny at the same time as being cringy to see hopefully how far I’ve come in seven years in my answering of political questions. But I could filibuster longer explaining and excusing away this video, but I’m just going to show it to you. This is back in 2016 at cpac. This video marked the beginning of a pretty major political transformation for me, and this is what happened. Take a look. 

So we were discussing the fundamental principle on which our nation is based, which is that the government is there to protect our individual rights, our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or in the laconian version, life, liberty, and property. Correct. So that we get to keep our property, we get to decide how we live. Our own 

Members are an extension of who we are. 

So we get to decide how to use the money that we make and how to pursue our own happiness, how to decide what to do as long as we don’t violate somebody else’s rights. 

Correct? I agree. 

So are there any exceptions to that rule? 

Are you speaking of something specifically? 

Well, for example, smoking marijuana, it doesn’t violate anybody’s rights. Shouldn’t it be legal 

In public or private? 

In private, you’re not. It should be left 

Up to the states. That’s not an issue for the federal government. States have more of a right to regulate issues like that than the 

Federal government does. The federal 

Government’s job is to be involved in national defense and to be involved in the economy rights. Sit aside, what laws are good for the public good. So it’s definitely state’s rights to either legalize or illegalize marijuana. 

I agree. But do you think that the state should make it illegal even though it doesn’t violate anybody’s rights to smoke pot? 

I think it’s the state’s right to do so. 

They have a right to do it. But is it a proper policy according to your principle? Oh, 

In my opinion or constitution, 

In your opinion? 

In my opinion, I’m not in favor of legalizing marijuana. 

So you are in favor of putting people in jail for doing an action that doesn’t violate anybody’s rights. Doesn’t that a contradiction? I didn’t 

Say that I was in favor of putting them in jail. I think it’s the state’s, right? It’s not the federal government’s, right? It’s not the federal government’s right to create a law about that. It’s the state’s, right? And they must decide on an individual basis those people are representing themselves voting for what they think. What a just punishment would be for that. 

Yeah, we agreed on that, that it’s the state’s right issue. But the question is, should the state make it illegal for you to smoke marijuana? And if they follow your principle, which was to only criminalize things that violate, 

That’s the federal government, though the federal 

Government, so the state government, it’s okay for state governments to criminalize. Wait, just lemme ask you a question. So you think it’s okay for the state government to criminalize actions that don’t violate anybody’s rights? 

Well, you’re rephrasing what I said. I said the federal government has no right to do anything but protect the citizens and regulate the economy. States’ rights are different than the federal Constitution. We’re all protected in the states. Citizens in the states are protected by the federal constitution. But the individual states do have a right to regulate social issues. That’s their right. I don’t agree with legalizing marijuana, but that is their right. And it is not falling under the same category as the federal government’s, right, to make those laws. 

So you think that the state a, a particular state, say Maryland should make it illegal to do something can doesn’t violate, 

First of all, can we talk about those bangs for a second? Can we talk about those bangs? I would bring those bangs back in a heartbeat. If Gen Z hadn’t ruined all the hairstyle trends with the middle part and the flat hair on the top, just wait until those bangs come back. I will be rocking those bangs on this show. So I’m literally itching right now with discomfort watching this video. It’s awful as listening to your own voice on a voicemail here. At the same time, it’s kind of funny to watch this because I didn’t know exactly what to say. You can tell I didn’t know exactly how to respond to him because he’d asked me what the role of liberty was in what the role of government was in our society and how government was supposed to protect liberty. And I said, well, government is supposed to protect individual liberties. 

They’re not supposed to tell you what to do unless you’re harming someone else or violating someone else’s, right? And he said, okay, well what about marijuana? You’re not necessarily harming someone else when you smoke marijuana. Why should the government have any right to regulate that? And by the way, spoiler alert, this guy turned out to be like a marijuana activist. I don’t think he was a journalist, which to the surprise of no one. But I walked away from this interview with a terrible feeling, a terrible gut feeling like something was wrong because he’d said that I was contradicting myself. And I like to think of myself as logically sound like that my principles are well ordered. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this. And I realized he was correct in the sense that I was saying something that was contradictory. If I believed that the only role of government was to protect just very basic individual rights and government didn’t have any role in helping create social order, then why do we have a right to have laws, for example, that would prohibit the sale or the smoking of marijuana? 

That is a contradiction. And this began what took a long time for me to transform my political ideology. I had been at the time very much into Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy and John Locke’s philosophy on which Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy was based. And I realized that that wasn’t what our constitution was based in. It poses this idea actually in our country, or it should pose this idea in our country, this philosophical question, if we think of ourselves as a free country, well what does freedom mean? Is freedom the ultimate end? Should you be able to do almost whatever you want as long as you don’t violate someone else’s right? Or is freedom the means to something greater? And this question, it’s not something that I’m the first one to think about. It’s not something that’s new to our generation. This question was actually the question that the frame of our constitution grappled with because our declaration of independence was based in this more John Locke, Thomas Jefferson view of liberty, that liberty almost equaled license or liberty. 

The freedom to be liberty should be defined as close to absolute freedom as a civil society could tolerate. And I bought into that. I was very much get off my lawn. Government shouldn’t be involved. I don’t want government’s opinion, they have no right to talk about morals. But I realized that there’s a flaw in that. There’s a huge flaw in that. And I realized that over the course of several years, but it became very clear to me when David French said that drag queen story hour was just one of the blessings of liberty. And I thought, well, wait a second. These grown men dressed up as sexualized versions of women essentially like strippers, gyrating, sexually in front of children. How could this be something that we accept as a society? How could this be thought of as a blessing of liberty? If it is a blessing of liberty, then it would have to have some morality to it. 

Because if the ultimate goal of freedom is just absolute freedom, then there’d be something good about allowing drag queen story hour because we’re protecting the men’s freedom to do that. And I realized that’s not the case. That drag queen story hour, you know this. I know this. I hope David French knows this. It’s grotesque. It’s downright evil. So if freedom is not the ultimate end, then because it can’t be, then what is freedom? Is freedom the means to something greater. And if freedom is the means to something greater, what is that something greater? And by the time I grappled with this question that in my mind, my opinions on the definition of liberty and the role of our government and how Republicans and conservatives should govern our country had begun to change very significantly. This is probably the issue that the biggest issue I’ve ever changed my mind about in maybe the history of my entire life. 

So I get to this point where I’ve changed my mind on something that’s like, I feel like my whole world has been shaken. My whole worldview is changing. And when I start viewing the world, I didn’t say anything publicly about it when I first started to change my mind on this because I wanted to be sure that I was correct, especially since I realized well, I wasn’t correct up until now. I wanted to be sure that when I changed my mind, I was educated about it and I was correct about it. So I began to do my research. And when I did, I realized that Republicans have either neglected or forgotten. I don’t know whether it’s willful, it was willful ignorance, whether it was laziness. I don’t know whether it was just naivete due to the prosperity of our country. But Republicans have forgotten that the definition of liberty is not that liberty is an end to itself. 

Republicans have forgotten that the real definition of liberty, how our constitution defines liberty. It’s that liberty is the means to something greater. So what I do in my book, obviously the first half of this book, I name the names of the Marxists, the people in the organizations who are behind the attack on America’s children, whether this is critical race theory in our schools, whether this is the transgender ideology, whether this is the effort to subvert parental rights via banning, homeschooling, or these laws that we’re seeing popping up in blue states around the country saying that, oh, if you don’t affirm your child’s gender identity, then you can lose custody of that child. Whether it’s laws that say, well, you might not want to give your kid the covid vax, but if they’re 12, they can make that decision to get it even overruling your opposition. 

There’s a deliberate assault on our nation’s children, on their minds, on their spirits, on their bodies. And I wanted to get to the bottom of who’s behind this. How do we stop this? And you know what I always say on the show? We have to acknowledge the reality of the political enemy that we face. Otherwise we’re not going to fight well against it. And if we don’t fight well against it, we’re not going to win. We’re going to lose. I don’t want to lose. I’m tired of losing. I know you are too. So the first half of this book, I identify the people in the organizations behind all these different assaults in our children. And then the second half of the book, I propose a solution for how we can recapture the institutions like the media and the education system. And sadly, religious institutions, too many of them, at least the law and even the family unit, I propose what we can do practically concretely to recapture those institutions and then harness those institutions to protect our children from the evil that seeks to hurt them. 

And the second half of the book is this philosophical idea that the Republican party is more to blame for Marxists subverting our institutions than even the Marxists are. And what I mean when I say that is we expect evil from people who have evil ideologies. We expect bad policies from Democrats. We expect Marxists to do things that would hurt us. But what we shouldn’t expect and what we shouldn’t accept is the Republican party, which is supposed to be the political apparatus that serves as a bulwark against this assault on our society. We shouldn’t allow the Republican party to get away with losing these battles year after year, decade after decade. We should honestly assess why is the Republican party losing? What have they gotten wrong? Why are we in this cultural insanity in which we live right now, where a child in California was suspended for school, from school, for five days, for misgendering, a classmate? 

How did we get to this point? And I argue in my book that the answer to that is the Republican party and the Republican party’s failure, which may be hard for some people to read. And I say it without particular animosity towards Republicans because as I just explained, my mind has changed a great deal on the philosophy of freedom. And so when I see the Republican party embracing the philosophy that I formerly embraced this idea that government’s only role is to protect people’s individual rights from being violated, I don’t feel animosity towards these people. I fell prey to that idea myself. But I do think that the people who are leading the Republican party, there’s no excuse anymore for them not to recognize that embracing this libertarian mindset is incredibly destructive to our nation, incredibly destructive. And what I mean by that is right now we’re in a situation where the Republican party is kind of jokingly branded as the party of, no, we know that we don’t like what the Democrats are doing. 

We know that we always hate their legislation. We know that critical race theory is wrong and bad and evil. We say no to the transgender ideology. We don’t want revisionist history in schools. We don’t want d e i in our boardrooms. We don’t want woke corporations governed by E S G. We’re very, very good at pointing to things and saying That is bad, that is wrong, that is evil. We don’t want it. But what we’re not good at as a Republican party is offering an alternative. And what I mean by that is we are not good at defining what is right. So we might say no to what is wrong, but we fail to offer something in exchange for the wrong thing. We fail to offer what is good and true and beautiful. And I say in my book, and I know some people are going to push back on this, I don’t believe in neutrality. 

I don’t think that we can have institutions in our country that are simply a neutral playing field. Our institutions and the very fabric of our society are going to be governed either by the beliefs and the ideologies of the Democrats or by the values and the principles of the Republicans. And when Republicans pull back because they’re afraid of inserting morality into legislation, they’re afraid of being accused of violating the separation of church and state. This doesn’t create a neutral playing field. The Democrats just swoop in and capture whatever institutions the Republicans have pulled back from. And therefore, the Democrat’s version of morality prevails. That example that I just gave about the child in California, the student who was suspended for five days is a perfect example. The Democrats don’t want a neutral playing field. They want their version of morality, which you and I would define as immorality. 

They want their beliefs, their ideologies, their religion forced on us. They’re not just going around saying, well, I’m going to call someone they them or Zer, I’m going to indulge someone’s transgender pronouns. No, no. They want to force you to do it or punish you if you don’t comply. So if we don’t, we can look at that and say that it’s wrong, but we’re never going to eradicate that from our society unless we as Republicans have something concrete to offer. And we use this concrete political agenda that we can define. We use that as the values. We use that to inform the values that we then teach to children through these institutions. Because remember, indoctrination is not a bad thing. We think it’s wrong when we see indoctrination in our children’s schools because of what is being indoctrinated. But indoctrination itself is a morally neutral concept. 

It’s not good or bad. It’s what is being indoctrinated that determines whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. For example, the American public school system was actually created to indoctrinate children. That’s what its purpose was. It’s not that now it’s turned into an indoctrination center, whereas years ago, it just stopped reading, writing, and arithmetic. No, no. Public education didn’t even become mandatory in our country until 1852. Massachusetts was the first state to make public education compulsory. And the reason that they did that is because at the time there were Catholic immigrants, this influx of Catholic immigrants coming to the United States, and the Protestant politicians in charge of Massachusetts wanted these children to be indoctrinated in American values so that their loyalty would be to their new country versus the country where they were born. And they wanted these Catholic children indoctrinated and Protestant values because Catholics and Protestants are always at war. 

Our education system was intended to indoctrinate children, but it was intended to indoctrinate them with generally good things, with Christian morals, with American values. But at some point Republicans forgot this. We forgot that it is good and right and moral to teach children what is good and right and moral. And instead we pulled back and what happened is Democrats swooped in and they took over these schools as indoctrination center. So what I want to do right now is I want to give you some examples of this philosophical discussion that we’re having. I want to give you some concrete examples of how this manifests in our culture and how this manifests in politics, how Republicans are very good at pointing out what’s wrong, but they fail to define what’s right. And once you see this, you will see it everywhere. You won’t be able to unsee this. 

So I want to give a couple of examples of both cultural examples and political examples of Republicans very accurately pointing out something that’s bad or wrong, but then not being able to define what’s right or offer a good alternative to replace what’s wrong. Two cultural examples, two political examples here we’re going to start with a cultural example. So red pillars on Twitter, I guess formerly known as Twitter X. If you’re not familiar with the red pill movement, a lot of you guys are I know, but we also have boomers that watch this show, so I want to make sure they fully understand this. Red pilled folks are people who don’t identify as Republican, they don’t identify as conservative, but they also reject wokeness. They reject radical leftism, they reject Marxism, and they sometimes are able to diagnose a cultural problem that has practical negative repercussions for our lives. 

For example, over this past weekend on Twitter, there was this effort by the red pill folks to push this idea that marriage as an institution is problematic. And their argument was marriage as an institution is problematic specifically for men because men can face divorces. I think 80% of divorces are initiated. Divorce papers are filed by women, and women oftentimes win custody of children in family court. And women when they divorce are oftentimes given lifelong alimony and can take half of the possessions of the man. And so the red pilled right, is arguing that marriage is a risky institution for men, that there’s no incentive for men to get married because they will get screwed over by women in marriage if they are to get divorced. And red pillars say the divorce rate is so high, this is almost inevitable for young men. Now, when I hear this cynical view of marriage, I don’t agree with it, but I do understand they are diagnosing a cultural problem. 

That’s a real problem. The divorce rate in our country, while it’s lower than it has been since the 1980s, it’s still astronomical compared to what it should be. And a lot of men do feel that they have been unfairly treated by family court or divorce court because of the reasons that I listed. I can sit here and fully acknowledge that our marriage and divorce laws, our civil laws are not ideal, that there’s probably reform that needs to be made to it. But here’s where the red pill, right, is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. They can point to this cultural problem and they can say divorce is bad and women divorce their husbands a lot more than they should, and men get screwed by that. But then when they go to offer a solution, well, what should men do? What should our society do? 

They offer a terrible alternative. In fact, in this case, I would argue that they offer, they’re prescribing poison. I posted about it on X this weekend to jump into this conversation and I want to read to you what I posted. I said, as usual, red pill identifies a problem accurately that divorce is harmful and evil, but prescribes poison as an antidote. No men should not reject marriage just because women initiate most divorces. Women win custody and women can take half of men’s money. The solution is Catholicism. There’s no such thing as divorce and Catholic doctrine. Marriage is not a contract. It’s a covenant before God to become one. And you simply can’t break that even if you want, even if you initiate a civil divorce, the church doesn’t recognize that civil divorce because they don’t recognize divorce. And I said, it’s funny how once again, as always, secularism is a failure and the real solution to sin and evil is and always will be God. 

And I posted this knowing I would get a reaction from the red pill movement because they’re not particularly religious. I think that’s how they differ from conservatives, is they’re usually basing their policies and the practical implications of policies versus the morality of the policy. And it was exemplified here. So one of the women who was leading this conversation on the red pill side, Pearl Davis, this sort of female Andrew Tate figure that we’ve talked about several times on the show, she responded just with a screenshot of what looks like a Google search that says about 34% of American Catholics who’ve been married have been divorced. So she thought she was debunking what I was saying about the Catholic belief on marriage. And I responded by saying, well, first of all, this is misleading because this statistic does not control for cohabitation before marriage or chastity nor religious practice. 

Lots of American Catholics or so-called Catholics claim they’re Catholic, but they don’t practice the faith. For example, only a third of Catholics in America believe in the real presence of the Eucharist, which is the fundamental doctrine of the Catholic church. Many people call themselves Catholic, like Biden for example, or Nancy Pelosi, or I think Pearl Davis also calls herself Catholic, but they publicly advocate for behavior that violates Catholic teaching. The example that I gave was Pearl excuses, male infidelity in marriage, which obviously is a violation of Catholic teaching. And I said, if anything, you’re just highlighting the desperate need for better Catholic catechesis in America. Show me the divorce rate for trad caths, those who actually practice Catholicism, and then we will talk. And I understand that a lot of people have marital problems. Marriage is wonderful. It’s also really difficult. People come into marriage broken because we’re all broken. 

Its, it creates problems in marriage. I’m not sitting here trying to paint a perfectly rosy picture of marriage, although I think marriage is wonderful and a gift, of course, it’s hard, and of course people have problems in marriage. But what the Red Pilled movement is doing, and this is the point of why I brought this topic up, is they point out a problem that divorce is harmful, it’s evil, and that men oftentimes get the short end of the bargain in a divorce. And their antidote for that or their alternative that they suggest is that men shouldn’t get married at all. Whereas what I’m suggesting is that we try to restore our cultural, cultural mindset towards marriage as being the unbreakable covenant that it is versus just being this secular contract. And I’m not saying that we should be a theocracy, that Catholic doctrine should be enforced at all costs. 

I mean, I would love if everyone watching this show wanting to become Catholic and share my religious beliefs. You guys know that, but I’m not proposing a theocracy. But what I am proposing is that you can’t remove morality from policies or else you end up in the cultural chaos in which we exist, where these people who think that they’re traditional, these red pill people are proposing that men don’t get married. I mean, this is something that you would expect a leftist, a Marxist to propose, right? The Marxist have in their direct object, the destruction of the institution of marriage, and yet these people who are supposed to be on the right are agreeing with them. Something has gone wrong here. So that’s the first cultural example. Then we have a political example. Politicians who fall prey to the same idea, they can point out something bad, but they aren’t able or refuse to prescribe what is good. 

They can’t define what is right. So here we have Governor Chris Christie, he’s running for president of the United States, although I think for his own fame, not because he has any chance of beating Trump. His entire campaign is based just on calling Trump names. And he says that he is against states banning transgender surgeries for children because he doesn’t think that government has a role in defining what’s right and wrong. He thinks that should be left entirely up to the parents. So I want to show you what he says in his own words. Let’s take a look at this. 

Republican governors across the country have been banning hormone therapy and puberty blockers for transgender people under 18 years old, though only they’re banning those procedures only as trans health procedures. They can still do them for other purposes, puberty, blockers, et cetera. As governor of New Jersey, you signed into law some legal protections for trans people, including students. What do you make of your fellow Republican governors and candidates going in 

The direction? Jake, what I believe we should be focused on most importantly in these issues is making sure there is parental involvement at every step along the way. I don’t think that the government should ever be stepping into the place of the parents in helping to move their children through a process where those children are confused or concerned about their gender. And I just would say that parents are the people who are best positioned to make these judgements. And so what I’d like to make sure each state does is require that parents be involved in these decisions. We were talking about students, I assume you mean people under the age of 18, Jake. And the fact is that folks who are under the age of 18 should have parental support and guidance and love as they make all of the key decisions of their life. And this should not be one that’s excluded by the government in any way. 

Okay, so this is a perfect example of what I’m talking about where Governor Christie can point out that, yeah, this is wrong when schools or healthcare facilities are trying to bypass parental involvement in children’s healthcare. But then what does he prescribe as a solution? How does he define his alternative? How does he define what’s right? He can’t because he fundamentally misunderstands what liberty is. He thinks that the goal of freedom is freedom, that the more freedom people have, the more successful a government is, and the more a society will flourish. And that is not the case because in this particular example, it leads to children being mutilated. Their body is being mutilated by pharmaceuticals and by surgery. In the name of a Marxist ideology, Chris Christie forgets that our government already has laws that are based solely in morality as related to children. For example, it’s not a parent’s right to abuse their child, to neglect their child, to starve their child. 

We don’t believe that parental rights are so absolute that it covers harming your child. We also have laws in our society that, for example, a child is not allowed to walk on the floor of a casino. Why does it cause the child physical harm? Well, no, but we recognize, we acknowledge that it’s a moral hazard for a child, and so we have a law against it. We have laws against it. Our government is already doing what Chris Christie claims it doesn’t have the authority to do when it certainly does. Senator Rand Paul, I love the guy, I love his wife, but he’s another example of someone who misunderstands fundamentally what liberty is and how government should be used to protect our liberty or to order society. The example here is Senator Rand Paul was the one who blocked an effort, Congress’s effort to ban TikTok. 

Now, this is obviously what we should have done. We should have banned TikTok. TikTok is a Chinese intelligence operation against us. It’s not just, oh, this is kind of bad for kids. It just collects your email address and your demographic data so it can be used for advertisers. No, no. TikTok collects data on your behavior, on your entire phone, your entire web footprint in order to draw a character map of you so that they can say, okay, you’re 12 years old. You are uncomfortable going through puberty. So we’re going to serve you some videos about transitioning genders in hopes that we can groom you towards that. Oh, you are a white kid and you live in a predominantly black neighborhood. We’re going to serve you videos about critical race theory to try to increase your white guilt. TikTok is a deliberate psychological op against our children that identifies who they are so that they can serve content that will reshape our children’s minds and how they view the world and how they define right and wrong. 

Obviously, we should ban this app. It’s not only a moral hazard. It is a national security threat for China’s to subvert our population from within our own country the way that they’re doing it. But Senator Rand Paul opposed this, and this was his reasoning. I want to read you this article. This is from Reuters. This was from back in March. US Republican Senator Rand Paul on Wednesday blocked a bid to fast track a ban of popular Chinese owned social media app TikTok, which more than 150 million Americans use citing concerns about free speech and uneven treatment of social media companies. I think we should be aware of those who fear to coax Americans to relinquish our liberties. Paul said on the Senate floor, every accusation of data gathering that has been attributed to TikTok could also be attributed to domestic big tech companies. Republican senator Josh Hawley had sought unanimous consent for a TikTok ban bill. 

It protects the American people, and it sends a message to communist China that you cannot buy us. Hawley said, adding that the app is spying on Americans. Paul said on the Senate floor, if Republicans want to continuously lose elections for a generation, they should pass this bill to ban TikTok, a social media app used by 150 million people, primarily young Americans. Do we really want to emulate Chinese speech bans? We’re going to be just like China and ban speech that we’re afraid of. And this again, I’d love Rand Paul. He’s wrong philosophically on the role of government here for a couple of reasons. First of all, we’re not doing the same thing as China because again, the idea of indoctrination is a morally neutral concept. So when China indoctrinates their children in communist values, it’s wrong because communism is objectively, inherently wrong and evil. But if Americans indoctrinate their children in the values of freedom, it’s not wrong or bad because freedom is an inherently moral thing. 

This is freedom is the means to something greater. It allows us to pursue a virtuous life. So we’re never going to be doing what the Chinese Communist Party is doing unless we are indoctrinating our children with communism. And this should be pretty obvious. There’s also no right for a Chinese company to launch a product in the United States that seeks to us. This is not an American owned company. So there’s no inherent constitutional right for us to allow China to do this. And this is a perfect example. He can point Rand. Paul can point to TikTok and say, yeah, bad things happen on TikTok. But he’s unwilling to define, well, what’s right? What do we want for our society? How do we use government, the just of government to promote human flourishing? He doesn’t do that because he’s a libertarian, because he misunderstands the definition of liberty. 

And then of course, we’ve talked about this a great deal on the show we have Andrew Tate, Andrew Tate’s, the biggest cultural example right now of someone who accurately diagnoses a cultural problem. That cultural problem is that men are vilified. They’re told that they’re demonized just because they’re men, and he’s correct about that. But then Andrew Tate prescribes this poisonous antidote. He tells young men instead, they should pursue materialism and pornography and exploitation of women and worship of self. And he diagnoses what’s wrong, but he can’t define what’s right. And so you have conservatives even who are supporting Andrew Tate, even though Andrew Tate says this about women. Take a listen. 

First things first, the reason women need a man to do only fans. It’s the same reason a woman need a man to do anything because they’re incompetent and they’re very, very lazy, and they’re stupid, 

Okay? Women are incompetent and stupid and very, very lazy. That is what Andrew Tate says. And yet, conservatives are defending him as being a good influence on young men because he is accurately diagnosed that young men are being harmed by wokeness in our country. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of conservatives about how we should be behaving. You can accurately diagnose a problem, but you have to be able to define what’s right to offer that instead. And if we don’t, then what do we get? We get this cultural chaos that we’re existing in right now, the reason we’re existing in this cultural chaos. The reason that Marxists, actual, literal Marxists, as I detail in my book, hide Your Children, exposing the Marxists behind the Attack on America’s Kids. The reason that Marxists have been so successful is because conservatives and Republicans have been mistaken about what the role of government is. 

We’re so worried about government being big brother government and a huge welfare state, and this bloated, bloated power, all powerful apparatus that we’ve forgotten that limited government doesn’t necessarily mean as small of government as possible. Limited government means limited by enumerated powers and limited by accountability to the people. But there is just authority of the government to properly order our society towards and our culture towards human flourishing. And believe it or not, this is not a new idea I’m proposing. This is not like a Bible Humber idea. This is not me trying to establish a theocracy, as some of you I’m sure will write to me and say, not at all. What I’m describing is our constitutional legacy. This is what our Constitution was designed to do. James Madison, the author, the Father of the Constitution, defined liberty in Federalist paper, number 51 as justice. 

He said, the end of civil society as justice and justice. He was defining the way that Edmund Burke, the British philosopher, defined Justice Edmund Burke defined justice as the earthly participation in original justice. And what he meant by that was natural law. Natural law being God’s law, and St. Augustine and Sin St. Thomas Aquinas define natural law as earthly participation in divine law. It is the fact that objective reality exists, whether or want not. You want to acknowledge it. And we know for a fact that men can’t be women, and women can’t be men. We know this by reason of human nature. Our reason, our ability to reason. We know that to be the case because it’s true, and it’s true because God created men and women, and you don’t have to go to church. You don’t have to practice a religion. Nobody’s trying to force you to practice a religion. 

But our country and our governmental institutions and our civil institutions were founded on this agreement, this acknowledgement that natural law exists, and our government was structured in a way that wasn’t supposed to violate natural law. It was supposed to protect natural law. So I challenge conservatives in my book to grapple with this question, what is freedom? Is freedom the ultimate end? Or is freedom the means to something greater? What is that something greater? What is justice? What is natural law? How can we use the just authority of government to order our society so that the something greater, that liberty becomes this tool that just allows us to live a virtuous life? And I truly believe that if we don’t embrace this true definition of liberty, that we won’t defeat these Marxists. We won’t defeat the radical left. We will continue to be pulled into the quicksand of wokeness. 

That right now seems so prevalent in our nation. But if we do embrace this worldview, if we do acknowledge that there’s not always something we can do just as individual citizens, sometimes we have to use our representatives in government, use the just authority of government to ban critical race theory in schools, and forbid any private company who has a contract with a government from having a D E I officer, that we have to ban the trans ideology from our military. There are things we can do with the government, not just to say no, but to properly order society, to teach children the real history of race and of racism, of race relations in our country, to teach children the truth about the horrors of communism, to educate children in the biological reality of sex and sex being binary, to teach children, American civics and Christian values. 

If we do this, then we not only will succeed in recapturing, our institutions will protect our children in the process. And we have to protect our children, not just for the sake of their individual souls, because if we surrender our children to the left, then that will be the end of the United States of America as we know it. So get your copy of my book, hide Your Children, exposing the Marxist Behind the Attack on America’s Kids. We’ll be talking about some of the juicy tidbits in the book in the coming days. Go to Hide Your children book.com. Get your copy. Let me know what you think. I want to hear your thoughts. This was a very philosophical, nerdy episode because the solution to our problems isn’t necessarily simple. It’s not necessarily easy. It’s not necessarily something that we’re all perfectly familiar with or immediately comfortable with. But I give you the blueprint for how to save our country in this book, and I want you to grapple with these questions. Go to hide your children@book.com. Thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is the Liz Wheeler Show.