CRAZY Fact Makes People Stop Smoking Weed

Welcome back to the Liz Wheeler Show. Happy National Weed Day, by the way, that is today. It is April 20th, or as it’s commonly known, at four 20. This is the unofficial holiday for marijuana. And you might be thinking, okay, but what does the number four 20 have to do with weed? Well, legend has it that at one point when marijuana was both culturally and legally, culturally stigmatized and legally prohibited, that teenagers in high school somewhere wanted to smoke weed, and they would meet at exactly four 20 in the afternoon, somewhere to smoke together. And so that was their euphemism. That was their code word for marijuana is four 20. That’s where, that’s where they would go at four 20. And eventually it was it was changed not from four 20 in the afternoon, but to April 20th as like, I don’t know, the day to celebrate marijuana. 

So that is today. I myself have never smoked weed. I’ve never done any of those edible gummies. I’ve never eaten special brownies, nothing like that. And I’d like to ask you to please subscribe to the show today. Right now, stop what you’re doing at this moment. Go to Apple Podcast. Go to Spotify, hit that subscribe button. Go to youtube.com/liz wheeler, go to rumble.com/liz wheeler, hit that subscribe button and do it right this minute. Because what I’m about to say, you are not going to light. I really wanna start with the topic today that a lot of you guys, including many of the conservatives that listen to the show, do not like you. Actually, this is one of the only topics that I talk about, that I get angry emails from conservatives, from Republicans, from people who otherwise agree with me on almost anything. I don’t care. 

I read all your emails. I do care about your opinions, but I don’t care about the, about the hate in those emails. I actually said to Dan the other day, I said, this is one of the pitfalls of being a thought leader, right? Is that sometimes things you say, even the people that agree with you don’t agree with you yet. Ooh, right? Well, mark my words. give it five years. Five years. Mark the date. You’ll remember it cuz it’s four 20 mark this date. And five years from now in 2027, you’re gonna look back and be like, oh, you know what, Liz was, right? Liz was right about marijuana. so what I wanna talk about today, you guys know who Cat Mayberry is, right? Well, if you don’t know who Cat Mayberry is, we gotta talk about this because this is a fascinating story, a young woman who we should all be pretty familiar with because of what her story means, not just anecdotally, but for the larger debate to happening today on National Weed Day. So, without further ado, let’s get to it. 

Okay. Ka Mayberry is a young woman who I wanna talk about for a minute. Maybe you know who she is already. And if you do, that’s great. If you don’t know who she is, that’s okay. I’m gonna tell you who she is and I’m gonna tell you why it’s important that we talk about her, why it’s important that we know her name. This is an article that was published on the National Review by Ryan Mills, and I wanna read you a little bit about Kat Mayberry. This is what Mills writes. He says, cat Mayberry grabbed her backpack and ran out the door with no jacket, had her gloves. She ran through snow flurries on a cold Minnesota Day. She ran down the street and down the hill. She ran down the nature trail near her family’s home, and a southwest suburb of Minneapolis. Trent Mayberry Kat’s dad ran after his 20 year old daughter. 

He caught up to her and grabbed her by the backpack, stopping her. They sat together on the frozen ground. Trent cried. Kat was scared, but otherwise expressionless. Katherine, I love you so much. He said to his daughter, we are trying to help you. You’ve got to let me go. Kat replied softly. Just let me go. Trent guided his daughter home, holding the straps of her backpack and using it to direct her like a joystick. How could this girl walking like a zombie, be the same girl who just a few years earlier had been a sunny honor student and varsity athlete with a world at her fingertips? Sure, she’d been using marijuana, but to Trent, it was just pot, basically. Harmless. Trent set cat in the backseat of the family’s car with her mother Jane, and drove her to a nearby Hazleton addiction treatment facility. Kat had agreed earlier to go communicating mostly with nods, but when it came time to leave, she ran. 

And when her parents eventually got her there, she wouldn’t or couldn’t engage with the center staff. We can’t force people to be here. Trent were called a staff member telling him, your daughter won’t talk to me, hasn’t said anything. There’s just nothing we can do. Desperate Trent and Jane took their daughter to the emergency room. It was there in the fall of 2018 that they finally got the real, the first real understanding of what was troubling her schizophrenia. For six years, Trent and Jane Mayberry had a front row seat to their daughter’s spiraling, dissent into psychosis. Her inability to communicate her increasingly disheveled appearance, her the piercings, the tattoos. She heard voices. She had friends who likely weren’t real. Her dissent ended in methamphetamine use and ultimately a deadly overdose. Both Trent and Jane are convinced that their daughter’s heavy marijuana use is to blame. 

I’m 100% certain that it came from cannabis. Trent told national Review of his daughter’s psychosis. If she never used cannabis, there’s a very high likelihood she would never have had these types of symptoms. Katherine Mayberry was born in June, 1998 when inhaling marijuana was still potentially disqualifying for presidential candidates over her lifetime. Shifting public opinion had increasingly backed legalization of the drug for medical and recreational use and pop culture, marijuana use Users have tended to be portrayed as harmless slackers who just wanna, wanna make a White Castle run or get high in their parents’ basement. The drug has acquired such a benign reputation in American culture that then Senator Kamala Harris felt comfortable joking about her history of use on a live radio broadcast when running for president in 2019. Then this article goes on to read The cultural makeover that led to widespread legalization has tended to hide a disturbing truth. 

Listen to this very closely, marijuana has never been the harmless drug that some advocates portray it as. And the high potency versions today can be dangerous, particularly for heavy users and young people whose brains are still developing. Several studies have linked heavy use of high potency cannabis by young people to psychiatric disorders, including psychosis with researchers increasingly concluding that cannabis has a causal role. Trent and Jane, Mary Berry do not believe they can hold back the tide of legislation in their home state, blah, blah, blah. But they’re working on it. Trent says, we’re trying to at least tell people this is not a harmless drug that everyone thinks it is. All we’ve got is the evidence in the world. We’ve lived it. He said, we lost a kid to it. 

Now maybe you’re sitting there and thinking, Liz, I’ve smoked weed all my life. It’s totally harmless. You get a little high. It’s kind of like getting buzzed or drunk. No harm, no foul. I never got any, any psychotic thoughts. I’ve never heard voices in my head. Nothing. It’s hard for me to sit here and believe you when I’ve tried this so many times. My friends have tried this. This is something we do on a regular basis, and we’ve never had any results like this. And I totally get that. I totally get that. That’s true. In fact, most people that use marijuana probably won’t descend into schizophrenia and psychosis. But it’s the same sort of thing as alcohol and alcoholism. Most people that drink alcohol don’t become addicted to alcohol. They don’t, they don’t become alcoholics. But a a percentage of people do enough so that we warn that any use of alcohol is a risk that could lead to alcoholism. 

If, if you’re predisposed to it, if you’re a person that may have an addictive personality, we don’t do the same sort of thing with marijuana. We don’t say, listen, you might be fine. You might be one of the people that’s unharmed by this, but maybe you won’t be. And the consequences if you’re not, are really, really serious. Again, every time I talk about this topic, I can, I can hear the people right now, clickety, clacking on their laptops. I’m smoking weed right now, Liz, I’m inedible. This is something that I’ve done since high school and it’s no big deal. That’s fine. You can believe that. But here’s what I would challenge you. In every situation in our country, when the prevailing narrative has told us something, take Covid for example, the prevailing narrative, the experts, the cultural, the cultural norms. Have we believed it? 

Because that’s what we’ve been told, or have we compared the prevailing narrative, what we’ve been told with the actual facts and data, the scientific studies, the ones that were done with me with solid methodology. And if your answer, and I think it is because I know you, if your answer is, well, we don’t believe prevailing narratives just because Dr. Fauci says it, just because the c d C says it. Just because the American Academy of Pediatrics says it. We look, we look at the actual facts, we look at the data, we look at the empirical evidence, and that’s how we draw our conclusions. If that’s what your answer is about covid, then I would challenge you and say, why isn’t that how you think about marijuana? 

I wanna read you a statistic here. The amount of th hc, which is the, obviously the active component marijuana, most people know that has climbed the pot that we saw in the 1970s is not, is not the marijuana of today. In fact, t h C is some sometimes 10 times stronger in marijuana today as it was in the 1970s. So it’s not even, it’s not even a a matter of comparing, oh, you know what I did in the 1970s and I turned out totally fine. It’s, it’s a completely different drug. It just has the same name. It’s intended to be addictive. It’s intended to be stronger five to 10 times higher compared to just 20 years ago. And of course, potency of these drugs that correlates to different reactions. And there is, there is ties to violence and psychosis. 

We’re gonna get to that in a minute because I’m not just, I’m not just saying this. I’m not just trying to be a buzzkill, pun intended. I’m not trying to reign on your parade. I’m trying to communicate that we have been culturally brainwashed by the Left. And I’m, I’m talking like all the way up to the top of the Left here. So we’re, we’ve been told lately, when it comes to Donald Trump and his indictment, we’ve been told that we can’t, we can’t talk about George Soros and his relationship to this indictment. The fact that he gave a million dollars to an organization that spent a million dollars on the election campaign of Alvin Bragg, the DA from Manhattan, right? We’re told, oh, we, we can’t talk about George Soros because if we talk about George Soros, that means we’re anti-Semitic. Why? What? Because George Soros is Jewish, so we’re not allowed to criticize him. 

I don’t understand that standard. That’s not anti-Semitic. That’s not the definition of the word. nothing at all. We’re commenting on the political activism of George Soros. But George Soros is tied to this revolution that happened in our culture, in our country when it comes to marijuana as well. Okay? Again, maybe you think I’m crazy. Maybe you’ve already, maybe you’ve already considered tuning out, but you’re just a tiny, tiny bit curious about what do these studies actually say? Am I being fair-minded? Am I being open-minded? Am I following the facts and not just following emotions? Have I been culturally brainwashed? This has been a pretty significant revolution in the past, what, 30, 40, I guess 40, 50 years in our country. Marijuana used to be a drug that was uncommon and illegal. And it was it was the legal, the illegality of it was actually enforced at a time. 

And now it’s legal almost everywhere. It’s, it’s still, by the way, against the federal law. But there’s never any federal charges for possession or use of marijuana. None basically. None whatsoever. many states have completely legalized it at the state level. We know that medical marijuana is really nothing more than it was at the time of front for recreational users who could use it under the guise of medical marijuana. But this whole, this whole cultural brainwashing that happened, this cultural revolution on marijuana, the fact that people’s minds were changed, people used to think that it was, that it turned you into a pothead, right? It turned you into a stoner. It turned you into just a shadow of yourself. And now most people don’t believe that the reason that people’s collective minds were changed is because of the efforts of George Soros. That’s right. 

George Soros. Now I know the Left says, oh, if we criticize George Soros is political activism, it must mean that we hate Jewish people. That’s the stupidest argument that I’ve ever heard. It’s obviously not true. I reject it. George Soro escaped 100 million, 100 million. That’s 100 times as much as he gave to Alvin Bragg’s reelection campaign. 100 million To what? To fund medical marijuana and legislative initiatives to legalize marijuana. This is a lot of money. This is like, this is more money than most of us are gonna see in a lifetime. A hundred million. this is all through the Drug Policy Alliance. It’s an organization whose initiative, or I guess their agenda is pretty obvious in their name. They wanna legalize, they wanna legalize drugs here. But this is counter the narratives that we hear, the cultural narratives that we hear now on marijuana, you know, that it’s not, it’s not a slippery slope. 

It’s not a gateway drug that it’s kind of harmless. It’s the same as alcohol. And we let alcohol be legal. We let people drink alcohol. that it’s medicinal qualities outweigh it’s negative benefits in some people. These are, these are the prevailing narratives. Most people, you can ask people sitting next to you right now, you can ask when you, when you finish your car, drive to work, when you, when you, when you talk to your spouse later today, when you’re with your college friends, you can, you can look at each other and ask, what do you think of marijuana? And most people are gonna say, well, whatever. I’ve tried it. It’s no big deal. Or I don’t really like it. Or, you know, it helps people. I knew somebody that had hoped. That’s what most people are gonna say. Even most conservatives, even people that maybe don’t use it. 

That’s what they’re gonna say. But that’s not true. If you look at the studies, there was a review done of 14, it’s like a meta-analysis that looked at 14 different studies about marijuana and its impact on violence. And this is what it found chronic marijuana users who suffered from pre-existing medical condition and used marijuana in an attempt to alleviate their symptoms. So this is the medical marijuana stuff actually worsened their conditions over time. So maybe you knew someone, maybe you know, someone right now who uses marijuana cuz they say they’re anxious, they’re depressed, they are bipolar, they’re, they have ptsd d whatever it is, 14 different studies. An analysis of all 14 of these studies found that when they use medical marijuana just to help them feel chill, to help ’em feel relaxed, it actually worsened their overall condition for which they were using marijuana. 

This, I mean, to me, this seems like medical malpractice then. If anybody is prescribing or recommending marijuana to somebody for a condition, when studies, when science shows empirical evidence proves that it makes the condition worse, that’s just the medical marijuana applications. So then we have the mental health issues like Cat Mayberry experienced psychosis. So psychosis, you’ve all heard of a psychotic break. This is when you are completely detached from reality. Schizophrenia is a good example of what psychosis is. A lot of the most horrific crimes, especially in true crime podcasts that you hear about these people were, were psychotic. It’s not just, it’s not just an ad hominem that we hurl at each other. It’s a, it’s a clinical diagnosis of psychosis. a psychotic break is what it’s called. Listen to this. People who use cannabis at age 15, so in the middle of high school, were more than four times as likely to develop schizophrenia as those who had never used four times as likely. Schizophrenia is like when you think that there’s people telling you what to do, it’s when demons are telling you to mass murder people. That’s what schizophrenia is. the homeless people that you see on the street who are like shouting obscenities and shaking with rage thinking that they’re in this other world. That’s schizophrenia. Usually if you use marijuana when you’re 15 years old, you are four times as likely to develop schizophrenia in your life. Is who don’t. 

This study actually even controlled for people who already had maybe minorly baseline symptoms of schizophrenia. Like the ones that, the symptoms that once you’re diagnosed with schizophrenia, you’re like, oh yeah, we did see those. We did see those a couple years ago. Controlling for that, controlling for people who had shown psychotic symptoms by age 11, the risks still remained three times higher for people who smoked weed in high school. This, this is something that I would want to know if I was a young person smoking marijuana, if I’m an old person smoking marijuana, I wanna know this. I think it’s probably more harmful for young people because their brains are still developing. We’ll wait to get to the science on that. That’s not just, I, not just offering my opinion here. I’m synthesizing facts and reality for you. Empirical evidence. 

You can, you can make your own decisions. Of course, it’s legal in many states. You can keep smoking it all you want. You can celebrate four 20, you can defend it. But again, if we reject the prevailing narrative on if we reject the prevailing narrative on covid, based on the fact that we don’t trust the politicos and the bureaucrats and everybody who’s involved and who are propagating that narrative, and we don’t, the reason we don’t trust ’em is we, because we have scientific evidence that contradicts ’em. Why wouldn’t we do the same thing with this? Why would you suddenly trust the prevailing narrative? Because that’s what doctors tell us. That’s, that’s, that’s what our state legislatures say. That’s what, that’s what the people want. Yeah, people oftentimes want to do harmful things. That’s part of, that’s part of human nature. So according to another study, this is a quote, the association between cannabis use and development of psychotic disorder is supported by data synthesized in several good quality systemic reviews. 

The magnitude of this association is moderate to large and appears to be dose dependent. The primary literature review by the committee confirms the conclusions. And yet this, this is maybe the freakiest statistic of all. When I read this, I like got the chills. Because oftentimes if you make a risky decision, the consequences of that risky decision become almost immediately evident, right? Like if you, if you get drunk and you drive a car, then your risk of getting, of getting in a car wreck, your risk of harming someone or harming yourself, or getting a d u i, even if nobody’s harmed is right then, right? The consequences is right then. But with marijuana, with marijuana, listen to this. A 2016 paper in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry says that the gap between when people start smoking weed and when this, the psychotic break happens to the people that it happens to, it’s not everyone, but when it does happen, the time between when you first use marijuana and when that psychotic break happens can be six years. 

How freaky is that? So that means you could be someone who has recreationally used marijuana and you’re like, no, this is fine. I don’t feel, I don’t, I don’t hear voices. I don’t see people. I feel totally fine. And then you start hearing, you start feeling these symptoms, you know, three, four or five years later and you put it down, but it’s too late. This has been in the queue, in your brain, in your body for six years. You cannot stop the train once it’s pulled away from the station. Now, you still should maybe stop. I’m not saying you shouldn’t stop, but it’s not because of what you just smoked the day before or the hour before or the minute before. What’s in your hand right now? It’s because of something you did six years ago. That one really freaked me out. So then of course, we have violence. 

Psychosis doesn’t necessarily mean violence. It’s oftentimes linked to violence, obviously. So, so schizophrenia, unfortunately and I know we’re not supposed to say that because that stigmatizes people with schizophrenia, but you know, data is data. Facts are facts. People with schizophrenia do have a higher rate of committing violence than people without it. but then the violence, let’s just isolate violence and not even talk about the psychosis for a second. According to the Journal of American Psychiatry, and this is a quote, the results demonstrate. The results of this study that I’m quoting demonstrate a moderate association between cannabis use and physical violence, which remained significant regardless of the study design and adjustment for confounding factors. I e socioeconomic status or other substance abuse. Cannabis use in this population is a risk factor for violence. For violence. According to a study, this was 6,000 men in Britain and China, cannabis use was linked to a fivefold increase or drug use, I should say. 

Let me be very precise here. Drug use was linked to a fivefold increase in violence. And the drug used in this study was almost always cannabis, five times as likely to commit, to commit violence. Another study, oh, I have a bunch of these. Just a couple more. There’s just a couple more. These are the good ones. I picked the really good ones for you. Studies have found that 30% of people who have been imprisoned, who are in, in incarcerated because they committed homicide, one third of those people had used marijuana within 24 hours of committing that murder. Okay? So the other part, the other prevailing narrative that we’re challenging today, and I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I feel ya, I get ya. it only gives me a tiny bit of pleasure to be a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian. 

You know, I’m kind of a skeptic by nature. I do enjoy questioning the prevailing narratives. But what can I say? I know I said this at the beginning of the show, but I said to Dan just the other day, I said, listen, one of the pitfalls of being a thought leader is that even the people who agree with you sometimes don’t agree with you yet. But you will. You will, because you’re smart people. You listen to the facts. You want to base your opinions and your behavior in reality. And when we’re told that marijuana is not an addicting drug or an addictive drug, that’s not true. 15% of people who try marijuana become addicted. 15%. That’s one and a half people. Out of every 10 people who become addicted to marijuana. It’s also a gateway to opioid addiction, which we know is extremely deadly. 

This is another culture. This is another prevailing narrative in our culture that is no longer accepted. We used to pretty, pretty universally agree that yeah, if you use marijuana, you’re gonna probably use harder drugs. Now, people don’t believe that, but the reason they don’t believe it is because of that big 100 mil number from George Soros, it’s not because this is based in any, it’s not because the prevailing narrative is based in fact, there was a state by state analysis done. and marijuana use showed, with marijuana use showed a moderately positive link with overall opiate deaths. Same with cocaine. The more you use pot, the more likely you are to get involved in, in harder drugs. That’s simply, that’s simply the fact of the matter. This is from a February, 2018 paper in the International Journal of Drug Policy that said that those who use marijuana are more than twice as likely to use opioids as those who don’t. 

Those who don’t. This is from the Journal of Opioid Management. Medical cannabis laws were associated with a 22% increase in age adjusted opioid related mortality between 2011 and 2014. So I gotta ask you guys, like, does this freak you out at all? Does it, does this, do you feel unsettled by this stuff? Like e even if you were feeling very defensive at the beginning of the show, even if you’re like, Liz, don’t lecture us on marijuana. This is your stupidest opinion. I’m gonna send you an angry email about it. You don’t know what you’re talking about cause you’ve never tried it, yada, yada, yada. Does it unsettle you at all? Does it make you wonder if you have been duped by the Left? If there is a political incentive and a financial incentive that was propagated by people not of good faith, people who don’t care that they’re hurting you, who don’t care that our culture is hurt. 

Do you wonder at all whether maybe, maybe we shouldn’t be celebrating national weed day? Maybe four 20 is not, is not something to joke about. Maybe, maybe you should put that on those brownies. Put down that that joint. I’m not trying to sound like your mom here, not trying to sound like your mom. I am trying to sound like a contrarian. I am trying to get you to think send me your emails. Maybe, maybe you think I’m wrong. Prove me wrong. This is not something I’m dogmatic about. It is something I’m pretty confident about. Cause I’ve done the research on it. I’ve changed my mind on this. Actually, I used to be fairly libertarian on it. I was never libertarian to the point where I was like, yeah, legalize, legalize meth. Never to that point. But I was always pretty ambivalent about marijuana. 

I was like, well, I don’t think you should smoke it. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I’m not gonna do it. But like, who am I to tell you not to do it? Like you’re only maybe hurting yourself. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t feel that way anymore based on this stuff. And if you’re looking for more information, by the way, one of the things that changed my mind the most was reading Alex Branson’s book about it. He did a deep dive into the scientific literature, both now and like over the past 40 years. He did a deep dive into the political apparatus that created these prevailing narratives that bought and paid for these prevailing narratives. His book is called Tell Your Children by Alex Berenson. And you know, a lot of us trust Alex Berenson pretty good on Covid. He’s not perfect as I text him all the time, but he’s pretty good on covid. 

So you should take a look at this book if you want, if you wanna know the truth about today. okay. Also, also, also, I’ve been meaning to talk to you guys about this all week. I know that the story is like four or five days old at this point, but I do, I do wanna, I do wanna talk about it for a second. So what I’m, what I’m talking about is Jake Tahara. Do you know who Jake Tahara is? Jake Tahara is this leaker, this National Guardsman who was arrested by the F B I for leaking classified, highly classified documents, actually about the war in Ukraine on a, on a discord channel. And then from this Discord channel that there were a couple dozen guys on this Discord channel these classified documents. Someone posted them on Twitter and they started to get a little bit more attention on social media. 

He was, he was arrested by the f b the footage of it. I mean, this is like, looks like a military operation to arrest this guy. He’s, I’m sure going to be charged with, with horrible charges related to violation of very, very highly classified information. And there’s two reasons that I held off on talking about this. And then let me walk you through what those are. So I, the way I think about this, or the way that I have been thinking about this, cause I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit. The way that I’ve been thinking about this is first, well, to kind of compartmentalize it. First, what was the information that was leaked, right? What was the motivation for this leak? Why did he do this? What was the motivation? Maybe we’ll find out more about what the motivation is. 

I don’t really know that much about him personally. I don’t think any of us do. He’s a young guy. He is 21. Maybe he was showing off for his friends. I don’t know. maybe he was trying to be a whistleblower because he saw wrong things happening. I do think his motivation here is important, but more important was the information itself. What did these classified documents contain? I’m more interested in what the documents contain than this guy, his motivation or even what happens to him. And I’ll tell you why in just a second. But the information that was leaked is extremely important information. It’s critical information. It confirms what you and I probably believed about the war in Ukraine, which is that we, the American people have US military members on the ground in Ukraine. We were told that we didn’t, we were told that we were just sending all of our money, literally all of our money to Ukraine. 

But the truth of the matter is, we have US military members who are taking part in this war in Ukraine. I already am against this war of Ukraine. I already think Putin would just about, I’m never gonna say that Putin would be justified to do anything. But if I’m Putin, I look at this war in Ukraine and I think, well, I’m fighting the United States by proxy. They’re the one funding it. They’re the one giving Ukrainians weapons. It’s US military that is killing us. It just happens to be Ukrainian soldiers that are pulling the triggers, right? If I’m Putin, that’s how I think. It wouldn’t be an irrational way for Putin to think. That’s what I’m saying. and because of that, we’re at the risk of this escalating into not only a full NATO versus Russia war, but potentially a nuclear war because NATO is nuclear armed and so is Vladimir Putin. 

This is not something that the world should allow. This is not something that we should tolerate. This is, this is not worth it to be vaporized by a nuclear weapon over a border dispute in Ukraine. And I’m not trying to be disrespectful to Ukraine. I un I understand that they’re entitled to sovereignty. I understand that they’re entitled to their borders, but is their border dispute with Russia more important than like the longevity of our world? Is it more important than avoiding nuclear apocalypse? The answer to that is no. And I’m not a, I’m not ashamed to say that and neither should you be. So the information that we got from these papers is critical. The information that was leaked in these classified documents is that us military members, not just our money and not just our military equipment, are on the ground in Ukraine. 

And that just brings us an inch by inch, by inch by inch closer to v Putin being like, you know what? We’re gonna stop the pretense. We’re gonna stop pretending that this is Ukraine versus Russian. We’re just gonna attack the United States. Do you wanna die in a war against Russia over a border in Ukraine? Do you want your sons to, do you want your fathers and your husbands to be sent off to this war? I don’t, I do not want my husband to be vaporized by a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. So the first thing, the first way that I’ve been thinking about this is just what exactly is this information? I honestly, the other stuff in the, in the, in the documents, the fact that we spy on our allies, like, okay, we all do that. We all do that. Any of our allies that are pretending to be shocked, it’s just for the public. 

It’s just for, it’s just a PR campaign. We all spy on each other. Get over it. Who cares? That’s just the way of the world. Whatever this information about Ukraine is really critical. So I care primarily about that. I care primarily about what the government has done wrong, the government, the bar for wrongdoing in my mind when it’s an individual citizen doing something wrong versus the government doing something wrong. I care a lot more about when the government does something wrong than when an individual does something wrong. Because the government holds the power in the situation. The government doing something wrong, harms not just one person, but harms an entire society. A society that’s supposed to be made up of, in our case, it’s supposed to be a representative, constitutional republic and made up of laws and not people. So I care more about when a co government does something wrong than when an individual does something wrong. 

So then we have the fact that this guy did do something wrong. How do we think about that? How do I think about that? And this is where I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve changed the way that I view this. I change the way that I view leakers. I even, I even, this is going to be very contradictory for, for the true fans here who’ve, who’ve been listening to me for years. This is going to be very contradictory of my view on Edward Snowden. What I said about Edward Snowden at the time, and maybe my views changed even on Edward Snowden, we’ll have to talk about that a different day. But I used to think when somebody from within the federal government with access to classified documents or someone in the military with access to classified documents leaked, those documents became a whistleblower to a media organization. 

I used to be appalled. I used to think, how could you possibly leak that information that our enemies are gonna gobble up, especially when it puts the strategic advantage or even potentially the lives of American military service members at risk. And I said, lock ’em up. I have no tolerance for that. And I actually used to care about that more than I cared about government wrongdoing. And this is where the contradiction of Edward Snowden comes in. I fully acknowledge that. And like I said, we’ll talk about that from with this new perspective a different time. But in this case, I used to think, listen, if you work in the military or the federal government and you see something that’s wrong, you absolutely have an op have a responsibility. You have a duty to report that. You have a duty to expose that you have a duty to be a whistleblower, even if that means that you’ve lost your career. 

Right? Even if you’re going to be retaliated, even are going to face retaliation in your career, you still have a responsibility and a duty to expose that wrongdoing. But there’s a right way to do that. And there’s a wrong way to do that. And this is where, this is where with Edward Snowden, I said, listen, the stuff that he exposed was bad, but there’s a right way to be a whistleblower, and then there’s a way of just handing all of our adversaries this information. And so I kind of sided against Edward Snow in that, in that case. Now, would I think the same way? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But now, now I don’t have the same confidence that there is another recourse besides going to the media. I don’t trust the United States Congress. I, that’s what I used to, that’s what I used to think. 

I mean, there’s, there’s like intelligence committees in, in both the House and the Senate that are specifically designed for whistleblowers within the military and within all of the Intel agencies, when they see something wrong that’s classified, they go to these, these, the House Intelligence Committee or the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they report that there are staffers hired specifically to deal with reports. That’s part of the oversight function of Congress. And I used to think why when you have this apparatus, especially when we have whistleblower protection laws as well, when you have this apparatus that’s intended to facilitate whistle blowing, and you have laws that in place that would protect whistleblowers, why, how could you dare, how dare you go to the media? How dare you publicly expose this? Especially when it’s the actual documents and not just a story that you’re reporting. But I’ve lost faith in that system. 

I don’t, I don’t trust our intel committee. I mean, who used to be the, who used to be the chair of the Intel committee? Adam Schiff. Give me a break. What happens when you have Democrats that populate these intel committees is you have people like Alexander Finman. Remember Alexander Finman? He was this it’s colonel guy. Remember when he was sitting before Congress? He’s the guy who invented the Ukraine whistleblower stuff. It was, it was his disagreement with President Trump over policy in Ukraine that caused him to essentially instigate instigate this report that Trump had done something unethical in that phone call with Donald Trump. Alexander Finman was the one who leaked the readout, not the actual transcript of the readout, but leaked information from that readout to the general public because he thought what Trump said to Zelensky about, you know, investigating the bidens, what, and then threatening funding if he, if Zelensky didn’t investigate, the Bidens was so egregious that Donald Trump should be impeached for it. 

These are the people, the Intel committee, Adam Schiff pretended that he didn’t, who, who Alexander Finman was and who these, who these different whistleblowers are. We don’t know the name. We don’t know who was behind this. We don’t know who Lee y yada, yada, yada. They’re liars, they’re partisans, they’re hacks. That system has broken down. I wish it worked because if it worked, then it would be the best of boast worlds. We could have oversight by Congress. We could have people within the military and the intel communities that we’re exposing wrongdoing. We could protect this information and we could have recourse when the government abuses its power. And then the people could be, the whistleblowers could be protected by laws. This would be utopian and ideal. I wish that that were the case, but I’m not confident that that’s the case anymore. I’m not confident that if this guy, Jake Tahara had gone to, you know, the Senate Intelligence Committee or the House Intelligence Committee, and he had made this allegation, I’m not confident that it would go anywhere. 

I’m not confident that we would ever have any idea what was at stake here. That we as the American people, we’re the, we’re the people that stand to lose in the war with in a potential war with Russia, right? We’re the ones that stand to lose our lives. Maybe the lives of our family members. We’re the ones that stand to lose the world order. If, if we end up giving away so much of our military power and our money to Ukraine, that it destabilizes the dollar in all these other countries turn away from the dollar, which causes the United States to lose our power around the world. Because our power isn’t really military power. It’s economic power. Like it’s convoluted, it’s complicated, it’s so dangerous what’s happening in Ukraine. And I’m not confident that you and I who sant lose everything. If the Biden administration continues, what they’re doing in Ukraine would have ever heard about it, or that the problems would’ve been corrected and those who had lied and committed wrongdoing would’ve been held accountable. 

And so that’s why I waited four or five days to think about this. Cause I thought, well, listen, I’m not a fan of the idea of this guy just posting this on discord and it going viral on Twitter. I’m not, I I don’t like that idea. It doesn’t sit right to think, okay, well if you have access to the nation’s highest classified secrets, that you’re going to be cavalier with him just because you disagree with something or just because you see something wrong. That’s not the way it should work. But when the way it should work has broken down, what are you gonna do Is your alternative just not to report it, not to say anything and to let that wrongdoing happen. And it seems to me that this is the situation that we’re facing now. And so it becomes a matter going back to my comparison, when an individual person, an individual citizen, does something wrong, that’s bad. 

I don’t like that. I don’t support that. They should perhaps be held accountable for it. But when the government does something bad, when the government lies to the people that they’re supposed to represent and protect, when the government tries to cover up their wrongdoing by using the power of government to silence that citizen, I care a lot more about the wrongdoing of the government. That’s a lot higher on my priority list than wrongdoing by the citizen. And I’m not trying to justify it. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not engaging in moral relativism. I’m just telling you my thought process because my thought process on how I view leaks of classified information has drastically changed over the last 10 or 15 years, as I have, call it red pilled. Call it, my eyes have been opened. I think this has happened to a lot of us, as I have seen the reality of what our federal government is and how corrupted they are by the deep state, the administrative state populated by swamp creatures that don’t care about us. 

Oftentimes they hate us. They don’t have our interests at heart. They either, they wanna profit financially or profit ideologically off of what they’re doing. They have no respect for our constitution and our constitutionally protected rights. They have no, they have no respect for sometimes the United States of America and our status as the world’s superpower When we see that, when we stand back and see that it changes the way that I view these types of situations. So I know that this story was a lot of people talked about this on Monday. A lot, a lot of us were, were, this was the big story earlier in the week. And you know, our news cycle, our news cycle goes so fast that this story is out of the news barely before you can have a chance to think about it. But I know we hadn’t talked about it and I wanted to talk about it with you because it takes a little bit takes a little bit to wrap your mind around something when it’s not just black and white. 

When it’s not cut and dry, when it’s not obvious, wrongdoing obvious, obviously the right thing to do when they, when there’s a little bit of a gray area, when there’s a little bit of vagueness to it. When the prevailing narrative isn’t true, you have to figure it out for yourself. And sometimes that takes a beat. And yeah, that’s why I wanted to talk about this with you. But as always, let me know what you thought of the show. I live for your emails. Guys, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about, don’t worry about disagreeing with me. Although I invite you to agree with me. I think five years from now, you’re gonna look back and you’ll be like, man, Liz was right. Liz was right. This was, this was a false narrative being propagated by the same people that always lied to us over and over again. 

So happy 420 Happy Weed Day. Put down the marijuana and pick up a book and educate yourself about it. Especially because young kids are using this more and more. It’s not the same as it was in the 1970s. It’s not harmless, it’s not good for medical conditions. It exacerbates them. It your chance of committing violence skyrockets if you use marijuana. The psychotic break that you may experience can sometimes take six years to manifest after you start using marijuana. And your chances of developing schizophrenia or other psychotic, psychotic breaks also exponentially increases if you use marijuana. So maybe you don’t wanna hear this, maybe you do. But thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is The Liz Wheeler Show.