The Evolutionary Lens 347 Transcript: Where Cheaters Prosper

Episode number: 347
Episode title: Where Cheaters Prosper: The 347th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Published date: October 14th, 2026
Hosts: Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Guest: None
Podcast: DarkHorse Podcast (The Evolutionary Lens livestream)
Transcript source: Edited machine transcript of the livestream; speaker labels not included

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Summary

In this Evolutionary Lens livestream, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying go through the three statewide measures on Washington's November 2026 ballot: I-645, which would repeal the state's new 9.9% tax on individual income over $1 million; Initiative 638, which would bar students defined as biologically male from girls' school sports; and Initiative 001, which would reinstate the parental rights law originally enacted as Initiative 2081. Reading the official arguments for and against each measure from the voters' pamphlet, they argue that the two sides make claims that cannot both be true, and that voters should vote against the side relying on false claims even when it appears to be on their side. They also discuss attorney Mark Lamb's challenge to SB 5974, a new Washington law setting standards for sheriffs that can lead to decertification, and the Attorney General's response on whether church membership could count as affiliation with an extremist organization. Other segments cover a video of Camas High School cross-country athletes declining to race against a male competitor, a county elections webinar on how Washington verifies voter citizenship, the urban–rural political divide in the Pacific Northwest, and which failure modes a democratic society should prefer.

Main Topics

• Washington State ballot measures (I-645, Initiative 638, Initiative 001)

• Washington's income tax on income over $1 million and the marriage penalty

• Use of emergency clauses to bypass constitutional limits

• Girls' sports, Title IX, and the Camas High School walk-off

• Parental rights and school disclosure of gender transition

• SB 5974, sheriff decertification, and churches as "extremist organizations"

• Voter citizenship verification in Washington

• Dissent, support bias, and performative politics

• Choosing between failure modes in policy

Search Keywords

Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, DarkHorse Podcast, The Evolutionary Lens, Washington State, I-645, Initiative 638, Initiative 001, Initiative 2081, income tax, millionaires tax, marriage penalty, emergency clause, Title IX, girls sports, trans athletes, Camas High School, Jennifer Sey, parental rights, SB 5974, Mark Lamb, sheriffs, extremist organization, voter ID, citizenship verification, No Hate in WA State, Rawlsian veil of ignorance, MAHA

Chapters

00:00:00 347: A Prime Episode
00:03:12 Signed Books from the DarkHorse Store
00:04:38 Sponsor: Redmond Salt
00:08:38 Sponsor: Ethos
00:09:48 Sponsor: CrowdHealth
00:13:43 The State of the State of Washington
00:21:23 I-645: Repealing the Income Tax
00:27:48 The Emergency That Was Never Defined
00:34:16 How Are Lies Allowed on the Ballot?
00:39:53 The You-Go-Girl Response at Brunch
00:48:17 I Will Vote Against the Liars
00:53:04 I-638: Boys Out of Girls' Sports
01:01:59 Walking Off in Camas
01:08:13 Tearing Down the Athletic Girls
01:12:51 Is Your Church an Extremist Group?
01:19:54 You Wouldn't Have to Cheat
01:21:34 I-001: Parental Rights
01:30:07 The Family vs. State Power
01:34:09 Miserable or Menacing?
01:40:47 Voting on the Honor System
01:49:25 Which Error Do You Prefer?
01:54:25 The March of the Lunatics

Our Sponsors

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Join Us

Join us on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: https://darkhorse.locals.com

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Mentioned in This Episode

• WA state initiatives: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/proposed-ballot-measure-information

• Churches w traditional views of gender: https://x.com/mattvanswol/status/2108696643646226634

• No hate in WA state: https://nohateinwastate.org

• Auditors in WA state: https://x.com/thehoffather/status/2108326733414039633

Transcript

[00:00:00] (Upbeat Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream. It is number 347. Yes it is. Which is an odd number, opening the possibility that it might not have a tremendous number of factors other than one and itself, which are required. Yes. Yes. Yes, it does not. It does not have them, any more than that. No more than that. All right. 347, here we are. Prime number. Prime episode. Which prime episode is it? I don't know, I didn't do the math on that one. Oh, which, oh. Yeah. Yeah. Is it a prime number or a prime? We should be keeping a tally. Yeah, in order. Which of the prime numbers are themselves a prime number of primes in order? Yes. Yeah. Yes, okay, it is exactly the kind of second order phenomenon that the mathematicians will have some special name for except. Yes, a name for, and incredibly easy to calculate in this case. Yeah. So today we're gonna talk about Washington state politics, which for those of you not in Washington, I think you will still find it interesting because the topics are unfortunately perhaps everywhere. So we're gonna talk about income tax, parental rights, sports, voter ID, more. tyranny. Oh, tyranny, fair. A little bit of Tyr, because the Pacific Northwest and of course being here on the West Coast, the tyranny is evergreen, as they say.

[00:01:20] Oh no, yes. Yeah, so we're also going to have a Q&A today after the show. We do that once a month. We also have a separate Q&A one Sunday every month, which you can watch on Locals. And today's featured question that we're gonna talk about right at the top of the hour on today's Q&A is this.

[00:01:41] In October, 2024, right, it's one of our local supporters, I stood on the National Mall at Rescue the Republic and watched thousands of fellow health advocates cheer on the MAHA movement. There was so much hope that day. Two years later, no promises have been kept, literally zero. Former RFK advisor, Tiffany Cianci, has meticulously cataloged it.

[00:02:01] And Dr. Malone believes the recent MMR EO is really about creating new mRNA versions. Indeed, mRNA research seems to be exploding. Meanwhile, RFK seems to be spending more time cheerleading Israel than addressing MAHA promises. Most of us have lost faith in Trump. Perhaps it's time we start seriously questioning RFK as well. Two years ago, I would not believe that I'd be suggesting this today, but here we are.

[00:02:23] So that's where we're gonna start our Q&A. Good question. Yeah, it's a really good question. Opens up a lot of avenues for discussion. We'll be talking about that in our Q&A right after the episode, which you can find at our Locals. So join us there and you can see all of our past Q&As and other good perks too. We will be A'ing that Q after we have cast this pod.

[00:02:44] Indeed we will. More sentences that if you go back, boy, I don't know, in that case 20 years, let's say you would have very little ability to parse it. Oh, there's, as you know, there is so much that I would just love to show my high school self and say. Check this out. Yeah, here's a five minute preview of 2026.

[00:03:07] Try to figure out what's happened. Yeah, and do you believe it?

[00:03:12] All right, so we also, for a couple of weeks now, we've been offering for sale signed copies of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, which was our co-written book, published in 2021, and Antipode, which was my first book published in 2001 or two, I can't remember now, but Hunter-Gatherer's Guide is sold out. So we're hoping to have some more of those by next week. We still have Antipode because I got almost no advance for this book, but I got a lot, a lot, a lot of books, which I've been carrying around everywhere.

[00:03:44] So we still have this available, Antipode: Seasons with the Extraordinary Wildlife and Culture of Madagascar. We also have several copies of, I have no place here because I got a bucket of salt that I'm gonna show you guys shortly. But we've got a Hunter- Gatherer's Guide in translation. All of these for this week are 40 bucks, prices are gonna go up next week. We've got a few copies of the French version of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, the Spanish, the Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, oop, sorry, nope. We don't have any more of the Czech. We sold out our last copy that we're willing to part with and Thai. So we have a few copies, a few more than a few copies of some of those.

[00:04:24] And you can go to darkhorsepodcast.org slash books to get those $40 each discount if you buy more than one for signed personalized copies of any of those.

[00:04:38] Maybe then it's time for our sponsors. The rent paying. Yeah, I think that's where we're at, which means I gotta move a few more things around because our first sponsor this week is Redmond Salt, which is awesome. We've been using Redmond Salt as our table and cooking salt for over a decade. We like it so much in fact, that we literally buy it by the bucket.

[00:05:01] There's our bucket of Redmond Salt. It does last. It does last. And actually when we moved up here, I bought two of these buckets just thinking like salt's not go bad and you're always gonna need salt and this stuff is great. And it feels like the great stuff is disappearing. Like the stuff that you really like, that's a great thing that I'm so glad is available. That's the stuff that disappears, right? Now Redmond Salt is not going anywhere.

[00:05:28] It's mined from a Jurassic era seabed in Utah and they've been in the salt business since the Eisenhower administration. These guys know salt and they have been making mineral rich non iodized salt available for longer than most people were giving any thought to their salt. Redmond Salt has now made the obvious jump to electrolytes. So they've got like, this is a variety pack with individual, whatever those are called, stick packs, individual stick packs. And of course they've got the bulk version. This flavor is iced tea lemonade because electrolytes are salts and trace minerals that your body needs to function. So Redmond Salt's Re-Lyte is indeed an excellent, excellent product.

[00:06:05] If you're drinking plenty of water but still feel dehydrated, you may have an electrolyte deficiency. I didn't think much about electrolytes until we did the Camino de Santiago last year. We were through hiking in Northern Spain when both Bret and I different moments felt woozy and disoriented at the end of a long day hiking. Our walking companions- That's a generous way to describe how we felt, but- Well, you were worse off than I was. I was pretty bad on it. Yeah. And our walking companions, apparently much smarter than either of us, insisted that we needed electrolytes and it turns out they were right. Our favorites of the ones we got given by our friends because we had failed to bring any were Redmond Salt's Re-Lyte. When your body runs out of the minerals it needs to run, it starts to fritz out. When that happens, Re-Lyte gets you back on track. Does fritz out sound more like what happened to you? Oh, completely. Yes, fritzed out before reach. So you hike every day to some place where you sleep.

[00:06:52] Miles before the place where you sleep, I fritzed out and that's not what you want. No, you don't want to fritz out on the road. Get where you're going. Yeah, exactly. Re-Lyte is different and better than the myriad of other brands, no, than the myriad other brands of electrolytes available because of where the salt comes from. Because Re-Lyte is made by Redmond, the company behind Redmond Real Salt, their electrolytes start with unrefined real salt that naturally contains sodium, chloride and more than 60 trace minerals from geology, not from a lab. And the rest of the formula is just as clean, zero sugar, no artificial sweeteners, no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, no chemical preservatives, no filler, no junk. It tastes great. I particularly like the grapefruit flavor. And when it tastes really good, that's your body telling you that you waited too long and you need electrolytes. If you've written off electrolytes because the category feels oversaturated and gimmicky, Re-Lyte is worth a second look. Real salt mine, real mineral heritage, real ingredients, that's it.

[00:07:46] Ready to give Re-Lyte a try? Go to http colon slash slash redmond.life slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse to get 15% off your first order. That's redmond.life slash darkhorse with code darkhorse for 15% off your first order or click the link in the video description, scan the QR code on screen or check the pinned comment. Yeah, I will just say, in the case where I discovered that I was electrolyte deficient, I went from being pretty sure that I had contracted something like the flu. I felt that bad to an hour later, feeling like I could-- Asking for a cider, as I remember. Go out, get dinner and go back to normal. So the gap that was simply covered by the Re-Lyte electrolytes in that case was shocking. Yes, yes, totally.

[00:08:38] Our second sponsor this week is Ethos, which connects people to life insurance. There are a lot of reasons to seek life insurance. Maybe you're a new parent or buying a home or just wanna protect your family against the financial burden that could follow unfathomable loss. We've looked for life insurance in the past and been disappointed by what's out there. Insurance is a mess and it's hard to know where to start. Ethos can help. Ethos helps provide financial security by connecting people to life insurance carriers fast and efficiently.

[00:09:03] Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy. It's 100% online. There are no medical exams. You just answer a few health questions online. You can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes and even get same day coverage. Up to $3 million in coverage is available and the rates are good, very good. You'll get the lowest rate possible for you from the Ethos network of trusted carriers. Ethos has 4.8 out of five stars on Trustpilot with over 4,000 reviews. So take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash darkhorse. That's ethos.com slash darkhorse. Application times may vary, rates may vary. That Trustpilot rating is as of June 1st, 2025.

[00:09:43] Once more, that's ethos.com slash darkhorse.

[00:09:48] Now Heather. Yes. You will, I think, be fascinated to discover that our-- I already am. Wait, what? That our final sponsor this week is CrowdHealth. And you will also be interested to know that CrowdHealth is not insurance, it's better. Which you know, because you wrote that line. CrowdHealth-- They may have actually written that line. You typed that line here. I may have, in fact, not even typed it. If they wrote it, then I just-- Oh, it's a cut and paste? Okay, just that line though. The rest of it is bespoke, I am certain.

[00:10:17] I edit strongly, sometimes I bespoke. Our final sponsor this week, Heather, is CrowdHealth. I just wanna give credit where credit is due. Some of our sponsors I do end up having to write because the product's great, maybe the people writing the ad copy not so much. I think CrowdHealth does a great job of everything. Including writing text. Yeah, I think so. Which is great. Yeah. All right, it's not health insurance though, it's better. CrowdHealth is a community of people helping to decentralize healthcare costs, from funding medical costs to helping negotiate your bills. We've had it for several years now instead of insurance, and have had, no, and have had occasion to use it a few times. Ah, there it is.

[00:10:55] They didn't write that. Ha, each time the CrowdHealth community has helped fund the hospital bills with a simple, straightforward app, and we have interacted with people who are easy to reach and help them. If you are in the United States, you know that health insurance here is a mess, complicated, hostile, and expensive. We used to contend with that madness, but not anymore. There is a better way. You too can stop playing the rigged insurance game. CrowdHealth is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly. No middlemen, no insurance, no nonsense. With CrowdHealth, you get healthcare for under $100 per month for your first three months, including access to a team of health bill negotiators, low-cost prescription and lab test tools, and a database of low-cost, high-quality doctors vetted by CrowdHealth.

[00:11:42] You pay for the little stuff out of pocket, but for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, or an accident, you pay the first 500, and the crowd pays the rest. Straightforward, affordable, and much better than health insurance. The health insurance system is hoping you'll stay stuck in their same overpriced, overcomplicated mess. Don't do it.

[00:12:04] Take charge of your health, no, take charge of your health expenses while taking charge of your health parenthetically, and be part of a community. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 a month for your first three months using code darkhorse at joincrowdhealth.com. That's joincrowdhealth.com, code darkhorse. And remember, CrowdHealth is not insurance.

[00:12:29] Opt out. Sorry. You're mocking a dyslexic, which in the state of Washington is probably some kind of-- It's hate mocking. Yeah. Okay. That's a lot for me to accept, but-- In the state of Washington, that's the crime that I will be charged with, hate mocking. Right, but it implies hate, and I'm loathe to accept-- I don't believe in the crime. I mean, especially since I made it up, but I don't believe in the crime of hate speech, and I also was not engaging it even if it did exist. However, I was laughing at your stumbling. It's true, it's true. You were committing a crime in the state of Washington that you don't believe to be a crime, making it some kind of uncivil disobedience, which I suppose I grudgingly accept. Proof that I'm in the state of Washington. That seems like it should be straightforward. Let me finish this ad and I'll think about how. Good, okay. All right, and remember, CrowdHealth is not insurance. Opt out, take your power back. This is how we win. Join crowdhealth.com code darkhorse.

[00:13:37] (Bell Chimes) I have escaped. Yes, you have. Okay,

[00:13:43] should we start with the ballot initiatives? Let's. Let's, okay. So here we are. Some of us are in the state of Washington. Provably or not? Provably or not, are in the state of Washington. And it, of course, midterms are coming up and with the midterms or the, what is it called when it's not the midterms, but it's also not an off year?

[00:14:06] I guess it's the presidential election year. Yeah, the general. The general. Well, no, because every November is a general election. So it's the midterms and every other year, of course, that means that there's more initiatives on the ballots in whatever state you're in. So this year in Washington, you can show my screen here, we have three proposed, no, this is interesting. It says it's the Washington Secretary of State site that I'm showing you, proposed ballot measure information. These are definitely on the ballot, so I don't know what makes them proposed, but they are on the ballot. They are going to be voted on. It seems like they are either proposals or ballot measures. They are not proposed ballot measures at this point. Yeah, so I think like some, but hardly all of our sponsors, the people running the Secretary of State site at the state of Washington, maybe need better copywriters, maybe, maybe. Yes, the- And a lot of other things. They were perhaps educated here in the state of Washington and not as well as they might have been.

[00:15:11] You know, we love it here in a lot of ways and it's unfathomably gorgeous. I mean, enough so that when we go other places in the United States and talk to people who've never been to the Pacific Northwest, they often say like, "Oh, but it's so beautiful." It's something even if they've never been, like they want to come because they've seen some of just the extraordinary natural beauty that we have here.

[00:15:36] So that is true. Like keep that in your heads as you listen to us. So, what do you think about the state of Washington and the state of Washington today? The state of the state of Washington, and I hope I'm not stepping on a punchline of yours, but just for those of you who don't live in Oregon or Washington, the dynamics actually in the two states are similar where you have an urban center that is, I don't want to say wildly liberal because they're not, they're illiberal, but they see themselves as radical- But they would never vote red, that's for sure. Right, they're dyed in the wool, blue team Democrats, or, you know, there's obviously a fringe that wouldn't vote for anybody.

[00:16:19] But point is those urban centers with their runaway loyalty to the democratic regime outvote the rest of the states, which are not insane. And so if you are not a Seattleite or a Portlander, you have the frustrating experience that you and your neighbors may on balance be pretty reasonable. And yet the concentration of population in those capitals makes it almost impossible that the state ever serves your interest. Yeah, I mean, I think, I guess, I wasn't planning on talking about this, but it maybe is interesting for people who haven't thought about, like the coastal elites is a legitimate complaint that some suggest that the state is not a state. Are guilty of wreaking havoc on the politics of the United States. And I would say that the coasts of the Great Lakes also provide some of this politics, like the Upper Midwest, where we have also lived, when we were in grad school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are also deeply, deeply blue.

[00:17:30] And the rest of those states don't tend to be. So, you know, like Chicago is deeply, deeply blue, but Southern Illinois, not so much. In, on the West Coast, you have exactly the dynamic that you're talking about, Bret, and at least in Washington, Oregon, it sort of, it neatly divides by mountain range, really West of the mountains in Washington and Oregon, you have relatively blue, blue voting blocks, especially in the urban centers, which is of course true everywhere. But once you get East of the Cascades, things become rural, agrarian, agricultural, doing physical work.

[00:18:08] And although there are exceptions in, for instance, Bend in Oregon, Sisters, Spokane to some degree in Washington, it's pretty red. And California's a little bit different because you have the Central Valley, that you basically have two mountain ranges that trisect vertically that giant state. But it's certainly true that the line directly along the coast is also very blue.

[00:18:36] Whereas as I understand it, and I've only lived on the Eastern Seaboard a very, very small amount of time, you a little bit longer than I have, but my sense there is that in part because the states are smaller and in part because everything has just been established for longer and so those in power in the cities, which is to say the Democrats have had a longer time to sort of establish themselves everywhere in Massachusetts, for instance. Sure, Boston is super blue, but as you go west away from the coast of Massachusetts, it doesn't really get redder, right? Like I spent time in Northampton, Massachusetts and certainly that cluster of women's colleges there in Hadley and Amherst and such, all extremely blue territory. And so for those on the coast in the Eastern States, it may seem like, ah, the entire state is blue, and it is more so than here in the West. In part because we have bigger states with wilder lands and we have people who are still able to make a real living actually off of their land, which is certainly true for some people in say New England and along the Eastern Seaboard, but there's less to be discerned and discovered that hasn't already been trodden on.

[00:19:56] I wonder just as a hypothesis, and we obviously do need to get to the ballot initiatives, but the hypothesis is you and I have talked often about the kind of common sense that comes from having a direct relationship to some system in which it's just not pure abstraction. You can't be such a smarty pants that your crops grow. You have to actually do the farming correctly in order for it to work. That's right. So the urbanites are living a purely economic life in which actually you can get ahead for being clever in the eyes of others, even if your cleverness is not actually smart.

[00:20:35] The business of sustenance is actually inherently transactional. Whereas the business of sustenance, if you are relying on your own body and wits, is not inherently transactional. Right, so you might imagine that just simply being, I don't wanna say forced to live closer to the land, but living closer to the land for whatever reason means there's more common sense. And what you're seeing is not only coastal elites who are gravitating to the fancy real estate and all, but you're also seeing a kind of disconnection from everything is mediated through the dollar, which means if you're making a fortune on TV saying stupid things, you seem smart to people and a little more common sense would go a long way. Indeed, indeed.

[00:21:23] Okay, so here in the state of Washington where we live, west of those mountains, in fact, so far west that you can't hardly get any farther west and stay in the state of Washington from where we are, there are three ballot measures on the ballot in the upcoming November midterms. We have 001 and 638, which are initiative to the legislature and then one initiative to the people, 645, and I'm gonna explain all of these, but it's not clear to me exactly why there is that distinction. So 645 to the people is about reversing the income tax that was just voted in by the legislature earlier this year, or at least in the last session, I think it was this year, it might've been at the very end of 2025 and the 2025, 2026, leg session. And then the two initiatives to the legislature regard parental rights and sports and basically keeping boys out of girl sports and men out of women's sports.

[00:22:20] Okay, so here we have, first we're gonna talk about the, at some level, well, I was gonna say it's the simplest one, but the one about the income tax. So we're just gonna go through the initial letter, the title of the initiative, a little bit of the full text and then the arguments for and against. So the title is, the concise description is, this measure would repeal a 9.9% tax on annual individual income over $1 million, prohibit taxes measured by individual income and taxes on individual income or the receipt of individual income and define income.

[00:23:01] And that, I think we talked about this as it was passing. The full text of this measure, which begins with a whole lot of numbers, begins, the people find that for nearly a century, Washington courts have held the income is property subject to ownership under the state's constitution. Income therefore cannot be taxed unless it meets all constitutional requirements for property taxes, including a uniform rate not exceeding 1%.

[00:23:27] The people further find that Washington voters have soundly rejected 10 attempts to impose a statewide income tax. The people also find that the Washington legislature has ignored the constitution and the people's will to enact an unconstitutional income tax. And to reinstate the will of the people, this measure would repeal a state tax on the receipt of individual income, define income for tax purposes and prohibit any tax on or measured by individual income regardless of source. Now we'll share a little bit of arguments for and against unless you wanna add something right now. All right.

[00:24:01] So of the many documents that are on the secretary of state site, we have the name, the summary of which I just read you part of, and then this which also shows up in the voters pamphlet that comes. To Washington state voters. The argument for argues right up top, trust is not built by passing another tax. It's earned by keeping promises. And then they repeat what I just read. The argument against begins, Washington is one of the nation's most upside down tax systems where working and middle-class families pay a far higher tax rate than the wealthiest.

[00:24:38] Then they decide under vote no, stop a tax break for the wealthiest. They go after the guy who is backing this. So this becomes a personal attack. They say vote no, stop cuts to schools, healthcare and childcare. This measure cuts funding for K-12 public schools, healthcare, childcare, et cetera, which is a lie because this is a tax that was voted in by the legislature this year and has not gone into effect, will not go into effect if this ballot initiative passes, which I hope that it does, but will not go into effect regardless until 2028.

[00:25:13] 2029, I believe. What was it, eight? It's 2028, income tax on 2028 with first receipt by the state in 2029. So one point, the claim here that you have on the screen was actually challenged by the proponents of this measure in court on the basis that it's not a tax cut because there's no money being collected. This doesn't eliminate any money that schools, for example, are currently getting. And the court ruled that it has to be on the ballot further. What little polling has been done on this measure. That this language has to be on the ballot? Yes, the court ruled that it had to be there. Court, I would argue, playing an activist role, basically with its thumb on the scales attempting to get this measure defeated.

[00:26:06] But that the polling radically shifts based on whether or not that language is present. Of course it does. It's present on the ballot. Basically what you've got is a lot of people who might instinctively think, actually, no, I don't want there to be an income tax in the state who then see, oh, but then that's gonna cut funding for schools and they may think, oh, well, the schools are already not so hot, I don't wanna see them get worse. So it's a manipulative tactic. It's highly manipulative. And indeed on the left again under the argument for, under a history of broken promises, I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger if this works. Oops, didn't work. Here we go. 80 times in the last five years, Olympia has moved money from dedicated accounts to the general fund. They've taken money from state healthcare, flood control, pipeline safety, school employees, insurance and others to backfill the general fund. The capital gains tax was promised to support early learning and childcare, which is another new tax imposed on Washingtonians.

[00:26:59] Yet those commitments were delayed, reduced or canceled. First responders spent careers relying on promises about the retirements only to watch the legislature pay their pensions to plug holes in the general fund. Trust erodes when dedicated funding doesn't produce the results people were promised. I will say as an editorial aside, not reading the argument for at this point, that this is part of what the Democrats are busy wringing their hands about and pretending they do not understand. Why have so many people fled the Democratic party? Precisely because of moves like this, because of false claims, frankly, flat out lies, but this is a tax cut, it's not a tax cut. It's a ballot measure to repeal an illegitimate legislative action that was just voted in and has not yet begun to and will not indeed begin to start collecting taxes for years.

[00:27:48] So hold on, I wanna add something. This was passed by the legislature, if I'm remembering correctly, over the constitutional ban on it for the state of Washington on the basis that there was an emergency which was never defined. Well, this is part of what is going on, yes. We talked about some staggering fraction of initiatives passed in the legislature this last session were passed with the language around them being passed to respond to an emergency because when there was an emergency invoked, then you get around all sorts of safeguards for the people that exist in the state of Washington. All you have to do is invoke emergency and suddenly you're free to tyranny.

[00:28:36] Right, so you can imagine putting an emergency-- Which is not how that works, but. You can imagine putting an emergency provision in because you can't foresee what might come and you don't wanna to tie the hands of the legislature behind its back so that it can't rescue the state of Washington in some unforeseen future event. But once you have a blanket, get out of the constitution free clause on the basis that there's an emergency, all someone has to do is say there is one, aha, it's a loophole. And so this has been rejected now, is it 10 or 11 times in the state previously? Yeah, they say nine, eight or nine, oh 10. Washington has been rejected in income tax 10 times over the last 90 years. It's been rejected 10 times, it's in our constitution that it cannot exist here and without even having to explain what the emergency is that they're claiming justifies overriding the constitution, they've done it. And now with activist courts misleading language on the ballot, they are very likely to maintain this unconstitutional provision that levies this tax, yes, on high earners, but everybody expects, especially as the high earners flee the state, the threshold at which the tax kicks in to be lowered by the legislature.

[00:29:52] Well, that's, I mean, and that's one of two things I was just gonna get to, which is that A, there's a marriage penalty baked into this tax, which is that that million dollars applies to married couples such that it actually is a $500,000 tax on individuals if they are married and filing jointly as married couples. Unlike such taxes that have been brought to bear in other states, Washington is unusual, although not unique in having that marriage penalty. But then also there are precisely no reassurances, no safeguards within this bill, Bill, I'm not sure I'm using the right language there, but this initiative, well, no, because what has passed is an initiative. This protects the initiative. I'm not talking about this, the bill. So it is a bill.

[00:30:42] So there are precisely no safeguards against the legislature going in next session, probably not. We tend to have very tiny sessions every other year, but going in and saying, actually a million was too high, let's make it for instance, 135,000, which was exactly the proposal made within the same session in which this passed at the beginning of 2026. So it's being called a millionaire's tax because calling it a millionaire's tax and calling the attempt to repeal it a tax cut, both are more likely to get actually middle-class voters to say, well, screw it, I'm never gonna make that kind of money. And we clearly need more money in the state and therefore let's keep it. That does not protect you. They're coming for all of us next because they can't, because if this stays on the books, they will be able to and everyone expects that they will do the logical next step, which is lower that ceiling on who is actually experiencing the income tax. And years ago, Washington was a state that actually successfully brought business in, which was, I think almost everyone will agree, good for the state of Washington, the fact that Boeing and Microsoft and, was it Amazon here?

[00:31:58] Amazon. Amazon, among many others, but those are three big ones. Starbucks. Starbucks. And two or three of those are already fleeing and there's moves for all of the business that has been here because people could come and start businesses knowing that they were not gonna have a state tax. They were not gonna have capital gains tax. They were not gonna have income taxes. They were gonna have low and easy to interpret business taxes. None of this is true anymore with the possible exception of the income tax, which is what we are currently talking about.

[00:32:34] Okay, so just one more thing on this. The rebuttal of the argument for, again, written by the people who want this not to pass and want the bill that was passed by the legislature to tax at 9.9% all income above a million married couples or individuals who weren't married. They write the millionaires tax again, calling it that as if it would stay that. The millionaires tax only applies to those making above $1 million per year. For now, they don't say. Any attempt to expand it to those of us making under a million would be decided on the ballot. That's not true. Voters always have the final say, also not true. Wow.

[00:33:12] I-645 blows a $13 billion hole in the budget. Nope. The thing that has blown a hole in the budget is actually the people who cannot figure out how to actually spend money appropriately, spend money on the right things, and they're instead blowing it on, well, grift and graft, frankly. Don't believe lies, they write, that we can keep tax cuts for working families and small businesses, but eliminate the tax on the wealthy few that pays for them.

[00:33:38] The rebuttal of argument against, again, these are people who are trying to get this initiative to pass as I would advocate they should be. The no campaigns claims are false. I-645 repeals the income tax. Without I-645, Olympia, the capital of the state of Washington, can expand the income tax to reach into your paycheck with a simple stroke of a pen. That is true.

[00:34:03] No public vote and no permission required any time they want. This was never about schools or diapers. That's a scare tactic. Washington has record revenues. An income tax on anyone will become an income tax on everyone. Vote yes.

[00:34:16] It is amazing to me that demonstrably false statements actually are allowed on this ballot. The idea that this is creating a tax shortfall, that the voters always have the final say, like, this is just obviously wrong. And so the voters should not have to sort this out. The whole idea of our system is that you are supposed to be presented with something that allows you to evaluate it. The whole idea of a ballot initiative is you're supposed to be able to decide which side of an issue you are on, not have which side, you know, knowing yourself perfectly well, it should not be difficult to figure out whether or not you're for or against these things.

[00:35:07] And yet, muddying the waters is clearly the tactic. And I don't know, I just, there's obviously kind of cryptic tyranny in that. The party in power is able to muddy the water so that you can't figure out how to vote for your own values on the ballot. That's right, that's right. And I guess I will say, just to combine a couple of things we already said into one thought, because when you're talking about numbers like a million dollars for most working and middle class people, certainly for us, when we were professors, we could not imagine ever making anything close to that amount of money. That was just unfathomable. And so, although I hope that I would have had the sense to vote for this, I can't say for sure, it never came up then. To vote for the repeal. To vote for the repeal, yes, to vote for this initiative.

[00:36:00] But, you know, I cannot say for sure because the legislature never voted for an income tax that I remember. I mean, they must have, and I don't remember exactly how that manifested. I wasn't paying attention to the ballot measures, I guess, at this level when we were professors, but we were not paid very well as professors. But imagine if that same legislator comes, if this does not pass, and therefore the bill holds and the millionaires tax is enacted starting in 2028 for 2028 revenues to start paying out in 2029.

[00:36:36] And that legislator that came in and proposed, actually, let's just drop the ceiling of that to $135,000. Remember the marriage penalty. So $135,000 between two people means two people making, you know, 60 to $70,000 each. And that, again, that doesn't mean that if that ceiling was dropped to 135,000, it's not that you're suddenly paying 9.9% on all of that, you're just paying it on any money you make above that. But you are most families in which both couples work and have enough money to own a home in the state of Washington where the cost of living is high, are probably very close, if not over that level already. And that 135 sounds like it's out of reach for many people who are making like we did when we were professors, 60, 65, you know, we started out much lower. We started out at $38,000 a year at Evergreen.

[00:37:35] But it was impossible. We were never gonna get to six figures there. And, you know, Evergreen paid way worse than the other schools, fine. But, you know, 135,000 may still seem out of reach, but not when you realize that the marriage penalty is in place. And that's not gonna change. Yeah, it's also, there's a level of like childish logic. Oh, for sure. Where the idea is, oh, well, you know, it's only gonna affect millionaires.

[00:38:05] Okay, well, do you want to punish the millionaires in your state? You know, you may be thinking of the people who are earning just above this threshold and thinking, yeah, why do they get so much? Okay, you don't know anything one about why they're getting so much unless you know them. But you're talking about a substantial fraction of the income of your really high earners. You've decided that you're entitled to almost 10% of the income of the really high earners who can flee.

[00:38:37] And they can take these giant businesses that employ your neighbors who aren't making a million dollars, and the point is, you simply have to ask the question, net impact. Is this actually going to help the people that I claim to want to help? Or is it going to hurt them? And we're already seeing, I believe, as of a week or two ago, there's an unprecedented glut of homes on the market in Washington State because-- High end homes. High end homes, people are fleeing these policies, and these are people who, whether you like them or not, are responsible for whether or not there are employers hiring. So, you know, let's put it this way. We should all be able to agree that if your point is that the people lower on the economic ladder need better opportunities and protection, that if the net impact of this is negative on those people, that it's bad, and you shouldn't want it, even if it sounds good to have a millionaire's tax. Yeah, even if you're, basically, you really want to vote out of spite, because that's what voting no on this is. It's a spite vote. I don't like the idea of rich people. Therefore, I'm gonna vote to hurt rich people. You're gonna end up hurting yourself. That's gonna bite you as quickly as it bites anyone else.

[00:39:53] Right, and there's a way in which all of this kind of performative politics, especially on the blue side, is about saying the thing that gets the you-go-girl response at brunch, at friends, right? No, I mean, seriously, I think the point is, I'm in favor of this millionaire's tax because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah! It's that affirmation that you're really after. It's not like, and the person at the table who says, well, actually, net analysis, I'm not sure that this actually helps the people that we all want to help. That person doesn't get a cheer, right? That person gets scorned. And so these people, look, do whatever you gotta do to get the girls to cheer at brunch, but vote based on reason and net analysis because that is actually what changes well-being. Frankly, the cheering at brunch, if you're actually willing to hurt the people you're trying to help in order to get the cheer at brunch, you're not really trying to help them, right? Net analysis is the only thing there is. And-- You're lying. Do whatever you need to do to get the girls to cheer at brunch.

[00:41:09] I was going to say, I've never been to brunch with the girls, but actually, you may have been to more brunches with the girls than I have because I eschew those situations like the plague precisely because of the social coercion tactics that happened there. And it's just no wins. Like, great, I'm gonna sit quietly while they're cheering some inane thing or talking about their shoes or whatever it is. Or I'm gonna speak up and be like, I just don't think this is right. And then you just get the cold shoulder while they, you know, clink their mimosas at one another. It's like, it's not worth it. But you know, you-- I think I hear that. You can invite it to some of these brunches and you would do just fine. But of course, it's true that just as, you know, we are seeing too much of the toxic feminine in politics and in the public now, but there is a really important good role that rare men in women's spaces, not sports, and rare women in men's spaces can do, which is that like you at a women's brunch can get away with more than I could because it's understood that you're not one of them and you're not expected to play by the same rules in a good way if you are being honorable about it. And the same is true for a woman in a man's space.

[00:42:27] If the men are getting into sort of like just thumping gorilla moves and a woman, if she is careful and honest and responsible and not playing her own toxic games, just as like you wouldn't be playing toxic male games at the women's brunch, can sort of break the toxic dynamic of an otherwise entirely male group. So, you know, there is utility in this that I think like there's no chance of getting that conversation to happen now because all of the systems are so broken by toxic on toxic as opposed to actually sometimes the thing that can break the toxic, the toxic single sex dynamic of either sex is someone who's not toxic of the other sex coming in and saying, you know, stop it. Or actually that's not how this is. I think you're exactly right about this. Something that I believe is driving the blue team insane is the fact that they police the borders of their conversations. Yeah, totally. And so the point is if there's nobody at brunch who understands the counterpoint, or even if there is somebody, nobody's gonna voice it because it results in punishment, then the point is everybody thinks that they're saying something that's just so obviously true that nobody could possibly, you know, reasonable people cannot disagree over this.

[00:43:41] This was the brilliance of the Spencer Pratt advertisements where he had the Pilates class and the women sitting around effectively, you know, a kitchen island at a brunch home saying, oh, but I'm voting for Spencer Pratt. You are? Well, actually I was thinking about it too. You know, it opens up the borders of the conversation. Sorry. Yeah, no, but I think this actually is necessary. And frankly, I think one of the things about our podcast that works in a unique way is that, you know, it kind of looks and sounds sometimes like NPR, but it comes from a place that NPR can't even touch.

[00:44:16] Schweddy balls. Yes. Schweddy balls. Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyway, the point is, yeah, you definitely, I don't care who you are, frankly, your point sucks more than it would if it hasn't been exposed to a counter argument. Well, and this, I mean, this is fundamentally the, you know, the message, the lesson of science, right? That, and no falsification. Why? Why is trying to falsify your cherished ideas a stronger test of them than trying to prove that they are true? Because at the end of the exercise, you have really put it to a test. You have really tried and tried and tried and having failed, maybe you just failed and maybe you didn't find the contravening evidence and maybe it isn't true even though you really think it is, but you tried, but you didn't try if all you did was try to find support for your own cherished hypothesis because everyone knows, yourself included, that you're not trying to prove yourself wrong. And this is actually, you know, trade-offs being what they are. This is a negative brought in by female culture because female culture has, for reasons that are game theoretic and evolutionary, has a reflexive support bias, right?

[00:45:37] The idea is to affirm what is being said by the other women. Men have the, find the flaws in your friends' arguments, you know, find the vulnerabilities in your friends' tactics. They have a reflexive shoving bias. Right, exactly. Poke this. Yeah, poking, and it makes for sharper, higher quality arguments. It's not inherently male, but it comes along with male culture. It is the stuff of a proper scientific laboratory or discussion. And to the extent that we are talking about how are we to govern ourselves, the point is the male rules beat the female rules every single time because they are refined by this process of finding defects and purging them.

[00:46:22] And what we are suffering from, as you and others have observed, is that over on the left, this is my right, I don't know what it is on your screen, but over on the left, you have this feminized culture that does not allow for dissent.

[00:46:43] And it's just, it's just toxic. And this is part of why dissent is taken as emotional assault, right? Because in some groups of women, dissent is taken as emotional assault. It's taken. And so out in the public sphere, which has been feminized and then that feminization is toxified and weaponized, any disagreement is taken as assault, which is of course totally absurd. And many, many men and good women are at first and maybe consistently just so taken aback by this. It's such an absurd argument. It's such a non sequitur when you were trying to have a conversation about what is best. And you were told that you're attacking someone for disagreeing with them.

[00:47:34] It's such a non sequitur that most of us have no idea what to do in the face of it. And many people never do figure out what to do in the face of it. Instead, they become silent, they self-censor, they never raise that topic again with those people. And so those people end up in the ever more echo we echo chamber.

[00:47:54] It's taken as defection, right? So there's a thing that we're trying to accomplish, all sorts of things that shouldn't be allowed or allowed in pursuit of it. And if you voice a criticism, then obviously you're not on the team, you're a problem. And those things make the already fraught process of coming up with good policy all the worse.

[00:48:17] But I would point out in looking at this ballot measure, if you didn't know a lot about the state of Washington and how it runs and how badly it's run with how much money they're collecting and all of that, if you didn't really have the background-- This is again, measure 645 to repeal the so-called millionaire's tax. If you didn't know the score in the state of Washington, you could imagine reasonable people disagreeing over this. If you didn't know that there had been a long history of it being rejected by voters, if you didn't know that it was against our constitution, if you didn't know that an emergency provision that never defined an emergency had been used to actually get this thing passed, if you didn't know any of that, you could say, well, I don't know if they need a tax at this threshold or not.

[00:48:59] However-- If you didn't know that the state had been wildly mismanaged for years, perhaps decades, and that money is disappearing-- Right, if you didn't know-- And that services are declining, even as tax revenues have climbed. Right, if you didn't know that money isn't gonna solve this problem, all it's going to do is put more money into whatever graft leak happens, the money's gonna end up in the pockets of people who are already getting our money and not doing what they promise. So more money is not the solution to that problem, but I can tell you from looking at this ballot, like as an honest broker, coming from the perspective of what if I didn't know all of the background here, I can tell that one side is cheating, that one side is lying. You can tell it must be that one side is lying because you can't reconcile the two statements for and against. It's not like, here are the arguments for this and here are the arguments against it. It's like, well, if these people are right, those people are lying, if those people are right, these people are lying, somebody's lying, right? You can see on the ballot that it's not good faith. Right, it's not good faith. And so my feeling is I will vote against the liars.

[00:50:06] I'm going to vote against the liars. Why would I vote against the liars? Because the liars are cheating, they are establishing a system, and even if I think they're cheating in my direction, I don't want to establish cheating as the mechanism by which the work gets done for Rawlsian veils of ignorance reasons. I want a system that's fair, in which we actually do settle something by a process that isn't biased in favor of one group or the other, because I don't know when I'm going to be up and get the advantage of the cheating and when I'm going to be down and suffer the harm of it. I want a system that I'm happy with, whether I'm up or down.

[00:50:45] Just like this bill which passed in the legislature for married couples or single unmarried people making a million dollars or more, that ceiling, that floor, that amount, it can be lowered at any moment by legislators. That moment can be lowered at any moment by legislators.

[00:51:08] Similarly, sorry, there's something wrong with my tech and I've never gotten where I was going. What were you just talking about? That the Rawlsian veil of ignorance suggests you would be reasonable without understanding the consequences of what's being voted on to vote against the cheaters, because the cheaters are by definition screwing up the system that actually functions to solve problems for voters. So the cheaters can change the million dollars to $50,000 at any moment they want to.

[00:51:40] And the cheaters can do the same thing to anything. If they have demonstrated that they are liars and cheaters, even if they appear to be on your team right now, that's not the team they're on. They're on the team of I'll do what I can to get what I want. And even if they've convinced you that what they want right now is what you want, ultimately that's not the case. What they want is what they want. You're not on their team. They get to choose who their team is and their team is them. And none of us out here who aren't on the inside are them. You're trusting liars because they say that they are on your team. And the point is no, those are liars. And you've got three obvious lies here. You've got voters get the final say, you get there was an emergency that required this, and you get this is a tax cut.

[00:52:39] Yeah. Right? Those three are just based on the facts of what's under discussion. Those are lies. And so I would argue that the people who make those lies are obviously in the wrong on this one, irrespective of the substance of, whether you think a tax like this would in general be a good thing. Yes, that is right.

[00:53:00] Okay.

[00:53:04] Let's talk about the other two. And actually first, do you have that picture that I sent you? Show the picture and then we're gonna come back to it after we talk about these. But this is a sign that's been showing up a lot around us. No hate in Washington state. Vote no on 001, initiative 001, initiative 638.

[00:53:25] Oh, wow. Yeah, I don't want to hate here. Yeah. Oof. It would be great to have no hate. Yeah, let's see. It's like end war. But you can say like, I'd rather there not be war. I'd rather there not be hate. Let's see what the hate is that they are referring to. Let's start with 638, which concerns participation in athletics at K-12 schools.

[00:53:52] This measure would prohibit students, it defines as biologically male from competing in certain school athletic activities intended for female students only. It would require verification of biological sex by students, healthcare providers. Does sound hateful. Very hateful stuff, no? So let's check out, in this case, the particular language is a little not as interesting. So we're gonna go right to the argument for and argument against.

[00:54:18] So the argument for this initiative, which would prevent boys from competing against girls in sports in Washington state. Vote yes to protect fairness in girls sports. Female athletes deserve fair opportunities to build confidence, develop skills and pursue goals. Let's protect those opportunities and affirm the hard fought rights assured by Title IX in 1972, et cetera, et cetera. We've talked about this ad nauseam some might think.

[00:54:42] And it's frankly of all of the cultural issues that Americans and indeed everyone in the West are dealing with today, this has got to be one of the simplest ones. It's just got to be one of the simplest ones because at base is the most obvious of the things that we are arguing about.

[00:55:02] Are men the same as women? Are male and female different entities? Can male become a female in a mammal? Can female become male in a mammal? Yes, they're different. Yes, they're different entities. No, in mammals of which humans are a member, no, male cannot become female and female cannot become male. Therefore, trans is a psychological cope among the best and most honest of the people themselves, trans. And over in sports territory, which, you know, the stakes are lower. We're not talking about what's going on in prisons where the stakes are high, domestic abuse shelters, stakes are really, really high. The stakes are lower in sport because sport isn't as imperative, but I would say it's fundamentally a part of being human. And Title IX in 1972, which has been weaponized a ton against its original, what it was originally trying to do, Title IX nonetheless was started, began as a way to allow girls and women in sport and allow them to compete in sport in some of the same ways that boys and men had.

[00:56:18] And that is wonderful. I assume that I benefited from that, although maybe not since I was at a private school where I was playing volleyball and then it was, you know, I don't know, club sports in college is different. So, you know, with ultimate frisbee. But, you know, sport is great. Sport is fun. Sport teaches you a whole lot about the physical world and about working together and about being fit and about meeting your own deadlines and about not letting other people down. And, you know, this is not the place that we need to defend sport.

[00:56:52] People who think that declaring yourself the sex that you're not, and of course in the case of sport, boys who declare themselves girls so that they can win when competing against girls are cheating. Again, they're simply cheating. Everyone can see it. And it's unsportsmanlike.

[00:57:12] And the arguments to let them do so sounds like, but shouldn't everyone get to compete? Yes, everyone should get to compete. And natal boys can compete against natal boys. Whether or not they want to wear a dress or lipstick while they're doing it. Whether or not they want to take, you know, puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, which I don't think anyone should be doing. But regardless, if you want to compete athletically and you were born a boy, you need to compete as a boy. There was no one trying to keep you out of sport, frankly. It's trying to keep you out of the competitions to which you are not entitled. It's like, and I don't know enough about this to get any of the language right, but boxing has weight classes, right? No one who weighs 300 pounds gets to say, someone who weighs 150 pounds and compete against people weighing 150 pounds. Because everyone can see that quantitatively and qualitatively, that is not fair. Same thing is true here. So the argument against the design, the initiative on the ballot in the state of Washington, initiative 638 to keep boys out of girls sports begins with vote no to protect all girls.

[00:58:22] These people are lunatics. Yes. They are freaking lunatics. Now, to be fair, they seem to be making an argument, which is that you're gonna have doctors and coaches looking up under girls skirts and assessing what they are. And that's not fair because most of them are just girls, which, you know, it's a self-own at some level, but that seems to be their argument. They write, we all want fairness and safety in sports. No, you don't. Okay.

[00:58:54] But this poorly written measure would require girls as young as eight undergo intrusive medical sex certification as a new part of sports physicals. It bans parents from using birth certificates. Section two says doctors must subject girls to invasive examinations of their reproductive organs. I don't know why that's in quotes, but it is. Or expensive genetic or hormone tests. These requirements apply to girls only. Boys are exempt.

[00:59:19] Boys are exempt because your game produced this insane situation because boys and girls are different. And boys, I mean, girls pretending to be boys, don't gain any advantage in sports. And so although there's plenty of problem with girls pretending to be boys, and girls are getting horrifyingly disfigured and appalling advice, and they lose their fertility, they lose their sexuality, they lose their beauty, they lose all sorts of things. When these people convince them that they are actually boys, they don't also go and try to join boys teams. That's not how it works. It's not a winning strategy. Because it's not a winning strategy, right?

[01:00:06] Because it's just not. So. Wait, hold on. First of all, intrusive medical examinations. Well, I don't know exactly what they're talking about. Could be a blood test, which you could argue is intrusive, but their rationale. Can you get karyotype from a blood test? Sure, white blood cells. Okay.

[01:00:29] But the rationale here is that birth certificates are not acceptable for this test. Well, why not? Because you-- Because you sabotaged-- Too many times. You sabotaged the birth certificate. You decided that it could have fiction on it. And if not, this would be settled by the birth certificate issue, which would be, but also-- Because the doctors, the midwives, or whatever, seeing the baby's genitalia is not considered intrusive at that moment.

[01:00:58] Right. Okay, but the other thing is the whole logic, I mean, there's no shortage of irony here. Protect all girls. Now, the focus of that sentence is the people that they're claiming are girls who are biologically not. You are not, however, protecting the girls who were playing girls sports. You've decided that men are now going to dominate not only men's sports, but women's sports. You are not protecting the women who were in the women's sports. You are actually exposing them to the men that they were otherwise insulated from in order to protect them. Again, their claim here about what they mean by that sentence is, yeah, there may be a few trans girls, they insist on calling them. There may be a few trans girls who are getting away with it. Think about all the poor girls who are really girls and they're gonna have these invasive procedures. Don't you care about them?

[01:01:57] That's the answer logic.

[01:01:59] Can we look at this video that came out of Camas, Washington? Before we keep going through this? I think it's just so salient here. So in this case, you have, so here's Jennifer Sey's tweet, tonight in Washington state, nearly half of the Camas High School team refused to compete against a boy on their own team. He switched from the boy's team just one month ago. He's now placing in every meet. Courage always wins. Does she have a picture or a video here? Yes, and so you can see, before we even start this video, you can see this-- You can play it. The boy who is competing with the girls, he's just built different, right?

[01:02:45] And kudos to these girls for doing what typically is not done by girls, which is standing up for themselves here by refusing to compete against this boy who's going to dominate them. So here they are walking off without competing. So anyway, well done on their part. Very supportive of that, but you could just physically see-- But how sad.

[01:03:10] That's the death of Title IX. Not that it hasn't suffered a thousand cuts already, more than cuts by many suggestions, but it's like we're back in 1971, and in order to compete, girls in many places would have to be competing against boys and know that they could compete, but know that they would have no chance of ever knowing how they actually stood up against an appropriate population. Imagine for just a second that this whole madness had come about because men had decided that they were fed up being excluded from women's sports, and they were looking for a loophole in order that the resources that were dedicated to women's sports were then going to be available to them. Imagine that a bunch of men got together and were like, "I know."

[01:04:03] If we say we're women and we claim that that's a real condition-- Well, I mean, it has happened. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, but I'm saying it wasn't a group of men that came up with this. This is largely a misbegotten movement to protect people who are claiming to be women in their status as women. This was not the patriarchy.

[01:04:29] I think that this is mama bears trying to protect vulnerable people who are actually wolves in sheep's clothing. Yeah, but it's all boys and men who are-- Oh, who are benefiting to be sure, but the patriarchy-- And who are claiming and who are crying crocodile tears on camera. And of the men who are competing in adult women's sports, we've seen plenty in the Olympics. Right, right, right. I'm not saying that this isn't men benefiting from it. That's exactly what I am saying and are benefiting from it. But what do you think? So this boy here who's running Girls Cross Country, what do you think the boys in the Girls Cross Country team are thinking about this guy who has just claimed to switch sexes in order to compete with girls? Do you think they're thinking, hell yeah.

[01:05:18] Or they're thinking, what the hell are you doing? Right? The point is this is not the men in the men's sports taking over women's sports. This is men who can't compete in those sports deciding that they would like to win anyway. This is loser men. This is third tier men, fifth tier men, eighth tier men going, well, but I deserve to win. It is, it's part of this culture of everyone deserves a gold star. I was told I deserved a gold star. I can't win in my actual group. So I'm gonna go find a different group where I can kick the crap out of them. Oh, and if I'm a dude, no matter how actually not good in the sport I am, I know who I can kick the crap out of. The actually elite girls, because you know what?

[01:06:01] This is high school. They're all over the age of having gone through puberty or still going through it. But the men are taller, slimmer-hipped, more muscular, cross country, at, you know, in less and the cross country actually like very long distance running is actually a very interesting, extraordinarily rare, maybe unique case in which women may out compete men at like a hundred mile distances or longer in some cases. But in cross country at the high school level, there's no chance. Well, these are- There's no chance. These are men who have decided to win competitions through a force other than competition. Right. Right? Again with the cheaters. It's the cheating, it's the thing. And yeah, the point is I'm reflexively against that. If sport isn't about competing and some people winning and other people not winning, there's no sport. Yeah, and what do you in it for if not to compete? Like what does cheating in sports get you actually? Because you know, you, the dude there, you know you're cheating.

[01:07:06] Everyone else knows you're cheating. When you compete and you do your best and you come in second or you come in first or you come in last, you know something. You have received information about the universe and your place in it and how well you did in that particular moment against those particular competitors. And that is real information that you can use going forward. And you can feel great or not so great. And you can think, "Oh, like what did I eat yesterday? I'm maybe a little sick." Or you can blame yourself. You can seek blame elsewhere. But ultimately that is information that you have about your place in the universe. And you can then say, "I wanna do better."

[01:07:44] As opposed to, "Yeah, I'm a dude, beat a bunch of girls." Where, what do you do from that? Like, there's nothing exalted in it. There's nothing good. And like, what do you learn from it? That you can cheat? Good on you, like everyone can cheat. Everyone can lie, everyone can cheat, it takes nothing. That's unfortunately a human truth. Well, we're training people to do it in this case.

[01:08:13] But all right, here's a potentially new thought. I think focusing on what do the boys on the boys team think of the boy who switches to the girls team is a useful exercise. But so too is the exercise of, okay, there's something female coded about the, you know, going up against the power structure, you know, breaking down the doors for trans women to compete against biological women.

[01:08:45] It's not going to be the girls on the swim team or the track team who are advocating for this. Unless you're Megan Rapinoe. There are a few famous elite female athletes who are for some reason standing up for cheating. Okay, but by and large, I think it's mostly going to be girls who couldn't compete there either. And so the point is they're effectively sabotaging girls who can compete.

[01:09:13] And that actually-- It's more female intrasexual competition. Exactly, tearing down the athletic girls by inviting the boys to compete with them is a great cryptic way of taking them down a few hundred pegs. Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, I think that's right. Okay, just a little bit more from the argument for and against here.

[01:09:37] Vote no, they say. Vote no against this initiative that would keep boys out of girls sports because it discourages girls from playing sports. Again, they pretend that they're talking, they say like put aside the couple of people. They literally say it's five or 10 trans athletes competing in Washington state right now. But it's all of these girls who would have these terrible invasive medical exams of this past. They say coaches and athletes say, if we truly cared about girls sports, we would not put up more barriers for girls like invasive genital exam requirements. The statewide blanket ban to kick five to 10 trans girls off school teams will negatively impact all girls, leaving no room for case by case decisions.

[01:10:24] There's no room for case by case decisions because boys don't belong on girls teams. Boys belong on co-ed teams. And there are sports like Ultimate Frisbee about which we've spoken a lot because we used to play a lot of it that are awesome in its co-ed form. Also in all male and all female, but it actually works as a co-ed sport, but most sports don't.

[01:10:46] And so pretending now that what you actually have is male and female sports, when what you really have is male and co-ed sports in which in order to really compete, you need to cryptically fill up your roster with boys pretending to be girls is not a support of girls or female athletics.

[01:11:07] So the rebuttal of the argument against the case that we were just hearing says, do not be misled by the opposition. This does not require invasive or expensive exams. Standard primary pediatric care already verify sex. Transferring that record to sports is sufficient. Male athletic advantage is well-established. Washington competition results document at least 269 placements by male athletes competing in girls' interscholastic categories, including 74 first and 156 top three finishes. The initiative does not ban anyone from sports. It simply requires participation consistent with one's sex. Vote Yes, that's right.

[01:11:49] Do you have the ballot here? No. The actual ballot? The actual ballot. Because I'm slightly hesitant because there were three initiatives on the ballot. We'll get into the third one. I know. Which was the most confusingly written. It was, okay. This is actually pretty clear. On the ballot itself.

[01:12:11] Well, I mean, this is in the voters pamphlet, this document that I'm showing you right now. And this of the two that are supposedly, if we believe the activists bringing hate to Washington state is more clear because it is specifying something about reality as opposed to responding to a recent legislative change. And so the response to a recent legislative change, which we're gonna get to in just a minute, is harder to track because you have to actually have been following what has happened in the legislature. All right, fair enough. Are we ready to move to that one? Because there's one more thing that I wanna introduce here before we do.

[01:12:50] Okay. There was another revelation in the state of Washington this week. At least it was revealed so that a lot of people saw it that I thought highly relevant here. And I think I wanna show the clip. This is of a lawyer, Mr. Lamb, arguing in Superior Court in Thurston County over a alteration to the way elected officials maintain their status, like elected sheriffs and things, maintain their status in the state of Washington. So let's take a look at it.

[01:13:32] (audience member speaking) Churches. I constantly argued, I consistently argued, that churches with a traditional view of gender would be considered an extremist organization under this statute as written. In its final reply, the state of Washington and the Attorney General, on page five of their final reply, on lines nine through 16, finally acknowledged and said the quiet part out loud that under SB 5974, churches with a traditional view of gender, that there's male and female, would be extremist organizations. And if you were active in one, you would not be able to run for office. And if you were elected, you could be removed from office. That sounds crazy, but if you read what they wrote, it says it.

[01:14:23] This is, I'm again, quoting the Attorney General. "Plaintiffs suggest that a sheriff who attends or even visits a church that holds traditional views of gender would violate RCW 4310101531 and be subject to possible decertification. They are incorrect." This is the state argument.

[01:14:44] And at that moment, I thought, well, the state is surely going to say Mr. Lamb is being hyperbolic. There's no way that a church, a traditional church, would consider an extremist organization. But your Honor, that's not what the Attorney General said. The Attorney General said they are incorrect. The statute's accompanying regulation makes clear that an affiliation with an extremist organization requires more than incidental attendance or simply holding a particular view.

[01:15:09] Do you think the regulation provides that affiliation means advocating for or providing material support or resources to extremist organizations? Note that they don't argue it is hyperbolic to say the churches or the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project aren't extremist organizations under the statute as written, implicitly conceding that they would be.

[01:15:32] Just that merely holding ideas or incidental attendance of a religious service once wouldn't trigger affiliation under that statute. Let that sink in for a moment. This isn't a slip of the tongue in a formal argument or a passing reference. This is a fully vetted pleading signed by the Attorney General of the State of Washington, effectively conceding that the law he is forced to defend in court would amount to a religious test for holding public office.

[01:16:01] Your Honor, there is nothing more offensive toward democratic traditions with the state and federal constitutions than that. All right, so for those who didn't quite catch it, what's happened here is that this lawyer has argued that this statute that he is challenging, the statute allows a unelected panel to evaluate and I think annually evaluate and then revoke the positions of elected officials. So an unelected panel evaluating elected officials like sheriffs and able to remove them if they belong to, for example, an extremist organization where the definition that this attorney, Mr. Lamb, points to says, "That could include belonging to a church that simply believes in binary sex, that belonging to such a church or even visiting such a church might be enough to get you removed." And the Attorney General of the State of Washington responds, "No, just visiting the church isn't enough."

[01:17:12] Validating the idea that actually belonging to a church that believes that sex is binary would constitute support of an extremist organization and would justify the removal from office of, for example, an elected sheriff. That is mind blowing to me. Yes, it is. We're not just talking about the state saying sex isn't binary. We're talking about the state defining those of us who believe that sex is binary as extremists with the force of law that would cause you to be unelectable to the positions in question. That is an amazingly radical position with teeth, right? The voters can choose somebody because they want that person to be sheriff and then this unelected panel can say, "No, he belongs to an extremist organization because his church says that there are only two sexes."

[01:18:07] What planet are we living on? Washington planet. Washington planet, yeah. Well, it's cheaters. It's cheaters. We're supposed to have consent of the governed. In many places, you're supposed to be able to elect your sheriff, including here. And the idea that somebody is gonna say, "Well, you can't elect just anybody, can you? Because certain people are extremists."

[01:18:35] And we in an unelected body are gonna protect you from extremists and we get to define what makes you an extremist. Right. It's like getting to define what makes you a terrorist. Yep, it's more governance by cheating is what it is. It's like declaring an emergency. Oh, it's governance by deceptive definition. Well, to go back to the argument in support of the initiative to repeal the income tax begins and ends with a lot of discussion of trust, which the first time I read it, I was like, "That's a weird place to start." But actually, it's exactly right.

[01:19:11] This is you guys, you blue team guys, having totally eroded the trust in all government, but especially any government that you have your hands in that has caused so many of us to leave the party. That's a you thing, you caused that. That wasn't us changing who we are. That wasn't us changing our politics. Some of us may have done that as well downstream of having realized that you were lying to us and cheating us and mismanaging our money. The trust is gone. Try being better, stop lying, stop cheating, and then maybe, maybe we can have government again.

[01:19:54] I think the overarching theme here is a bunch of things that cannot stand on merit have found another way, right? Women who cannot compete against men are gonna compete against women. Provisions that cannot overcome a constitutional prohibition are gonna get through a loophole based on an emergency that is never defined, right? Sheriffs that are duly elected by a population are gonna be unelected based on the definition of the term extremist, right? It's all cheating. And the point is, if you were any good at governing, you wouldn't have to cheat.

[01:20:36] The fact that you're having to cheat, everywhere we look, you're cheating tells us you're no good at this, you have no business anywhere near the levers of power. And take a look at your budgets and see if we're not right. Like, you know, the budgets of the cities and the states, which is to say most cities and many states that are being run by the cheaters, which, you know, red team is cheaters too, but they're doing it in different ways, right? But the blue team cheaters do not apparently have any interest in managing money.

[01:21:08] They are tiding it, they are losing it, they seem unconcerned when things go wildly over budget, or when they just keep on needing more and more and more money for less and less and less services, even as the population stays the same. How could that possibly be the case? It makes no sense. And unless you look and you say, ah, cheating.

[01:21:31] Yeah, it's cheating, one end or the other.

[01:21:34] Okay, so this last initiative that is on the ballot in the state of Washington in November this year in the midterms is, it's a little hard to parse, and I admit that I did not go into the deep history because it is a response to changes in legislation that were themselves changes to preexisting legislation. And so what this initiative is basically trying to do is just get us back to where we were until like 2024.

[01:22:03] So there have been recent attacks on parental rights. Yes, I'm speaking from my position, attacks on parental rights, that voting yes on this initiative, initiative, I never, this is initiative 001, would reverse the recent changes so that we went back to a pre-2024 state of parental rights with regard to understanding what is happening to their children in public schools in Washington.

[01:22:29] So, concise description is, this measure would repeal amendments to a statute listing certain rights of parents and guardians of public school children and reenact the law as it was originally enacted by initiative to legislature 2081, excuse me. Full text on this one is actually very interesting. I'm not gonna read anything close to all of it, but I wanna read some of it here. Being enacted by the people of the state of Washington. Yeah, I'm not gonna, the people find that starting in line 13, parents are the primary stakeholders in their children's upbringing. I'll pause for a moment here. Reminder that this and keeping boys out of girls sports are the two initiatives that are being called hateful by an activist group that is posturing the state signs.

[01:23:19] The people find that parents are the primary stakeholders in their children's upbringing. Parental involvement is a significant factor in increasing student achievement. And see access to student information encourages greater parental involvement. Parents and legal guardians of public school children younger than 18 years old have all the following rights. A, to examine the textbooks, curriculum and supplemental material used in their child's classroom.

[01:23:42] B, one, to inspect their child's public school records in accordance with RCW, et cetera, and to receive a copy of their child's records within 10 business days of submitting a written request, either electronically or on paper. B, two, parents or legal guardians must not be required to appear in person for the purposes of requesting or validating a request for their child's public school records.

[01:24:02] No charge may be imposed on a parent or legal guardian to receive such records electronically. Public school records include all of the following. Academic records including but not limited to test and assessment scores. Medical or health records. Records of any mental health counseling. Records of any vocational counseling. Records of discipline. Records of attendance. Records associated with a child screening for learning challenges. Any other student specific files, documents or their materials. To receive, parents are also to receive prior notification when medical services are being offered to their child, except where emergency medical treatment is required.

[01:24:40] To receive notification when any medical service or medication have been provided to their child that could result in any financial impact to the parent or legal guardians, health insurance payments or co-pays. To receive notification when the school is arranged directly or indirectly for medical treatments that result in follow-up care, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on and on and on. What this is a response to is the same broad issue as the last initiative that we talked about. This is a response to the fact, and there are other issues which it will pertain to, but this is a response to the fact that cryptically and without parents' knowledge, Washington schools, teachers, counselors, sex educators, have been encouraging students to transition at school and keeping that hidden from parents.

[01:25:28] This is a move to make sure that parents know when things like this are happening, and that is what is being called hateful. So let's go-- Hold on, a couple of things. Okay. One, in there, you will notice that where they smuggle in the idea of allowing kids to transition at school without alerting the parents, they make an exception. So this is the initiative that I'm reading. This is the initiative that we are in favor of. This is the initiative, and the point is, the thing that they are trying to repeal is saying, parents do not have the right to information about medical stuff going on at school, except in the case of an emergency.

[01:26:13] So the cheaters are, again, using language, but in this case, they've, you know, is transition not an emergency in your child's life? It should be, right? That's a-- I don't think that's, I think you've misunderstood what is being argued here, but the argument against does use this confusing language. So this is, again, this is in the voters' pamphlet that we all received.

[01:26:41] They are claiming the argument against this initiative, which again, this initiative is to repeal legislative changes, which bring back parental rights as they existed until very recently in the state of Washington. They say, vote no on delaying parental notification when children are crime victims. If a student is the victim of a serious crime at school, parents should not have to wait to find out. An unintended consequence of 26001 is ending Washington's legal requirement that students immediately notify parents when the crime is reported. This is a flat out lie.

[01:27:10] This is a flat out lie, and in their rebuttal of argument against, they say, don't be misled. IL26-001 expressly states that schools shall not be required to release mental health counseling records when a parent is the target of a child abuse or neglect investigation. That's to a different argument that they're making, which is that, oh, you would have abusive parents have information about their children. No, no, but also this requires immediate notification of a criminal action is deemed committed against or by their child. So we have, and we see it in the text of the initiative. So what we're seeing again in the argument against is flat out lies about what the initiative would do, but it's just a he said, she said problem, right? Like you can tell exactly as you said, you read this and you go, huh, clearly one side is lying, but how am I to decide who's lying?

[01:28:03] The argument for this initiative has in part the following language, support families, not secrecy. Parents must give permission for schools to administer medication, apply sunscreen or take students on field trips. That already exists. If you have kids most places I assume, but certainly the state of Washington, you have to give written consent for these things. And I remember us explicitly not giving written consent for sunscreen for our children and getting some grief about it, right?

[01:28:30] Yet current policies allow schools to withhold critical information when a child expresses a new gender identity at school. These policies may require staff to conceal this information from parents, even when doing so conflicts with their conscience or professional judgment. Opponents call sharing this information with parents outing, even when significant changes to a minor's school life may already be known to classmates, teachers, and staff. Deliberately excluding parents treats them as inherently unsafe without an individualized assessment. This undermines the vital parent-child relationship and denies families the opportunity to navigate consequential questions about health and wellbeing together.

[01:29:06] This feels to me like the crux of it. This is exactly right. There is nothing hateful there. This is the opposite of hate because a functioning family is the very core of love. This is where love starts and lives and prospers and expands. And the idea that a kid can and should take on a life-altering set of behaviors that may become pharmaceutical interventions, that may become surgical interventions at school in a way that remains completely screened from their parents is acceptable, much less the loving thing to do is obviously upside down world. Once again, we have the people writing against this initiative. The people who would try to transition your child in school cryptically, they're the ones who are cheating, who are lying, and for whatever reason, don't appear to have any love in their hearts.

[01:30:07] Two things. One, the, hey, I don't think anybody's confused here. I think that this is-- Well, they're trying to confuse the voters. Oh, well, I'll get to that in a second. But I don't think anybody's confused about the role of parents. I think the point is, the question is, some people are not in favor of that role. The understanding that parents actually are the primary advocates for their children is well understood by everybody. But the point is, communists oppose this, vocally often.

[01:30:39] There's a reason, yes. The family. The family. The family is the threat to the state power, and the state's power is what is necessary to turn you into a worker bee rather than a human. And so what's really going on here is that this is yet another attempt to attack the family, to hobble it, to down regulate it, to demote it. All of those things are built in to the attack on the West, frankly, on individual autonomy, on individual property. All of these things are coming from the same place. You've got people who have embraced communism, who are once again attacking the relationship between parents and offspring. They are attacking the relationship between husband and wife. They're attacking all of these relationships because those things are a threat to their power.

[01:31:25] With respect to the who's lying business, I will point out that there is a well-known pattern when it comes to ballot initiatives. And the pattern is, it confused people vote no because it feels safer. Yeah. Now in this case, the people who want the system that we used to have, they want to move in the direction of what was once functional, have to vote yes. A couple of years ago. Right. Like not even-- Yeah, it's not ancient history. This is not trad life stuff here. The point is, if you want to de-radicalize the state and go back to normal, you actually have to vote yes on these three initiatives, right? Yes. But the people who don't want you to vote yes because they're the radical commies, they know that the point is if they can confuse you enough, so it's like, well, somebody's lying, but I don't know who it is, I'm just gonna vote no. And the point is, I'm gonna vote no is actually radical in this case. So it reverses the normal order of operations. And we've seen that throughout our lives here on the West Coast. I remember many years ago, decades ago, in fact, where there was a situation, there were a bunch of initiatives on the California ballot.

[01:32:37] And there was one that I was, I assume you were too very much in favor of that would have reduced logging in sensitive areas. And I remember that the logging industry itself put up an initiative that sounded like it was trying to do a thing, but the point is the average voter-- That's right, there were two long initiatives on the ballot, and you could barely tell which one was which. Right, you couldn't tell which one was which. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of them was like a poison pill. And so the point is they both got rejected, of course, which is exactly what the logging industry had wanted.

[01:33:13] So-- Yeah, even a step beyond this tactic of like just make the rebuttal and the argument for so in Congress that you can't tell. In that case, they're just like, oh, let's put another one up. But I think the point is the overarching strategy comes from the fact that when voters are confused, they feel like voting no is safer. In this case, it's the opposite. The radicals cheated their way into provisions that should never have been changed. And these are attempts to restore things to a less radical state that are gonna be rejected because the voter is confused. In two of these three cases, these are literally initiatives that if you vote yes, you undo recent horrible changes.

[01:33:50] And in one of the cases, the one about sports, that just crept in without any legislative action at all. But that has been a change that no one ever voted for. And we should vote for that initiative to undo the change that crept in, even though a bunch of us were saying, hold up, you can't do that.

[01:34:09] Oh, so just one more thing on this topic before I cede the floor, if you wanna talk about other things here. You can show my screen here. So this picture again, no hate in Washington state. Vote no on 001-638. That's the two that are broadly having to do with trans people, with boys and girls sports and parental rights in schools.

[01:34:34] They've got a URL at the bottom, nohateinwastate.org, which I went to. And there's a lot here. The only thing I wanna say about this website, and we'll link it and you can go look at yourself, the people they have posing for this website, No Hate in Washington state, they all look either miserable or kind of filled with hate themselves.

[01:35:01] And it reminds me of us going to downtown Portland during those 100 consecutive nights of riots, the protests, the mostly peaceful protests during the day that turned into mostly violent protests, riots at night. These people look like they were pulled from sort of central casting with those activists. They have been, either they were told to put on these faces for the camera, or they have just been convinced by the activism that life is miserable, that it's because other people hate them, that their lives are so miserable. And if they can just get other people to stop hating them, then things will get better, but that's not how it is. For one thing, and this may be actually the most important thing of all, the people who are trying to keep boys out of girls' sports and keep parents with an active loving hand in their children's lives and trying to prevent the overreach of government in taxation, these are not the hateful people.

[01:36:13] Is there hate in pockets? Do we all have some hate in our hearts somewhere for someone who wronged us once or for something that we just can't get over? Sure, but we're not the hateful people. We're not hating on whole other groups of people. It's those who have been convinced that they are hated who are so, so miserable.

[01:36:36] If you walk around with the reverse expectation, actually, you know what? I'm a full, agentic, autonomous human being, and I got this. Maybe I didn't start out with all of the things that some of my neighbors did or some of the people I see on TV, but I could do this. I got this, and I'm gonna persevere and I'm gonna do it.

[01:36:58] That's not the look on these people's faces. This is like celebrating being the underdog. This is celebrating victimhood. This is a celebration of actually having no agency. And you know what you do if you celebrate having no agency? You never get it because you haven't learned that it's something you could have and it's something that you might want, but you need to develop it yourself. That's the point with agency is it's on you. You're gonna need to do it. There's no amount of making other people do the things that you want them to do that's gonna fix your lack of agency. That's a you problem. You're gonna have to do it.

[01:37:40] You put that back up, the image. The image. Yeah, no, that one. I see your point about they don't look happy. I think they actually look menacing. Yeah, that's what I meant by hate. Like they look hateful. They look like when you see films about the struggle sessions, the Chinese struggle sessions where the students are challenging their professors and all of this stuff.

[01:38:14] It's like that. We've obviously faced it. That's very reminiscent. And so the thing is I think that that image intentionally or otherwise is more or less designed to menace people who are trying to figure out what to think. And the whole idea that this is being phrased-- You don't wanna be on the wrong side of us. Right, you don't wanna be. You don't want us to declare you a hater.

[01:38:42] Because we're entitled to do certain things to haters because they're the ones who are causing. Because when we are acting against hate, we are defending vulnerable people. That's what it is to fight hate. You are going after a tiny number of people who can't defend themselves and we're gonna protect them, God damn it. So in any case, the point is hate, look, you're exactly right.

[01:39:08] We all have hatred for the occasional bad person that we've tangled with. But hate does not generally categorize, right? I don't even hate the boys who are trying to get into the girls' sports. I hate the system that is enabling them, but that's not hatred of individuals, right? I hate the tactic, but what is being disguised here is more well-being transfer.

[01:39:40] They're gonna identify some tiny little minority in order to justify a wholesale change to the system, right? They're gonna claim that you are actually hating this vulnerable entity in order to justify obliterating women's sports, for example, right? And the point is it's a fictional framing. That is a bunch of people drawing a line in the sand against an enemy that doesn't really exist, right? Or if it does exist, it's a tiny number of people. It's not the vast number of voters that might pass these measures, right? So you're being portrayed as hateful and that's really the point of this is that's a group of people who are motivated enough to stand their ground against a hateful mob that you are going to be portrayed as participating in if you so much as notice that voting yes would be a good idea in this case.

[01:40:38] So, you know, sneaky as hell. Yeah, I thought so too. It's very sneaky. Yeah. All right, you're done on this topic.

[01:40:47] So I have one more. Can you play the video of the webinar? So we have some video of a webinar clarifying some issues about how voter registration, how eligibility to vote is established in the state of Washington.

[01:41:20] And speaking of skepticism, we have a question. We have some folks that are interested in during the registration period and then have also submitted the same question here during our talk, how do you verify citizenship when people vote? So in the state of Washington, your identity is verified when you register.

[01:41:47] And in this state, you are expected to be truthful and honest. So for some voters who register, that is not verified. However, for voters who have enhanced driver's licenses, their citizenship has been verified. So I just want to point one thing out.

[01:42:09] When it comes to the documentation that's necessary to prove your citizenship, it is not cheap. There are people out there who have very little to live on that may only have $60 to $100 a month in expendable funds. And when it takes $35 to get your birth certificate, I can't remember what the cost is of getting a certified divorce packet, but there is a cost. So folks, for those of you who are demanding that people prove their citizenship, you need to stop and think about what it takes for an individual in resources, time, money, to get those documents. So if that's what you're aiming for, you also need to pay up.

[01:42:58] You as a taxpayer need to ensure that that person is able to get their documents and get through a process without any cost. You're providing your social security number and your driver's license number when you get registered in Washington state. As auditor Dalton said, you're signing an oath attesting that you are qualified to be a registered voter. The penalty is five years in prison, $10,000 and a class C felony. And though we hear a lot about non-citizens getting registered to vote, there's no facts of that, right? There's no actual cases of that. In fact- All right.

[01:43:40] So what's fascinating to me here are two things. One, what you've heard is that effectively it's on the honor system. How do we establish that you're eligible to vote? Well, we expect you- They're so people are trustworthy. We expect you to be honest about it. And then there's a bunch of obfuscation.

[01:44:02] If your ID is a REAL ID, well, then your citizenship has been validated. Okay, but you don't have to have a real ID in the state of Washington. So anybody who wants to vote in spite of the fact that they're not eligible just simply isn't gonna have the REAL ID because they couldn't get it. But then the third woman to speak said that social security numbers are required, which did not seem consistent with what had been said before. Right. I can't make sense of it.

[01:44:29] The first person is establishing it's the honor system. The second person to speak rather than the question asker. Right. The second person to speak. They are also pulling this same stunt where the point is they're gonna define the tiniest minority who needs protection.

[01:44:50] How many people in the state of Washington, it is beyond their financial means to establish that they are in fact a citizen. And it is on you, you person who is insensitive to the financial straits that these folks are in. You're trying to disenfranchise people who can't come up with the money to establish that they're citizens. And it's incumbent on you. We're gonna have to levy a tax on you if you want this. When the answer is, look, actually we as citizens have a right to be represented.

[01:45:22] We do that through elections. The most important thing is not that every last person who happens to strangely be living in a cave and not have any financial means at all is able to vote. Yes, we should make it as accessible. What do you do with the person who is blind and deaf and in a coma and has no legs?

[01:45:46] This person faces, you really wanna disenfranchise those people? And it's like, well, I don't want to disenfranchise them, but the fact is they may have been disenfranchised by-- I think the coma disenfranchised them. I don't think blindness or deafness or leglessness disenfranchised them. It made it more difficult for them for sure, but I actually don't think. And I'm probably on no ice at all legally here, but I actually don't think that if you're literally in a coma for the entire duration during which the voting period happens, that a vote from you should be considered legitimate. I mean, right? Well, look, obviously not. I don't know what the law says about it, but the point is there are some cases where, tell you what, there will be people who have highly legitimate excuses for not having voted. They intended to vote and something terrible happens on the way to put the ballot-- Fair enough. And they'd been advocating, everyone knew how they were gonna vote and their husband, whatever, it's like, I'm voting for them. Everyone knew. No fault of their own. They got T-boned in the intersection by a drunk driver. Somebody who I really feel should have been able to vote, right, who didn't. Do we invalidate the election?

[01:47:02] Because the election isn't fair since an eligible voter was disenfranchised by fate. No, the overarching-- Oh, I thought you were arguing for the, okay, nevermind. No, my point is, look, they are making an excuse. They are making up a category of people in a world where everybody's got a cell phone and a credit card and the number of people who don't are absolutely miniscule.

[01:47:26] They are making an argument that the most important thing the state needs to do is figure out how to ensure that somebody who has no financial means whatsoever is able to establish that they are, in fact, a citizen more than we need to prevent a loophole through which lots of people who aren't eligible to vote at all can become voters in the state of Washington because we expect it to be done on the honor system. And I'm not arguing these aren't both important, but I'm arguing that one of them is really, really important and the other one is a theoretical-- Well, yeah, and I mean, the starting argument is like kindergarten level. We're on the honor system here today, kids. We can all expect everyone to be honest and nice, right? Because if not, you might not get your cookies. Come on. Right, well, let's put it this way. You can see again, something's not right here in this argument.

[01:48:24] The question is by focusing on the individuals, oh, you've got this individual, they might be living on $100 a month, you're gonna have to pay up in order for them to prove that they're a citizen in order for them to be able to vote. If we took all of those people, how often is the sum total of them in a position to shift the direction of an election in the state of Washington?

[01:48:48] Very, very, very, very, very, very rarely, okay? So the point is how different is the governance that these people get because they are minimally, if at all. On the other hand, if people who are not citizens but are in the state of Washington vote, how often can they shift an election? Often, I don't know how many of them are registered. I don't know how many of them will be registered. But the point is the reason that we don't enforce a citizenship requirement is because somebody wants the ability to cheat in a way that matters. They want to shift an election in the direction of something that the voters themselves would not have supported.

[01:49:25] So many of, so many political issues come down to a question of which mistake do you prefer? Which error, given that we know that mistakes, errors, depending on what the situation is, will happen on both sides, which one do you prefer to minimize? And I do think that in all of these discussions, we should start and we might get clarity by putting, acknowledging, by putting on the table, like, look, both these things will happen. They will, they will for sure. And it's more important to me to minimize no boys in girls sports than the rare girl who somehow doesn't have any other medical records at all, having to undergo a medical exam in order to be allowed to compete in girls sports.

[01:50:15] The people with absolutely no ability to prove that they are a citizen, I prefer their disenfranchisement to people who are not citizens being allowed to vote. The guilty person who gets away free, I prefer to not guilty person being executed.

[01:50:35] Those are three examples. Like you may differ, but we are arguing over actual preferences between two positions in which in either case, there was a problem. And in the case of trans athletes, I don't think there's a problem in the other case, but you could say like, look, there's two things here that are failure modes. Which failure mode do you find more acceptable in a democratic society?

[01:51:05] With regard to the thing that you just showed, I prefer never letting non-citizens vote to sometimes disenfranchising citizens. That's what I prefer is a failure mode. The occasional citizen. Yes. Yeah, now I wanna point something out one level up. We've talked earlier today about, I'm just gonna vote against the cheaters. They wouldn't have to cheat if they were basically right. So the cheaters are the ones I'm concerned about. In the case where you have two things that are arguably bad, and we are choosing which one of them to accept in order to negate the other.

[01:51:43] The question is one of magnitude of impact. The sophists, the sophists, not sophists. The sophists are going to find some little harm and they're gonna obsess over it, and they're gonna portray you as a bad person for not giving a damn about it in order to allow the harm that they like to happen. And that's the thing that you're looking for. Further in this case, think about the argument.

[01:52:12] Okay, we've got some tiny number of people that would vote but cannot produce proof that they are citizens because it's too costly. Well, A, if the state was disenfranchising voters in some way that mattered, this could be challenged in court, right? You're entitled to vote. And if the state is disenfranchising you in some onerous way, the courts will have something to say about it.

[01:52:39] One thing that they might say-- Well, I mean, to woman number two in that webinar's point, the person with $60 in disposable income every month is not gonna initiate a court case. Right, I also don't think they're gonna vote. Now, I'm not saying it never happens, but I'm saying you're talking about somebody who's manufacturing a category of people in order to justify their obsession with blocking an obviously right provision.

[01:53:06] And I think it's a sophist. That's what I think. I think that's cheater is what that is. And the point, their point is, well, we couldn't do that without taxing you. That's a threat. Yes, that is a threat. And yes, you could do that without taxing them. One thing that the court could declare is-- If you need this piece of paperwork from the government in order to get your citizenship declared, then the state will give that to you for free. Right, or if you don't have the-- Which, like, okay, may cost a little bit of money, but honestly, there's plenty of people-- But it's a tiny-- Or an employee.

[01:53:42] Look, A, first thing you told us is that this is on the honor system. You could also have a little checkbox on the honor system. It says if you cannot pony up the $15 to get the proof, then the state will provide it for you for free. Given the amount of money that we flush down the virtual toilet in the state of Washington, that's not gonna show up on any balance sheet anywhere. Tiny number of people checking that box. So the point is, this is a totally solvable problem. You don't want it solved because what you really want is to keep the door open for large numbers of people who aren't citizens to vote because, frankly, you wanna win elections, you're not entitled to win.

[01:54:21] Yes. Yeah. Yes.

[01:54:25] Oh, wait, that's the state of Washington. It is really a beautiful place, though. Gotta say, even mid-October when things are getting dark and bleak, but at the moment, I think, at least when we started, the sun had come out. It is a beautiful place being taken over by lunatics, and it would be great if we could just stop the, I don't know, the march of the lunatics. Stop the march of the lunatics, yes.

[01:54:50] I'm totally on board. Excellent. Okay, well, that's the show for today. We are going to take a few minutes, and then we'll be back on Locals with our Q&A for the day, in which we're gonna be starting with that question that we read at the top of the hour about what has happened to MAHA and whether or not there's any saving it. The pod and the die have been cast. We will now hear the Qs starting with that one.

[01:55:20] Yes, yes, we will. Not my most communicative sentence, but you know, it worked. I got it. I think if you were paying attention, you got it. Okay, so, and we'll be back here same time next week, and until you see us then, be good to the ones you love, eat real food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.

[01:55:40] (Upbeat Music)