- The day started out, actually,
at an MSNBC live taping
that was taking place
a couple of blocks away
from the Trump rally.
I went there first
because I was very nervous
about going to the Trump rally.
I went there first because it
was more of a comfort zone.
I just started chatting with people,
and everyone I told I was
thinking about going over
to the rally, and they
were like, "Don't do it.
"They're horrible people.
"They're the lowest of the low.
"They're going to harass you."
One woman actually offered
me her pepper spray
to take with me, and I was like, "No.
"I think I'm gonna be fine.
"It'll be okay."
(bass jingle plays)
- I'm Dave Rubin, and
this is the Rubin Report.
Quick reminder, everybody.
You can get all our shows days early
and totally ad-free at RubinReport.com.
Joining me today is a
psychologist and author
and a contributor to Forbes
Magazine, Dr. Karlyn Borysenko.
Welcome to the Rubin Report.
- Thanks for having me, Dave.
- I am glad to have you here.
Unfortunately, due to social distancing,
we are not doing this in person.
You are all the way in New Hampshire,
so we are roughly 3000 miles apart.
As I told you right before we started,
we're gonna be holding this
interview for just a little bit,
because there's so many moving pieces
in the world right now, but
how is lockdown treating you?
- Lockdown is treating
me quite well, honestly.
I work out of my house.
It's not really that different.
The only difference is that
my husband is now working
from home, and so we'll see
if our marriage survives this,
but he's a good guy, so I
think we're gonna be just fine.
(laughs)
- You just told me that
he took the dogs outside,
at least while you're doing this,
so he's making himself useful.
That's nice.
- He is.
That's why you keep 'em around, right?
- Yeah, I assume so.
A couple months ago you
really got put on the map
with a piece that you
wrote that, obviously,
we're gonna spend a lot of
this interview talking about,
but before we get to that,
you're a psychologist first,
tell me a little bit
about your background,
the types of things you're interested in,
and then we'll get back to what
brought you to my attention.
- Yes, I'm actually an
organizational psychologist,
so I focus mostly on helping
businesses create positive
working environments.
The bulk of my academic research has been
in the area of workplace bullying,
which played into what we're
gonna talk about quite a bit.
I've studied it quite extensively.
I help organizations tackle
those types of challenges,
and just to make work better for people
so they don't have to
stress out all the time.
- Which probably is coming
in very handy these days
as everybody's working from home
and figuring out new ways they have
to do things and all that, right?
- Yeah, absolutely.
I actually think this is going
to fundamentally change the
relationships that a lot
of organizations have with flexible work,
so in some respects, it's
gonna be very exciting
for people once they think
things get back to normal.
- Do you sense that we'll
get to a whole new way
of not only just looking at
the world as a general idea,
but we're looking at work
that people are gonna
realize they can telecommute
and work from home, and
maybe spend some more time
with their spouses and
maybe don't wanna be
on the road two hours a day,
getting to work and
commuting and the rest of it.
- I think it's going to have to,
because so many
organizations now have staffs
that are completely work-at-home.
A lot of them went there kicking
and screaming they got
pushed off the cliff.
Now their staff is seeing,
"Well, we can make this work,
"and we don't necessarily
always need to be in the office.
"It's so great to have to
change the relationship."
I think it's really funny.
I'm actually working with a
group of managers right now
who are transitioning their
teams to working virtually.
They always have to go back to basics.
They just say, "They have
to build their workspaces
"and teach those teams
how to (audio skips)
"in these virtual environments,"
but once they can get there,
they're going to be okay.
- You think most people
actually are better
if left to their own
devices, or do you think,
because we're social creatures,
a lot of us need to
actually show up somewhere
and you put on different
clothes and behave differently
with other coworkers and things like that?
- Yeah, I think it's a little
bit of both, to be honest.
We still need those social interactions,
but also, one of the keys
to working at home well is
to have a routine, to
get up, to take a shower,
not sit around in your PJs all day,
have a dedicated workspace.
That's part of what's gonna help people
maintain work/life balance and be able
to focus their energy on
the things that matter.
I think people are figuring it out.
Working from home is weird.
You know this.
It's like, sometimes you forget to eat,
sometimes you forget what time it is,
you forget to stop
working at 5:00 o'clock,
and so people are having
to tackle that as well.
- When I was writing my book, I would go
into our green room
here, which is a bedroom,
and I would just start at
about 7:30 or 8:00 a.m.,
and I'd be writing, writing, writing,
and it would literally be 2:00 p.m.
and David would basically slide a plate
of food through the door.
He would open up the door,
slide it in, not even bother me,
'cause I would legitimately forget to eat,
because I was so just in that zone.
- The same when (audio skips) my book.
I was up here 1:00, 2:00
a.m. in the morning,
and then I would go downstairs
and my husband would be like,
"What the heck happened to you?
"Where did you go?"
It's just the way it is when
you get into that flow of work.
- You're a psychologist
and you're doing some interesting stuff
that obviously is very relevant,
as we're talking about,
to the way we're all living right now,
but what put you on the
map here was this piece
that you wrote that all started...
Well, you were part of
a knitting community,
and we can all imagine
how radical the knitting communities are.
Tell me a little bit about the
knitting communities online.
I'm not in the knitting world.
I don't know what's going on over there.
I have respect for the knitters,
but tell me about the knitting community.
- Dave, prepare to have your mind blown,
what's going on in the
knitting world. (laughs)
This all started about a year ago.
The knitting community I'm talking about,
this is not a knitting
circle of little old ladies.
This is mostly people
of all different ages,
Instagram sharing their projects
and sharing their yarns
and all these things.
About a year ago, these roving gangs
of social-justice warriors
starting infiltrating
different parts of the knitting community
and really started
going after and bullying
and mobbing people very severely.
It started with a woman
named Karen Templar,
who wrote a blog post about
her upcoming trip to India.
She was so excited about
going on this trip,
and she thought it would never happen,
and she was always scared to
travel, and all these things.
The SCWs mobbed her so
badly because they said,
"You're othering them.
"You're colonizing, all this stuff.
"How dare you?"
She had to write this full
retraction and apology
and point out every single thing
that was wrong with her blog post.
It was several paragraphs long.
It's crazy.
So, another woman, Maria
Tuskin, was watching that.
She does these beautiful hand-dyed yarns.
All Maria did was post a
video on YouTube saying,
"I'm not comfortable with what's going on,
"and I'm going to take some
time off from Instagram."
They didn't like that.
They went after her and mobbed her,
tried to destroy her business,
destroy all her partnerships,
who would post horrible
pictures of her on Instagram,
like Photoshopped into
(audio skips) uniforms
and things like that.
That was crazy, but the thing
that really got my
attention was this one guy,
Nathan Taylor.
He goes by the name, Sock
Magician, on Instagram.
All he did when all of this
was going on was to post a poem
on a hashtag called,
diversity, asking for kindness,
asking for people to
be nice to each other--
- [Dave] The worst of all things.
- I know.
The ironic thing about him,
too, was he was a gay man
in the knitting community, so
he's a couple minority cards
in this instance working
for him, but for his effort,
he was thanked by being mobbed
by hundreds and hundreds
of people, to the point where
he had a nervous breakdown
and went into the
hospital on suicide watch.
I'm watching all this
happen, and like I said,
my background is in workplace bullying.
I studied adults bullying
other adults extensively,
and I just thought, "This is
not what I signed up for."
These were people that I was
aligned with politically,
and that was my wake-up moment to say,
"What is going on in the world,
"and do I wanna really be a part of this?"
- There's a lot there, but the bones
of your story is the type of
story that I hear all the time.
I've had many of my guests,
I've been through my own version of it,
that you're basically, I think,
you can describe your
own political positions,
but you think of yourself
as a good Leftie,
you're knitting, this is apolitical.
Next thing you know, some
bizarre thing happens
and everyone's a racist and a bigot
and we're destroying lives and all that.
Did you have no sense that any
of this was going on within the community,
or you actually used
the word, infiltrator.
Were these outsiders that were coming in
to suddenly wreak havoc,
or were these people
from within the community themselves?
I ask you this because a lot
of people these days are,
now we're spending more
and more time online.
One of the things that I'm trying
to do with my new tech
company, Locals.com,
is create protected communities.
People are trying to figure out,
how can you gate a community and make sure
that all these bad actors
don't get in there?
- No, I think a lot of
them were actually part
of the knitting community,
and all of this, too,
was surrounding the site, Ravelry,
which is one of the most
popular knitting sites
on the Internet.
What Ravelry did, I think
midway through last year,
is they banned all
support for Donald Trump,
so you were not allowed to
say anything in the forums
about supporting him, you were
not allowed to post patterns
with, like, "Trump 2020,"
or anything like that.
That fed into all of this as well.
What would happen is, they
would coordinate on Ravelry
and then they would go forth
and bully people on Instagram, I think.
- What were the types of
things that you were seeing
besides just, "Oh, you're evil,
"you're racist, you're a bigot."
They were actually trying
to go for people's jobs and,
as you said, at least one
guy had a mental breakdown
because of it, but can
you talk about that,
'cause a lot of times,
people that don't pay that much attention
to this stuff, they're always like,
"Oh, well, it's just
some trolls on Twitter
"and there's no real-world consequences.
"Toughen up."
- What is happening, in the
knitting world, at least,
is these people are not
just leaving nasty comments
on people's images.
They're actually going
after their businesses.
What they do is, first off,
they pick out high-profile
people to go after,
because you don't wanna just go after,
like Suzie Q, with two followers.
You're not gonna make an impact that way,
so they go after people
that are influencers
in the knitting world,
and then what they do is,
they direct-message all
the major NetWear designers
or knitting stores,
and they basically say,
"If you do not denounce these people,
"we are going to come after you, too,"
so they're very detrimental, in fact,
on people's businesses, and this is
what their livelihood is.
Spoiler alert, Dave, knitting
is not a lucrative business,
and so, when we're talking
about going after them--
- You're not getting
that big knitting money?
- No, I don't make my money from knitting,
but no, they're doing what
they need to do to get by,
and so it really does
have a horrible impact.
- So what's interesting about this,
because this is a world,
it's a very niche world
that a lot of people
don't understand about,
but politically, you mentioned
the Trump thing already,
that one of the sites said,
"Okay, no more pro-Trump stuff.
"You can't knit a Trump
sweater or anything like that,"
but politically speaking, this
is a pretty female-dominated,
basically, Lefty,
ideologically dominated arena,
so were you shocked
that these are the people that
are supposed to be tolerant
and diverse and open
and all of those things,
and you considered yourself one of them,
at least at the time.
Were you shocked, and then,
how did that then lead to,
I think what you'd now consider
your political awakening?
- Yes, it was very shocking to me.
This was not what I perceived the good,
tolerant liberals to be doing.
I frankly hadn't been paying attention
to a lot of this stuff that
was going on in the world.
I was busy; I was living my life.
To see how this played
out, it really did make me
question everything about my belief system
and the people I had aligned myself with.
- Can you just go through a little bit of
what your political
leanings were beforehand?
- I've called myself a
liberal for 20 years.
I've been a Democrat
since I was 18 years old,
since I was able to register to vote,
and frankly, I never
really saw myself leaving
the Democratic Party up until
all this started happening.
- Then, this all happened
and you did the scariest,
most evil thing someone can do.
You went to a Donald J. Trump rally.
- I did, but we have to
back up a little bit,
'cause it didn't actually start there.
It started several months
before this Trump rally.
When all this was going
on, I basically said,
"I need to get out of my echo chamber.
"I need to get out of
my liberal echo chamber,
"because that was the only
people I was hearing from,
"not just liberals but
progressives and all this,"
and I made this concerted
effort to start listening
to voices that I thought
I would disagree with.
My husband, who has always been
a little bit more
conservative than me, he said,
"Karlyn, you should listen to Ben Shapiro.
"You should watch Ben Shapiro.
"You'd like him,"
and I said, "No, Victor, I'm
not watching Ben Shapiro.
"Ben Shapiro is Satan." (laughs)
My husband's a pretty smart guy,
so eventually I listened to him.
I waited until he was out of the house,
'cause I didn't want
to give him that point,
but eventually I listened,
and it turns out,
is Ben Shapiro is not Satan.
He is just a conservative
guy who is also really funny
and really smart, and I just
happen to disagree with him
on some things.
From there, it was down
the YouTube rabbit hole,
where I just started listening
to all these different
people and discovering,
conservatives are not really
what I thought they were.
It wasn't the perception that I had.
Living in New Hampshire, I'm very lucky.
I get to see all the
political candidates up close,
and at one point or another,
I had seen every other political
candidate, and I thought,
"Donald Trump's coming to town.
"Well, why not?"
This is like my big graduation exercise.
- First off, tell me a
little bit more about those,
what I described as "factory settings,"
that you were a liberal for 20 years.
Did it have any real meaning to you,
or it was just like where I think a lot
of somewhat apolitical
people are, where it's like,
"Oh, Democrats good, Republicans bad.
"Democrats care about poor people,
"Republicans care about money."
For the person that's
not purely political,
it's just s stuff that you get culturally.
Is that basically where you were?
- Yeah, kind of.
I think I was very active
politically when I was younger,
and then, growing up, and
really after Obama was elected,
I shut it all off.
I was like, "Okay, he's got it.
"A Democrat's in office.
"It'll be fine,"
but really, what I didn't realize is
how much Democrats have changed since
between W and what we have now.
That was really the big shocker for me,
because I became a Democrat
because I didn't like people
telling me what to do.
I didn't like people telling me
what music I should listen to,
or trying to legislate their
religion, or what I could wear,
or all these things, and
who to love, as well.
That was why I joined originally.
It didn't occur to me
that the Democratic
Party had changed so much
from the thing I joined.
- Oh, I have heard this story before.
What did you think, intuitively,
about the Republicans?
You thought they wanted to tell you
what music you could listen to
and what video games you
could play and the rest of it.
- Yeah, they're a horrible, evil people
that just wanted to control
everything I said and did,
was my presumption of the Republicans.
- So then, Trump comes to New
Hampshire and there you are.
Talk to me.
- There I am.
The day started out, actually,
at an MSNBC live taping
that was taking place a couple blocks away
from the Trump rally.
I went there first
because I was very nervous
about going to the Trump rally.
I when there first because
it was more of a comfort zone
and just started chatting with people,
and everyone I told I was
thinking about going over
to the rally, and they
were like, "Don't do it.
"They're horrible people.
"They're the lowest of the low.
"They're going to harass you."
One woman actually offered
me her pepper spray
to take with me, and I was like,
"No, I think I'm gonna be fine.
"It'll be okay."
Then I went over the
the rally, and you have
to get there early, because the
line is really big and long,
and you're just hanging out
and chatting with people
and discovered these are not bad people.
There was not a Klan uniform in sight,
I didn't meet a Nazi that I'm aware of,
just normal, everyday people like veterans
and school teachers and
small business owners
that just had different ideas about
how the country should run.
- How shocked were you?
It sounds obvious.
The way you're saying it now, it's like,
"Of course it's obvious.
"These are regular people.
"They just happen to have
different political thoughts
"than what is more mainstream accepted,"
but for you, as someone that
wasn't part of this bubble,
you get there and you start seeing this.
Were you just completely blown away?
- I think I was more relieved
than anything, honestly.
I think I was just like, "Oh, my God,
"these are people that I can
have a conversation with,
"because that's something
that is very void
"in the democratic space."
You have to agree with everyone,
and if you don't agree with
them, you're a horrible person.
I've always been a centrist.
I've never been terribly far Left.
I'd always kept my views to myself,
whereas these people, I was
having robust conversations
with them, even in line, and
I let it slip a couple times,
"Oh, I'm a Democrat,"
and they were like, "Oh, my God, welcome.
"We are so glad you're here."
That was very different
than what I was expecting.
- Yeah, I know the feeling.
So then you go and you hear Trump talk
and, okay, there's some
agree-to-disagree stuff,
no Nazis, all good.
You decide to write about it.
How'd that work out?
- I did.
I almost didn't even write
the article, to be honest,
'cause I was like, "This is not my lane.
"I don't wanna talk about politics.
"I'm gonna get in trouble.
"I'm gonna make someone mad, whatever,"
but then I sat down at
my desk the next day,
and I just had to get the
(audio skips) out of my system.
So I went onto Medium, 'cause I was like,
"I don't really use Medium.
"I haven't published there in over a year.
"No one's ever gonna see this."
So I wrote the whole article
about, yes, surprise.
I wrote it in about 20 minutes
and didn't even proofread it
before I posted it and just
threw it up, and posted it
on a couple, like Twitter
and Facebook and all that,
and really thought
nothing of it after that.
It got about 200 views
the first day, and then,
the next day, it was like
a bomb went off on my life.
- So you put it up.
You're not really expecting
much of anything, and then,
you just can't control the
viral nature of these things.
Do you know where the
energy behind it started?
Was there a specific person that caught it
that set it on fire?
- I still haven't been able
to figure that out, honestly.
It started going viral in the
morning, and then, I know,
a whole bunch of people
from Fox News tweeted it
and Glenn Beck tweeted it.
At some point in the afternoon,
Trump Jr. tweeted it,
and that was it all (audio
skips) started going out of hand,
but I haven't been able to
pinpoint what exactly happened.
- Okay, so the thing goes viral,
you're getting support from people
that maybe you traditionally
wouldn't have thought
would of supported you,
the President's son,
this is getting weird.
What kind of reaction did you get?
Why don't you just lay
out a little bit more
of what you said in the article?
It's what you've laid out here,
but maybe a little more specifically,
so that when we talk about the reaction,
it'll be a little better framed.
- Basically, what I
said in the article was
that we need to start taking
steps towards one another
and to start healing
the political divides.
That, I think, was the big
message I wanted people
to take away from it,
is that Trump supporters are
not bad people, and hopefully,
a liberal writing this article, let's say,
it's Trump supporters think
that I'm a bad person.
They're gonna see that
someone has your back.
I think that that was what a lot
of Trump supporters really
appreciated about it was,
there was this person coming and saying,
"You're not a Nazi.
"I know you're not a Nazi.
"We just have different ideas
"and let's talk about those ideas."
Then it was off and running.
The response from the Trump supporters
or the Conservative community.
Those are not always the
same thing, I've discovered.
It's been amazing.
They embraced me, and
so many of them said,
"I don't agree with you on
a lot of political issues,
"but I'm so glad you wrote this.
"I'm so glad you're speaking your mind,
"and let's have those conversations,"
and a lot of them, too.
I was overwhelmed with
the amount of notes I got
from people, saying, "My
husband is a Republican.
"I'm a Democrat.
"I don't know how to make
our marriage survive,"
or people who have lost
family members over this,
so a lot of people
really appreciated that.
I think they saw it in
me, someone that said,
"It was possible to get over
"your Trump-derangement syndrome,"
and that gave a lot of people hope.
- And then, you find yourself
on the other side of this,
and then, suddenly, all the people
that you might have thought
were bad guys are being nice
to you and agreeing to
disagree and the rest of it.
There's a moment there
where you have to be like,
"Oh, was I really wrong?"
You have to do a little
self-reflection, right?
- Yeah, and I've been, actually,
pretty transparent since then.
Trump-derangement
syndrome is a real thing.
I had it for years.
I regret so many of the
things that I've said
to people over the last couple years,
now that I've seen the other side of it.
- Can you tell me some
of the types of things
that you would say to people,
because when people talk
about it, as being a real thing,
it's this knee-jerk response
that people just go to,
so I think, hearing you
say the type of things
that maybe you would have said
to somebody would be interesting.
- There was one person, specifically,
that was a Trump supporter
that was always posting
on my Facebook page these crazy things,
and I would say horrible
things to this woman,
because my aunt wasn't a Trump supporter
and she was obviously annoyed by it,
so I was trying to
defend her a little bit,
and I would call this woman
every name in the book.
I would say anything I could
that I thought would hurt her
to try to get her to stop.
I look back on that now, and I'm like,
"Oh, my God, like, what
were you thinking?"
because it just skews absolutely
the way you see everything.
I thought this was completely okay.
I was like, "She supports Trump.
"That means she's a horrible person
"and she deserves to
have these things said."
In that relationship,
specifically, I'm very regretful
of many of the things
that came out of my mouth.
- So now you're agreeing to
disagree with some people,
but I'm guessing that you
get this article out there
and it didn't just become a
love fest on all sides, did it?
- No, it did not become
a love fest on all sides.
There was definitely all the blowback
that you typically hear from the left,
I definitely was on the
receiving end of that blowback.
I have gotten more hate
mail in the past two months
than I ever thought I would get
to experience in my lifetime.
It's been super-fun, but the
hate mail, like, whatever.
The overwhelming love from
the Conservative community
has balanced out the
hate mail, but the thing
that really has been
impactful on my life is
that I lost clients over this,
clients that I have served well.
They would even say, when they emailed me,
"You've always been great for our team.
"They've always loved you,
"but we can't work together anymore,"
and also my friends.
I lost so many friends over this.
I actually came from the
world of higher education.
A lot of my friends we
in higher education,
and over time, I had watched
them become pod people
and didn't really understand it.
I think, when this all happened,
the rubber met the road,
and I've lost friends that I
was friends with for decades,
people that I was in
their weddings or people
that I've always been
there to get on a plane
to see them anytime they needed anything.
That's been the most
difficult piece of it.
- And that's the part
that I think people can't really believe,
because every few months, a
story like yours bursts forth,
and the way I get to it is
that, suddenly on Twitter,
everyone's like, "Dave, Dave.
"There's another one.
"It's happening right now,"
and then you came to my attention,
and it happened before
you with James Damore
or Brett Weinstein or a
plethora, Lindsay Shepherd,
a whole slew of other
people who were all Lefties,
in some cases, academics, who do one thing
that then caused them to be
put in this new position.
Where does that leave you now?
- I've been very blessed to
have made a lot of new friends
in this experience.
The old ones I have just let go away,
because if they're going
to break off a friendship
of years or over a decade in some cases,
then really, are those people
that I want in my life anymore.
Not all friendships or
relationships are meant
to last forever.
Maybe you can appreciate
the things that were good,
but the thing of it is,
with a lot of them, too.
They didn't even say anything to me.
It was just one day they
stopped talking to me
and one day I noticed they
unfriended me on Facebook,
and so, if they wanna go
over something so silly,
then fine.
- What about the ones that
did talk to you, though,
because I had similar things.
I had at least one friend
who was invited to my wedding
that told me I was a
racist, and that was it,
even though she couldn't point
to anything racist I said,
but it was enough to just say it,
that it's self-evident.
What were the types of things
that people were saying
to you, and were you ever
able to walk anyone back
off the ledge, because
that's what I think a lot
of people are always curious about.
They're afraid that if
they come out, so to speak,
out of the political closet,
that they're gonna lose friends
and they won't know how to react
when people say all these
horrible things about them.
- I'll start with the good news.
The good news is that
there were people that,
maybe they were never the
uber-Lefties, that stuck around
and I was able to have
conversations with them.
I actually just had one
earlier today with someone
who was just asking my
opinion on the federal judges
that Trump appointed and all that,
and we had a good conversation.
It was a good dialogue,
and so there is hope
that some of your friends
will stick around,
but the other things that happened is,
I have this one, in particular.
I've been very transparent
about documenting
what's been going on in my experience,
but I actually posted a video
to my YouTube the other day
of me reading something that
one of my friends posted
on my wall, crying and all that stuff.
It actually reminded me of
something I think I heard
from you, which is, you had
a conversation with a friend
and you asked him, "Do you
think I believe what I do
"as strongly as you
believe what you believe?"
and he said, "No,"
and it was exactly the same thing.
I was so angry at her,
'cause she was like,
"You're just pandering
and doing all this stuff
"for the Left, for
ego-stroking and all this."
I'm like, "No, I'm really not.
"This is actually what I believe,
"and I just could never
tell you what I believe,
"because this would happen."
- And just that concept, though,
that you wouldn't grant someone
that you're friends with,
the belief that they might
believe what they purport,
what they say to believe.
It's so profoundly offensive
that it's really something.
You'll find this interesting.
I haven't even said this publicly before,
but I have a friend who's a public person
in the political space, well,
I can't say he's a friend,
a former friend who has publicly
gone after me many times
over the last couple years, who called me
in the last few months to apologize,
because he heard me say that exact line
that you just quoted.
He got it used against him by someone
that was further Left than
him, and then he thought,
"Whoa, maybe I've been wrong
about Dave all these years."
We'd been trying to figure out
how we can have a public mea culpa,
but that's the thing that I always say,
"It comes for everyone, so the people
"that are using these tactics on you,
"if they ever have a flicker
of an original thought,
"it'll come for them, too."
- What I've been telling people is
that the only thing that you can really do
for people like that in your
life, is create the space
for them to change and create the space
for them to come around.
I can't force my friends to do anything.
I can't force my friends, or
former friends, I suppose,
to see me in a certain way,
but someday they might
have an "Aha!" Moment
just like I had the "Aha!"
moment, and if that happens,
then I'm not gonna make
them feel bad, I'm not going
to make them grovel on the
ground to get back in my life.
I'm just gonna say, "I
love you and I accept you
"and I'm glad we can move forward."
- So are you a card-carrying
Republican now?
- I am not a card-carrying Republican.
As an interesting epilogue to my articles,
I did actually end up going to
CPAC right after it came out,
because everyone was telling me,
it was a week-and-a-half
afterwards, and they were like,
"You have to go, you have
to go, you have to go."
I had a really great
experience at CPAC, actually,
again, like liberty-loving
people, and I'm a fan of that,
but no, I deregistered
from the Democratic Party
a couple days after my article came out.
I became an Independent.
I was very excited to do that.
I'm just gonna sit in
the middle for a while,
because, fundamentally, my
perception of both parties is
that they're two sides to the same coin.
They act exactly the same,
and neither of them wants to admit it.
I have Democratic tendencies
and I have more Conservative
tendencies, and so,
I'm just gonna sit back with my popcorn
and let them fight it out.
- So using the little bit of
your educational training,
the psychological aspects of
all this, have you thought,
I'm sure you have, about,
perhaps, the psychological makeup
that leads someone to be a Leftie
or that leads someone to be a Rightie,
and why it would be that, right now,
like this moment we're at right now,
why the Lefties would be so
hysterical and authoritarian,
while the people on the
Right, broadly speaking,
are much more open and decent?
Do you have any theories behind that?
- Yeah, I think that
people on the Left tend
to be much more focused on
emotions and how people feel,
whereas people on the Right are just like,
"Just the facts, please, just the logic."
I think that that plays into a huge bowl,
and I think a lot of people on the Left,
with their crazy hysteria,
I think for most of them,
it comes from a (audio skips) a good place
of wanting to make the world
better and (audio skips)
for people to be accepted
for exactly who they are.
They don't realize that folks
on the Right are already much more open
than they have probably
ever been to people
who look differently or speak differently
or think differently or live differently,
and they don't realize
that shift has taken place,
and so they're doubling down on the Left,
because they think it's the only way
to create this more fair, just world.
- Do you think the biggest
fear for the people
that were trying to
destroy you and make sure
that you couldn't maintain
business relationships
and the rest, is that, partly
what it is, I think, at least,
that their ideas have become
so thin that they fear
that if they let you
walk, if they let me walk,
if they let any of this
endless amount of people walk,
that everyone will walk, and
when I now go to events or most
of the public speaking that I
do, which is, I'm only invited
by Conservatives and Libertarians,
really, and I tell them
what my differences are and it's all good.
I see a truly diverse group of people.
It may be because of their gender
and sexuality and skin color.
I don't really care about that,
but there is some of that, sure,
but I see people debating and
nobody's angry at each other.
That's the weird thing,
so that welcoming thing,
it's like the Lefties can't
really let you see that,
'cause if you see that, well,
that's pretty attractive
to know you could go into a
room and say what you think
and not be harangued for it.
- I think that's giving a lot
of Lefties a little bit too
much credit, to be honest,
for where a lot of them are right now.
- I don't do that too often.
- I had the same experience at CPAC.
One of the most surprising
things to me about CPAC was,
it was such a diverse audience,
and some of the people there
that were the most celebrated were people
that the Left would say
are in these marginalized,
oppressed communities.
I really think that they
just see, just like I did,
they perceive Republicans
as being this closed group
that just wants to keep everyone
that aren't old white men down.
What's fascinating is
that the Left can't articulate arguments.
They can't even have debates.
They can't have discussions.
They don't know why they
believe what they believe.
Once you start analyzing
that, you really start to see
that, "Oh, this isn't what
I thought it was at all,"
so I think you're right that,
if you let people analyze these things,
they are going to walk.
- Has business all worked itself out
and you're doing okay, not under threat,
and where is the knitting
community at the moment?
Was this the gamer gate of knitting?
Did it blow apart the entire thing?
- What's funny is that this
is actually still going on
in the knitting community,
so there is actually this
just happened this week,
where there is a yarn store
in New England that actually praised some
of Sock Magician's yarn,
who I talked about earlier,
was having a breakdown,
and Dave actually got special
permission from the government
to stay open during this if
it continues to supply people.
A lot of people using it
for mental-health purposes,
and so what happened is the
SCWs are now mobbing them
and trying to get them shut down.
They've actually called
the police on them,
and now they're trying
to get their government
permission rescinded,
and so this is still
going on, but I think that
what's unique about the knitting world is
that a lot of us are now pushing back.
It actually really started with
when my article got so much attention
and they had this giant spotlight on them,
so many new people started speaking up
and started posting videos
to say, "This is not okay.
"I am not okay with that."
I actually think that
this could be a model
for when this happens in other communities
if people can speak up, people
can organize, people can say,
"No, your mobbing and
bullying is not all right."
If you get enough people to do that,
then you can start to
take their power away.
- I love that.
I don't know that anyone has
ever been better equipped
to deal with it than a
psychologist who specializes
in bullying, so you survived,
you made it to the other side.
Do you have any other
pieces of advice or wisdom
that you would share with anyone going
through their own version
of this right now?
- What I would say is that the freedom
that I have discovered in being able
to speak my mind without
fear is just something
that I wouldn't trade for anything.
Listen, I was terrified
when my article went viral.
I was like, "This is
gonna destroy everything,
"I'm gonna lose my business,
"I'm gonna lose everything
I've worked for for years,"
but that hasn't happened.
There is some temporary pain
to go through this type of experience.
However, I am so glad it happened,
because now I feel like I
completely lost my filter.
Now I can say whatever I want
and they can't come and hurt me,
and so I wouldn't trade it for the world.
- That is how you end an interview.
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