 All right, this is your own book filling in for pure PELCA for the rest of the day today and and tomorrow and Mike will be back on Friday, all right, we're talking about false news and the media bias and and I would actually put this even in a more broader perspective There is a general disregard in the world we live in today for fact, for reality, for science, for truth. We live in an age where left and right are consumed by conspiracy theories of all kinds, all kinds, whether it's Alex Jones type conspiracy theories. Hey, we have a president who became politically active and politically famous as an advocate for the birth of conspiracy, a conspiracy theory that stated that Obama wasn't born in the United States. And I mean, he was full throttle into it. He was the lead spokesman for it. We have a president who is a conspiracy theory nut, if you will. And the conspiracy theories all over the place, everywhere, you know, what's happening in Venezuela is not socialism. It's some conspiracy of capitalists who are who are creating this. It's American imperialism that is creating hunger and starvation in Venezuela. And and, you know, on the right, where do you stop? Where does it end, right, all over the place from 9 11 is a government conspiracy to. Honey, you know, every day, you just open up, open up Alex Jones. We've got a culture that's consumed with these things. We've got a culture that does not respect science. And we'll talk about one aspect of the disrespect of science when we talk about climate change. Not in the way you expect, but when you talk about climate change in the next hour, we'll have a world-class expert on on Al Gore and climate change coming on in the third hour of today's show. Alex Epstein will be with us for that hour, and we'll talk about that particular. You know, pseudoscience, you want to call it, or mixed science or science by authority, 97% of scientists, you know, the mythology of those kind of claims. But also, you know, we live in a society where most Americans or a significant number of Americans don't believe in evolution. Really? Now, let me be clear, evolution is settled science. Evolution is a fact, not a so-called theory that is unproven. Evolution is done like the law of gravity is done. And yet we live in a world where, you know, we consider school boards consider whether they want to teach evolution. We are consumed by mysticism and conspiracy theories and falsehoods all around us. We've lost all respect left and right for science, for truth, for fact, for reality. And the climate change debate is a perfect illustration of that. And again, not in the way the leftist media presents it. Not, did you read the New York Times thing where they said, this is a classic New York Times, right? Unfortunately, it's becoming classic New York Times where they said, the fact that we could predict the eclipse is proof that we must trust science and science predicts catastrophic global warming. So if you believe in the eclipse, you must believe in catastrophic global warming. I mean, wow, talk about non-thinking. Talk about a logical fallacy. It's unbelievable. So, you know, we live in a world where, you know, whether it's the rise of the new age or the people believe that angels and devils are running around among us and are dangerous to us. It's a complete negation of rationality and reason and reality that is consuming this culture. And it's scary. It's scary. And I don't think it was always like this. Now, maybe it was, but I don't think it was always like this. I think it's getting worse. I think mysticism, unreason, anti-reason is on the rise, left and right on the rise today in America. And the false news and the media bias are basically reflections of that. And you might ask yourself, why, why, why is this on the rise? And I think, I think at the end of the day, when you look at the cultural white phenomena like this and you ask the question, why is this happening? The answer is always going to be found in our educational institutions. When people ask me, what is destroying the world or what do I fear the most or what I think is the most problematic institution? I don't think it's the media. I don't think it's politics. You know, I really don't. People always say it's a media bias. That's what's destroying America. No, it's not the media bias that's destroying America. You have to ask the question, why is the media biased? Where do they get that? Where's this idea of peddling false news? Where does that come from? What is the idea that there is no one reality, that there is the truth? Where does it come from? And it always comes from ideas. I said yesterday, history is shaped by ideas. The world is shaped by ideas. And where are those ideas coming from? Well, they're coming from the universities. The universities are the source of all of our ills, of all of our problems, because that is where ideas are taught, articulated, written about, propagated. Where does the media get the ideas that it holds from the university? They're all trained there. Where does the culture, why does the culture have a certain attitude, let's say towards science or towards reason or towards rationality? I would argue because that's what our intellectuals, that is what our professors, that is what our universities have been teaching for decades. And if you teach something for decades, you have the most profound impact on the culture than any other activity possible. Teaching and writing, teaching and writing. If you establish yourself on the intellectual, philosophical high ground, you get to shape everything. Who do you think trains the teachers who teach in our schools? The universities do. Who trains the reporters who go out and report on the news or pretend to report on the news as sometimes is the case? They're trained at the universities. Who trains our spineless, unprincipled politicians? Well, they've all got university degrees. They've all been trained by intellectuals. They all read books written by our professors. And what has been a big theme within academia over the last, you know, since the 1960s really, since the 1960s. Now, you could argue that the 1960s, this is capitalizing on philosophy going back to Plato, or if you want to be more modern, going back to Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Marx and Nietzsche, that whole string of philosophers. And I will agree with you. But the 60s got to a new low, and we've been going lower from that point. During the 60s, a big swath of academia made a turn away from science, from rationality, from reason, from reality. They declared all those social constructs, all those, you know, arbitrary, all those just what those in power want them to be. And therefore teach us. History's out. Truth is out. Reality's out. Science is out. And you hear it today on the campuses. Science is just a white male tool to oppress everybody else. That's what science is according to some faculty members at universities today. Now, the really nutty part of this, not a lot of people take too seriously. Not a lot of academics take too seriously. But the more moderate parts of it, yeah, they become part of what people learn, part of what people study. It becomes part of what we all taught. It infiltrates all aspects of our curriculum, the politically correctness, the multiculturalism. Everybody has their own truth kind of attitude. Everybody's point of view is equally okay. Emo the primacy of emotion all comes from this kind of ideology, from these kind of ideas in our universities taught, written about, over and over and over again for now 50 years. And what we're seeing today in the world around us is the direct result of that. All right, when we come back, we'll talk more about this. If you want in on the conversation, it's 888-900-3393. Some of you must have a view about some of these arguments I'm making. Agree? Disagree? 888-900-3393. Please call on this topic 888-900-3393. And you're listening to your own book on pure apelca. And we'll be back after this break. All right, this is Yvonne Brooke filling in for Mike. And I hope you don't take it out on him, everything I'm saying here. Nothing I say should mean that Mike has endorsed what I'm saying. I'm sure much of what I say he would not. But here I am. All right, we're talking about false news. We're talking about media bias. And we're trying to get to the heart of it, the cause. What is really happening? I actually read a really good article about some of this. And now it's flawed. It's got major, major flaws. And the funny thing is that the article itself falls into the traps that it is trying to warn us again. So I'll be quoting some stuff from the article. It's by Kurt Anderson of Neverhood of Him. But Kurt Anderson, it's called How America Lost Its Mind. Great title, great title. And he's talking about the nation's current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of a mindset that have made America, anyway, some really bad stuff in the article. But overall, a lot of truth. It's in the September edition of The Atlantic Magazine. I actually liked The Atlantic Magazine. Again, very biased. This article is a good example of that. But very intellectual and very interesting. And often a lot of truth gets revealed in spite of the bias. And this article is perfect for that because he talks about all these things happening in academia and the decline of reason and the decline of rationality. And then he falls into that. He makes irrational statements and he projects it in an irrational way on current events. And he is leftist bias, his ignorance of economics, his ignorance of history just reflects through. He's trying to fight against the phenomena he's talking about and he falls right into it. Now, before we go on discussing this, I want to just ask a simple question. What is truth? Where does truth come from? How do we know when something is true? I mean, this is probably one of the most important philosophical questions ever. And there are multiple variations of answers to this, most of them wrong. And I'll give you then what I think is the right answer. So there's the idea prevalent at a university and among many intellectuals that the truth is to some extent or another whatever you want it to be. That you are the creator of your own reality. You know, again, truth is just a way to oppress people. So truth might be racial. So it might be all dictated by the same race. We all have the same truth. It might be personal. Literally every single human being has his own truth. It might be cultural. Truth in America is not the same as truth in Saudi Arabia. Let's say with regard to how to treat women. Truth is completely influx and completely dependent on us, on our own consciousness in a sense we human beings create our own truth. Now to some extent this comes from, or is a spin off from kind of the German philosophy I talked about earlier. If, you know, if our minds are disconnected from reality, if what we see is not actual reality, is not actually there, if it doesn't correspond what we're seeing, what our senses provide us and what our consciousness provide us, does not correspond to reality, then anything goes. It means our reality is making it up. And then it's a question of how does our mind, our consciousness is making it up. And then it's a question of how our consciousness and our mind makes it up. And whether it's made up by our, you know, particular genes that are associated with race, particular genes that are associated with gender, or just the particular genes associated with us and individuals, but in any case it's being made up. And this is the relativism, the subjectivism, there's so, so prevalent in our culture today, so prevalent out there. And again, mostly on the left, but also on the right, there's a lot of this subjectivism on the right. And then there's the other perspective which is truth just implants itself on your brain. Whether through mystical revelation, whether because you read it in a book, whether because you just saw it, it just boom, it just hits you. And you just know it. Now this has the same problem as the other approach to truth because what does that even mean? And how do you persuade, how do you argue? How do you convince somebody that your truth that you, you know, got from reality somehow is really true? How do you, if it's through revelation, how do you convince somebody that your revelation is right and their revelation is wrong? What is the means by which we debate, we convince, how do we even know? And isn't our revelation in the end just our emotion? Isn't it just again, just our subjective preference? Doesn't this what's called intrinsicist view of the truth, which just there, some people see it, I guess some people don't. Some people have the revelation, some people don't. Doesn't it that the end depend on your complete subjective preference as to whether you see it or whether you don't? Doesn't this position just boil down to subjectivism and relativism? Just the same. Now this is more common on the right because it's more common with religion, right? How do we know religious truths by revelation or by reading a book? But what about people interpret the book differently? Or what about people who don't get the revelation? How do you convince them that the truth is the truth? What mechanism do you use if it requires just being hit by it? No answer. So what we have today across the entire field is a view of truth that is completely subjective. That is completely relativistic. That is completely dependent on your state of mind, on your emotions at the end of the day. There is no standard for truth. Now what is truth? Really, what does objective truth mean? Ten. We will get to right after this break. You're listening to Ron Brook filling in. Four. Four. Three. Apelka. Two. One. Sure, Apelka. With Mike Apelka. All right, you're listening to your Ron Brook show and, oh, you're on Brook on the Michael Pelka show. And we're getting pretty philosophical here. We're getting pretty deep. I hope you'll stick with me and be patient. I think this is really important. I think this is at the core of all of our problems. If you want to understand the world, you have to understand that a whole conception of what true is has gone, you know, is wrong, is being distorted and perverted. And that unless we recapture, unless we grasp what we're talking about when we talk about truth, then, you know, we're living a post-truth era and that can only lead to one thing. Let me tell you right now. The only thing a post-truth era can lead to is authoritarianism. Because when you don't have the truth, when you don't have a standard by which to discuss the truth, all that's left is force. If my truth and your truth don't align, then how do we get alignment in society by whoever has the bigger gun? If my revelation is different than your revelation, the only way to resolve the difference between us is who has the biggest gun. I mean, this is why the only way to deal with the Islamic terrorist threat is by eviscerating them, is by crushing them. You can't reason with them because they are committed to their revelation. They are committed to their subjectivist, emotionalist truth. And it's not truth. But you can't argue against it because it has no reference except their emotions. And you can't argue with emotions. And that's true of all truth achieved through revelation. So what is truth? What is truth? I'm going to quote Ein Rand here. Truth, and this is actually from Atlas Shrugged, from Gold's speech. I know many of you probably skipped Gold's speech. Go back and read it. Go back and read it. Truth is the recognition of reality. Reason is man's only means of knowledge. Is his only standard for truth. Reality, ability to observe reality, to understand reality, to integrate reality, to use our senses, to be able to check, to examine, to think, to create concepts, to integrate into new knowledge. That is what is required to establish truth. Truth is the recognition of reality, recognition of facts. And to make this statement, one has to acknowledge the idea, the metaphysical idea, the axiomatic idea that reality exists. It exists. It is out there. And it is independent of your wishes, your emotions, your religion, your thoughts. It's just there. And that we have the tool, consciousness, is the tool by which we observe reality. And we observe it as it is. Not, you know, we don't observe it like a bat. A bat has a different mechanism by which to observe it. But what we observe is, so reality is what it is, and we observe it. Now, here's a more extended discussion of truth. Right, from Ein Rand. Truth is the product of the recognition, the identification of the facts of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. He retains concepts in his mind by means of definitions. He organizes concepts into propositions. And the truth of falsehood of his propositions rests not only on the relationship to the fact that he asserts, but also on the truth of falsehood of the definition of the concept he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth of falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics. Complicated. Way over your head. I know this is hard stuff. And this is part of what, you know, I want to say, discovering truth. Discovering abstract truth. Truth about the physical world that's immediately accessible to you is relatively easy. You can look. Hey, this is a table. I'm standing next to a table. That's a truth. This is your own book speaking to you. That is a truth that you can immediately observe. At least you can. You can observe it. My voice. Right. But political reality, political truth, scientific truth. Abstract truth. Require rigorous knowledge, rigorous study. They require defining clearly concepts. I mean, even when I say this is a table that requires an understanding of what a table is, which we all have implicitly in a sense have that definition. But when we have definitions of things that are far more complicated, far more abstract like freedom, well, how do we define freedom? We all have different definitions of it until we get our definitions right, until we know what we're talking about. We can't even talk about what's truth with regard to a concept like freedom. Right. So truth or quiet, both a huge sense of integrity in terms of knowing what you know, knowing what the facts really are and the facts are corresponding to reality. And then it requires real effort to integrate, to think, and it's hard. It takes effort. It's not simple. And the more abstract the truth is, political issues, for example, are far harder than, you know, simple truths like this is a table. The concepts are harder. And then our set of knowledge that we're integrating is different. And we need to understand what are the relevant facts, which facts are relevant to understanding what freedom means, to understanding whether freedom is good or bad. This is hard. This is not simple. But all of that is thrown out. It's thrown out when we say the truth is meaningless or we say the truth is subjective. Or we say, as the French philosopher Michel Foucault said, that rationality is a corrosion, a regime of truth that we need to abandon. Now, I quote Michel Foucault because he's an important philosopher, incredibly influential in academia, particularly since the 60s and 70s, particularly today. So today, in academia, this idea that rationality, that reason, is a coercive regime of truth and add to that kind of the modern part of it. A coercive regime of truth applied to all of us by oppressive white males. Then truth is out the window. Then we live in a society which has been educated since the 1960s on these kind of ideas, right? There was a book in 66 called The Social Construction of Reality, right? And they basically said, you know, all scientific truth was dubious. Scientific truth was a concussion by elites. I mean, it used to be these crazy professors talking about elites. Now it's the president of the United States talking about concussions of the elites. But this is the idea that the scientific truth is a concussion of elites. The rules, I'm quoting for this article, the rules of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws. They are the masters of everyone's perceptions, defining reality itself. So white males growing up in a particular environment have a different reality than black females growing up in a different environment and a different reality than transgender people. It's even their perceptions, even their senses are different, are different. Knowledge we are taught is not real. There is no truth. What is real they tell us to a Tibetan monk may not be real to an American businessman. All right, all right, so truth, reality is out. This is what we've been taught. This is what we've been taught since the 1960s. And we shouldn't be surprised that the consequence is a disregard for truth, a disregard for reality, a disregard for fact, and a complete bias. Hey, I'm a liberal, therefore I have my liberal reality. You're a conservative, you have a conservative reality. Conservatives consume conservative news, which reinforces their conservative reality. Libbles have liberal news and reinforces, I hate using the word liberal, leftist news and reinforces their leftist biases, their leftist reality. And it's all reality and it's all legit. And now it's just, how do we decide between the two? Who has the most votes? Who has the most power? Who has the biggest gun? That's who gets to decide what facts and reality actually are. And that's where we live today. That's where we are today. All right, we are going to take another break. You are listening to the Iran book, or Iran book on the Michael Pelka show. We'll be back after this. It just amazes me how time just runs here, right? I mean, I haven't even started on this topic. And we'll have to continue tomorrow because, you know, we've got Alex Epstein to talk about climate change and Al Gore's documentary movie coming up at the top of the hour. We're going to devote the last hour to these issues of truth will come up there as well. But man, this is a big topic trying to cover it quickly. But the important thing to remember is truth is the recognition of reality. And the only tool we have to identify reality and to understand what is true is our reason, is our rational faculty. Now, that's hard. The recognition of truth is hard. And we're going to disagree. What do we do then? We argue. We debate. We argue and debate based on the idea of facts. You might have a completely different set of facts, of context. You might have a different context than mine. And you have come to a different conclusion than I have come to. How do we achieve agreement? How do we find the truth? Well, you present your facts. I present my facts. We resolve any contradictions. We each expand because you might have experienced things that I have not experienced. You might know of things that I do not know. You might have seen things that I have not seen or you might have thought of stuff that I have not thought of. And we share that. We debate it. We discuss it. We resolve contradictions because the one rule of logic is contradictions do not exist. And through that process, we both benefit and we both discover the truth. So the fact that the truth is out in reality doesn't mean we all get it immediately. This is not about the truth in planning itself on our brain. This is about discovering truth, which requires effort. And the more abstract the truth is, the more effort is required. And we're going to make mistakes. But the way to resolve mistakes is by going back to reality. The way to resolve mistakes is by looking at more facts and by making sure our integrations do not contradict that we've done, we've used logic properly. And even then we can make mistakes. And even then somebody else coming to us and saying, hey, I think you made a mistake is incredibly helpful. I always say the two attitudes towards somebody who says you are wrong. If you have any kind of self-esteem, the two attitudes towards somebody who says you are wrong. They might be right. They might be wrong about me being wrong. If they're right, then the only proper response of somebody says you're wrong and then shows me why I'm wrong is to say thank you. Thank you. Truth is amazing. I always want to move towards more knowledge. So if somebody can correct the mistake I've made, thank you. That's wonderful. Two minutes. And if they're wrong about thinking I'm wrong, then why do I care? Then that's their problem. I might try to convince them that they're wrong, but at the end of the day, they have a problem. You know, they hold an untruth. They hold a falsehood. So we should all in life be in whatever realm we are, in whatever realm we live, in whatever our ability is, in whatever profession we have. If we're going to do one thing in life, we should be truth seekers. We should look for the truth. There's no other way to live a good life. You can't live a good life based on falsehoods. You can't live a good life based on emotions. You can't live a good life based on revelation. A good life comes from examining reality, from gaining knowledge, from examining and integrating that knowledge and applying it consciously to living your life. We all should be truth seekers. We should all be little scientists applying the scientific method, if you will, to our own lives, to our own experiences, to our day-to-day lives. That's what life is about, in my view. That's what life is about. If you're interested in this topic, if you want to delve deeper, I encourage you to read Ayn Rand at the Shrug. But also, she has a great book on this issue, on the issue of truth, on the issue of knowledge called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Alright, when we come back, we're going to be talking to Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress. We're going to talk about Al Gore's new movie. Five, four, three, two, one.