Thomas: Baby Umstattd was born on July 5.
My wife missed me naming the baby George Washington Umstattd by seven hours. She was laboring all of July 4, and I kept saying, “Come on, George Washington.” That evening we were walking around the deck with fireworks going off all around us, and she was having contractions.
My wife is a real trooper. I’m always impressed with her, but nothing impresses me more than watching her soldier through giving birth. It’s such a miraculous event.
The birth overall went well. There were complications afterward, and I’ll leave it at that, except to say they sent us back to the hospital a couple of times.
We’re displaced right now, living in what my daughter calls our crisis home, because she didn’t have her own home to bring the baby back to. We do have a home, and we’re trying to make a home out here as best we can. We’re close to my parents, so my wife has her in-laws nearby for childcare. That has some advantages.
Thomas: You’ll notice I’m not naming the child. At the same time all of this was happening, a leftist subreddit started going after me.
That brings us into another Zeitgeist segment on how to navigate leftist violence as an influencer.
My audience really wants to know about my children and what’s going on with my family, and they want to see photos of my kids. I posted one picture of my newborn because all newborns look like little wrinkled raisins.
With leftists becoming more violent, I want to protect my children. Specifically, I want any leftist who is threatening me or brigading against me to have to come through me, because you don’t want to come through me.
What does leftist mean in this conversation?
Jonathan: Let me take a step back so we don’t get boxed in unnecessarily.
When we say leftist violence, we’re pointing at a provable difference in problem-solving between the different political spectrums. We’ve talked about it before, but some people are new here.
If you vote blue, we don’t think you’re going to come out and kill us.
There is a problem-solving pattern that runs, “I’m actually being attacked because you’re using words I don’t like.” That’s the whole speech-is-violence idea. And since they believe that speech is violence, they reason they need to use violence to protect themselves. In actuality, all the guy did was say something you didn’t like, but now you’re trying to kill him.
It’s a provable phenomenon on social media. I went to college with someone who’s kind of trying to be another Charlie Kirk. The comments under his posts from these deranged wackos say, “Hey, why is there a hole in his neck?” It’s despicable, violent rhetoric.
That’s the problem-solving pattern when you think speech is violence: “They said something I didn’t like, so that’s an attack on me. It’s an attack on my identity, which is an attack on my person, which is something I need to respond to for survival.”
That’s deranged. If every time my drill instructor called me a name I thought he was trying to kill me and so I tried to kill him back, that would be called psychosis.
That’s what Thomas is talking about here. We’re using one word to describe it, and leftist doesn’t necessarily mean Democrat. When we say leftist, we’re talking about this strain of problem-solving that has proven to be deranged. If a leftist comes after me and starts shrieking at my children and me, I’m going to protect myself and my children.
Thomas: It’s not just violence in the lethal sense. It’s also shouting at my children or making them unsafe in a public environment.
I saw footage of leftists shouting at JD Vance’s kids at Disney World. You can disagree with JD Vance politically; that’s your right as an American. But leave his kids at Disney World alone.
I’m not saying that from a legal perspective; I’m saying it from a cultural perspective. It’s not okay, but people are acting as if it is. The media made no big deal about it. Right-wing circles knew about it, but many of you have no idea it even happened, because there’s this acceptance of left-wing violence.
There was a spate of left-wing terrorism where they were killing people and bombing things. Many of those terrorists, who were part of organizations like the Weather Underground, went on to get professorships and became commentators on TV. The Weather Underground is now an app you can get on your phone. The group and their violence was just accepted. They killed people, and the response was, “Oh, that’s okay, they were just overzealous.”
When you’re the victim of that, or you could be the victim of that, you don’t care that they were overzealous. I don’t want those people to know what my kids look like.
How do you stay public and keep your family private?
Thomas: My guide here is Charlie Kirk. He did a good job of allowing his family to be public figures. You would see his kids, but you rarely saw their faces, and I don’t think you ever learned their names.
His kids could be at the store and be fine. If their grandmother took them to the park, they were safe, because you don’t know what they look like or what they’re named.
His wife couldn’t take them to the store, because she’s famous. She has to have security now. That’s the cost of notoriety in this era, where violence for the left is a form of communication.
Thomas: Violence for the right is not a form of communication, but the right can be just as violent. In fact, the right’s violence is worse, because for the right it’s a switch. We just listen and put up with it with no violence, and then suddenly, there’s genocide. That’s the switch.
You see this in the Bible, in the Book of Judges. You’ve got the tribe of Benjamin, and they do this terrible thing. We’ve talked about this story before. It builds and builds and builds, and the other tribes put up with it, and then the switch flips, and they kill the whole tribe of Benjamin. They went way overboard, and they didn’t realize they’d gone overboard until they’d killed everybody and couldn’t bring them back to life, and they said, “What have we done?”
At some point the switch on the right may flip, and that’s very scary, because suddenly there are burning houses everywhere and suddenly there are lots of dead people. We’ve got to avoid that. Stop poking the bear. We’ve got to ramp down the violent rhetoric.
Until we do, people like me have to take precautions, especially with these subreddits coming after us.
I posted a photo of the newborn and me. I figured I could get away with that because all newborns look the same.
I’ve been slowly purging photos, which was not my approach initially. I used to share lots of baby photos, and my audience loved it. They still love photos of the kids. I still waffle on this, but as this show gets more political and the left gets meaner and more violent, caution is needed.
What changed after the Charlie Kirk assassination?
Jonathan: There’s also the embrace of the Charlie Kirk assassination afterward. They’re really celebrating it. That caused a shift in my tactical analysis of the situation. Before, we could all agree, “I hate you, you hate me, but I love your babies.” “I love your kids. I’m going to take care of your kids.” Now we don’t have that understanding anymore.
Thomas: There was a federal judge whose kid got killed. They came to kill the parent, but the son answered the door, and the son got killed. The son was about 20 years old.
There is a massive ignorance about how much leftist political violence is happening. Amy Coney Barrett gave testimony about how many violent threats she and her family are getting and how it’s affecting her voting. She’s been pushed to the left, voting further left than she was, because she’s afraid of the mob. It’s really unfortunate.
I have a lot of complicated feelings because I totally understand. As a mom, she’s saying, “Forget the country, I care about my babies.” Moms are genetically programmed to defend their children, and they need to be for the continuation of the species.
As the country, I want to say, “No, vote for me! Don’t vote with the crazy leftists. They’re going to destroy the country.”
Thomas: I might refer to the baby as George Washington as code. Somebody said that for this podcast, the baby can be George Washington. I kind of like that. I don’t know what my wife will think about it.
Baby George Washington is just the cutest thing, and I love having a newborn. It’s not great for sleep. I have consumed a huge amount of coffee in preparation for this episode. I’ve learned that quantity is a quality all its own. That was Napoleon’s advice for dealing with the Russians and the Prussians, but it works for newborns. If you can’t get quality sleep, try to get quantity sleep.
It’s a challenge, because the whole family is in one acoustic zone. We all have one bathroom, and we’re all kind of sleeping on top of each other. We’re making it work, and we’re making some good memories.
