BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guests: Adam Conover @TheAdamConover (YouTube) Producers: Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X) Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| How's it going, everybody? | ||
| Welcome to The Culture War. | ||
| We've got a special episode today. | ||
| It's not necessarily about a core issue. | ||
| We're being joined by Adam Conover. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me. | ||
| Nice to be here. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Thanks for coming, man. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| I've made a couple television shows in the past. | ||
| I did a true TV show. | ||
| I did a Netflix show. | ||
| I'm a stand-up comic. | ||
| I'm going to be in Charleston, South Carolina this weekend, and you guys invited me. | ||
| I thought I'd swing by. | ||
| Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What year was that show, Adam Ruins Everything? | ||
| It first came out in 2015, I think, and ran until 2019. | ||
| We did like four or five cycles of it. | ||
| My mom loved your show. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And I think she watched regularly. | ||
| I watched a handful, to be honest. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But you did have one really good one on gun control that I thought was good because you pointed out Reagan was the start of gun control. | ||
| And you had probably one of the most, I think, honest portrayals when you had a Black Panther and like a white rural work, like fat guy, both being like, yes, guns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because we often see this depiction where it's like, Racists are mad. | ||
| They lump all 2A people in with all white supremacists or whatever, and they try and act like conservatives are mad that black people have guns. | ||
| And it's like, the 2A guys are... | ||
| Not racist. | ||
| It's a totally different ideology. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| We made the point in that video, though, that those people tend not to defend black people who are – the Philando Castile case was one of the ones that we talked about. | ||
| But that's – that actually was a really interesting case, too, because there were a lot of people on the right. | ||
| For people who don't know, this is – the guy got pulled over. | ||
| I think he was smoking weed. | ||
| He had a gun. | ||
| He didn't draw it or anything, but the cop just shot and killed him. | ||
| I believe what happened—this was so many years ago, and I've done so many things that my memory for stuff like this isn't as good as it used to be, but I believe he said, like, officer, I have a firearm, which is what you're supposed to do, and the officer shot him, I think, at that point. | ||
| Yeah, like, he didn't draw it or anything. | ||
| It was interesting to see the rift between— He had it stored in the car properly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then a lot of conservatives were like, yeah, well, you shouldn't have been smoking weed. | ||
| And I'm like, whoa, whoa. | ||
| Like, yes, but you don't die because you're armed. | ||
| You have a right to keep and bear arms. | ||
| So that was an interesting contrast. | ||
| But anyway, that was – you got a lot of praise from that from the pro-2A people because they were like, hey, this guy's – he's being honest. | ||
| It's like there are pro-2A people. | ||
| They're not all going to be racist, white supremacists or whatever. | ||
| But anyway, I digress. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| I guess I can ask you something simple first. | ||
| Like what are you currently working on? | ||
| Currently, everything I'm doing is like podcast YouTube, right? | ||
| The mainstream entertainment industry kind of stopped making the kind of comedy I make. | ||
| And so YouTube has replaced television for so many people. | ||
| It's the number one streaming app on televisions. | ||
| Their top format is television sets. | ||
| And so that's where I've moved all my shit. | ||
| And so, yeah, I do kind of similar stuff to what I used to do on cable, doing it on YouTube on a weekly basis. | ||
| And I'm a touring comic. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| Well, let's just let's jump into the current state of affairs. | ||
| We've got a second Trump administration, non-consecutive. | ||
| What's your take on what is currently happening politically and culturally? | ||
|
unidentified
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Damn. | |
| Yeah, I mean, you're going to disagree. | ||
| Your audience is going to disagree. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to, you know, Tim Pool destroys woke comedian. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| You can start the clip at this point if you're doing your response videos, you know. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it looks like a pretty clear fascist authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government, you know. | ||
| We got people being thrown in unmarked vans. | ||
| We got the destruction of the civil service, which is a pretty standard authoritarian tactic early on in an administration of that type. | ||
| And yeah, it sort of remains to be seen how far they'll get and if they'll actually be able to transform America in the ways that they're trying to. | ||
| But yeah, it's pretty – my side of America, people are a little on edge. | ||
| It's a little frightening to folks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My take on that would be largely because corporate press is lying to them, largely. | ||
| What corporate press? | ||
| There's no corporate press left, hardly. | ||
| Well, I would say their viewership is rapidly diminished. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But still, when you look at – there was a Real Clear Politics aggregate polling found that – they didn't do it necessarily by demographic. | ||
| They did it by decade age bracket, so it was like 20 to 29 or whatever. | ||
| Every age group except for 70-plus was pro-Trump, was a few points above – RealClearPolitics did an average and they said that every age group in America – Except for 70-plus. | ||
| Every age group except for 70-plus is pro-Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let me see if I can try and find it. | ||
| And this is contrasting to all the approval rating stats I've seen have him at, what, 47% and dropping or something like that? | ||
| It's largely based on the older crowd. | ||
| That seems like the opposite of every stat I've seen in the past, but I don't follow this really closely. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how to find this image because it was a few weeks ago, but let me see if I can try and pull it up and talk at the same time, which I probably can't. | ||
| I don't actually – do you want to see if you can try and find it while we talk? | ||
| Otherwise, I'm going to be sitting here typing out of my mind. | ||
| Yeah, so what I would say is like the obvious story – we debated this last week live – is the Abrego Garcia story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so the take that I've typically seen from liberals is – actually, I'll use a specific example. | ||
| The David Pakman subreddit. | ||
| Pakman, of course, has millions of followers. | ||
| He gets 100 million views per month. | ||
| And his audience on Reddit was saying this is just a family man who is trying to escape harsh conditions in Central America who has been effectively disappeared by the Trump administration, which is a gross mischaracterization of what happened. | ||
| If we were to say that a judge granted Abrego Garcia withholding of deportation due to Barrios 18 in Guatemala and threats against his life in El Salvador, then the question of due process is he needed to get a hearing. | ||
| As pertaining to that withholding of deportation. | ||
| But he did already have two hearings in which he was determined to be an MS-13 gang member. | ||
| He was pulled over and law enforcement believed to be human trafficking. | ||
| He has two filings from his wife for beating her. | ||
| She was filing orders of protection. | ||
| And so it's fine if, in my view, the liberals, the liberal side of things or the podcasters like Pac-Man and Brian Tyler Cohen and others are going to say, hey, he was supposed to get a hearing, agreed. | ||
| But it is a gross mischaracterization. | ||
| So when you mention that people on the left are on edge, I'm like, yeah, well, they think that a guy who lives in Maryland who was working like a regular union job or whatever just disappeared one day, as opposed to a guy who had gone through several hearings, was arrested with MS-13, had symbols on his hand that law enforcement believe were MS-13 gang tattoos. | ||
| And so the real question is, what was the error in that deportation? | ||
| On the right, it's... | ||
| It's legally called harmless error in that he didn't get a hearing as to the withholding of deportation. | ||
| However, he wouldn't have got it approved anyway. | ||
| So the answer now is a formality. | ||
| It's paperwork. | ||
| It's a Zoom call, and then it's done. | ||
| But people on the left, the liberal side of things, they think that this is a working-class family guy who's vanished one night, an American citizen. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I think it was actually Hassan— People don't think he's an American citizen. | |
| I mean they're up to speed on like— Hassan Piker thought he was from Maryland. | ||
| Legit. | ||
| And so we're talking – and I know it's not you, but this is like the seventh biggest live streamer in the country. | ||
| Almost every single day Hassan gets 50K. | ||
| And he actually said on his stream in response to the comments I made at the White House, what do you mean he's not from Maryland? | ||
| Are you saying he's from D.C.? | ||
| He's from Maryland. | ||
| No, he's from El Salvador. | ||
| He only lived in Maryland for a few years. | ||
| Okay, I mean, that guy talks for, you know, eight hours a day, like you can parse, you know, any particular statement, but like, I mean, that... | ||
| To me, everything that you said, first of all, half of it sounds unrelated. | ||
| Like, you know, he's had past interactions with law enforcement, like domestic violence and stuff like that. | ||
| To me, that's like neither here nor there. | ||
| It's like character stuff. | ||
| I don't really give a shit about like the character of the guy. | ||
| And I didn't think that was a big part of the story. | ||
| It was like the the fact that he did not. | ||
| Receive due process before being rendered to this bizarre prison in El Salvador. | ||
| That's the strange part. | ||
| That's El Salvador's government with an El Salvadoran citizen. | ||
| That's not our purview. | ||
| I mean he's like – Sent directly to this gigantic complex. | ||
| It's in a highly public way, in a way where the administration is making a show of their refusal to follow the law. | ||
| It's bizarre to witness. | ||
| And this sort of narrow legalistic, oh, he had a hearing, he was da-da-da-da-da-da. | ||
| It's irrelevant to the purposeful spectacle of the Trump administration sending this guy who they admit they should not have done this, but they're like, we don't give a shit. | ||
| We're doing it just because we hate guys like this and we want even people who are in the country legally to be afraid and to self-deport. | ||
| It seems like... | ||
| The only justification is purposeful cruelty for doing it. | ||
| I don't think they call on any legal immigrants to self-deport. | ||
| They're calling on illegal immigrants to self-deport, offering up $1,000 if they do. | ||
| The guy had a legal status to be in the country legally. | ||
| Withholding of deportation isn't legal status. | ||
| Withholding of deportation means he was ordered to leave the country, but the U.S. was barred from sending him to El Salvador, specifically because Barrios 18 in Guatemala had threatened his family. | ||
| So the question... | ||
| As to due process was, this is why I think the actual legal standard is called harmless error. | ||
| If he actually got a either USCIS interview as to the withholding of deportation, it would have been voided because El Salvador no longer has the crime rate that it did 12 years ago or 10 years ago. | ||
| The issue is, are you still at threat from Barrios 18? | ||
| The answer is no. | ||
| And so then your withholding of deportation is void. | ||
| We can deport you. | ||
| The issue is that for deportation of someone like Rego Garcia, he has a home country, El Salvador. | ||
| He has a withholding to that – to El Salvador, a withholding of deportation because of a gang in another country neighboring El Salvador. | ||
| We can't deport him to Venezuela. | ||
| We can't deport him to Mexico. | ||
| That requires treaties. | ||
| The U.S. doesn't have those, though we do have a treaty with El Salvador as it pertains to Trendy Aragua. | ||
| So what ends up happening is… He's got he's got he had two orders of deportation. | ||
| He conceded in 2019 through his lawyer that, yes, he was here illegally. | ||
| Yes, he had been found to be here to be removable under the law. | ||
| And he requested three. | ||
| There's withholding of deportation. | ||
| There was asylum. | ||
| And then there was. | ||
| I forgot the third one is you can't deport him because of a fear of torture. | ||
| It's like a UN thing. | ||
| And they denied two of them. | ||
| Asylum was denied because he didn't apply for it in a timely manner. | ||
| Deportation to El Salvador was granted because of Barrios 18 in Guatemala. | ||
| And then the last one was denied because there's no torture provision. | ||
| The remedy right now would be a Zoom hearing. | ||
| Where he gets on a computer, talks to a – these are executive judges, by the way. | ||
| And they would just say, withholding denied. | ||
| Welcome to El Salvador. | ||
| You're an El Salvador citizen. | ||
| I think the real issue is, yes, it was an administrative error. | ||
| Shouldn't have happened. | ||
| But the remedy is a 10-minute Zoom call. | ||
| If we did that, nothing would change. | ||
| If he was brought back to the United States, he'd immediately be turned around and sent back because his withholding would be voided. | ||
| How is this something that you're certain? | ||
| I mean, the man was – did a judge not order the Trump administration not to remove the guy? | ||
| I think – well, it was under the first Trump administration. | ||
| He was granted the withholding. | ||
| He wasn't supposed to be removed. | ||
| He got caught up in the sweep essentially. | ||
| But again, if the due process due to this man would be a hearing. | ||
| Under withholding of deportation. | ||
| So is he receiving this due process? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| They should do it. | ||
| I actually asked the secretary why not just send the USCIS guy down. | ||
| Why don't you think they're doing it? | ||
| I think there's two potentialities. | ||
| Actually, it's probably more than two, but Trump doesn't want to look weak. | ||
| He doesn't want to look like he's going to be pushed around by the judiciary. | ||
| But I do agree with you. | ||
| Otherwise known as following the law. | ||
| No, not necessarily. | ||
| I mean the universal – In this case? | ||
| No, actually. | ||
| Universal injunctions are unconstitutional. | ||
| So there's a concern that precedent will be set by Trump adhering to universal injunctions pertaining to the Alien Enemies Act or mass deportation, and he's not going to allow that to happen. | ||
| So he doesn't want to set a precedent. | ||
| Universal injunctions don't exist anywhere in the Constitution, and we've seen some 40% of all injunctions ever issued in this way against Trump and his administration. | ||
| He's got more—I believe he has more universal injunctions in the first four months than all other presidents ever got individually. | ||
| And that is—I mean, that is unconstitutional. | ||
| These judges are issuing these mandates which— Right. | ||
| So this is – Again, this is authoritarianism, right? | ||
| How is that authoritarian? | ||
| I agree, the judges are acting in authoritarianism. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's like he, as an executive, is trying to destroy the power of the other branches of government by ignoring their authority, by mounting aggressive legalistic defenses like the ones that you're making in order to expand the power of the presidency and be able to act with impunity, which is part of why he's sending them. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, look, I'm not a legal scholar. | ||
| Generally, I would have said that presidents, I think, tend to follow judicial orders more than Trump tends to, right? | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| If a judge ordered you to shoot a man in the head, would that be illegal? | ||
| I'm using an extreme example on purpose. | ||
| It's obviously no. | ||
| A judge can't order you to kill somebody. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But we're not talking about a judge ordering Trump to kill anybody. | ||
| We're talking about judges. | ||
| And I think we're up to like 87 instances issuing universal mandates across the entire nation based on lawsuits of single individuals. | ||
| So, for example, a recent one was the transgender military ban. | ||
| Donald Trump issued an executive order saying, you know, DSM-5 mental disorder, you are now going to be inadmissible from the armed forces and will be severed unless you are not showing symptoms. | ||
| A judge ruled, from this point forward, the military under Trump must admit all individuals regardless of any mental disorder. | ||
| The judges only have the authority over the people in their courtroom unless it's a class-action lawsuit. | ||
| Universal injunctions are not constitutional. | ||
| So like Brown v. | ||
| Board of Ed. | ||
| So when a person brings a lawsuit to the government... | ||
| The Board of Education is the country, right? | ||
| So a person brings a lawsuit to the government about – to a judge or the Supreme Court about a law being unconstitutional and like the ruling should only affect that case? | ||
| It shouldn't affect – It literally affects the law. | ||
| It affects the law. | ||
| So in the issue of lower courts and this universal injunction, lower courts have the authority over the singular individuals in their courtroom unless it's a class action. | ||
| They could have made it a class action. | ||
| They could have sent out the letters. | ||
| They could have gotten the signatures and said, we need X amount of transgender military service men and women because we want this to apply to all. | ||
| Instead, what happened was, and I'll argue this, this is where it encroaches into the authoritarian. | ||
| The judge said, all means all. | ||
| That's a quote. | ||
| This created a huge uproar because it meant that the military now had to enlist schizophrenics. | ||
| That if someone showed up suffering from manic depressive disorder and they were paraplegic, they were now under this universal injunction entitled to join the military. | ||
| But I mean, a schizophrenic bipolar who's suffering delusions is not going to be able to complete basic training. | ||
| Now, perhaps there'd be an argument, as you're saying it, if the judge only said this stay will apply just to transgender military men and women, but they didn't. | ||
| It was a woman. | ||
| She said it applies to everybody. | ||
| So Trump said, okay. | ||
| I'm not even going to defy that. | ||
| We're going to appeal it. | ||
| He didn't even ignore the order. | ||
| They went to SCOTUS and SCOTUS— You think Trump even knows any of this was happening? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Well, I mean— I don't think he's like— I'd say he probably knew it was happening, but I don't think he had a hand in the day-to-day operations of it. | ||
| Yeah, it's just funny that we go, oh, Trump said this, Trump said that. | ||
| I mean, he certainly hates trans people, but I don't think he's like, and doesn't want them in the military, but I don't think he's like following the day-to-day of the case. | ||
| I agree, I agree. | ||
| He's like, you know, doing loop-de-loops out on the golf course. | ||
| The legalistic points that you're making to me, it's all a fig leaf for the larger thing that he's doing, which is bending the law in these bizarre ways. | ||
| What is the point of sending people to El Salvador, to this prison in El Salvador? | ||
| Part of the... | ||
| The reason to send him there, to send Abrego Garcia there as quickly as possible, is it just shields him from the rest of the legal system. | ||
| It makes it harder to get him back. | ||
| He's El Salvadoran. | ||
| Yeah, but my point is he's entitled to due process as someone who is in America. | ||
| If you shove people into this hole in another country as quickly as possible, it gives you plausible deniability. | ||
| I don't really give a shit about the various legalistic little nuances of the ruling. | ||
| The important part to me is Trump saying – being under an order to bring the guy back and saying, I can't because the president of El Salvador, my best friend, says he won't return him, right? | ||
| How would he get him to do it? | ||
| El Salvador is basically the client state of the Trump administration at this point. | ||
| He'll do whatever he wants. | ||
| Like, Bukele will suck his dick. | ||
| Like, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Will Bukele want something in return? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Give him – like, they're friends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a fig leaf, right? | ||
| It's like, it's in order to, the reason to do it is to just make it more difficult to do the right thing. | ||
| I suppose the issue is, when Brego Garcia got deported, the administration right out was like, this is an administrative error. | ||
| It was an oversight on the withholding of deportation. | ||
| The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Trump must facilitate his return. | ||
| And now, the political debate is, what does facilitate mean? | ||
| The Supreme Court hasn't clarified, which they definitely need to do when you have two factions arguing. | ||
| The left argues it means literally bring him back. | ||
| And the right says, no, it means provide him the means to return should he be able. | ||
| And then I say, OK, the Supreme Court can literally just come out right now and issue like a writ and be like, no, we mean go and negotiate. | ||
| However, the other challenge is the Supreme Court also stated that no one can direct the executive branch to conduct foreign policy. | ||
| So this would mean that Donald Trump. | ||
| Could get him back in the sense that he could negotiate simple terms very easily. | ||
| He could literally say to Bukele, listen, you're going to release the guy from prison. | ||
| You're going to do it. | ||
| If you want to keep working with us, if you want our money, you're going to do it. | ||
| And then we're going to bring him back. | ||
| Bukele would begrudgingly say yes, probably. | ||
| There is the concern that Bukele would say I win my presidency on going after MS-13. | ||
| You've got to give a concession publicly in some way so that it looks like – but you're not going to – look, if you shrug or not, the issue is are we going to direct the executive branch through the judiciary to conduct foreign policy, and you can't do that. | ||
| So I agree. | ||
| Trump – here's what just happened right now. | ||
| The executive courts – this is what they have, their immigration courts – should conduct a Zoom meeting with Abrego Garcia, and we're done. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| That's his due process. | ||
| He's an El Salvadoran citizen in El Salvador who was imprisoned by El Salvador. | ||
| My point is this – the reason – there's any number of things that they could do. | ||
| There are some things that both of us agree that they should do. | ||
| There's more things that I think they should do than you do. | ||
| But et cetera. | ||
| The point is they are like loudly and proudly not doing any of that, deporting a guy they know shouldn't be deported. | ||
| But that's – hold on. | ||
| That's not true in any of the media. | ||
| The media – The full reporting that we get across the board from the New York Times to CNN to even Fox News was he was accidentally deported without his hearing on withholding. | ||
| So it wasn't an intentional, we're going to get this guy and get him out. | ||
| It was a, ah, crap. | ||
| So when Trump is like holding up photos of his tattoos with like MS-13 on it and like they're giving press conferences about he beat us, what they're doing, character, you know, assassination on the guy, like all of that is accidental. | ||
| That's a political attack against Democrats. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And so let me just get to the end of my point, OK, is that, you know, they turn it into a political attack because they are. | ||
| Acting lawlessly. | ||
| They're proud to be acting lawlessly. | ||
| The point is to demonstrate on this issue we will act lawlessly. | ||
| You're not safe if you are even under the protection of a court order in this country, and you should be frightened, and you should leave. | ||
| It's an authoritarian attack against immigrants directly, and it's a leveraging of the state to try to frighten immigrants and other groups, not only illegal immigrants. | ||
| OK, so let's talk about the students who have been detained and deported, right? | ||
| These are people who are under student visas, right? | ||
| They appear at a protest or two. | ||
| And they're thrown into vans. | ||
| They're held in these bizarre facilities. | ||
| There's multiple cases. | ||
| So the point of this is to frighten A, people at universities, B, pro-Palestinian protesters. | ||
| That means any protester on the left, of course. | ||
| And C, immigrants of all types, including those who are here on legal immigrant visas. | ||
| The details of the individual cases don't matter. | ||
| They like creating a firestorm around someone who is here legally, creating a huge controversy about them, and then saying, we don't give a fuck. | ||
| We're going to do whatever we want to these people because we want you to be afraid. | ||
| And that, to me, that's an expression of like, Pure authoritarianism. | ||
| It's a leveraging of state power to frighten undergroups in society that these people don't like. | ||
| It's very straightforward. | ||
| We can mount as many legal defenses as we want of it and say, blah, blah, blah, according to this statute or that statute. | ||
| But the actual action is just designed to frighten people Trump doesn't like. | ||
| And it's bizarre to see him do it. | ||
| Let's say yes, but none of that's illegal. | ||
| That's all actually codified law that they're allowed to do. | ||
| Okay, yeah, sure. | ||
| It's fucking bullshit. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| It's bad for the country. | ||
| It's bad for the American spirit. | ||
| We can talk about a lot of bad things that every administration has done in the past that liberals and Democrats have covered up or participated in or didn't argue against. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I mean, we're talking about this one currently. | ||
| It feels disingenuous. | ||
| It feels disingenuous to talk about one thing that the Trump administration is doing because Democrats have done bad things, too? | ||
| Well, like, for instance... | ||
| Donald Trump, through Marco Rubio specifically, revoking student visas, saying that these individuals represent a threat to our national security by adhering to our enemies. | ||
| And literally, that's what they're claiming. | ||
| I think it's ridiculous to claim that a student who's anti-Israel is working with Hamas. | ||
| That's silly. | ||
| But that's the argument he's making, and under the INA, he has the authority to do it. | ||
| So you say, okay, well, when people come in here on student visas, they do sign agreements saying they won't do certain things. | ||
| They do it. | ||
| They get kicked out. | ||
| So this is okay with you because it's narrowly legal under Marco Rubio's purview? | ||
| I would say what's fine with me is the revocation of a visa for someone who's not a citizen who's here conditionally. | ||
| Like Mohammed Khalil, who was on a conditional temporary visa, and if he gets revoked, I just say, well, that's a conditional visa. | ||
| I don't go to Singapore and spit on the ground. | ||
| I'll get caned. | ||
| So sorry. | ||
| You think what's happened to those students is like, that's okay with you? | ||
| Not legally. | ||
| I'm talking about like, as an event that occurred in the country, you're like, oh, it's good that that happened. | ||
| It's okay with me. | ||
| You think it's moral. | ||
| You think it's right. | ||
| You think it's just. | ||
| I'm not talking about legally. | ||
| I'm talking about like, you know, you say you don't- 60%? | ||
| Yeah, like nothing so easily black and white. | ||
| Rebeza Osterku, you know, she wrote an op-ed. | ||
| The only thing that anybody has even claimed that she's done is she wrote an extremely mild op-ed in her campus newspaper asking that the college sort of consider being supportive of the Palestinian cause in some vaguely defined way. | ||
| Her visa is revoked. | ||
| We've all seen the video, right? | ||
| People come and like grab her and literally put her into a vehicle. | ||
| They're wearing masks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, she's like, she's stopped in an alarming way on the, It's not like they filmed that and published that footage, though. | ||
| That was security camera footage. | ||
| Yeah, but they did it in a... | ||
| Hey, if you want a student, like a young woman... | ||
| There's other ways to arrest them than have six people show up wearing masks, surround her in a pincer formation. | ||
| Like, it's designed to create terror. | ||
| You don't have to do it that way. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| And Biden's DOJ didn't need to show up at Roger Stone's house at four in the morning. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If you want to bring up another example, I'll say I condemn that as well. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| If that'll keep us on the topic for a second. | ||
| We've had numerous instances across administrations that have acted similarly. | ||
| Okay, so let's stay on Ramesa Ozturk. | ||
| Why do you think that... | ||
| Like, what was the administration's purpose? | ||
| Not the legal argument for whether they can do it or not. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| It's literal Israel. | ||
| And it's absurd that they'd argue... | ||
| You know, what they're doing when it comes to these students is they're saying they're a threat to our national security. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| Do you think she was a threat to the national security? | ||
| It's technically the truth, which is the best kind of the truth, in that, yes, opposing... | ||
| U.S. alliance with Israel is bad. | ||
| Rallying in any meaningful way students to oppose Israel is bad for the U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| But come on. | ||
| A woman writing an op-ed that's not from here is nothing compared to the people from here writing the same op-eds. | ||
| What they're doing is they're basically saying, I agree with you in that they're saying, do not do these things or we will deport you. | ||
| We will find the thinnest of hairs of a reason. | ||
| To revoke your visa if you come out against us. | ||
| I'm not completely in disagreement. | ||
| So the reason why I say 60% when you asked me if I thought it was morally right, because obviously they don't need six guys swarming or in a pincer formation. | ||
| One guy could have knocked on her door and said, ma 'am, your visa has been revoked. | ||
| I'm going to need you to come with me. | ||
| We've got a black SUV you can sit in. | ||
| We're going to deal with this in a rather kind of boring way. | ||
| They didn't need to do that. | ||
| The claim about a threat to our national security is grossly overestimated. | ||
| The claim that these people have adhered to Hamas is grossly overestimated. | ||
| That being said, it is still completely legal in that an individual who comes here on a conditional visa not violate the conditions of that visa. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So it's legal. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| But, dude, I'm asking you, like, do you think it's good for America that, like, college students who are here on a student visa because of political speech— Are being thrown into vans and having legal things be done. | ||
| Sure, it's narrowly legal, but she's being put in a prison and then she's being forcibly deported. | ||
| Do you think that's good for America? | ||
| Marginally. | ||
| What do you think is good, even marginally? | ||
| What's the minor small benefit to America? | ||
| Do not come to our country and rally against it and its interests. | ||
| And I apply this too. | ||
| So what is the U.S. interest that her writing an op-ed… The Suez Canal. | ||
| The Suez Canal? | ||
| Right. | ||
| The United States – the reason why the U.S. is so – I love these Zijus people that are like, Israel controls the foreign policy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shut up. | |
| The U.S. interest with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia has a lot to do with the Red Sea. | ||
| And the Suez Canal. | ||
| This is why Donald Trump is obsessed with Panama and Greenland. | ||
| He wants to control the global trade routes is what America's largely done. | ||
| That's why I say it's a gross mischaracterization to claim that an op-ed is a threat to national security in that it is in the smallest of senses. | ||
| Students coming here and telling us to oppose our support with Israel puts us at risk in terms of the sentiment of a younger generation as to whether or not we'll fund Israel and control the Suez Canal. | ||
| But I asked you if you thought it was good to deport her. | ||
| That's a marginally. | ||
| Because we have national interests in the Suez Canal and she wrote an op-ed? | ||
| That's the U.S.'s interest. | ||
| Okay, so why do you think it was good to deport her? | ||
| Asserting U.S. sovereignty. | ||
| Do not come to our country and tell us what to do. | ||
| You've got a condition of your visa. | ||
| You're a guest in this country. | ||
| Adhere to the agreements we have. | ||
| So you think that America should be a country where if you come here on a student visa, you're paying into our university system, you're coming here for the reasons that completely legally we've invited you to come. | ||
| This is why America is the country it is, partially, because people like this have come for decades. | ||
| If you... | ||
| You think America should be the kind of country where if somebody comes here, they write an op-ed that says... | ||
| Literally anything about U.S. foreign policy, they should be deported. | ||
| So going forward, literally everyone in the world should know if you are on foot on U.S. soil, you should not say anything in public about U.S. national priorities of any kind or else you could be deported. | ||
| You think it's good to have a country where that's the understanding? | ||
| This is what I'm trying to go down to. | ||
| The individuals who come to this country and apply for student visas have made that agreement already. | ||
| So while I would argue the deportation of Romesa is the thinnest of hairs, Mahmoud Khalil makes more sense. | ||
| I mean, he organized and helped lead protests that resulted in damage, occupations of buildings, several staff at the University of Columbia. | ||
| Let's say on Romesa because then we don't have to split hairs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The issue is do not come to our country and tell us what to do. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| If you're here as a guest of this nation, you do not start rallying its people in opposition to the will of the voters and what the government is doing. | ||
| I mean, I really thought the point of America was... | ||
| Freedom of speech was like a main value here. | ||
| I think that's why people come here. | ||
| It's why I like living here because I always felt that, hey, I can express an opinion, especially about U.S. foreign policy, and not have anything happen to me. | ||
| So that's a right that only citizens have. | ||
| And you think America should be a country where, if you are not literally an American citizen, if you express... | ||
| Any opinion about U.S. foreign policy? | ||
| I mean, and we both agree the opinion she expressed was pretty mild. | ||
| It wasn't like a very inflammatory opinion, right? | ||
| It was like it's pretty mainstream political opinion to have. | ||
| It conflicts with U.S. interests about the Suez. | ||
| I still don't really understand that point, but let's just say that it does. | ||
| That should be grounds for being forcibly removed from the country. | ||
| And like whether or not it's legally the case that we could do that, do you think it's good? | ||
| You think it's good to have a country where things like that happen? | ||
| You think a thriving country is one where people come into the country, they write an op-ed for the paper of the organization of which they're a member. | ||
| She's paying tuition to go to this school, and she's working for the student newspaper or whatever. | ||
| She's writing an op-ed. | ||
| She's probably not employed there, but she's writing for the student newspaper, and that is grounds to be deported. | ||
| Always was. | ||
| You think that's the kind of country America is? | ||
| Always has been. | ||
| I guess that's where we fundamentally disagree. | ||
| But hold on. | ||
| The Immigration and Naturalization Act has multiple provisions that outright say this is the case. | ||
| And so that's why I say it's marginally good because the issue is the U.S. asserting its sovereignty and saying as a guest in this nation, we ask you not do certain things. | ||
| We ask you don't write mildly worded op-eds about U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis. | ||
| A different country's war. | ||
| Let's not load it. | ||
| Let's not load it. | ||
| Let's say, do not speak out against our foreign policy. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| So America is a country where, in your view, if you are a foreign national, you are here on a student visa, you've been invited to the country, you should not... | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I just want to – it's fair. | ||
| To me, Tim, it's a very baffling position. | ||
| Listen, you're arguing that I should call for illegal activities. | ||
| Let me put it – Let me phrase it this way. | ||
| My attitude is Congress has passed a law. | ||
| It was passed in the House, in the Senate, signed by the president and upheld by the courts. | ||
| This law states it is the purview of the secretary of state to make the decisions as to whether or not these visas can stand for a variety of reasons. | ||
| I say it's marginally good. | ||
| Her opinion was mild, and I don't think it—I think it's silly to claim that she's adhering to Hamas because an anti-Israel position. | ||
| My point is, for the government to assert its authority under the law as codified by Congress, the president, and the courts is marginally good. | ||
| Marginally. | ||
| Marginally is, I said 60% maybe. | ||
| If I was president, I wouldn't do it. | ||
| But the idea that our country asserts its authority to say, you are guests in this country and we will make the determination whether you can stay or not, is a normal process. | ||
| And to argue that the government should not assert its authority when it feels it should, I think is silly. | ||
| I'm so looking. | ||
| There's a world we want to live in, and then there's, I'll put it this way. | ||
| I think people have a right to keep and bear nuclear weapons. | ||
| The Founding Fathers were clear in their intent on the right to bear arms, which included privateers with grape shot. | ||
| Now we've changed that and said only large corporations that the government approves of can have nuclear weapons. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Nobody should have nuclear weapons. | ||
| My point is that if you want to change the law, you have to do it through the constitutional process and that adhering to that is typically a good thing. | ||
| I don't know how we got on nuclear weapons. | ||
| It's a point about process of law. | ||
| And saying the government has a right to do something, so if they choose to do it, okay, if you have a problem with it, then Congress should repeal those, specifically amend the INA to remove those provisions. | ||
| It is completely legal under the United States at the will of the American people that this happened. | ||
| You don't like that it's happening now, but this was the will of the voters and Congress, and it's been law for like 50 years. | ||
| Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| We should change it then. | ||
| So my point is upholding the law is marginally good. | ||
| Sometimes the law is bad, and that's why it's not always good. | ||
| In this regard... | ||
| So you're saying simply... | ||
| The fact that Marco Rubio exercised his legal authority to do something was good. | ||
| It's like he had the legal authority to do it. | ||
| He could have enforced this law, as he saw it, on anybody. | ||
| He could have enforced it on a comedian, right, who's in town and goes on stage and says, hey, you know what, I disagree with this or that, or hey, I just did shows in the UK and Amsterdam, and I made fun of UK politics, made fun of American politics. | ||
| You wouldn't dare make fun of Islam, though. | ||
| Go to the UK and mock Islam. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Well, I don't have any jokes about Islam. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| They got Pakistani grooming games raping little girls. | ||
| Why won't you go to the UK? | ||
| What? | ||
| Why won't you go to the UK and make jokes about Islam? | ||
| I don't think it's very funny. | ||
| I don't have any jokes about it. | ||
| I'm so confused. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Okay, let me help unconfuse you. | ||
| Are there jokes that can be made about Islam? | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| Wait, I don't want to go to this particular rabbit hole. | ||
| Are you terrified? | ||
| You're a hypocrite. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Are there jokes you can make about Islam? | ||
| Mohammed banged a little girl, right? | ||
| I'm really baffled. | ||
| I'm terrified of this subject. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| In the UK, you can be jailed for making jokes about Islam or even bring up the grooming gangs. | ||
| There are people who go online and pointed out that a stabbing was carried out by a Muslim and they got arrested for it. | ||
| You, I'll bet you $1,000, you will not go to the UK and make a joke about any of that stuff. | ||
| Because you will not go to a foreign country and in violation of their laws, speak out against what they've said not to speak out against. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| I dare you. | ||
| $10,000. | ||
| Cash in your pocket if you go to the UK and make a joke about Mohammed having a 12-year-old wife. | ||
| Man, we got here faster than I thought we would in this conversation where you're shouting at me about something I don't understand. | ||
| I don't really understand how you would think it's incumbent upon me. | ||
| Do you think anybody watching this right now thinks you are confused by the notion that in the UK you go to jail for mocking Islam? | ||
| I don't understand how we got onto you shouting at me about Islam specifically. | ||
| I'd like to return to... | ||
| Okay, it's because you said people should be allowed to come to this country and speak out against it. | ||
| And you said you're a comedian and you go to other countries, right? | ||
| And you said you go to the UK. | ||
| And I said, okay, if you go to the UK, speak out in violation of their laws and see what happens. | ||
| And you said, I'm confused. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| What don't you understand? | ||
| Will you go to Turkey? | ||
| Will you go to Turkey and speak out against Islam? | ||
| I mean, if I have a joke to make sure, I don't have a joke about those particular topics. | ||
| You would? | ||
| I would? | ||
| You're saying if you had a joke about it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I would try to do the best I can. | ||
| I always try to poke the bear as much as I can. | ||
| It's part of the job of a comedian. | ||
| As it pertains to one of the world's largest religions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, come on. | |
| I mean, I haven't written a joke about that recently. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| I'm a free speech guy, right? | ||
| I think that something that's nice about America is that we're a country that has that value and that we don't generally think that you should be tossed into a van and kicked out of the country for expressing an opinion. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| It is a change. | ||
| I think it's a change in America to most people around the world to feel that, oh, wait, if I go to America and I express a mild opinion about their foreign policy in my own student paper or maybe on a stage or maybe somewhere else, I could be, without any warning to me, accosted by six people on the street, thrown into a van, and taken out of the country. | ||
| Oh, come on, accosted. | ||
| Let me finish. | ||
| I think that's a new idea for a lot of people that America is that type of country. | ||
| I think that Donald Trump's purpose is to turn America into that type of country. | ||
| I think that that's bad. | ||
| I think it makes the country smaller. | ||
| I think it makes the country worse. | ||
| I think it's a violation of most of the values that I grew up with as an American. | ||
| And that's my view of what's happening in the country. | ||
| Now, if you want to say, hey, Then that's your prerogative. | ||
| It's a big difference between us that you don't like free speech in that way. | ||
| I mean, that's loaded language, right? | ||
| Yeah, all the language you're using is pretty loaded. | ||
| Well, you keep using adjectives to describe things to diminish one thing while exacerbate or exaggerate something else. | ||
| I do use the English language to express my thoughts and opinions, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but it's strawmanning. | ||
| It's not a legitimate attack of the ideas, right? | ||
| So accosted on the street. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| She was arrested by a relatively large group of men compared to what a normal arrest would require, which I think they didn't need to do and was silly. | ||
| So we can say... | ||
| She was arrested by several men, unmarked, or plain clothes, which didn't need to happen. | ||
| But I don't need to say, like, she was accosted by men on the street and, like, it was about a mild opinion. | ||
| It's like, okay, listen, the facts of the case, like I said, I don't like the idea that people come to this country and then try and tell us how to do, how to live our lives. | ||
| You're not for free speech, I understand. | ||
| I think American citizens have self-determination and sovereignty, and I will say this even of the Canadians who keep coming here, and they keep getting involved in our politics. | ||
| I'm friends with some of them, but I think it's fair to say that there is an issue with Canadians, largely conservatives, who come to this country and then start advocating for conservative evs in a country they're not from. | ||
| To be fair, there are liberals Canadians who do it too. | ||
| I find it to be silly. | ||
| That being said, Canada as a bordering nation with a largely overlapping culture is a morally different question, but still applies in much the same way. | ||
| So I do take issue with foreigners coming to my country. | ||
| It's a nice white country, so we like it. | ||
| They call it, what, the most multicultural country in the world, I think? | ||
| They're big on immigration. | ||
| I think Toronto is considered to be the most multicultural city in the world. | ||
| So Canada actually is, you can call it a nice white country, that's technically the truth, but it also is very, very much in favor of immigration and diversity and all these things, largely what many of the conservatives are coming here speaking out against. | ||
| But without – I do hear you. | ||
| So this is a country where if you're from another country and you're in America, don't say anything about our politics or you could be forcibly removed from the country. | ||
| You're comfortable with America being that kind of country. | ||
| That's something that's – that's a value of yours. | ||
| Those are your values. | ||
| See, you're doing it again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, I'm trying to understand what you actually believe. | |
| Yeah, I'd say marginally it's a good thing. | ||
| Because I think that's a point of distinction. | ||
| It's useful in a conversation like this to be like, okay, I have my value, you have your value. | ||
| And my value is like, I really like it when people say what the fuck they think about any country's politics. | ||
| We can simplify it. | ||
| My value would just be... | ||
| To whatever mathematical degree, American sovereignty supersedes the right of foreigners to speak about our policies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But in this case— That's just my value. | |
| So you think that literally any time America is exercising its sovereignty, that's like a good thing in that particular case? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| You're a guest in our— With all due respect, I think I've said it like six, seven times. | ||
| You're a guest in our country. | ||
| Adhere to the rules. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That includes conservative Canadians, conservative Brits. | ||
| That's Carl Benjamin. | ||
| That's Paul Joseph Watson. | ||
| That's Viva Frye. | ||
| That's Seth Rogen. | ||
| And it's also... | ||
| All those people should not speak about... | ||
| American national interests, like the Suez Canal, we shouldn't say, oh, the Panama Canal, or like, you know, Puerto Rico State or not. | ||
| They should not speak about American politics. | ||
| You can speak about what you want, but speech has consequences. | ||
| I mean, okay, so we can move on. | ||
| I'll say to me, that's a radically different America than I thought I grew up in. | ||
| And I think it's fucked up that we're becoming that kind of country. | ||
| I don't believe you think that's true. | ||
| You don't believe I think that's true? | ||
| Well, I mean, I suppose... | ||
| Like what I just said, I believe. | ||
| You're like, I don't believe that. | ||
| Well, because if we go back several administrations, that's not been the case ever. | ||
| I mean, look at New York in the 2000s when the Bush administration rounded people up. | ||
| Well, I'm sorry, it wasn't Bush. | ||
| During the Bush years. | ||
| And they put 200 people in like a bus. | ||
| They locked them in a bus cage. | ||
| Yeah, that was bad. | ||
| That's the country you grew up in. | ||
| The idea that these things haven't been happening. | ||
| George Carlin got arrested for swearing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it was bad. | |
| And then we said, oh, we shouldn't do that anymore. | ||
| And it never changed. | ||
| The idea that you think you grew up in a nation where you could say whatever you wanted is an absurdity. | ||
| George Carlin went to jail for swearing. | ||
| And that was good, you think? | ||
| No, it wasn't. | ||
| And you think it's good that Ramesa Oztek is being forced into the country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's not a citizen. | |
| She's on a conditional visa as conditioned by the INA and the existing administration and the will of the voters. | ||
| You're arguing that Osterk's deportation makes sense because George Carlin was arrested for swearing. | ||
| No! | ||
| You said I grew up in a country with free speech, and I said, no, you did not. | ||
| It's never been true. | ||
| And you're like, okay, that's, yes. | ||
| So under your view, America is a country that doesn't have free speech, never had free speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| And that's a good thing. | ||
| No! | ||
| Because we're exercising our sovereignty. | ||
| No! | ||
| Okay, but you think it's a good thing that Ramesa Ozturk doesn't have free speech? | ||
| You understand the distinction between a non-citizen here on a conditional visa and an American citizen being arrested for swearing? | ||
| I understand that there's a distinction. | ||
| I don't think that either of those people should be treated differently in that case. | ||
| Let me see. | ||
| I don't agree with you, man. | ||
| This country has never had free speech. | ||
| It's a fact. | ||
| When the Founding Fathers finalized the Constitution... | ||
| Do you think we should have free speech? | ||
| Yes, but there are limits on what free speech is based on the moral worldview of the individual argument. | ||
| For instance, do you believe someone should be allowed to direct someone to commit a violent crime? | ||
| That's not the moral worldview of an argument. | ||
| That is the effect of the speech. | ||
| So you think that whether you have free speech, your words, should be based on the moral worldview of the argument. | ||
| So to understand your view of what free speech means, I'm asking you a question. | ||
| If somebody says explicitly, you, right now, commit crime to that person, is that free speech? | ||
| Someone says, you right now commit crime to that person, and what, do they do it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I mean, I guess I'm not a free speech scholar, but that is probably legal consequences for that free speech. | ||
| It is illegal to do that. | ||
| Do you think someone should be able to yell fire in a crowded theater? | ||
| I mean, this is the canonical example of speech that's not free speech. | ||
| It actually is. | ||
| That's Brandenburg v. | ||
| Ohio. | ||
| It is, in fact, legal speech. | ||
| I don't think people should. | ||
| I understand the Supreme Court's ruling on that issue. | ||
| The challenge with free speech, let's go back to the beginning of this country, blasphemy laws were on the books after they even had the First Amendment. | ||
| They literally said you can't blaspheme. | ||
| We would say that's not free speech, but how did you have a First Amendment if you arrested people for blaspheming? | ||
| My point is, and this is an anarchist philosophy, The laws of the country are dictated by those of the power to enforce it. | ||
| That's why it used to be illegal to put a pie on your windowsill, but even though it's still illegal, nobody arrests you for it. | ||
| So free speech does change throughout the generations. | ||
| We never grew up in an era... | ||
| We never had a time in our lives where you had true free speech the way the absolutists want it to be. | ||
| I'm talking about the story that we tell about ourselves as a country, man. | ||
| I'm talking about the values that we have collectively as people. | ||
| And of course those are always changing a little bit and people are trying to pull them in one direction or another. | ||
| I would have thought that... | ||
| I don't know that much about you. | ||
| I know you're very involved with Occupy and stuff like that and protest movements, which I think is cool work. | ||
| I would have thought that a student... | ||
| Writing an op-ed about another country's war and her own institution's support for it vis-a-vis our country's foreign policy would be the kind of thing that you would think is a sort of free speech that we should value. | ||
| And that is the kind of free speech that I think... | ||
| I personally think a lot of the idea of America is built upon. | ||
| I think it's one of the good things about the country, that this is a country where you can come here and you can express your opinion mildly in the newspaper. | ||
| What happened to Kent State? | ||
| Yeah, I think Kent State was bad. | ||
| My point is, there's things we wish America was. | ||
| But I kind of feel like a non-citizen getting deported. | ||
| But this one you said you think is good. | ||
| You're not sitting here going, ah, man, yeah, that's a bummer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She got deported, dude. | |
| What are you talking about? | ||
| She didn't get shot in the face. | ||
| A conditional visa was revoked. | ||
| I'm not crying about it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I mean, I think she cares. | ||
| I think her family cares. | ||
| That's too fucking bad. | ||
| I think the people of her university care. | ||
| I think other, I think, like, change the law, man. | ||
| This is a marginal issue for a single person who was in violation of the INA as it's enforced by a government that was elected by a popular majority, or I should say by a plurality, but the popular vote. | ||
| So let me pull this up because this is what we were talking about earlier. | ||
| This is RCP from April 22nd. | ||
| Every age bracket, to be fair, 40-49 is a tie, but RealClearPolitics aggregate shows from all the latest polls, 70-plus is the only age group that has a negative view of Trump's job. | ||
| I'm just trying to make sense of your position around free speech because you agree with me about all the past things in America that you're talking about. | ||
| Kent State, you're talking about George Carlin and all these other things and these were bad abrogations of free speech. | ||
| Indeed, deportation is not a murder. | ||
| You're going home. | ||
| I'm giving you a ride home. | ||
| If you came to my house, I let you in the door. | ||
| I said, you can hang out tonight. | ||
| He started shit-talking my brother. | ||
| I said, bro, I'm going to give you a ride home. | ||
| I don't think you should be here. | ||
| That's not an affront to someone's sovereignty or free speech. | ||
| It's like the worst thing that happened to you is I gave you a ride home. | ||
| I'm going to cry. | ||
| She's going home. | ||
| What's the problem? | ||
| Home's nice. | ||
| She was here conditionally. | ||
| We said, hey, we kind of think you're being a dick. | ||
| We're going to give you a ride home. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| When I get a ride home, six guys don't normally shove me into a van, and then my family doesn't know where I am. | ||
| You know, how about you're at a bar, and you're acting out in some way, and they say, listen, buddy, security throws you out of the bar. | ||
| Do you feel this woman was acting out? | ||
| Do you think she was acting inappropriately? | ||
| Do you think that she was acting... | ||
| I've already told you, I did not. | ||
| Okay, so then how are you justifying what happened? | ||
| I don't think you can... | ||
| Is it legally narrow that it can happen, therefore it's good? | ||
| I don't think you know how to separate. | ||
| I just don't think you know how to comprehend the separation between I have no issue with a woman making her argument. | ||
| I think it was absurd to claim she's adhering to Hamas because she's critical of Israel. | ||
| But her visa is conditional. | ||
| And it is the authority of these United States and the Secretary of State to revoke that. | ||
| So it's okay. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Trump won the popular vote. | ||
| Sorry, man. | ||
| This is the hump that I can't get over. | ||
| Clearly. | ||
| You don't have any problem with what she actually did, right? | ||
| But Trump and Rubio had the narrow legal ability to do it. | ||
| You're not following. | ||
| Do you agree with their decision to do it? | ||
| I do not. | ||
| I think there is a net negative to a degree that foreigners come to this country to dictate our politics. | ||
| I'm sorry, dictator politics or just give their opinion in the newspaper that's dictating? | ||
| I'll talk about the language. | ||
| To come here and advocate for policies of the American people. | ||
| So you feel that foreign nationals of all kinds, when they're in the United States, should never speak about our politics ever upon pain of legal punishment that is a position that you have about America generally? | ||
| Did they agree to it? | ||
| When they applied for the visa under the INA, did they agree to those terms? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The answer is yes, they did. | ||
| It clearly states when you're coming on a condition, you can't do certain things. | ||
| It literally says you won't protest. | ||
| And we still would allow them to hold a sign-up or something. | ||
| But maybe if they didn't... | ||
| But apparently we don't allow them to hold a sign-up. | ||
| I'm not asking about what they agreed to. | ||
| I'm not asking the legal justification. | ||
| Do you, Tim Pool, believe that? | ||
| As a moral issue, as a practical issue, do you think that America should be a country in which every foreign national in the country should feel that they should never speak about American politics under pain of legal punishment? | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't think that that's – you don't agree with that? | ||
| You presented me an absolute. | ||
| You gave me the extreme end. | ||
| OK. | ||
| So it remains to Osterk I think is a really illustrative example because it was such a mild inversion. | ||
| They've made an agreement upon entering this country that if they are in violation of the terms of their visa, it may be revoked. | ||
| If they come here with the intent of advocating against U.S. foreign policy, that is a consequence. | ||
| Speech has consequences. | ||
| I think we're getting hung up on the issue that I've clearly answered, and I understand maybe you don't understand, but... | ||
| No, I just... | ||
| I think I've pinned you down well enough that you just really have a much smaller view of free speech than I do and I think a lot of Americans do. | ||
| I don't think what you said means anything. | ||
| I think it's a change to the American spirit. | ||
| I think it makes the country smaller. | ||
| It's a shittier country to live in where people live in fear of what they say when they're here on a student. | ||
| They always have. | ||
| Yeah, and that's bad! | ||
| It's bad to live in fear of saying shit. | ||
| This is not – see, here's the issue. | ||
| I suppose your memory goes back three years. | ||
| Your whole bullshit culture baiting thing about the Islam stuff in England, if what you say is true and it may be, I don't know because I don't really give – like I don't really follow that as you do. | ||
| But I think it's bad about that country. | ||
| You would never go to the UK and do those things. | ||
| If I were – now look, I don't know of the policies of which you speak, OK? | ||
| But if I were to be in England and I were to make a joke on their stage and I were to be put into a van and removed from a country, I would say this is a bad thing about England and I would – I think that the country sucks and I think that they should change it and I don't think people should go there anymore and that sucks for them and it sucks for us. | ||
| You wouldn't make a joke about Islam in the United States. | ||
| You wouldn't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What's that meant to prove? | ||
| You don't actually believe in free speech. | ||
| You fear the consequences. | ||
| Because I don't make a joke about the topic that you demand me to? | ||
| Because this topic in particular has resulted in people like a Charlie Hebdo getting murdered. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Yeah, that's bad. | ||
| It's bad that they were murdered. | ||
| South Park tried just showing Muhammad and Comedy Central wouldn't let him do it. | ||
| Yeah, that's bad. | ||
| So let's see you stand up for that value and come out and make a joke about Islam. | ||
| I stood up about free speech plenty of times. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Take it to the next level, brother. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How about we do this? | ||
| You believe in free speech? | ||
| Dude, this is what you do when you've lost an argument, is that you just like, you just jump to this. | ||
| You brought it up. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| You brought it up. | ||
| Oh, the Islam piece of it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no. | ||
| And now I'm continuing the conversation and you're derailing into you must have lost the argument. | ||
| No, no, because you're... | ||
| Let's stand up for South Park, for Matt Stone and Trey Parker. | ||
| Yeah, I stand up for them. | ||
| So go on stage and show a big picture of Muhammad. | ||
| I'm sorry, the thing that you're doing... | ||
| Stand up for free speech, brother, do it. | ||
| I'll do it with you. | ||
| So you're demanding me to go on stage and do something specific, and unless I do, I'm a coward? | ||
| I didn't say you were a coward. | ||
| This is a bizarre rhetorical move. | ||
| This is a bizarre rhetorical move. | ||
| I didn't call you a coward. | ||
| I said prove you care about free speech. | ||
| Do something that creates real risk to your person for free speech. | ||
| Yeah, I speak about shit all the time, dude. | ||
| I'm happy to live in America where the things I say don't create real risk to my person. | ||
| In fact, if I were to say the things that you're saying, I would not be creating real risk to my person. | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| I do not think so. | ||
| Then why not just do it? | ||
| Prove me wrong. | ||
| Because I don't have anything in particular to say about those topics. | ||
| Just put a picture of Muhammad up and say praise be. | ||
| Prove I'm wrong. | ||
| I'm really glad we got here again because it's just very fun to sit in how weird this part of the conversation is. | ||
| Remember Charlie Hebdo? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| A bunch of people were shot because they... | ||
| Got a picture of Muhammad. | ||
| Yeah, that's bad. | ||
| You think if you did that, they might want to shoot you too? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| So you shouldn't do it? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I don't have it. | ||
| Well, you know, the particular images that they showed I didn't think were, like, very funny. | ||
| Like, it was their right to do it. | ||
| South Park do it either. | ||
| They censored the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, that's bad. | ||
| Yeah, that's bad. | ||
| And I think that's contrary to American values. | ||
| Why won't the free speech people who believe we should live in this country stand up against that? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm not standing up for free speech unless I do what exactly? | ||
| I didn't say the only way for you to stand up for free speech is something I said, why won't people who are claiming... | ||
| You called me a hypocrite and I don't understand what's hypocritical about me only doing jokes about the topics that I'm interested in. | ||
| You would not go to the UK and speak in violation of their speech laws. | ||
| I mean, I went there, I made fun of their government, I talked about, you know, the fire at Heathrow because that impacted my travel when I was there. | ||
| They have hate speech laws. | ||
| You can make fun of white people, but you can't make fun of non-white people. | ||
| You go to jail for that. | ||
| Okay, yeah, I think that would, if it's as you say, that sounds like a, if it would apply to me as a comedian, I think it would say that's a bad law. | ||
| I would not go to Turkey and speak out against Islam, and I would not go to the UK and violate their speech laws. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So are you a coward? | ||
| What's your point? | ||
| No, I actually agree with the sovereignty of nations, and if they have laws, I'm not going to violate them. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| I see the point that you're making. | ||
| Okay, so when things are legal, they're just? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay, so then what is your point? | ||
| Your argument is that... | ||
| Foreigners should come here. | ||
| So one of your values is you should respect the sovereignty of other nations. | ||
| But again, look, this is a recent change in the way that the U.S. prosecutes and selectively enforces the laws that are on the books. | ||
| And that's, again, what happened to Ramesa Ozturk. | ||
| And again, that's like a material change in the spirit and values of America. | ||
| Yeah, I think we spent like an hour on the one subject. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've been having a great time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It's been fun. | ||
| I had a question. | ||
| I have a question for you. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| You mentioned that Trump is – it's the makings of authoritarianism and things like that. | ||
| Do you think that's distinct from any other administration? | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Is the authoritarian push from the Trump administration – obviously there's going to be procedural distinctions, but I mean like – Were other administrations not also doing similar authoritarian maneuvers that were a gas? | ||
| Yeah, I mean every single American administration could – I'm sure I could find things that I disagree with. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think one of the challenges that we have in the United States right now is the people that largely support Trump and voted for him, particularly in his first term and largely carrying over in the second one, non-consecutive, had never voted before. | ||
| We saw parts of the country that normally don't vote start turning red, start lighting up with new voters. | ||
| I was at a rally for Trump in Fort Lauderdale, and most of the people that I met were like, I don't vote. | ||
| I never voted before. | ||
| So these were new voters, which were like poor, white, working-class people. | ||
| And so what I think we end up seeing happen, especially right now, is for younger voters, it's interesting considering they are shifting to the right, but they also have Less memory of administrations past. | ||
| For me, I voted for Obama. | ||
| He was an evil man. | ||
| And I didn't vote in 2016 because I said the system is corrupt. | ||
| I've lived through, you know, I was a teenager when the Gore v. | ||
| Bush stuff happened. | ||
| And I just saw bickering and arguments and I'm right, I'm right. | ||
| Then war and... | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| Then Obama comes around and I was, how was I, 22 or something? | ||
| And people were like, you gotta vote. | ||
| I was 21, no, 22. You gotta vote for him. | ||
| He's changed. | ||
| It's new. | ||
| He wasn't supposed to win. | ||
| Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the person. | ||
| So I voted for Obama. | ||
| One of the first things he does is he bombs a Pakistani village, kills a bunch of women and children. | ||
| And I went, holy fuck! | ||
| Stopped voting. | ||
| Didn't vote in 2016 either. | ||
| I said, fuck this. | ||
| The issue we see largely now is to see so many people who are, you know, older millennials, Gen X and boomer acting like Donald Trump is an aberration. | ||
| For a lot of people, it's like, you're fucking lying. | ||
| You're lying or you have a myopic view. | ||
| I lived through when Barack Obama signed the indefinite detention rendition provisions of the NDAA or when George W. Bush lied to the American people. | ||
| Didn't declare war. | ||
| Got a bullshit AUMF. | ||
| And at the time, during the Iraq and Afghanistan war, it was, if you did not agree, they'd blacklist you from media and all these things. | ||
| I don't see a functional difference until now. | ||
| What I see now, I wouldn't necessarily call authoritarianism in that Trump gutting the budget and shutting down departments is weakening federal authority for the first time in my life. | ||
| I mean, he's not weakening federal authority. | ||
| He's weakening state capacity. | ||
| He's destroying our ability to predict the weather. | ||
| He's firing scientists and park service people and stuff like that. | ||
| In terms of authority, they're beefing up the law enforcement departments and they're sort of reaching out legally in stronger ways than ever. | ||
| So the law enforcement, the capacity for the state to sort of control... | ||
| The people with guns, there's more of them and they're more powerful than ever. | ||
| Now, there's some I'm sure that will disagree about, like the EPA, you'd probably see as the sort of department that's forcing people to do things. | ||
| I think the EPA is mostly good. | ||
| We probably disagree about that. | ||
| But most of the stuff that he's firing are just the basic good things that the government does. | ||
| The government does a lot of really bad shit. | ||
| The government does a lot of really good shit. | ||
| One of them is predicting. | ||
| The weather, firing thousands of NOAA scientists who predict when tornadoes are going to come hit places like this here in West Virginia, right? | ||
| We're in the mountains. | ||
| Okay, sorry. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think, like most places, you can get a tornado. | ||
| Sometimes they form, but it's not like Tornado Alley or anything. | ||
| It's just funny. | ||
| Some of the people who interact with the weather service the most are in the red... | ||
| Yeah, and it's really sad because it's just sort of like... | ||
| Ignorance, like this anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment sort of sweeping the country is really bad. | ||
| But I think the interesting thing that you point out, though, is, yeah, there are past authoritarian things that other past presidents did, and I'll agree to that and say, yeah, that's really bad. | ||
| The difference is you're stumping for it when Trump does it, and I find that really interesting. | ||
| Well, you're stumping for, yeah, we should deport foreign students who write an op-ed. | ||
| You said it's good that they did it. | ||
| Marginally good? | ||
| Yeah, okay, great. | ||
| So you're stumping for it. | ||
| You're on your platform saying it's good. | ||
| Marginally good. | ||
| But I think the important distinction is should implies whenever it happens. | ||
| I don't agree with that. | ||
| I think, as I've said a million times, I don't understand. | ||
| I don't want to go back on the issue. | ||
| It's an absurdity to claim that someone who's critical of Israel is pro-Hamas. | ||
| People who are pro-Hamas are pro-Hamas. | ||
| So there are nuances in all things. | ||
| What I see largely right now is... | ||
| Trump won the popular vote. | ||
| He's got approval as of April 22nd. | ||
| You know, to be fair, this is pre-tariff, so I'm sure it's gone down. | ||
| But he's got general approval from most demographics except for the 70-plus bunch. | ||
| And I don't see the removal of government agencies as authoritarian. | ||
| Especially when he promised to do it and then did it based on the people who voted for him. | ||
| I'm listening to just finish an audiobook about the rise of the Third Reich, just boning up a little history. | ||
| One of the first things that they do is destroy the civil service and that kind of state capacity, frighten those people, get them to fall into line. | ||
| And that's a big part of what Trump has done, and I think it's been really effective. | ||
| Frightening who? | ||
| Frightening like the actual people who work in the civil service, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, firing them and frightening the rest, right? | ||
| And getting them to behave differently, installing loyalists, stuff like that. | ||
| I think it's plainly authoritarian. | ||
| Every administration will change out the department heads. | ||
| They won't – and I did a show about the US government and I met some department heads who were like, oh, this person is a political appointee and they're not that bright, right? | ||
| From both – But the civil service underneath them, the people who are the trained experts, the weather scientists at NOAA, the regulators at the FDIC who keep their bank balance safe, stuff like that, have been wiping those people out and replacing the actual people with expertise with loyalists. | ||
| And that's where you end up with the primary value is loyalty to Trump rather than actually getting the thing done properly. | ||
| And the DEI... | ||
| That's a fig leaf for removing people who are not sufficiently loyal as well as, well, there's a lot of reasons that they're doing that. | ||
| I'll say on that right now, I won't make a direct counter-argument to that, but I do think that's pretty assumptive. | ||
| Oh yeah, I'm making a claim and you can get into it or not. | ||
| Yeah, it's trying to read into the intent, which may or may not be correct, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, it may or may not be correct. | ||
| That is my view, though. | ||
| Right. | ||
| My point is, and I respect that, like, your view is based on those actions. | ||
| There actually absolutely is an easy vehicle for firing people if your move is DEI. | ||
| It's like, these people here, I don't want them here. | ||
| Oh, you were hired incorrectly. | ||
| You're part of a department. | ||
| I don't want to get rid of them. | ||
| On the surface, outside of that, I think the DEI stuff is illegal, and I'm glad to see it purged and removed. | ||
| I think it violates the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| Like DEI programs, do you think, violate the Civil Rights Act? | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| You know, there's an interesting conversation around what is legal and what's not. | ||
| A lot of people think if SCOTUS has it true, it's legal. | ||
| I don't think that's fair because that would mean that Roe v. | ||
| Wade should have been overturned, but I think most liberals think it shouldn't have been. | ||
| So they would argue that it wasn't constitutional or legal. | ||
| But the Civil Rights Act says we're not supposed to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, gender, etc. | ||
| And when you create DEI programs where you're specifically targeting based on those factors, you're in clear violation of the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| I mean, you've got to amend the law or change it or create new provisions. | ||
| But how I grew up, I would never want to be in a circumstance where race was a determining factor and whether or not I could get into school or get a job. | ||
| Yeah, neither would I. But for a lot of people, it fucking is, man. | ||
| But that's why we got the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| And you have a right to sue the institutions that are in violation of that. | ||
| And through those laws, we've eliminated largely blockbusting and redlining. | ||
| And then Democrats largely started to enact... | ||
| There's a lot of redlining still, but it's better than it used to be. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And that... | ||
| Shouldn't be allowed, and it's through the Civil Rights Act, through the lawsuits. | ||
| We've gotten rid of those things. | ||
| I don't understand how we've circled back, and it's largely through the liberal side of things, to start using race again. | ||
| That's crazy to me. | ||
| To start using race again. | ||
| Well, let me clarify that. | ||
| Obviously, everybody always was secretly trying to use race. | ||
| Because this country has a history—I don't think it's fair to say just this country, but people are racist. | ||
| I think everybody's racist. | ||
| And we're trying our best, I think, civilizationally, to be like, let's stop doing that. | ||
| But there are a lot of people that don't because they're racist. | ||
| So when I see—I don't care if it's a white redneck dude saying he doesn't like black people or whatever. | ||
| These people online that want to make—anytime they post a video— They like – they'll post a video of black people committing a crime and it's like, brother, I could find videos too of white people committing crimes. | ||
| If you want to do like a multivariate study of every single instance of video crime or whatever, we could. | ||
| There are FBI crime sets. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| But there are racist people out there. | ||
| But the Democrats are still engaged in racist practices through DEI and gender-based discrimination, etc., which is just clear violation of every title of the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| I mean, there's a million different programs that get lumped in as DEI. | ||
| I'm interested to know, you do think racism exists in America and it's a problem that we should keep fighting? | ||
| Profoundly exists in this country. | ||
| And I don't think it'll ever go away. | ||
| I think proximity is the best cure. | ||
| You grow up around people and you understand they're good people, you tolerate them. | ||
| I think we have a challenge with enclaves. | ||
| So you'll find – and I think a lot of conservatives need to hear this too because I was in Virginia near Hampton Roads. | ||
| It's a lot of racism there. | ||
| And I mean like literally white areas that are predominantly white that don't like black people, don't like Mexicans, don't like Chinese people. | ||
| And that exists and they're going to be racist. | ||
| But you get a similar but different kind of function in white uppity liberal conclaves too. | ||
| And so I do think it's a problem. | ||
| But the problem that I see now is affluent white liberals. | ||
| Who have this, you know, let me use an example. | ||
| Do you know about the Yale study that found that white liberals, they reduce their vocabularies to talk to black people? | ||
| I do not know about it, but it sounds like it could be true. | ||
| Like, it sounds anecdotally, you know. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of racist white liberals. | ||
| They present themselves as less competent in interactions with African Americans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Conservatives tend not to, but there still are obviously, like, racist. | ||
| Parts of the South, especially in the South. | ||
| Racist parts all over America. | ||
| And by the way, racism isn't unique to white people either. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, brother, go to Asia. | ||
| Anybody who's been to China or Japan or Korea, it's like... | ||
| Well, in America, we have a form of racism that's based around white supremacy, but it's like non-white people can participate and be a part of it. | ||
| I think that exists, but I don't think it's the predominant. | ||
| So let me ask you this. | ||
| When there's a plane crash or a fire or something like that and the Trump administration, the first thing they do is they say, ah, too many black air traffic controllers. | ||
| That's the first thing they do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When did they say that? | |
| That was like – immediately they just come out and they're like, DEI and the FAA, that's the problem. | ||
| That was like the first – that was the first thing Trump came out and did, and then that became the narrative. | ||
| All I can tell you is – Does that seem like racism to you? | ||
| Because it does to me. | ||
| What I can tell you is I interviewed the secretary of transportation. | ||
| He actually rejected that premise. | ||
| Oh, is that – you rejected the premise of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| Right. | ||
| So I asked Secretary Duffy, are we actually seeing an increase in – You know, these these airline accidents because we've seen these high profile stories. | ||
| Some have argued it's DEI finally catching up, which I don't think makes sense that all of a sudden just planes crash because they hired diverse people or whatever. | ||
| And Duffy said, no, he said, we've not seen a significant uptake. | ||
| It's largely just a phenomenon of the media and people are getting riled up. | ||
| And of course, the right wants to say it's because of DEI, which makes no sense. | ||
| The left is saying it's because of the Trump administration, which makes no sense. | ||
| The issue is. | ||
| We had stories that were sensationalized in the media. | ||
| People perceived an increase in air traffic accidents. | ||
| But we are going to try and streamline and fix the effect. | ||
| Yeah, no, I felt that – well, look, the air traffic controller system is in obviously a terrible state and that's a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you see the computers they have? | |
| The Newark thing is, I mean, look, there's something to be said for old computers, you know? | ||
| There's a lot of people who make a lot of hay about, you know, government systems being written in Fortran and COBOL, but that stuff is actually really, like, future-proof, you know? | ||
| Like, it's old code bases that are, like, really well-run and stuff. | ||
| It's not future-proof. | ||
| It's subject to ICS hacks. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| In some cases, I've read engineering analyses for, like, you know, in some cases, we don't need to make fun of the old code. | ||
| It's okay to have old code. | ||
| You know, same reason why, hey, you know, Punch cards weren't so bad for voting sometimes. | ||
| The old shit works well in some cases. | ||
| But... | ||
| The FAA, air traffic control, we've got to fix it up. | ||
| It's an infrastructure problem in the country. | ||
| And so based on what – and I believe that a lot of the crashes were clustering. | ||
| A couple of crashes happened in short order. | ||
| It happens randomly. | ||
| Well, not just media. | ||
| It's like the human psychology. | ||
| Three random events happen together and you think a whole lot are happening all at once. | ||
| But like Donald Trump, the man, the human being. | ||
| His literal first response was to come out and go, too many black air traffic controllers, too many. | ||
| I mean, I'm paraphrasing for comedy. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think he specifically said black people. | ||
| No, he didn't say black people. | ||
| He said DEI. | ||
| He blamed it on DEI immediately. | ||
| And there is this odd, like, look, I'm not a fan of corporate DEI programs especially. | ||
| The right was really smart to seize on DEI as a slur to tar all... | ||
| They're calling it didn't earn it. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I've been through some seminars that were like a waste of time or whatever, kind of annoying. | ||
| And I think that, you know, the corporate response to, you know, George Floyd's murder and everything that happened afterwards was like pretty toothless and stupid. | ||
| But I find it bizarre to watch the right, like something goes wrong and they're immediately like, oh, the problem is that we have a, you know, woman fire chief or we have a, you know, people. | ||
| People of color air traffic controllers. | ||
| Like it's like, oh, that's just straight up racism. | ||
| Like it's a communication. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But you've like, you've like somehow done a little loop de loop where you're like, oh, oh, I think DEI is racist. | ||
| I mean, but that's not the case. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I mean, the right wanted to elect Larry Elder to governor of California. | ||
| The meme among all conservatives is that Clarence Thomas should clone himself and replace every other Supreme Court justice. | ||
| I'm not talking about that. | ||
| I'm just talking about the rush to blame these infrastructure problems. | ||
| So I would call that a failure of communication for sure. | ||
| Call it racism. | ||
| But it's not the target. | ||
| The target is people who are hired without passing, not the fact that they're black. | ||
| So Charlie Kirk got a lot of flack for this because he said, you know, I go on a plane, I see a black pilot, and I think, am I supposed to be worried? | ||
| Yeah, that's racist. | ||
| But the point he was making was he was calling you racist, dude, and you guys didn't get that. | ||
| He said, you have created a situation where average people think you are hiring people who can't do the job based on race, and we don't want to live that way. | ||
| I mean, he's the one getting on the plane and seeing a black person and saying that person's not qualified. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| That's not what he's saying. | ||
| He says Democrats are intentionally hiring underqualified people based on race. | ||
| Why are they putting us in a situation like this? | ||
| He's saying that if a black person is in the seat, it means they're unqualified? | ||
| That's his assertion? | ||
| No, he's saying he doesn't know because he knows you are advocating for it. | ||
| I'm just listening to the words that he's saying. | ||
| It seems pretty straightforward. | ||
| I would say that when the left and the right only listen to the surface-level clips and arguments, they don't actually understand what the person is conveying. | ||
| And so the argument then is Charlie Kirk is a racist, which is not true. | ||
| Charlie Kirk's point on that plane was, let's just map it out one, two, three. | ||
| Democrats have created policies by which they will put people in positions of authority who don't have the same caliber degree or have passed certain tests because of race. | ||
| We've seen policies where they will actually go down the list of top candidates until they get to a race. | ||
| This creates a concern among people that individuals are being hired without the capability based on race. | ||
| That's the idea he's trying to convey. | ||
| Not that he doesn't want to fly with a black pilot. | ||
| You think that in the time when we only had white pilots or white executives or white whatever, all those people were hired on merit. | ||
| None of them floated through for some other reason. | ||
| Nepotism. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I bet some people gave BJs. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The systems are... | ||
| Like, they already do that for everybody. | ||
| So for him to go in and say, oh, when I see a black person, that's when I think that, not when I see a white person, then that's racist on his part because he's only focusing on when the black people are there. | ||
| But it's because the policy is race-based. | ||
| The policy is race and gender-based. | ||
| And so the issue is not Charlie Kirk saying he doesn't like black people. | ||
| He's saying Democrats are hiring people who are less qualified based on race. | ||
| This is creating a concern for people which we don't want to experience. | ||
| So the counterargument would be if you have a system that has no black people in it, right? | ||
| You have a pool of people doing the job that has no black people in it, that clearly... | ||
| Is not based on merit because, you know, black people are X percent of the population and surely some would have gotten through if it was really based on nothing but merit. | ||
| So some of the existing white people must actually not have gotten there via merit. | ||
| It must be because of a race-based system. | ||
| So instead, let's adjust the system so that we give everybody an equal opportunity. | ||
| That is going to mean that there are going to be more black people in the system. | ||
| Now that that happens, he now gets on the plane. | ||
| He sees a black person. | ||
| He says, oh, now it seems... | ||
| I actually think that it was racist systems that kept out qualified candidates. | ||
| What I would say to your argument is the only distinction between what you said and white nationalists is that you want a system to bring those people in and white nationalists don't. | ||
| So both the left and the right agree that there is some kind of phenomenon where black people should be qualified and aren't qualifying. | ||
| I disagree with that. | ||
| I think that there were institutions throughout history that have put – that hampered the process by which minorities were able to go to schools to effectively get those degrees. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| The liberal argument floats dangerously close, I think, to what white nationalists are hoping for. | ||
| It's not to say you're wrong or anything, but it's a similar argument that is the implication. | ||
| So I'll put it this way. | ||
| Ben and Jerry's – do you know what the 1350 is? | ||
| They call it the 1350. | ||
| Is that a Ben and Jerry's thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not intentionally, but this was like, holy shit, brother. | ||
| Maybe you shouldn't be tweeting this. | ||
| The 1350 is a meme which references 13, despite being 13% of the population, black people commit 50% of the crimes. | ||
| And so that is a meme shared among white nationalists. | ||
| Ben and Jerry's put out the exact same meme, but tried approaching it from a DEI standpoint. | ||
| And this lit the fucking Internet up with people mocking Ben and Jerry's being like, holy shit, they've gone full white nationally. | ||
| I think it's fair to say that they're a racist. | ||
| You know, components of racism that have existed in this country for a long time. | ||
| The solution would be colorblind hiring processes and educational benefits that target class and not race, because then you remove the racial component from the argument completely instead of creating a racial argument for the white national. | ||
| But if you admit that people in America are racist, you can't. | ||
| If you want to. | ||
| You can't build systems that are completely blind to race. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| Then you have individual racists continuing to insert their power over the system. | ||
| So what you do is... | ||
| So you accept racism. | ||
| You're just like, okay, yeah, racism will continue to affect every part of the system. | ||
| And we can mitigate it, right? | ||
| So for instance, for hiring practices, when it comes to the hiring managers, they should have no access to the name or the race of the individual. | ||
| It should literally be... | ||
| Here's the resume. | ||
| Here's our qualifications. | ||
| Is it a yes or a no? | ||
| And what we do then is we should target class-based opportunities for the younger generations, meaning if we go – like, so, for instance, I grew up in Chicago, heavily racially segregated. | ||
| We had – 47th Street was a dividing line where on one side it was all black. | ||
| On the other side it was largely white, but, you know, there was some Latino there. | ||
| This created a lot of problems. | ||
| Two different neighborhoods. | ||
| Looking at each other like others. | ||
| And if you were white and went to the black neighborhood, you got arrested. | ||
| If you were black and went to the white neighborhood, the police wouldn't go near them because they were scared of being called racist. | ||
| The gangs would come from the black side and rob people on the white side, creating a lot of anger where the white people would be like, it's black people doing it. | ||
| And then I'd be like, I actually think it's a different community. | ||
| It doesn't matter if it's white or otherwise. | ||
| They just don't view as part of their community. | ||
| So they don't care if they rob you. | ||
| But if I robbed you. | ||
| All the neighbors would get mad at me, right? | ||
| The issue isn't the race, but this created massive racial tensions. | ||
| If you went into that neighborhood and gave the black neighborhood a ton of benefits, resources, checks, or whatever based on race, brother, that'd be murders. | ||
| It'd be fucking nuts, the racial tension you'd create. | ||
| But if we do it based on income and class, then you'd have equal amounts of both neighborhoods now going to the same schools. | ||
| Making friends with each other. | ||
| And then you're going to have one guy who's going to be like, yeah, I live on 46th. | ||
| I'm like, no way, do I live on 48th? | ||
| Like, bro, you're south of 47th? | ||
| Let's hang out, man. | ||
| Now they're friends. | ||
| They don't view each other as others. | ||
| They don't feel like their taxes are going to one racial group. | ||
| Instead, what's ended up happening is DEI programs have said it's going to be based on race. | ||
| And so then you get, you know, if you go to like Appalachia, for instance, these are the poorest of the poor, and they feel like... | ||
| What little they could have is being given away to other people based on race and they're being left behind, which breeds racial animosity. | ||
| Yeah, I mean the pitting of poor white people against black people is like just part of the strategy of the people in power and they've always done it. | ||
| Liberal or otherwise. | ||
| It's unfortunate to watch. | ||
| It's unfortunate to watch the country descend into that again. | ||
| Racial issues are hard to tackle because we're very susceptible to it and unfortunately backslid into a period of white racial backlash again where the people around the country are just like – I mean the Trump administration literally just treats any black person as unqualified and fires them from the federal government. | ||
| That's what Pete Hegseth is doing in the Department of Defense. | ||
| It's just like out and out. | ||
| Racism, you know, it's like a racial purge of the government. | ||
| It's really bizarre. | ||
| Where did that happen? | ||
| Where did that happen where they were firing black people? | ||
| I mean, I don't know the names off the top of my head, but yeah. | ||
| That sounds not true. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| I mean, because like I'll put it this way, even if it were true, it's so overt. | ||
| Yeah, they're being really overt about it. | ||
| I mean, Donald Trump is going on television and going, planes are crashing because of DEI. | ||
| But DEI is a philosophy, it's an ideology. | ||
| He's saying because there are unqualified air traffic controllers because they were hired because they're people of color. | ||
| It's racist. | ||
| He's racist. | ||
| He's a racist man and he's issuing racist policy and the entire country is going along with it because we're in a period of white racial backlash. | ||
| When do you think he became racist? | ||
| I think he's been racist his whole fucking life. | ||
| How did he win all those awards then? | ||
| Or like those accolades and like... | ||
| I don't know what accolades he won. | ||
| He's won accolades? | ||
| Yeah, it was like a civil rights leader awards and shit. | ||
| Donald Trump has won civil rights leader awards? | ||
| Let me see if I can find some. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Well, that's... | ||
| I mean, awards are dumb, so I don't... | ||
| They are dumb. | ||
| I think he won them because awards are stupid. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| Bad job awards committee for giving the... | ||
| He did get the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, but there's a correction. | ||
| It wasn't particularly over racial issues. | ||
| I don't know what that means. | ||
| You love Trump so much. | ||
| It's funny you're pulling up his awards. | ||
| He's won so many racial awards. | ||
| I think it's weird that you think I love Trump. | ||
| I mean, you're here talking about how great his approval numbers are. | ||
| That's a fact statement. | ||
| Your YouTube headlines are all like, Trump is crushing. | ||
| His numbers are up. | ||
| Well, you know, and the rest of the press is like, his numbers are down. | ||
| I never said his numbers were up. | ||
| I literally just told you right now because of the tariffs his numbers have gone down. | ||
| Dude, look. | ||
| I went on Piers Morgan and said Trump's approval is absolutely down. | ||
| And I said you don't got to look at corporate press. | ||
| Take a look at Rasmussen. | ||
| They love Trump and they have Trump down four points. | ||
| Let me ask you something. | ||
| I don't think you watch my show. | ||
| I don't watch it that much. | ||
| But I've looked at like your YouTube headlines. | ||
| We've never said Trump's polls have recently been rebounding. | ||
| But that's a fact statement from Newsweek aggregating like three or four different polls. | ||
| I'm not going to lie in case his polls are down if they're not down. | ||
| And if his polls are down, I'll say they're down. | ||
| Okay, I mean, all the reporting I saw in the last week was like, oh, his numbers are down, and I saw you were going there up. | ||
| And I look at your YouTube headlines, and a lot of times it seems like, look, the easiest way to get people to click on YouTube is tell them that their side is winning. | ||
| I have trouble getting sucked into this in my own YouTube headlines. | ||
| I just go by, I just go, and you know what I try to do? | ||
| I try to avoid singular polls as well. | ||
| So what I, I was on, I was on Piers Morgan. | ||
| He asked about this. | ||
| Kerry Lake, of course, said, of course he's doing well. | ||
| I said, no, they're not. | ||
| I was like, the issue is that people don't – the one thing that's challenging is that the polls are so dramatically different from each other that it's going to create this perception. | ||
| But my point was simply track a single poll. | ||
| Find one you trust. | ||
| Trump supporters love Rasmussen. | ||
| OK, well, Rasmussen had Trump go down. | ||
| So even if you think ABC is lying, is Rasmussen who had Trump up yesterday? | ||
| Well, he's down today. | ||
| So Trump's approval went down with – oh, come on. | ||
| It went down with the tariffs. | ||
| The tariffs were bad for him. | ||
| The tariffs are bad. | ||
| They're really stupid. | ||
| He's losing his mind. | ||
| So, for instance, Rasmussen currently has him up three points. | ||
| The challenging thing, I think, is if you look at Economist and Big Data, they cover nearly the same span. | ||
| Plus one, minus eight. | ||
| That's why I'm like, I don't know how you track singular polls. | ||
| And the aggregates are also confusing as well. | ||
| So what I say is, I always show this. | ||
| I'll always try to show all the polls in the aggregates. | ||
| But then I'll say, let's just track an individual poll. | ||
| Maybe it had Trump minus 10 yesterday. | ||
| Maybe he's minus 12 today, showing a downward trend. | ||
| Then where are the favorable polls? | ||
| I don't watch your show that much. | ||
| I click around. | ||
| It seems like you support Trump generally. | ||
| You're normally saying, here's why the thing that he did. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So you like him generally. | ||
| He did a lot of bad things too. | ||
| I'm saying, you know, he's behaving in an authoritarian fashion. | ||
| He's abridging free speech. | ||
| You're like, oh, but presidents in the past did that. | ||
| They were being authoritarian and they were abridging free speech. | ||
| And here's why Bush did it. | ||
| And it's bad. | ||
| Well, that's how I phrased it. | ||
| My phrasing was, do you think it's distinct from other administrations? | ||
| Like, my question was good when they were doing it before. | ||
| My question for you is, do you think it was good when they were doing it before? | ||
| It was bad. | ||
| Yeah, and my point is there are instances where you didn't care and instances where you did. | ||
| So again, I think— I wasn't on this show then, so I cared about it then. | ||
| Let me—so Piers Morgan had a great question for me when I went on the show, and I keep bringing him up, but he does a good show. | ||
| It's kind of sensational, but he asked me how I thought Trump was doing, and I said, B+. | ||
| I think that the universal tariff thing is—I'm skeptical of it. | ||
| It's a little wonky. | ||
| Selective tariffs, I think, are a good thing. | ||
| And then Piers asked me, would you say the same thing about Joe Biden if he did this? | ||
| I said, of course not. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| And the issue is that Donald Trump's moral positions more largely reflect my own. | ||
| And just like liberals who would defend Biden, we're more forgiving of the individual who does errors and makes mistakes if they're more in line with our worldview. | ||
| So if Joe Biden, like the Afghanistan debacle, the Burisma scandal... | ||
| All of these things, Keystone Pipeline, I'd look at as a litany of negative. | ||
| Compounded with another negative, I'd say it's bad. | ||
| Donald Trump, I see, is doing a spattering of bad things, but largely good things. | ||
| So I say, I can tolerate some bad things from Trump. | ||
| I'm not going to condemn his whole presidency. | ||
| Yeah, so you're like, it's tribalism on your part. | ||
| Like, you're like, he's my guy. | ||
| You know, I agree with him about, I don't know, what do you really like? | ||
| You hate trans people or whatever. | ||
| Well, I'll reiterate it, right? | ||
| I praised Joe Biden when he was fighting to remove ATM fees. | ||
| But you have a litany of negatives with the Biden administration that I see. | ||
| And so when he does something wrong, I'm going to say one more grain of sand in the heap of the bad things he's doing. | ||
| With Donald Trump, the policies enacted I largely agree with. | ||
| So when he does a bad thing, I say, yeah, that's kind of bad. | ||
| But, you know, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt for now and we'll see what happens. | ||
| Well, you're also talking about... | ||
| Liberals do the same thing on all their issues. | ||
| It's not unique to me or you or any other person. | ||
| Obviously... | ||
| You're talking about human psychology. | ||
| When someone's on your side, generally, you forgive the bad things that they do a little bit more. | ||
| Well, I don't forgive the bad things. | ||
| I'm saying we tolerate them. | ||
| We say, like... | ||
| Those are close to each other, but sure. | ||
| Well, the difference is I'm not going to forgive Donald Trump for... | ||
| You know, he's accused of killing a seven-year-old American girl in Yemen. | ||
| I want that criminally investigated. | ||
| I'm not going to forgive him for 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria in his first term. | ||
| That was ludicrous that he thought that was going to be good. | ||
| And it's ridiculous. | ||
| The media praised him for it. | ||
| These things always deserve condemnation. | ||
| In fact, I'll criticize him now because he said to me personally in an interview, he wouldn't bomb Yemen. | ||
| And then he did. | ||
| Now he's claiming he's not going to do it anymore. | ||
| But that deserves criticism. | ||
| I don't need to forgive him for that. | ||
| I will challenge him because of it and demand he do better. | ||
| I see largely what he's done as things I want to happen, and the bad things should be called out when they are. | ||
| I'm not going to condemn his presidency over the bad things. | ||
| I will criticize them. | ||
| For Joe Biden, I see a litany of bad things. | ||
| I condemn largely what he's doing. | ||
| You know, periodically he gets praise for the things that he's trying to do, and I'll say, look, that's a good thing, right? | ||
| ATM fees are fucked up, and that's bullshit. | ||
| A tax on the poor through the corporate banking system, that shouldn't be. | ||
| However, Biden... | ||
| You know, look, when he defies the Supreme Court over the student loan thing or tries to decree an amendment, the criticism there is you don't have the authority to do that to just decree an amendment. | ||
| That's a ridiculous overreach. | ||
| Nice try, buddy. | ||
| When the courts say you can't forgive student loans twice and he does it anyway, we're like, holy crap, look at what he is doing once again. | ||
| With Donald Trump, we say, yeah, he shouldn't have done that with Arrigo Garcia. | ||
| That was wrong. | ||
| What's the solution here? | ||
| Let's just try and mitigate that. | ||
| But it's harmless error. | ||
| There's a difference in the scale and scope of actions taken. | ||
| But they're making such a big deal out of it, right? | ||
| They're not treating it as a harmless... | ||
| It's a political attack against Democrats. | ||
| Yeah, and against immigrants. | ||
| Illegal immigrants. | ||
| Well... | ||
| There's a distinction. | ||
| Yeah, and also foreign students who are here studying. | ||
| And it's a full-pronged attack against... | ||
| All types of immigrants. | ||
| Like, he's trying to frighten every type of immigrant in America. | ||
| They've gone down the list, you know? | ||
| When he's, like, talking to Bukele and he's like, oh, you gotta make a prison for citizens, too, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's wrong. | |
| Like, he's doing that on purpose to frighten people. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about with authoritarianism, and I think that's bad. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I think it's bad, too. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Yeah, we've had that conversation many a night about how Trump shouldn't do that. | ||
| In fact, the Trump base is split on whether he should or should not be doing it. | ||
| Half of them are saying, no way. | ||
| A lot of the most prominent voices have come after him over saying American citizens, because that's, you know, clearly. | ||
| Wrong. | ||
| And authoritarian. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, they came for the Jews and I said nothing, you know? | ||
| Like, it's... | ||
| This is how I feel. | ||
| People voted for this guy who's... | ||
| I mean, he doesn't give a shit about anybody. | ||
| He wants to just throw anyone he doesn't like away to El Salvador and lock him up. | ||
| And, you know, that's the deal the American public made, unfortunately. | ||
| Like, for me, I remember when, you know, Barack Obama killed four American citizens. | ||
| And his staffers publicly stated, too bad. | ||
| One of them was a 16-year-old American citizen named Abdulrahman Alalaki. | ||
| Was it a drone strike situation? | ||
| A drone strike in Yemen, authorized by Barack Obama. | ||
| And their response to the extrajudicial assassination of a 16-year-old American who was not a criminal, not wanted for anything, was, oops, we were trying to kill somebody else. | ||
| So it's like, country we're not at war with was bombed, killing... | ||
| Dozens of – or several civilians. | ||
| It's a horrible program. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| And these people that are complaining about Trump are just – it's platitude. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying you. | ||
| I'm saying – Because I also complained about the drone strikes. | ||
| Indeed, indeed. | ||
| And every liberal I talk with is like, yeah, we all condemn that. | ||
| I'm like, I think there's a general agreement among the populist factions of left and right. | ||
| We are mad at Obama for doing these things, but the establishment forces that are empowered never gave a shit, and that includes the Republicans. | ||
| So, like, recently I was complaining to Sri Tandadar, who was trying to impeach Trump, and I said, I'll give you this. | ||
| I will give you my full support of your articles of impeachment against Trump if you also draft retroactive impeachment against Obama for the extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens. | ||
| He said no. | ||
| And I said, we— Is retroactive impeachment— It is, in fact. | ||
| So because of presidential immunity, you can't go after Obama for having killed a 16-year-old American citizen. | ||
| Like the new Supreme Court ruling, you can no longer do it? | ||
| Or presidential immunity generally? | ||
| So presidential immunity in general, it was presumed to be the case. | ||
| There is, however, an argument that you can't even impeach at this point, but I believe the general legal consensus is in order to convict a president— For actions conducted while president, he has to be impeached and convicted for those actions first. | ||
| Nobody, nobody, I think, even the people who don't want to bring it up, I think everybody would agree Barack Obama should not have killed that 16-year-old American citizen. | ||
| And if it was an accident, well, I'm sorry, but if you accidentally run somebody over, you get some kind of penalty. | ||
| Even if it's like a fine, I think, you know, you might get some kind of court supervision or certification of license. | ||
| I said, look, I'll tell you what, let's impeach Trump. | ||
| Do me a favor. | ||
| Draft articles of impeachment for Barack Obama for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens and keep it specific to Abdul Rahman Al-Awlaki because you want to argue Anwar and the other guys who are jihadis or whatever, but Americans. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Just a 16-year-old. | ||
| He said, no. | ||
| He says, I'm focused on here and now. | ||
| And I said, if he's impeached and convicted, we can get criminal charges for a president who murdered an American, even if it was negligence or accidental. | ||
| He said, listen, I'm concerned about now. | ||
| I was like, exactly. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Not a single Republican would do it either. | ||
| Because when it comes to the executive authority, what we have learned over the past 50 years since the end of World War II is every politician in this country will get on their knees and lick the feet of the president and allow them to blow whatever fucking country they want. | ||
| And no member of Congress, no senator. | ||
| Well, to be fair, Thomas Massey would probably say no. | ||
| But they all just allow it to happen. | ||
| And it's bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, and... | ||
| So I guess I don't understand why you are so supportive of Trump because part of his entire presidency is about expanding the executive power of the president. | ||
| That's the whole Heritage Foundation's whole thing, the imperial presidency. | ||
| They're trying to increase the amount of impunity that the president has and remove checks and balances, which I think is the few that did exist, which I think is bad. | ||
| Congress is more supine than it was during the Obama years. | ||
| Like, they're not even protecting their power as a branch. | ||
| I think they were always pretending. | ||
| I think it was always pretending. | ||
| It sure seems like it's at a fucking ebb, man. | ||
| The Republicans right now have a two-seat majority in the Senate. | ||
| Trump's impounding money that Congress has already spent, right? | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
| So the challenge is you've got... | ||
| Two rogue branches, the judiciary and the executive, by this argument. | ||
| I think Trump is applying the language of the executive branch in any way that's beneficial to him to enable himself to do these things. | ||
| And actually, I think that's what Kristi Noem actually said to me, that they're going to use the language of whatever is codified to try and get these deportations through. | ||
| The problem is you've got a judiciary that is rogue at the same time, and Congress has abdicated their responsibility for checking either branches. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| You know, I think largely you'll find there's this diehard MAGA base, which is like Trump can do no wrong. | ||
| You'll find the liberal base saying Trump is clearly everything he's doing is wrong. | ||
| And then you'll find this like spattered middle of the road of no one's doing what they're supposed to be doing. | ||
| And it's just fuck. | ||
| It's just pure chaos. | ||
| And that's not it. | ||
| That's not, you know, like Chuck Schumer says that's Trump. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, please, it's everybody. | ||
| You know, the issue then is. | ||
| The liberal side of things can allow Trump to make his assertions under the Alien Enemies Act without challenge, and then Trump steamrolls them. | ||
| They're not going to do that. | ||
| Trump could allow the judiciary to enact universal injunctions unconstitutionally and get steamrolled. | ||
| He's not going to do that. | ||
| Congress isn't doing anything. | ||
| So there's no check or balance between either of these branches, and it's just going to come to a point. | ||
| We're in a perpetual state of constitutional crisis until one side finally says, I don't think it matters anymore. | ||
| What? | ||
| I would argue that there's... | ||
| I mean, that's what they're currently doing. | ||
| Both sides, both the executive and the judiciary are doing this. | ||
| I mean, the judiciary, like... | ||
| There's no authority for universal injunctions. | ||
| I – to me what it sounds like is you're participating in the campaign by the executive branch to discredit the judiciary. | ||
| Now, I'm not going to like go to town, go to the mattresses for like any particular injunction. | ||
| But like the observation that I'll make is that weakening the judiciary, setting the legal groundwork for why they can defy any particular court order they want to because if it goes against the Trump administration – That's not an argument. | ||
| Currently, as a lot of really frightened liberals are who are like, we're descending into Nazism or whatever, because I think Trump is ultimately a lot weaker than that, and I think he's kind of too old and dumb to really do it. | ||
| He's losing his mind. | ||
| You know what's really funny? | ||
| It's very funny to see – I came here from L.A., and a couple days ago he had that – Truth post about, like, we need to put 100% tariff on movies, on foreign movies. | ||
| And then the Hollywood press for, like, the next four days was like, oh, no! | ||
| Like, what does that mean? | ||
| What's going to happen? | ||
| Like, oh, Jon Voight has a plan, like, all this shit. | ||
| And I'm like, do you guys think? | ||
| That he remembers posting that? | ||
| Like, the man is, like, on pills or something. | ||
| Like, he got a text from John Voight about, like, you should do this. | ||
| He says, we're gonna put 100% tariff. | ||
| One of the fucking cabinet guys goes, we're right on it, sir. | ||
| And then they're just waiting for him to forget about it. | ||
| Because the idea of putting a tariff on movies doesn't even make... | ||
| They don't come here by fucking boat. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| People are trying to make sense of, like, the Mad King's, like, drool coming out of his mouth. | ||
| Well, that one for sure, because, like, what if a movie is based in Africa? | ||
| You know, it's like Safari featuring Tom Cruise, but you can't do it because you're filming in Africa. | ||
| It's like, well, I have to. | ||
| And also every film is, you know, it's like any other product. | ||
| They're made multinationally, you know? | ||
| Like every Marvel movie, they ship all the footage off to Korea, you know, to do the CGI, right? | ||
| This is the real argument. | ||
| I think the issue is, the saying has been for a long time that the left takes Trump literally but not seriously, and the right takes him seriously but not literally. | ||
| So the question is, what does that mean? | ||
| The question is, what's going to happen? | ||
| From Trump's directive. | ||
| You can't tariff a movie. | ||
| Like, how? | ||
| However, he can find ways to penalize... | ||
| Yeah, but he's not going to do that because he doesn't have coherent policy about literally anything. | ||
| Even tariffs, the one thing that he, like, the regular tariffs, right? | ||
| The one thing he really cares about, he's just fucking winging it. | ||
| Like, saying random shit, doing math that doesn't make any sense, making deals, canceling deals, like, just causing chaos. | ||
| Because he has the attention span of a gnat. | ||
| the reciprocal tariff stuff where they like, did it based on the trade deficit and all that shit. | ||
| It was on the chart. | ||
| The chart said... | ||
| You're going to stump for the chart? | ||
| You're going to back up the chart? | ||
| Well, you're arguing they didn't argue a thing that was literally on the picture they showed. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The math was very dumb. | ||
| The math they presented said including trade imbalance and things like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's like they said... | ||
| Here's our – and then someone did the math and they were like – he basically took existing tariffs and then added in the trade deficit and then gave us a number. | ||
| So you exist in like an info ecosystem where what he did made sense? | ||
| Like you hear people saying, oh, this makes sense and you felt that those charts like were ultimately sensible? | ||
| I'm saying – you said the math didn't make sense because he was using the trade deficit and all I said was it said on the chart – he showed the trade deficit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's a stupid way to make a tariff. | ||
| I'm not giving you my opinion and I'm giving you a fact point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The policymaking is chaotic and erratic. | ||
| It has no thought process behind it. | ||
| So the idea that Trump – no, that's a judgment on my part. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| My point is just the idea that Trump would look at Hollywood and go, oh, there's a problem here. | ||
| What if we disincentivize them from doing – That's not how he operates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| He doesn't actually make real policy. | ||
| He does loyalty tests. | ||
| He does like he misunderstands things. | ||
| He has a whim and people forgets. | ||
| Do you remember the story in the tariffs where they claimed that Trump was tariffing an island only inhabited by penguins? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you know that's not true, right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this is the challenge we face communication-wise. | ||
| There are a couple islands that operate companies but don't have a living population that we do import from. | ||
| So Trump imposed a tariff on any region that he could. | ||
| That was the point, closing loopholes. | ||
| The corporate press, like Newsweek, CNN, they all, and prominent liberal personalities, started running this lie that Donald Trump was tariffing an island with only penguins on it, which is, we call that factual but not truthful. | ||
| There's businesses that are on this island. | ||
| Fishing refineries, and they do ship products to the island as corporations, and then when they're done, they transport them to the United States. | ||
| Trump wants a tariff on anyone who's trying to use that island loophole. | ||
| But instead, the media just claimed he was so stupid and didn't think about his plan. | ||
| And I'm like, why don't you just say you don't like the tariffs? | ||
| I don't know why you have to make up that weird story. | ||
| Well, I mean, everything about them was senseless. | ||
| This was simply the silliest detail. | ||
| But that's what discredits the actual argument. | ||
| Look, I think the universal tariffs were a bad idea. | ||
| I think selective tariffs on like particular products on nations can make sense, especially like Canada or China. | ||
| Universal tariffs seemed like a scattershot that was going to cause more problems in the short term. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I can say that. | ||
| Nobody fucking cares. | ||
| The right goes. | ||
| Interesting point, Tim. | ||
| But our problem is the left is lying about what he's doing. | ||
| And then I go to the left and they go, you're wrong. | ||
| Our story is right. | ||
| And I'm like, but that's not true. | ||
| It's this it's this shit all over again of the of the first Trump term of, quote, stop making me defend Trump was the trope. | ||
| Where Trump would do something that was like, I wonder why he did that. | ||
| The left would then lie about what he did. | ||
| And when we come out and say, but he didn't do that, they'd say, stop defending Trump. | ||
| And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| Like, the very fine people hoax, the Shinzo, the Koi fish hoax, the fucking injecting bleach stuff. | ||
| It's like, bro, Donald Trump dumped food into a fish pond after Shinzo Abe did. | ||
| Why are you trying to make that a negative story? | ||
| It's all of these hoaxes. | ||
| The very fine people hoax. | ||
| I remember the line, yeah. | ||
| Never called Nazis fine people. | ||
| He said there were very fine people on both sides. | ||
| Except the neo-Nazis and white nationalists who should be condemned totally. | ||
| He said that? | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Brother. | ||
| I don't live in your bubble, man. | ||
| You don't live in the fucking news, dude! | ||
| Come the fuck on! | ||
| You don't read the fucking news! | ||
| This is what fucking... | ||
| Blows my mind. | ||
| No, I just don't have your... | ||
| I don't have your obsessions. | ||
| No, Trump did not call neo-Nazis and white supremacists very fine people. | ||
| Bro, it's been almost 10 years and you still think he did. | ||
| That's what's fucked up. | ||
| I didn't say I think he did. | ||
| I just don't know what you're talking about because I don't listen to your shit. | ||
| It's not about listening to my shit, bro. | ||
| It's reading the news. | ||
| It's fact-checking. | ||
| Bro, I got Snopes for you. | ||
| They're not a conservative publication. | ||
| Even Snopes was like, guys, stop saying this. | ||
| I don't know why you're shouting at me. | ||
| I was just asking you to explain. | ||
| Because the issue we have, and I apologize, because I'm not trying to shout at you, I'm shouting an exasperation, that we've had two liberals on in the past two weeks who didn't know this. | ||
| And I'm just like, for the love of all this holy, I just, all I do all day is I read probably 500 news articles every single day from CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, and all their aggregates. | ||
| And then liberals come on and they believe things that were debunked eight years ago. | ||
| I didn't say I believed it, I was just asking what you were talking about. | ||
| You didn't know this. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know everything that you know. | ||
| But this is what Biden launched his campaign on. | ||
| Biden made a public announcement to launch his presidency in 2020 off of this lie. | ||
| And you didn't know that. | ||
| Four years, five years later. | ||
| I don't know why you're getting on me about this, but... | ||
| Again, I apologize. | ||
| I'm not trying to get on you. | ||
| It's the exasperation largely with liberals. | ||
| Like, this is... | ||
| When this happened, and like the Covington kids hoax, remember that one? | ||
| Kids on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. | ||
| This is seven years ago. | ||
| Oh, and the kid that was smirking or whatever. | ||
| The Native American guy goes up in his face, banging a drum. | ||
| And CNN gets sued over it. | ||
| All these outlets, all these journalists were pushing this lie. | ||
| And I was just thinking to myself... | ||
| Resistance 1.0 stuff was cringy, sure, yeah. | ||
| But I mean, here we are today. | ||
| We had a journalist on. | ||
| She's a Brooklyn journalist. | ||
| And I thought she was very nice. | ||
| I don't mean to be disrespectful. | ||
| But she was like, no, Trump did this. | ||
| And we're just like... | ||
| I don't understand how we've come to this point where there are so many stories like the Penguin Island hoax, Very Fine People hoax, Covington injecting bleach, Maryland man. | ||
| It's like the media just lies and the liberals believe all of it. | ||
| Look, man. | ||
| So I'll tell you what it looks like from my side, which is that it looks like Trump does stuff that is either completely fucking moronic or completely indefensible, right? | ||
| And then you guys find one detail. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Where you reinterpret or you find a place where, like, oh, the liberal media went too far. | ||
| Yeah, sure, whatever. | ||
| And then, like, harp on that one little point forever. | ||
| And then miss, like, the larger thing that's happening to distract from. | ||
| In the same way that, you know, again, we're talking about Rumeza Osterk, and it's like, was it legally possible? | ||
| And, like, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And, like, what's the narrow legal justification when it's like, do we want to be a country where, you know, you can come here and speak your mind or not? | ||
| So... | ||
| Like... | ||
| This is... | ||
| This guy... | ||
| I don't want to talk about Brian Tyler Cohen. | ||
| You know who he is? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| But let's talk about something else. | ||
| Do we have to talk about what some other guy who's not me said? | ||
| I'm not talking about what he said. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm making a point where he said, you guys harp on one thing. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This guy... | ||
| David Pakman as well. | ||
| And many of the other most prominent liberal podcasts. | ||
| I won't defend any of these people. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| I'm only bringing this up because you made the point that you guys find one thing and then harp on that. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Look, dude, I'm just a little bored of this, like, sort of 10 minutes of conversation because I'm like, I don't say this stuff and, like, it feels like this is a thing to, like, fill air with rather than talking about what's actually happening. | ||
| You just accused me of doing something. | ||
| It's to complain about what the liberal media says. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Should I just say... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or should I have a conversation? | |
| Make your points or show. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| What we've been seeing prominently, there are three areas in the podcasting space. | ||
| There is the liberal, like this guy, where every single video he makes, is Trump. | ||
| Literally every single one. | ||
| Not to be fair, figuratively, because every 10th video might be one other person. | ||
| All just generic screenshots of Trump. | ||
| Hey, look, Cory Booker. | ||
| And nothing else. | ||
| And he gets 200 million views per month. | ||
| I do a show where we talk about whatever the news may be, which includes AI, solar storms, we talk about power outages, India, Pakistan, talk about everything. | ||
| Trump comes up, prominently he's the president, but we don't defend literally everything he does. | ||
| But you come and say, you guys do it as if I am and I'm not. | ||
| My concern is, when I look at the prominent left podcasts, they do. | ||
| There's a distinction between the left and the right that I think is important. | ||
| The left calls the right everyone from anarchists. | ||
| To neo-Nazis, which clearly don't align. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| There's sovereign citizen anarchists with, I mean, nebulous political views beyond that called the right wing. | ||
| You don't think you caricature the left at all? | ||
| You don't think you lump them all in together? | ||
| You don't think you engage in, you know, the same? | ||
| We do not. | ||
| For instance, we often make the distinction that leftists are pro-guns and liberals are not. | ||
| between a progressive and a moderate liberal, or like Gavin Newsom and say an Antifa protester. | ||
| They're very distinct. | ||
| And so we always draw that distinction. | ||
| Liberals, where I will lump them together, do not. | ||
| So the one So this is like, but you literally are because you're saying that like liberals do that to the right. | ||
| I am sitting here, you'd probably define me as a liberal or a leftist or whatever you want to say, but like I, I also believe myself to have a nuanced view of the variety of political positions on the right, right? | ||
| And the point I'm bringing up is not pertaining to you as an individual because we understand that it could be granular. | ||
| The point I'm making is, say, ADL, for instance, and other left-aligned political organizations use the phrase the right to represent... | ||
| Anything not left. | ||
| I wouldn't define the ADL as a left political organization at this point, but... | ||
| Perhaps I would agree with, yeah. | ||
| Like, at this point, it's very weird. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| Pro-Israel. | ||
| The politics of – to me, it's less about Israel. | ||
| It's more about what's happening in Gaza specifically and like that. | ||
| But yeah, it's the – and they've been like bizarrely sort of pro-Trump in all these like weird ways. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They came out. | ||
| It's Israel. | ||
| The way they were like tweeting about Elon's Heil Hitler salute going, don't worry about this too much. | ||
| Like it's fine. | ||
| Like that's very odd. | ||
| It's Israel. | ||
| Elon has been pro-Israel. | ||
| He's been making statements in favor of them. | ||
| And so I think, especially when we're talking about like Romesa and all that stuff, Israel is the issue. | ||
| The reason why they wanted to ban TikTok is because of Israel. | ||
| And when they come out and make these arguments about anti-Semitism, they're not talking about any other bigotry or racism. | ||
| So I'll agree with you on the ADL thing. | ||
| As of now, they're leaning more into Trump camp because Trump is pro-Israel. | ||
| Yeah, you know, the politics of, like, there's some really weird shit happening with politics when they go after a student protester, right? | ||
| Because I look at Trump's coalition. | ||
| He's got a lot of fucking anti-Semites on his side for sure. | ||
| Like, all the anti-Semites are definitely Trump fans. | ||
| But so are the, like, fascist Israeli pro-Israeli people. | ||
| The anti-Semitic right hates Trump. | ||
| Go watch their live streams. | ||
| I don't want to say their names because it just invites brigading for either of us. | ||
| But the white nationalist Christian right wanted Trump to lose. | ||
| In fact, they were pro-Biden. | ||
| And not because they thought Biden was good. | ||
| So here's why I try to be careful on this matter because you get it. | ||
| You're going to get trolled. | ||
| You're going to get death threats. | ||
| You're going to get blasted. | ||
| We were getting... | ||
| Tons of chats on IRL where they were like, I would rather Biden win because at least he is bad on Israel. | ||
| That's the statement these people were making. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so there is this— I'm sure there's some who feel that way, yeah. | |
| Watch some of their streams and how they talk about Trump. | ||
| Trump's pro-Israel. | ||
| They're mad. | ||
| They're very mad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just—it's sort of weirdly scrambled. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Have you seen— Because there's definitely also anti-Semites in his coalition, like the people at that rally. | ||
| Have you seen... | ||
| Let me see if I can find this. | ||
| There's a meme. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| What is this flag? | ||
| Let me show you this picture. | ||
| This is the new horseshoe theory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| Oh, left, right. | ||
| I'm confused as to the axis. | ||
| So there's Ukraine, Russia, and Israel, Palestine. | ||
| And then it's like, on the left, the moderate liberal types are pro-Israel. | ||
| But then from the moderate right to the conservatives are pro-Israel, but the far right are pro-Palestine, and the centrist, the more moderate, I shouldn't say moderate, but the left to the far left are pro-Palestine. | ||
| Then you have, on the Ukraine-Russia axis, moderate conservatives are pro-Ukraine, but... | ||
| Largely the conservative to far right is pro-Russia. | ||
| And then on the left, it's largely pro-Ukraine except for the far left. | ||
| That's pro-Russia. | ||
| They call this the new horseshoe theory as a joke. | ||
| Yeah, it's the problem with nationalism when it gets involved in the political system of a country. | ||
| It like scrambles everything and you get like all these weird alliances. | ||
| It becomes very hard to parse out like who's connected to who. | ||
| So when you guys were being paid by the Russian government, you didn't know. | ||
| We never got paid by the Russian government. | ||
| But the Russian government paid Tenet Media and they paid you. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| They didn't pay you. | ||
| It never got paid by the Russian government. | ||
| The case, as far as I know, has been dropped. | ||
| But I thought that you were making statements like, oh, we were the victims of being... | ||
| Should this prove to be true, we were defrauded and victimized. | ||
| But I guess the challenge is right now, the Trump administration has no priority in going over a story they don't give a shit about, but the Biden admin dropped it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, they didn't go forward on the prosecution. | ||
| So I don't know exactly what I can say. | ||
| And this is what the challenge is, is that my understanding is during the Biden administration, they dropped it. | ||
| I don't know because we're not party to anything having to do with it. | ||
| But like when they were like – I saw a – there was a thing in The Guardian about someone had like told like RT or whatever, had like asked Tenet Media, oh, could we do some anti-Ukraine story? | ||
| And then Tenet Media is like, oh, yes, one of our people will get on that. | ||
| It was not RT, but the evidence has never been released. | ||
| It's been denied. | ||
| Of course, it's been denied, but, you know. | ||
| Well, I mean, but this is the challenge, right? | ||
| But you were doing content that's, like, broadly consonant with what the Russian government wanted to be said about Ukraine, right? | ||
| I mean, this podcast that we're on right now was licensed to Tenet Media. | ||
| Which was being paid by the Russian government. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| Okay, I think it probably was, but... | ||
| I mean, maybe they dropped it and there's no evidence it was ever true. | ||
| I don't know how you resolve that circumstance, but I'll put it this way. | ||
| This podcast that we're currently on right now, we host a variety of subjects from, like, we did one on polar shifts. | ||
| We did one on theology. | ||
| We did one on aliens. | ||
| We did one on cryptozoology. | ||
| None of that had anything necessarily to do with politics. | ||
| We did talk Israel-Palestine. | ||
| Dave Rubin, for instance, had a contract with them for licensing, I think, for... | ||
| Half a year where he did reaction content to viral videos like a woman getting pulled over because she had too much milk in her car, some weird shit like that. | ||
| So it was a particularly strange circumstance. | ||
| The narrative that emerged from it is largely fake. | ||
| So this is a show that is owned by me, has been owned by me for a decade. | ||
| We've produced for years and a Tennessee company approached us to buy a license for it. | ||
| Non-exclusive, meaning we distributed wherever we want, but they also wanted to live-stream it. | ||
| They had no say or control in anything we had to do, and they bought a license. | ||
| Fox News lied about it. | ||
| The left continues to lie about it. | ||
| I think it's largely just... | ||
| I'm not going to get conspiratorial on what happened, because I honestly don't know. | ||
| The case has completely been dropped, as far as I can tell. | ||
| I suppose I could put in a request for the Trump DOJ to investigate why they did it and why they dropped it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean – so let's talk about what you have right now is an indictment of two Russians without any charges to Americans with no evidence that anything actually happened. | ||
| I mean if you want it to be true, you can say it is, but there's no evidence anything actually happened. | ||
| Do you think Russia should have invaded Ukraine? | ||
| You think that was good? | ||
| No? | ||
| No, I think Russia is a bunch of – I think the Russian government – I say this even like China. | ||
| The governments are the shitheads. | ||
| I think Putin is a despot who has used manipulative means like, I don't know, killing his political opponents to retain power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think he shouldn't have invaded Ukraine. | ||
| I think Russia lost the soft power battle and resorted to violence because they were losing an expansive cultural victory from the West. | ||
| And I think the outcome was inevitable to anybody in military because Russia's never going to give up the Black Sea. | ||
| But I think, you know, I think Russia's a bunch of shitheads. | ||
| I just don't think we should be involved in it. | ||
| But that's not even like a thing we talk about on the regular. | ||
| A lot of people left latched on to one video I did where Germany accused Ukraine of bombing Nord Stream and accused accused Ukrainian citizen of criminal actions against NATO, to which I said, if this was sanctioned by Ukraine, that makes them an enemy of ours. | ||
| I mean, but let's let's be literal. | ||
| If the Ukrainian government sanctioned an attack on on NATO resources, that would literally make them an enemy of this country. | ||
| I'm like, but that's a fact statement. | ||
| Germany accused this Ukrainian national of bombing Nord Stream. | ||
| Germany is NATO. | ||
| What am I supposed to say? | ||
| So, you know, the long story short is I look forward to anybody digging up what happened with the tenant thing. | ||
| It sounds like you lucked out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| If it was dropped and like nobody... | ||
| But it sounds like there's no case. | ||
| There's no story. | ||
| Yeah, that's great for you. | ||
| But why would it have been good or bad in the long run? | ||
| Well, it could have been bad if the case had gone forward and it could have turned up some... | ||
| I want it to keep going! | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you really? | |
| I wouldn't want it to keep going. | ||
| I would be like, oh, sick, give me the money. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Look, one of the reasons I wanted to come, I was just curious to see your operation here. | ||
| The money that we were paid by 10 is completely negligible? | ||
| And this is what a lot of people don't realize. | ||
| I don't know how much you were getting paid for your shows. | ||
| I mean, your shows were pretty big. | ||
| Yeah, that was in the days that cable still existed, you know, before it was all destroyed by... | ||
| But, I mean, we do ad rates sometimes for $50,000. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when the story came out, the insinuation was that, like, oh, holy shit, Tim Pool is getting $100,000 to license a show. | ||
| Well, that was literally printed in the press, that it was $100,000. | ||
| The indictment said it. | ||
| But I have no problem saying, like, yeah, yeah, we got a license for $100K. | ||
| It was a market rate negotiated by lawyers. | ||
| That's why Dave Rubin and several others in it negotiated the exact same rates, independent of us. | ||
| You have to take a look at, like, for instance, this show is the, on average... | ||
| Seventh biggest live stream in the country. | ||
| So, like, what do you think you're going to sell an ad for on the seventh biggest live show in the country that pulls in hundreds of thousands, you know, between on a low day, 200, but maybe upwards of 500k for one episode? | ||
| Well, with a two-hour show, you could probably get in four or five ad reads at... | ||
| 10k each. | ||
| So you're looking at for one show selling ads upwards of $50,000. | ||
| And if we do premium buys, like Adam Conover, he's a big get. | ||
| You know, a clothing company wants to sponsor it because they know people are going to want to watch. | ||
| We go to them and say, if you want an ad read, it's $50,000. | ||
| So, singular episodes could actually run as high as $250,000. | ||
| But every episode of your show being worth $100,000? | ||
| Like, how is an episode, how is a two-hour podcast of people talking worth $100,000 license fee? | ||
| How are they going to make more than $100,000 on it on the other end? | ||
| It sounds like a crazy number. | ||
| It's pretty standard, right? | ||
| If we're doing a show that is routinely averaging the seventh biggest in the nation, when someone comes to you to make a licensing agreement, they're saying, I can make your show bigger. | ||
| And make more money than you could on your own. | ||
| That's why Joe Rogan did the deal with Spotify. | ||
| Like, how is Spotify going to make more than Joe Rogan did? | ||
| Yeah, but this is just some... | ||
| But that's like a platform. | ||
| This is like a company that's just licensing it. | ||
| What were they doing with it? | ||
| They were airing it on their platform to... | ||
| Their platform just like tenantmedia.com? | ||
| No, not even on their website. | ||
| Just on YouTube and Rumble. | ||
| They were just... | ||
| So they were just re-airing it on YouTube and Rumble and it was going to be worth $100K an episode to them? | ||
| It already was generated. | ||
| Some Russian guys show up and they're like, we will give you 100k. | ||
| And you're like, ah, this is legit. | ||
| Russia was never involved. | ||
| So a conservative personality who's been in the space for a decade who worked for the Blaze Media said, I've got funding for a startup. | ||
| We want to license one of your shows. | ||
| I licensed a discovery. | ||
| Look, I take tons of dumb money. | ||
| I've done dumb money gigs before. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know why people are giving me this much money for this. | ||
| But all right, if you want to do it. | ||
| You don't have to say if you don't want to, but what's the biggest sponsorship you've ever gotten? | ||
| The biggest sponsorship? | ||
| I just... | ||
| If you asked me in three months, there's something I could tell you about because it's too recent. | ||
| We've done one ad read for $100,000 before. | ||
| Here's the business proposition. | ||
| Someone comes to me and says, we want to license your show. | ||
| I say, okay, right now we're doing, I don't know, maybe like $10,000, $20,000 per episode. | ||
| Why would I license this show to you when I have full control of it right now? | ||
| They say, we'll give you 50. I say, eh. | ||
| In a year, I think we'll be doing 50, so why do a deal with you if I'm a year going to lose that money? | ||
| So then they say, what do you think you're going to generate? | ||
| I say, okay, well, we're planning on expanding. | ||
| We're doing live shows. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Sometimes we do special events. | ||
| And I think the biggest ad read we've ever done was 100,000. | ||
| We've done some that were 80, some that were 50. So if we're going to give up on that. | ||
| And lose the ability to negotiate those terms. | ||
| You're going to pay a premium. | ||
| They say, okay, we're going to pay a premium because we bet in one year we're going to make more than we're paying you now. | ||
| I say I'll make the deal because I'm going to make more now and not have to worry about doing development and hiring people. | ||
| That's any license agreement anyone does with anything. | ||
| Spotify doesn't actually have Joe Rogan's podcast exclusive to Spotify. | ||
| Joe Rogan's podcast is on all platforms. | ||
| But they paid him, I think the number they gave was like $250 million for the latest up. | ||
| Because they're saying, Joe, we are confident we can sell ads better than you and we will make more than $250 million. | ||
| So we will pay you that. | ||
| Yeah, there's just a huge difference between Spotify, the largest audio platform in the world, and people who are rebroadcasting it on YouTube. | ||
| It's just like it makes less sense. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I mean like take the money. | ||
| I was just like – I wish I could get a foreign government to sponsor my show. | ||
| Then I could have a bigger show. | ||
| I don't and I never did. | ||
| Never did. | ||
| So I guess the issue is Blaze Media, right? | ||
| American company, American personality says we're launching a company. | ||
| We're going to license your rate at a market standard that a lawyer negotiated non-exclusive. | ||
| And then the government came out with an indictment and then dropped it almost immediately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why would they do that? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, I guess they were about to be out of power. | ||
| They thought it maybe couldn't keep going. | ||
| Why wouldn't they just release some evidence or do something? | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I was just curious to hear you talk about it, because it's like the, you know, when I told people I was doing the show, the only thing anybody said to me was like, oh, that was the guy who was paid by the Russian government, and oh, the beanie guy. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Would you concede the paid by the Russian government thing is unproven? | ||
| What evidence is there? | ||
| Yeah, I mean I was just like – I read all the articles when it came out. | ||
| I didn't follow the case. | ||
| So I guess I would look into it. | ||
| This does exemplify I think the problem left in the right house currently, right? | ||
| You've said several times rather insinuating it directly that we intentionally took money from a foreign power. | ||
| I was just curious to hear you talk about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the issue I see is liberals largely don't – I'm not saying you. | ||
| Online, the argument is always, aha, Russia, which was never accused of us. | ||
| The feds reached out to us for victim statements and asked us to help go up against them and provide assistance against the literal Russians that they accused. | ||
| We agreed and then they dropped it. | ||
| So I don't understand what happened other than the liberals' side of things in the podcast have largely run with a narrative that never happened and used it as a smear against my companies. | ||
| I don't want to be that kind of victim. | ||
| That's a great kind of victim to be. | ||
| Get like a million bucks. | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| Make a statement about how hurt you got. | ||
| If that was the story. | ||
| Right now, the only story that we know of is a media startup paid a license fee that was a standard market rate for one of the biggest podcasts in the country. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And that's why I said, if it is true, we were defrauded into, you know, like we were lied to. | ||
| This was never part of the terms of any agreement. | ||
| I've never accepted money from any foreign governments. | ||
| Or anything like that. | ||
| I think largely what we end up with is a political vector for liberals to disregard the points we make on our show. | ||
| Regardless, still, Timcast IRL is the biggest live show in the country. | ||
| It was the seventh biggest. | ||
| The Culture War seventh. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| They're different shows. | ||
| But this is just like a Friday show, right? | ||
| The Culture War was licensed to tenant. | ||
| But Timcast IRL and the Tim Pool Daily News show were not. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Then you record those in this room. | ||
| Everything's recorded here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I will caveat when I said the biggest live show. | ||
| Obviously, there are live streamers who do chats who are bigger than us and everything. | ||
| But in terms of a news-produced podcast, we're number one. | ||
| Crowder, depending on the metric you want to use, Steven Crowder is a comedy news sketch show. | ||
| He's bigger than us by 10,000 per day or whatever, which is tremendous. | ||
| Oh, got it. | ||
| We got this problem with classifying shows in Hollywood. | ||
| I always get beaten to Emmys by some talk show that's pretending to be a best hosted informational non-fiction series or special and then fucking David Letterman's talk show would crowd us out for the nominations. | ||
| Fucking category abuse. | ||
| But what I will say is Hard numbers throw my opinion away. | ||
| We were number two of all streams only beaten out by Vatican Watch. | ||
| So with all the lies, the smears and manipulation, we're hitting 800K a day, bigger than all the cable shows. | ||
| So they can say whatever they want about me, I guess. | ||
| The people who watch the show, we give them the facts, we give them the documents, we show them the articles. | ||
| We don't do any story without pulling up the article from any source, which includes the New York Times. | ||
| And then people watch, and I think this is the challenge I brought up as my final statement, because I know we'll try to end here. | ||
| The challenge that I typically find when we bring on liberals on the show, when they do rarely come, Not the culture war. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| But for IRL, liberals largely say no because every story we do is predicated upon Newsweek or CNN or the New York Times or even sometimes MSNBC. | ||
| And there's a problem that many liberals end up having. | ||
| I'll give a shout out to Luke Beasley or Hunter Avalon is a good example. | ||
| When they make claims asserting like things like, you know, Donald Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people and then we just pull up the article and say, hey, it didn't happen. | ||
| And then what do they do? | ||
| They end up with a viral clip where it's like they were wrong about something. | ||
| And that ends up being the principal issue for why I think liberals don't come on this show. | ||
| It's like hard to... | ||
| You fly everybody out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes first class too. | ||
| Oh, you flew me out first class. | ||
| It was really nice. | ||
| Travel was... | ||
| It was really nice, man. | ||
| But the travel was like... | ||
| I got like four hours of sleep last night. | ||
| I'm like, man, this was rough getting out here. | ||
| It's like hard to... | ||
| I went like out of my way to come on because I was just curious to come on and see what you do and like meet the weirdest guy on the internet, you know? | ||
| The weirdest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Whatever we are, whatever we do, we've got Magic the Gathering, we've got skateboarding. | ||
| But to be fair, we're an hour and a half outside of D.C., so it's not easy, but it's not the hardest. | ||
| I know you've got a hard stop, so if you're... | ||
| Yeah, we should probably wrap it up. | ||
| It's on kind of an equivocal note. | ||
| I thought you were fantastic. | ||
| Oh, I appreciate it, man. | ||
| I had a good time, and it was fun mixing it up. | ||
| Absolutely, man. | ||
| Where can people find you? | ||
| So I do a podcast called Factually. | ||
| It's a lot like you were explaining to me your different shows. | ||
| It's all on one YouTube channel. | ||
| I do a podcast called Factually. | ||
| I do monologues that have no name. | ||
| It's on YouTube. | ||
| The name of the podcast feed where all that stuff is is Factually. | ||
| And I'm in Charleston, South Carolina doing comedy at the Wits End Comedy Club this weekend if people want to come out. | ||
| I think we've still got some tickets. | ||
| We are airing this a week later, though. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| Okay, well, air that and you just missed it. | ||
| Tomorrow. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Tomorrow. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So by the time people watch this, it'll happen. | ||
| It'll be too late. | ||
| So you can't see me in Charleston. | ||
| And then I'm about to announce a bunch of other dates. | ||
| The only dates that are currently up right now are Oklahoma and Brea, California. | ||
| If people want to go to adamconover.net. | ||
| There's going to be more. | ||
| In June, I'll have a whole fall tour up. | ||
| But yeah, people can follow me there if they want to come see me live. | ||
| Brother? | ||
| You've had the best hair in media the whole time, and you still do. | ||
| Thanks for coming, man. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I really appreciate it, Tim. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| All right, everybody. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out. | ||
| Follow me on X and Instagram at TimCast. |