Supplementary Materials 12: Olympic Ceremonies and Presidential Candidates
We tour the Guru-sphere's balanced and considered response to the Olympics Opening Ceremony and Kamala Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate. And oh boy are they on form!Addressing Petty Grievances: The Show's FormatThe Furor French Olympics Opening CeremonyTrump's Assassination ConspiraciesThe Great Flowering of Kamala Harris TakesKonstantin Kisin and Cringe ImmunitySteven Pinker vs. TriggernometryBret Weinstein's New Conspiracy HypothesisThe Wonders of Peterson AcademyBret's Falsifiable PredictionWe Never Miss!The Importance of Supporting the PodcastLex Fridman's Selective Centrism and Wounded Bird PoseThe Hypocrisy of Reactionary PuritansKen Klippenstein on Steve Bannon's War RoomFinal Thoughts and FarwellThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1hr 17 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusLinksBret's New Conspiracy HypothesisTriggernometry: Is This the Death of Harvard? - Steven PinkerLex's wounded bird poseJournalist Ken Klippenstein Enters The War Room
Hello, and welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplementary materials.
Bonus, the B-side, the unreleased tracks from the Decoding the Guru's archive.
How are you keeping, Matt?
You're looking wintery.
You have a beanie on.
No proper introduction.
Just how you're doing.
Oh, shit.
I always forget that.
Right, that's Matthew Brown, psychologist extraordinaire.
I'm Chris Kavner, anthropologist.
We look at gurus, we decode them on these episodes.
Have a slightly more informal air to them.
We surf around the discourse sphere and feel despair at what we observe there.
So that's what we're up to.
But you're still wearing a beanie.
I'm still wearing a beanie.
You can't distract me.
I can't let you go with that introduction, though.
You didn't inject any special source.
You should have said something like, with me is Matthew Brown, the heart and soul of this podcast.
I'm Chris Kavanagh.
It's cold, calculating brain.
Something like that.
Wow.
That was good.
Yeah, so just imagine I said that.
That's why Matt does the intro to the main thing.
That's why I do the intros.
But yes, under the beanie, I'm hiding my white, snowy, uh, coif.
Mian?
You're like Koizumi.
The old Japanese president.
That's right.
That's right.
I'm developing the eyebrows to match.
You look lovely, may I say?
Thank you.
Very youthful black hair and just a few streaks of grey in the beard that just does nothing but add a note of distinguished hair.
I've seen things, Matt.
I've seen things.
That's changed me.
It was Jack Black.
I've seen tweets you wouldn't believe.
I've watched the Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson.
You know, meeting of the minds.
And I looked in the mirror and I was just peppered white.
That's right.
It's stealing your soul.
It's stealing your soul.
Well, what are we doing today, Chris?
We're doing like, look, my God.
I mean, I know what we're doing.
We've got to get a grip on the discourse.
It's running away from us.
So much has happened.
It happens too quickly.
There's a lot going on, Matt.
There's a lot going on.
And, you know, far be it from me.
The stoop to the level of addressing petty grievances before we talk about world affairs.
But I'll just note that, you know, this concept for this version of the podcast was that we would take some of the material that was in the introductory sections and would extend it out and package it separately for people that wanted that,
right?
So should these introductions or should these supplementary materials be a little indulgent?
That's by design.
That's by design, Matt.
So if we want to talk about the weekend, if we want to mention our recent fitness achievements, that's fine.
That's fine.
That's part of the plan, right?
Because you can just skip it by the magic of technology.
And to remind everyone else in an additional public service announcement, I always put bookmarks in.
So you can always see the little thing.
You're like, oh, they're talking about this again.
Just click it.
You go on to the bit that you want.
That's the service that we provide for you.
So there we are.
There we are.
There you go.
See what happens when you complain, people?
You get answers.
You get answers.
That's what you get.
So, yeah.
But I'm not even going to talk about it every weekend, Matt.
Just I had a good weekend.
That's all.
I'm not even going to go into the...
No, you don't get it.
That's your punishment for this week.
We're just going to not give any updates.
You don't know what happened.
I mean, you know, but other people don't know.
It was nothing special.
It was fantastic.
It was very special.
Yeah.
Well, I worked, as you know, all yesterday, all my Sunday, just like I worked last Sunday to get this report in, which is due today, Chris.
I worked to give myself that extra time so I could be with you.
So, you know, that's how much I care.
That podcast is about you personally.
Yeah.
We don't even need to provide context.
Just as a report, okay?
It's going in.
It's a report.
You have to do it.
It's a report.
You can't just leave reports undone.
Reports need to be done.
Everyone knows this.
It's the 21st century.
That's right.
That's right.
We're pushing papers around.
We're submitting things into files.
This is the way it works.
This is the way the world map.
But the world has been turning.
Things have been happening.
People have been losing their collective shit over various events.
So I will note that since the last time that we recorded in America in the presidential race, Biden stepped down, announced that he would be not seeking re-election and then subsequently that he would be essentially endorsing Kamala Harris.
And I think it's still yet to be officially determined that she's the nominee, but it looks all but certain at this point.
This led to various people having conniptions all over the internet in different ways that we'll talk about.
But you may remember, you know, there was an assassination of Trump a while ago.
That now feels like a million years ago because all of the discourse has shifted.
But before we get to that map, there was other discourse, the most contemporary, up-to-date discourse that we have for people.
It relates to the Olympics.
What has been going on there?
The French Olympics.
Why could anybody be upset about that?
The French Olympics.
That's right.
Well, what happened there?
Let's see.
They had an opening ceremony, didn't they?
They had an opening ceremony and it was very French.
You know, if you haven't seen it, it looked like Cirque du Soleil on acid a little bit.
Was it avant-garde?
It was avant-garde.
It was the French.
At their Frenchiest.
And it was very dissimilar to the opening ceremony, which I also saw a post about in China for the Beijing Games.
And that one there was complete contrast, right?
It was...
There was like a thousand drummers with the great big taiko drums or something like that.
It was really impressive.
I don't think they were using taiko drums.
No, I know.
The Chinese equivalent.
Apologies to any Chinese listeners out there.
I know we've got a lot of fans in Beijing.
But, you know, that was in many ways a classic kind of ceremony.
It was very Chinese.
It showcased tradition, strength, unity, etc.
Yeah, and then in Japan, during the pandemic, there was a kind of a ceremony that was very scaled back because the crowds and the various concerns and perhaps economic concerns in Japan about the cost of hosting the Olympics without audiences and whatnot.
But yeah, so the Japan Olympics, the opening ceremony there was controversial in a different way.
People felt it was a bit lackluster, but other people defended it.
That's not what this controversy is about, is it?
No, no.
It was one, wokeness gone mad, obviously.
I think there was a chubby lady wearing a costume, and that just makes the red mist descend over the eyes of the anti-woke, because, you know, to them, that's just unacceptable.
That should never happen.
There was a guy who looked like a Smurf.
Wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
I saw him sitting in a bowl of fruit.
Or her.
I don't know.
But wasn't there also drag queens or something?
Yes, there was like a man with a big beard.
It had a bearded lady kind of thing with a dress.
So, you know, it had that carnival, you know, circus, slightly off-putting, French kind of thing.
Yeah, and apparently also the Dionysian feast that was going on there, that was perceived by American right-wingers as being actually a parody of The Last Supper.
So it was not only troubling transgenderism and wokeness and large-figured ladies wearing costumes, but it was also a mockery of Judeo-Christian values.
Oh, I see.
Well, I did notice the parallels with the image, but like, you know, the Last Supper image has been...
Parodied a bazillion times.
Like you can find Simpsons posters with it or Succession or like Game of Thrones.
I've seen that hundreds and thousands of times, right?
Like that image repurposed.
So it's not that surprising that somebody would choose to include that.
No, it wouldn't be surprising and I'd be totally fine with it if they did.
But I mean, the more reasonable interpretation is it was like a bacchanalian.
Oh, is that it?
Yeah, that's pretty much the consensus.
And I think actually what the ceremony's artistic director said, that was pretty much what it was about.
But, you know, who cares?
I mean, the point is that a lot of these American culture warriors and influencers wringing their hands, clutching their pearls, absolutely shocked.
And, you know, they see this and they position it within their...
Culture war framing, which is this is an assault on Western values.
This is an assault on our Judeo-Christian heritage, yada, yada, yada.
And it is ironic and very funny that they only see this because of their culture war adult brains and also because they have very little conception of European culture and European history and French people in particular.
And the fact that they...
Couldn't perceive it for being what it was.
The French are frankly just like this.
Yeah, made them get it hilariously wrong.
I see, right?
Yes, but also, I noticed one thread by a guy, Tracy Moortgreens, who was a researcher, I think, for Blocked and Reported, but usually a quite thoughtful guy, ex-Mormon, on X. And he wrote a kind of thread and responded to things saying that...
He really didn't like it, right?
He found it distasteful.
And his point was that there was a lot of marking of Christianity implied in it or Western culture, right?
But that they would not have done this for like Mohammed or Muslims or the CCP, like because that would have led to huge controversy and whatnot.
But I was like, right, but...
But that's the point.
Like, France's history is to do with, like, Christianity and secularism and revolutions and beheading nobles and all.
So that's what they put fun at.
So if their opening ceremony had to be dedicated to, like, making fun of China, it wouldn't make sense.
But it would have came across as quite mean-spirited.
I'd like it.
They could have.
I actually think they could have done something.
About the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
That would have been in the realm of possibility for France to do, right?
Because France is also the country that has all the things about the full-body veal bands, right?
So it's not like they're completely unwilling to touch any issues around secularism and conservative religiosity as it pertains to Muslims.
Well, the whole vibe of the thing, as I said, was this carnival-type burlesque.
And, you know, it included a bunch of other edgy, somewhat offensive, at least to some people, things like Marie Antoinette, someone dressed up as Marie Antoinette with a severed head and holding her head in her hand in a fabulous costume.
It was that kind of vibe.
And so...
Yeah, I mean, I don't recall spotting, like, specific references to mocking Christianity, but the whole point of the thing was that it was irreverent.
Conservative commentator said.
Yeah, well, yeah, they clearly saw things that I didn't.
But, I mean, the whole point of the thing is that it was irreverent and, you know, disrespectful and flippant and tongue-in-cheek and all of those things.
In fact, it was just extremely French, and frankly, if Western culture means anything...
It means that.
French people being weird.
It doesn't mean like 10,000 people banging drums in perfect unisons, you know, demonstrating their self-control and discipline.
That's not the French way.
So I just feel like these people have got everything.
They understand nothing.
They've got it completely backwards.
I also saw that some people were complaining about like a deaf battleman called Gojira.
By the way, Godzilla in Japanese.
But they're a technical...
Death metal band.
Apparently, some people describe them as progressive metal, right?
But like, death metal's whole thing is, you know, making use of satanic imagery and like, you know, just in general, that's the thing.
Blood and gore and demons and devils and alongside hard guitar riffs and whatnot.
Yeah, it would be like complaining about Lordy.
And Chris, I mean, that's right.
I mean, if you're going to clutch your pearls over the satanic references in heavy metal, it's like, hello, the 1980s want the outrage back.
The other thing too is that death metal band was playing like on a stage that was sort of built into, I don't know, one of France's iconic classical buildings, right?
So that was the kind of thing they were going for.
And for me, that was very, like that's just the whole thing was very...
Very French.
So the point is, the people have got problems with any of that stuff.
It's like, yes, it was in bad taste in some ways.
It wasn't very respectful of the traditional buildings or the monarchy of France.
But that's the whole point.
That's what French people exist to do.
That's what they do.
That is right.
So I think these people, they portray themselves as good liberals, right?
Defenders of free speech.
And progressive Western civilization.
But yeah, no, no.
They're the opposite of that, right?
The only thing they care about is respecting authority and not challenging the historical classical things.
Yeah, that's right.
It's like Jordan Peterson's videos always like to play or, you know, James Lindsay liked to play classical music as the intro, right?
It adds up in a touch of class, Matt, right?
Roman statues.
And you mentioned Charlie Hebdo, right?
So these people would like to consider themselves as the inheritors of Christopher Hitchens' legacy, right?
He was someone who was very vocal about that.
It was a big flag issue.
And the main point of...
That motivated someone like Christopher Hitchens.
This is what's wrong.
This is when moral outrage around challenging sacred images and cultural things is wrong.
That it's okay to be disrespectful.
It's okay to exercise your free speech and so on.
That these people would like to see themselves as the inheritors of Christopher Hitchens' ideas.
But in fact, they've got more in common with the attackers, with the people who attacked the Charlie Hebdo building.
Oh, hot take.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Let me play a centrist devil advocate here, Matt, because wasn't one of Hitchens' things?
So, like, I agree about the kind of hypocrisy in that regard and pearl clutching, which wouldn't be very Hitchens-like.
But one of the things that Hitchens also pilloried was the liberal hypocrisy around...
Being willing to criticize Christianity and the West, but being very hand-wringing when it came to any condemnation of Islamist violence or non-Western cultures, alternative ways of knowing and that.
And isn't there an element of truth in that?
You know, there is the point that it would have been weird for them to have made a big thing about like...
Not liking Mohammed in this ceremony.
But if they had did it, it would have led to more than angry tweet friends, theoretically at least.
There would have been protests at French embassies probably and that kind of thing.
So isn't that a difference?
You look at me like, come on.
That's my best try.
Answer the charge.
I'll answer this.
I don't know where to begin.
I mean, one, it's what you said before, which is that this is not a thing you do.
You don't do a performance at an Olympic festival making ironic cultural references of other countries, right?
The French are going to riff on their own culture first and foremost.
England first and foremost as well, just to say if they did.
We do that.
Oh, yeah.
The first country to be part of it would be the English or the Germans.
And rightly so.
But I guess the other thing, too, is that it is just literally more cool if you're going to have playful, ironic satire and fun.
It's just more appropriate to be doing about yourself.
Like if you go around Japan making fun of Japanese stuff, right?
So this is so stupid what Japanese people do with this, that and the other.
That's different from a Japanese person.
Talking about the same thing.
Yeah, this would be like, you know, Follow Ted was very funny, right?
Because it's made by people poking fun at like the various things around Irish Catholicism and the hypocrisy.
If it had been called like Follow Takeshi, that was one of the Japanese immigrants that was like making fun of him to do with these cultural stereotypes.
Well, imagine an English show about this drunken, stupid, Irish corrupt priest.
It doesn't have the same flavour to it.
Anyway, but the main thing is you're dealing with hypotheticals there.
Those hypotheticals are kind of silly.
Well, there's a very good movie called Four Lions, if you've ever seen it, which is like a satirical presentation of extremist Islamic people in the UK, right?
Like kind of homegrown terrorism.
And it's a comedy by Armando Iannucci.
And it's very satirical, but...
That is also not treating that like it's poking fun at it, right?
And I think that is absolutely within standard, I don't know, liberal lexicon.
Like Armando Iannucci is still alive.
He's not being shot dead in the street and whatnot.
Like in Australia, we've got a show called, I think it's called Fat Pizza, right?
Which just makes fun of basically people from like Middle Eastern and Southern Europe type.
Sort of thing.
And it's all making fun of all these.
It involves all the stereotypes.
It's got a bad taste and all that stuff.
But it comes from a place of love, right?
It comes from people who are there.
Same with Kathleen Kim, right?
This is just making relentless fun of bogans, of lower class white people.
Again, every Australian watching it loves it.
And again, it comes from a place of, you know, whatever.
So the French, right?
When the French are being disrespectful.
About Marie Antoinette, the French Revolution, the monarchy.
Trust me, that doesn't come from a place of where the French don't love themselves enough and don't think their culture is freaking awesome, because they do, right?
They really do.
Yeah, well, that's one example of the idiocy that can be generated online in response to events that you don't have to like.
The opening ceremony?
No, I didn't particularly like it.
I don't like Cirque du Soleil.
I don't really go for that kind of thing.
Who cares?
You know, that's the point.
Yeah, they're just freaks on wheels rolling around.
Let them do their things.
That's it.
So, the other thing, Matt, that happened, you know, as we said, was that, one, there was the assassination attempt, which we talked about before, but just to mention that, of course, The internet's premier conspiracy theorist,
Brad Weinstein, had an episode, How Many Shooters, John Cullen, on the Trump assassination attempt.
So he, like other conspiracy theorists, could not help themselves with inventing deep state conspiracies and whatnot about the shooter.
You know, maybe he was allowed to do it.
No, it has to be that there was additional shooters as well as this one, because in general...
Part of the reason for the additional shooter conspiracies is that the person responsible for killing or attempting to kill significant figures is often not a particularly impressive person.
And so, you know, if it turns out that there's just somebody unhinged who's not really impressive but managed to get into a position to, like, kill someone who was a larger-than-the-life figure, people often are like, no, that can't be it, right?
Crap guy attempted to destroy this larger than life figure and succeeded.
Or in this case, failed, right?
So there has to be more to it, right?
And you can do that by inventing a backstory where they're actually like a security agent for the CIA or the FBI or whatever.
Or you can posit that there were other people involved, like on the grassy knoll or wherever, right?
So Brett did that.
And in that interview, Matt, this is a guy who believes he gets coded messages from Trump.
Delivered in his speeches to him, like proper QAnon shit.
And Brett is straight there.
He just is a giant conspiracy theorist now, which we already knew.
But yeah, that happened.
But in response to Kamala Harris, that led to the great flowering of cakes online.
Because...
Like, ostensibly, this is what people on the right kind of were calling for.
They were saying, you know, Biden is mentally unfit.
He needs to step down.
Who's really controlling things?
This is a, you know, look at him.
He's being puppeted around and all these kind of things.
And then when he stepped down, saying, you know, that he's made the decision that, you know, he's not going to be leading the party.
Ostensibly what they called for.
They called it.
A coup.
An undemocratic coup.
And this is not fair.
And they all started throwing their backdrops.
It was like Twitter became like a pram show.
Just all the toys were flying everywhere.
And it was amazing because the narrative shifted so quickly from the Trump assassination attempt to everyone being like, oh dear.
Like he's now got this kind of heroic, you know, moment and a kind of invincible persona around.
This guy, J.D. Vance, a young conservative who people had questions about, but, you know, a young guy in another round of coverage about Trump.
And look, he's back on the campaign trail immediately.
And Biden was not very visible or doing a couple of interviews where he didn't come across much better.
And then the news came out that he got COVID, which was like, so there was many celebratory victory laps being taken with like, this is all sewed up now, right?
And including, that seemed to be the general consensus.
In liberal media, that Biden is possibly not going to drop out and we're looking like we're going to be screwed from polls and whatnot.
And then Biden did drop out.
And Kamala Harris very quickly, instead of it becoming this like kind of shitshow fight thing, it seemed that very quickly there was a move to Kamala Harris as the presumptive nominee.
And that seemed to greatly upset all the conservative, a significant...
Portion of centrist heterodox accounts, and they were all going crazy.
Did you see any of this?
Well, one thing, you kind of maybe passed over it a little bit, but Brett Weinstein's theory about the conspiracies.
Are we going to get to that?
I've got clips.
I've got clips.
We can go there if you want.
Well, we can.
I mean, the only other thing I'll say first then is that, yeah, it's amazing because for a long time the discourse has been that age, Chris, age is so important.
What we really need are young leaders.
These people in their late 70s, early 80s, they're just too old.
To lead this country.
That's really the main thing.
This is why I, as a centrist, have totally opposed to the Democrats and this walking zombie that is Biden.
That suddenly stopped.
That's gone now.
Forget about that now.
Now there are different problems, different problems with the Democrats.
She's 59, by the way.
I mean, young, comparatively, but it's amazing what we now consider youthful exuberance.
In politics.
But yeah, so David Sachs, he's one of the guys from the All In podcast, a kind of like tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and has been relentlessly pro-Russia mouthpiece during the Ukraine conflict.
He's just, in general, a massive shitty person.
We should cover the All In podcast.
But like, if you have the view of the reactionary right-wing tech entrepreneur type...
David Sachs is your man.
And he went on the Twitter bender.
He was just, like, tweeting every couple of minutes.
You know, we all know Joe didn't want to go.
First they told us there was nothing wrong with fighting.
Then they threatened to destroy him if he didn't leave the race.
Now they're calling him a hero.
How can you not be sickened by these people?
What I did not know until this day, it was Nancy all along.
She got him.
And he also said...
Just this morning, Biden's campaign chair said he wasn't leaving the race.
Then Biden suddenly posted a resignation letter with no address to the country.
Reeks of a coup.
And reeks, spelled W-R-E-A-K-S, just to show their level of intellect.
Also, Democrats are euphoric right now that they drove their own nominee and sitting president out of the race.
This is desperation masquerading as strategy.
As soon as the American people realize that they already know Kamala Harris and dislike her, the bottom will drop out.
Joe Biden turned America into a banana republic by prosecuting his election opponent.
And as in a banana republic, he has now been deposed in a coup.
What goes around comes around.
And that's like, you know, that's probably just a span of about 20 or 30 minutes, right?
Like, he went on endlessly, just...
Throwing out things constantly.
It's a coup.
It's a coup.
One candidate survived the assassination.
The other staged a coup.
Your choice, America.
I saw Benjamin Boyce, a reactionary anti-trans guy, Brett Weinstein, Uber fan as well, posted a meme showing the Democrats pointing a gun at a person sitting in a couch and it says democracy, shooting him and then say,
now that we got democracy...
Out of the way, we can get back to saving it.
And rigid phetasy, no dissentrist.
The Democrats have no respect for their voters at all.
It's wild.
So this is just some of the tips, right?
It was just everywhere.
They were all exploding.
Not like, this is not okay.
No one can accept this.
And the thing is, the Democrats of various stripes, I saw progressives, you know, center-left people, people on the left generally were like, well, this is fine.
You know, this is what people...
Overall, there was a rare general consensus that this was a positive move.
And they are supposed to be the ones that would be upset about this.
You know, because whenever Bernie was not selected, right, because the DNC, according to various narratives, kind of lined up behind Clinton and the candidates dropped out, the left was not united.
That was then presented as, this was a coup organized by the...
But there was no talk of that in this case, or at least very, very little that I saw on the left.
So it was like the right saying, well, this isn't democracy.
No one on the left should be happy with this.
And everyone on the left being, no, this is fine.
This is what everybody was asking for.
And like, this is democracy.
She's the vice president.
He stepped down.
And there's going to be some process that they go through to confirm her.
But this is, you know, it's just what...
What's going to happen in this circumstance?
So it's an unusual circumstance because a sitting president has, I think, never stepped down without being assassinated or like having, what's his face, you know, the water gate.
Yeah, well, he's not stepping down, though, is he?
He's just not running for re-election.
Oh, yeah, well, he's, yeah, so stepping down in terms of not seeking re-election.
Yes, he's finishing out his term.
And Dave Rubin said that if Biden finished out his term...
He would delete all his social media accounts and exit the public punditry.
People play that clip.
So he released the thing saying, well, obviously he's not going to do that, but it's because Biden, even if he's technically, physically there, he's mentally already checked out.
So his prediction is valid.
So, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, just imagine the converse, right?
Can you ever imagine Trump putting his party, and maybe even the country, First, right?
Because that's what Biden has clearly done.
You know, like any human being, he's got ambitions.
I'm sure he'd personally like to run a second term.
He's been convinced by members of his party that it's not in the best interests of them and perhaps not even the country, that he should retire.
And he took that advice and he did step down.
You cannot imagine Trump ever doing that.
And the other thing you can't imagine is that there was a huge amount of talk.
Within the sort of general left in the United States, I know because it was just endless left-wing progressive Democratic voters talking about how concerned they were about Biden running for a second term and basically evincing their lack of confidence in him.
Now, that's exactly what you're not going to see in Trump's new MAGA-style Republican Party because one of them is a cult of personality where the leader...
Cubs first and foremost.
And the other one isn't.
So, yeah.
Anyway, the ironies abound.
The double standards.
Whatever.
Yeah, and they all seem...
Also, there was a lot of shock expressed that suddenly Kamala seems to be popular.
There's various memes going around and people are joking.
Stuff that they were previously using to dismiss her as a serious candidate is being repurposed.
As like a positive meme, right?
And they're like, why would this happen?
This is completely astroturf.
This could never happen.
And you're like, why would people on the left rally behind the next person that's likely to be, you know, the candidate for the president in an election year with an election a couple of months around?
I can think of one or two reasons that that might happen.
And when the contrast is Trump, you know, or Biden, for that matter.
You know, she comes across as competent and coherent and young, like frankly young, 59 years young.
By Biden and Trump standards, that is extremely young, right?
So yeah, just this thing that like...
There's no reason that the left would support the left-wing candidate for the presidency.
There is.
There's a really obvious reason that they would do that.
But this is conspiracy thinking in a nutshell, isn't it?
Where you just ignore the obvious banal interpretation of events in favor of some lurid, insanely complicated explanation.
And I think that's a theme that we're going to be following up with Brett shortly.
Yes, yeah, I will.
I get to that very shortly.
But just Tim Pool, noted idiot, beanie wearing Tim Pool.
He wrote, for example, they knew Biden was out.
This whole ploy was to block Robert Kennedy Jr. from winning the Democratic nomination, which he would have.
But obviously he wouldn't have because he was never polling anywhere near enough to...
Like, secure the Democratic nomination.
So it's just an alternative world, right, that they live in, where this is what it's all about, right?
And, you know, Kennedy, Robert Kennedy has a famous Democratic name, but he's much more popular amongst the right and the libertarian set than he is amongst anybody left-wing.
So the last person I'll mention, Matt, before we get the breaths taken, there is a reason to leave it to last, was Constantine Kissin.
Noted centrist from Trigonometry, he wrote, you couldn't write a better finale to the last eight years than a demented president resigning, handing over the candidacy to someone who was picked because she had a vagina of color.
Then he followed that up with, I don't care if you're offended.
Objectively, vagina of color is a sublime bit of writing.
Somebody responded saying, I kind of wish you just said vagina of color is sublime.
And Constantine, the...
Consummate comedian responded, you appear to be confusing me with Francis.
Another person says, oh, like you're immune?
And he responded, I am.
Jewish in the streets, Aryan in the sheets.
Wow.
There's so many layers of like badness there.
You know, there's the like just Constantine being the, you know, the consummate centrist.
A demented president resigning for a vagina of color.
Like, that's a normal, neutral way to describe the events that occurred.
And then, you know, the one which I don't want in my head ever is Constantine in the sheets and what his particular proclivities are.
But also, that last thing, Jewish in the streets, Aryan in the sheets?
Doesn't even make sense.
So does that mean he only sleeps with...
White people, but in the streets...
It's too distasteful to analyse, and we shouldn't.
But as well as just being off in so many ways, it is such a good demonstration of how unfunny this purported comedian is.
It's so ham-fisted, ugly...
Bullshit, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
And it's, you know, we've talked about this superpower, about cringe immunity.
I think this is a demonstration of it.
Because it's the kind of thing where you should then be known as like just, you're a really polemical, but also shitty comedian.
But no, like the thing is, whenever Constantine got slammed for this being a bad joke and like an off-color comment.
That's just liberals being triggered, right?
He got them good.
I assume.
Yeah, but our comedians, usually they don't, like if a comedian was like, that's sublime piece of writing, right?
That would be them being, you know, self-aggrandizing and that's not good.
But that's what they do now is that they just come out and say, you know, I'm fantastic and I'm brilliant.
And since Trump, this is the playbook where their audience is like, yeah, yeah.
Like that's the right way to respond.
No, you're right.
It's such a weird, curious, Very contemporary phenomena.
And you're right, Trump started it by being obviously crude and polemical and shameless.
But then to just go, look at me, I'm so fantastic.
Look, that was all gold.
That was all gold, what I did there.
And everyone, it's almost like the fact that it's an obvious lie is like a testament to their...
Power and confidence or something?
I don't know.
There's no world in which that was a sublime piece of writing.
No.
And anyone else, you would think that they were self-deprecatingly making fun of themselves, but Constantine's not.
You could just look at all his other tweets and he's not.
He really thought that was brilliant.
Yeah.
Oh, that man, that man.
Well, before we leave Constantine, just one other small thing.
There was a rewarding series of clips from an interview he did with one Steven Pinker.
Oh, yes, that was very good.
Yeah, I will say.
Yeah.
And we don't need to talk too much about it.
Maybe we'll link to it.
But, I mean, that was just pleasing because Konstantin Kissen was doing his usual thing and he was speaking to these pseudo-religious reactionary talking points like this crisis of meaning that's supposedly going on, how we need to save the West, etc.
And it was just nice to see that Steven Pinker, whatever you think of him, I've certainly got my quibbles with various points that he's made.
He did not buy it, and he stuck to his guns, usual Steven Pinker-esque style.
But one's saying, we want to focus on policies that make the world a better place, that bring more people out of poverty, that increase education, that decrease illness and health.
I think this crisis of meaning thing is nonsense.
You know, Steven Pinker's theme is the world's getting better, stay the course, keep trying to make things better.
Yeah, I think he was also just saying that that is narrative that has always occurred in every...
Like time that you look at in history and like by objective standards, there are things that are improving.
So when Constantine was kind of raising various things, he kind of flipped the script on Constantine.
You know, Constantine is usually the one saying, well, it doesn't matter all this like woke bullshit.
It's about how many people survive or whatnot.
And that was what Pinker was doing was like when Constantine was like, sure, secularism and free, you know, like these things, they're good, but like...
Is it actually good that people have feel disenchanted and disconnected from themselves and what that?
And Pinker responded by pointing out like, well, it's probably better if like, we don't think about it, but like your child survived past early childhood is objectively better for them.
Like regardless of your feelings about the crisis of meaning.
And so it was kind of beautiful because Steven Pinker's thing was facts don't care about your feelings, Constantine.
I will also say when I saw him appear there, my initial reaction was, like I was preparing the tweet to be like, Pinker has went on and embarrassed himself by just yes and in whatever reactionary bullshit they spewed.
And I was really pleasantly surprised because he didn't.
Almost every time they did it, he would push back on it.
Yeah, and it also highlighted just how hollow...
I mean, Jordan Peterson is already a man almost entirely of pure rhetoric, right?
There's not that much substance behind him.
It's a lot of fury and sound and these kind of things.
But, you know, he can make references to various things.
He can sound impressive and whatnot.
But someone like Constantine or Dave Rubin, they're essentially doing an impression.
Of Peterson.
So whenever somebody provides pushback that doesn't go along a talking point that they've prepared, they don't have the substance to respond to it.
I just spent a few weeks on tour with Jordan Peterson and he asked me to join him as an agnostic to disagree as much as I could with the things that he's saying on stage.
And I want to try and see if we can have a conversation about some of the things that he's saying, because I think for whatever reason that conversation has become relevant and I think it's not accidental.
So his argument is And I think I'm quoting him directly on stage, actually, at the first show that we did.
The Enlightenment was wrong.
And there's a bunch of things that he would say about that, but one of them would be that Nietzsche correctly predicted what would happen in the 20th century with the death of God, who, I think it's fair to say, was killed by the objective pursuit of truth that you so admire and practice.
And then the things that are happening in the 21st century are a further consequence of the same thing.
And we've talked about dumerism already, but we could also talk about the fact that all over the world, but mostly in the West, we're not reproducing at a sufficient rate to replenish the population and so on and so forth.
Why is she wrong?
Oh, well, we'll begin at the beginning.
Was light better before the Enlightenment?
And there were worse religions that killed people by the tens of millions.
Life expectancy was 30. Land heretics were burned to the stake.
When a third of children did not live to see their fifth birthday.
When there were routine forms of sadistic corporal and capital punishment, like disemboweling and the breaking of the wheel.
I think that wasn't so great.
I think he'd agree with that.
I don't think he's saying technological progress and science are wrong.
It's not just technological progress.
We could still break people on the wheel.
We could still keep women in positions requiring brain power and autonomy.
We could still skew homosexuals.
We could still fight wars of religion.
To blame the 20th century on, first of all, the death of God assumes that there was a God to kill in the first place.
So the death of God is highly misleading.
It's a very Nietzsche way of putting it.
But a secular understanding of morality, that it doesn't come from scriptural commandments that tell you to stone adulteresses and to commit genocide against your enemies, but rather from universal human well-being.
It's a moral advance, and in fact it has led empirically to enter ways of living.
Today, it is the most secular countries that are the most pleasant places to live.
Western Europe, we have Commonwealth countries of New Zealand and Australia and Canada, and the most religious countries are helpless.
God hasn't died in Afghanistan, so I'd rather not live there.
So Constantine just flailed and came across as like really empty whenever there was significant pushback that he hadn't heard.
So yes, I think it's a very good representation of Pinker and highlights that he is not the same as like Constantine and Francis, whatever your other issues might be with, you know, stances that he's taken.
So yes, I think it was good to mention that.
It was good.
Yeah, I think he acquitted himself better than other purportedly centrist.
Public intellectuals that might have appeared on trigonometry.
True, true, true.
True that.
Brett.
Brett.
So all of that, right?
This is why I did in this order, Matt.
So that was all the people losing their shit, running around like chickens on Twitter or social media, just everywhere.
Into the fray, the Weinstein brothers step.
So, you know, there's Eric.
We're not going to focus too much, but of course Eric had to, you know, tweet out pseudo profound things saying
nothing, but like hinting at that this was an invalid choice and people should have selected Tootsie Gabbard instead if they really represent the person who again, had hardly any support of the Democratic primary when she ran, but, but nonetheless, Brett is
the brother that outdid himself and he released a short little video to
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