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May 31, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
48:01
E19 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | Our Descent Into Madness & What to do About it | DarkHorse Podcast

The 19th livestream from Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in their continuing discussion surrounding the novel coronavirus. Link to the Q&A portion of this episode: https://youtu.be/kx8vL7GRV1MSupport the Show.

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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I am Brett Weinstein.
Many of you who have been watching the Dark Horse podcast know that our live streams have included Heather Hying, who will not be joining us today.
Unfortunately, she has lost her voice and rumors are not true.
This is not from her participating in the writing.
She was in fact here.
I am her alibi.
So, we have a lot going on here.
This live stream has been postponed for the SpaceX Dragon launch that just took place.
I must say I had forgotten that it was taking place because we had rioting here in Portland last night.
Zach and I went down to see the damage ourselves this morning, and by the time I got back it had slipped my mind that they were going to launch.
But In catching up on that launch, I was reminded that this moment in history has many odd echoes to approximately the year of Heather and my birth.
We were both born in 19...
1969, that is of course the year that men first landed on the moon.
It is also the year of the summer of love.
And the juxtaposition, I think, suggests a great many things that are worth investigating.
There was a tremendous amount of unrest at that time surrounding the Vietnam War, among other things.
There was obviously a great deal of racial tension.
There was hopefulness that arose out of the ability of human beings to get to the moon and back safely.
And I also realized moments before going on the air that 1968 was the year of the Hong Kong flu, a serious flu pandemic.
So there were many echoes of our current situation back then.
And I will say on the one hand, that's hopeful because we got through that.
On the other hand, I think this time we might be in quite a bit deeper.
There are things that haunt our landscape that did not exist in 1968 and 1969.
We were not all in the sway of algorithms that we cannot check and that have unknown influence over our thinking and the way that we interact.
And I am quite concerned that even given similar ingredients, that we are in a great deal more danger this time around.
Our Our election looming also adds a certain amount of pressure to the mix that could end very badly.
So I had several things I wanted to discuss today.
To be honest, they interact in so many different ways that I'm not exactly sure where to begin.
Obviously, the riots that have followed the death of George Floyd, which happened very dramatically on videotape, which presumably everyone has seen.
Those riots now having spread across the country, including here to Portland, are a major phenomenon.
What kind of phenomenon they are is, I think, up for debate.
And in some sense, the feeling I am getting having seen the damage today and seeing what has come across my Twitter feed, Tells me that they may actually be several different phenomena interacting.
I don't think they're going to interact in a positive way, and I'm hoping that we, by thinking carefully about what we are seeing, can disentangle the threads in time to save ourselves from a noisy nightmare.
All right, so let us talk about what has taken place.
George Floyd has been apparently killed on videotape by a white police officer.
George Floyd, of course, was black.
He was killed by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes as he said he couldn't breathe and then apparently stopped breathing.
That, on the one hand, seems to be a very simple story.
I think it is transparent to anybody who looked at the video that something very wrong occurred in that moment.
On the other hand, it is very difficult to know what it is that occurred.
And one of the concerns that I have is that these protests, which have now morphed into riots, are effectively predicated on the fact that we know what the story was.
And if it turns out that we don't know exactly what the story was, and there are lots of ways that that could be true, Then we have been moved far down a road under some kind of false pretenses.
Now again, I'm not saying that this is the case.
It could be that that video is exactly what it appears to be, that this is a cop who had a race problem, and that that race problem resulted in his complete indifference to the fact that he was suffocating a man to death who died in front of many witnesses and other cops, and the other cops did nothing.
But, We also live in America, and in America, this cop is due a fair trial.
In fact, if his punishment is to mean anything, it has to follow a fair trial.
And the way that this has unfolded does raise a question about how any fair trial could possibly happen, because at some level, the violence that has unfolded already Will be reinvigorated if any result other than a full conviction on the maximum charges occurs but And in fact the protesters have demanded that the charges that have been leveled which as I understand it are third-degree murder and manslaughter are not sufficient
On the other hand, in order to convict him of something like first-degree murder, you would have to show something like intent.
And as terrible as what is on those videos is, the definition of intent, as the law sees it, is narrowly defined.
And did he intend to kill George Floyd?
Hard to imagine that he did on camera.
We are headed for a very tense situation as he is tried and either convicted of a crime many do not regard as sufficient for what they saw on that tape, or he is exonerated for some reason that we don't yet know.
Now it could be that the exoneration is a miscarriage of justice.
I believe we saw that in the Rodney King case many years ago.
Many of you will be too young to remember that but it was quite a parallel situation where Rodney King, who I believe had tried to evade police when he was finally stopped, was beaten On videotape, and at the time, video cameras were sufficiently rare that the world was shocked by what it saw.
As I recall, the argument was leveled that the officers could not get a fair trial in the jurisdiction where this had taken place.
The trial was moved, I think, to Simi Valley.
And Simi Valley was a place where they found a sympathetic jury and despite the fact that these cops had seemingly needlessly brutalized Rodney King, they were exonerated and that resulted in riots.
So, we've seen this pattern before.
We are now in a highly charged situation where a system whose greatest strength is that it does demand that you be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law, in front of a jury of your peers, that that
That very important accomplishment that is handed to us in the Constitution is now very difficult to deploy in the context of George Floyd and George Floyd's death and this officer.
All right, so I just want to point out a couple of ways in which this could become difficult to manage in a court setting.
What if this officer is just a terrible person but that this wasn't racially motivated and he, you know, has a history of brutalizing people?
Okay, maybe that plays into it and maybe it doesn't.
What if, as there is some indication I believe in the medical examiner's report, what if George Floyd was having trouble breathing before he ever hit the ground?
And what the officer did certainly made things worse, but was not the cause of his death.
For example, what if he had had a heart attack?
Ended up on the ground the officer put his knee on the The neck of George Floyd and George Floyd died I think needlessly because certainly the officers should have gotten him help at that point But nonetheless, these are the kinds of things that could complicate a trial Okay, now let's move on for a second from the question of whether or not a fair trial is conceivable, in this case, for that officer.
And as much as I saw a brutal officer on that tape who I believe was engaged in a very serious crime, which demands very serious punishment, I know that a trial is necessary in order to figure out the facts of the scenario.
Okay.
We now face spreading unrest and violence.
And as I said, Zach and I went down to downtown Portland and looked at some of the damage firsthand.
And I think probably it makes sense to show you some of what we saw.
So let's see.
Zach, how do we do this?
You can find the stuff in your computer and just tell me what's going on.
I can't.
Okay, so you know what I have here?
Yeah, why don't you just start and go through stuff.
Alright, so here you see a picture of ACAB spray-painted over the sign at the corner on the Ninth Circuit building in downtown Portland.
The Ninth Circuit being a federal court of appeals.
So I must say, looking at this spray paint here, all cops are bastards.
That's what A.C.A.B.
means.
I find it a preposterous phrase.
Certainly some cops are bastards.
I've run into them.
But all cops being bastards seems incredibly improbable.
And the claim itself seems deliberately designed to inflame cops to bring out the worst in them In order to reinforce the belief that there is no humanity In them.
I know that this sentiment was deployed at Evergreen and That it wasn't true there after the Evergreen riots broke out I got to know Stacey Brown the chief of police there who I found completely humane and rational and decent to the core
So all cops are bastards can't possibly be right and here it's being spray-painted on a Federal Court of Appeals and I had the question to the people who did this spray-painting Do they have any idea what the Court of Appeals represents?
Do they have any idea what role it plays in protecting them from tyranny?
I have the sense that they they surely do not and yet and yet here it is.
All right, let's move on one Alright, here's a car that had been burned out.
Of course, there is no indication about whether there was some sort of a gripe against the owner of this car, but I have to say that the violence and damage that we saw in evidence downtown suggested not an entirely random pattern, as you'll see.
But a highly random pattern so this will just have been a car that was parked in the wrong place at the wrong time And burned out for I don't know to demonstrate someone's power or something like that All right, move on one.
Okay, here we have the Apple Store.
This is just right adjacent to the circuit, to the Ninth Circuit Court there.
And spray-painted here is Cops Hate Us.
Now, I don't know who us is in this bit of graffiti.
I don't know whether that was intended to mean the anarchists, who I believe did most of the damage here, or if it's supposed to mean something else.
But I will say, as you will see in other graffiti that is documented in these pictures, The cops have been thoroughly provoked.
Now, is there a long history of bad policing in America?
Is there a reason for suspicion that bad policing may have something to do with episodes like the one that took place with George Floyd or habitual bad policing?
Sure there is, but To turn the cops into a monolithic phenomenon and to declare their hatred for us is so childish and so dangerous that it is hard to imagine that the people who did it could mistake it for the solution to any problem.
Okay, move on.
Alright, here we have the Apple Store, and the Apple Store looks like Apple Stores in many cities.
It's glass all the way around, and almost all of the panes had clearly been attacked with heavy objects.
Now, this will begin to show the pattern.
The attacks, to the extent that they were not random, and there were certainly some that looked random, Included a great many attacks on stores that sell high-priced items and there were occasionally bits of graffiti I think meant to rationalize this complaining about Slave labor that goes into the production of these Apple products.
For example on the other hand the Impression that we were certainly left with looking at this was that at some level The breakdown in order was being used as an excuse to loot high quality stores that sell high quality goods.
In other words, somehow these anarchists in their day life are Regular citizens who covet things whether or not they should and then at the point that they have an excuse like the death of George Floyd They go after the stores that have the things that they might otherwise wish to purchase I don't know what was taken or not taken from the Apple Store.
Most of the windows look like they held I guess they would have to be high quality windows to not be routinely broken by petty criminals, but but anyway, it was Quite dramatic and the pattern was quite evident.
Alright, move on.
All right, now this photo is one of two.
I don't know if they're in sequence here or not.
This photo is of a trash can near one of the important parks in downtown Portland, and the trash can has been burned.
And looking at this and the other picture, which will come up here at some point.
Yeah, if you know where it is.
Okay, here's the other one.
This is a trash can With a sign that somebody has made out of cardboard and put on it, and they've taken the trash out of it, and they've strewn it all around.
In the same park, there is a porta potty that has been destroyed, and a shrine for George Floyd.
But in any case, the attack on the trash cans I think it's particularly telling because everybody benefits from the proper functioning of municipal trash cans and trash collection service that picks these things up just the same way everybody benefits from a city in which you can walk down almost any street and not worry about random violence or theft.
You know, the policing and the trash, when they work correctly, are nearly invisible.
And they make life vastly better for us.
And it has struck me since I began encountering anarchists years ago, actually during the Occupy protests, where anarchists took over the movement.
That the anarchists have no concept of what actually makes their lives possible.
They have a fairy tale notion about what things are unnecessary and what things they could do better themselves and attacking trash cans and dragging the trash out into the street is exactly the kind of confusion that I see.
At Evergreen, the anarchists famously wanted to eliminate the police from campus, and they wanted what they called community patrols.
And inside of hours of starting their community patrols after George Bridges stood the police down, people were being intimidated and brutalized by bat-wielding students.
That's what community patrols broke down into the lack of a system like the courts, the lack of policing that is properly set in motion.
These things have almost immediate consequences on civilization that the people who see only the problems with them do not anticipate.
So Do the people who took the trash out of this trash can or burned the one across the street or crushed the port-a-potty, thereby depriving people, including homeless people, of some place to use the toilet, do they think that they have improved the city?
I can't imagine that they do, and yet they behave with this kind of arrogance.
All right, move on.
Ah, here another instance that shows the pattern.
What store?
There was no other store on this block that had been attacked.
What store was attacked?
The Sprint store.
Why the Sprint store?
Presumably because it had phones, and all of these anarchists are also users of cell phones that might desire a little upgrade.
So this is really tarnishing any legitimate complaint they might have.
Go on.
All right.
Now here, again, you can see one of the problems with the protests that have become riots.
This is a picture of some graffiti, and it was really all over downtown.
And it says, Rest in Power, Big Floyd.
And then you see the Anarchist A. Now, I don't know of any evidence that says that George Floyd had any sympathies with anarchists.
I find it hard to imagine.
And the attempt to graft anarchism onto his death in order to justify some movement that, as anybody who lives in Portland knows, is sort of constantly bubbling under the surface, looking for a fight, right?
Suddenly they have something that they can claim is motivating them, and it is really just a rationalization, as far as I can tell.
All right.
Okay.
I can't breathe.
That is a quote from George Floyd.
And this says, fuck pigs, oink oink.
Right?
Again, a deliberate provocation of the cops.
Now, there were police all over downtown today, and I took the opportunity to go talk to a set.
I just saw some standing on the corner, and Zach and I went up to them, asked them if they had any thoughts, and they were initially very reluctant to say anything.
And, you know, I appealed to their being citizens of Portland and we being citizens of Portland, and I just wanted to hear what they have to say.
And one cop said, well, you know, this is troubling because, he said, I, speaking of himself, have nothing in common with the cop who did this to George Floyd.
He says, the only things I have in common with him are that I'm white and I'm a cop.
And I don't understand why it is that this attack on all police has to happen in response to this event.
He says, I was sickened too by what I saw.
So that is completely inconsistent, of course, with the all cops are bastards belief system.
But the all cops are bastards belief system is really just a simplifying assumption that allows those who are engaged in it not to have to worry too much about who's on the other other side of their violence Okay, go on Okay, here we've got a video I'm going to be quiet so you can hear it.
This is actually, this is the building that Heather and I have worked in.
This is the bank on the bottom floor, the Chase Bank.
And these guys are replacing all the windows in this one that were broken.
Now it does, it's not part of the pattern of retail.
But watch what happens here at the very end.
Now I can't hear this.
You guys can hear the audio here.
But what that guy said as he walked by was proudly that he had participated.
He said he had helped to tear apart The bank there.
Now, I don't have any great love of Chase.
Chase is one of the banks that we use and I have my problems with them.
Nonetheless, here's a guy walking around in broad daylight proud to have destroyed this institution.
Now, what does he think is going to happen to the costs that they inflicted on Chase?
That's going to come back to Chase customers and just like everything else, it will be dealt with.
Do they really think they solved a problem?
I can't imagine how they would, and yet they certainly seem to.
Okay, so...
Oh, yes.
Actually, we should look at that tweet.
Now, this is Mayor Ted Wheeler.
Ted Wheeler says, burning buildings with people inside, stealing from small and large businesses, threatening and harassing reporters, all in the middle of a pandemic where people have already lost everything.
This isn't calling for meaningful change in our communities.
This is disgusting.
This is actually a highly unusual tweet for our mayor.
I have been highly critical of our mayor, among other things, for coddling the so-called anti-fascists who are constantly picking fights in the streets of Portland.
By coddling them, by effectively letting them do what they do without arresting them, even when they're doing absurd things like taking over intersections and directing traffic, he has left them with the impression that what they are doing is okay.
But even Ted Wheeler has now apparently had enough.
Now, I had some Frankly pretty pointed things to say about Mayor Wheeler and I noticed that the tweet below this one says that he has actually been called back to the city that he had left to go attend to His dying mother and in light of the fact that he is facing that terrible crisis I'm inclined to give him a pass I do however want to point out that if Ted Wheeler has finally understood that
That the coddling of the so-called anti-fascists is only going to result in more violence.
That's a very good thing for Portland.
I hope the lesson sticks, and Mayor Wheeler, I'm sorry to hear about your mom.
That's a terrible thing to face, and I think all decent people understand that no matter whether we're supporters of yours or not, that you're going through something serious.
Yes, all right, so now we have some other video business here, but I want to take Mayor Wheeler's tweet down.
Okay, so what I want to connect this to is that really we have two Movements in motion at the same time and they are Interacting in some kind of what I would say is a dangerous way now in the past I've said some things about black lives matter black lives matter is a movement that I would Like to be able to support because I support the concept black lives are undervalued I believe
Any decent person who evaluated the evidence would recognize that black lives are undervalued in the US and that results in many things including violence sometimes by police.
On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter movement is not simply about that point.
It's about many other points, some of which I can't support.
And so the compromised nature of Black Lives Matter means that I have to stay at arm's length from it, even if I don't feel naturally that that's where I should be.
So that's one tension inside the Black Lives Matter movement.
But then we have a second tension, and the second tension has to do with the anarchists, the so-called anti-fascists, who are basically utilizing the unrest that exists as a result of this video of George Floyd's death.
For their own purposes and the point here is that they are in fact Jeopardizing the very thing they claim to be attempting to advance They are claiming to be very upset about what happened to George Floyd, but at the same time they are Engaged in random violence and looting and those two things undercut the claim that this is a movement that is motivated by frustration at a broken system.
So you want to show the first of those videos, Zach?
Yeah.
And then we feel the bulk of that.
We're not allowing that no more.
Okay?
That's the reality of what we're dealing with right now.
Alright?
Like I said to all my white brothers and sisters, we appreciate y'all being out here and supporting us.
But this is not y'all's space.
This is not your space.
Period.
We don't need this bullshit right here.
Because our reality is, when this shit is all said and done, when we wake up, we're still going to be black in America.
Now that's not nothing against none of y'all.
That's not what I'm saying.
But we're not going to allow y'all to go up there and start causing chaos and confusion.
It's just not going to happen.
Okay, so I wasn't able to hear the video with you, but if memory serves, you had a black guy respectfully but pointedly telling white folks who were engaged in violent and destructive rioting, that they were doing the black community no favors, that at the end of the day, the black people have to go back to being black, and the white people get to go home to do something else.
And so the fusion between these two movements is understood inside at least many parts of the race-based part of the movement, understood to be dangerous and destructive.
Can we show the other video?
No!
and here you have white anarchists engaged in violence and this black woman is pleading with them to stop I mean this pains me to walk in
I guess partly because I've seen the same dynamic unfold up close.
Those of you who listened in to our last live stream about the evergreen meltdown and how that went for Heather and for me will remember the discussion of Odette, who was our good friend and our student who was challenged Uh, by, uh, by rioters at Evergreen as some kind of a traitor for studying science and for not seeing things the way they did.
Um, in any case, these tensions are important and those of us who are outside of these protests and riots need to remember that we're not looking at one thing.
We're looking at several things and that these things are being distorted by the lens through which we are looking at them.
I guess I would also point to the very interesting fact of the two places CNN shows up prominently In this story one of them a CNN reporter arrested While reporting from a place that he had been told to stand by police on camera quite dramatic that was in Minneapolis in
Atlanta, the CNN headquarters were, of course, attacked by protesters, which is nothing if not ironic because CNN has bent over backwards to coddle this perspective as foolish as it is.
So the, and I'm not saying that the whole perspective is foolish, but CNN has bent over backwards to coddle all of these perspectives that have been fused together into something incoherent.
And what, what was the upshot or what was the outgrowth of their spending all of that time trying to find a reason where in many cases there wasn't any is they got targeted because the mob doesn't, doesn't pay any attention to who has done its bidding.
Frankly, it just comes for everybody.
All right.
So this leads me to, um, the following, the following point.
We're in very serious trouble.
America has a very serious race problem.
We have not fully dealt with it.
We have done a lot, but as with many, or actually all, complex problems, this is a diminishing returns issue, where the easy stuff has all been done, and what we are left with are all the difficult things, the things that are hard to spot, that are a bit subtle, that require us to think outside the box in order to discover what solution might actually function.
And because of that I believe there is natural frustration and that natural frustration is pent up and I believe that people in especially the black community have reason to be impatient and they have reason to notice that year after year
Patterns that systemic systemically shut them out of opportunity Remain and what they get is a lot of lip service from especially the Democratic Party So, what I want to do is I want to talk about how it is that we are going to get out of this predicament without descending into, at the very least, madness.
And I believe we are already effectively on a slippery slope to madness.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, in light of the election year that we are in, it seems likely that what will happen is more heat and more pressure will be added to the situation, and that is going to result in an increased likelihood of it boiling over in some even more spectacular and dangerous way.
So, as a patriotic American, I want to find a way out of that predicament.
What I would like to do is propose something that might allow us to, well, not to put too fine a point on it, to rescue the Republic from a trajectory that seems certain to tear it apart.
But first, we have to talk about what the predicament really is.
So we have a president who engages in behavior that is nothing if not stunning.
A couple days ago, he tweeted and he quoted essentially a threat of shooting.
Basically, the quote was something to the effect of, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
And this is apparently a quote from the 60s, 1968, I believe.
Uh, that, uh, could not help but be a dog whistle to certain parts of his base.
Twitter rather absurdly decided to label the tweet as troubling but needing to stay up in order for, uh, you know, for the greater good or something like that.
Now, the fact is the man is the president of the United States.
Irrespective of what he says, no matter how vile, no matter how dangerous, we need access to it.
We need access to it if for no other reason than to know how dangerous it is.
So the idea that Twitter is debating whether or not to protect us from something the president said is absurd on its face.
Twitter should step out of the way.
They should treat us as adults, and they should allow us to see what is being said.
We can then discuss what its meaning is, but whether we get to hear what was said, of course we do.
Any other choice makes no sense whatsoever.
Okay.
So I want to present a model and a principle that are the basis for what I see as a plan that could get us out of our predicament.
So, the model is this.
For almost my entire life, I was born in 1969, for almost my entire life the two-party system has functioned like a influence peddling racket.
And there are two parties in that influence peddling racket.
You have the Democratic Party and you have the Republican Party, both of whom have their version of it.
Now I think the Democratic Party's version went from a kind of Light influence peddling to absolutely all-encompassing influence peddling at about the time that Bill Clinton was elected the first time.
Bill Clinton's first administration marked the point at which the Democratic Party abandoned working people and decided instead to peddle its influence to wealthy interests that did not have the public interest at heart.
So, that created a structure.
In which these two teams effectively battled for a larger fraction of the influence peddling pie, but basically the whole system functioned to exclude the interests of common people.
We were shut out.
We were constantly being sold out by one or the other party, and each party paid lip service to working people.
But, you know, inexplicably, policy never worked substantially in our favor.
So what happened in 2016 was effectively Trump staged an insurgency.
That insurgency was to many people hopeful because it did represent a challenge to the influence peddlers who had Treated public policy as their own private bank account and This is quite understandable.
You can imagine living in a town in which rival crime families exist.
If some new syndicate showed up and challenged them, you would at first be relieved to see somebody fighting back against the people that had you under their thumb.
But in Trump's case, he effectively functions as a third crime family.
And at this point, The red crime family has made an uneasy peace with him, so they've now joined their interests.
It doesn't mean that they are permanently joined, but for the moment they have joined together, and the blue crime family is very interested in restoring the order that used to exist.
It wants nothing more than to eliminate Trump, and many people have understood eliminating Trump to be the solution to some problem, but Of course, it isn't the solution to some problem if it returns us to a state in which the red crime family and the blue crime family continue to peddle influence and sell us out.
That system is what created the vulnerability that we currently have.
It actually created the frustration that is currently manifesting itself in the form of riots across the country.
So, what I want to propose is that we start by looking at fellow Americans, people we don't necessarily understand because they are choosing to vote in some way that we find unconscionable.
And my point to you is that it is unacceptable to hold people responsible for making bad choices when they only had bad choices to choose from.
If the menu contains only bad choices, people will choose among them, and holding them responsible for having made a bad choice makes no sense.
Now, some people will quibble.
Some choices are worse than others, and that's true.
But effectively, we are prevented from seeing the predicament we are in by a battle over which choice is worse.
And it's like this election after election.
The lesser of two evils paradigm has ruled our electoral cycles for a reason, and it is because it distracts us from the glaring fact that our system keeps handing us only bad choices.
And it's not because there are only bad choices to be found, but it's because anything that was not a bad choice would threaten the influence-peddling racket of the major parties.
So, of course, those things are dead on arrival.
And this is what we've seen again this year.
There were interesting candidates in the Democratic field.
All of them eliminated by the end.
And now, what we are left with, apparently, is a competition between these two decrepit clowns.
I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine a worse moment to be left with a choice between decrepit clowns than this one.
In light of COVID-19, in light of the racial tensions that are threatening to tear the country apart, in light of the predicament we find ourselves in with China, which manufactures most of what it is that we consume, And yet is a hostile state with hostile interests that is clearly aware of the vulnerability we have created for ourselves.
So, what are we to do?
That's really the question.
I want to propose a way out of this mess, and I will just tell you at the get-go.
Anything that someone proposes to escape the hegemony of the duopoly, to escape the, uh...
The election, as we see it shaping up, is going to sound far-fetched.
But I would ask you, if the answer is, this seems far-fetched, so I'm just going to choose from the menu that I've been given, then where are we going to be after the election?
Where will we be four years from now?
Will there be an opportunity then, or will it just be another absurd set of choices?
Okay.
So, deep breath.
Here's the proposal.
The proposal is that we draft two people.
Now these people have to have certain characteristics.
They need to be patriots.
They need to be courageous.
They need to be highly capable.
Now, if we can find two such people, it would be ideal if they came from different sides of the usual political divide.
That is to say, it would be great to have somebody from the center-right and somebody from the center-left.
We would draft them, and they would agree to rule as a team.
Actually, govern as a team is a better choice of words.
So they would agree to govern as a team, and the choice of who would run at the top of the ticket would be made arbitrarily.
They'd flip a coin,
And we'd see who was going to run in the top spot and who was going to be vice president, but with the acknowledgement that in all matters they would attempt to rule, to govern by consensus, and that only in circumstances where they could not reach agreement or where a decision had to be made quickly, like in some sort of a military confrontation, would the person at the top of the ticket have the final say.
So, this team then, after four years, would reverse roles.
Whoever had run at the top of the ticket in the first election would run for the vice presidential spot, and the former vice president would run for the presidential spot.
And this would continue until either some other ticket was voted into office or one of the parties had been in the presidential role twice and therefore had become ineligible as a vice presidential candidate, at which point they would be replaced by somebody else who was suitable.
Now, this plan solves a number of different problems.
Most importantly, it escapes the hegemony of the parties and it would put highly competent patriots in the position of ruling or governing in the American people's interest in a transparent way.
It does not require us to alter anything about the Constitution or to pass any laws in order to make it work.
Now, of course, it has obstacles.
Primary among them is the question of who the individuals who were chosen would be.
Now I've done a lot of thinking about that question, and I've concluded that the person who is best suited for the role on the center right is fairly clear, and I would suggest that it would be Admiral William McRaven.
Hey folks, apparently I am once again live.
I think you will all agree the timing of that failure was uncanny.
I'm going to try not to think too hard about the meaning of why our system suddenly collapsed at that moment and just simply pick up where I was.
I believe the last thing you heard me say Was that in the center-right position, I would advocate Admiral William McRaven, current Chancellor of the University of Texas.
He is obviously a courageous person, he is obviously highly competent, and clearly a patriot.
So, I do not believe there is any strong reason that we would need to find some different candidate, were he willing.
On the left, it's a little bit more difficult.
There are some people I really like for that spot.
In each case, there is something that makes them just shy of perfect.
In the end, I have concluded that the best person for the role is probably Andrew Yang.
In Andrew Yang's case, he has demonstrated that he is capable of thinking outside the box.
He's demonstrated that he's courageous and all-in when it comes to mounting a campaign, and I'm sure he would do the same thing in the role that I've proposed.
The downsides, as I see it with Andrew, are that in the aftermath of his being, in my opinion, pushed out of the Democratic race, he embraced Biden, and he went over to CNN, who had treated him so badly during the primary.
That said, I don't see either of those as fatal problems, and I would certainly trust him to do an excellent job were he elected.
Okay, so now you have the outlines of the plan.
What problems does it solve?
Well, in one fell swoop, it would remove the power of the parties over the presidency, and it would put the presidency in the hands of people with excellent leadership capacity, excellent insight, and most importantly, people who hold the public interest in high regard.
All right, so that's the plan.
Now I think probably the best thing to do is for me to take a brief break and then to return and we can do our question and answer session.
I will start with the questions that came in on the initial stream and I believe we have now switched to the second stream and you're Oh, Zach tells me we're still on the first stream.
All right.
Well, this uncanny collapse of our system in mid-discussion has left me a little bit confused about where we are technologically, but nonetheless.
I think it makes sense at this point for me to take a five-minute break and then return.
Sorry folks, Zach is telling me that we need 15 minutes in order to make this work.
So I will take 15 minutes and I will return to answer Super Chat questions.
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