The 21st 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/VYXrMPFDTS8Support the Show.
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| Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast livestream, our 21st. | |
| Am I correct about that? | |
| That's right. | |
| We are ready to drink. | |
| We don't have anything to drink but water. | |
| But in any case, I'm here with Dr. Heather Hying, and there's not much going on this week, so I think it'll be more abstract. | |
| We will discuss high-minded ideas and not focus so much on what's going on on planet Earth, because frankly, there just ain't much. | |
| I'd like to talk about the new findings in obscure natural history journals. | |
| Interesting. | |
| That's what I often want to talk about and what I'd probably rather be talking about, but I don't think we're going to do it. | |
| Nope. | |
| Nope. | |
| All right. | |
| So for those of you who are on planet Earth, you know that we've just been kidding around, that there's a lot going on. | |
| I saw in the chat after the sound check before this live stream, I saw feedback coming in from Germany. | |
| Tanzania and Alpha Centauri. | |
| Wow. | |
| Which I regard as fascinating, because if this podcast is reaching Alpha Centauri at that rate, it suggests Eric might be right. | |
| There might be a way to break the Einsteinian speed limit, which is good news, because we have got to get out of here. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Superluminal travel. | |
| Yeah. | |
| On our way. | |
| Yes. | |
| Cool. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, without further ado, how about you lead us into the breach? | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, we were going to begin by talking about whether or not the events at Evergreen and of course the other college outbursts, Yale, Middlebury, Berkeley, all the rest, presage the events that we're seeing on the streets today. | |
| And, um, obviously by asking that question, we, you know, and we, you alluded to this last time that you were beginning to see, uh, people say the whole world is evergreen now. | |
| And what we said in our last live stream was, Yeah, kind of-ish. | |
| I hear a couple of ways that it's different. | |
| One being that there's a clear instigating factor, and another being that George Bridges and Trump are quite different figures in terms of would-be leaders. | |
| But that doesn't really get to the heart of the similarity, does it? | |
| So I thought maybe we would start by watching just a minute or so from the third part of Mike Naina's excellent documentary on what happened to you and to us at Evergreen. | |
| It's part three, The Hunted Individual. | |
| Zach, if you want to put my computer on screen here, I'll play this and at the point I stop, you can pull us back, okay? okay? | |
| So apparently it's not working. | |
| Sorry about this, folks. | |
| This is a live fire exercise. | |
| We are doing our best to get you some sound on this clip, because without sound, it ain't gonna be nothing. | |
| No, it really doesn't work without sound. | |
| Well, let's take one more crack at it. | |
| Yeah, play it again. | |
| We just... | |
| There's no audio. | |
| I don't know why. | |
| Oh, that's super disappointing. | |
| Okay, you can take that off, Zach. | |
| Do you remember what you said? | |
| I remember roughly what I said. | |
| What I said was that I was frequently, at the point that this video was made, asked to speak on the question of free speech on college campuses. | |
| And that every time I was invited on that topic, I told them the same thing, which was, this is not about free speech, and it is only tangentially about college campuses. | |
| That college campuses were effectively the first battle in something much bigger, and that this would eventually spill over into the courts, it had already spilled over into the tech sector, and that if we weren't careful, we were going to see it spill over into leadership in civilization. | |
| You know we can debate till the cows come home whether or not what we are seeing in civilization is very like evergreen or something like evergreen but the fact that it is dawning on many people that what they are seeing has some high degree of relevance to what they saw in that situation is on the one hand Frightening. | |
| It means we didn't get the message in time. | |
| And it is also reassuring because it means that at least some of the people involved are paying enough attention, even ones who are now embarrassed that they had taken a position that we were overreacting to what we were seeing and experiencing. | |
| Some of those people are now saying, I had it wrong. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And as much as it may be too late, it's not obvious that it's too late. | |
| So there is hope in that. | |
| There is indeed. | |
| So, when we were talking between Livestream 20 and now, one of the things that was dawning on both of us was that, okay, you know, we both, and you in particular, you know, more than a year before Evergreen came to public attention, We're looking at this and saying, I can see where this is going. | |
| I really hope I'm wrong. | |
| I really hope this prediction that I'm making is wrong. | |
| It turns out you weren't, and we weren't. | |
| But this isn't about taking a victory lap, right? | |
| This is about learning from the model. | |
| This is about learning from the model that allowed you and us to accurately predict that this was actually what was going on in the first place. | |
| So, I don't know if you want to speak to that. | |
| Yeah, I do. | |
| I think, and you will recall from our personal discussions when we first got our initial glimpse of this, that... At Evergreen, or what's going on now. | |
| At Evergreen, that I was hopeful that there was a possibility to step into the situation And lead. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it doesn't have to be me, but somebody needs to lead in order for this not to turn into madness. | |
| And anyway, I felt I'd been training for it in a sense. | |
| You know, I had thought a great deal about racism and studied the rudiments of it, scientifically speaking. | |
| I had great relationship with a great many students of every description and all of those things seemed to me hopeful. | |
| And so when people heard me say, In the hallway during the initial public confrontation that history could pivot in that hallway if we could hear each other I wasn't Yes, I didn't know that that's what I was going to say, but I was tapping into a long-held belief that something needed to take that energy and And turn it into something useful, because the frustration that fueled the protests was real. | |
| The complaint was phony. | |
| So, in any case, I think we're now seeing that very same dynamic play out on the streets of many major American cities. | |
| And the dearth of leadership is spectacular, and I think if people understood what danger that creates, they would rightly be quite frightened about what comes next. | |
| Yeah, so who should we be looking to? | |
| Well, a couple things. | |
| One, you know, as we discussed last time, we have an incredibly deep bench of really high quality black thinkers in the West, and my concern is What we also seem to have is a new model for how those people interface with the public, and it does not look to me like a proper replacement or upgrade for our past version of leadership. | |
| It looks to me like an obstacle to it. | |
| So the interface being, as I see it, when I think of who we're talking about, and I came up with a few more names in the interim, but there's some academics on the list. | |
| And then there are people who are, you know, public intellectuals for lack of a better term, but the term that you had used to describe sort of how it is that they're making a go in the world is they're players in the gig economy as, you know, as we are at this point, right? | |
| They are trapped in the gig economy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And the problem with being trapped in the gig economy is that the relationship is producer-consumer, which is not the relationship of a leader to people who are in need of leadership. | |
| He's an actual leader truly needs to be able to disappoint and to dissatisfy in the short term for a vision that if he's a good leader, if she's a good leader, will do good in the long term, but you know, a good leader will also sometimes make errors. | |
| And short term, there's a very good chance that very many of the followers, the constituents, whatever it is, We'll not be pleased and that has to be acceptable. | |
| It has to be acceptable. | |
| I will say this is also an echo of a dynamic that you and I saw at Evergreen that had nothing to do with the protests, which was there was a sort of creeping false sophistication among students that they were consumers of education and that we were in some sense their employees. | |
| They were paying good money to be there and we were being paid to be there and therefore we were their employees and we had some obligation to deliver them what it was that they wanted. | |
| And you and I By the end of it, it took great pains to point out to them that this dynamic was not correct. | |
| I actually, I formalized this at the beginning of most of my programs for the last five years or so that we were there. | |
| I don't remember exactly, I had sort of a script to this effect. | |
| I then never really saw it rear its head, at least in my programs, but it had a lot to do with, you know, I'm not your employee. | |
| I'm not producing something for your consumption. | |
| I have knowledge and expertise and things to teach you about how to view the world and how to understand it and how to work from first principles. | |
| That hopefully you will find valuable, but we are all co-creating together. | |
| I bring to you curriculum that I've created, and then this learning environment will emerge as a result of our producing it together. | |
| You are not consuming my thing, and you are also not paying my bills. | |
| You are paying money to a college, and I am earning money from a college, but that does not suggest an employer-employee relationship. | |
| Yeah, in fact, many of the things that superficially seem to be accurate are not correct about the interpretation. | |
| So, you know, we were being paid by the state, a state that was being, the education of these students was being subsidized by that state, therefore the taxpayers were paying to educate these people, which was not charity. | |
| The fact is, an educated populace serves the state, and so The whole dynamic needed to be broken free of the false analogy to a standard producer-consumer market relationship. | |
| And I think in some sense we have this disease much more widely than we realize because We are, all of us increasingly, and the younger you are the more true this is, we are all being raised with markets as a dominant developmental influence. | |
| And so we learn to be consumers, we take on that mindset, we forget that we are citizens and we become consumers instead. | |
| Our pseudo-leaders Treat us like consumers, they pander to us the way a marketer does, and the thing is the whole... And we let children be advertised to. | |
| Right, for which I've never heard a rational defense. | |
| I cannot imagine why you would allow a corporation to study the minds of children and learn how to capture them. | |
| How to make permanent, dedicated consumers of them. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So in any case, we now have this dynamic and unfortunately now what we are seeing is the potential of this mindset to disrupt leadership at a moment when everything seems to be at stake. | |
| And as I'm sure we will end up talking about, I had a contact this week, somebody who has been following us for quite some time, contacted me. | |
| He's actually a Department of Homeland Security officer in Portland. | |
| And he contacted me, I think it's fair to say, in something of a panic based on what he is seeing unfold night after night for the last, I guess, eight nights in Portland. | |
| A standoff between the protests and the police. | |
| And he, frankly, is worried about what might emerge from this. | |
| And among the possibilities are, you know, a civil war based, you know, in race. | |
| And it wouldn't be the first one of those, obviously. | |
| And so I really think we have to figure out how to escape the momentum of this moment. | |
| And without leaders I don't know that we can do it, which means I think one of our primary concerns ought to be figuring out what to do when your leaders are trapped in the gig economy. | |
| How do you free them to actually do what leaders are supposed to do? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, it seems to me that that is an open question that we all need to be thinking about, but the natural segue there was maybe to show some of the video that Andy Ngo has collected. | |
| Actually, so you met with this Homeland Security officer yesterday, at the same time that I was having an interesting interaction that's relevant to the current moment that we'll talk about as well, with a totally different human being. | |
| And at the point that you met with this man, we had the impression that while the protests had been clearly quite destructive and divisive last weekend in Portland, Um, that the curfew had been, had been dropped as of a couple nights earlier and that things had basically calmed down. | |
| And this contact, this, this guy in Homeland Security said, Oh no, really not. | |
| Which raises the question, why then did the curfew get called off? | |
| One thing we've been talking about as well was, what was the curfew for? | |
| Curfew sits badly with just about everyone. | |
| No one likes the idea of lockdown, even if you can see why it has to happen. | |
| One of the things, of course, that curfew does Is it frees the police in, I believe, a good way to say, anyone who is on the streets after this time is breaking the law and therefore I can arrest you without having to demonstrate anything else about what it is that you're doing. | |
| And therefore you hopefully don't end up escalating between police and protesters or police and rioters into something which could be much, much worse. | |
| So the curfew has the potential to be quite protective and it was on in Portland for several nights running. | |
| I don't remember exactly how many. | |
| But that it had been called off, and the second night, I think, that it was not in place, we have these images. | |
| Actually, Zach, if you want to play, I guess, just the first video that I showed to you. | |
| This is Andy Ngo's Twitter feed from last night in Portland. | |
| Doesn't look cool. | |
| Yeah, those peace signs are a little bit ironic. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So maybe switch, I mean they're all sort of on a peace, but Zach, maybe go to the third video? | |
| No, I think they sent me there all from last night. | |
| So I think this is at the federal building. | |
| There are two federal buildings downtown. | |
| The reason that the Department of Homeland Security is front and center here is that there has been a consistent attack. | |
| Yes, this is the Justice Center right there. | |
| So this is, these are two federal buildings that are being besieged by the protesters. | |
| The park that these protesters, protesters, what am I talking about? | |
| These are rioters. | |
| Um, actually I should say, since we can't hear the audio here, I don't know if people are able to hear me talk over this video. | |
| Alright, I'll try to... Yeah, you want to take it off? | |
| Okay. | |
| So, um, the standoff that is taking place there... | |
| Disappears late in the night the park is then cleaned up and the buildings are thoroughly defaced with Graffiti if you've looked at my twitter feed you've seen some of the more dramatic things that are sprayed there Captured on on camera but in any case these are buildings that the federal government is charged with defending and the rioters | |
| I think are clearly trying to precipitate something that they see as in their interest, and my feeling is it is exactly not in the interest of almost anyone. | |
| It's probably not in their interest either for them to successfully precipitate it, but their power to precipitate it is substantial. | |
| And being made greater by the municipal authority, in this case a weak executive, which is robbing them of tools that could prevent lethal violence. | |
| Including, if I may just interrupt briefly, Zach, if you want to, hold on, show | |
| Here, so this is the letter signed by over a thousand public health officials arguing that while COVID-19 kills, racism predates COVID-19 and kills more and therefore protesting is a legitimate response to the current situation despite the fact that lockdowns are in place and still are, you know, basically as of now. | |
| So one of the things in this letter, I'll just highlight it, I can't highlight it, it's right where my cursor is here, there it is. | |
| Oppose any use of tear gas, smoke, or other respiratory irritants which could increase risk for COVID-19 by making the respiratory tract more susceptible to infection, exacerbating existing inflammation, and inducing coughing. | |
| So that's all I wanted to say there, Zach. | |
| That sounds at one level like these public health officials are trying to temper their frankly ludicrous Assertion that it's a legitimate move to go out en masse onto the streets because this is a bigger, because the killing, the senseless and violent killing of one man at the hands of a bad police officer is more of a public health threat than COVID-19. | |
| That's a ridiculous statement, right? | |
| But in this they say, well, but you know, you don't want to inflame your lungs. | |
| Sounds right, and yet one thing that you reported that this Homeland Security officer told you yesterday really puts this into stark relief, I think. | |
| Which is, he said, we're having our tools taken away from us. | |
| We're having our low-impact tools like smoke and even tear gas taken away, and unfortunately that leaves us with more and more lethal tools. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so I should probably say a little bit more. | |
| And really, this was not said to me in confidence. | |
| He obviously wanted to talk to me for a reason that had everything to do with my public-facing life, I guess. | |
| So I'm assuming that I'm at liberty to talk about this. | |
| But he said a number of things. | |
| One is, he said they're not going to cede the federal buildings. | |
| They can't. | |
| It's their mandate not to. | |
| The federal officers? | |
| Yeah, and that they are fully capable of protecting those buildings. | |
| What they're not fully capable of doing is protecting those buildings and keeping the rioters safe. | |
| They cannot simultaneously do that. | |
| So the point is the rioters have a tool, which is they can force these federal officers into lethal violence, which will, of course, what do you imagine would happen at this moment in the George Floyd protests when lethal violence is brought on protesters? | |
| By federal officers, right? | |
| This is Potentially shot heard around the world stuff and in my opinion the Anarchists are actually looking for a massacre and let me explain to you what I mean by that because obviously the idea that anybody would seek to be massacred is ludicrous and it is ludicrous, but You have how many major cities engaged in violent conflict on a daily basis now? | |
| If one of those cities sees a massacre, it does the job that the anarchists would like, right? | |
| It will be used to illustrate the illegitimacy and the overreaction of the government. | |
| And so, if you have all of these anarchists in all of these cities, the chances that you will be in the city where the massacre happens are low. | |
| So provoke, provoke, provoke, and probably it doesn't happen where you are, but it'll happen somewhere and that's good enough. | |
| And even if you're in the city where it happens, chances that you are among the massacred, pretty low. | |
| So there's a game being played, I believe, in which the idea is to precipitate violence that will be used to justify what comes next. | |
| And the point is, just as we all take a risk when we get behind the wheel of our car, thinking it's very unlikely to be me, that gets killed. | |
| There's an advantage to driving. | |
| So I'm going to accept that risk. | |
| The anarchists are accepting that risk of a small risk of being massacred in order to precipitate a massacre somewhere, which will do their bidding. | |
| Now, the problem is that the anarchists are undercutting the legitimacy of the actual protests that started this. | |
| They've thoroughly undercut it already. | |
| And they are co-opting this movement for what I regard as a completely insane objective. | |
| They actually believe that if you tore civilization down, what would replace it would be better. | |
| Now, A, we might not survive its being torn down, and B, the chances that what replaces it is better are very near zero. | |
| It's like the argument that we should terraform Mars because the environment on the Earth is lousy. | |
| Well, the environment on the Earth is getting worse. | |
| It's always going to be harder to terraform Mars. | |
| Is, you know, is America a fair place? | |
| I don't think it's fair enough. | |
| I think we have real problems. | |
| But the chances that tearing it down is going to create a fair replacement? | |
| No, it's going to create a power vacuum. | |
| And what's going to happen in a power vacuum is the powerful are going to rise. | |
| You're going to make things far worse. | |
| So the anarchists don't have the right to push us into this madness. | |
| What they do potentially have is the power. | |
| And why do they have the power? | |
| They have the power because somehow we have been led to accept a world in which those who would lead are doing something that sort of sounds like leadership, but it doesn't have the power. | |
| People can click away from there would be leaders on the Internet where they follow their leaders to useful effect in many cases, historically speaking. | |
| So how? | |
| How the heck are we gonna bail ourselves out of the situation so a small, really tiny number of anarchists don't lead the rest of us into a conflagration that all will end up regretting? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I guess that raises for me the question that we have been talking about for years now, of what are the various constituencies that make up the people whom we're seeing on the streets right now? | |
| And maybe, you know, as part of that, Related to that, but not exactly that question, I'm also curious as to, you know, really what are the data? | |
| How much police brutality is going on in the streets right now as part of these protests? | |
| And how much rioting and looting and violence by non-police? | |
| We can see through these video feeds taken by someone whom we know and trust that in our hometown there is violence and looting and rioting going on. | |
| Uh, and I have actually seen no evidence for, um, police brutality against protesters or rioters here in Portland. | |
| Clearly it's happening. | |
| There are these super cuts out there, um, which are showing only the awful behavior by the police. | |
| And there are super cuts out there that are showing only the awful behavior by the rioters. | |
| And what we don't have is any way, I haven't seen anyone with any even access to any even like credible It's an incredible idea for how we would know, how we would begin to know, what fraction of the behavior that's out there that's bad is being done by the police, and what fraction of the behavior that's bad is being done by the rioters and looters and the violent people who came for a fight. | |
| And we also don't know to what extent the misbehavior of police is the result. | |
| I mean, they are surrounded now by every one of these walls that has been vandalized, literally calling for their blood. | |
| All Cops Are Bastards is the shallow end, right? | |
| The graffiti goes up into, you know, guillotining, the need for the police to pay with blood, pictures of pigs with X's for eyes. | |
| This is surrounding these people. | |
| It is intentionally there to make peace impossible. | |
| And this, I mean, we saw this at Evergreen as well, right? | |
| So maybe before we talk a little bit about what the various groups of people are who are protesting on America's streets right now, some of whom are good faith and emotional and really trying to fix a system that is broken in some ways. | |
| Let's speak a little bit to, you know, what our, but specifically your experience was in a community having the leader of the community stand down the police who were good and honest and honorable and what kind of a vacuum that left. | |
| Sure. | |
| So for those who aren't familiar with the story, I got a call. | |
| Tuesday was the day on which protesters showed up by surprise at my class, accused me of racism, demanded my resignation. | |
| Somebody called the cops. | |
| They came to check on me, thinking I might be in danger. | |
| At that point, I didn't feel like I was in danger, although that would quickly change. | |
| Anyway, they called the cops. | |
| The protesters, who had not yet begun to riot, blocked the police so they couldn't get in the building and check on me, which alarmed them, but they stayed away. | |
| They went around to a different entrance to the building rather than confront these people who were obviously illegally blocking them. | |
| On Wednesday, the following day, I got a call from the police chief, Stacey Brown, who I had met the day before when she came to check on me after the protest at my class. | |
| I guess I had met her also at the 4 o'clock meeting in the library. | |
| Um, but she called and she said, are you on campus? | |
| And I said, no, I don't have class today. | |
| She said, good, don't come to campus. | |
| And I said, why? | |
| And she said, because, um, we have information that the protesters are searching for someone car to car, and we believe it is you. | |
| And I said, okay. | |
| And she said, what's more, we can't protect you. | |
| The president has told us to stand down. | |
| And the police were literally at this point locked in their police station, which left the campus ungoverned. | |
| And the lack of police on campus had been a rallying cry on the campus for years, including amongst some faculty, some of the very radical faculty. | |
| And what then unfolded was, instead of the police, the protesters and rioters formed what they called community patrols. | |
| They said they were going to keep themselves safe since the police couldn't do it. | |
| And in less than 24 hours, they were actually terrorizing other students. | |
| They actually physically beat one guy with weapons. | |
| It took no time at all to go from causing the power vacuum by eliminating the police to, you know, hunting people car to car. | |
| They were literally stopping traffic and nobody was stopping them from stopping traffic. | |
| This is all documented. | |
| And, you know, intimidating people. | |
| That's the result of the power vacuum. | |
| It's not the utopia that they claim is going to happen. | |
| Some of them know that and they're just looking for an excuse to behave this way. | |
| Some of them are naive enough to think That community patrols are going to be an improvement justice-wise. | |
| Well, they're utopians. | |
| Some of them, the most naive and good-hearted among them, that combination, naive and good-hearted, are utopians. | |
| And they really think that if you just get rid of the bad structures that are already instantiated, that good ones will spring up like flowers, you know, and of course that won't happen. | |
| Well, the biggest irony, I think, of it is that the bad ones, the ones who understand that it's not true, are actually about something. | |
| So there's a way in which the police are utilized to leverage people who would otherwise potentially revolt against a system that has frozen them out of well-being. | |
| The police and police brutality are used to keep people in line. | |
| That's actually, I believe that to be true. | |
| Yep. | |
| Yes, this is no justification for bad policing. | |
| Right. | |
| But what happens when you pull policing out is you get the community patrols doing exactly the same thing in the other direction. | |
| They start bullying people into making them more powerful. | |
| So it just, it's just a power grab where, yes, the injustice is pointed in a different direction. | |
| It's animal farm. | |
| It is Animal Farm. | |
| And this is something that means... So I got into an annoying battle yesterday on Twitter where I was pointing out... Can you say that many days? | |
| Anyone on Twitter? | |
| Well, this one was a little bit more ferocious because... Okay, what was it? | |
| My point was, look, you've got people calling for us to abolish the police. | |
| Um, I had, uh, I found this one tweet. | |
| This guy had 900 followers. | |
| He had tweeted something about abolishing the police and it had almost a quarter of a million likes. | |
| Now, I have, uh, something like a quarter of a million Twitter followers. | |
| The most liked thing I've ever said on Twitter has maybe had 12,000 likes. | |
| This guy had a quarter of a million likes on a tweet demanding that we abolish the police. | |
| And people, good people, some of whom I know, were telling me, you're misunderstanding. | |
| When they say abolish the police, they mean, you know, rein in these growing police budgets, demilitarize, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| That's not what they mean. | |
| They actually mean abolish the police. | |
| And it's a, it's one of these Mott & Bailey situations. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Where they are, they have a, Almost responsible version of the position, and then they have their real position, and if you say, hey, that real position is... It's dangerous! | |
| ...is downright crazy, their point is, well, no. | |
| That's not what we mean. | |
| They want to rein in budgets. | |
| Come on, we're all adults here, come on! | |
| You're not for reining in budgets? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, anyway, here's the part people don't get. | |
| When you say, abolish the police, Can you imagine, even if you thought that was a good idea, how much paperwork would be involved in abolishing the police? | |
| That's your argument! | |
| No, that's not my argument. | |
| Here's my argument. | |
| No paperwork is involved in abolishing the police, because the structures to do it are already there in civilian hands, and what you need is something that forces those civilians to their worst instincts. | |
| So, George Bridges, the president of our college, was a civilian who just happened to have the power to tell the police not to enforce the law, which still shocks people when I tell them that. | |
| Why did the president of your college have the ability to tell the police not to enforce the law? | |
| Well, that wasn't my choice. | |
| It was somebody's choice deep in the past, but it unfolded on us. | |
| As incidentally is also true of the Portland mayor, Ted Wheeler, has the ability to tell the police not to enforce the law. | |
| Yes, the mayor of Portland is also the police commissioner, which means that the ability to hogtie the police is in his hands already. | |
| Now, it doesn't apply to federal officers, which creates a whole other dynamic where the city against the... Which is part of why Homeland Security is here, which in terms is antagonizing the idea that Homeland Security is in the city, is antagonizing the protesters who see the idea of federal officers as itself anathema to democracy. | |
| And we know something about how Wheeler views this stuff because, frankly, he's been bending over forwards to please them since we moved here and before, right? | |
| He is constantly keeping the law from being enforced, which emboldens them to do ever more egregious things, including taking over intersections and terrorizing citizens. | |
| So maybe, you know, maybe then, to get back to this earlier point, lifting curfew. | |
| Why on earth, at the point that the protests are actually not getting in any way better, in fact getting worse, is curfew lifted and, you know, I read some of the local news, I saw no evidence. | |
| I actually thought, and the few other people that I talked to, I guess it's getting better. | |
| There's no curfew. | |
| No, quite the contrary. | |
| Why on earth did the curfew get lifted at exactly the moment when Homeland Security is here and fighting battles every night with an increasingly agitated crowd of, sorry, it's not the protesters who are out there at 2 a.m. | |
| throwing bottles and rocks. | |
| It's not protesters, that's rioters. | |
| Yeah, it's rioters. | |
| And you know, this is a distinction we have had to make repeatedly with respect to Evergreen, is there were protests. | |
| They turned into riots. | |
| At the point they turn into riots, if you call them protesters, you are obscuring the nature of what's taking place. | |
| And you are obscuring the danger that people are being put in. | |
| So there are good faith protesters out there, on the streets. | |
| And there are, you know, the term that you have tended to use, and I agree with it, is anarchists at the other extreme. | |
| But there are also sort of people who are coming in and doing, you know, not as much physical damage, not as much violence, but maybe putting the fabric of society at greater risk. | |
| Who are basically bad faith activists who have taken a good-sounding ideology, something like Black Lives Matter, and basically wrapped up their truly hateful ideas in that, and they are passing off their basically hate-filled ideology On to the majority, which is just confused about what it is. | |
| Confused about what it is that we are actually, that is actually being engaged in. | |
| So there's a natural tendency, you know, look, a lot of these people are young. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Protest has an honorable history. | |
| It's not entirely honorable, but it's also necessary. | |
| It's necessary. | |
| It, you know, it has all of the positive attributes. | |
| So if somebody can figure out how to connect the dots for you, so your frustration at the lousy situation you find yourself in or the boredom of COVID-19 or whatever it is, If your frustration has an outlet in which you can go tear some stuff up, you know, and feel like you're making positive change, then a lot of people will fall for it. | |
| A lot of people will fall for it and it does, you know, we are not the first but we have been saying for years that this has a lot of the hallmarks of either religious indoctrination or even worse a cult, right? | |
| That there is cultish thinking that is being encouraged Among the good faith, young, naive protesters who are being, you know, and we see images, I don't have any queued up here, but we see images of people basically all being forced to, you know, take a knee and put a hand up and, you know, do all these things in lockstep with one another. | |
| And then we're also seeing, you These children, these young adults, being told that if they don't force the people who are closest to them, their loved ones, to disavow the racism at their hearts, that they themselves are racist and that those people must disavow those people, their family members. | |
| That's a hallmark of cult behavior right there. | |
| You separate people from their loved ones, you inform them that they can't possibly be understanding the world correctly, And then you have basically an army that is ready to go with you wherever you want it to go. | |
| The anarchists and that desire, that destructive desire that they have tapped into, are filling the leadership vacuum. | |
| And so I don't know, I remember during Occupy, The unnatural love for the idea of leaderlessness. | |
| And it came from somewhere initially, which was in the past leaders had been a vulnerability of movements and so a leaderless movement negates that possibility, right? | |
| You preclude a cult of personality. | |
| You preclude a cult of personality, your leaders can't be killed or co-opted or whatever. | |
| But, you know, it was clever for two weeks and then it was really unclever and it resulted in actually the anarchists taking over the movement and the fact is it became incoherent. | |
| The thing fractured, became incoherent, and died. | |
| Yeah, what had started as a legitimate and widely hearable complaint about the TARP program and the collapse of 2008 and the bailout turned into just a sort of unspecific complaint. | |
| And the the problem in this circumstance is I sort of feel like we are watching Occupy 2, right? | |
| That this is Occupy. | |
| It's the nebulous part of Occupy that took over in the end that has suddenly come back and it's found a new reason to be in the streets, which is George Floyd. | |
| But that's not really what's going on. | |
| It's a general frustration amongst people who basically don't have the chops to figure out what it is exactly they're complaining about. | |
| And so They know at some level, viscerally anyway, that they are tired of being told that we live in the best of all possible times. | |
| This is the messaging coming from most of the intelligentsia and the media that things are so much better for most of us by most of the measures of resources than they have been for any generation in the history of the planet. | |
| How could you not be grateful? | |
| This was my final point that I made in those 14 points in the last live stream. | |
| You've got a generation of people whose educations have failed them, who are in debt, who have terrible healthcare, who have almost no chance of ever owning a home, who've been drugged into submission by legal pharmaceuticals in many cases, and who've been sold to all of their lives such that the consumer mindset is the one that they know. | |
| And they don't have the ability to regulate their own psychological states, in part because they were being given drugs that were explicitly about letting some exogenous molecule regulate them for them. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Of course they're angry, and of course they don't have the ability to quite put their finger on exactly what it is they're angry about, because it's kind of everything. | |
| And also, what are the solutions? | |
| It has to be systemic. | |
| There have to be sweeping systemic solutions, but it likely is not going to be about Frankly, the idea of reforming police departments, which clearly needs to be done. | |
| Some police departments need reform. | |
| Not all of them, I don't think. | |
| There's not police brutality widespread in every single police department, but some police departments need reform. | |
| But that's not big enough. | |
| That's not big enough to solve the problems that are true across America and generationally. | |
| No, in fact, the police problem is a symptom of a different problem. | |
| So if this protest was actually | |
| Sharpened to be about the thing that generated the frustration that is allowing it to happen it would be about the system being rigged and even rigged is wrong because rigged suggests that this was all conscious when a lot of it is a simple outgrowth of a corrupt system serving those who have the resources to take advantage of the opportunity for corruption which has generated a positive feedback for wealth and power that has frozen a lot of people out and so | |
| That frustration about the system being rigged actually comes with a corollary involving the police, which is if you are going to rig a system against people and they are not going to revolt, the reason that they're not going to revolt is because the penalty for running afoul of the police is high. | |
| So bad policing is a feature, not a bug, right? | |
| It's part of how the corrupt civilization keeps people in line when actually they have a very good reason Uh, to be angry and to say so. | |
| And, you know, I would also say that our absolutely massive, unmatched anywhere else in the civilized world, uh, prison system, uh, is, is the same phenomenon, which is, it's cheaper. | |
| Frank, as expensive as our prison system is, and as expensive as our highly military, militarized police are, it is the cheap solution to a different problem, which is how do you freeze people out Of well being that they would be entitled to participate in and not have revolution, right? | |
| So anyway, that thing requires a solution, not at the police level. | |
| I'm not arguing, frankly, it may be that we've got the wrong model of police. | |
| It may be that actually a from the ground up rethink of the police makes sense in In tandem with a rethinking of how we can bring everyone in on opportunity. | |
| Now mind you, I did not say anything about distribution of wealth. | |
| Because distribution of wealth is a symptom of the distribution of opportunity problem. | |
| And if we talk about the distribution of wealth problem, we're going to end up in a quagmire we can't get out of. | |
| But the distribution of opportunity problem, any honest broker Should acknowledge that opportunity should be widely distributed, right? | |
| Freezing people out of opportunity does not serve us. | |
| The market does not function well when people do not have access to it. | |
| So distributing opportunity widely is the thing that we ought to be fighting over. | |
| Is it widely distributed? | |
| If it is, okay. | |
| But if it's not, and it sure looks to a lot of us like it's not, that's something to talk about. | |
| And then the police issue is downstream of it, right? | |
| Now, is there a racial component to the police thing? | |
| I think we all know there is. | |
| Is it as clear cut as black people are being gunned down in the street by the cops and it's happening all the time? | |
| And, you know, well, frankly, that analysis doesn't stand up when you look at the actual statistics. | |
| Yes, it's disproportionate, but it is not. | |
| It's not the problem that is singularly experienced by the black community. | |
| It is a problem of bad, brutal policing that we see too often in every community. | |
| Blacks are running afoul of the police at a high rate. | |
| Why? | |
| I would argue it has a lot to do with being frozen out of opportunity, which results in more lawlessness. | |
| We can debate whether that's actually the cause, but sure looks right to me. | |
| And anyway, it is a systemic problem, but What do you do when the people who are apparently protesting at the frustration are also, you know, massively looting, are claiming that all cops are, you know, so guilty of this that they deserve death without a trial. | |
| I mean, this is such a There's dehumanization on both sides, and that will only make the problem worse. | |
| Both sides has become easy for, and you know, you can draw lines in a lot of places, so a lot of these things have at both sides. | |
| There's a police versus rioters, there's a left versus right, you know, blue states versus red states. | |
| There are many places to draw the lines, and in both cases what we see, as things get tenser and tenser, is those people over there aren't really quite humans anyway, are they? | |
| And no one is saying that out loud exactly, but it is becoming the tenor of the conversation. | |
| So one thing you said back there prompted me to think that this thing that is easily mocked in conservative circles, that it seems like progressives don't believe in meritocracy. | |
| They don't even want merit to be the basis on which advancement is made in things like school and jobs. | |
| And, you know, I have thought this is an absurd, this is an absurd critique. | |
| What the hell? | |
| Of course we have, of course we want a meritocracy. | |
| But your points there about About how opportunity has been distributed not equally means that we can have the appearance of a meritocracy without there actually being one because opportunities have not been distributed equally early enough for people who are now adults to have all of the skills that they would have had had they had the opportunities that they should have had By an actually equal society. | |
| So, of course, meritocracy is what we want, what we should have. | |
| You know, arguing for anything else gets us into Harrison Bergeron territory, the Vonnegut short story that you've referenced before. | |
| But in order to have an actual meritocracy, we have to have a quality of opportunity throughout society and at as early stages as possible for children who would otherwise be effectively sidelined from the, you know, Well, I, of course, agree with everything you just said. | |
| The problem is that, again, as I think a result of a lack of real leaders empowered to do what leaders do, we have an artificial bifurcation of the positions, leaving two wrong ones. | |
| Right? | |
| So, on the right, we have a position that is correctly in favor of meritocracy and, frankly, the inequities that would be produced by it, naturally. | |
| In other words, some people contribute more and some people contribute less. | |
| But, on the right, that is fused together with a belief that things are much fairer than they actually are. | |
| And so, you know, declaring it's a meritocracy at the finish line Is not quite acceptable if what's happening at the starting line is that people are, you know, discovering that somebody has, you know, strapped them to the starting blocks and, you know, put up barriers in front of them. | |
| And yeah, OK, you cross the finish line later, but it wasn't inherently about merit. | |
| So so that's what's going on on the right is a belief that things are fairer than they actually are. | |
| And a kind of rationalization of the unfairness that is there, but is maybe a little hard to diagnose. | |
| And then On the left, there is this attack on meritocracy, which the first time you hear it, you think, this must just be some little outbreak of insanity in this room. | |
| And then it turns out, no, it's actually widespread everywhere. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it really comes with The de-individuation. | |
| At the point you surrender, you surrender the idea that I am responsible for achievement, right? | |
| I am better off becoming part of a mob than I am being an individual responsible for my own achievement, then this all begins to make sense. | |
| The point is, well, the mob will achieve something and then we'll divide it. | |
| But you know what's going to happen when the mob achieves it? | |
| It's going to be divided so unequally, right? | |
| If you think— You think the mob's going to be equitable? | |
| Right. | |
| Really? | |
| That's really the question. | |
| If you think the mob is going to be equitable, you don't understand the game theory that underlies mobs. | |
| They're taking advantage of you in order to get where they want to go, and as soon as they do, they'll cut you loose. | |
| Which is of course what explains this phenomenon that everybody is now remarking on about the left eating its own. | |
| Right. | |
| Right? | |
| The left eats its own because it is too prone to deindividuation and mob-like behavior, and when the spoils are there to be divided, They're divided the way human beings would be expected to divide them in the absence of a system that aspires to fairness. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| Boy, there's a lot more to say here. | |
| Let me talk just for a couple of minutes about what I was doing while you were meeting with the Homeland Security Officer. | |
| Sure. | |
| So, I have gotten approval to use her name. | |
| I was approached by the mayor of Mill Valley, California, a woman named Sashi McEntee. | |
| I hope I'm pronouncing your last name correctly, Sashi. | |
| Who, Mill Valley is a town of about 14,000, a few 12-14 miles north of San Francisco in Marin. | |
| So, for people who don't know California, Marin County is quite wealthy, pretty white, and this is effectively a bedroom community of San Francisco in the Bay Area. | |
| It's beautiful, it's on the, you know, east, eastern slopes of Mount Tam, Mount Talapayas, And Sashi, who I did not know at all before she approached me a couple of days ago, and we spoke for a while yesterday, is being dragged. | |
| You know, it's being facilitated by the Twitter mob, but it is happening in her hometown now. | |
| Because in a, you know, in a Zoom call, boy I'm probably going to get the particular details a little bit wrong here, Um, but they were doing a, um, a city council meeting over Zoom because they were still in lockdown, uh, just within the last week or so. | |
| And there was an opportunity for community comment, uh, but, you know, we're all following the, you know, city council rules are whatever they are. | |
| It's not Robert's Rules of Order, but it's something there's, they have to follow some rules about what they do and do not talk about. | |
| And during community comment, a question came over the transom. | |
| It was something to the effect of, I had a Black Lives Matter sign up and it got taken down and I wonder what you, the mayor of and the city council in Mill Valley, are doing to ensure that Black Lives Matter, something like this. | |
| And saw she responded according to protocol, but perhaps she allows a little bit more tersely than might have been perfect for the situation. | |
| It is a matter of policy that we don't comment on things that are not of local or immediate importance in city council meetings. | |
| That is the extent of her infraction. | |
| That is the infraction that now has had protesters with signs and a flyer, and they were going to be marching on her home, and they were calling for her resignation, and they were informing people far and wide about her hatred of all things Black Lives Matter. | |
| What I haven't said is that Sashi herself is a person of color. | |
| She's a Sri Lankan American, She's not black, she's not African American, it's different, but it's not that she has not experienced the racism that does still exist in America herself as someone who is a politician in a town in California and has done good work and people have honored that work until now. | |
| She is now in this position of going, I don't, I don't know how to respond to these people. | |
| And she clearly is compassionate. | |
| She is so humane. | |
| She happens to be a Republican. | |
| They are now picking up on that and saying, ah, she's been hiding the fact that she's a Republican. | |
| No, actually, you elected her to be mayor, knowing full well that she was a Republican, and you voted her in, in this pretty liberal county, in the liberal state of California, knowing what her politics were, but also knowing that she cares deeply about people, about the community, about leadership, and about doing right by her constituents. | |
| So I want to stop us from doing something. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It sounds like she's a marvelous person. | |
| She doesn't need to be. | |
| That's right. | |
| She could be an average person in this case. | |
| And what is going on is still obvious. | |
| And let me point out that actually... Can I just interrupt there? | |
| It's exactly the instinct that has people explaining how lovely a rape victim was, right? | |
| It doesn't need to have been true. | |
| Right, or, you know, in George Floyd's case, turning him into a saint rather than just the victim of a crime. | |
| So, anyway, what I would say is, look, we've already talked now about the fact that there's a game theoretic reason that you might have anarchists looking for a massacre against themselves, right? | |
| There's a good reason because it advances the anarchist ball. | |
| We can see what is taking place with Sashi in what happened at Evergreen. | |
| It's a story I think we told last time on the podcast, but the Flyergate story is the flip side of her story. | |
| So the Flyergate story at Evergreen, a flyer for a rally against white supremacy at Evergreen, and there was no white supremacy at Evergreen, so a flyer advertising a rally against a fictional enemy was put up. | |
| And you're welcome to have the rally, but... Sure. | |
| No big deal. | |
| But it had, you know, it had black power symbols on it. | |
| But, you know, I saw the flyer. | |
| It struck me as odd that they were protesting white supremacy because I couldn't figure out what they meant. | |
| But, you know, I wasn't angered by it. | |
| I was just perplexed. | |
| But some people may have been angered. | |
| In any case, some flyers were taken down. | |
| We think. | |
| We don't know. | |
| The person who announced that they were taken down turned out to be a bad actor. | |
| So maybe that was even cooked up. | |
| But let's say the flyers were taken down by somebody who was rubbed the wrong way by a black power rally against white supremacy at Evergreen. | |
| Okay, at the point that Naima showed the poster and described how exhausted she was for counseling students about the trauma they had experienced at their posters being taken down, the school erupted in an outpouring of the most absurd support for this anti-white supremacy movement | |
| Where literally the administrators of the college were all posting this flyer against white supremacy at Evergreen on their doors. | |
| The daycare center was printing the flyers up, right? | |
| And it was just, it was madness as people fell all over themselves to advertise that they were definitely against all of the white supremacy at Evergreen. | |
| I am woker than thou. | |
| Right, I am woker than that. | |
| So the point is, all of those people were solving a problem for themselves at expense for other people. | |
| Who did the expense fall to? | |
| It fell to those of us who wouldn't do it, who weren't going to pretend that something was going on at Evergreen that wasn't. | |
| So it's externalizing harm onto others to solve your own little problem. | |
| This is why we're worried about Ted Wheeler and what he's going to do to the police in order to advertise to the mob that he's really with them. | |
| And what happened to Sashi was that she made the cardinal error of not doing what was being demanded of her. | |
| She was supposed to advertise failty. | |
| She didn't do it. | |
| And now she has to be publicly punished so that the next person that they ask will demonstrate failty. | |
| And that is really the key to this whole thing, is that the way to wield power is to get each person to solve their own problem and externalize the harm onto those who won't do it, and then the whole thing topples. | |
| And it's very tough, right? | |
| So how, you know, a politician, one of the things that a politician should be doing is receiving and hearing the fears and the anxieties and the concerns of their constituents and basically reflecting those back in such a way that the politician can assure their constituents, I hear you and I have both the power and the intention to help those things get better. | |
| That is part of what a politician is supposed to be doing. | |
| There is potentially a reason that an apology for something that wasn't an error was necessary. | |
| She and I went back and forth on this a little bit. | |
| My point was, Never make an apology that you don't mean, because we need apology. | |
| We need apology in the world. | |
| We need good apology. | |
| We need honest apology, and if we weaken that, if you start having people make apologies that they don't mean, then we lose this incredibly necessary tool in human interaction. | |
| It's not just human. | |
| We obviously don't have apologies by words in dolphins and chimps and elephants and such, but you see clear signs of forgiveness and affiliation and reconciliation and such. | |
| So, you know, I preface those comments to her with, I'm not a politician. | |
| I don't fully understand how it is that you need to reflect back those fears and anxieties to your constituents and make it clear that you've heard them, but certainly I would say do not make any attempt to appease. | |
| Do not make any attempt to appease, because there will be no appeasement. | |
| They will not be appeased. | |
| A, you did nothing wrong, in my view. | |
| I'm not sure that she would say that, but in my view, she did nothing wrong. | |
| She did nothing wrong. | |
| Do not try to appease a mob. | |
| Don't negotiate with the terrorists. | |
| Do not try to appease a mob. | |
| They will not be appeased, and then they will just be one step closer to the leadership that they certainly shouldn't be in. | |
| I mean, you know, we saw this with George Bridges, who, you know, at the point that he acknowledged his internal racism, right, which is a lot wrong with George Bridges. | |
| I don't think racism is anywhere in there. | |
| But at the point that he acknowledged the racism that the crowd demanded that he acknowledge, They turned on him and they were like, aha, we told you you were a racist. | |
| And it was like, well, you just insisted that I admit it. | |
| And, you know, so anyway. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You don't fess up to thought crimes, right? | |
| The best you can do is you can speak the truth. | |
| And the thing is, if you are cast out, you are going to be cast out into the realm of those who also stood up. | |
| And I can't promise you that it's going to work out okay. | |
| I don't know what's going to happen. | |
| But I can say, if the problem is they're driving you crazy by demanding that you admit things that you are not guilty of, Um, then being cast out into the realm of others who stood up, uh, will be a breath of fresh air. | |
| That I can tell you. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, there's at least a one, one thing for sure else that we want to talk about and maybe, um, maybe quickly too. | |
| And one of them is to return to something that we talked about last time. | |
| Um, so I began, uh, the last. | |
| Last livestream of these 14 points, and I raised the issue of, in Donald Trump's June 1st press conference, he mentioned the Second Amendment, and I had this reaction of, what the hell was that doing there? | |
| And it wasn't that I was objective to him talking about the Second Amendment at all, it just really didn't seem to belong in that sentence. | |
| And I asked, was that a call to arms? | |
| And if so, I suggested that that was possibly treasonous. | |
| I didn't say it was a cold arms, but that was one of my guesses and maybe my best guess at the time. | |
| We have a friend who grew up in the South who had a different take. | |
| I've heard versions of this from a few people, but I'm actually just going to read this friend's take on this and then have us talk about it. | |
| As soon as I read what she wrote, I thought, yeah, I think this is a much more likely and valid interpretation of what he was doing than that it was a call to arms. | |
| So she says, Men in the South, Christian men in particular, literally talk all the time about how one day the government will show up to take their guns away, and that will be the day that they defend their families as men of God should do. | |
| If there was ever a time that I was around more than two adult men and that topic didn't come up, I swear to you I have no memory of it. | |
| I think what Trump was actually saying to his base was, you may have to see tanks in the street, but it's not the day you have been dreading. | |
| Your Second Amendment rights are safe under me. | |
| Amazing. | |
| Amazing. | |
| Right? | |
| And so we then, the three of us, had sort of a back and forth. | |
| And do you want to riff here a little bit? | |
| Well, yeah, I do. | |
| One thing I would say is this mirrors quite well what I heard from the Department of Homeland Security officer, who one of his major concerns Is that the rural folks are watching the cities go insane and they, you know, are heavily armed as a demographic and they are being called upon effectively to | |
| Not take up arms in this conflict, which is very important that they don't at this moment, because this could easily break down into something from which we cannot emerge. | |
| And he also helped me to understand this concept that many of us have started to hear, some people will be thoroughly familiar with it, Boogaloo. | |
| I've been told all kinds of things about it being code for race war and all of this. | |
| What he told me and what I've seen reflected elsewhere, and I am in no position to say for sure what the truth is, but- It's so hard to figure. | |
| Is that it is a code word for the day that the government comes to relieve the population of its guns. | |
| In any case, the fact that that is expected to happen is an important fact in this discussion that everybody needs to make eye contact with. | |
| I think there's another fact that everybody needs to make eye contact with, which is going to be especially uncomfortable for people on the left, which is | |
| I believe the reason that this set of riots has not spilled over into neighborhoods, that it's been kept to government buildings and commerce establishments, is that the population at home is armed at an unknown level. | |
| That is to say, there are a lot of guns that people have. | |
| In their homes, and they are also in many places in a position to defend their homes with those guns and not go to jail for shooting somebody. | |
| So in any case, I know that inside of gun circles, there's a lot of discussion about what the circumstances are that actually justify you using overwhelming force to end an invasion of your property. | |
| In other words, inside your building, for example. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so I have the sense that one of the things that the left needs to own up to is that to the extent that it is quaking in its boots about these riots spilling over into neighborhoods, that although the Second Amendment was not written to protect from this moment, it may in fact be protecting civilians from being confronted by this, frankly, very dangerous mob. | |
| And that at some level, somewhere in our Second Amendment discussion, that fact needs to be lodged. | |
| Yeah, that's critical. | |
| And just one last thing on this. | |
| One of your reactions when we first heard this from our friend is that the Second Amendment isn't there, isn't about the guns. | |
| It's not, you know, we shouldn't care about the Second Amendment in order to protect the guns. | |
| The guns are there in order to protect our other rights. | |
| And, you know, we talked about this a little bit last time. | |
| I think it was in the Q&A. | |
| You know, someone said, you know, the Second Amendment is just as important as the First. | |
| And we had a little back and forth on this. | |
| And, you know, at first I said, yeah, of course, and you kind of pushed back. | |
| And I think, yeah, you know, actually, The second is what allows us to defend the rights that are laid out in the first and I actually I just printed out what the first says it's so it's it's actually a beautifully complete sentence, and it's, it's short Congress, First Amendment. | |
| Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. | |
| And one of the things that is so beautiful about that, all of those things which might under some really bad circumstances need to be defended, perhaps by someone who is appropriately armed, perhaps by someone who is appropriately armed, Um, is that it begins at the most private thing. | |
| You know, freedom of religion. | |
| That which only, you know, that's between you and your God. | |
| And it need never go beyond your own head. | |
| And it goes out from there. | |
| It's religion, or the exercise of religion, or speaking about religion, or speaking to the press so that they can share what it is, and you know, now we're beyond religion. | |
| It's ideas, the right of people to then group in numbers, and to, and to approach the government and to get them to redress grievances. | |
| It just goes from the most private to the most public. | |
| It takes on all the levels of democracy and, you know, points once again to how just brilliant and foresighted the founding fathers of this country were, but of course they couldn't have known most of the technology that we're living with now, which is part of what those of us, you know, on the left who understand the necessity of the Second Amendment are talking about when we say, okay, but there have to be some limits. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It is a beautiful document. | |
| I mean, it has its paradoxes in it. | |
| I saw the Third Amendment come up, trended on Twitter, the Third Amendment. | |
| That was an amazing moment because it's... The soldiers aren't coming, are they? | |
| They're not ordering here. | |
| No, well, I think they were kicked out of a hotel or something. | |
| But in any case, so I've taken the left to task here for a naive interpretation of the Second Amendment and its relevance to the present. | |
| I think I should say on the other side, there is the question of whether or not any of the amendments other than the second would be defended with the guns that are protected by the second. | |
| And I have concerns that actually one of the things that is unfortunately true is that the only right that would result in the founding fathers hedge against tyranny that they built into the second amendment being utilized is a challenge to the second amendment. | |
| So anyway, I think that needs a rethink. | |
| If I can close us out here with a final thought, do you have something? | |
| Maybe we'll come back in a later episode, but I just wanted to say that, as many people will know, there was a big paper, there was a big retraction from The Lancet yesterday, the day before. | |
| The Lancet being one of the major medical journals, and this being an article that, you know, had gone through peer review. | |
| That found that hydroxychloroquine was not only not effective, but actually possibly dangerous in the treatment of COVID-19. | |
| And so it got reported widely, and it was mostly stopped, as I understand it, in many places. | |
| But it's been retracted because the data were bad. | |
| And, you know, one of the takes is, well, but peer review never pretended that it could see whether or not the data were bad. | |
| It's whether or not the analysis is bad, and that's true. | |
| But it points further to the rot at the core of what is going on in science and medicine right now, and not at all a problem with how it is that we can understand what is true using the scientific method. | |
| But if people are willing to fabricate or just find lousy data, then of course you can't trust anything downstream of those decisions. | |
| So, amazing that there is a retraction of this size out of this journal on this topic right now. | |
| And I think it was episode 6 that we talked explicitly about peer review and some of its problems. | |
| Well, here we have further evidence of that. | |
| As if we needed further evidence, but here it is. | |
| All right, so what I wanted to close with was something that this DHS officer said to me, among the many things that struck me. | |
| Actually, he said two things that I think are worth saying. | |
| He said that he thought Trump had been elected as a giant middle finger to a system that was broken, and I resonate with this. | |
| I agree that that's why he was elected. | |
| But he said he's very much the wrong person for the crises of 2020. | |
| And I thought that was a very interesting piece of nuance I hadn't heard from anybody. | |
| But even more importantly, he said something to me, which I know that I have said, I may even have said it on this podcast, which is that all cops are bastards could rightly be replaced with SCAB. | |
| Some cops are bastards. | |
| So here you have a person charged with defending a federal building, afraid that he is going to be lured into massacring people that he very much does not want to shoot at. | |
| Acknowledging that, in fact, there is a problem and that some cops are indeed bastards. | |
| And I was struck. | |
| I mean, I was actually, as he said it, I was in view of all of this graffiti where people are saying, you know, all cops must die and this other just stuff with, you know, it's the opposite of nuance. | |
| And the difference between somebody who is nominally on one side of this, who is able to acknowledge exactly the thing that I would want to acknowledge, which is that there is a problem, right? | |
| And then the other side is so busy trying to pick a fight, in fact it doesn't want the nuance. | |
| The nuance is the thing that will prevent what they are looking for. | |
| What they are looking for is a conflagration. | |
| And all of us on the outside of that little narrow fight are in some sense stuck in the middle, because if they get their conflagration, it's all of us who are going to lose. | |
| And I don't care what neighborhood you live in. | |
| I don't care. | |
| I mean, I don't mean I don't care. | |
| I care. | |
| But no matter how bad your policing is, the absence of policing will make it far worse. | |
| The lawlessness in, you know, the worst neighborhood in America, the lawlessness that will happen if there's no law, Is much greater. | |
| So in any case, let us please figure out how to resurrect the concept of leadership so that somebody wise is in a position to tell people, you know what? | |
| That stuff doesn't speak for us. | |
| We are over here. | |
| That's something else. | |
| Don't listen to those people. | |
| Very good. | |
| All right. | |
| So we probably want to say a few words about, we will be taking a break for 15 minutes and coming back and taking your Super Chat questions as we usually, as we always have, starting with the Super Chat questions from this hour and then picking up about halfway through with the Super Chat that comes in the next hour. | |
| But we won't be back on Tuesday with a live stream because you've got something else in the works. | |
| Yeah, I've got a podcast that I recorded yesterday. | |
| I don't know how much I should say about what's in it. | |
| Do you want to say who? | |
| Sure. | |
| Uri Degen, who... I blew it! | |
| You did it! | |
| I did it! | |
| It's Uri Degen, who is the guy, the entrepreneur, biotech entrepreneur, who wrote the excellent Medium article, basically a review article, of the evidence relevant to the question of whether or not COVID-19 might have been started by a laboratory leak of a virus that had been Studied in Wuhan. | |
| Anyway, excellent interview. | |
| I think you will find it fascinating. | |
| I will release it on Monday. | |
| And I think, so it's a couple of hours, and you were talking about doing it as what's called a premiere. | |
| I might. | |
| I have to figure out whether Yuri could join me for that. | |
| I mean, maybe there's a possibility for feedback, even if it were just you. | |
| As I understand it, I don't know. | |
| But as I understand it, it allows for some of the virtues of a live stream on YouTube. | |
| The virtues and the horrors of a live stream on YouTube. | |
| Exactly. | |
| They are inextricably tied up together. | |
| But basically, if you did that, then you would be online and you would be answering Super Chat questions in text, just as if... Or dodging Super Chat questions. | |
| We don't know. | |
| Yeah. | |
| We don't know. | |
| Bullets. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And then you may have another one. | |
| We'll leave that sort of vague after that. | |
| Oh, there will be another one. | |
| And it's going to be a good one. | |
| And we don't know, you know, maybe in between those two we'll come back for a live stream, but the timing is going to be different starting now. | |
| Also, Zach, our producer and just finished 10th grade son, had his last day of school yesterday, so we could start doing these earlier even on weekdays for those in Europe who've been asking for that. | |
| I feel like everyone in Europe has been asking for it. | |
| I think so. | |
| Yeah, that was my understanding too. | |
| Okay, so maybe that's it for now. | |
| So great! | |
| Please like, subscribe, comment, and consider spreading this video around if you got something useful out of it. | |
| It would be great to reach some people who don't even know that there's a discussion taking place. | |
| We will see you in 15 minutes to answer your questions. | |
| In the meantime, stay safe! |