Bret and Heather 31st DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: The Danger of Invoking Terrorism
In this 31st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, foll...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream our 31st.
I'm here with Dr. Heather Hying.
Many, many things are afoot, including on this channel.
Because we've released a number of things in sequence, you may not get notifications of them all based on the vagaries of how YouTube functions, so I will call your attention to them now.
The Black Intellectual Roundtable has been tremendously successful.
People are really excited about it.
It has been covered by The Spectator, so check that out.
Well worth a look.
I have also just released an interview with Matt Taibbi, which I thought was great.
He has long been someone I have admired, and it was an excellent conversation.
He endorsed Unity 2020, which I consider a very important bit of progress.
Anyway, check those videos out.
Oh, and the third one that we have recently released is an interview with the world's most interesting orthodontist.
And I know that doesn't sound like... I thought you called him the world's most hated orthodontist.
He's both.
He is absolutely... Hated is a more interesting word than interesting.
He is the world's most hated orthodontist and the thing is the only people who hate orthodontists are people like me who have been damaged by orthodontists and other orthodontists who don't want the truth out about that kind of damage.
So anyway, check out this podcast with Dr. Mike Mew and if you are puzzling over how an orthodontist could be interesting, you know, think through that a little bit and then check out what he says on The Dark Horse because he is truly a dark horse.
And he doesn't appear to be hated by his patients or by other patients.
It's within the field that he is dismissed and disliked.
Dismissed and disliked and threatened with the loss of his license and things for saying things that to me sound extremely reasonable evolutionarily, whereas mainstream orthodontia frequently says things that are evolutionarily preposterous about how our genes have suddenly gone bad and that's why teeth end up crooked and things like this.
That's what genes do, they suddenly go rogue on you.
They suddenly go, they're on the fritz.
You're humming along hundreds of millions of years and then boom!
Your jaw's all cattywampus and you've got sleep apnea and AED and all that stuff.
That's genes for you.
Yeah, that's genes for you, exactly.
All right.
Well, that was good.
That was sort of light on a day that I must say has been a bit heavy because there are things afoot on Twitter, which in general, when there are things afoot on Twitter, it is often best just simply to ignore them.
But in this case, I think there is actual physical danger emerging from them, which forces us to react to things that we might prefer not to.
So in this case, what I'm referring to is what appears to be an invitation from the majority report with Sam Seder delivered by a producer for that program.
But in making this invitation, if that's actually what it is, the producer in question Delivers knowing falsehoods about me and these falsehoods look like they will incite potentially violence against us.
And so, you know, we live here in Portland where things are quite tense and there is daily violence downtown.
And basically this producer has made an attempt to portray me as somehow on the other side.
So I have tweeted back and insisted that the proper Remedies be taken that this be retracted that we be given an apology And that the producer in question be fired because obviously if he did this without the program's knowledge Then this is a rogue producer if he did it with the program's knowledge, then there's an even bigger problem So in any case we will see what they do, but I did want to look at
a what the the libel in question is and then Pursue the actual truth behind it which we can see because there's evidence.
So the the particular claim that is being made is that I have been consulting for the Department of Homeland Security and Now, this claim is being hung on the fact that I have talked to an officer with the Department of Homeland Security, which of course many of the viewers here will know because I've talked about it openly here.
There's no secret about it.
In fact, Zach, would you put up the photo of the DHS officer?
So that's not from my... I sent it to you.
Okay, so we're going to try to get that photo up for you.
But in any case, to remind people who did hear the story and for people who were perhaps not here for that episode, a Department of Homeland Security officer contacted me saying that he wanted to tell me his viewpoint about what he was seeing.
It was in fact his last day on the job as a DHS officer in Portland.
And so I went downtown and we had a conversation.
And anyway... This is a while ago, right?
This was before the most recent... All right, so here is the officer in question.
As you can see, our meeting took place in the open.
This is in the park directly across from The Federal Buildings.
In fact, while we were talking, we had a conversation that was an hour and a half, possibly two hours.
A citizen journalist with Copwatch came over.
The officer knew him.
They talked.
I was filmed by him with the officer.
There was nothing in the least bit secret about this.
And I wasn't talking to him in any official capacity, nor Was it my instigation?
He wanted to tell me things that he thought I needed to know.
So the idea that I am consulting for the Department of Homeland Security is preposterous and inflammatory in light of what DHS is currently engaged in in downtown Portland.
So for those of you who don't know that story, what is apparently happening Is the Department of Homeland Security has unmarked vehicles, rented vehicles, and it has what appear to be officers who are not in uniform.
And what they have been doing is they have been grabbing people from the crowd during the, and by the way, these things are falsely portrayed as protests.
They are in fact nightly riots, which have gone on for something like 50 consecutive nights.
So these out-of-uniform officers are pulling people out of the crowd without apparently arresting them and they are transporting them somewhere which apparently is into the federal buildings and those people are then in one case at least delivered their Miranda rights and then in that same case released hours later without any explanation of whether or not they've been charged with anything.
Now, I do think I know what's going on here, and of course, as a citizen, I find this very troubling.
This does not sound like a constitutional process.
It sounds extra-constitutional.
However, I would point out that I was warning about this very possibility.
I have been warning about it for many years, but I warned about it specifically in June.
I think June 1st.
Zach, can you put up that tweet?
Okay, I say in this tweet, I don't think people understand the significance of the president declaring Antifa a terrorist organization.
The Patriot Act and provisions of the NDAA of 2012 make this frightening.
Because Antifa is informal, it puts all protesters in danger, like declaring them un-citizens.
I want to fill that out and explain what it was that I was concerned about back on June 1st.
The term terrorist is a magical term.
It is a bit like the terms that we see deployed by the protest movement in the streets, where the terms have multiple meanings and dodging between those meanings allows things to take place that would not be normal, that would not be possible with normal terminology.
So, terrorists, to me, and in fact, if I recall correctly, years ago, before I was in the public eye, I wrote a piece in the aftermath of the attacks in France about what terrorism is and why we are reacting to it incorrectly.
And the point of that piece was that terrorism is basically a psychological op.
It's a psy-op.
And the idea is an enemy that does not have the power to overwhelm you with force can fool you by hijacking your fight-or-flight response.
It can fool you into doing more damage to yourself than it would be capable of doing directly.
That's what terrorism is.
That's why terror is in the heart of that term.
And so, my point was, when somebody engages in a terrorist attack, you need to be very, very careful about your reaction, because whatever your instinct is to do may well not be in your interest.
It's like the allergic reaction to a bee sting that is much worse than the bee sting itself and can actually cause your death.
So, terrorism is about using fear to get people to hurt themselves.
I do not believe that that is an accurate description of this protest movement.
This protest movement is wielding a threat, but it is not, to me, a terrorist threat.
It is different.
And so the instinct to throw every term that suggests that it is awful at it, including terrorist, is a problem.
Because the term terrorist triggers changes in your rights.
Let me push back on that a little bit, and I'm not sure, I'm out of my depth here with regard to the legal definitions of these various terms, but given what you just said about what terrorism does, your analogy was to the body's inflammatory response when a foreign toxin, a foreign substance comes in like a bee sting, it's actually the body's response, the anti-inflammatory, the immune response that is inflammatory
That is actually what kills you, and that this is how terrorism works as well.
Whether or not that is the method of action of Antifa, which is to say maybe some of those were originally protesters but now many of them are rioters, certainly that would appear to be the mode by which they are getting so many people to remain quiet.
I do not disagree that fear is at the core of this.
But I think, actually, this movement is delivering a credible threat inside of institutions.
It's not a... So, you know, in the case of, let's say, 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed.
But then we lost more than twice that number in the military response in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And we spent trillions of dollars, you know, in order to engage in those responses.
And so the harm we did to ourselves just As a matter of fact, was much larger than the harm that was done to us.
In this case, I don't think it is the method of action.
In other words, the threat is credible.
It's not misleading.
So I guess maybe we're talking about two different things.
The threat on the streets is violent and is destructive of property and in some cases humans as well.
The threat that is accompanying this, that predates this, the critical race theory and bastardization of postmodernism and white fragility and all of this nonsense, Is actually being wielded as a very blunt instrument that is in fact, you know, incredibly effective.
Oh, it's incredibly effective.
I mean, those things aren't identical, but they are very much hand in hand.
And it's hard for most people to separate out those two things.
And in fact, they shouldn't be separable when we try to figure out, you know, how do we move forward?
How do we get our democracy back?
Here's the point, though.
Let's say I'm wrong.
Okay?
About which?
About whether or not this was a terrorist threat.
So, whether or not Antifa is a terrorist threat.
Right.
Okay.
Let's say I'm wrong.
Still, what side of the issue am I on?
I am trying to keep the federal government from using the word terrorist about this movement, right?
Now, I am as troubled by this movement as anyone, right?
And that should be very clear to anyone who has watched this podcast.
However, even as troubled as I am, I do not want it labeled terrorist because I know what happens next.
You know what happens next?
People get dragged off the street by people out of uniform, without their rights being read, in unmarked cars.
And you know what?
It gets worse from here, because chances are, you don't know about the NDAA 2012 and its two provisions, right?
These two provisions are so frightening and so draconian, and frankly, I've been through this, right?
You and I were part of Occupy, right?
Occupy was also declared a terrorist organization.
Occupy?
There was nothing terrorist about Occupy, right?
It was just something that was a vile stigma that was thrown at us that turned out to have these legal consequences.
And so let me just run through a little bit of what we're really dealing with here.
In the aftermath of 9-11, there were many changes made to the structures that protect citizens.
NDAA 2012 had two provisions that resulted in, I would argue, the elimination of all of your constitutional rights with the exception of your Third Amendment right not to have soldiers quartered in your house.
And the reason that I say that is because those provisions allow the executive, the moment that's Donald Trump, to declare someone terrorist.
And at the point that you have been declared a terrorist, the federal government has the right to remove you From any street in the world.
They have the right to remove you.
You do not have the right to review the evidence against you.
You do not have the right to confront witnesses.
You do not have the right to cross-examine.
So you can be disappeared under these provisions because you have been declared under this special term.
Right so I believe what is happening in the streets of Portland is that they are the federal government is firing across the bow of the protest movement and they are alerting them what provision they have now triggered right now they are basically involved in some kind of NDA a catch and release program, which is vastly better than being disappeared and having nobody, you know, having lost your habeas corpus rights.
But nonetheless, it suggests what legal landscape we have just entered, which is exactly what I was warning about on June 1st with that tweet.
So, if you are concerned about what is going on in the streets of Portland, please understand it.
What we have is a situation in which our mayor, who happens also to be our police commissioner, a disastrous structural error in civilian governance, Our mayor has coddled this movement for years.
He has allowed them to take over intersections, to declare themselves the police.
He has kept the police out of their way.
That has set up a dynamic over the last 50 days in The heart of downtown Portland in which two federal buildings have been under persistent attack every night with all sorts of things including incendiary fireworks and the police who guard them have been targeted with all sorts of improvised weapons that include really dangerous things like slingshots with BBs, right?
Think about how much damage you can do to somebody if they're not wearing a helmet and you hit them with a BB from a slingshot.
So you've got this dynamic where the mayor refuses to enforce the law downtown.
You have riots reliably happening every night.
The target is two federal buildings that the federal government is charged with defending.
And now you have Donald Trump playing politics with this situation.
In which somebody does need to enforce the law, and if the city and the state won't do it, then it makes sense that the federal government, at least as far as those buildings go, will do it.
But, what are they doing?
Right?
They're using this extremely draconian stuff that some of us challenged from the very beginning.
You know, in fact, if you think I'm exaggerating, of course the charge will come back that my interpretation of the NDAA 2012 is incorrect, and that's not what it means.
Of course, the language is meant to be ambiguous.
But, Chris Hedges sued the Obama administration over this.
A federal court declared that he had standing.
What was the basis of that decision?
That he had interviewed Al-Qaeda members as a journalist and that that meant he could be declared a terrorist and he might be disappeared.
So, a federal court agreed that that was true and then a three-judge panel reversed the decision.
Triggering this law to be the law of the land to restore it restored it to that status and as far as I know It's the law of the land today.
What can you do about it?
Well, you could challenge it in court or If something happens to you, there's nothing that can be done, right?
You don't even have a legal Avenue because the very nature of these provisions is to eliminate that legal Avenue and So, we find ourselves in a terrible position.
We have feeble law enforcement as a result of a political entity, that is to say, Mayor Wheeler and the governor refusing to enforce the law, which means that the only entity that can enforce the law is the federal government, and you have the federal government taking these abusive powers that it set aside for itself and using them predictably because we have invoked the word terrorist, which we never should have done, and which I tried to prevent.
If you think I'm on the side of DHS violating the constitutional rights of Americans, you just don't understand where we are and how we got here, right?
I tried to prevent that from happening.
And so I absolutely insist that the majority report, correct the record, retract what it has said, issue an apology, and fire this producer.
It seems to me that at a minimum, those things are necessary.
Sorry.
All right.
That wasn't as funny as I was hoping.
No, sorry.
I'm not sure what we should do next.
One of the things that this producer, who you haven't named, so I don't know if that's intentional.
I don't know if I'll name him then.
No, let's name him.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
Matt Leach.
Either way, it's not a great name.
They both work.
Yeah.
That's not necessary.
What?
One of the things that he says in this thread is, A, he's playing with words, of course.
He says, you're consulting with DHS, which at the point that either of us says, for God's sake, it's not consulting, because consulting obviously implies payment, implies some sort of remuneration.
He'll say, no, consulting means a totally different thing also.
So there's clever wordplay here.
But one of these tweets, Zach, maybe you want to show this now, says, do not question Brett Weinstein's sources on the ongoing Portland race war that he is consulting DHS about.
And it has two pictures, one with you, Brett, and me, and Andy Ngo from actually the day that we met him.
That picture has clipped out Helen Pluckrose.
This is at the James Damore panel that Peter Boghossian Moderated that James and Helen and I did with Andy Ngo organizing.
He was a student at PSU at the time, so that was at Portland State University in February 2018.
And then there's a second picture here of you, Brett, with Andy in Portland, I don't know, maybe a year later or so, maybe sometime last year, sometime in Yeah, we had just moved to Portland and Andy asked if I wanted to see what was going on at the protest.
And so I went to both the Antifa side of the protest and the Proud Boys side of the protest in order to observe them both.
And anyway, this is being portrayed, obviously, in a particular light.
So, I mean, we met Andy on the day of that left-hand picture, and we became friends.
And the fact is, we don't share his politics.
He doesn't share ours, and we talk about that when we see each other.
We don't see each other very often, but as it happens, I actually did spend a couple of hours with Andy about a month ago, walking around outside, as one needs to do now when one's meeting people outside of their home for the most part.
It happened to be raining, so we both ended up totally drenched because, like, good Pacific Northwesterners, neither of us had brought an umbrella.
And one of the things he asked me in that conversation from sometime mid-June, I think, was, does this look like a race war?
Does this look like a race war to you?
And that's exactly the language that this producer from the Majority Report is claiming Portland's ongoing race war, to which I say, bullshit.
This is not a race war.
And that's what I- Andy asked me that question in good faith.
He was wrestling with, is this a race war?
And I said, no, I really don't think so.
And, you know, or will this become a race war?
Are these race riots?
And in part, I think not.
But that is exactly what the instigators want us to think.
They are trying to pit us against one another so, so, you know, baldly, really.
And so I will say here that We have a, I guess you don't have to show this Zach, but we'll post in the show notes a half hour-ish interview with a black Portland police officer, he's not NHS, he's a Portland police officer, in which He is being asked, what's the experience?
What is the experience on the streets now?
And one of the things he says is, quote, this is a black police officer on the streets in Portland who has been out there on, you know, probably not every night, but these protests that have become riots that have been taking place downtown and elsewhere in Portland now, Uh, consecutively for I think more than 50 nights now.
He says, it says something when you're at a Black Lives Matter protest and you have more minorities on the police side than in a violent crowd.
And you have white people screaming at black officers.
You have the biggest nose I've ever seen.
Now, this man was himself educated at PSU.
He appears to be a good and honorable police officer, and he is angry.
He is legitimately and justifiably angry.
And one of the other things he says in this interview, and there's a short version that I tweeted a day or two ago that I think you did as well, but the longer, the full interview is quite compelling.
And one of the things he says is, Whenever I try to talk to protesters, when another person of color comes up to me and tries to talk, immediately what happens is one of the white protesters comes and tells them that all cops are bastards and they can't talk to me.
And he, in fact, relates a story.
Anecdote, yes, but he relates a story in which a young, I think it's black woman, comes up to him and says, why don't you talk to us?
And he says to her, if I try to talk to you, I will be stopped.
Some white protester is going to come and tell me you can't talk to me.
And exactly as he's saying that, exactly this thing happens.
And this woman, this protester, woman of color, says, my God, that's exactly what he just said would happen.
But it's read-only.
This is read-only activism, read-only rioting, protests.
But this is also exactly what we saw at Evergreen.
This is part of the tactics, and it's part of what makes the overall strategy so successful.
You will not take in new information.
So this isn't actually About race.
We are being told it's about race to divide us, to keep those people who can see it, who look like we're supposed to be the ones feeling guilty and ashamed of the color of our skin right now, from saying, actually, no, I'm not racist.
I do think that there are problems with policing, certainly historically and still today, but that doesn't mean that I need to sit down and shut up when I see a divisive movement that is pretending to be about race create division in society.
No.
So I want to correct one thing.
What I have said and what I believe is that we are being headed towards a race war that fringes on both sides are actually interested in such a thing and that what is happening is that this desire to categorize us by race on the left It's going there, yeah.
But it's not what the thing is on the streets right now.
We obviously don't have a race war.
We are being told it is.
But the Black Lives Matter protests are mostly white people.
Right.
Telling the black people to shut up because they're not falling into line.
It is white people behaving as another one of these terms with a double meaning, right?
They're behaving as what they are told an ally behaves as, which is being synonymized with something accomplice, right?
As if that doesn't tell you what the game is.
And so the point is...
These white allies, and that's the wrong term because ally is actually a symmetrical relationship and this is a subordinate relationship, but these white allies are enforcing this new orthodoxy which is going to cause white people to view themselves as an entity.
Right?
So the race war is being set up.
We are being played and we are going to be driven into this state.
And that's extremely dangerous.
That's exactly it.
It is being set up.
We are being informed that this is about race.
And therefore those of us who are historically on the wrong side of this issue, even though, Put that aside, you know, our ancestors actually weren't part of that, right?
Certainly none of yours were in any way, right?
No, my ancestors were being persecuted in Europe, so yeah.
But we are being told it's about race, and that is going to make it become about race, and it's going to bring out the worst.
I hope it's brought out the worst of the pseudo-left, but it's about to bring out the worst of the pseudo-right.
It's going to bring out the fricking fringe lunatics on both sides, and there you have it.
There you'll have your race war.
Right, and so the thing is, what we tried to explain several times in the past, is that the thing that is special about the U.S.
is that it aspires to be something different than this.
Historically speaking, lineage is battle.
That's been standard and all of the worst atrocities in history owe to this way of viewing things, or at least almost all of them.
What we have now is the resurrection of that viewpoint which is the uninvention of the American attempt to put those things aside and for us to collaborate as one people in spite of our lineage level differences.
So this is a very un-American instinct but the problem is it has an advantage.
America aspires to do this thing which requires us to construct a different structure.
We never got it right but we were headed in the right direction.
We made great progress on it.
I do believe that progress stalled, which is part of why people are so angry.
But going in the other direction is completely incoherent.
It is the most foolish thing you could do.
And that's before you get to the consequences that this will have internationally.
Which is to say, if we hobble ourselves by battling lineage against lineage within the US, We are going to take our position in the world and we are going to undermine it.
And what that's going to do, at the very least, is it's going to empower China.
China, which at this very moment is behaved in stuff that frankly, the parallel, you know, as we are doing things, at least Some on the left are doing things that look Maoist, and it's having exactly the expected consequence.
The former Maoists are now doing stuff that looks Nazi, right?
They have concentration camps full of people, organ harvesting.
I mean, this is really, you know, it's not, it's, it's not goose-stepping, right?
Is that supposed to be the difference?
But other than that, it really looks like the same phenomenon.
And so as we hobble ourselves, we are going to empower this this Chinese entity, which has a race first view of the world and is showing us how it thinks that should be dealt with.
So this couldn't be more foolish.
Yep.
All right.
Again, this is not the most lighthearted Dark Horse podcast ever, but I guess we just have to deal with it.
So, is there more to say on that topic or should we move on to another?
There's infinitely more, but if you would like to move on, let's do so.
All right.
So, what's next?
The Harper's Letter?
As you like.
All right.
So, let's talk a little bit about the Harper's Letter.
The Harper's Letter emerged two weeks ago, something like that.
I have not.
I don't know.
The Harper's letter caused a bit of a stir online and quite a bit of backlash and it is worth thinking about a little bit.
We didn't get to it in our last It's a podcast, but in any case, what it does is it groups a number of people.
It was written by five people.
July 7th it looks like.
July 7th.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the most prominent spokesman for the letter, but it's been signed by 100 plus people, many of whom are friends of ours from the long battle for civil liberties that we've been involved in.
But in any case, it's also got, you know, big names on the left in particular, who, you know, we have not yet come to meet, but people like Katha Pollitt and J.K.
Rowling.
And I'm just looking down the list really quickly.
Oh, Salman Rushdie.
So, you know, it's quite an impressive list of signatories.
Yeah, which is part of the problem with it.
So you want to show the, you want to scroll up and show the letter?
You want me to scroll up and you want Zach to show the letter?
Yeah, there we go.
So here's the letter.
For some reason, Harper's debuted this to great fanfare online, but they're not going to publish it on paper until October for some reason.
That's a conspicuous oddity about it.
But in any case, as I see it, the problem with the letter Is that it is incredibly tepid with respect... Sorry, but, you know, it's presumably it's going on, it's going into the hard copy magazine in October, because that's right before the election.
I mean, that's what that timing is about.
You know, they're going to have to say something about the timing of how long it takes to get things into print and all of this.
But it's also, you know, just it's, this isn't an October surprise, but it's, you know, it's trying to be something like that.
So let's talk about what the problems are.
One, it is an incredibly tepid defense of freedom of expression.
And two, it is divisive twice over.
The letter goes to great pains to portray the problem of censoriousness as a right-wing problem at a moment when in fact the right wing contains many people who have been courageous in our defense, for example,
While the left or the mainstream left was feeding us to the wolves and so at this moment in history to say that actually the problem that free speech faces a problem it comes from the right but in this case we're seeing hints of it on the left is just simply not accurate and it is unkind to people who have been courageous in the defense of people across the aisle like us so for example Robbie George has been very courageous in in our defense you can
See his testimony and oh, maybe you can't see it because the point the Democrats took over the house They eliminated the video in which he testified on the same panel that I was on If anybody has that video, I'd like it We had it, but I can't locate it In any case, he defended us.
He is right of center, and he deserves to be recognized for that, rather than to be portrayed as part of the political spectrum that doesn't understand the value of these rights.
So, the letter takes great pains to portray the right as the problem, to suggest that the left is beginning to show signs, which is not true.
The left has a massive problem with these civil liberties at the moment.
And then the letter divides a second time by bringing certain people into the list of signatories and not inviting others.
So there are many of us on the left who never saw the letter until it emerged.
We were surprised at its existence.
Now if you and I had been asked, I don't I am sure I would not have signed it and I believe what I would have done is I would have responded that there was a lot wrong with the text of the letter and I would have tried to get them to correct it and I don't know whether that would have had any success or not but what I do know is that we were specifically not asked While people like Matt Iglesias are prominently featured in the list of signatories.
So, we weren't asked.
I know that Sam Harris wasn't asked, and so consider the following puzzle.
Sam Harris has been absolutely courageous and steadfast in his defense of free expression, free exchange of ideas.
Matt Iglesias has been on the wrong side of this issue until the last few weeks when he has finally, apparently, woken up.
Now, I would say welcome to him if he's finally gotten it.
To sideline somebody like Sam Harris as you bring Madaglasius into what appears to many to be the forefront of this battle is preposterous.
For one thing, it makes an implication about why Sam isn't there.
I know from talking to a number of the people on the list that they did not know who was to be asked and who wasn't to be asked.
So the absence of Sam Harris could mean he refused to sign.
It could mean that there's something about Sam Harris that makes him an inappropriate person to be asked.
And the thing is, I believe many people have that sense, but where did they get it?
They got it from people like Matt Iglesias.
So, to have the press portray people like Sam as somehow beyond the pale, to stigmatize them, and then for this letter to exclude them on the basis that that stigma makes them controversial, when really all they were doing was defending the most central rights that we ought to all be defending, is the height of lunacy.
So in any case, the letter is troubling.
I believe we ought to be troubled by it.
And just to say one final thing, to bring all of these important voices, including Thomas Jatterton Williams, including Jonathan Haidt, Barry Weiss, to bring them all on as signatories to a letter that then divides us twice over, has compromised the movement to protect these civil liberties rather than enhanced it.
And that's why I'm upset about it.
And in the final paragraph, it's a short letter, but in the final of three, I think, paragraphs, one sentence is, the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.
Sure, of course.
The next sentence, we refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.
So, that's worth a little exploration, isn't it?
The far left would actually, you know, publicly mock the idea of caring about freedom because justice is the preeminent value, and the far right tends to hold quite the inverse, right?
Inverse values, that freedom is paramount and justice not be damned, but justice will suffer at the hands of freedom.
And so we have To some degree, to the degree that the left-right polls in politics are coherent.
You do have people sliding the trade-off for increasing justice at some small cost to freedom on the left, and people sliding to increase freedom at some small cost to justice on the right, but this suggests that Pointing that out as a choice, as if justice and freedom are in trade-off relationship with one another, is false.
And that's facile.
That actually doesn't have much representation in the world.
Well, I guess I'm not sure exactly what you're saying.
There is a trade-off relationship, but the idea that one needs to choose, you know, is obviously incorrect.
The question is where's the sweet spot and, you know, what was the genesis of this letter relative to those things?
And, you know… Well, so, it's possible that they mean to say that there are people on the right who want freedom and no justice.
I've actually never even heard that caricature.
I've never heard the caricature of the people on the left that they want no freedom, the far left, or the people on the right want no justice.
That would be a caricature that I don't think is what they're engaging in.
If I read this with a little bit more care, less desire to caricature the intention here, The idea that there's never a choice is wrong, actually, because they are in trade-off with one another, and it seems to me that this letter is misunderstanding that point, which is in fact, I think, a point that is misunderstood across the spectrum, across the political spectrum.
But particularly likely to be misunderstood in sort of left-ish wing intellectual circles.
The idea of trade-offs being not a desirable, but a reality of the human experience and of just the world that you can't get around no matter how much you don't like it.
Yeah, they're a design constraint and, you know, we can have endless arguments about which thing is more important, but the answer is how do you find the sweet spot in which you give up, you know, a small amount of justice for freedom and a small amount of freedom for justice rather than keep pushing the slider around and suffering the catastrophes that result.
So, I mean, maybe I'm reading too much into this and it's just, you know, it's a short letter and there, you know, with two more sentences, there could have been nuance that was clear here.
But I just, I do think that that reveals, again, the bias of the letter, which would slate anyone who is right of some line that is ever more difficult to draw as not just a conservative and not just maybe a Republican, But someone who is working with the forces of illiberalism.
And, you know, it's not a fair characterization.
Well, in some sense I don't think this is designed to be a fair characterization.
What I have the sense has happened is that a bunch of people who, and I must say, in some sense I'm borrowing heavily here from Eric, the journalists seem to have some kind of a carve-out, where things that were happening
um on campus were understood to be a separate phenomenon and journalists portrayed them as unimportant because they did not understand that they would be in the line of fire soon enough and so having suddenly found themselves in the line of fire you can read Matt Taibbi's piece on this and you can discover how all of these important newsrooms including places that you would expect to be most immune like for example the intercept are having these horizontal
revolutions take place inside of them.
So as that's coming for journalists, and they are suddenly discovering that they don't have the safety that they thought they had, that that was that their appeasement is resulting in a predictable outcome where they're now suddenly being targeted.
There's a desire to carve out some sort of new agreement.
And that new agreement is, you know, why is the letter so deferential to the left, which frankly has done a terrible job of policing these challenges to the free exchange of ideas.
Well, in part, because what this really is, is a negotiation.
But I don't think Jonathan Haidt would be negotiating.
I think Jonathan Haidt, and I'm just using him as an example of an important voice who I believe has been brought into this under somewhat false pretenses, but You know, the thing that needed to happen was a statement in which, first of all, everybody who had properly defended these rights was invited on, and B, that didn't divide us further, thereby hobbling the effort to fight the censorious instincts.
But what ended up happening is the attempt to negotiate some sort of agreement that would again give these journalists and academics some kind of immunity from what's moving across society has now taken the voices that were clearest and put them in this compromised context.
So, um, I think it's frankly, it's, it's very unfortunate that it's happened and we need to be very careful that it doesn't happen again, because all sorts of people are going to discover they're suddenly in the line of fire and they're going to attempt to carve something out.
And lots of people are going to look at it and say, well, I'm in favor of free expression of ideas, therefore I should sign on to everything that comes my way that points in that direction.
But the point is, no, no, no.
Sign on to the ones that are right.
Don't sign on to the ones where somebody's trying to accomplish something and they put it loosely in the terms of free expression of ideas and so, you know, it's in the ballpark.
Because the in the ballpark stuff is not, it's not refined enough to be useful.
It's going to do exactly the opposite thing.
Yep.
What do you have next?
Uh, let's see.
Oh, do we want to talk about the, um, the transcripts that emerged?
Um, I guess it would be about a week ago.
I don't know when, when they emerged.
I know what you're talking about.
So what you're talking about is the transcripts from the body cams of, uh, two, I believe of the police officers, uh, in the George Floyd killing.
So, uh, do you want me to set this up or do you want to do it?
I don't.
You just showed it to me for the first time, so I've read them, but that's about as far as I've got.
Okay, you want to scroll up and just show what document we're talking about?
It's a long document.
So Zach, you can now show us.
This was an 82-page document, which is two different body cam transcripts filed in district court in Minnesota 10 days ago or so.
Actually, same day the Harper Center came out, looks like.
And yeah, it's audio transcripts from Two of the police officers involved and what I was able to do, I read through them and went back and looked at a little bit of the video and was able to map on a little bit in one of the cases to sort of where in the transcript we're seeing because it's hard to know Without any sound or anything, it's hard to know what is actually going on when in this transcript.
But what do you see here?
Well, I see a number of things.
So first of all, this covers a lot of territory that I spoke to Joe Rogan about that we disagreed over the interpretation of.
And so now we know a lot of the answers that we were speculating on.
Back then and I will just say I've read through the transcript and certain things one.
There's no indication that Chauvin and Floyd Recognized that they knew each other if they knew each other at all, right?
So there's no dialogue between them.
That seems like people who know each other.
I don't see anything in there about race There's no overt racism in the transcript doesn't mean it's not there on people's minds, but it doesn't show up there Excited delirium does show up, but it shows up late in the interaction So, probably doesn't play a role as important as I suspected it might.
I wasn't able to figure out.
Early, throughout the interaction, Floyd is saying things like about claustrophobia, I'm choking, I can't breathe before, as far as I can tell, before any officers are on him.
And he says things like, my face is gone.
And then what you can't hear in the video that we all saw, but you see in these transcripts, is discussion between officers.
Is he intoxicated?
What kind of pipe was that?
Do we think it's PCP?
And what you see, again, is no mention of race between the officers, at least from these two transcripts.
But what does appear to be a description, A discussion of them trying to figure out what is going on with this guy and how it is that they can do what they need to do, it seems like, while really trying not to hurt him.
Well, look, I'm no expert in police stuff, but I do want to say, in the transcript it is clear, A, that George Floyd complains about not being able to breathe before he's on the ground, B, that the officers don't prefer to put him on the ground, they want to put him in the car.
He won't go and actually he asks to be put on the ground, right?
So you've said that.
I didn't see that in these transcripts and I read through it fast.
But, you know, so Floyd talks about, you know, this just happened to me.
I don't want to get shot.
And, you know, there's a whole lot in what he says that we can imagine.
And, you know, I just simply don't know the truth of his history.
But we could certainly imagine that he is beyond spooked.
By the prospect of agreeing to demands by police when he doesn't disagree when they say that he's passed a fake bill, I guess is why they were called to the scene.
But that doesn't mean just because he did either nothing wrong to begin with or something trivial wrong, that doesn't mean that something bad won't happen to him.
So, you know, is he legitimately, you know, worried and alarmed and saying things that are incoherent?
Maybe.
But he's also so incoherent and so unwilling to respond to what appear to be very moderate requests that the police are being pushed and pushed and pushed.
Well, I don't know.
They want to put him in the car.
He doesn't want to go in the car, he wants to go on the ground.
And why do they want to put him in the car for having passed a fake bill?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know enough about the law.
I mean, obviously passing a fake bill, you know...
Potentially, we're talking about a counterfeiter, right?
Obviously, a $20 bill is not a major matter, but counterfeiting is a federal crime.
I don't know.
I don't pretend to know.
But the point is, I mean, I think the real point is this.
The transcript is complex, right?
There are lots of things in play here.
What we all saw on video was very troubling.
But what it actually means is unclear, right?
What you need in order to figure out what it means is a court that is free to engage in navigating those issues, to have experts on the law, on normal police procedure, on procedure under special circumstances, on the drugs that appear to have been in his system and whether or not they were present at the moment that he was being arrested or this was a trace toxicity as Joe Rogan suggests it might be.
You want to know those things and you want to have a court free to navigate these things.
But above and beyond the fact that the transcript does reflect an environment that has a lot of things going on and which a court would need to navigate, here's the thing that is most troubling to me.
That link to the document was sent to me by a friend, right?
We both thought it did not exist in the world.
On trying to figure out if the document was authentic, it was on a New York Times server, right?
And so the question is, well, is it authentic?
Why is it on a New York Times server?
It became quickly apparent that it had been published a couple days prior by the New York Times.
They had written a story on it, and they had linked the document, and it was sitting there on their server, so it is legitimate.
But here's the question.
Why was it not a huge story?
Why was, given all that is happening downstream of George Floyd's tragic death, why was the contents of the transcript not on everybody's mind?
Because many of the things that have been said about the arrest are, I don't want to say testable in a scientific sense, but they can be compared to the transcript and we can actually have answers about what took place.
And there seemed to be Very little interest in having that discussion for some reason, and it's very hard for me to imagine.
I would have thought the emergence of that transcript would immediately have trended on Twitter.
It would have been the focus of the news cycle for 24 hours, if not more.
And there would have been all kinds of discussion.
And instead, somehow the social environment, I think, treated it as not important.
And I worry that it treated it as not important because it was complex rather than a simple story of murder.
Yeah, it is complex.
I've got a piece highlighted here.
In which the officer is trying, Officer Lane I guess in this case, is trying to get Floyd to get out of the car and we can't necessarily tell.
It looks like he's, Floyd doesn't want to do it and he's not doing it and the officer keeps saying get out of the car and the woman who he's with, Shavonda Renee Hill, finally says stop resisting Floyd.
And this is early in the interaction, but one of the people whom Floyd is with is reading what is happening as Floyd resisting the officers.
I'm reading into this, but it would appear from her comment here that she is reading what her friend, acquaintance, whatever, Floyd is doing as resistance that is not warranted by the situation.
It's complex, like you said.
Yeah, it's complex, which doesn't mean it's not murder, but you know, again, we have a structure that deals with this.
It's called a court.
It makes findings of fact and findings of law.
It does so on the basis of evidence, and what we now have is a situation in which the public perception that it knows what it saw on that video, that that is sufficient to determine what took place,
It is a grave danger, you know, it is a grave danger to our system to the extent that what we end up doing is using our courts to validate public perception, basically getting them to rubber stamp the court of public opinions judgment.
That is, again, the uninvention of America.
If this is clear, then allow it to be found so in a court rather than assuming that the court has only one choice because the answer is so simple.
Can we do something a little hopeful?
All right, good.
Yeah.
So, there's a relatively new magazine out of Philadelphia called Root Quarterly.
It's an arts and ideas magazine, so it's called Root Quarterly Art and Ideas from Philadelphia, and we became aware of it because the editor-in-chief, I believe, turns out to be a friend of your cousin, Allie, whose wedding we went to last year.
And she, the editor, saw a picture of Allie with Eric and went, wow, my worlds are colliding.
I had no idea.
And so they sent us, this is almost a brand new magazine, there's four issues, and it is gorgeous.
And whether or not you're in Philadelphia, I actually want to highly recommend it.
It's a glossy, aesthetically beautiful magazine that has art, that has poetry, that has fiction, that has cultural critique, and is just open to ideas across the board.
And so, let me read just a couple things from it.
She, Heather Shane Blakeslee, who is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Root Quarterly, says in her summer letter, which came with the fourth issue ever, When I look back on the pieces in the magazine, I'm amazed at what we've asked ourselves.
So these are just some of the topics that they've explored in four issues.
What does it mean to have lost your way in your life?
What does grace mean to you?
In what ways are we manipulated by our media?
Must our identity be centered on our race only, especially if one is adopted and does not know one's history, and if people will, in any case, see us how they will?
What does it mean to be an artist, mother, and entrepreneur?
Do the stories we tell ourselves about our trauma affect our well-being?
Can we entirely change careers and deal with adult bullying at 60?
What does it mean to be a successful professional but to not be able to share your chronic pain with others as you suffer?
What do we lose when we cancel art or artists?
What is the hell of being a midwife who has undergone multiple miscarriages?
What does resilience mean to a person recovered from addiction?
What kind of country do we want to live in?
So, I've now read parts of the four issues that she sent to us, and they're just glorious.
This is exactly what we need right now, and it looks like they're actually surviving, but I'd love for us to help them survive.
It's called Root Quarterly, and from, again, Heather Shane Blakeslee's initial essay in the initial Issue.
The very end, she says.
The constant state of hurt, of fear and of rage, stoked by ever more divided media and entrenched ideology, is a perfect breeding ground for further division and for the type of widespread addiction we now see in the United States.
Thousands keeping the pain at bay on the streets of Philadelphia, hundreds of thousands across the country, an army of walking dead shuffling around us with no spiritual tether, stripped of hope and humanity.
And then there are the larger hordes, all of us addicted to the glowing rectangles of various sizes, crawling with spiders and bots, algorithms sucking us dry of information, the feedback loop of ads and curated content meant to move us in this direction or that, a little more to the right, a little to the left, a little more lonely and deeper in debt.
It is social media's job to numb us and addict us, exploit our worst instincts and most base biology rather than give us anything that might actually heal us, unite us with facts or strengthen our ability to reason and live peaceably with one another.
We are animals and they have trained us.
However, We can be untrained to tune into interesting ideas and honest disagreement, to contemplate art that illuminates our complicated humanity, to see our city in a new light, to enjoy a rootedness in our community.
To that end, we offer you unplugged pages, pressed with ink, which you hold in your hands right now.
So, we can do this.
We can still do this.
This is our Better Angels, and we owe it to ourselves, and all of us, and our future to engage with art, and with science, and with truth, and with beauty, with honor, and without division.
Yeah, I heard in there, I think, the central question.
What country do we want to live in?
What kind of country?
And the thing is, if you just play out these alternatives, you know, tear it down, race first, it doesn't lead anywhere that you would want to exist.
And, you know, frankly, it's not going to be good for the people who are advocating it either.
It's not good for any of us.
So I tweeted this thing, which I got some pushback on, which I want to defend here briefly.
That basically we are all in this together and that our enemies are the ones who don't know it.
Now I don't mean to put anybody in the enemy category.
I would like nobody to be there.
But I think what is hard for people to grasp is that actually what we have is very fragile.
It can come apart and that those who treat it casually or hostily are putting everyone in jeopardy.
The recognition that actually we are all dependent on features of the system.
Even those of us who are being unfairly treated by the system are dependent on that system and therefore the only option we have that is rational is to make it work.
To the extent that it has never worked for some populations, that has to be fixed.
That's part of its fragility, but tearing it down in the hope that something great will emerge is the road to madness.
So, um, somehow we need to bring everybody on board with the idea that yes, there are problems, they have to be addressed, but tearing the system down is, it's like, uh, sabotaging the ship on which you are dependent.
We're probably at about an hour.
Do you want to say something about Unity 2020, which seems like a decent segue from what you just said?
Yes.
Well, sure.
Of course I do.
So Unity 2020 is moving forward.
We have big plans that will emerge very quickly.
We are working on the technical aspects of those plans so that we can deploy them.
They will involve you.
They are active.
So please come visit us at articlesofunity.com.
There's also a terrific new animation that came out this week.
Yeah, great new animation by a true patriot who is, like everybody else involved, is volunteering his time.
He does great work, and it's beautiful.
So check out the animation.
You can find that at our Twitter page, Articles of Unity.
I have also tweeted it.
You can find it there.
It's on our YouTube channel, which is going to be somewhat difficult to find until YouTube figures out what it is.
But, in any case, check out the animation— Or including afterwards, depending.
Right.
Yeah, depending is exactly right.
So, there's a lot happening.
We welcome Matt Taibbi's endorsement.
We know that there are others waiting in the wings who have not yet come out publicly but are planning it.
So, this is all very exciting.
You should stay put.
We will be back in 15 minutes to do our Q&A.
Do you want to say some things?
Yep, so we'll be answering your superchat questions in the next Q&A.
Some of those that came in this hour and some of them that will be coming in next hour.
A week from tomorrow we'll be doing our second private Q&A for Dark Horse members, which involves signing up at my Patreon at the $5 or up level.
There is also a private Discord server that's now available as a benefit at both of our Patreons at that same $5 up level, and reports are that it's really going quite beautifully.
That this is a community that knows how to talk to one another, even when they don't agree.
And that's exactly what we are hoping to be able to facilitate.
