#43: War is 93% Peace (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 43rd 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, follow us ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
We are one of the least violent podcasts on the internet.
More than 93% non-violent.
We are, in fact, 0% violent.
So far.
We make no promises.
Violence could happen.
Especially if we were to hold a moment of silence that would, by definition, according to some people, be violent.
I think actually we have to reconfigure our statistics.
I think we must be 100% violent on account of silence being violence and also words being violence.
Therefore, be we speaking or be we silent, we are engaging in violence.
Did you say be we?
Be we.
That's weird.
I would also just point out that at a sonic level, we have this very thing playing out at a scale that we don't really intuit it, but basically sound is waves and so you have the peaks and the troughs, right?
Physics is violence?
Physics is violence.
That's where you're going?
No.
Well, my point was that wherever you define the noise and the silence and the interspersing of them in order to make the frequencies, you would find... But maybe the liminal spaces aren't violence.
Maybe the transitions between them are not in fact violence.
Maybe that's the crux.
Um, if the transitions are not violent, that is because somebody has overlooked them, and soon enough they will be redefined into violence.
Yes.
Except if they are wielded by certain people, and then they will be declared nonviolent by definition.
Nonviolent, for sure.
This is episode 43!
It is episode 43, which is wild.
A bit.
Yep.
All right, so where should we start?
Where would you like to start?
I was not expecting that question somehow.
I guess turnabout is fair play.
Well, I thought that you had some places you wanted to start, but why don't we, if you don't, start with this memorandum that came out yesterday from the Executive Office of the President.
September 4th, 2020, Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies from, I did not look up how to pronounce this guy's name, Russell Vought, Vought something?
Subject, Training in the Federal Government.
I'm just going to read, it's not very long, but I'll read you, I'll read the first three paragraphs here for those not watching.
It has come to the President's attention that executive branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date training government workers to believe divisive anti-American propaganda.
For example, according to press reports, employees across the executive branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that, quote, virtually all white people contribute to racism, or where they are required to say that they, quote, benefit from racism.
According to press reports, in some cases these trainings have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity, or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.
These types of trainings not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the federal workforce.
We can be proud that as an employer, the federal government has employees of all races, ethnicities, and religions.
We can be proud that Americans from all over the country seek to join our workforce and dedicate themselves to public service.
We can be proud of our continued efforts to welcome all individuals who seek to serve their fellow Americans as federal employees.
This is terrible.
Really?
This is appalling.
We want to accept our employees receiving training that seeks to undercut our core values as Americans and drive division within our workforce.
This is terrible.
Really?
This is appalling.
I mean, I don't usually use the term evil, but I think in this case I'm going to invoke it.
All right.
This is going to be good.
Well, actually, I'm just giving voice to the blue perspective on this move.
It is evil.
And by blue here, you don't mean the police, you mean the Democrats.
The Democrats.
That's by definition this move.
Still members.
This move is evil because it emanates from the Trump administration.
Right.
Anything that emerges from the Trump administration, especially when it is so clearly actually from the president himself.
Must be evil.
You don't have to know what he said.
You know that if he said it, it's evil.
Right.
Now, the awkward thing is, let's just say Joe Biden were to win this election and the very same decree were to be issued by a Biden administration.
I would be forced, as much as I am not a fan of Joe Biden, I would be forced to admit that this is an important Moment that this is progress and that this needed to be done as unpopular as it may be as indeed you are forced Without any, you know affection for Trump or his policies or his abilities as a leader in most regards to say this is important and powerful and much-needed and Hopefully it begins to affect some of the changes that actually need to happen.
I Are you suggesting I need to walk back my claim that this is evil?
I am.
Okay, all right.
Maybe I should walk back my claim that this is evil and say it is, you know, evil minus some amount based on the fact that it is the right thing to do, even though it is being generated by the Trump administration.
I'm not sure this isn't just confusing at this point.
All right.
You think I'm confusing people?
Yes, my point is actually that this did need to be done.
And it would be welcome news to anybody who is interested in seeing what is important about America preserved.
It should be welcome news but many of the people who should be on that side will no doubt either have to ignore it on the basis that it needed to be done and they don't want to allow anything that brings credit to the president to be discussed or they will decry it for some reason because it is necessary to do so because of the principle that we've mentioned here before which is anything Trump does is by definition wrong.
That's right.
So, um, you don't need to show my screen again, Zach, but the very, the final sentence of this short memorandum, uh, which again came out yesterday on September 4th, reads, The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the federal government.
There are a few sentences I can imagine that I would agree with more.
This is exactly right.
And one of the connections that we've been making over the last, boy, you know, dozens actually of episodes at this point is that there is a clear connection between the critical race theory that has taken over institutions of higher dozens actually of episodes at this point is that there is a clear connection between the critical race theory that has taken over institutions of higher ed for a few decades now and has now crept
That the rhetoric that we hear from the people who actually engage in rhetoric rather than just engaging in violence who are on the streets now is are engaged.
engaging in exactly the same words, the same thought patterns, and they are intellectual inheritors, whether or not they recognize it, of critical race theory.
So this is the same thing.
It manifests differently in a college classroom and in the editorial board of Nature Magazine and in the editorial board of New York Times and in decisions by rioters to hurl human feces or set fire to things on the streets of Portland and many other cities.
But it all is traceable back to the same, and again to use this language from this memorandum, divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda.
Yep.
You know, critical race theory has now broken into the mainstream consciousness.
It was certainly trending on Twitter today.
I think it may even still be trending.
So the fact is... Well, I mean, that's presumably because of this, if that's true.
It is because of this.
But I think the point is...
To the extent that it was true months ago to say that critical race theory had some important relationship to what we were seeing, but that most of the people who were engaged wouldn't know that.
That they wouldn't understand that that's what they were deriving this from.
This is now changing.
We are actually, through one mechanism or another, converging on a moment at which you can invoke critical race theory.
And we may have different opinions on whether that's a positive or negative thing, but at least it is recognized to have this relationship.
Right.
And, you know, the workforce trainings that are being referred to here and that we've talked about on several other episodes often come with a couple of books that increasingly people are recognizing, which we've also talked about.
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, So those books themselves, which many people watching and listening will have been forced to read by trainings, you know, either in the federal government or not.
These trainings are hardly limited to the federal government, but there's no way for this kind of memorandum to reach beyond the federal government, at least to begin with.
Those books are an even more direct, you know, a shorter line of connection from critical race theory.
They are the manifestations in sort of the popular press as opposed to the so-called scholarly academic papers.
And I just have to laugh when I say scholarly because it's anti-intellectual at best.
It is, yes.
Well, let's put it this way.
Scholarly could mean two things, and this is going to become a theme during today's discussion for various reasons.
But scholarly could mean that it aspires to insight of the kind that a scholar might aspire to.
Or it could mean that the stuff of scholars.
And the fact that scholars are now attacking insight makes that second definition highly relevant So the stuff of scholars.
This reminds me then of a way that I used to begin generally my first lecture in most of my programs when I was a college professor.
You remember those days.
Oh, I know.
Right where you're headed.
Yeah.
And I always began with a philosophy of science lecture about epistemology and how it is that we make claims of truth, how it is that we know what we claim to be, how it is that we think what is true is true.
And what I would say, and actually there's a ton in those lectures that would be relevant here, but I would ask students, you know, what is it that makes someone a scientist?
And while, you know, no one would ever give these examples to me, I would caricature what was in people's head and say, well, of course you need a lab coat and you need glassware and, you know, you need the stuff of science, right?
And of course, neither of us ever did the kind of science that required glassware or lab coats.
No, it was rubber boots and machetes.
Right.
It was rubber boots and machetes, and we both preferred that kind of science.
It was fun.
And as the science that people who use glassware and lab coats presumably find that engaging as well.
But our image of what makes you a scientist, just This can be useful in some ways, right?
Like once you have an image in your head of what makes someone a doctor, when the person who looks like a doctor comes into the room, perhaps you have more trust that they actually know what they're talking about.
And of course, that can be gamed and it has been.
But the fact that scientists often look a certain way does not mean that people who look that way are doing science.
The fact that doctors may often have a stethoscope around their neck, I'm not sure they ever do anymore, but doesn't mean that a person with a stethoscope around their neck
He has any medical knowledge or insight whatsoever, ability to diagnose, and the fact that a person uses the tools of scholars, perhaps has a passing familiarity with how one might cite a paper that someone else has written, has no bearing on whether or not that person actually has any insight, any ability to actually understand what was in those other papers, or any ability to analyze the current moment.
Yeah, at some level the metaphor we're looking for is capture, and critical race theory existed in many departments, and those departments were always dyed in the wool with this ideology, and ideology really has no place in academic study.
But what has happened is the capture of the university structure itself, By these ideological departments.
And that capture results in all of the tools that should be deployed on behalf of science and other kinds of insight being co-opted and now functioning ironically to attack those things.
Hence what we've talked about here before, which is the autoimmune disease aspect of this, right?
To have Scientific journals, for example, Science and Nature, broadcasting shut down STEM is very odd because if anyone should be dead set against the shutting down of STEM it would be Science and Nature, right?
The journals, Science and Nature.
The journals, right.
But the point is, well, they have staffs of people and those staffs of people are subject to the same pressures that people are now Facing everywhere and it shouldn't be surprising to hear them say ironic things for the same reason that you know somebody you've known for your whole life who you know doesn't harbor any racism right might be heard to say that they are a racist.
They've seen the light.
Right.
You know, a journal that you know at the very least should be a champion of the idea of science, even if it doesn't always achieve it, can be made to broadcast an attack on the idea of science, you know, by virtue of social pressure, which is so much of where we are.
Yeah.
So what do you think will be the ramifications of this memorandum?
If, you know, I guess two possible ways to answer that.
One, is it going to be successful?
And I, you know, obviously it should be.
That is, you know, a memorandum about what happens in the federal workforce from the executive office should be implementable.
And then if we think that it will be successful, I wonder what the rippling effects are elsewhere.
You know, do other government workers, for instance, at the state level who, you know, I only say government workers because I imagine that maybe there's some overlap between the kind of work that a state worker in some realm might do and the kind of work that a federal worker in the same realm might do.
Do state workers start trying to jump ship from state work and go into federal work because they are being effectively, you know, I was going to say witch hunted, but you know, maybe not yet.
Some people for sure, but they are worried for their job security and for the integrity of the work that they can do because these trainings come with these implicit threats at best.
Um, whether they move from state work to federal work on that basis, I don't know.
It's kind of long term.
It's a trend you can imagine short term.
It's hard to imagine how it even works.
But yes, over time.
To the extent that anything shows the ability to resist these trends, it's going to accumulate all of the people who understand what's wrong with this ideology.
And frankly, it's going to create a concentration of competence and courage in anything that resists.
A concentration of competence and courage.
Yep, a concentration of competence and courage, and that has implications for this movement that should be very frightening.
It should stop them in their tracks, right?
You are going to drive out all of the most competent people, all of the people who actually have courage.
You're going to drive them to your enemy's side.
That is a losing play.
Well, it's a losing play in some contexts, and it's potentially a winning play depending on what their goals are and others.
So apropos the conversation that you had with Nancy Rollman, which just posted a couple days ago, which I've only listened to about half of, but I was listening to This morning.
If their goal, as she says has been said to her by some of the agitators on the streets, is in fact to leave people with the sense that the police are not just incompetent but dangerous and so everyone should want them gone,
Then the combination of defunding at the same time as as many good police or police somewhat near retirement or police just with any other options may be leaving because who would want to be a police officer right now at least in some of the places where the violence is concentrated like Portland where we live.
You're going to end up with a police force that is worse than it was, because you can't attract new people because the resources are leaving, and you don't have many of the good people you already had because they are leaving.
And if the stated goal is to basically, you know, just as has been suggested for the United States Postal Service, right?
Like if what is trying to be done is to leave people with the sense that the USPS can't do anything right and therefore it needs to be defunded, well...
demonstrate how bad it is.
In this case, it just happens to be the other side of the political aisle, but it's the same kind of technique.
It's the same strategy.
Like, okay, let's demonstrate how bad the police are so that people are fed up with them and make it really hard to attract new people.
In that case, leaving the courageous and competent, or having the courageous and competent flee is useful for the goal. - Well, it is going to create many of the features that those who are marching claim are driving them, it is going to create many of the features that those So it is going to create an incompetent, underfunded, and therefore brutal and arbitrary police force
And the competent people are going to end up in a private version of policing, right?
Where they are not constrained by the same kinds of forces that constrain public policing.
So basically, this is frightening enough that people are going to end up sourcing their own private security.
Yeah, the rich are going to have security.
They're going to have the police and they're going to have the ability to wield them and the public is going to be left with warlordism and underfunded, not so hot police officers protecting them, which is going to work very badly, which is going to create a huge disadvantage for people who are subject to public policing relative to those who have a private police force.
It's going to drive Those with the resources to group together, right?
It's going to create more gated communities.
It's going to create, you know, it's going to create cities, you know, if people flee the West Coast to go to Austin, because it's like a little piece of the West Coast in Texas where the center might still hold, right?
It's going to create these islands where the old version of things is still going to function, and it's going to leave, you know, something more Mad Max-like out in the vast swaths of the country where this illogic was allowed to take over.
Well, I guess it's not clear to me that this madness is being allowed to take over in the broad swaths of the country.
The places in the country with low population density do not seem to be particularly susceptible to this kind of ideology.
Now, part of that may be that there aren't the numbers to swarm, but I think actually that this just falls out along somewhat traditional political lines.
And there are many of us.
There are many of us.
Who have been on the left our entire lives, who object strenuously to this thing that is going on.
But more people on the right are more likely to be sort of law and order enthusiasts, who are more likely to have stood up in defense of, you know, strong police to keep the peace in the past.
Yeah, I agree with your rural-urban distinction, but if you play this through, if you look at California, for example, and you look at the pandering that is going on by politicos who are
Attempting to wield fiscal policy in a way that placates the mob, they are going to drive the entire business sector out of California because it's going to be impossible to be competitive if you do so from there.
So then the question is, what happens to the rural parts of California that may not be crazy?
As the urban parts of California collapse because the tax base has fled to someplace where law and order still functions.
This is a very unstable and dangerous trajectory that we are rapidly heading down.
Well, I mean, to some degree, presumably.
I mean, we are far afield from any place that I have expertise or prepared for today, but to take California, which is at some point it was like the fifth largest economy in the world if it was a nation-state unto itself, I think.
Presumably there, and again, I hope to be corrected if I'm wrong here, Much of the wealth of California comes from basically the population density and the big corporations that are in the big cities along the coast, San Diego, Los Angeles.
Seattle.
That's not in California.
Oh, sorry.
You said along the west coast, you're right, within California.
Along the coast within California, you have basically a string of cities up through, you know, it peters off after the Bay Area, you know, Eureka is that big, but basically the bottom half of coastal California is, you know, I don't know, to 50 miles inland, which is a tiny percentage of the land mass of California, Is presumably where most of the wealth of California has been generated.
And so to the degree, I know that, you know, Barstow and Fresno and, you know, other places inland in California don't have the kinds of resources, for instance, in their public schools that the coastal areas do, but they have more than they would absent the wealth being generated on the coast.
So, they will begin to suffer as the businesses leave because the taxation is becoming punitive for businesses to stay in California.
And so, I'm not an expert here either, but it seems to me that there's one thing that can't leave California easily, which is big ag.
Right.
But Hollywood can leave, right?
Hollywood can leave.
The tech sector can leave.
Lots of these things.
The tech sector kind of is, and Silicon Valley is a thing, but I don't remember what they're called.
I was talking with you the other day about why couldn't Portland become Silicon Forest?
Why couldn't we attract that?
Well, we can't right now because there are a bunch of small number of loons being allowed to run Rampant on the streets.
But, you know, Austin, there are a few other places with Silicon something in the country that are becoming concentrated areas.
You know, New York has always been an area of, you know, for theater, for entertainment, but not film and television.
So, you know, Vancouver and not in Washington, but in Canada, you know, to some degree, can Hollywood move there?
If it was trying to leave the country entirely?
I don't, you know, I don't I don't know how that works.
Well, so it can move anywhere.
What it wants to do, so because lifestyle is such a big part of what Hollywood and the tech sector is actually about, the question is where can the people who inhabit it move that fits their sense of how they want to live that also allows the thing to function?
And, you know, Vancouver seems plausible, a little cold, but A little pricey.
Not for Hollywood.
Oh, no.
Vancouver, at least for a while, was literally the most expensive place to live in the world.
Sure.
And, you know, San Francisco too.
But my point is these industries that profit from the vastness of the audience for what they are delivering can afford those prices.
Those prices are not prohibitive if you are in this sort of unlimited upside industry.
Well, maybe, right?
So in terms of sort of the growth of Hollywood in the early mid-20th century, LA is a fascinating city that has changed with every decade.
And one of the things that happened, I think, is that people with not a dime to their name could actually come and say, you know, I'm going to go and try to make it in Hollywood.
And if in modern times people who are trying to make it have to go to a city where rent is so prohibitive that you simply can't.
You can't take a job as a waiter or doing white collar work or something and actually even pay rent while you try to break into the system.
That cuts the creative input of, you know, young people and aspiring, you know, actors, directors, writers, choreographers, cinematographers, everything off at the knees.
Only sort of, you know, the fact is it's a cost of doing business thing.
So to the extent that Silicon Valley needed to bus people in to do the grunt work, you know, they figured it out.
And Hollywood will do the same.
Yeah, actually, I don't think so.
I think Silicon busing people, you know, Google buses through San Francisco for, you know, grunt work tech workers is different than people trying to make it break into entertainment.
Oh, no, no.
But you're imagining that Hollywood needs to function in the good tiny fraction of it that functions, that allows people who are creative to land there and do amazing stuff, right?
But that's, you know, that's the tiniest sliver on the surface of the thing.
That's not the Core of the business so the core of the business can be made to function and to turn out its garbage Anywhere and you know to the extent that there's a basically a tax that needs to be paid in order to to to staff the part of it that Won't be able to afford the big houses.
It'll figure it out.
I Okay, but I mean, allow me to have the hope that these businesses actually still have that sliver, which is what should be a vast majority of what they're doing, which is allow for the creation of things heretofore unthought.
Heretofore unimagined, where people come together and share ideas that have never been shared before and create things that have never been created before.
This is what tech is supposed to be doing, and Hollywood is supposed to be doing, and science is supposed to be discovering rather than creating for the most part.
Engineering is supposed to be creating and discovering.
If we are imagining the world which doesn't allow for those things, then every single one of those industries is dead already.
Well, because I love you and because I share your dream, I won't mock you for it.
So, sorry.
But I mean, yes, I agree.
I would like to live in that world too, but wow, are we not headed that direction.
But let's go back to this other point in passing, the Silicon Forest.
Because I really think it's essential.
Please.
So here's the irony of this whole situation, is you've got a bunch of things looking for somewhere to go because their home base is being wrecked by lunacy.
Any one of these places.
I mean, here's the thing.
Portland is really screwed up at the moment, but the bones of the place are freaking fantastic.
We didn't move here because we wanted to be surrounded by crazed liberals.
We moved here because... Wait, didn't we?
No!
I will remind you.
I forgot why we moved here.
We thought about moving everywhere because suddenly our income was not based on any particular location.
So we knew we had to move out of Olympia.
And we were looking for some place to go, and it could have been anywhere that had access to an airport.
And good schools.
And good schools.
And bandwidth, I guess.
Bandwidth?
Yeah, so that, you know, internet stuff.
Oh, just internet.
Could function like actual, literal bandwidth.
But that was a lot of places, and we literally considered, you know, ten different towns.
Yeah, like I've said, the people at Zillow, if they were paying any attention to my saved homes, would have thought we were insane.
Yeah, they would have thought we were nuts.
Everything from Santa Fe, Washington, D.C., Tacoma.
London.
Yeah, all sorts of places.
But anyway, the point here is...
Lots of people are looking for somewhere to go.
Lots of industries are looking for somewhere to go.
If California goes crazy, that's a tremendous opportunity for anybody who can get their freaking act together to be attractive to the things that are fleeing California.
Anyone being any city, any municipality, any state, something, right?
In the case of Portland, Portland has really everything you could want.
It's The air is clean, the quality of life is high.
At the moment, it's not a cheap place to live, but compared to the big... Compared to almost every place else that are considered to be places that the people who are fleeing California that we're talking to are moving to, Portland is still less expensive than the vast majority of coastal and even inland cities like Austin and Santa Fe and Denver and such.
There are endless opportunities for, you know, within an hour's drive or two hours drive, the number of fun, cool things to do in the mountains, on the rivers and all is great.
So, you know, quality of life is high.
Here's the question.
All you got to do in order to attract all of the stuff that is fleeing these major economic hubs is figure out how to resist the thing that is causing people to flee.
If you could compellingly make the argument, if not just Portland, but Oregon could make the argument, hey, guess what?
We are going to resist this woke madness, right?
And what we are going to do is we are going to do things that are hospitable to the kinds of people who are economic drivers.
We're going to give them an ironclad assurance that they will be protected to do what they do here.
The effect of this would be such a massive burst of growth for the state of Oregon that it would be able to elevate everybody's state of well-being to the extent that you wanted to create a model state that actually addressed The unfairness, right?
You would have tremendous resources with which to do it.
In other words, you could have glorious public schools, right?
At a relatively inexpensive price point.
So you could still make the place very hospitable.
And because it has many of the features of quality of life that drove people to California in the first place.
It would be a natural place to go, but we won't be able to do it because our politicos are so dim that they can't understand that there's an argument they could make.
Hey, everybody of every color, we can make your life much better without actually figuring out how to produce anything new just by being hospitable to people who are already producing this stuff, right?
Portland could be the next big place.
Yeah, no, it absolutely could.
And I think one thing, but then I think this may be the place to show the video that you were showing me.
With Governor Brown, answering to Governor Kate Brown of Oregon, answering in a press conference to the question of why in the letter that she just published.
She talks about the risk to people of Oregon from white supremacists and doesn't make any mention of the people who are actually engaging in the vast majority of violence on the streets of Portland.
Which is far left, Antifa, BlackBlock, you know, choose your description.
Yeah, okay, let's go.
So let's see the video.
Yes, thank you so much.
Good morning, Governor.
We've had some viewers ask why your anti-violence statement this week about ongoing unrest in Portland mentioned white supremacy, but did not also include mention of groups like Antifa and other bad actors.
Why was that?
And also, what is your response to City Commissioners Chloe Eudaly and Joanne Hardesty not signing on to that anti-violence statement?
So the first question is why did I specifically hold out white supremacist organizations?
Because my goal, my vision for a future Oregon is to build a better Oregon where everyone can thrive and that means eradicating racism and so my understanding of these organizations is they're based on hate and I think it makes it really difficult for us to build a What Dr. King would call a beloved community.
All right, so what we discover here is that the instinct to pander to these constituencies is so great that Governor Brown and Ted Wheeler are going to bypass... Mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler.
Did I say it wrong?
No, you just didn't specify who it was.
Yeah, Mayor Wheeler and Governor Brown are going to bypass the opportunity To turn Oregon and Portland into a shining example of what is possible to make it a absolutely hospitable place in which its liberal values are allowed to shine by virtue of having the resources to actually solve some problems.
It's particularly notable in Oregon to my mind because unlike the other two lower 48 West Coast states.
California, to a large degree, and Washington, to a lesser degree than California, don't just have one major metropolitan area, right?
They have multiple concentrations with multiple mayors making different decisions, etc.
Oregon's only got one.
Eugene and Corvallis are both campus towns, college towns, and Bend is growing, but really this stuff is concentrated in Portland, and my sense, and even just going a half an hour out of Portland, we see a different kind of Oregon.
People here in Portland are not pleased with what's going on.
They are not.
And some of them are buying the rhetoric that is being trotted out, but they don't think that any of this is making sense.
Outside of Portland, my sense is people don't buy the rhetoric.
They just, they look at this and they say, what the hell is going on?
And no way, no how is the rest of Oregon going to go along with what What is being allowed to pass for, I don't even know what it's being allowed to pass for, you know, democracy somehow in the streets in Portland?
Yeah.
Most of the people of Oregon who don't live in Portland see this actually, I think, with greater clarity than people who are here in Portland.
Oh, no doubt.
People who are here in Portland are parroting the rhetoric at the very least at such a high rate that they can't figure out the A great many of the people probably a majority of the people in Portland are frightened of this and want somebody to save them from it.
They're just not saying so and so we have the tragedy of our mayor and governor catering to the rhetoric rather than catering to what people actually want.
I mean, I think to go back to this memorandum that came out of the executive branch yesterday, this does exactly go back to critical race theory.
The stuff that's going on in the streets is the same thing as what is going on in our schools and the corporate trainings and all.
A woman that I know, kind of, who lives in Portland this week assured me that there had been outbreaks of racism at a local high school in the last couple of years.
And when I pressed her, she couldn't come up with any examples, and she admitted, well, I hadn't been paying that close attention.
And, you know, but certainly there's been an upswing in racism.
And, you know, I pressed her enough that she was a little bit surprised to be asked, and clearly thought that me pressing her was evidence that I don't believe in racism at all, and in fact actually am probably a racist myself.
Like, this is how the rhetoric is spreading.
The same people who can go downtown and, frankly, there are some so-called reporters who are coming to Portland and saying, hey, I'm in a park and I'm eating my breakfast burrito and there's no problem.
I wasn't attacked by Antifa.
Well, to hell with you people.
Like, go downtown at any moment of the day And tell me that looks like a functioning city.
It doesn't.
It's not a functioning city.
Everyone who actually lives here and has gone downtown at any moment in the last three months knows that.
And if you go downtown after night, after nightfall, or go to one of the many city parks where the conflagrations are beginning, and then into one of the many areas that these hoodlums are being allowed to take over, you cannot come away with a sense that this is a functioning city.
It's not.
So, I've had the experience in multiple places.
I've had it in Portland, where, you know, I try to be... I'm careful how I say things, but I try never to leave a misimpression about what I actually think is going on.
So when people say this, you know, this rhetoric about anti-racism and stuff, I find a way to point out that I don't believe that this is anti-racism and that I'm frightened of what it's doing.
People confess to me all the time, right?
Like in these interpersonal interactions.
And, you know, they confess, oh, I am also frightened of this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so there's a lot of stuff going on right below the surface.
Just below.
Just below.
And, you know, I'm also hearing it not locally here.
I'm hearing lots of people.
Who we know, and I will never cough them up.
I'm not going to say who, but people are frequently telling me, you know, I'm contemplating political stuff I never would have thought before because, you know, this is really scary.
And so anyway.
Because look at what's coming out of the executive branch.
Right.
Right?
The stuff that's coming out of the executive branch from a guy who these people you're talking about don't have any respect for.
Yeah.
Now he's doing things that are necessary and respectable.
Well, if you just use the following generating function.
You and I have both said versions of Trump as a political genius, right?
You've called him a savant.
Yeah.
Okay, he's a political genius.
I don't think he's ideological.
No.
Right?
In no way.
The idea that he's gonna bring fascism down, like, no, he's a narcissist.
Well, actually, he might bring fascism down if it was a popular thing to do, but I don't think it's what he's about.
Not because he's into fascism.
Right.
And the fact is, if some kind of reasonable or at least functional leftism was the thing, he might be showing up on that side.
He's self-interested and he's riding these waves.
So here's the point.
You've got a huge number of people, anybody who's got any reason left to them at all knows that something has to halt the march of critical race theory and all of its outgrowths, right?
We cannot have people confronting each other in a cafe and have nothing happen, right?
You cannot have people targeting members of some mainstream political movement in the middle of the street and shooting them.
Right.
So somebody has to do something and Trump is detecting, hey, there's a vast constituency out there that wants something done and isn't feeling like they can say so.
Yeah.
So now he's tapping into it, of course.
Right.
So you should expect him to do it.
And here's the thing.
Let's put unity aside for a second.
I do believe unity is vastly more possible than people give it credit for and the longer the Democratic Party refuses to acknowledge what's going on and adds fuel to the fire, the greater the chances of something unusual like unity working become.
But if we take unity out of the picture for a second, I think Trump is going to win handily.
And this is before we even get to the debates, and there's a question.
The Democrats have given us effectively a scarecrow in place of a candidate, right?
They've given us something that looks, takes human form, but is not really capable of delivering on I wasn't very nice.
It's not very nice.
On the other hand, why are people angry at me for saying such things?
Shouldn't they be angry at the Democratic Party for delivering this?
Absolutely, yes.
So I don't know how they get the scarecrow through the debate.
Maybe, you know, maybe they've got a plan, but I don't think it's going to work.
We're not prepared for this, but didn't you tell me that Pelosi said something to the effect of, well, Biden shouldn't legitimize Trump by agreeing to debate him?
Like, shouldn't legitimize the sitting president by agreeing to debate him?
Is that not an out for someone who can't debate?
Or, you know, if it's not, I've never heard one.
It was beautiful.
You can imagine the dumb shits in the Democratic Party who are responsible for political strategy getting together and saying, all right, here's what we're going to do.
Nancy, you're going to tell Biden that he shouldn't debate so as not to legitimize Trump because nobody wants Trump legitimized, right?
And then Biden will be able to say, oh, no, I'm debating him.
So that'll make him look strong.
Oh, this is great.
You could just imagine them setting that plan up, right?
And, you know, it Went off with a whimper, and everybody saw through it, right?
So, anyway, okay.
Went off with a whinge.
At what point are you going to acknowledge that we have handed the responsibility for recapturing the White House to a bunch of people whose understanding of this whole process is that of a third grader, right?
And they've blown it quite predictably, and the clock is ticking, and nobody's got a plan B. Like, at some point— They're waiting for the bell to ring.
They're totally waiting for their snack.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Political geniuses in the Democratic Party.
Let's get the DNC a bunch of juice boxes and send them on their way.
Totally!
Oh, I love it.
I love it.
Yeah, why didn't we think of that juice box?
We probably could have settled this if we, you know, came up with good notes.
This one also wants juice boxes.
All right, where are we?
So we are, how far are we in, Zach?
Okay.
So where would you like to go?
So on this, my prediction, and by the way, I've gotten one prediction very wrong here and nobody's taken me to task for it, which I think means they must be, somebody's holding it in reserve.
What is it?
I predicted that Biden wasn't going to get the nomination.
I was wrong about that.
Okay.
No big deal.
I've been right about a lot of stuff, but okay.
Yeah, that one was a little over the top.
That they were going to pull it somehow last minute.
Yeah, which, you know, after I predicted it, I thought, no, that's not right.
I think it's still likely, but it'd be after the nomination, because then that gives the DNC the ability to swap rather than if you do it before the convention, then technically the delegates have the opportunity to do something else, which doesn't sound like the DNC.
So probably I shouldn't have.
Made that prediction.
I still think the model is right.
I still think they know that he's a placeholder for either party rule or Kamala Harris is party rule incarnate or whatever their plan is.
But anyway, I got it wrong.
But anyway, I'm predicting here Trump is going to win by a large margin.
The reason is obvious because the fact of people not being able to say what they think causes noise in the polling that you can't overcome, right?
People will hold their nose, like many of them did in 2016, and say, I don't like the guy personally, and I don't trust him over in this space, you know, over in leadership space, but he's actually willing to do some of the things that need to be done, and the Democrats don't seem willing to do so.
Right, except that by setting this in motion, they're now setting us up for the question we still can't answer, right?
Turned out the guy wasn't Hitler.
If he was Hitler, we'd know it by now, right?
But okay.
Not an ideologue.
What happens when you elect the guy for his second term, and he doesn't face another election?
Now, I don't think anything Hitlerian is the answer here.
But the point is, we're going to find out.
If I'm right about what's going to happen, and Unity 2020 does not manage to pull it out, which I still believe is a possibility, and we can talk more about that.
But Trump is sworn in again.
Then we're going to find out what Trump with the gloves off looks like, right?
And that, I think, is a failure mode waiting to happen.
That this is a disaster, that it is going to feed the crazed left many of the things that it's going to need to fashion some story that's going to justify its becoming even more unhinged.
And anyway, it's a... As his election in 2016 did.
Frankly, right?
I mean, the polarization was already well underway before Trump appeared on the scene whenever he first began to run, but certainly both the election and then the inauguration were step functions in the depravity of the techniques used by the would-be activists on the left.
Yeah.
That's something else would unfold.
We can hope that in light of not having to face another election that Trump might begin to think about Legacy?
Yeah, about confounding his critics by doing unifying things.
And in fact, going up against critical race theory is such a thing.
I don't really expect this because for one thing, those who do the writing of history have announced that effectively there's nothing that he could do that they would record as positive.
So at some level they are disincentivizing his behaving in our collective interest.
Yep.
So it's a disaster, a disaster waiting to happen of course.
Can we show the video of the New York City Rioters are disrupting patrons of a restaurant, frightening them, breaking things, driving them out, chastising them publicly.
And... That was in New York, you said?
Yep, that's in Rochester.
And then can we see the march in New York?
So here you have people who can't hear this.
What is this?
Is that the chant about burning all the precincts down?
Yes, every city, every town.
Burn precincts to the ground.
And then there was a death to America banner in there.
So this is sort of announcing what their plans are.
Now, I've heard people say that this is being funded by those who want Trump to win.
Certainly possible.
On the other hand, you don't need that because the numbskulls who Hold this anarchist ideology are perfectly capable of saying insane things like this in advance of an election either as an accelerationist Move or just out of pure stupidity, but The point is they are setting us up For Trump win one way or the other.
One way or the other.
And I think we should increasingly expect it.
And I think those who think that that's the end of the world should start thinking outside the box.
Because you know what?
Your party fucked up.
Your party delivered you an answer that can't beat them.
Yeah.
That is unfortunately right.
Let's riff on this from 1984 for a couple minutes.
Wonderful.
Shall we?
Three.
Okay, everybody turn your hymnals to page three.
I don't know why books are paginated this way.
It says page five, but it starts on page three.
So early in 1984, the famous and important book by George Orwell, written in 1949 originally, I think.
Yep.
We have The Ministry of Truth, mini-true in newspeak, was startlingly different from any other object in sight.
It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 meters into the air.
From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face and elegant lettering, the three slogans of the party.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
Those are the three slogans of the party that we hear about in the rest of this unfortunately prescient book.
War is peace.
Freedom is labor.
Ignorance is strength.
So my claim is that we have achieved two of these three, that we are now regularly hearing that war is peace.
Not in those terms, but the term mostly peaceful, as we have covered here before, basically means that anything, you know, anyone who wishes to portray violence as peaceful simply has to emphasize The percentage of time or the percentage of locales or whatever metric you want to use to game the statistic means that it is peaceful.
So if you could show, why don't you show that headline I sent you and then show us the document on which it's based.
So here, The Guardian, and you can find this in many different publications, nearly all Black Lives Matter protests are peaceful despite Trump narrative report fines.
So it is Trump that is portraying these things as violent, and... So I have a couple of screenshots from that document.
Yeah, please show them.
Okay.
So here, an overwhelmingly peaceful movement... Actually, turn this off for a second, Zach.
Before we go there, this document, let me see if I can find it, is...
Sorry.
Just published, it's called, it's from September 2020.
Okay, you can show this now, Zach, for just a moment.
This is Demonstrations and Political Violence in America, New Data for Summer 2020.
And it presumes to be a very measured and careful sort of data-forward, data-centered type analysis.
Turn off my screen for a moment, Zach, and let me just show a couple of screenshots from this.
Here we go.
An overwhelmingly peaceful movement, it concludes.
The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent.
I'll show you the map in a minute.
In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity.
Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country.
Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations, under 10% of the areas that experience peaceful protests.
In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd's killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks rather than dispersed throughout the city.
Here they reference the honest, saleable source that is CNN, as if that is going to be trustworthy here.
And here is one of the maps of their conclusions.
This is an organization that says that they share all their data, but interestingly, none of these data appear to be findable on their site at the moment.
So it's really hard for me to figure out how it is that they have assessed how many demonstrations there have been, for instance, or whether or not the demonstration type has been a protest or a riot.
In Portland, for instance, there have been, I can't remember the numbers, but MG Some number of nights, the nightly thing that goes from relatively peaceful to really, really not, which has been like clockwork every night.
Some number of those, by no means a majority, and certainly not all, have been declared riots by the police.
But to an observer thinking, does that look like a riot to me?
Pretty much every night there's been something somewhere in Portland that looked like a riot.
How many of those were actually called riots?
Now, we have on this map, you know, a big orange circle that is orange over Portland, which suggests that there were, yes indeed, a lot of riots.
But without access to the data, we have no way of assessing how it is that they concluded these numbers.
Oh, and I suspect that they do not invoke the term riot based on the behavior that they invoke it based on whether a riot has been declared.
And I can tell you, one of the things I learned watching the protests here, In Portland was that there are all kinds of things that are clearly a riot that the police do not declare a riot for some reason that has to do with the way they're policing them, but lots of violence goes on outside of the category, right?
I would also if you can go back to that map the map.
Okay.
Yeah, you can also see that even the idea of peaceful protests is a phony story because mostly what went on was the growing of GMO corn, right?
That's not a protest that doesn't even involve people.
Well, they're very focused on the idea that protests were a big story, but protests are a result of the news bias in favor of protests.
You haven't seen the growing of corn reported on the news, but on a percentage basis, you can see based on this map, a large amount of that territory is dedicated to the growing of crops, which you almost never hear about.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm using their rubric, right, where they're going to declare stuff peaceful because, you know, they haven't gotten around to the rioting, for example.
And my point is, the idea that we focus on, you know, you and I will focus on the fact that, as I think every night but one for the last 90-some, has involved violence in Portland.
That would suggest a large percentage of what goes on in Portland is like the run-up to violence or violence itself, right?
But the idea that it was mostly peaceful because there were many hours in which there was no violence and the city is overwhelmingly not involved in any protests whatsoever.
A lot of peaceable eating of breakfast burritos.
Right.
My point is an intuitive rubric here where the point is, huh, there's been violence every night in Portland for the last 90 years.
That sounds kind of unusually violent, right?
Rather than, oh, it was mostly peaceful.
By what rubric?
And my point is, if we're going to do everything by this mind-numbing, you know, statistical analysis that pretends to be quantitative on the basis that most of what it was was not violent, you know, as I pointed out on a previous live stream, the The motorcade in Dallas in 1963 was overwhelmingly peaceful.
I mean, you know, why anybody even reports on the violence is hard to understand.
Clearly bias in reporting.
Right.
And my point is, you know, the same analysis suggested what's being ignored is the growing of corn in favor of news that focus on protests, because there's a lot more growing of corn than there is protesting.
You think it's the corn lobby that's behind this?
Oh geez, I fear my point has been lost, but yes.
So anyway, back to the point.
The point is, war is peace.
This is a statistical version of that, right?
Mostly peaceful is a way to ignore the violence, right?
Now, ignorance is... remind me.
Freedom is slavery, is the second one, and ignorance is strength.
Yes, ignorance is strength.
We have also achieved this one, right?
Shut down STEM, the Enlightenment is a white thing, logic is a tool of white oppression.
Math is a tool of white supremacy.
Math is a tool of white supremacy.
All of these things are an attack on reason, right?
And so, they are an embrace of ignorance, obviously, for what purpose?
For the purpose of wielding power.
So, here we've got two of the slogans on that pyramid, and we've fully achieved them.
Now, freedom is slavery.
I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're headed there.
Right?
We're definitely headed there, because what we have are people putting other people through struggle sessions on the basis that what comes out of this will be the liberation that we all seek, right?
Through the admission of things that aren't true.
So, I don't think we have quite as clean an example on that one, but at some level We know that we are engaged in the process that Orwell was responding to because the match between the things we are now contemplating and the slogans on the pyramid, which seem beyond, you know, ridiculous, the match is just too damn close.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, it is.
One hour.
All right.
Well, let's see.
We should probably talk very briefly about unity, and then maybe we take our intermission.
And answer your Super Chat questions when we come back.
Yeah, so let me just say, Unity had its Twitter account suspended, as most of you will know.
The Twitter account remains suspended.
The information we have on why it was suspended, to the extent we have any information at all, does not in any way match the results of our exhaustive internal investigation.
Right, we did an internal investigation to make sure that there wasn't something we didn't know about that matched the accusations that were being leveled against us.
We found nothing like what Twitter has told us and they haven't told us much.
So I am not sure what is going on but I do have the sense that we are being politically targeted.
Because obviously anybody that speaks as openly as we do about the corruption of the duopoly, the necessity of us doing something about it, the fact that we face an existential threat from continuing to follow the duopoly, it's an all-hands-on-deck moment, that thing is a threat to The woke movement, which clearly exists inside Twitter and is wielding rules arbitrarily in its favor.
It's a threat to Twitter's disproportionate access that it gains through the manipulation of the political process.
So in other words, to the extent that unity is a challenge to corruption, very powerful economic entities like Twitter may be hostile to it.
Now, how this all unfolds, we don't know.
I will say, personally, I don't suspect that Jack himself is aware that what he is saying about why we were suspended is nonsense and transparently so.
I actually suspect he is being fed bad information.
I don't know that to be true.
Maybe that's me hoping that it's true because I want Jack to be a good guy.
But Jack, if you're listening, You should really look into what you are being told about Unity 2020 and you should check for yourself whether it adds up.
You, we were able to check this very thoroughly, you have better data than we do because you have the records of who contacted Twitter and did what.
You've got IP addresses, presumably.
You should be able to tell that the things that you are saying to us about what we have done are incorrect.
And to the extent that your organization is willing to meddle in a natural process of democracy in which citizens attempt to escape the duopoly paradigm, which is our right, that you would interfere with that is very, very troubling.
And it needs to be reversed immediately.
All right.
We have arrived at the end of this first section of this live stream.
We have.
Do we have announcements?
Sure, just the usual announcements.
Last Sunday we had our monthly private Q&A, and it was good.
You can access all the past ones and get access to the live one for next month at my Patreon, get access to the Discord server on either of our Patreons, and this morning you had your two-hour conversation with Patreons at the $100 level, and tomorrow morning you will have one Yep, this morning's conversation was off the hook.
I'm hoping tomorrow's conversation will be off the hook, but you know, it's too early to judge.
But I would think so.
Yes.
All right.
So we will be answering your Super Chat questions from this hour and the ones that you pose next hour when we come back in about 15 minutes.
