Josh Szeps and Joe Rogan critique the weaponization of "fascism" by both left and right, exposing how Breitbart misquoted Szeps to falsely link him to Trump. They highlight rising suicide, alcohol, and drug deaths among white American men while questioning outrage culture’s focus on trivial slights—like CNN’s Beirut bombing silence or Meryl Streep’s feminist t-shirt—over real threats like Islamist extremism. Szeps warns of overreactions alienating moderates, while Rogan notes ideological tribes thrive on certainty, stifling nuanced discourse. The episode underscores how performative activism and tribalism deepen societal divisions, making open dialogue critical to addressing complex issues without bigotry or denial. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you know how sometimes you don't need to go to them because they come to you.
When you say something, then you get taken out of context, then you get picked up by some blog, and then all of a sudden, like over the weekend I've been getting all these...
Tweets just out of the blue about what fascism is.
I was like, who are these people and why are they tweeting at me?
I didn't even know that I said anything about fascism.
Well, it's because Breitbart picked up something that I did on a segment on HuffPost Live last week and wrote something up about it, about how apparently I implied that Donald Trump was a fascist, which I actually didn't mean because I don't think that he is.
And now all of a sudden, I'm in the hashtag.
I'm part of the hashtag about fascism without even choosing it.
Let's find the official definition of fascism, because I think most people get it wrong.
Fascism means an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
So, people use that, there's other definitions of it, of course, but extreme right-wing, authoritarian, people use that for a lot of, like, non-fascist reasons.
That's true, and I probably used it sloppily myself in the context in which Breitbart was picking me up, and they would have a point if I did come across as saying that Donald Trump was a fascist, but all the people who were tweeting back at me were saying, fascism isn't right-wing, you idiot, it's left-wing!
Yeah, it's mostly considered right-wing, but people are using it in the left-wing circles now, or about left-wing circles, because they're using it in the authoritarian context.
That's right.
I think that's applicable, because a lot of what is going on In, like, really extreme social justice left-wing type organizations or groups is that they're trying to control behavior and they're trying to mitigate criticism.
Like, you can't criticize these concepts because these concepts are supported by, you know, social justice.
So I was in Beirut briefly a few months ago and was standing on the rooftop of this swanky hotel looking out over the Mediterranean and looking out over the houses.
And I was like, this is like an idyllic, beautiful part of the world in terms of its natural beauty.
And I could practically swim from here to the Greek islands, how people are, basically, the refugees.
And I had just been in Athens as well, which is like, geographically, physiologically, Italy, Greece are the same as all these fucked up parts of North Africa and Israel and Palestine and Lebanon and not to mention Syria.
And I was, like, just struck by how capable we are of fucking things up as people.
Because the actual geography is the same.
Like, those waves are the same waves as the ones on the Italian Riviera.
But the Italian Riviera is the Italian Riviera, and this shithole is this shithole.
Through no difference of climate or sun, or the birdies are still there, the birdies are the same...
But religion and politics just has an endless capacity to screw things up.
You could call it religion or politics, but it's really just power.
It's human beings trying to achieve power.
And you could do it through whatever modality you choose, but the reality is it's just people that are trying to control other people and trying to gain things.
Sorry, but isn't the argument against that what we were just talking about in terms of social justice warriors and people calling people fascists?
I mean, you're in a tribe.
If you're on the extreme left or the extreme right, you're in a tribe.
You know, when you talk to right-wing people, they're almost incapable of not bringing up liberals.
Or the liberals think...
They don't just bring up their own concepts and their own thoughts.
They'll immediately disparage liberal ideas.
Like, immediately.
Well, you know, they'll tell you, well, you're a liberal, you know, you believe in this and this and that, so you're a liberal, and they'll, like, immediately, like, downplay your ideas.
And social justice warriors will do the same thing.
They'll do the same thing about, I mean, my, you know, the first time I came to your attention was with that interview with Suey Park, the Council Colbert activist, right?
To people who haven't seen it, she wanted to have the Colbert Report cancelled because apparently it was racist, and I did an interview with her on HuffPost Live.
who was saying that he, so that he didn't have to change the name of the Redskins because it was racist, he was going to set up a charity for Native American causes.
And Stephen Colbert, in his right-wing persona, said that sometimes he'd been accused of doing jokes that could be considered to be offensive about Asian people.
So in return, he was going to set up the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for sensitivity towards Orientals or whatever.
But there is a much, much, much bigger awareness of the kind of tragedy of the original sin of what happened when Australia was settled than there is here towards Native Americans.
I sort of regard Native Americans as being the people who've really been screwed in this country.
I mean, not that it should be a competition of, like, whose suffering was worse or, like, I'll put my slavery up against your genocide.
That's right, because I always hate it when we get into those games.
but no one even talks about it.
Like in Australia, if you go to an awards ceremony, for example, if you're at the Grammys, every single presenter will come up and they will begin by saying, I want to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, the Yadawundi people.
You know, they'll at least give a kind of politically correct nod to the fact that...
We occupied a country and basically wiped out an entire people.
You'll see Aboriginal flags flying on Parliament House alongside the Australian flag.
I don't even know what the Native American flag is.
I mean, they were at the time when the British settled Australia, and I always get accused when I say things like this of, you know, by politically correct social justice warriors, of imposing onto traditional societies an idea of human civilization as being better if it's, like, industrialized than if it's not industrialized.
Right.
Because I'm, like, a white man who, like, totally thinks that, like, the 21st century is better than the fucking 15th century, which I do.
Having said that, if you think about, like, the traditional anthropological conception of human evolution going from, like, the discovery of fire and farming and then up through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and so on...
Aborigines, when the British settled Australia, were the least advanced civilization in the world by far.
I mean, we're talking...
And again, the politically correct part of me has to keep qualifying.
They had been around for over 100,000 years, so they were doing something successful.
I like you for that, because I like analogies, and I like being able to accept analogies without thinking that the person is saying that the two things are the same in every respect.
I don't remember whether I've spoken to you about this before, but when I was in Greece on the trip that I was just talking about, I was standing at the Acropolis, and I was expecting to be wowed like all tourists are by, oh, the sheer age of this thing.
Oh, I'm at the birthplace of Western civilization.
And instead, what I thought was, I'd actually just been back to New Zealand because my grandma died.
And what I was struck by at the Acropolis and the Parthenon was not like how old human civilization was, but was like...
My grandma, her lifetime is a manageable period of time in my brain.
I can think about that in a way that when you talk to me about something that happened 50,000 years ago, it's just meaningless.
And when you talk about the size of the cosmos or a light year or something, I might be able to understand it intellectually, but it just washes over my head.
I don't know what you're talking about.
But the lifetime of my grandmother, that's a manageable span of time.
This Acropolis, at the dawn of Western civilization, before humans had even invented anything that we would recognize as being civilized in terms of laws and procedures and technologies, that's only 100 of my grandmas.
Like you go to the Chicago theater, that's 3,700 people.
That's a good spot to look at.
Those people in that audience, if you get a full Chicago theater of 3,700 people, if every one of them lived birth to death, just stop and think about that.
And you don't even need to go that far before the kinds of lives that people were living and the kinds of concerns that they had to concern themselves with were so parochial and they knew so little.
I mean, even just back to the Middle Ages.
I mean, think about having 50 of my—no, sorry, five of my grandmothers get us back to the Middle Ages.
I mean, we're sitting here, we're not science deniers, and we're looking at the age of your grandma, 100 years, and we're just going back a few grandmas, and we're like, fuck, man.
Well, this is the first time I've been amazed by that, though, because I... Although, you know when else I had this feeling was Richard Dawkins has this cool analogy where he says, imagine...
He's talking about how evolution denies...
I keep wanting to say climate denies, I don't know why.
Evolution denies.
We'll talk about how there are these gaps in the fossil record, right?
And how, like, well, what happened to the species that were interim species in between the species that we find?
Richard Dawkins tries to make the point, the whole concept of a species is something that we sort of retroactively superimpose onto things because lots of animals, because the vast majority of animals die out and don't manage to...
Succeed in this world.
The vast majority of mutations fail.
But he says, imagine getting a book, imagine getting a picture book, like a high school yearbook, and it's got your photo in it on the last page, and the page before that is your mother's photo, and the page before that is her mother's photo, and the page before that is her mother's photo, right?
And you go back and back and back and back, all the way back to the first dawn of life.
hundreds of millions of years ago.
And each page is going to basically look like the page before it.
There's never going to be a point at which the shrew becomes a monkey or some amphibious creature becomes a shrew.
Every child looks like its parent.
But as you flip through the pages of this book, it's such a thick book that over time, like one of those little cartoon figures that you could draw and it looks like it's moving on the page, you just start morphing back, back, back, back, back until eventually you're a fucking fish. - Right?
Or, you know, your great-great-great-great-grandma is.
It is true, though, that, like, you know, age is on the inside, because I can feel that now, at this age, I just have to do a shit more work not to feel crappy.
Your body is just automatically functioning exactly as it should.
Now, like, my ankle will just occasionally hurt.
You know?
That didn't happen when I was 22. I actually remember the first time in my life when I was getting out of a car, and as I got out of the car seat, I went...
That's the other thing, is nature is trying to kill you.
And nature would like you to give in to the same decay that you see in animals and the forest and what have you.
It would like you to just accept the natural process.
But us and our clever little minds have figured out how to mitigate that process, at least slightly, with exercise and nutrition, proper rest and supplementation.
Hormone supplementation and going to the doctors and new inventions and cryotherapy and all this crazy shit that people figured out how to just...
Just put the brakes on this fucking inevitable demise.
Do they do it by contracting the muscle that starts with a P, whose name I'm forgetting, between your balls and your ass?
No, there's a particular muscle there, which apparently, if you learn to build it up, like we're doing exercises throughout the day, then it will compress and it will push against the...
I've stood at one end of a strip club in Bangkok, had a Thai stripper fire darts from the other side of the room out of her pussy and pop a balloon that I was holding over my head.
Wow.
And she could fire those things with such aim.
I don't know why I was so stupid, because I could have taken an eye out.
Not to mention, like, I mean, I've been to shows there where there are just, I remember the finale to one show where it was like, there were about 15 to 25. How many fucking shows did you go there?
I mean, everything's sort of far for most Australians because Sydney and Melbourne are located on the southeast coast of Australia, so there's a lot of Australia to fly over.
Australia's the same size as the contiguous United States, so you basically have to do the entire flight from the equivalent of Miami to Seattle before you start entering Asian airspace.
So from Australia, the country itself, it'd probably only be two or three hours to Bangkok.
It's only like...
An hour or two to Indonesia and Singapore.
But from Sydney, then you've got to add on an extra six hours just to get out of Australian airspace.
There's a species called the Irukandji, which I can't remember whether it's the same as a box jellyfish or not, but someone's going to tweet me now that I've said that.
And there was a case where these scientists on the Great Barrier Reef, they were studying the Irukandji, and they're almost invisible.
They're very tiny, small little jellyfish with extremely long tentacles.
And they do the same thing as the box jellyfish, if they're not the same thing as the box jellyfish.
And they had like a carton, a bottle of Irukandji in water, and they put it in their research fridge.
And a dude came in and drank the water, thinking it was drinking water, and died instantly.
The reality about Australia is we've managed to export this Steve Irwin crocodile hunter vision of Australia as if we're all rugged outdoorsmen who live in the bush in the outback.
The reality is almost half the country lives in two big cities and we're all sitting around swilling Chardonnay and drinking lattes complaining about property prices and sitting on yachts and going to the beach.
Very few Australians live in the outback.
We're a very urbanised country.
America is much more It has much more regional variants.
My friend Adam, my friend Adam Greentree, he lives out there.
And he works, he has a business and something involves mines.
And they'll be working, like digging holes.
And, you know, doing stuff out in the bush, I guess you guys call it, the bush, and they'll just find these brown snakes, which will just fucking kill you.
Yep, and most Australians are trained in knowing how to basically, you know, obviously put a tourniquet on so that you can, you know, maybe suck out the venom and spit it out and identify what the snake was.
You know, I really get really pissed off when people talk about healthcare and healthcare in America and this idea that somehow or another it's better to not have people covered with medical insurance.
And there's always been Medicaid and there's always been, for extreme example, people have had medical issues that have put them in severe debt.
I don't think that we shouldn't have private care in terms of the best doctors and the best surgeons should be allowed to be compensated for their excellence.
I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but the idea that we don't have some sort...
I mean, we have roads that are taken care of by our taxes.
Why the fuck do we not have medical insurance or medical care that's just standard?
And this is exactly what we're going to talk about on my podcast, hashtag WeThePeopleLive, which we're going to do immediately after this, because I want to talk to you about Bernie Sanders.
Because, do you remember, Rush Limbaugh was going deaf.
But he had a real medical explanation for when you overdose on opiates, when you take massive amounts of opiates.
It affects your central nervous system in such a profound way, and it affects your entire physical body in such a profound way that it's possible you can induce hearing loss.
But he ended up getting to slut because his logical argument was she wants to be paid for something that is only needed if she wants to have recreational sex.
Well, what do you call someone who we pay to have recreational sex?
Not that there's anything wrong with being a fat fuck.
Some of my best friends are fat fucks.
There's nothing wrong with being overweight, ladies and gentlemen.
Well, there's something wrong for you.
It's not healthy.
But, you know, you could fix that.
It's hard, but you could fix that.
Just as easy as it is to get off of heroin.
As easy as it is for Rush Limbaugh to get off heroin, he could get off sugar and simple fucking carbs and all that stupid shit that makes you balloon up like that.
It's hard for people to get excited about doing something that's difficult to do that's going to be ultimately beneficial for them because it drains your energy in the short term.
Did you see the study that came out recently about the huge increase in the death rate, the fatality rate of white people between the age of 35 and 50, I think it was?
Well, I think there's a lot of people that live a very unsatisfying life, and they got roped into living this unsatisfying life because someone told them they have to make a living, that they have to make tough choices, and they have to go do things that they don't want to do, and then find a good job with a fucking plumbing supply company or some stupid shit they don't really want to do when they really want to be a musician or whatever, and then they just live depressed.
But we were talking about how you're not allowed anymore to have any feelings as a white man that are anything other than guilt about being a white man.
So I was just listening to the latest episode of his podcast where he's talking to this guy, Douglas Murray, who's this English conservative, and Douglas is saying that when the jihadi nuke finally goes off, what we're all going to be talking about is transgender pronouns.
Much easier than it has been at any point in time.
And I think, also, it's very easy to communicate today.
Much more easy than it has been at any other point in time.
And before this era, the era of instant communication, if you had an idea, it had to be really good to get it out there to the masses.
It had to be really good.
It had to go through editors and publicists.
It had to go to publishers.
They had to print it.
People had to read it and recommend it.
It had to be verified.
It had to be excellent.
If you were Hunter S. Thompson, there was a lot of jumps you had to go through, a lot of hoops, a lot of ladders you had to climb before you could publish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Today, any fucking dipshit can start a hashtag activist, some sort of a...
You could start a Tumblr blog or anything, and then it can immediately be picked up by people that also want to be outraged, and they'll go on this goddamn rampage, and it's confusing as fuck.
It's because...
It's so easy to get by.
We were like spoiled rich kids, in a way.
Spoiled rich kids with our ability to communicate ideas.
So she's just finished shooting a movie in London called Suffragette, in which she plays Emmeline Pankhurst, who was one of the great women's rights campaigners back in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
It's about the birth of the feminism movement.
And in 1913, Pankhurst gave this speech, this famous speech for women's rights, in which she said that the women's rights movement will survive, quote, So long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion, I would rather be a rebel than a slave.
So they do this promotional thing, in which, here's Meryl Streep wearing a t-shirt, I'd rather be a rebel than a slave.
Meaning, I'd rather fight for my rights than be downtrodden as a woman in the early part of the 20th century.
Well, the internet blew up with how racist Meryl is, because she's not understanding the context of that.
I mean, there are...
Hashtag.
So I put a...
Like, here are some of the tweets.
I can't believe this is real, someone said with a link to it, that the word rebel is juxtaposed with slave in that quote.
Just, I can't fathom this.
Someone else says...
Someone else tries to school him, says, the quote is from Emmeline Pankhurst, who said it in a 1913 rally for women's rights, to which the social justice warriors respond...
And I'm letting you know that it doesn't matter who said it.
The quote is trash.
And another person, white women have said a lot of terrible things over the course of history.
Doesn't mean you wear it on a shirt.
And this just goes on and on.
And I put it on Facebook and just said, I'm glad that we're focusing on what's really important.
And, like, a black friend of mine said, you know, just started attacking me for being an apologist for racism.
And I wrote, right, fortunately, that t-shirt has nothing to do with being black.
And then he went off onto this thing about how you have to understand how other people are going to perceive things, and we have to be cognizant of always using the right words.
And it just ends up spiralling down into this situation where all of a sudden I have to be censoring every single word that I say in case some idiot misinterprets it and doesn't understand the historical context that we're talking about the women's movement in...
Like, early 20th century Britain and not the fight against slavery in America?
They look at Meryl Streep in that t-shirt, and if they understand the context of what she's trying to say...
Like, if you quote the original piece that it was taken from...
If they still have a problem with that, then what they're doing is just finding a green light.
It's a cunt green light.
I can go.
I can go.
I can hit the gas.
That's what it is.
It's all it is.
It doesn't make any sense.
She's posting something, or she has a t-shirt on, rather, that's taken from a historical quote.
It's really simple.
If you have an issue with those words, because those words can be used in other forms, well, that's your issue.
But to make a big deal of it, and that you have to be more aware, and you have to be, you know, because being black is exhausting, or being Chinese, we built the railroads, for you to ride that railroad and not acknowledge the fact that Chinese people died during the making of that railroad, fucking Christ!
It was also the fact that people recognized the importance of having first responders, having firemen, having policemen, and that they really felt it like in a deep, real way, like, thank you.
Thank you for what you do.
If it wasn't for what you do, we would be in so much more danger.
It's having a very real memory of them stepping in and risking their lives and helping people and seeing them covered with dust as they carried people out of the buildings.
It was solidified in people's memories.
Over the past, you know, decade or so, you go back and it's back to being New York again.
People don't look at each other, fuck you.
Like, there was a feeling of vulnerability that existed because we had recognized a real problem.
And we had gone through a real, they had gone through, a real moment of intense adversity.
Tragedy hipster is someone who, the moment something like the Paris attacks happens, starts shitting on people who are pouring out sympathy online or changing their Facebook profile pictures to the French flag or something by saying, "Well, where were you?
Why weren't you outraged when there was Beirut?" Like, I've got an article here in The Stranger, which is the Seattle blog entitled, "Why putting the French flag on the Space Needle is racist." What?
I also find it a bit fatuous when everyone starts pouring out, you know, all of it.
There are certain fashionable things to care about.
You know, it's a bit like the Coney 2012 phenomenon or something, right?
Yes.
Where all of a sudden everyone jumps on some social media, social justice bandwagon.
But I feel like Paris is a bit...
Yes, people should pay attention to Beirut.
Yes, people should pay attention to Nigeria and Boko Haram.
Yes, people should be more aware of what's going on.
But as Obama said in the wake of the Paris attacks, it is understandable for people to have a more instinctive, sympathetic reaction to a city that they know, a city that they've been to, a city populated by people like them who are doing things just like them, going to see a soccer game, sitting in a restaurant.
Than they are for parts of the world where they think that violence is more commonplace, like Nigeria.
I don't think you can be belittling people for genuine expressions of sympathy.
I certainly don't think that you should be accusing them of being racist.
And CNN is fucking awful, and I'm definitely not going to defend CNN. I mean, CNN is the worst example, I think, of just following the most predictable line on everything.
They try not to alienate anyone by being too left or too right, and as a consequence, they're just a mush of ignorance and parochialism.
Well, I would like to think that there's a market for smart conversations about things, which is what I try to do at Half Post Live, and we don't get small numbers.
I mean, oftentimes I'm surprised when I have a smart conversation about the relationship between Islamism to Islam and the plight of poor Muslims in the suburbs of European capitals where unemployment is 35%, and the demographics of the types of people in Iraq who are joining ISIS who were 14 years old during the U.S. invasion and who've just endured...
all of their the rest of their lives basically being full of civil war and people being beheaded and strung up in the streets and who hated saddam but hate america and hate the west now for everything they've been through like when we talk about all that sort of stuff some people are actually you know significant numbers of people are actually interested in hearing about it in Instead of, meanwhile on CNN, should the mayor of this city in the Midwest that has a majority Muslim population be afraid?
You have a selective media outlet, which means someone finds out about Josh Zeps from one of your many wonderful appearances all throughout the world and HuffPost Live and all these different things.
They get to know you.
I like this guy's perspective.
He's very intelligent.
He's very articulate.
And then they seek you out.
And then they find your thing.
They subscribe to it.
And then they go to it because they're becoming a Josh Zeps fan.
Whereas...
CNN, it's at the fucking airport.
I'm waiting for my flight the other day and they have CNN. And they're showing these people doing these things and it's on.
There's a difference between something that's broadcast and something that you select.
And I think when someone gets excited about something like what you do is someone who has chosen to go seek out your perspective and your point of view.
It's very difficult to do that on a show like CNN or a network like CNN. We have to be able to do better than we are, though.
Because, like, 60 Minutes, for all of its faults, occasionally hits the nail on the head and does a good job, and certainly used to, and people watch it and watched it.
I mean, Cronkite used to do it.
They do a great job.
I mean, PBS does a great job.
Broadly, I think NBC News does a great job, just as a whole collection.
On your point about what people are going to watch and seek out, there's a good piece in Vox by Max Fisher after all the criticism of why didn't the media cover the Beirut bombings.
Because one of the most retweeted tweets the day after the Paris attacks was a tweet about why is the media covering this so much when they didn't cover Beirut.
Well, at some point, if you're interested in having a thriving media business, you have to give people what they actually want, which is judged by what they click on.
That's where it's fucked.
So they put Beirut at the very top of the page, and then, you know what, it doesn't even register as a blip on the number of clicks.
So then they downgrade it, and it ends up falling back onto the world section of the site.
But they entertain you by showing you the real reality TV, which is the news.
But much like reality TV, you know, if you live in a house with a bunch of people and they film six hours a day and then they water it down to 44 minutes on television or 22 minutes on television, when they do that, I mean, they're going to do it the way they want to show it.
They're going to chop out a bunch of other shit that you're not really interested in and they're going to paint a picture and they can edit it and paint that picture in a variety of different ways.
But they're going to do it in the way that they think is going to be the most salacious.
It's going to be the most compelling for you to tune in so they can sell you a Toyota truck.
And is he going to have any privacy, or is the NSA going to spy on everything that he does, and are we going to let it because we're so afraid of having attacks like this?
And is he going to live in a pluralistic society, or are we going to be so...
We're cowed either one way or the other, where either we take our Trump id and oppress Muslims, which only exacerbates the problem, or on the other hand, we become social justice warriors who are like, this has nothing to do with Islam.
Islam is a religion of peace.
There's nothing to see here.
You don't have to worry about the Islamists, which means that we end up with mini-theocracies in our own cities where you basically have illiberal communities that don't respect women's rights and don't respect gay rights.
We, and by we, I mean people like me who are broadly sympathetic to minority rights and who are broadly pro-civil rights and want everybody to be able to live life however they want to, and I'm pro-high levels of immigration, and I'm not intolerant, I'm not xenophobic...
I'm certainly not racist or Islamophobic, but how do we talk honestly about the fact that at the fringes of Islam there is a big fucking problem and not yield that territory to the right wing?
Because you've got this rise of these right wing...
Can you imagine if there was an election?
There's an election...
There is an election in Paris, in France, next week.
And how many more Paris attacks would you have to have before the National Front, the anti-immigrant racist party, won power?
In Sweden now, the third largest party is a party that wants to close the borders completely.
I mean, you've practically already got that on the GOP side here.
Well, no, not even remotely, actually.
I take that back, because they want to close the illegal border, but they still believe in having moderate levels of...
Yeah, exactly.
They still believe in having people like me come in.
White people that speak well with a cool accent, come on over!
Yeah, are you educated?
Sure, come on over.
Probably more educated than we are.
Yeah, I think what we have here is human beings classically react to tragedies and massive events.
We have problems and then we have solutions.
And the solution is being debated, and there's the extreme right-wing I think we're also dealing with people like Trump that are gigantic egos that have these platforms where they want to step up and they want to gather all this attention to themselves and point to themselves as the solution to this issue with their hardline stances.
And I think what's going to happen is Technology, as it becomes more and more pervasive and invasive and as we become more and more symbiotically connected to the ability to express ourselves through phones and through the internet, I think the next level of this is ultimately going to be some level that allows people to communicate in a way that it's not just typing things down and it's not just watching a video online.
I think we're going to be able to communicate with each other in some sort of a neural transmitting manner.
There's going to be some next step level of technology, whether it's a decade from now or two decades from now.
It's going to seem pointless.
To have phones.
The idea of having a physical thing where you have to go to in order to access information is going to seem absolutely ridiculous.
And once that happens, we're going to see what we see right now in the world where I think I think, regardless of how crazy the world is, I think, at least in America right now, this is absolutely the safest time ever.
When all the social justice warrior shit that we're seeing, and all this craziness about outrage and hashtag racism and hashtag this and that...
It's bad, but it's good.
It's good because it's all about sensitivity.
It's good because it's all about inclusion.
It's good because it's all about eliminating anything that's disparaging or racist or anything where you are marginalizing groups based on something that they can't control, like what they look like or their sexual preference.
And I think as we get deeper and deeper into this interconnectivity that we're experiencing right now, We're going to absolve a lot of our differences and grievances through our ability to communicate with each other and connect with each other.
And I think we're experiencing like this adolescent sort of angst before we get out of the fucking house and go out onto our own.
I mean, we're becoming adults as a civilization.
And along the way, we're experiencing...
The fucking teenage hormonal rage that, you know, a 14 year old has when they're still trapped in their parents' house.
The freedom that human beings are going to have in the future to communicate and express themselves is going to negate a lot of this hashtag college racism or hashtag college activism.
I think what that's coming from is this feeling that a lot of people have that their ideas and their opinions aren't Black lives matter!
We're certainly in the adolescence of our species, and I'm trying to find a way of saying drugs without saying drugs.
But not just drugs, float tanks, meditation, whatever else it is that you do in order to gain a perspective on things that is beyond your own little tribe.
My concern is whether or not there is a direct correlation between upgrading the means of communication, and I'm with you that obviously the way that we currently communicate is going to seem completely antiquated in decades to come, But what we've seen happen when the internet began,
you sound to me a little bit like people who I would listen to in the 1990s who would say, once everyone is online, there's going to be no need for a difference anymore because everyone's going to be able to communicate everything and everyone's going to be able to be exposed to so many different ideas that you're not going to be able to be insular anymore.
You're not going to be able to be parochial anymore, trapped in your own little circle of beliefs.
Because with the internet, everything's going to be available at everyone's fingertips all the time.
Of course, what's happened is it's had the opposite effect.
The availability of communication on a widespread scale has actually enabled people to silo themselves into little self-thinking communities of sameness so that we're actually more divided than we've ever been because you can seek out only the information that comports with the way that you see the world.
So I don't think that a technology is necessarily going to drive an awakening.
I think the awakening comes from drugs and spiritual epiphanies, and then the communication can be a tool to enact that.
But I can just as easily see some communication revolution being manipulated by jihadis the way that they currently use the Internet and Twitter to coordinate terrorist attacks.
And let's just unpack two things that we're talking about so we're not conflating two things, right?
One is the social justice warrior debate here in the United States and the other is Islamism.
And we're sort of kind of having two parallel conversations about that at the same time.
In terms of social justice warriors in the United States, I hope that you're right that what they think that they're doing is being an extension of the great traditions of civil rights in America.
In other words, that they're being motivated by a sense of understanding, as you say, and of compassion.
And of outrage against what they perceive as being outrageous injustice.
My concern is that what they're also doing is buying into a long tradition of intolerance and a lack of respect for pluralism and for other people's ideas about things, for other people's right to express ideas that they regard as being I mentioned earlier this study that I thought you were going to like that I bought.
Let me just find it because it's good.
So there's this professor called April Kelly Wozner, and she's a professor of political science at Elizabethtown College.
And she's got a chapter in this new paper called The End of the Experiment, The Rise of Cultural Elites and the Decline of America's Civic Culture.
And it's this study, which is called the General Social Survey.
Which looks at how tolerant or intolerant particular demographics of Americans are, right?
So they start by...
Hang on, I've got tangled up in my microphone here.
I was getting too relaxed listening to you talk.
I was like kicking back.
I was like getting out the popcorn, listen to Joe.
So in the general social survey, they propose a bunch of different groups and they ask people how much they would like or dislike that group of people, right?
Just to establish who we really, really don't like.
The least liked group included in the survey was Muslim clergymen who preach hatred against the United States, right?
That's understandable.
And the second least liked group among Americans are people who believe that blacks are genetically inferior.
So racists.
So then they ask people how tolerant they would be towards a person from that class of people giving a public speech in their community.
And people in their 40s are more tolerant than people in their 30s, and people in their 30s are more tolerant than people in their 20s.
For people in their 40s, the proportion who say that a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred against the United States should not be allowed to give a public speech is 43%.
People in their 30s, 52%.
People in their 20s, 60%.
So if tolerance means not like, oh, I support black rights or I support gay rights or I support trans rights, but if it means respecting the right of someone who you really disagree with to express that opinion, Well,
I think what you're saying, though, is they're less willing to accept hate speech, which they think are dangerous...
Shorts of conversations.
They think that someone who's a Muslim clergyman who wants to express the hate of America, it's dangerous because he could promote terrorist attacks.
Someone who thinks that black people are genetically inferior to white people is dangerous because they could promote racism or they could promote someone confirming their racist beliefs and then instead of Becoming educated or becoming enlightened.
They go with their initial racist instincts and they go, I was right.
You know, the white man is superior, you know, and they're worried about hate.
Where people who are stupid or have ridiculous ideas about the genetic inferiority of black people are able to be exposed, be argued with, be contended.
Because racists aren't just going to go away if you ban them from talking.
They're going to go underground.
They're going to find other communities.
They're going to increasingly self-segregate into their own little communities online.
You want...
I think you want free speech to be a big, roiling debate.
You don't want to be censorious and judgmental and intolerant towards people whose ideas you disagree with.
You want to take them on and expose why those ideas are wrong, and hopefully through that intellectual wrestling match, you all end up progressing forward.
You don't progress forward by simply banning ideas that you think are objectionable.
That's what I was going to say, is that they themselves have been indoctrinated into the idea of liberalism and liberal thinking by, like, charismatic people with interesting ideas that they believe in wholeheartedly, and they're very confident in what they're saying, and they speak very well.
Those ideas become infectious.
And sometimes those...
I've expressed this before on the podcast that I listen to these Islamic clergymen speak.
And although I have zero desire to become a Muslim, there's something intoxicating about people that are extremely confident about their ideology.
And that's dangerous for people.
It's dangerous even with a person like me, who's done a lot of fucking drugs, who does a lot of meditation, is involved in martial arts.
I'm a free thinker.
I'm a non-theistic sort of a thinker.
But I watch these people have these conversations with these massive crowds.
And they're saying all these crazy things about Islam being the truth.
And I feel an understanding why people would be drawn to that.
I'm not saying that I'm drawn to it myself, but I understand it.
I feel the compelling idea behind someone joining a group like that.
If you're discombobulated, if the world is complicated, if you don't know what to make of shit, especially if you're in a situation where you feel like you've been shat on for a lot of time, which is what a lot of these followers of these extremists do feel like, then it's nice to just have clarity.
It's nice to just have someone who knows what the truth is and who knows what the right path is.
If you'd asked me to list five things that you were going to end that sentence with, country music would not have been top 50. I know a lot of people that I love dearly that like country music, and they read the least out of all the people that I know.
All the people that I know that are really into really dumb country music, these motherfuckers aren't aware of shit that's going on in the world.
I have good friends that I love, but I have to talk to them, especially from the hunting world.
Like, the hunting world is goddamn hilarious, because I've somehow or another become a part of this world, because I've expressed this idea that I think is very important, and we should be aware of where our food comes from, and I've become someone who gathers their food from a hunting way.
But then you connect yourself with these people that are also in this, which become very religious.
There's a lot of religion, but it's a weird kind of religion.
It's almost like a hashtag activist sort of religious idea, where they don't understand the texts.
Yeah, the tattoo thing is very clear, but when I got into it with these people was when that woman from Kentucky wouldn't marry gay people, and I wrote this piece on Instagram and Facebook, and it got millions of likes, and all these people traded it back and forth, and I got all this blowback from the hunting community, because all these people that are really into God, or really into religion, and then they're also recognized...
Getting pressure, my friends who are in the hunting community were getting pressure to talk to me about my stance on God.
Like, this is hilarious.
Like, how much do you guys actually know about the scripts?
How much have you guys read?
How much do you know about the origins of the scripts?
And it turns out, very little.
Most of them, very little.
But there's this need to simplify things that appear to be very complex.
And the way to simplify things is to put it all in God's hands.
It's all about Jesus.
You know, Jesus said, well, I'll tell you why.
I want to vote for him because he's on Jesus' side.
So one of the things that he's talking about is when he's talking about the Balkans, He's saying, like, when the Balkans imploded in the 1990s and we had the collapse of Yugoslavia and, you know, Bosnia and Serbia and all that, he's like, you go there even to this day and you talk to a Bosnian Muslim or you talk to a Serb or you talk to a Croat...
About the problems that they've endured, and every single one of them will point a finger at the other groups and say, they've been doing this to us for so long, and back in this day they did that, and then they did that, and then they did that.
It's like the Israelis and the Palestinians or something.
It's like, oh, well, you know, 10,000 fucking years ago my ancestors got massacred by blah-de-blah.
And it's so easy to think of ourselves in terms of aggrieved groups, whether or not Yeah.
is sort of a weird parallel that I'm drawing just as I'm only sort of thinking this up right now, but there is a parallel between jihadis and social justice warriors in the sense that they each are able to take an off-the-shelf, pre-packaged kind of identity and set of beliefs about things and gain certainty from it and be part of a tribe pre-packaged kind of identity and set of beliefs about things and gain certainty from it and be part of a tribe and be part of a community and be fighting the good fight against people who disagree with them, who hold beliefs that they believe are objectionable, whether that belief is that the West is at war with Islam, which is what jihadis think
Whether that belief is that the West is at war with Islam, which is what jihadis think that we want, or whether the belief is that racism is okay, which is what social justice warriors think that all white people think.
Right?
There are these easy, off-the-shelf categories, so think independently, people!
Ideologies where you have locked into a predetermined pattern of thinking that you just have to conform to, I think becomes very problematic for people because the world is fluid.
There's a lot going on, a lot of weirdness to it.
There's also an issue in communication through language and communication through words and the ability to express yourself through words.
It's sometimes difficult because what you're trying to do is you're trying to express intent.
You're trying to get someone to understand how you think and view things.
And you're trying to say, well, why don't you express and view yourself like I do?
Or why don't you see things how I do?
And maybe you're talking to someone who has a completely different idea of what those words mean and completely different idea of the context of this particular scenario that you're discussing.
That's why podcasts are so unique in a way because, you know, one of the beautiful things about it is that, you know, you do sort of search for the correct way to, I mean, you hear us do this sometimes where this is like...
Yeah.
And what we're doing is we're just trying to figure out what's the best way for me to express this idea that I've got bouncing around in my head where I'm trying to understand how this thing sort of lays out to everybody else.
How do I get it out there in a way where you know what I'm actually saying, what I'm actually thinking, instead of getting outraged as something that's not what I meant, like this Meryl Streep thing?
That's not what she meant.
She obviously didn't mean, I don't want to be a slave, like I want to be a black person in the 1800s.
And there are certain triggers that are really hard for people to get beyond in communication, but we have to find a way to get beyond.
I think the most pressing form of communication that we have to grapple with now is how do we speak to the Muslim community and to one another about the Muslim community and about jihadism without either being bigoted towards Muslims or pretending that there isn't a problem of Islamism that has some relationship to the Muslim community and that has some relationship to the text of right?
Because the moment I say anything remotely Like, the day after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Howard Dean went on Morning Joe on MSNBC and said, these guys are about as Muslim as I am.
Well, that's bullshit.
I mean, that's obviously not true.
They're arguably a lot more Muslim than most Muslims.
I mean, they are very fanatically Muslim.
At least they think they are.
So we can't keep litigating whether or not they're theologically correct or whatever.
There is obviously a cancer at the extremist fringe of Islam that has to be dealt with and has to be talked about.
And the more we just talk about it, the more the left talks about it in terms of, well, it's just a problem of extremism in all faiths.
It's got nothing to do with the faith.
the less able we are to actually have a conversation about what needs to be done and how to win over moderate Muslims and how not to alienate them.
Because if tolerant people can't talk about it, then the only people talking about the problem are right-wing xenophobes or fascists, right?
And so what we have to do is find a way, when we talk about, like, those off-the-shelf ideologies, whether it's jihadism or social justice warriorism, we have to find a way to win over moderate Muslims and make them not feel like they're being alienated and judged.
We have to not be, you know, sending southwest flights back to the gate as it was the other day because two people were speaking Arabic.
And watching a video about what's going on in the wake of the Paris attacks or something, and people freaked out because they think all Arabs are terrorists or something.
We have to make sure that doesn't happen, but we can't have that not happen as long as everyone is pretending that there's not a problem with Islam.
Right?
At the edge of Islam.
And I don't know how to have that conversation without sounding like I'm intolerant.
The arguments against it come up, you talk about the arguments against it, and it just takes time.
I really do believe that.
I believe it just takes a lot of discourse, takes a lot of communication, and the clumsy type of communication that you get through language, through talking.
I think the more this happens, the more this gets discussed, the more people gain an understanding, And again, like we're looking at people aging or like trees growing, it is a slow process.
That in the middle of it, it doesn't seem like any progress is happening at all.
But ultimately, if you look at the world today versus the world of 10 years ago, you see a big difference between what Al Franken was able to publish with that book and what you're able to get away with today.
And I think that sort of, in a weird way, for lack of a better analogy, it highlights the growth that's going on.
It highlights this very strange era that we are currently experiencing.
And with that, let's end this and do your podcast.
We're going to keep talking, folks, but we have to end this.
Because I've got to pick up my kid in a little bit.
But we're going to do an episode of We the People Live.