Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan dissect leftist hostility, from Berkeley’s canceled event (later reversed) to Evergreen State College’s absurd "microaggression" demands and Missouri’s Melissa Click controversy, exposing how safe-space culture fosters fragility over resilience. They critique Trump’s political tactics—like framing interactions for public perception—and debate transgender policies, citing a 40% suicide rate among gender-dysphoric individuals while rejecting media-driven identity redefinitions. Shapiro warns Nazi comparisons fuel polarization, dismisses UBI as premature, and argues market solutions overregulate environmental issues, despite CO2’s human impact. Their discussion reveals how ideological bubbles and performative outrage distort discourse, leaving only confrontation. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, well, you crushed him, and one of my other favorite ones was Chelsea Handler crushing him, where she was literally talking, like, you don't even talk to me in the break.
In the break, you're checking your phone and checking Twitter.
And you could tell he was like, oh no.
He just, you know, he came from that weird British tabloid environment, and you found out that the company that he worked for did really creepy shit, like check people's voicemails.
They hacked into people who were dead, and they gave the family false hope because they had checked the voicemail, and they found out that someone checked in.
Well, I could tell people from, like, Manchester and stuff like that, because they, you know, they have, like, this sort of, like, way of talking so fast that all the words kind of pile into each other.
But, yeah, Oliver's, his recent one, Eddie Bravo got really mad at it, the recent one about Alex Jones is fucking hilarious.
And, you know, we've been talking about some of your debates.
There's not a lot of guys like you out there, which is really interesting.
It's like you're a fast thinking, fast talking, very smart young guy who's also a conservative.
Like there's not a lot of those out there.
And this is one of the things that we're encountering today is there, especially in college campuses, there's this very strange separation between the left and the right to the point where the right is like almost non-existent or at least doesn't have any representation.
And they're actively shunning that representation.
Yeah, so UC Berkeley, if you recall last year, I actually spoke there before any of this happened.
I spoke at UC Berkeley in like April 2016, and then Milo was supposed to speak there, and he actually went there, and there was a riot where Antifa infiltrated the student community, and there are all these pictures of them bombing things and blowing up cars, or setting them in a fire at least, and throwing things at windows.
Yeah.
So Berkeley shut down that event for safety reasons.
Then Ann Coulter wanted to speak there.
And they basically used what they call time, place, and manner restrictions to stop her.
They kept saying, well, we have safety problems.
We can't figure out how to do the event.
And in the end, they just canceled it because they didn't have security.
And then Young America's Foundation, which sponsors me to go to a lot of these campuses, they said, we want Shapiro to come.
And again, I spoke there like a year and a half ago.
And they gave them two and a half months advance.
And Berkeley said, well, we have no venues available.
And so this seemed to be another cover for we're not going to allow a conservative on campus because there are security problems.
So we made that public.
And then Berkeley said, no, no, no, no.
We'll make sure that you get in.
They gave us an alternative venue.
And they even said they'd cover the security fee because they didn't like the bad publicity.
Yeah, just yesterday Jordan Peterson was banned from YouTube.
And YouTube has a new policy that it's very weirdly worded, but apparently they're allowed to block and restrict any kind of videos that are about religion or that could be deemed offensive, which is almost everything.
And this is one of the reasons why I'm very meticulous in my terminology about people who are on the other side of the aisle.
I actually separate people who are liberal from people who are leftist.
So when there are people who try to ban speech, I call them leftist, and if they are not interested in banning speech, then they're liberal, meaning they want bigger government, they disagree with me on politics, but they're still willing to have a conversation, they want an open forum.
People who are on the hard left think that it's actually an insult to their identity to disagree with them, and this is what I experience sometimes on campuses, you know, Cal State LA, where there's a near riot when I speak.
University of Wisconsin, where people storm the stage and stand in front of it and won't leave.
Or Penn State, where we have, again, another near-violent incident over at Penn State.
Or DePaul, where they actually banned me outright.
So sometimes you get this routine from people who think that they conflate their viewpoint with their identity.
And then if you have a different viewpoint, you're denying them their humanity.
That's a very good point, is that they have their identity completely connected with their ideology.
And when you oppose these people, when you have these debates with these people, What's really fascinating is the level of hysteria that gets reached while you're staying calm.
Well, February of 2016 is when I started traveling with security.
So I spoke at University of Missouri.
Remember, they had a big blow-up at University of Missouri with Black Lives Matter taking over campus offices and suggesting that there was some sort of big racism problem at Mizzou, which is just ridiculous.
And so they flew me in.
I did a speech there.
And then the next time I spoke was Cal State LA. And they brought in a couple of security guys.
And I was like, what do I need security for?
I'm just speaking on a campus.
Who cares?
We get to the campus, and they had already tried to cancel my speech because of security.
And I said, I'm coming anyway, so tough.
I had to be escorted in by 20 armed police officers.
I had to be escorted off campus by motorcycle cops flashing their lights.
There were 300 students who had blocked all of the entrances, were physically assaulting people trying to get into the theater.
The police had to sneak the students in two by two into the theater.
They told them that until I left the campus, they couldn't actually let the kids out of the theater because they were afraid that if they let the kids out of the theater, they'd be attacked as they were released.
That one was pretty wild.
So after that, it was like, okay, well, I guess the security is necessary.
I think the identity politics is ramping things up.
So I think there's a new mentality out there.
It's this intersectionality politics on the left that says that there are a bunch of victim groups, basically.
There are blacks and Hispanics and gays and Jews and Asians.
They're all victim groups.
And we get all those people together to attack the system because the system is keeping them down.
And there's a hierarchy among these victim groups.
And if you are a straight white male, you're at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy in terms of viewpoints that should be acknowledged because you're the creators of this vast white supremacist system that keeps down everybody else.
If you're a black woman, you're near the top, right?
If you're LGBT, you're at the top.
If you're a white guy and you challenge the viewpoint of a black woman, your viewpoint is an attack on her identity.
And therefore, she has the right to shut you down.
And so the idea is that your words are violence to her identity and therefore she has the right to react.
This is the term you hear on campus a lot is microaggressions.
This idea that my opinion microaggresses you.
Now, even that terminology I think is really stupid because normally in regular life we would say that's insulting and you said something I don't like.
The terminology microaggression suggests aggression, like I'm actually doing something aggressive to you.
And the rational response to someone aggressing you is to use physical force in response.
And so you start to see a more violent response.
I think it's been growing in our politics.
I think there's a reactionary side on the right that's growing.
If there's an identity politics on the left that says, you know, black identity politics, gay identity politics, female identity politics, I think you're starting to see in some areas of white identity politics that's almost formed in response.
Like, okay, well, if everybody else gets to have their identity politics, why can't we defend ourselves on those same grounds?
I hate that shit too, and I would like to find the person who invented the term microaggression.
Because that fucker, whoever it was, they created quite a mess.
I'm sure you saw what happened at Evergreen with Brett Weinstein, where literally the left is eating itself, and that's where it gets crazy.
It's like you're not progressive enough, unless you're literally submitting to leaving your class because you're white.
Like, you can't be there because you're white.
They want a day of absence, meaning the professors, the white people.
And then when you don't do it, you're somehow another racist and a Nazi.
I mean, the whole thing was very bizarre to watch, but...
surprising because you see it so much so often all over the country right now and it's almost like some new flower of ridiculous thinking and behavior has blossomed and it's in bloom everywhere and when people can point to it existing in other places like in missouri where that woman what Was that woman who got- Melissa, Melissa Click, yeah.
Yeah, whatever her name was.
When you see it in video, when you see her on video saying, can we get some muscle over here?
Asian man taking photos of a public place that you've created some safe space.
But it's...
This weird thing where half of it is identity politics, but it's also wrapped up in this need to control people and control people's behavior, control their vernacular, control the way they communicate and how much you give in to groupthink.
And Jonathan Haidt, who's a social psychologist over at NYU, he did a really good piece for The Atlantic in 2015 about this phenomenon, this kind of safe space trigger warning phenomenon, this idea that you must never be forced into a position where someone has an idea that opposes yours.
And what he said is it basically makes people crazy.
You know, it actually makes you crazy.
The idea in psychology is that if you have a chain of thoughts, Leading to a bad outcome.
If you're depressed, right?
If you're depressive, then you have a chain of thoughts leading to a bad outcome.
The way that psychologists deal with that is with cognitive behavioral therapy.
They say, okay, where in this chain of thoughts are you going wrong?
Are you attributing to somebody a motive they don't have?
Is your wife really being nasty or is it you just attributing nasty to her and that's why you're getting depressed, you're spinning off, right?
Try to control your own chain of thoughts.
What the microaggression trigger warning culture does is it actually grants value.
The more you are offended, the more value you are granted.
And therefore, you have actually an interest in being offended.
We give you awards if you're offended.
You're treasured if you're offended.
Because it demonstrates that you're woke, right?
The more you are offended, the more we can show that you are woke.
And because you are woke, therefore, you're granted this virtue.
You get to lord it over everyone else.
I mean, I say in my speeches, if we could somehow identify, like, the LGBT, half black, half Hispanic, one-quarter Native American...
Little person.
You know, then we would finally have the person who we could go to to answer all of our questions because their identity would be unquestionable.
Well there's the really bizarre statement that I've heard over and over again that black people cannot be racist against white people because they don't have any power over white people.
This trend and look at what's going on in popular culture and look at what's going on with identity politics and this war between the left and the right and wonder where it's going.
I mean, it feels like the people on the left are completely emboldened by the fact that you have this guy in office who has said things like grab him by the pussy and he lies all the time and makes fun of people's plastic surgery.
You think that having this guy in this position I guess in some way emboldens them and makes them even more convinced the fact they're right, you know, fight, put up the resistance and hashtag resistance, hashtag resist.
I think what's happening, and it's one of the things that I personally am not a fan of, and this goes all the way back to the Piers Morgan debate that you mentioned.
I mean, I started off that debate with Piers Morgan.
Saying to him, you don't get to attribute intent to me that I don't have, right?
You're standing on the graves of the Kids of Sandy Hook in order to promote your political agenda, implying I don't care enough about dead kids because I don't agree with you.
That is the sweet spot where a lot of people like to live, which is, if we disagree on politics, it's because you're an asshole.
It's not because we disagree on the best method to get to the goal or we have different goals.
It's because you're a bad person.
And I think that what you're seeing is with Trump, there's an attempt to cast all of his voters as people who love all of the things that are bad that he does and says.
It's not that they voted for him because they thought Hillary Clinton was the worst presidential candidate in the history of America, which is true.
They voted for him because they liked the grab him by the P word stuff.
They voted for him because they like that he's vulgar and he lies a lot.
They voted for him because they are bad people, right?
This is why people misread, I think, Hillary Clinton's deplorable speech.
The implication was, okay, everybody who voted for Trump is a bad human being.
They tried this with Romney, too.
I mean, they tried to castigate Romney, who's Whatever you can say about Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney was maybe the most honorable person ever to run for the presidency.
They tried to cast him, as Joe Biden said, a guy who wants to put y'all back in chains.
He said that he straps dogs to the top of his car.
So there was a story, I think it was in the Boston Globe, about how back in 1982, he went on a family vacation, and when they were traveling, he put the dog in a cage and put the dog on the top of his car.
The binders full of women thing was particularly stupid because the entire point he was making is that I was trying to recruit women to my administration so they would bring binders full of female resumes to me so I could staff more women.
And they turned it into binders full of women.
He's like, Hugh Hefner.
Yeah, Mitt Romney?
Like, really?
So this attempt to castigate the other side is really bad.
And I think that you see some of that on the right, but I think it's more reactionary.
I think that the unearned moral superiority that the left likes to kind of wallow in, I think that's more on the left than on the right, although I think that there is an attempt by some on the right now in response to do some of that.
Well, it becomes these sticking points that you use to win, you know, and it becomes something that people repeat over and over again, you know, like the deplorable thing.
I was walking down New York City, down the street, right after Trump won when they were protesting, and there was this guy right next to me fucking screaming.
He wasn't even in the actual parade itself.
He was on the sidewalk, but he was screaming, Donald Trump, KKK, racist, sexist, anti-gay.
He had just boiled it down to this thing, but the best part about it was he saw a black guy coming towards him, and he just started screaming, Black Lives Matter!
Black Lives Matter!
I saw him.
I saw his soul.
In that one move, that shift to screaming Black Lives Matter when he saw a black guy.
It's almost like the laziness in having the ability to communicate is one thing, but having the ability to express a complete thought that covers something as nuanced and as complex as American politics in 2017, That's too hard.
So let's just yell out, Donald Trump, KKK! And this ability to boil down what's the difference between the left and the right to a little statement, or a bucket of deplorable, a basket of deplorables, whatever it is, binders of women.
It's so tempting, because it's so powerful that it works.
Well, when you say reduce the power of the president, I think there's a lot of people that would think that would be a great idea, because having one person has the authority over 300-plus million people, it is kind of ridiculous at this point in time.
But how would you go about doing that?
Like, what would be the best way to implement something like that?
You'd have to reduce the power of Congress as well.
I mean, you'd have to go back to a federalist-based system where localities and states have more power over local issues and the federal government just isn't that powerful.
Because what's happened basically in the constitutional structure, the federal government was never supposed to be anywhere near this big.
There are very certain delegated powers in the Constitution of the United States that Congress has, and they are very small.
I mean, it's things like building post offices and interstate roads and regulating interstate commerce.
But the idea that they could regulate, you know, your toilet flushing is just, that's silly.
I mean, the founders would have thought that was ridiculous.
Yet you have a federal government that's that big.
So Congress regulates on that.
But if you're in Congress, the last thing you want is to be answerable for that.
So what you do instead is you drop vague statutes, right?
You say things like, We hope that we're passing a law that says that we should fix the environment.
And then you kick it over to the executive branch.
And the executive branch, you know, run by President Trump or President Obama, has a bunch of executive branch agencies like the EPA. And the EPA puts together all these regulations that you've never seen, never heard of, you never elected these people.
They put together all the regulations.
And then those are the ones that actually govern your lives.
So if you're in Congress and things go bad, you say, well, that's not what I meant to do.
I told them to do good stuff.
And the bureaucrats who are not elected don't have to care.
So basically you have everyone kicking the can to the other person for purposes of responsibility.
The only way this is going to happen is if the American people just decide they're sick of the federal government running all this stuff, and they start actively working to elect people who want to minimize their own power, which is difficult.
I mean, most people in power don't want to minimize their own power.
It's funny you say this, but it's actually indicative of why the United States works, that people actually follow traffic lights.
It's true in Italy also.
It's true in Israel.
When I visited Israel with my wife when we got married, no one pays attention to the traffic rules.
Everyone's honking their horns at each other.
I'm American.
I'm like, why are these people so rude all the time?
And my wife's like, honk the horn.
She's Israeli.
But it is why, in America, because we have a baseline, and this is what I think is breaking down, actually, so not to get too deep on a point about Mexican city traffic, but I think that, you know, the country was based on this idea.
There's a social fabric.
We all have respect for each other enough that we're going to follow the basic rules of the game.
And that's true as far as traffic lights.
It's true as far as financial dealings with one another.
And when you lose that, when you lose the basic respect for the guy who lives next to you, you know, you need to get through the red light.
You know, screw him.
It doesn't matter if it's red.
Then it's kind of indicative of a culture in collapse generally when small rules start to go broken.
Like in Italy, the problem in Italy is that 50% of their economy is black market because they have high tax rates and no one pays them.
You're starting to see that in California too.
California has the highest taxes in the country by far.
We also have the number one rate of deductions.
So we pass all these high taxes so we can congratulate ourselves for social justice.
And then we avoid all the taxes as much as we possibly can.
Well, I just also feel like when you get a giant number of people smashed into a small area, and with LA, it's not even a small area.
It includes Greater Orange County, and it goes into the Conejo Valley, and it's just like there's so many of us.
There's so many.
It's almost like you get that sort of diffusion of responsibility thing where there's just too many people to care about and you lose this feeling of value that you have for fellow people.
I lived in Boulder for a little while.
And when I lived there, the People's Republic of Boulder, you want to talk about lefties.
I'm in Oklahoma, and I'm walking down the street, and the first thing that, and some lady and I catch eyes.
Now, in L.A., you're from L.A., you look away, right?
You don't want to get stabbed.
If you catch eyes with somebody, it's rude.
You don't catch eyes with people in L.A. And I'm walking down the street, we catch eyes, the lady goes, how are you?
I called my father.
I was like, where am I? What's going on here?
Like, this is not regular.
But I do think that there is something to the idea that if you have too many people in too small a space, we're all up in each other's business so much that it's very hard to say to people, okay, liberty, stay away from one another, leave each other alone.
It's like, yeah, but he lives next door and he's a jackass.
Hate that guy.
Because he's, like, right next to you.
In Oklahoma, the guy next to you is three miles down the road.
I was there last week, and I like the sky, so you can't actually see the sky in Manhattan, right?
I mean, you just see these brick buildings, you know, 25 stories high.
And I noticed that we were walking past the store, and there was a shirt on sale.
And the shirt's entire text was, F-U-U-F-ing F. And I thought, only in New York could you sell this, right?
I mean, you try to take this anywhere else, and people would have been like, wait, what now?
But New York, I'm sure that's a bestseller.
That's why, honestly, I think it's one of the reasons why Trump won, is because he's basically just a guy from New York.
He's like a taxi driver from New York who's really, really wealthy.
And, you know, he does what a taxi driver from New York would do if you're really, really wealthy.
He marries models and builds gold toilets and all this kind of stuff.
And people in the rest of the country actually take that language seriously.
So when he says stuff like, yeah, we're going to bomb the shit out of him.
People in New York are like, yeah, that's what we do, you know?
And people in Oklahoma are like, wow, he's serious.
Like, that's actually going to happen.
And it's like, probably not.
Probably that's just how people from New York kind of talk.
We saw this last week, right?
He was talking about the cops, and he was saying this thing about...
Covering their heads before they put them in the car.
Yeah, covering their...
He's talking like a Long Islander.
You know, he's talking about like, you know, they throw him in the back of the paddy wagon and we do all the, and you don't put your head on the, fine, they bump their head, they just killed someone.
And so the entire media went, now how dare he?
He's talking about how cops should rough people up.
Listen, is it appropriate for the President of the United States to talk like that about treatment of suspects?
No.
Are we supposed to take this super seriously?
Like Trump is actually recommending a policy change with regard to...
Well, there's a group of people suing them, and now they're actually starting to rule against public officials, people who are in the public light, being able to block citizens and having their own opinion about what this person is doing or not doing.
So then you have to say, well, are you allowed to be vulgar?
You say that the level of hatred directed toward Trump is warping Trump.
I think that it's also warping some people on my side of the aisle who are so interested in the fight that they're less interested in advancing the policies that I'd like to see achieved.
I think there's a whole group of people where, let's say that Trump would just resign tomorrow.
He'd say, you know what?
I've had it.
Screw it.
I'm out.
And Mike Pence becomes president.
And then Mike Pence proceeds to do all the things conservatives want him to do.
You know, we get tax reform and we limit immigration and we do all of these things.
But he does not tweet about Mika Brzezinski's bloody face.
I think there's a whole group of people on the right who'd be pissed.
They were asking him why he visits his golf courses so much.
And he said, oh, because my golf courses are nicer, because the White House is shabby.
But there are people on the right who are like, fine, it's funny.
At least he's trolling the left.
At least it's ticking them off.
Guys, ticking off the left is not a substitute for defeating the left if you actually care about defeating the left.
This is one of the things that drives me nuts, because my life goal has been to promulgate particular ideas, not just to piss off the left, but I think that in the fight, there are a lot of people who have fallen into the trap of thinking these two things are identical, right?
You piss off the left, that means you're winning.
It's like, no, pissing off the left may be part of it, but that's not how you win.
You win by saying things that are true, and if they get pissed, they get pissed.
Well, my good friend Bill Burr did this piece about Obama back when Obama was mocking Trump and saying, the one thing that I am that you'll never be is the President of the United States.
The crowd went nuts.
Remember when he did that?
And Obama was saying this on stage, and you see Trump in the audience boiling with his big frog, double chin, just sitting there eating it all, and that fucking stuck in his craw.
There's a whole story that came out from BuzzFeed about his interaction with a guy named McKay Coppins, a reporter for BuzzFeed, in which McKay was basically saying to Trump, like, you're a joke.
You're not going to run.
I think Trump ran just because he was sick of people telling him that he wasn't going to be president.
I really think that's half of what drives him.
That doesn't mean that he can't do good things.
I hope he does do good things.
He's the president.
I want every president to do things I like.
He's going to have to get it under control a little bit because he was willing to keep the Mooch.
I mean, the Mooch was only ousted because of John Kelly, and the Mooch is it.
Well, I mean, there were reports from the New York Post that he actually, that Trump liked it.
That all that happened is that there was so much blowback that he had to replace Kelly, and he puts Kelly in there, and Kelly's like, you can't do this.
And at the same time, remember, this is the same week that Trump himself is tweeting out that Attorney General Sessions, who is his most loyal supporter for a year and a half, that that guy is like a traitor.
First of all, Trump can fire any of these people at any time.
Like, this is very passive aggressive.
For a guy who made his living saying you're fired on TV, it's amazing that all the people that Trump has fired have been fired actually through surrogates.
Well, Comey, so he screwed it up and then he re-screwed it up.
So when he originally said publicly, we're not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, he was doing something he didn't have the authority to do.
The FBI does not decide whether to prosecute people.
They refer the information to the DOJ and then the DOJ decides whether to prosecute people.
It was Attorney General Loretta Lynch's decision whether to prosecute or not.
The statute itself, I mean, I'm a lawyer, the statute itself did not say, do you have intent to commit espionage?
Do you have intent to make classified secrets public or expose them to the possibility of being made public?
Intent is not an element of the crime, right?
If you do it, it's a crime.
So my wife, she's a doctor, and that means that she is under HIPAA requirements.
There's no element under HIPAA that says that if she reveals somebody's, you know, proprietary medical information by accident, well, there's no intent, so she's okay.
That's not part of the statute.
If she brings somebody's medical records out to her car and somebody steals the medical records, you know, if she's working at the VA or something, that's a crime.
It doesn't matter if she intended to do it and just left it in her purse.
So Comey read the element of intent into the crime to get Hillary off, and then he said, okay, we're not going to prosecute this.
We're going to leave it alone.
He shouldn't have intervened in the first place.
Remember, he made an entire case basically for why she should be prosecuted.
And then at the end he goes, but we're, you know, but no, we're not going to do that.
He also said, we're going to keep Congress updated on any future development.
Well, you get to October and there's a future development.
They found this laptop with all sorts of information on it, with new emails from Hillary Clinton that they haven't seen before.
And now he has an obligation to inform Congress because he told them that he would.
And so he screws the pooch again.
Because he's afraid that if he doesn't reveal that information, Hillary goes on to win, and then it comes out there's something criminal, then people are going to blame him for Hillary winning and putting a criminal in the White House.
So instead he says, oh, well, I'll be fully transparent.
I have to honor my institution.
I'm going to put this out there.
Of course, then Hillary loses, and now he screwed up twice.
And then he gets into the White House and now he's supposed to be investigating the Trump-Russia stuff at the same time.
So now he's investigating basically both candidates in the 2016 election.
He handled this the wrong way every step of the way because he was so focused on what will uphold the integrity of the FBI and the integrity of the investigations and the integrity of the DOJ. He was less worried about, okay, what do I actually have to do under the law?
What's my obligation under the law?
His obligation under the law is to shut his piehole, hand the information over to Lynch.
If Lynch wanted to kill the investigation, let her do it.
But the problem, remember, was not the firing of Comey.
It was that two days after he fired Comey, he went to Lester Holt on NBC, and he said, the reason I fired Comey was not all the excuses I gave about the Hillary stuff.
Yeah, I mean, the obstruction laws, I mean, I've looked into kind of the statutes that they've used to suggest obstruction, and it's not clear that there's any statute that specifically governs something like this.
Plus, it is true that Trump does have the power, as the chief executive, to fire, as the commander-in-chief, to fire the FBI director for any reason he chooses.
Now, all that said, he can be impeached for any reason, criminal or non-criminal, right?
Impeachment is not a...
You don't actually have to have committed a crime to be impeached.
There's the House, and they have to vote to impeach you.
And then there's the Senate, and they have to vote by a two-thirds majority, or a 60, yeah, I think it's a two-thirds majority, to actually convict you of a set of crimes that they come up with.
But these are all political definitions, right?
When it says high crimes and misdemeanors, it doesn't mean they actually have to prosecute you like they would in a criminal court, and you'd have to go to jail or any of that kind of stuff.
Like, they could impeach anybody at any time.
Clinton didn't even have to commit perjury.
If they wanted to impeach him, they could.
They could have impeached every president you can impeach.
It's just a vote.
It's just a vote.
So all the talk about what's criminal and what's not criminal, the problem for Trump, there are two ways of reading Trump's behavior in the whole Russia thing, right?
Way one is he's got something to hide.
That's the most obvious way.
He's got something to hide.
That's why he gets rid of Flynn.
We don't know why he got rid of Flynn.
He gets rid of Comey.
We don't really know why he got rid of Comey and then brags to the Russians that it took pressure off him on the Russia stuff.
So way one is he's hiding something and now he's firing everybody who gets in the way.
The chain of evidence doesn't not fit that.
The people he's angry at in order are Attorney General Sessions, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the former head of the FBI James Comey, the acting head of the FBI McCabe, and the special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
So those are all people involved with Russia.
Those are the only people he's really angry at.
So there's something to be said for the idea that maybe he's trying to hide something.
On the other hand, We haven't actually seen any hard evidence of collusion itself.
So we saw an attempt to collude by Donald Trump Jr. But we haven't actually seen any evidence that the Russians were providing special information to the Trump administration, which was then being weaponized for use in the campaign.
We haven't seen any of that stuff.
So here's the other plausible theory, and this goes to Trump's personality.
He's so petty and he wants to be loved so much that he is angry that people keep saying he won because of the Russians.
And so now, every time people say that, he just gets pissed, and he fires people.
So, Comey...
I mean, this is totally plausible, right?
Comey comes to him and has said privately that you are not under investigation.
And Trump says to him,''Well, why didn't you say that?'' And Comey says,''Well, I can't say that, because if I say that, I'm going to have to update Congress if you do fall under investigation.'' And Trump doesn't like that.
He wants the public to know he's free and clear.
So he fires Comey.
And then he goes up public, and he says,''I didn't like how he was handling the Russia thing.
I'm innocent.
Why won't these people leave me alone?'' Right?
So there's two ways to read this.
Either he's totally innocent but stupid, or he's trying to hide something.
Those are the only two plausible ways of reading the situation.
I mean, it would be smart if he had found a way to spin it.
Right.
This is the thing in politics now.
The way politics works now is your smartest move, if there's dirt about you, is to be the first person out the gate with it and you put a spin on it, right?
So like Barack Obama, imagine if Obama hadn't said anything in 2008 and then we found out a week before the election that he did coke in high school.
Now, a lot of people wouldn't care.
A lot of people would, right?
In 2000, George W. Bush was hit with a DUI charge from like 1973, and it probably lost him a point in the polls.
So what Obama did is he wrote an entire memoir, and he just kind of dismissed it, right?
In the middle of the memoir, he goes, you know, when I was in high school, did a little blow.
It's not quite as much as people on the left want to say it is, meaning that there's no evidence yet that any information was actually exchanged with the Russians or that anything came of the meeting.
Most of the people in the meeting who have said something have said nothing came of it.
You know, but we don't know whether Trump knew about the meeting.
I find it kind of hard to believe he didn't, you know, considering every major campaign figure was there.
But, you know, and then they just keep lying.
And this is the part that's a problem.
Are they lying because they just think they can get away with it and they're stupid?
Or are they lying because they're actually being meticulous about their lies?
I tend to think the former, because this isn't a professional administration.
I think these, I think Trump, you know, fibs a lot.
He says things that are, I mean, like, on stupid things.
He says things like, the leader of the Boy Scouts called me and told me that he loved my speeches.
And this is something that, again, I think that we're shaped by Hollywood a little bit.
Politics is dirty, but some of this stuff is not usual.
It's actually not particularly usual to meet with a government that is really not friendly to the United States to receive information about your political opponents.
But if you've watched House of Cards, you think, well, I mean, that's like two steps down from throwing somebody under a subway, so what's the big deal?
I'm sure it's happened at some point, but again, if I don't know who and when, I'm hesitant to, like, I think that we, and I think that we tend to think things are regular when they are, I mean, that'd be really irregular.
The point I'm making is, if you think that's a regular thing...
If you think that it's not a rare thing, and maybe once in a while, once every 20 years somebody gets whacked quietly for a political reason, if you think that's a regular thing, then fibbing is way inside the line.
You hiding documents is really...
Or you writing your son's stupid statement about a stupid email exchange and then fibbing about it publicly.
That's really inside the line.
So, again, I don't think that...
I think some of this...
I have a rule about the Trump administration.
I never attribute to malevolence what I can attribute to stupidity.
Because I think that that's...
More likely to be the case.
It's like the Occam's razor of the Trump administration.
For people to know the story, this guy was having an affair, the girl turned up dead, and then 9-11 happened right away afterwards, so people kind of forgot about it.
But they found her body in the park, and everybody was like, Jesus Christ.
Like this is a woman that was about to testify that she was having an affair with this guy and That one was a good one.
Like, you climb out the window of the car, swim out to the river, bank, go to somebody's house, come back, like, a day later, and you're like, oh, shit, there was a girl in the backseat.
Well, that was one of the things that they said that they would have used as a defense, again, with OJ. That OJ, with the CTE, that he might not have even known what he was doing, that he might have flown into some...
I mean, the fact is that we have an insanity defense, right?
And what it means is you don't know right from wrong.
Well, if you don't know what you're doing, like, this is something they teach in law school.
If you're sleepwalking, you kill somebody.
There's no motive.
So it's difficult to, like, you need mental treatment, but should you be in jail for that?
Not really.
I mean, they've had cases where people are, like, sleepwalking and...
They think that, and they're dreaming at the same time, so they think that their wife is actually like, this defense has been used, where they think their wife is some sort of monster in the room, so they club her to death, and then they wake up and they're like, oh, that was my wife?
Well, if we know that people can go crazy and we know that brain trauma is a real issue, the two of them together, I mean, there's something about getting knocked around in the head where it's so completely unpredictable and then you add in this impulsive nature of their behavior that happens.
There's something really weird about brain trauma.
It causes a lot of very strange, impulsive behavior in people.
They really can't understand even why they're behaving the way they're behaving.
I mean, they've been calling people punch drunk since 1910. Well, see, the thing is, when you get to that, when you get to the slurring your words part, you're so gone.
Like, you're already gone.
There's a lot of people that have CTE that speak really well, and they're very articulate, and they're very reasonable, and you wouldn't even understand that they're dealing with all this host of neurological issues.
By the time your voice, obviously I'm not a neurologist, but by the time, as it's been explained to me, your voice is slurring and you're dealing with, like, real heavy-duty symptoms, like, you're fucked.
But then there's also, look, the Colin Kaepernick thing, I think that probably cost a lot of ratings for the NFL. Yeah, there was that poll that came out that said, I think, of the 12% of people who said that they were not watching NFL games last year, 28% of that 12% said that the Kaepernick national anthem thing was the reason.
I was born in 1984. Well, the Caitlyn Jenner piece, when they did it for ESPN, and I don't know if this is true or not, but the word was that her getting Athlete of the Year, or whatever the award was that she got.
The number one retweeted tweet I have ever had had a hundred and I tweeted I think a day ago and it has a hundred and twenty thousand likes and it's it was there was a headline from CNN that said transgender man gives birth to trans what was it was transgender man assigned the female sex at birth Gives birth to healthy baby boy.
And so I tweeted, woman gives birth to boy.
Because it's a woman.
I mean, that's not a headline.
I'm sorry.
Just because the woman believes she's a man doesn't make her a man.
Biology still exists.
Sex still exists.
If you want to say she's a woman who feels like a man, that's fine.
If you want to say that...
And by the way, I don't even care if she gets hormone treatments or if she wants to have surgery.
It's a free country.
Do what the hell you want.
But when you start insisting that I just throw biology out the window...
I don't understand why that's any better than I, as a religious person, saying every time you say something, you have to mention God.
So I think that there's a couple of things that are going on.
One is that it's very dark, but I think that there is an element of, like, this is different, and we get to revel in the weirdness of it, but we're gonna pretend that it's all about the civil rights of it.
We're gonna feel, like, special because we're on their side.
We're not watching Caitlyn Jenner because it's a curiosity and because it's weird and entertaining.
We're doing it because we're on Caitlyn Jenner's side.
I mean, again, I don't care if you transition, do what you want to do.
But the idea that we as an entire society have to redefine what sex is, and we have to blind ourselves to what biology is, this is something I'm not willing to do.
I think that it's actually damaging to kids, particularly.
I'm willing to call Caitlyn Jenner Caitlyn Jenner.
I'm not willing to call Caitlyn Jenner a she.
Because you can't change your sex.
You can change your name.
You can change your name to whatever you want.
I don't care.
Caitlyn Jenner is not a chicken.
Caitlyn Jenner is not a woman.
Caitlyn Jenner is a man.
A biological man.
And if a man lost his penis in a tragic accident, it wouldn't make him a woman.
And if he were born with high doses of estrogen in his bloodstream, he would also not be a woman.
Right.
You're determined by your chromosomes.
And this is not even talking about intersex people.
Like, intersex is an actual status.
Intersex is a biological status.
But this nonsense that if you, Joe Rogan, decide tomorrow that you are a woman...
No surgeries, no homeowner, nothing.
You just, tomorrow, you wake up, and not decide, but you feel like a woman.
Then you have always been a woman.
We must treat you as a woman.
You don't have to change anything about yourself for us to even determine whether you're a woman.
We just, like, no.
I'm sorry, no.
I mean, like, I had mental illness.
I had a grandfather.
I get so much shit for this.
But I had a...
This is not me being unsympathetic to people who suffer from a condition that is really tragic and obviously harms people, you know, in terms of, again, the rates of suicide and depression are astounding.
My grandfather was a bipolar schizophrenic.
And it would have not been good for him or my family if people had said to him, Nate, you're right, the radio is talking to you.
Nate, you're right.
The curtains are talking to you.
They put him in a mental hospital, they gave him lithium, and then he was better, and he could actually live a normal, relatively happy life.
There's no good treatment for gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria, whatever you want to call it, but to suggest that it is a condition that doesn't require treatment, that really it's just that you're actually brain female, again, this is ascientific.
There's no scientific evidence to back this whatsoever.
Even these studies that have been done talking about there's a female brain and a male brain, first of all, if you say this to a feminist, you're a sexist.
If you say to a feminist, there's a female brain and a male brain, and the male brain works differently than the female brain, the feminist will look at you like, how dare you?
Well, it's also one of the rare times where you're allowed to celebrate classic definitions of female beauty when a man embraces him when he becomes a woman.
Lipstick, high heels, short skirt, this is like not sexist.
So the civil rights fight is immigration, or the civil rights fight is gay marriage, or the civil rights fight is transgenders.
Okay, how about this?
How about there was only one real civil rights fight, and it was about black people who had been historically oppressed in the United States for 200 years.
Yeah, okay The worst that Caitlyn Jenner had experienced is being incredibly wealthy in a high net worth suburb This is not say the transgender people don't you know aren't discriminated against right in some in some areas of American life I'm sure that's true, but it's also like behavior is not the same as being born black or being born Asian or being born with you know a disabled if
If I'm a business owner, and I hire you, and you're a man, and you come in the next day, and you're dressed in a woman's clothing saying you're a woman, but you still have a full beard, I don't see why I, as a business owner, am expected to eat the cost of that.
I was completely open and liberal about it until there was a case where a man who had been a man for 30 years became a woman for a little less than two years and then started MMA fighting women.
And beating the fuck out of these women and not proclaiming that he or she used to be a man because, in quotes, it was a medical condition that I did not need to disclose.
But again, it's so funny how the transgender movement destroys the feminist movement by living off of the sort of lies that the feminist movement promulgated.
So the feminist movement said stupid things like, women and men, equally athletic proficient.
Yeah, my daughter is into Batman, and then she was into Wonder Woman.
Like, who cares?
But what's funny about this is that the left kept saying, even when I met my wife, right, who's a conservative, and I made her more conservative when we got married because that's what men tend to do to their wives.
But she, you know, I remember early on we had a conversation about this, and I said, women don't throw like men.
And she got, like, all offended.
And I said, but that's factually true.
She said, right, but it's insulting.
It's like, no, that's factually true.
Like, I'm sorry to...
There have been studies.
Out of a thousand, if you took a woman throwing a baseball and then a thousand men throwing a baseball, the woman will throw faster.
Then out of those thousand men, this is in the book The Sports Chain, the woman will throw faster than two of those men out of a thousand.
And we're not talking about like Goose Gossage here.
It turns out that men are better even at being women than women.
No wonder feminists are pissed, and they should be.
And this whole glossing over the difference between feminists who have been claiming that women are distinct from men and important and different and better in certain ways.
Like, I don't understand how you hold these two simultaneous thoughts.
Hillary Clinton needs to be president because we need a female president.
But also, Donald Trump, if he said he was a woman tomorrow, would be a woman.
How do you hold those two simultaneous thoughts?
I always thought that in the last week of the election, if Trump thought he was going to lose, he should have just declared himself a woman, and then he too could have run as the first female president.
I've been voted as the best looking woman of all time.
One of the great arguments that I got in online, it wasn't even arguments, but so many people were calling me a bigot because of this Fallon Fox thing.
It was stunning because it was so confusing to me.
I'm like, I'm talking about defending a biological woman.
Like, these biological women, at least two of them, got the fuck beaten out of them by Fallon Fox before they found out that she used to be a man.
I'm like, that's not an issue to these people?
And so this one woman said, she's always been a woman.
And I said, okay.
She gave birth, she impregnated a woman and got her pregnant.
I go, what about then?
She goes, even then.
So even then, she was a woman.
She was fucking a woman with her dick and getting that woman pregnant.
Like, you can't, just because something's illogical, you can't just decide that someone's a bigot.
Like, we're in a weird area.
We're talking about bone structure and here's the crazy thing.
Muscle density.
There's a crazy thing is that they always rely on these gender reassignment doctors to define the terms.
And it's really interesting because I got deep, deep, deep into the rabbit hole with this because I was really shocked at how many people were angry at me.
And there is one doctor who is a board-certified endocrinologist who sort of broke it down.
She's like, not only is the science behind this crazy, but when you have gender reassignment surgery, One of the big issues with men transitioning into women is bone density.
She's like, when you have gender reassignment surgery, you're taking estrogen, which actually preserves bone density.
Not only do they have less bone density once they become a woman, they might have more.
Because you're preserving it.
You're not going to automatically be just like a woman in a year or so.
I mean, I know too much about doctoring from having spent 1,000 years with my wife's medical education to believe that doctors have the capacity to magically change a man into a woman.
Well, they say that 80% of kids who experience any sort of gender dysphoria as children grow out of it.
So when you have a society that reinforces it, and then in Canada, they're passing laws now that say that if a kid says, you know, you have a girl, and the girl says, I'm a boy, and she's three, that the government can come into your house and take the kid.
Because obviously, if you don't want to humor the kid and get the kid treatment or surgery or hormone blockers, then you're obviously doing something wrong to the kid.
This is just...
It's insane.
First of all, if anyone tried to do that with my kid, I would meet them at the door with a gun.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff where you're talking legit civil war.
Like, when you say that the government can take people's kids from them because the government knows better than you how to parent your kids on basic things like, are you a boy or a girl?
That's going to get violent pretty quickly.
If you send someone to my door with a gun saying, I'm taking your daughter from you because your daughter says she's a boy at school and you're not going to take her to a psychiatrist to start her transitioning process...
But how did we get so crazy that that becomes an option that people aren't They're not paying attention to the massive variables that a child encounters.
Psychological variables, stress variables, what's going on in the home, what's happening hormonally, what's happening psychologically, what is happening to you, and how can you decide, like, this is it.
You're going to allow this kid to make a lockdown decision to begin gender transition surgery at, like, 9 or 10 years old.
Yeah, and then they'll show you this girl who's like 13, who used to be a boy, and you see her act and talk, and they go, how could you imagine that this isn't a girl?
I'm gonna go with the fact that there's a Y chromosome in every cell of that person's body, except, ironically, for some of his sperm cells to tell me that that's probably a boy.
And yes, you can block the manifestation of some physical characteristics.
That does not change the chromosomes.
And there are legitimately intersex people, right?
I mean, there are people who legitimately have conditions like Kleinfelter syndrome.
I mean, these are actual biological things.
But if you're telling me any boy can be a girl, no.
No.
The answer is no.
And that's not biologically correct.
And you're not doing any sort of service to a child, especially evidenceless.
I mean, you're doing no service to a child by humoring what is obviously a mental condition.
And a mental condition, by the way, again, linked 40% lifetime suicide rate is higher than any other population on planet Earth by a whopping margin.
I mean, telling kids that we are going to force you into that, like you express when you're five that you think you're the opposite sex.
And now at eight, we're going to transition you into this.
And your suicide rate is exactly the same as somebody who didn't do that.
Or it's very similar to somebody who didn't do that?
And, like, this is somehow supposed to benefit the person?
And as someone who doesn't experience gender dysphoria, I like to, I mean, when someone's got some sort of an issue, whatever it is, whether you call it an issue or a condition or whatever the fuck it is, and I don't have it, I try to be as...
Stand-offish.
I tried to be as objective.
I tried to be as kind as possible.
This is a weird one, though.
This is a weird one because it's become some sort of a fad, and any criticism of it whatsoever, even discussion of it, you are labeled as a transphobic piece of shit.
Yeah, I think it's only weird, honestly, because it's run into the weird sexual politics that dominates in the country.
Because if we were to talk about anorexia, which is a form of body dysphoria, or if we were to talk about, I mean, there actually is something body identity integrity disorder, right?
Where people want to lose an arm.
We would be saying, well, the problem is in your brain, it's not in your arm.
Chopping off your arm seems a little extreme, but if you want to do that, go ahead.
But if you were a kid and a five-year-old, you wouldn't say, oh, well, this kid's going to suffer with this their entire life.
Let's just chop off their arm now.
Let's prevent their arm from developing.
This is not...
And to tell the entire society that this is a positive good is a whole other thing.
It's one thing to try and treat people who have a disorder humanely.
It's another thing to redefine the terms of the entire civilization as well as biology in order to fit that.
It's valuing the subjective over the objective.
Science is objective.
Your feelings about who you are is subjective.
You can have those feelings, but once you are trying to translate those feelings into the objective standard we all must hold by, now you're encroaching on my territory.
It's not just you doing what you want to do anymore.
You're telling me what I have to do, and that's a different thing.
Now, when people say that there's this 40% suicide rate amongst transgender people, one of the arguments that I've heard is it's because they're not accepted.
I would like to know, is gender dysphoria, is it in a similar percentile as anorexia, or what bodybuilders get, or what strippers get when they get triple F tits?
And listen, I'm not saying that we should mistreat people, but if, again, you're talking about an entire society being forced to redefine basic biological terminology, then, like...
Be an adult.
Live with this.
I'm happy to treat you with...
Listen, I would hire a transgender person, but I'm not going to change what reality is in order to humor you.
If you call yourself Napoleon, I'm not going to call you Napoleon.
Well, I mean, I think that you would have to think about, you know— Typical aspects of reliability just the same way you would with any other mental disorder if you knew somebody was was manic depressive Which is super common and you have somebody who's equally qualified who's not manic depressive You might think well that might have an effect on how they do their job.
Yeah, so maybe I mean, I You know, I haven't had enough personal experience with Transgender people to know whether it would impact a secretarial job or something probably not Yeah, probably not but it's it but again to pretend that like transgenders in the military This seems to me like a decision that should be made my military people Who actually have to determine how much does this impact the job?
And if you already have a group of people with a 40% suicide rate who have higher levels of instability as a group, not individually, as a group, and you're choosing which groups to pick from to be on the front lines in small units living under severe pressure for months at a time, is that what you're going to go for?
Or is that something where you'd have to overcome certain presumptions in order to get there?
Two minutes later, he was back to tweeting about Sessions.
This was the part about that I didn't like.
Like, I actually agree that there is a question as to whether the military should be recruiting transgender people because I think that the military has certain, like, it creates a bunch of questions.
Not just questions about who showers with whom, but also questions like, okay, you have a transgender man.
Does he have to fill the female standards of fitness or the male standards of fitness?
You have a group of men, and now you have a man who's technically a man, but do you treat him as a woman?
Does he have to carry the same amount of stuff as the guy?
How does that work exactly?
The cost of gender transition surgery and hormones and psychologists, does that come into play at all here?
Would you recruit from the anorexic community for the military?
These are like real questions.
But that said, that's why they commissioned a study from General Mattis at Department of Defense.
He was going to look into all of this and then give a report in six months.
And Trump just sort of tweeted it out there.
I agree that I think that Trump's general, you know, his general attitude on it is probably correct in terms of what the military is there doing, what it's not there to do.
But what I don't agree with is how he did it at all.
Because it's disrespectful to the people in the military who are transgender.
I mean, like, I wouldn't want to find out in a tweet.
I want a better rationale than two tweets, and then we're back to, you know, like, look, they're doing more than I. I mean, they're serving the military.
I didn't serve in the military.
It seems like it would be pretty hypocritical of me to say, well, it's perfectly respectful to say in two tweets you're out because that's the way it is without any sort of supporting argumentation.
And he didn't actually implement a policy.
He didn't give the policy to the Defense Department so they could even implement it.
The Pentagon says they're not implementing it because they don't have a policy.
So there was a story at BuzzFeed that was kind of funny.
They went and interviewed a bunch of people in the Pentagon, and a bunch of the people in the Pentagon were like, during that 10-minute gap, I didn't know whether we were going to nuclear war or what, right?
unidentified
Because that first tweet was like, we will no longer accept it.
Could have been North Korea's missile test program.
Yeah, but this, again, is evidence, you know, I think it's an example of, even if I think the policy is good, good policy done the wrong way is actually counterproductive for the policies that I want to see done.
Like, I want it laid out by Mattis.
I want it laid out by Defense Department.
I want all the reasons laid out so we can have a good discussion over it.
I don't really want just, like, thought vomit on Twitter.
Well, it also seems that this issue is such a hot issue, and it's also an issue that you're not really allowed to have an opinion on, other than the standard opinion that this has always been a woman trapped in a man's body, and this is the way it is, and it's totally healthy.
By the way, this Descartesian notion that it's like the soul in the machine, and there's a woman deep down for 40 years who had three children with a man's penis, and now is escaping.
So there's that clip of me that's gone around the internet a fair bit where I'm talking to a college girl about this and she's saying, like, men can be women and women can be men.
And then it finally hits her and it's like, well...
Yeah.
I think this is what's kind of frightening about the age we live in is that we can't even come up with common definitions of basic things.
How are we supposed to have conversations with each other if you can't decide what a man is or what a woman is or whether a scientific fact ought to be relevant or not?
At least we could decide what was a scientific fact or not before, and now it's like the subjective has just eaten everything.
If I don't think it's a scientific fact, it's no longer a scientific fact, and therefore I no longer accept it.
It is no longer about your freedom to be your authentic self when you're talking about either legislation that impacts how I run my business or how I raise my child, or you are suggesting that it is my duty to humor your authentic self.
Like, I think there are a lot of people who do stupid crap their entire lives.
It's not my job to humor their authentic self.
I mean, I'm pro-drug legalization, but I've never done drugs, and I think that drugs are stupid.
You know, don't tell me that I have to, like, cheer when somebody smokes a joint.
And the one I thought was amazing was the NCAA saying they were going to remove the Final Four from North Carolina because they passed the bathroom bill in North Carolina.
And I asked online, okay, so when are you going to abolish the separate male and female divisions of the NCAA? I mean, you've said that we can't have separate male and female bathrooms where biological males play and, you know, where biological males go to one bathroom and biological females go to another.
So why do you have separate divisions?
Why do you have an NCAA women's division and an NCAA men's division?
Also, this raises a bunch of other weird questions.
Like, okay, there's been this...
Again, you want to talk about weird.
There's been this weird push in parts of the trans community to suggest that a male who doesn't want to have sex with a biological male who says he's a female is now a sexist against women.
It's definitely weird, but I have seen the arguments in the blog posts and the tweets about men who discriminate against trans women, who do not want to date trans women.
What I've heard of the argument about bodybuilding is that they suffer from it as well, is that in order to get that big, you almost have to have some sort of a body dysmorphia.
You have to not understand how insanely huge you are.
Or be really into it.
Their argument is they're really into it, which makes sense to me.
But I've heard people say that it's almost like a reverse anorexia.
And it also came from TV. Like TV, it was going to be, men are going to be hairless now.
This is the new trend, men are going to be hairless.
You don't even get the Burt Reynolds-like, you know, bear chest anymore.
So if people are susceptible to even that with regard to fashion, like people have, for five years, people convinced themselves that skinny jeans were a thing.
People are open to virtually any sort of suggestion.
So assuming that culture has no impact, and this goes against the whole born this way aspect of even the homosexual rights movement, the gay rights movement, that says, oh, you were born this way.
I agree that there's a genetic component to sexual behavior, but the idea that that's why 50% of the UK population has shifted toward, you know, I'm open to anything.
But I think also it's like they're trying to impress people.
You know, there's an Adam Carolla thing, right, where Adam has a whole shtick about, like, in the future, there's going to be a point where guys are considered gay if they won't kiss another dude.
There's also this thing that I think happens when you have two very clear sides, you know, where you have teams, and you sort of have a line in the sand that you're not supposed to cross, and there's the right side, and there's the left side.
I think that, especially in this last election, I think that was true.
I think that people felt so alienated by the other side.
Like, to understand a lot of people who voted Trump, you have to understand that there are a lot of people in the country who felt insulted by the left.
They were just sick of being called racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes every time someone wanted to advance a policy on the left.
And so they said, okay, screw that.
At least Trump's not calling me that.
So I'll do that.
And then there are a bunch of people on the left who now feel insulted by Trump's even presence, and they think all the people who voted for Trump are those people, and so they're fighting racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia by voting against Trump.
Again, we go back to this, and there's a hardening of, there's not one bubble in the country, there's two.
You know, the right likes to accuse the left of being in a bubble in the coast.
There's a bubble on the right, too, which is the idea that everybody on the, every piece of the media is lying to you.
The New York Times is always fake news.
Everything is fake news.
You don't like it, it's fake news.
These bubbles are not healthy for the Republic.
I mean, we can't have conversations with each other if we do this routine.
But I think that once you label somebody completely evil, You have a responsibility not to debate with them.
You have a responsibility not to talk with them.
Even the conversation legitimizes them.
Listen, I'm sure you're going to get a bunch of shit from people for even having me on because the idea is going to be, well, how could you have on somebody like Shapiro?
You're legitimizing his point of view by having him on.
I know a lot of people who I politically disagree with who have had that experience will have me on their show and it's like, how dare you have Shapiro on because you're just granting him cover.
Or we can just have a conversation and maybe we'll disagree and maybe we'll agree.
Yeah, I really don't give a fuck about those people.
I think that's a silly conversation.
I feel like you should talk to everybody.
And if you disagree or agree, I have friends on that.
My friend yesterday on Eddie Bravo, he believes in everything's a fucking conspiracy.
I disagree with him wildly and I love him like a brother.
I don't think you have to agree with people and I don't think you have to...
The idea that you can't just have a conversation with someone about something and see if you can find middle ground or see if you could clearly define their point of view or find their perspective, that's missing today in a weird way.
And one of the weirdest things about the election was the ping pong match between the left and the right as played out on national television by the media.
I would watch, especially cable news, I would watch Fox News and then go to CNN and go back and forth and flip channels.
You know you have that previous channel button on the DirecTV?
If you read the right-wing media, there was no way Romney was going to lose.
And if you read the left-wing media, there was no way Romney was going to win.
And she said, which one of these do I believe?
And I said, it's probably somewhere in the middle.
Like, I have a basic rule, which is that if you have a New York Times report, and then you have a report from my site, The Daily Wire, and they share the facts, you can probably assume the facts are true.
But the opinions that are, you know, embedded with the facts...
Those are opinions.
And that's what's so hard about, I think, the modern media landscape is trying to separate the facts from the opinion.
And so this is why when Trump says fake news, he's not wrong that CNN hates him and the New York Times hates him.
He's right about that.
But just labeling it all fake news is inaccurate also because most of what they're reporting is true, right?
It's just that it's biased.
Something can be both true and biased.
I'm true and biased, right?
I say things that I think are factual, but I'm obviously conservative.
And this is where I think the right is correct about CNN and the New York Times and some of the other networks.
Like, if you ask the right, what pisses you off more, CNN or MSNBC? Most people on the right will say CNN, not MSNBC. Because MSNBC is honest enough to say we're on the left, and CNN pretends we have no bias.
You know, one of my most fascinating characters of this whole play was Scott Adams.
And particularly because Scott Adams, when I had him on my podcast, he was saying he doesn't even vote.
And he's like, what I am paying attention to, he goes, I am a trained hypnotist, and I'm paying attention to the powers of persuasion, and I'm looking at trends, and I'm making some predictions that turned out to be accurate.
And he's like, he's looking at Trump, and he's not talking about Trump in these glowing terms.
He's talking about him as being an effective persuader.
And he lost millions of dollars because of that opinion.
Talking about a guy that he's not even going to vote for.
I mean, this is all leading up to the election where people were fucking furious at him.
And even more furious at him after Trump won, because he would do those coffee with Scott things that he does on Periscope, where he wakes up and he just starts asking questions.
And he's so measured and calm.
He had a podcast recently with Sam Harris where I think he was just like...
A little too far over the edge of apologizing for some of Trump's behavior and sort of attributing some of Trump's behavior to that you could say was incompetence and attributed to some sort of a master plan.
This is my only quarrel with Scott, I think, is that he tends to believe that everything Trump does is 987 degree underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry hippos.
Like, everything is just, it's all just acts of genius and it's three steps down the road.
Like, every single person who was involved in the campaign I knew.
This was a stumble their way to victory.
Like, it is amazing.
Human beings are, we need to think, it's sort of like the Joker says in The Dark Knight, we need to think there's a plan.
We always need to think there's a plan.
And so if Trump won, it must be because there was some master plan that he unveiled over the course of the campaign.
Three weeks before the election, he was caught on tape saying that he wanted to grab women by the P word.
No, there was no master plan.
It's just that Hillary was an awful candidate and no one liked her.
Even the idea that there was a broad national movement for Trump that wasn't there for other candidates, he won fewer votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney did and he won the state.
And that's because no one liked Hillary.
I mean, the untold story of the election is this was not a referendum on Donald Trump.
This was a referendum on Hillary Clinton, particularly in the heartland, and people hated her guts.
Barack Obama won Ohio walking away.
Everyone talks about Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Nobody talks about Ohio.
Trump won Ohio walking away.
One of the reasons he won Ohio walking away is because in 2012, Barack Obama really drove out the black vote.
The percentage of the black vote, typically in Ohio, it's like 10% of the general vote.
In 2012, it was like 13% to 15% of the general vote.
And that was the entire margin of victory for Obama in the state of Ohio.
Hillary got closer to sort of the traditional percentages, and she lost in a whopping blowout in Ohio.
No one likes Hillary Clinton.
And the left was so arrogant that they thought, we can take the most unpopular, unlikable...
Unqualified, nasty, boring human being anyone has seen for 20 years.
And we'll run her.
She's the one we'll run.
But do you understand how incompetent you have to be to lose to a celebrity game show host?
I think we all should be happy with that because the only way things were supposed to get passed was with wide public support, right?
Which is probably a good thing.
We don't want the government shifting wildly and veering on its axis every four years or every two years.
I like the gridlock.
My big problem is that the gridlock now protects a huge system that I don't like that's been built up over 100 years in the case of growth of government.
But I like the gridlock.
But that's one promise that's made.
And then people are disappointed.
Oh, if we get in there, we're going to repeal Obamacare.
It's like, no, you're not.
You're not.
I mean, like, you can promise it, but now you're not gonna do it because you were full of crap when you said it, and now you're not gonna do it.
And the gridlock is there, and it's hard to change things.
You know, it takes a tremendous effort of will and electoral power to actually change things in a big way.
So this idea, we'll elect Trump, and Trump would say, it's all gonna be so easy.
It's like...
No, it's not.
It wasn't easy for Obama.
Obama passed Obamacare and that was it for his presidency.
He can do anything for the next six years.
There were no major pieces of legislation.
Nothing happened after that.
He lost Congress and that was it.
Okay, so that's promise number one.
The other promise is your anger is justified.
And this is the one I hate even more.
And that is the idea that, you know, in regular life, when you have kids, I have kids, when your kid is angry, the first thing you have to teach your kid is maybe you're wrong to be angry sometimes.
Your anger is not justified.
If you want to make good human beings, You have to determine whether they are right to be angry.
Is your anger correct?
Politicians are in the business of justifying people's anger.
Oh, you heard this about the Trump voter a lot, right?
They're so angry.
They're so angry.
Okay, well, I'm angry too about things, but are they angry about the right things?
And Trump would say, you're right to be angry because you've lost your job in Podunk, Ohio, because it's being stolen by the Chinese or by the Mexicans or something.
And it's like, well, is that factually true or are you just...
Are you just pandering to the anger?
And on the left, you hear people say this to black folks in the inner city.
It's the system that's keeping you down.
It's a racist, white supremacist system that's keeping you down.
Say, well, is that true?
Or are you just pandering to the voter?
Because it's hard to tell people hard truths, like you're not right to be angry, get off your ass and do something with your life.
And this is true regardless of race.
You know, go out there.
No one cares enough to stop you in your life.
Your life is your own.
No one in the United States cares about you, wants to stop you, wants to throw obstacles up in your own way.
I'm not sure you can win an election on the basis of go live your own life, even though everyone keeps claiming they want to live their own life.
I think most people are full of it.
I think most people don't want to live their own life.
They want a politician to tell them that all of their complaints about life being unfair are justified, and the politician's going to solve all that.
Well, there's certainly a lot of that when you're talking to adults because you're dealing with people that have the momentum of all their failures in their life and all the different things that are not going right.
And then here they are at this moment today, right now.
And they want to figure out why and why they're not on track and how to get on track.
And the easiest way is to point the finger or blame someone else.
And everybody has their own hand.
I'm not saying that people's hands are fair and that, you know, one person doesn't have it easy.
But the reality is there's a tremendous amount of psychological factors that go into why someone does or does not succeed and to placate them or to play on those psychological factors as not being their own fault.
And I think that's what politicians have become in the business of doing.
And it's both right and left.
It's people saying that it's not your fault because you're being screwed by some foreign country.
It's not your fault because the immigrants are doing it to you.
It's not your fault...
Maybe some of that's true, but you have to show me why it's true.
Did you lose your job because of China, or did you lose your job because you're in an industry that is being crowded out because of technological change and because your union struck and created wages too high to be globally competitive?
Let's look at the actual logic here, and then how can we change it?
How can we make it better?
Is it something we have to do, or is it a matter of you need to broaden your skill set?
You see a lot of people now who are stuck in the mindset of 30 years ago that you're going to work a job and stay there for 20 years, and then you're going to leave with a gold watch.
That's not the way the job market works anymore.
If you're entering the job market right now as a college student, you can expect that in the next 10 years you'll probably work four jobs.
The turnover is too great, and you have to be constantly increasing your skill set.
Also, with every new innovation, there's businesses that branch out and become new, and then there's also businesses that die, and there's no bringing them back.
You're not going to bring back the printing press.
And, you know, this is the great fallacy that people have been trying to fight since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, is this idea, okay, well, the new technology is going to kill jobs, and then no one will ever work again.
So we've had the same unemployment rate in this country for the last hundred years, and the technology is a little bit better.
Like, how is that going to work for all the other industries that are affected?
Let's say that you now have...
You're artificially raising the prices of all the goods that now have to be brought in by the Teamsters, and now it's more expensive, so it's more money out of your pocket and my pocket.
That's money that...
Maybe I was willing to buy American, but now I'm going to buy Chinese because I have to feed my family.
So that's one of the issues, is that with a lot of the...
So the automated trucks, basically, in order for them to work, you need dedicated lanes.
Because otherwise, human error is such that if there's a Google car on the road, and you're a bad driver, the Google car is probably going to get in a crash, or might be more likely to get in a crash than if it were human driving.
It's sort of like how there's a lot of fuel-efficient lighter cars on the road, but they're a lot more dangerous than the heavier cars, because the heavier cars, the clunkers, are still around from 1970, and they're tanks.
Because that's a subject that comes up a lot lately.
When Elon Musk is talking about these driverless cars, one of the things he's saying is that one thing that we're going to need is universal basic income.
He said we're going to have to figure out some way to feed all these people that are going to get taken out of the job market because their jobs have become irrelevant.
So I think that universal basic income is for when the technology gets so good that there legitimately are no jobs.
I don't think that we're there yet.
So if you have a machine that can make everything basically for free, and then there's a bunch of people who you don't need anymore to do work, then you can talk about a universal basic income because there's no scarcity.
Scarcity is what creates a need for labor.
So if there's scarcity in any industry, then there's going to be a need for labor.
There's going to be a need for new labor.
People are going to still have to work on these trucks and deal with technology.
And the computer industry didn't destroy jobs all over the United States when typewriters went out.
So I think it's a little premature.
I'm not sure there will ever be a day when the machine society is so well-developed that it can take over all jobs.
I do think you're seeing a bifurcation in the labor market.
So I think people who are in jobs like yours and mine, we're lucky.
This is a creative job.
It's hard for machines to create.
But for jobs that are single-task jobs, a lot more of those are going to be technologically driven.
And so people are going to have to, you know, work the right side of their brain a little bit.
We're going to have to train people in a different way.
But my perspective on universal basic income is when you have a 4% unemployment rate, it's very difficult to say you need a universal basic income.
It's, again, 96% of people in the labor market who can work are working.
So that's not...
That's not suggesting to me that there's this vast underclass of people who are totally incapable of working.
And once you do that, you see what you've seen actually with the disability programs in the United States, right?
Where now everybody's on disability.
Like the fastest growing government program in America is the disability program, where people declare themselves disabled so that they can get government pensions, basically.
Once you have a universal basic income, is there an incentive to work?
And also, I'm not sure that you've solved a lot of people's problems.
Like people still need something to do with their day.
How many 60-year-olds do you see who retire and they're dead within three years?
Again, I hope I never retire because I just know too many people who retire and they're, oh, I'm going to retire and I'm going to golf and I'm going to paint.
Well, people enjoy doing things and feeling like they're valuable.
And I don't know if that necessarily has to be a job, but it's a very clear, definitive test of whether or not you're valuable.
If somebody gives you money, and you get that money, and you're like, look, I'm valuable, I'm doing something, I'm contributing, I've got a check for my week's worth.
I mean, I like what I'm doing in the sense that I get to work on what people believe, which I think is sort of the root of politics.
I'm not sure implementing is the same thing.
As I said, I'm not sure that the president can get...
Like, I'm more focused on getting people to think in the terms that I'd like them to think, you know, about limited government and you taking control of your own life.
And I might be able to do more good We're promulgating that message using a growing medium.
We're very lucky.
The podcast went from having 3,000 listeners 300 episodes ago to now we have 300,000 listeners a day.
It continues to grow.
As that crowd continues to grow, it's actually harder for me to say I want to jump into politics, not easier, I think.
The limited government thing to me has always been a fascinating subject because the people that don't want limited government, that is the utopian ideal in my mind, that somehow or another the government's going to be effective if you give them more money.
I had an argument with a friend where he wanted...
People to be taxed more because he felt like that money could be distributed to people and you would get more funding for the arts was one of his arguments.
But my thought was like, first of all, the arts, when people like them, they pay for them.
That's not good.
And funding for the arts means you're going to have fucking LACMA. You go to the LA County Museum of Art and you have a fucking box on the ground that someone's calling a piece of art.
Did you see that guy, I think he went to, it was either in San Francisco or LACMA where he went there and he took off his glasses and he just put them on the floor and then he stood next to them going, you know, kind of standing there and kind of stroking his chin.
Seeing there were 30 people all around him staring at the glasses on the floor.
And it's also stoking those fires of pretension and making something that's not legitimately creative, making it celebrated because you don't really have the ability to create something that's legitimately creative.
Yeah, I was pointing this out today with regard to...
It's funny how a lot of people who want bigger government, they embrace states that start to grow the government, and then when things go to shit, they're like nowhere to be found.
So Venezuela is the most obvious example, right?
Venezuela has turned from what was the richest country in South America and had the best oil reserves of anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, basically.
They've turned it into just a garbage heap.
People waiting in lines.
I have a friend named Nami Horwitz who went down there, did some documentary stuff down there.
And he was, I think his cameraman got shot.
He was watching people like literally shooting dogs in the streets for food.
And this is, I mean, Caracas is the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere now.
And all of this is because Hugo Chavez was a piece of garbage who centralized all power to himself, redistributed the wealth to all of his friends and cronies, and then supposedly uplifted the poor, except that now everyone is poor.
So on my show today, I played like Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson and that freak Jeremy Corbyn, who's the head of the Labor Party in Great Britain, and they're all just praising Chavez, right?
He's a great guy.
He was a hero to the poor.
And now, Venezuela's going to shit, and where are all these people?
Would someone stick a camera in Sean Penn's face, like now, and just ask Sean Penn?
So like five minutes ago, you were saying this was awesome.
Normal socialism is the state owns the whole thing, but democratic socialism is there's private industry, but only to a certain point, and then we tell people no, no more.
But then you find out about Bernie and his wife, and his wife's idea was to buy up a bunch of land and expand the college, and then the fucking college went under, and now they're being sued and investigated.
Like, what would you propose for the United States?
Like, the United States, obviously, what Trump wants to do is reinvigorate manufacturing, make things in America again, bring back the labor force, take away the jobs that are going overseas and other countries in South America.
But since I don't care, right, since I'm not a politician, my view is that if you want a thriving economy, you relieve as much regulation as possible, you lower the taxes for everyone, personal and corporate, you attract as much foreign investment as possible, and you allow people to build businesses with as little risk as possible, And then you allow them to compete, and if they succeed, they succeed, and if they fail, they fail.
And you get rid of tariffs as well, because I want cheap inputs for my products, and I want cheap products on the shelves at the store so I don't have to pay a bajillion dollars for a pair of shoes.
So my view of this is that economics is an element of freedom.
I am a free person.
I get to do with my money what I damn well please, and you don't get to stand in my way unless there is some sort of moral thing, right?
Like, if you want to say, let's put sanctions on Iran, let's put sanctions on China, right?
China's funding North Korea right now.
It hurts our national security.
We want to put sanctions on China to try and pressure them into ending North Korea.
That's a national security thing.
But the idea that, like today, Trump rolled out this new plan on immigration, and he says, I want to cut down on legal immigration, but the reason is because I want to raise wages of people in the United States.
And I think, well, that's not productive, because what you're actually doing is you're restricting the supply of labor, artificially increasing the wages, which artificially increases prices, which means it's not competitive on a global scale, which means the companies outsource.
It's the exact same thing as minimum wage.
You create a minimum wage, you're artificially increasing wages, that increases prices, that makes it non-competitive, people outsource.
So it actually achieves the opposite of what you're trying to achieve.
All government intervention in the economy, save for interventions that are designed to prevent externalities, you know, things that I do that hurt you, all of those are unjustified in my view.
Yeah, that's one of the most disturbing things about this administration is the cutting the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and the changing of their standards, removing some of the funding for things like satellites that they're using to track the climate change and things along those lines.
That scares the shit out of me.
It scares the shit out of me that they're going to ignore the environment in favor of the economy.
What I don't appreciate is when people kind of futz the evidence, when it's like, oh, well, I set my water on fire because of fracking.
It's like, well, no, that's not because of fracking.
That's because of the groundwater.
But in any case, as far as the satellites and global warming, listen, I think that...
It's pretty clear that the climate is warming.
I mean, the greenhouse gas effect is a thing.
The question to me is less whether it's happening and more what are you going to do about it?
Because even the left seems to have no real solutions as to what to do except for massively cutting economic growth.
And it seems to me that if we're talking about an increase according to the IPCC of something like 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of the next century, then on average, right, not universally on average, then it seems to me that it's easier to just say that the climate changes over time and maybe cities that are on the coast are going to have to pull back a little bit over time.
Like 100 years is a long time.
100 years ago we would have said that the pollution was the chief...
Yeah, exactly.
And now, not really even through regulation, but just through market competition, you've gotten better environmental products.
So I think that the market does take care of a lot of these things.
People don't actually want to live in human waste, you know, like, we actually don't want to do that, so.
Tucker Carlson kept saying, okay, but you're talking about science, so tell me how much of an effect do human beings have on climate change, and what's the science?
Show me.
And all he wanted to say was that, you know, are you a climate?
It doesn't even have to be an exact number, but give me a range, and then tell me, okay, what do we have to do, in your opinion, in order to stop the climate change where it stands, or if we can't do that in order to minimize it, what's the actual risk also?
People keep giving these catastrophic scenarios where it looks like the day after tomorrow, and Dennis Quaid running into subways and shit.
You know, Randall Carlson, who's been on my podcast a few times, and he's an expert in collisions, in asteroidal collisions, and one of the things he said is, like, he goes, global warming is not great.
So I think that if you're going to worry about the emissions problem, worry about the sea absorption of emissions, like the toxification of the oceans.
That seems to me to be a bigger problem than the climate changing over time.
I mean, Venice, the sea level rises in Venice every year.
People are going to move.
I mean, that's the way it works.
There's this weird idea, and it's true in economics, it's true with global warming, that where you were born is where you must die, right?
And that you can never move.
And it's like, well, this is the most mobile society in human history.
We can get on a plane and be on the other coast in six hours.
It's easier to move than ever before.
So if you really think that the climate is that bad, first of all, I'd like to ask Barbara Streisand, if she's that deeply concerned about global warming, why she doesn't sell her coastline estate.
But it's like, am I going to lose a lot of sleep if a bunch of Hollywood stars lose, you know, five feet off their coastline because we didn't kill the industry of the United States and lose $4 trillion a year?
That when Tucker Carlson was challenging him on it, he didn't have any data to support this argument.
He just wanted to sort of, like, play word games and have this, you know, saying, well, you know, you guys on CNN, there was one time when they had some guy on who was saying exactly what we were saying, that the models, they have not been proven to be accurate, and that Al Gore's movie predicted that we'd be underwater in 2014. Like, didn't it?
Like, he's made a shitload of money off of giving these speeches and...
The whole thing is very strange because it becomes this untouchable subject like what we're talking about before with transgender people or with many other subjects become you can't discuss them They're not even open to debate or scrutiny they they become locked down and when Tucker Carlson was pressing Bill Nye, like, what are the numbers?
Like, what is happening?
Tell me how much of an effect are we having?
And Bill Nye had nothing on it, and he just became stammered and started getting angry, and it's like, wow, this is weird.
We see some people that are just really good at, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, and you get them in the podcast, and after, like, Peter Schiff's a great example of that.
After, like, 20 minutes, I'm like, you want a drink?
Let's have some whiskey.
We had a couple of glasses of clink, cheers, and we settled down, and then he settled into, like, a normal way of talking, but he's just so used to, like, force-feeding you facts and opinions and...
It's such an ineffective way to communicate with those three heads and the one person who's the host, Megyn Kelly throwing a question, and then this person's talking over that person.
It's the only place left that you can do this, unless you're making YouTube videos, and you know, Jordan Peterson is obviously finding out that that's a problem, but unless you're doing something along those lines where no one's there but you, and you get to expand and express yourself,
there's no other form of conversation like podcasts where you're not getting interrupted by a commercial, you're just talking, and you know, as well as I know, that conversations sort of evolve and move and They, you know, when I get to know you better, I see how you're thinking better, and I kind of have more questions to ask, and you expand more, and you get to know a person for real, and that's just, those television shows are so, it's so divisive in that way.
Yeah, Anderson Cooper's sitting there in the middle, and there's people, and then there's people that are just- It's like, ooh, I made a diagonal, cool.
And they're interrupting each other and said, excuse me while I talk, you mind not interrupting me for a moment?
Like, they're grandstanding and trying to have this point they think is going to be a zinger because they wrote it last night, and it's just like, ugh.
And I think that, you know, part of that is, there are people who are experts on particular topics who could, I'm sure, know more about their specialty than I do on a lot of topics.
Of course.
Like, if I were to discuss climate change with a person who was, like, an expert on climate change, I would not know as much as that person.
I think it's also worth noting the market makes these things better in many cases.
I mean, the fact is that if you look at the areas where, for example, everyone is down on carbon-based fuels, okay, fair enough, but if you go to places that don't have carbon-based fuels, they're burning animal dung and wood.
There's nothing worse for particulate than animal dung and wood.
And if we did even better than this, we would get to nuclear power, which, unfortunately, a lot of people have banned because of unbased fears.
Most of France's electricity is provided by nuclear power, and that's about as clean as it gets.
Even in worst case scenario at Fukushima, I mean, if you're talking about global warming and environmental damage, the amount of environmental damage supposedly done by carbon emissions is a lot larger than Fukushima.
This is from 2003. Yeah, sometimes the statistics on cancer are hard to correlate, because you'll have groupings that are sort of weird, and that's just because random statistical grouping happens.
So how much of it is due to X factor or Y factor?
If we knew that, then presumably the cancer rates would be going down a lot, and they haven't really in most cases.
It's pretty rare you have like a lung cancer situation where smoking obviously causes lung cancer.
Also the valley itself, like anything that happens in the valley, like when you drive from like Thousand Oaks over the hill and you look down at the valley and you're like, Jesus, that can't be good.
Again, I wonder how much of the car emission standards...
There's actually a pretty thriving debate in the libertarian community, particularly, about whether CAFE standards are what drove greater fuel efficiency or whether it was the price of gas that drove greater fuel efficiency.
And as the price of gas has risen and fallen, you see people change their buying habits.
In the 90s, everybody bought an SUV, and then the prices went up and everybody bought a Prius.
Well, the Prius thing is interesting too, particularly the Tesla thing, because then you look at the environmental disasters of creating these batteries.
The one thing we know is that there are millions of people all over the world for all of human history who've been living in absolute penury and misery.
And we now support 7 billion people on the planet.
And the rate of global poverty has dropped by 50% in the last 30 years.
A lot of that is technological change.
A lot of that is fossil fuel use.
And so before we...
These are two things that are worth thinking about balancing.
And this is what's...
Again, a little frustrating is that sometimes you see people on the environmental left who will say, well, this has to be done, or it's the end of the world.
And it's like, well, how about those people in developing countries?
How many of those people are you going to say have to live in poverty in order for this to happen?
And then on the right, you'll see people say, well, no environmental regulations at all, just let it all hash out.
And, you know, sometimes the market hashes it out, and sometimes the market doesn't hash it out.
And so, you know, I think a little caution is warranted.
You know, I'm not arrogant quite enough to think that a lot of those people know who I am.
I think that what happens is that there's sort of a call that goes out from a select few saying, this KKK member's coming to campus, go stop him.
And that's what happened to Cal State LA. Like, when I spoke there, there were actually a couple professors were telling their students that I was a closeted member of the KKK. Meanwhile, you show up wearing a yarmulke.
I'm their favorite person, the KKK. I'm like a charter member.
It's my thing.
I was literally, in 2016, it was hilarious.
That year, 2016 was a wild year.
So David Duke accused me of being a far leftist.
Black Lives Matter accused me of being a member of the KKK. And I was the number one recipient of anti-Semitism from the, according to the Anti-Defamation League, I was the number one recipient of Twitter anti-Semitism in the United States for journalists last year.
Once Trump was elected, then it was like, okay, if he does good stuff, I'll praise him, and if he does bad stuff, I'll hit him, as I would any other president.
So, I've been sort of, you know, calling balls and strikes with him, and some of the stuff like Gorsuch I love, and some of the stuff like Mikko Brzezinski's bloody face I'm not so hot on.
But, yeah, so I think what led off was, it was a combination of three things.
One, I'm Jewish.
And obviously so.
Two, I was working at Breitbart and then I quit in the middle of the election cycle.
Do you remember the Michelle Fields incident?
Where Corey Lewandowski grabbed a reporter from Breitbart by the arm hard enough to bruise her.
So I won't say that Breitbart directed it at me, because I don't think they did, but I think that there are a lot of people who follow Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos, and they were pissed at me, and they'd seen me as an ally, and now they saw me as an enemy, and this kind of thing.
I mean, I've said this to a bunch of college students about, you know, the alt-right.
First of all, I think it's important to mention, a lot of people who say they're alt-right aren't actually alt-right.
Just because you like a meme doesn't make you alt-right.
But, like, there's a group of people who actually like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and the race-based identity politics of white supremacy.
And those people are actually alt-right.
When the alt-right is coming after you, then it's not a lot of fun.
But there are a lot of young students who will retweet things from, like, things that are obviously nasty and are going to hurt them in their future career.
That everybody was willing to take Donald Sterling's team away from him because he said something shitty to his girlfriend about Magic Johnson when there's no evidence that there's actual discrimination among clients at the Clippers.
Again, if there are actual evidence of discrimination, then sure, boycott his team and do what the NBA has to do.
But like...
I'm pretty certain that every human being says crappy things to their intimate loved ones about groups of people and other people.
And if this now becomes the standard, then I think that we're all toast.
Yeah, Anderson Cooper goes, he starts laughing, he goes, no, I've never had that experience.
Well, Anderson, when you do fall in love with a woman, and he's so unaware, and it's like, I'm sorry, like, I can't consider this guy, like, he's a KKK threatening figure.
Like, the guy can't even, like, find the toilet in the mornings.
He's, like, stumbling over his ottoman, like, Dick Van Dyke.
I had a bit I did about him defending him, where I was like, because if you look at what he actually said, everybody's like, he's a racist, he's a terrible person.
He said...
He goes, don't take pictures of black guys.
In the next sentence he said, I don't care if you fuck them.
Just don't take pictures of them.
I go...
In my world, that's pretty reasonable.
Like, you got a girl, you're buying her a Ferrari, all you say is just don't take any pictures.
Instead, he was like self-righteous and Well, I mean, a lot of that, again, is I think that if you look at the NBA statistics and who watches the NBA, the outsized number of people who watch the NBA are black, and they spend an outsized amount of time watching it.
And so, you know, Donald Sterling pissed off a lot of black folks with that, understandably.
And so a lot of people were like, I think the NBA was like, we're not going to lose our fan base over it.
It was a money decision, in other words.
I don't think it was a values decision as much as money was.