Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan debate L.A.’s crime surge, blaming policies like Mayor Eric Garcetti’s underpass porta-potties and ACLU lawsuits against LAPD for displacing homelessness into suburbs. Shapiro dismisses White Fragility and the 1619 Project as flawed history, citing Jewish immigrant success despite discrimination, while Rogan counters that systemic barriers—like absent fathers and poverty—undermine individual agency. They clash on marriage, with Shapiro favoring shared values over biology-driven attraction, and critique cultural appropriation, China’s Uyghur abuses, and Trump’s 2016 voter strategy, where disliking both candidates led to his victory. Today’s polarization hinges on whether Americans accept flawed systems or reject them entirely—with Biden’s campaign facing potential underestimation due to Trump’s volatility and shifting voter calculus. [Automatically generated summary]
No, I literally just run around on the streets, hoping that one day I will be hunted down by the rioters so I don't have to go deal with my children screaming at me.
So, I mean, not to get too fast into the biblical stuff, but the original logic was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way was the idea.
One thing that we're seeing with society and culture in general, and one thing that sort of does support the idea of maintaining these sort of rigid disciplines, is that when things start to slide just a little, you lose these little incremental steps.
They slide, and people go, oh God, what's the big deal?
And you saw it in LA. I mean, I've lived in LA my whole life.
And the move from LA being a pretty safe, fairly nice city, suburban in orientation to just overrun with horror shows is really, it was a lot faster than I thought it would be.
But it's sort of a, you're right, it's a gradual decline and then it's just off a cliff.
Well, the thing is that that sort of disaster area stuff in LA was sort of localized, right?
I worked in the LADA's office for a summer when I was in law school.
It's been like 2007, so it was a while ago.
And I remember they had a giant tent city and you had to walk from the car.
They made you park a mile away and walk it.
And so you're walking through Skid Row.
And it's like, okay, well, this is really terrible.
And honestly, I feel bad for these people because I don't think the best solution for people who are drug addicted or mentally ill is to live on the street.
And a heavy percentage of people who are homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill.
But, you know, for people who are living in the suburbs, like, this is at least localized.
It's not, like, reaching into your life.
And then over the past 13 years, like, I live in a pretty decent suburban area.
And I'm seeing, like, open needles on the street.
Walked out of my house one day, there's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe.
And I thought, well, this is falling apart rather quickly.
What do you think caused the slide or the expansion of the slide?
Because I agree with you that it was very, it was very isolated.
Skid Row was very isolated.
Downtown LA was very, I remember one time we were filming in downtown LA and we were on a gurney, or I guess that's what you call it, one of those things called where it lifts up.
Anyway, we're filming some Fear Factor stunt, and as we got up, we could see people smoking crack.
And I go, oh look, there's people smoking crack right there.
And the guests on the show, like a lot of them, they fly from all over the country, and they're like, is that real?
They're really smoking crack?
I'm like, that's crack.
That's a homeless person smoking crack.
Welcome to LA. It's right there.
But I didn't feel bad about it.
I felt like, look...
It's unfortunate, but this is not indicative of all of LA. We're just in a shitty spot because it's really cheap to film here.
So here you go.
You got a little gift.
You get to see some weird shit while you're here.
But I didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on Winnetka off the 101, and there's 80 fucking tents, and they put a port-a-potty there.
And the courts ruled that you actually are not allowed to move people's stuff, that that's actually personal property, even though it's in a public area.
And then they got a ruling from a court that you're allowed to live in your car, because for a while you weren't allowed to live in your car, and then it was you're allowed to live in your car.
So now you're basically allowed to leave your stuff on the sidewalk, and the police are not allowed to move it, and you're allowed to live in your car.
And then there was this sort of...
Equity movement that said, okay, well, they do it in business districts, but why can't they do it in, like, more suburban areas?
Why can't they just move into nicer areas?
After all, if there's misery, it should be equally spread across the city.
And that's kind of what you see.
I mean, there have been so many breaking points over the last year in the city.
And for me, for me and my wife, I mean, we looked at the rioting, and they shut down the entire city at 6 p.m.
It's a county of 12 million people.
And they shut down the entire county so that douchebags could run around shattering windows, pretending that they were standing up for social justice.
They shut down Beverly Hills at 1 p.m.
They shut down Rodeo Drive at 1 p.m.
So that people could run up and down Rodeo Drive talking about how capitalism sucks while tweeting from their iPhones.
You know, there was two moments where I was like, this is a real opportunity for us to come together.
And one of them was the moment the lockdown happened.
It felt to me very similar to right after 9-11, where everybody was confronted with their own mortality.
Like, holy shit!
We might be on the verge of a pandemic, like in a movie, where a lot of the people we know die.
And here, we have to be kind to each other.
This is what's important.
Family's important.
And I remember thinking, I've never been closer to my family.
Never been closer to my friends.
We were calling each other all the time.
There was real hope in that.
I was like, if we get through this, we're going to be tighter.
We're going to know what means something, what counts.
Fuck stand-up comedy.
Fuck everything else, man.
What's important is love and friendship.
Then it started to get angry.
It only took like three or four weeks where people started getting, like they were scared.
So people started getting shittier with each other online.
And then I basically swore off Twitter.
I was like, this is just too toxic and too hostile.
The second moment...
I thought we had the opportunity to come together was George Floyd.
So George Floyd died and all of a sudden you have these Black Lives Matter protests and I'm like, maybe we can finally make a dent on racism.
Maybe we can finally make a dent in police brutality.
Maybe this is a moment Where we can come together and realize what's important.
It's community.
Solidarity.
We're all in this together.
This is crazy.
And then the cops need to be reformed.
They can't live like that.
And maybe we should take into account PTSD. Maybe we should take into account the fact that these fucking guys are pulling up on people every day that might shoot them in the face.
They might never be able to see their family and their kids.
Every single person was like, yeah, that's real bad.
And cops.
I know tons of cops.
I'm friendly with tons of cops.
And not one of them was like, yeah, that's good police procedure.
I'm glad he did that.
No one thought that.
And so when people are like, okay, we're going to look at police brutality.
Maybe we'll take a look at qualified immunity.
Maybe we'll take a look at police unions and the kind of restrictive covenants that they have with the cities and how we make sure that everybody knows who the bad cops are so they can't get hired at different places.
All those are solutions.
But It quickly turned from, well, we don't want to talk about solutions.
Solutions are a bad idea.
What we need to do is we need to shout about everything we can possibly imagine all at once.
And you know what?
Instead, let's have a conversation about, like, was George Washington a bad guy?
Let's have a conversation instead about, like, just completely defunding the police.
We want to have, like, a responsible conversation about things that make sense.
We'll talk about, like, what if we just got rid of the police?
That may have been the moment when I realized that we were all effed.
It was the moment when we're in the middle of a global pandemic with hundreds of thousands of people dead, and an entire swath of our media and health elites just decided, randomly, That if you were protesting against lockdown, you were very bad, right?
Then you were a racist and you were going to get people killed and you should wear a mask.
And I was like, well, I sort of agree with the mask thing.
Like, yeah.
Okay.
And then you get millions of people in the streets yelling at each other and breathing on each other and spitting on each other.
And you got health professionals on TV being like, well, racism is a public health threat.
I guess that you can do that now.
It's like, well, what the?
I know people who died in the hospital of COVID and their family could not visit them.
Like they literally died alone in the hospital of COVID and family could not visit them.
And you're telling me that it's deeply important that we have like dance lines.
This was stuff happening at rallies, like dance lines in the streets in New York to fight racism.
That's deeply important.
But a daughter being able to visit her dad before he dies, that's not important.
I made this point online, I got shellacked for it, but I was pointing out that most Americans are wearing masks right now.
By polling data, 59% of Americans say that they always wear a mask when they leave the house.
And if you look at the map of mask wearing, Across the board, in the places where there are the most cases, people are wearing masks.
I wasn't saying masks don't work.
I wear a mask.
I think that the evidence shows that they do something.
We don't know that they're not like full protective.
The cloth masks are not as effective as surgical masks, which are not as effective as N95s, but wear a mask, good.
The point that I was making is people are acting in fairly rational fashion, meaning if you think COVID is like around you, you're wearing a mask and you're socially distancing.
So this idea that Gavin Newsom knows best how you ought to live your life I got some trouble with that, especially because California saw the same uptick as Texas and Florida, and California never opened.
Well, we were doing pretty good up until the protests.
Everything seemed like it was on an uptick.
The Comedy Store was talking to them about becoming an essential business and opening up, because they had opened up bars, and they had opened up restaurants, and they didn't really have a designation for comedy clubs.
They sort of We've talked about it as a live performance venue, but then that puts comedy clubs at the same place as the Staples Center, which sounds crazy, right?
So, like, listen, we can do this.
We can just have half capacity, temperature checks, do it right.
They're doing it right in a lot of places all over the country.
We can do this.
The audience has to wear masks.
This is totally doable.
And so they were right about to do that.
And then post...
There's another thing is, we were trying to figure out, like, is it protests only?
I think it's bars, too.
The thing about bars is close talk.
People are drunk and they're on top of each other.
Churches and synagogues were a main vector for this.
But again, these are all things that are fairly commonsensical and we can agree on and yet we're beating the hell out of each other over this stuff and there's this suggestion we know what to do.
If only we just did it, this would stop.
It's not going to stop.
Okay, it's not gonna stop.
It's a very transmissible disease.
We don't have a vaccine.
As long as people are out there, it's going to continue to pass.
Wear a mask if you're in close proximity with others.
And that's pretty much it.
The hospitals are getting better at this, thank God.
Well, not only that, it goes against science because there's been papers that have been studied that show that this virus dies almost instantaneously when it's exposed to sunlight or even artificial sunlight.
But it does feel like, bottom line, there were a bunch of gaps in American society, and then a bad thing happened, and everything just sort of fell apart.
It was sort of like a house of cards, and then there's a little bit of weight put right on top of the house of cards, and everything just collapsed in on itself.
I gotta say, the media coverage of this stuff is just awful.
The media were cheering this stuff on.
They were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other.
One was, these are mostly peaceful protests.
First of all, mostly peaceful is the most...
It's the most loosely defined, arbitrarily applied term in history.
O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night.
O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night.
For like an hour 15, he was really not peaceful.
But for the other hours between sunset and sunrise, he was unbelievably peaceful.
Like, I've never heard this term before where a protest turns into a vast riot wrecking all of Melrose and everybody's like, well, it was mostly peaceful.
How about you either say that the protesters and looters are two different groups of people and we treat them differently.
If you're protesting, that's First Amendment activity.
The minute you shatter a store window, you go to jail, right?
That's the way they should run.
Or alternatively, If you're saying they're the same group, then they need to be treated as lawbreakers.
So I believe the first.
I believe if you're a protester, you should be protesting.
If you're a looter and a rioter, then you should go to jail.
But the media refuse to make that distinction.
And then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to arrest people who are violating the law.
I think it's in Portland right now.
They're trying to burn down the damn courthouse.
And the feds come in and start arresting people.
And people are like, this is the Gestapo.
It's like, okay.
Speaking as one of the tribe, let me say, this is not like the Gestapo.
Okay, like, the Gestapo was not famous for rolling up on people, and then charging them, and then if they didn't have a charge, releasing them.
That wasn't like the Gestapo's thing.
I'm sorry, but you decided that you wanted to throw a firebomb at the federal courthouse, and your local mayor said he wasn't going to let the police do anything, and so DHS came in and arrested you.
Tough shit.
I mean, like, I'm sorry, at some point, somebody's got to restore some semblance of law and order here.
The answer is kind of yes, except that the NBA is not racist because obviously it benefits black people, right?
I mean, now, the NBA is not racist, except it's because the meritocracy is the reason the NBA is not racist.
But Robin DiAngelo and Kendi both suggest that meritocracy is an aspect of whiteness.
They say that meritocracy and individual are aspects of whiteness because these institutions, things like meritocracy and individualism and not seeing people's colors, these just reinforce hierarchies that end with disparate outcomes.
And so what they say is in order to be anti-racist, you have to want to tear down the entire system.
They literally say this.
I know that I'm not misidentifying the argument because, again, I've read their books.
The basic notion that to be anti-racist, you have to tear down free markets or you have to tear down free speech.
And what that means is, of course, that anytime there's rioting and looting, that's really just an expression of outrage at the broader American system.
And so it justifies that sort of stuff.
This is why you saw Nicole Hannah-Jones, the de facto editor of the...
New York Times 1619 Project lady tweeting out that she appreciated that people were calling these the 1619 riots.
Because once you say America is rooted in slavery and rooted in evil and a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place, then robbing a shop is just the latest iteration of you fighting the system.
So the 1619 project is something put forward by the New York Times.
It's not good history.
There are four Pulitzer Prize-winning historians who have said this is not good history.
The basic argument is the United States was not founded in 1776 with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
The country was actually founded in 1619 with the importation of African slaves to American shores because that's when the first African slave arrived in the United States was 1619. So the idea is that the entire history of America is a history of a system that is endemically white supremacist.
And that all of the Declaration of Independence is basically a lie.
That the principles of all men are created equal, that was a lie when it was written and it's a lie now.
That the idea that we have rights that pre-exist government, that's a lie.
All of these things are lies.
The Constitution was built in order to enshrine white supremacy.
And no evolution has taken place.
So they essentially make the argument that from 1619 to 2020 is a continuum.
Racism has gone underground a little bit, but it's still there and it's still implicit in all of our systems.
So the 1619 Project has essays blaming literally everything on racism.
So disparities in maternal mortality between black women and white women, which by the way exist in Europe and in Canada, that's due to American racism.
Traffic patterns in the United States is due to systematic American racism.
Every racial disparity is attributable to a system that was rooted in slavery.
Now, the traditional notion of America is that America was founded in 1776 and that the story of America is that America did tolerate the great original sin of slavery up until the Civil War and then tolerated Jim Crow up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
And that is a great stain and a blot on America.
But the story of America is trying to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence over time, make those promises available to everybody.
And this isn't my argument.
This is Martin Luther King Jr.'s argument when he talks in the March in Washington about fulfilling the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence.
He says, we're here to cash the check, right?
You issued us the check, and then you didn't let black Americans be Americans.
We're here to cash the check.
This is the argument Frederick Douglass, the freed slave, makes in 1852. He makes a famous speech before slavery has ended.
And he says July 4th doesn't mean anything to black Americans because we're not included in the bargain.
Include us in the bargain.
The story of America is the Declaration of Independence, those principles that we should all basically still agree on because they're pretty good principles.
Free speech, free assembly, all the things you see in the Constitution.
That those things brought about greater freedom and prosperity than anything else and helped us overcome sins that are present in all human societies and were present in the United States in extreme ways as well.
But that's the counter-narrative, right?
The 1619 Project says that all that was basically nonsense and that America is just a history of whites keeping blacks down and that no progress has essentially been made.
If there is progress, it's mostly a lie.
And so every disparity now can be attributed to historic disparities between white and black.
So, if we look at 1776 and we look at the Declaration of Independence and we look at America today in 2020, there clearly is some impact in the echoes of slavery and then after that Jim Crow.
There's clearly some impact in these deeply impoverished communities that don't seem to advance.
So to make the argument about institutional racism, there's a couple ways you can read this.
When people say systemic racism or institutional racism, I usually ask them to be a little more specific in what they mean because there are a few ways you can read that.
One is history has impact.
Of course that's true, right?
That's true for everybody.
It's true in your family history.
If you have a grandfather who went to prison on a particular charge, that leads to poverty for your parents, which led to more poverty for you, right?
People have histories.
Those histories are embedded in their life experiences, and that's true for societies as well.
All of that is for sure true.
Then there's the question as to whether the institutions today are racist.
And that's not quite the same thing, right?
Because history has consequences is not the same thing as saying the rules today are racist.
Yeah, and it is important for people on my side of the aisle, conservatives, to acknowledge and recognize the importance of history in people's living situations now.
And it's important for people on the other side of the aisle to, at the same time, not attribute every single thing to history.
Yeah, but I don't think that it lies as far in the dead center of that as people, I think, want it to.
What I mean by that is the problems that have plagued communities in the United States, not just the black community in the United States, but problems of racism or problems of sexism, the way those get alleviated is people making better choices over time.
That's the way that those issues get alleviated.
When Jews arrived in the United States in the early 20th century to talk of my people, when they came, they were impoverished.
They didn't speak the language.
They were banned from country clubs.
There was open discrimination against them.
They were banned from Harvard.
Harvard Law School had quotas on Jews.
The way to fight against that is to make good decisions.
And so you fight against the system to make sure that the system has rules that apply equally to everyone.
Right, but you clearly see that there's a big difference between people coming over here willingly and doing so in order to better their lives versus someone whose ancestors were dragged over here To be sold as property and then dealing with the repercussions of that being your family history and redline laws and all the other things that were put in place to sort of keep them in very specific areas which to this day remain crime-ridden,
Well, that's true, but the question is how much of that is historic redlining and how much of that is an 18-year-old kid today deciding to pep a gun and shoot somebody?
But how much of that 18-year-old kid today deciding to pick up a gun and shoot somebody is based on him growing up in this fucked up environment where that's what he models, where everything around him is crime and gangs and you imitate your atmosphere, which is what all humans do.
I think that's a simplistic way of looking at it if you're on the outside of that community and you're not one of those 18-year-old kids that grows up with the incredible influence of all the people around him and that's all you see and that's all you know.
It does, but education and teaching them about personal agency and letting them understand that there's a way out of this and that the path that they see… Being replicated over and over again by these people that wind up dying young, that wind up going to jail, that there are other options.
There's a lot of kids that never get that other information, or if they get it, they get little blips of it, but the vast majority of the information, the vast majority of the influence they get is terrible.
Well, I totally agree with this, and this is why I think the worst thing that you can say to a kid is you're born behind the eight ball, and no matter what you do, you're not going to succeed.
That's literally the worst thing you can say to a kid.
What you should be saying is, look at how your grandfather was born behind the aid fall, and look how hard he had to work in order to get ahead.
If that's true though, but if your grandfather wasn't ahead, didn't get ahead, if your grandfather was in and out of jail, if your father was in and out of jail, everyone around you is like that, if there's literally no influence that's positive in your life, The idea of saying to a kid like that, hey, don't pick up a gun and shoot somebody, that's way too simplistic a version of their future, in my opinion.
I think an alternative solution is there has to be some sort of large-scale intervention in these communities to do something about what has already been set in motion and the momentum that keeps continuing decade after decade.
Well, but that's the problem is that I think that a lot of the solutions that have been proposed have already been tried.
Meaning that, for example, LBJ thought that the way to alleviate a lot of these inequalities was the war on poverty.
And he openly talked about this.
He talked about, he gave a speech very famously in which he said, we're trying to guarantee equality of outcome, not just equality of opportunity, equality of outcome.
And you can't hold the race where somebody is starting 20 yards behind and then fire the gun and say, okay, then it's an equal race.
So you have to get the person who's 20 yards behind to actually get up to the starting line so that they're equal.
And so the idea was we're going to fight this war on poverty and alleviate poverty largely through transfer payments and through the government taking a forcible step in favor of alleviating people's lives.
We've now spent $22 trillion in the war on poverty and we have about the same number of black Americans living under the poverty line as we're living under the poverty line by the late 70s.
The real issues that are creating intergenerational poverty, everyone knows this but remains true.
The number one predictor of intergenerational poverty in the United States remains single motherhood.
The single motherhood rate in the black community was 20% in 1960. It is upward of 70% today.
That's not unique to the black community, by the way.
It's true in the white community as well.
5% of white kids were born out of wedlock in 1960. Today it's upward of 40%.
Something has happened and it is not a matter of increased racism.
That's not happening because of increased racism.
That is happening because there's been a cultural change that does not place tremendous emphasis for black or white or for anybody.
On personal responsibility and personal agency.
There needs to be a mindset change.
We do this, by the way, in all other areas of American life except for the most important decisions.
In the area of sports, nobody does this routine.
This is a point Shelby Steele makes.
In the area of sports, if a kid does not have a good jump shot, nobody says to him, you know what, you don't have a good jump shot because your father didn't have a good jump shot, his grandfather didn't have a good jump shot, and the game is biased against you.
We say, okay, if you want to be on the team, you're going to have to learn to shoot a jump shot.
I don't think white people or Jews or Asians have a monopoly on valuing education or a monopoly on hard work or punctuality or anything.
I think that black people have exactly the same capacity as any people of any other race to do all of these things, and those are the preconditions for success.
But don't you think that a lot of that is predicated on the environment that you develop in and the people that you're around and the lives that you imitate and the influences that you have around you?
Someone has to do something to influence those kids in a different way.
I was very fortunate when I was young that I discovered martial arts, and it kept me from being what I could have potentially been a bad kid.
It gave me something to focus on.
And I didn't grow up in a bad environment, but it wasn't the best.
There's a lot of people out there that grow up in horrific environments, and they never have that thing.
They never have something.
They don't have a father around, or they don't have a mother around, or whatever bad influences they have are overwhelming.
It's very difficult.
For someone to just, air quotes, get their shit together.
But you would say about somebody losing weight, you know what's not useful here is lamenting how bad your family has had it with regard to losing weight.
Like, at a certain point, if you want to lose the weight, you've got to figure out a way to lose the weight.
That's true, but this is based on the information that I have.
I have this vast scope of information that I've been able to absorb.
If you're in these isolated environments and everyone around you is involved in gangs and crime and drugs, it's very difficult to model yourself after something that you don't see in real life.
But to go back to the original conversation, none of this has to do with telling kids that you live in an evil country that's seeking to keep you down.
Well, maybe not, but there has been a very small amount of emphasis placed on taking these impoverished communities and figuring out how to engineer them out of the situation.
I think they'll spend $80,000 and they'll be right back where they started from.
But I do think that there is an argument that there can be some way of engineering, whether it's community centers or education or doing something differently in these places to chip away at this problem.
Okay, so here's the unpopular view, but it happens to be empirically correct.
The first thing you have to do is you have to load the place with police.
You got to load the place with police because you have to stop crime.
Once you stop crime, then businesses are happy to invest in those areas.
You're not going to get businesses to invest in those areas and provide jobs unless the crime is gone.
In fact, one of the reasons that you have such a vast differential in racial crime in the United States is because of white racism.
And this is a point that Jane Levy, writer for the LA Times, has made, and she writes a book called Ghetto Side, and she points out that the reason that black crime was so high in the early 20th century and late 19th century is because basically white communities said to black communities, you're on your own, right?
Enjoy.
And so the crime rates ended up spiking because there were no police there.
You have to make sure that law-abiding people are protected, that law-abiding businesses are protected, that people want to live there, that people want to invest there.
You have to have a reestablishment of faith in churches, right?
You need social institutions outside of government that are promoting things like family.
One of the reasons you need more companies in these areas is they can offer educational opportunities to kids, internships, deals to go to college and then come back and work for us for a couple of years.
You need an opportunity, the same way that opportunity is built anywhere else on earth.
You need to provide a safe space for business to work and for free speech to flourish and for education to be valued.
You need to go and you need to make clear to every kid, if you graduate high school, then you will have a shot at college, which by the way is 100% true today.
If you're a black kid and you graduate high school with any level of achievement, you will have a very solid shot of at least going to a community college.
And if you score even decently on the SATs of going to a very high level college, right?
Affirmative action programs are extraordinarily common across the United States.
But the first message is...
We are going to ensure that law and order prevail here, a safe space for life, liberty, and property, and ownership of private property, and we are going to make sure that you as a law-abiding citizen have the opportunity to succeed, because the biggest obstacle to young black kids growing up in the inner city, again, is not history.
It is in the moment.
The drugs, The crime, the fact that there are no fathers in a lot of these areas.
Roland Fryer, black professor at Harvard, he's done excellent work showing that actually the number one factor in allowing kids to rise is not even having a father in the home.
It's how many fathers there are generally in a community.
So you can have a single mom, but if there are a lot of other male father figures around, that helps fill in the gap, right?
These are practical things.
Giving kids the ability to pick the school they go to so they don't have to go to the local crappy public school if it's a local crappy public school.
It would be a solution here.
But this all starts with the notion that it is not racist in the slightest to suggest that law and order have to prevail and that law-abiding people should be protected in their exercise of their rights.
And I think although that might be an unpopular opinion, I agree with you.
I think that is very important.
Now, what do you do in this environment when you look at the way people distrust the police now?
In particular, I mean, I've been reading stories about Cops go into Five Guys Burgers and they can't get served because people won't serve cops.
And this idea that all cops are bad.
And this is a really disturbing perspective to me because you're seeing what's happening right now in Chicago.
You're seeing what's happening right now in New York where you have this massive uptick in violent crime because it's perceived that the police presence has been diminished greatly.
So how do you reaffirm the trust in law enforcement and what do you do to reform law enforcement?
Because clearly, there are some people that are cops that should not be cops.
So qualified immunity generally means that if I do something bad, then as a police officer, if I act within the scope of my general reasonable authority, you can't sue me for it.
So the reason that qualified immunity as currently understood under Supreme Court doctrine is too broad is because the standard used to be you would have to act as a reasonable police officer.
If you acted as a reasonable police officer and you took a reasonable action, somebody went for their waistband.
They had an object in there.
You didn't know if it was a gun.
You shot them.
Right?
You wouldn't presumably be suable because that's still reasonable.
You track a guy down, you shoot him in the back, you know, and then you plant a gun on him, that presumably would be suable, right?
He'd be personally liable.
So the way that Supreme Court has done this is they broaden qualified immunity to such an extent that you can still, bottom line, you can still get away with some bad stuff and not be sued for it.
So that needs to be curbed.
That's one thing.
Second, police union contracts need to be utterly redone across the country.
Police union contracts right now protect a lot of bad cops, right?
Because the police unions are designed to protect the members of the union, just like any other union.
And so what that means is that police unions, I'm not a fan of public sector unions generally, but police unions need to be abridged in their ability to protect cops who do something wrong.
Third, you need to have a national registry of cops who are disciplined for violation of procedure so that they can't just leave LAPD and then go work for a Ferguson PD. Those are some easy things that you could do right off the bat.
But the biggest thing right now, the biggest factor in terms of lack of faith between police and citizens really is the media because there's been a lot of talk about the racial constituency of police forces.
The majority of the LAPD is minority.
The majority of the Baltimore PD is minority.
I believe that a huge percentage of the Chicago PD is minority.
So it really is not about lots of white cops in black neighborhoods.
In Baltimore, it's a lot of black cops in black neighborhoods.
And that has not solved the problem of people mistrusting the police on an endemic level.
It is, on a data level, an extraordinarily small threat.
Law enforcement as a threat to black life on a generalized level is extraordinarily small.
The Washington Post database last year showed a grand total of 15 black Americans shot unarmed across the United States in a country of 42 million black people.
it's social media social social media has blown this stuff up and it's gotten to the point where if you say that's a horrible situation that's also an anecdotal situation here's some data if you present the data it's like well you're are you ignoring people's lived experiences that's racist how can you present the data the data is the data doesn't take into account the full story nobody takes into account an awful lot of the story which is why it's called data right like i just don't anecdotal evidence is evidence of an anecdote it
It is not evidence of a broad national trend, nor is it evidence that taking a broad national policy like cutting back funding to the police in a time of rising crime is a good idea because you saw a video on YouTube.
I think probably white people are less likely to believe that the cop's going to kill them, whereas black people are probably convinced the cop's going to kill them.
That might play a factor in why there's more white people being killed by cops.
It may also be that low-level uses of force may be disparate.
If you think that the cop's likely to be a racist, then you might be more likely to resist the cop, and then you might be more likely to rough you up.
So it's very difficult to rub out the confounds there.
The one thing that we know for sure is that the greatest threat to black life, just like the greatest threat to white life, is members of your own race killing you.
Like, if you're talking about actual murders, White people are killed by white people.
But again, young white people in Appalachia are dealing with the same thing.
What's around them all the time is crime, people taking pills, everyone having babies out of wedlock, people impoverished, no hope, no potential for escape.
I agree, but the first thing that has to change – so my dad had a – when I was looking to get married, my dad said the way that you get married is it's not that you find a girl and then you decide to get married.
You decide to get married and then you find a girl, meaning that you have to sort of make up your mind that you're in the mode of – That's a good way to get hooked up with the wrong lady, bro.
Well, you make the life decision that you're at that point in your life when you want to make a decision along those lines.
Get married when you love a girl so much you're willing to do something so fucking stupid that you're willing to get married to her.
Because getting married to her is less painful to you than the idea of losing that person.
Because I think...
Marriage, the good thing about it is that there's financial protection for the family, particularly when there's children involved.
I think that's when it's the most important thing.
I think financial protection for the children...
Look, I grew up without child support.
My father was a deadbeat dad, so I know what it's like to be poor because your father doesn't support you.
I think that's horrific.
I've seen it in many situations.
I know many people that have been the victim of this.
It's disgusting.
There are a lot of shitty men out there that don't take care of their kids.
White, black, Asian, it's universal.
I think that is where the legal definition of marriage and protection of children and protection of the woman who has to take care of these children financially.
I think that's significant.
When it comes to bringing the state in to...
Somehow or another solidify your love.
Like, you know, I love you, you love me, but let's bring in a bunch of fucking people we don't know and write it down on paper.
But the point that I'm making is that when you want to make a change in your life, you first have to commit that you want to make the change before you make the change.
Okay, so not to get into marital advice here, but I've been married for 12 years at this point.
Thank God.
Very happy marriage.
We have three kids.
And the reason that I say you have to make up your mind that you want to get married before you get married is because you look for a different set of factors then.
If you make up your mind you want to get married, what you're going to look for is commonality of values.
Who is the person you want to build your life with?
Do you share interests?
Do you share a vision for the future?
Whereas if you sort of fall into it, then you can fall in love with somebody you don't share any of these things with and it makes it a lot more difficult later on to actually build a life on that.
But people make mistakes when they get attracted to someone physically.
And, you know, particularly men are, and I guess women too, I'm just not one of them, are attracted oftentimes by people they think are sexy, but are a bad choice in terms of a life partner.
But I don't think you fall in love with those people.
He talks about the fact that people make a very large scale mistake about marriage, which is they think that the passion you feel at the very beginning is what you're going to feel 40 years in.
And that's not the way this works.
It starts off where your passionate love level for somebody, meaning like lust and how much you want to get them in bed and how much you want to be with them all the time.
Is it like 100?
And your level of kind of committed love, right?
That level of love where you have shared values, that matters to you like this much.
And then over time, after about like two years, the passionate love starts to decline.
And by the time you're 60, then you better have shared values because after 60 years, it ain't going to be like it was when you were 20, right?
So you have to have in mind what things are going to be like a few years down the road, which is why I say you should be thinking about what your life together is going to be like before you fall into bed together.
And it may be that when I die, I look back and that is one of my great regrets, my friend.
But let me just say that I think that the...
The thing that has been foregone is, in my life at least, more than made up for by the relationship that I have with my wife.
So I'll go anecdotal there, but I'll go data-driven, which is the longer you live together with somebody before you get married, the higher the divorce rate after.
I've tried to be open-minded with basically every kind of way that people live their lives, including, like, couples that live with other couples and they wife swap, which is...
And I almost universally believe that they are distracting themselves from their life.
They distract themselves from either their career, they're fulfilling the potential, whether it's as an artist, or as a creative person, or as a person who's pursuing a discipline.
I really believe that a lot of times when people complicate their lives with multiple sex partners, and a lot of times what they're doing is they're distracting themselves.
And they don't realize it at the time.
It just keeps getting pulled into this direction, pulled into that direction.
It's because you don't have a primary focus on something that's very important to you.
And it doesn't mean that you have to be with this person for the rest of your life.
It doesn't mean you have to only be with one person.
But when I see a guy that is involved in swinging or something like that, and they're balancing a bunch of different gals, trust me, you're going to waste time, man.
I mean, it's weird to tie this whole conversation together, but it is true that if you want to be good at a thing or be successful at a thing, you have to commit to the thing.
And it is true that you have to make the pre-investment and you have to make the commitment that you're going to continue to invest in the relationship as time goes on.
And that's where people fall off the wagon.
That's why you see a lot of divorces around year three.
As that passionate love It kind of goes down and the companionate love is the name of the term.
When the companionate love starts to rise, people are like, well, yeah, but the companionate love ain't as much fun as the passionate love.
The ultimate biological trick is like, look, when we were monkeys hiding from eagles, okay, you had to fuck as much as you could and spread that seed around because you likely only had five or six years on this earth, right?
You were trying to just get as much of your DNA out there as you possibly could.
That's still inside of us.
That program is still inside of us.
And that program is when you see a man, and he's with a beautiful woman, but another beautiful woman walks by, he's like looking at her and thinking, maybe I can do better.
That's a thing that is programmed into your DNA. But you have to understand what that is.
If you're a man and you understand what that is, you go, oh, this is nature and it's a dirty little trick.
Dirty little trick trying to get me to spread my seed.
Brett Weinstein, he illuminated this in a really interesting way.
He was saying to me, what's the difference between beautiful and hot?
And I said, I don't know, what is the difference?
And he's like, beautiful is someone who you look at and you're like, wow, that person looks beautiful.
That's lovely.
They have a beautiful face or wonderful eyes.
They look great.
Hot is someone who's wearing like a short skirt and their tits are popping out.
And you look at that person, you go, this is an opportunity for...
To spread my DNA with no commitment.
And that's what that is.
That's the pull.
And hot, that kind of hot, is what's sold.
That cheap, quick, fast food sort of thing.
That's what porn is.
Porn is all hot.
Porn is not beautiful.
I don't think porn's bad, either.
But porn is all hot.
It's all dirty girls.
It's all your stepmom, your dad's off playing golf.
It's that kind of shit, you know?
It's like, you know, you're the pizza guy.
You show up and two girls are having a pillow fight.
So even if he's having sex, like, it's probably exhausting, and the rest of the day, he's just listening to them talk about TikTok and all kinds of other stupid shit, and he's like, He's like, remember when Frank Sinatra was here and we were banging everything in sight?
Yeah, I can't believe this perfect body and I get to, with this wrinkly sack of rocks that he has as a body, he gets to have sex with this beautiful, perfect specimen of a female human being.
Well, that's another Jonathan Haidt book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is amazing.
And it really illuminates, and I'm waiting for my kids to read it.
I think maybe this year is a good time for my 12-year-old just to understand that this is a real issue with children that are comparing their lives to these...
Oh, here's an example.
I wanted to show you something.
I haven't actually put this up anywhere, but this is actually important because this is so goddamn crazy.
So when you're seeing things like that, what is that?
How are they doing that?
And who's doing that?
So if you're a girl and you are overweight or you don't like the structure of your face or whatever is bothering you, you have acne, and you see a girl like that, and she's like, can't believe I'm graduating high school, LOL, what do I do now?
And you see this...
That's not even her!
This is my ten-year-old!
She doesn't look anything like that!
She's like, Daddy, look!
This is what I look like!
I go, that is not what you look like!
I don't know what the fuck you just did!
That's not what you look like!
And so I had her go through this with me and show me what she did.
I'm like, show me how you did this.
Like, what are you doing?
She's using some weird app like, was it Khloe Kardashian?
And then it has broader societal ramifications because then it turns into stories about, well, okay, well, society doesn't accept me for the way that I am.
Society values that look and that means society is flawed.
And it's like, well, how about this?
How about like, people are flawed, society's flawed, you're flawed, do the best you can.
And there are all sorts of studies that demonstrate that this leads to relationship and sexual insufficiency later, and it ain't good.
It ain't good.
I mean, this is not an argument to ban porn or anything, but like, the way that it has integrated into so many really young people's lives, I'm talking like young teens.
It's got to be an extraordinarily high percentage, and none of that is good for relations between men and women.
And then you've got this weird dynamic where it used to be that the feminist movement sort of recognized what social conservatives did, that this is pretty objectifying and not necessarily great for women.
I think there was a shift, and it's a shift that's happened throughout American society that went from the notion that men were acting like pigs and they should stop acting like pigs to what if everybody acted like pigs?
And so instead of just saying that standards exist and people don't live up to them, but the standards are actually not a bad thing, we just decided, you know what?
We don't want to be hypocrites.
We're getting rid of all standards whatsoever.
Everybody shouldn't have standards.
And if you believe that anybody should have standards, then you're a hypocrite.
And when all the standards go, then everything goes.
So I actually kind of agree with the original feminist idea that men were kind of acting like sexist jackasses and they should stop that.
But the solution to that was not, okay, now women should imitate men at their worst and that's a free or better society.
I just don't think that that's Again, it's a free country, do what you want on a legislative level, but as a cultural matter, I don't think that leads to a lot of human happiness.
I think that you should be allowed to rip people off With a really obvious ruse.
Like, if you're one of those late night people that can put hands on people and raise them from the dead, if you're one of those people, I feel like, God, that's so obvious.
It's almost like a good little pitfall to have out there in society to teach people that some folks can be deceptive.
And I feel like really manipulative women that trick old guys into marrying them and then take all their money, I feel like that's sexual televangelism.
No, because I think that he made a serious error, which is that the most positive movements in American social history have been ones that don't kneel for the flag but say, in the name of the flag, you should do X. Martin Luther King said, in the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary.
Booker T. Washington said, in the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary.
They didn't say the American flag stands for racism and Jim Crow.
They said the American flag stands for something beyond that.
Live up to the American flag.
Trashing the American flag is like endemic of police brutality.
First of all, it's bullshit.
But second of all, it's actually divisive on an issue that does not need to be divisive.
Like nobody is in favor of police brutality, nor should anyone be.
Why is it trashing the American flag to take a knee?
Isn't that in some ways just another gesture of respect?
Like you're not doing what everybody wants you to do, which is put your hand over your heart, but you're doing something that's also respectful and silent.
You're not standing up and going, fuck the American flag, fuck these people.
You're actually taking it to another level of respect.
You're taking a knee.
You're bending the knee.
Whether you're doing it For something that you want to talk about later, saying, I'm not going to stand up because this is my way of acknowledging the fact that there have been a lot of people that have been mistreated by police and murdered by police, and this is how I do it.
This is how I treat racist police killing black people.
I take that moment to take a knee.
How is that so disrespectful?
How is that It's a silent gesture.
It's not uniform.
It's not doing this thing that everybody else is doing.
But you're doing something that's very respectful.
He did mean it as an FU. I mean, there's no question that's what he meant it as.
And it wasn't even over something that actually made sense.
Like, you understand during the civil rights movement, when people are raising the black power fist at the Olympics to say, like, we're fighting for civil rights, Jim Crow is still in operation around the country.
Colin Kaepernick taking the need to symbolize that America's police are systemically brutal and racist is just – it's factually untrue, and to attribute that to the American flag is really kind of nasty.
So he's looking at things like the Eric Gardner case or – which is a terrible one, right?
There's cases that you see like when the guy's just selling loose cigarettes and they're straining them in front of the store.
It's a terrible case.
You see something like that, and that motivates him to do that.
And I know what you're saying, that these are anecdotes, and this doesn't encompass the full statistics of cops versus black men and what exactly is happening.
If he'd explained it the way that you're explaining it, meaning we're not living up to the American flag, which is why I'm kneeling, I wouldn't be arguing with it.
He led the 49ers to the Super Bowl, and then like a lot of kind of one-hit wonders in sports, people kind of figured him out season two, and his QB rating started to decline.
But, I mean, look, bottom line is that making him the spokesperson of a movement where he really...
I don't like the idea that you are going to attribute to all of America a sin that is, number one, anecdotal in nature, and number two, cannot be attributed to America's highest ideals.
You're doing it wrong.
If you want to fight police brutality, say America is not living up to her promises.
Say that the promise of America...
Like, there is a way to convince...
Every successful social movement in American history has done this.
The gay rights movement did this.
The gay rights movement said, listen, everybody in America has been guaranteed a certain level of freedom, and we're not being guaranteed that level of freedom.
The freedom to pursue happiness is not being guaranteed to us.
We're just asking that we be left alone.
Leave us alone.
And it took time, but most Americans came around to that perspective.
The same thing holds true on race.
The same thing holds true on police brutality.
If you make an invocation and you say to Americans, as Americans, I know that over time my fellow Americans are going to come to realize that they need to live in accordance with the fundamental principles that founded the country.
That's unifying.
To say that the American flag is inherently non-unifying is really bad.
Like to the point where you now have college campuses where if you fly an American flag, there have been cases where people are asked to take it down because it's too divisive.
When you say it's anecdotal, that he's reacting to something that's anecdotal, but there's many of those anecdotes, and you see them over and over again.
The problem is they're so prevalent.
There's so many videos.
My friend Joe Schilling...
He's a kickboxer, and his entire Instagram has been dedicated to bad cops over the last few months, just showing all these videos of bad cops.
I mean, yes, it's anecdotal, but goddamn, there's a lot of anecdotes.
Actually, I'm warning people now that what happens in the George Floyd case with Derek Chauvin...
Like, they should be warned up front.
I want this police officer punished.
I think everyone wants the police officer punished.
The defense is going to make a case that the police officer is not responsible for George Floyd's death in exactly the same way that the New York police officers made the case that they were not responsible for Eric Garner's death.
And the autopsy, the initial autopsy tends to support that.
So what that suggests is not that Derek Chauvin is good or clean or decent, but if you're going to charge him with murder, that's a hard charge to make, just on a legal level.
So I'm warning people now of that because the next move will be, obviously the system is racist if Derek Chauvin doesn't get convicted of first degree murder.
It's going to be very hard to convict him.
I think to charge him with second.
It's going to be very difficult to convict him with second.
I had the part of when this actually started in 2016. He started by sitting, and people started getting video of him sitting as the preseason was starting.
So he then talked to a teammate.
They discussed kneeling was the best thing for him to do at the time.
And I've been very blessed to be in this position and be able to make the kind of money I do.
I have to help these people.
I have to help these communities.
It's not right that they're not put in the position to succeed or given those opportunities to succeed.
And as far as taking a knee tonight, Eric, as well as myself, had a long conversation with Nate Boyer, who is a military vet, and we were talking to him about how can we get the message back on track.
And not take away from the military.
Not take away from fighting our country.
But keep the focus on what the issues really are.
And as we talked about it, we came up with taking the knee.
Because there are issues that still need to be addressed.
It was also a way to try to show more respect to the men and women that fight for this country.
Although he recently released a video that sort of goes back to the original explanation, suggesting that America is endemically and systemically racist, which is a problem.
I always hope that things go really far in one direction and really far in the other direction and sort of Listen, I end up in the same place I always end up, which is we gotta learn to leave each other the F alone.
I mean, seriously, that's the only way this is gonna work.
Because we either have to decide we want to share a country and live together with each other, or we have to decide we don't.
If we want to live together and share a country, then we have to stop...
Basically making crazy demands of one another.
And this is what the cancel culture is all about.
But we got to stop that.
We got to recognize that people may not agree with you.
People may do things differently than you.
And that's okay.
As much as I dislike what Colin Kaepernick's doing, I don't think that he should be blackballed from the NFL. If I were an NFL owner, by the way, I'd hire him in a second.
You know the kind of press I'd get for hiring Colin Kaepernick?
I mean, I assume because he's not that great a quarterback.
I mean, like, if he were Tom Brady, I think that he would, you know, be getting a contract.
He also, I mean, there was that whole situation last year with Kaepernick where he wanted to do tryouts for the NFL and then he sort of broke the NFL's rules in doing the tryouts and he wanted it filmed in a certain way and all this sort of stuff.
I'd hire him as a backup quarterback because here's the thing.
You're either going to please one half of the population or please the other.
Either he's amazing, in which case you've got a winning team and a great story, or he gets sacked every other down, in which case half the country cheers.
But apparently they have Mexican products that they were calling Trader Jose's.
And some board person in their basement decided to create a petition that got signed by some 2,400 other board people about why it shouldn't be called Trader Jose's because that's racist.
So apparently it's cultural appropriation if you're Trader Joe's and you make a burrito.
But he kind of looked like that, but he was really dressed like an old-timey guy, and he had this old-timey shop, and he would make this stuff, and I loved watching him, and I don't give a fuck about his shitty furniture.
I don't, but what I cared about was the fact that this guy was really passionate about his thing, and it was very attractive to me.
And I feel the same way when I watch this guy, Rick Bayless, talk about Mexican cuisine.
He loves it.
He takes regular trips to Mexico and learns how to cook these dishes in the traditional way and then talks about it with his great passion.
But the guy just got shit all over.
They were just like, you're culturally appropriating.
The point of a Christopher Columbus statue is not all the bad things he did to the Arawaks.
The point of a Christopher Columbus statue is we are glad that Western civilization came to the Western Hemisphere.
I kind of agree with that principle.
I think it is a good thing that Western civilization came to the Western Hemisphere.
And yes, there's a lot of brutality.
And yes, there's a lot of cruelty.
And we should talk about all those things.
But this notion that the only cruelty that has ever existed in human history came at the behest of Western civilization, that everything was a Russellian paradise before Christopher Columbus came, that Christopher Columbus doesn't deserve a statue in specific.
That we should, like, either make the argument that everybody was a product of their time and therefore no one deserves a statue, or recognize that when there's a statue of Christopher Columbus, we are not honoring how he treated the Arawaks.
No one ever thought that we'd put up a statue to Christopher Columbus because he was really sweet to the natives on the other end of that statue.
But there is this idea that has settled in, and it's really of high irritation to me, that we are now the only good people who have ever lived.
Everyone who came before us was just a horrible person, and we are the only good humans who have ever...
Like, isn't the world lucky to have us?
We're the only people who have ever lived who are completely sinless, and we can look from our perch at the top of morality at everyone who came before us and say that those people were all garbage compared to us.
Now, there were people who were garbage compared to us, but I really don't think that Washington was among the people who you can say was garbage compared to you.
Like, I don't think that you living in 1770 are a better person than George Washington.
I think you stand atop the legacy that George Washington helped build.
Well, I have news for those people that were trying to break into Amazon Go.
History is going to look back at you like you're a piece of shit.
The people in the future that would never shatter property and never spray paint things and never attack people for filming things with their cell phones, they're going to look back at these violent actions.
And they're going to look back and they're not going to be kind.
Every single generation, hopefully, if society doesn't implode, we don't have nuclear war, Every single generation is going to learn from the mistakes of the past and hopefully improve.
That's what we're hoping for.
And we should be happy that we can look back on a lot of these people and say, we understand now how deeply flawed they were and what was wrong with George Washington or what was wrong with Thomas Jefferson.
Although he did draft the Declaration of Independence, he was a slave owner.
And this is one of the contradictions of our society and our culture.
I mean, you don't have to shortchange the evils of human beings in order to recognize either the direction of American history or recognize the good things about people.
People are a little more complex than I think we want to think of them as.
And this is one of the arenas that sort of gets back to the point about the system.
If you recognize that human beings are capable of great sin and also capable of doing great things, what you really want is a system that Of checks and balances that prevents people from gaining too much power to hurt other people.
And what you also want to recognize is that the flaws of human beings are not necessarily the flaws of the system.
And that just changing the system is not going to change the underlying flaws of human beings.
Which means you actually have to think through the policies that you're promulgating before you implement them.
Clearly, if you say this, you're not paying attention to what happened at CHAZ or CHOP. Because they had it nailed.
It was paradise for a short period of time.
That's one of my favorite stories of this year because these people basically took over this gigantic chunk of Seattle and said, we're going to show you how it's done.
They wind up being the police.
They wind up beating the fuck out of people who did anything they didn't want to do, including film things.
Because the founders didn't understand the problem of human nature, which is people want power, and they want to hurt other people very often.
And you still need government in order to do things, but there better be broad-scale agreement on the things you want to do, or a small majority of people can really hurt a huge minority of people, right?
This is what they call tyranny of the mob.
They're much afraid of this.
And that's stuff that is worth remembering.
Tearing down that system because you want to build something more beautiful, if it looks like Chaz or Chop, that ain't a thing.
I think they think that human beings are going to be fundamentally transformed by a different system.
So they look at the problems.
One of the biggest problems we have in American politics is the myopia with which we look at the United States.
So when you're dating somebody, it's very easy to see all the problems with the person you're dating.
When you're married to someone, it's certainly easy for my wife to see all the problems with me, and there are plenty.
But when she looks at all the other people, then she's like, okay, well, he's less flawed than the others, right?
When you look at the United States, it's very easy to see all the different flaws in the United States because, of course, they exist.
This is a society filled with humans, 330 million of them.
But when you look abroad and you look at other examples of civilizations over time, and then you look back at the United States, you think maybe the system isn't quite that bad.
Because the fact is that for all the problems we got, the biggest problems that humanity faces and has faced are not happening in the United States.
They're happening everywhere else.
China right now is shipping Uyghur Muslims on trains after shaving their heads to concentration camps where they are being forcibly sterilized.
There are actual problems on planet Earth.
That is not to say there aren't problems in the United States, but they are not the same in terms of degree, and they are not the same in terms of scope.
And to pretend that the system of the United States needs to be ripped down from the inside, and that if you build a beautiful new system, you will shape humanity such that we are all saints and no sinners, you're out of your mind.
So the BBC interviewer shows him the tape of the people being pushed onto trains, right?
And he says, what is this?
And the Chinese ambassador says, I can't see it.
I'm not sure what you're talking about.
He's literally saying that the screen is huge.
It's right behind him.
Like he's looking right at it.
And he acts as though he can't see it.
And then he starts talking about the natural beauty of the region.
He won't deal with it.
He won't explain what it is.
And the rest of the world is just like, well, you know, this is where, you know, in the sporting world, the story that's undercover in the sporting world is the blowback that the NBA gave to Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets GM, for saying free Hong Kong.
You can't even get anybody in the NBA to condemn China while China's subjecting a million Uyghurs to abject slavery.
Mark Cuban just had an exchange with Ted Cruz the other day where he was going after Cruz for something and he questioned Cruz's balls or something and Cruz came back and said, well, do you have the balls to condemn China?
And Cuban said something like, well, you know, I don't want to get involved in the internal affairs of another country.
I thought, well, that's...
That is not an internal affairs question.
It's one thing to say I don't want to get involved in the tax rates of other countries.
It's another thing to say shaving people's heads, shipping them on trains to concentration camps where you force them into labor and or sterilize them.
That seems like not an internal issue that you're not allowed to criticize, really.
But the China thing is so crazy because so many business interests have this connection with them and so much of...
The money that they generate is because of China.
I mean, the NBA, films, there's so much of our culture that kowtows to China.
We're so connected to them.
That's one of the things that we really found out from this pandemic is how many things are built there, how much of our medicine, how much we rely on China.
It also demonstrates the lie of the idea that if you trade with somebody, then they're going to liberalize.
That was something that was pushed over the last 30, 40 years real hard, which is we'll help them out economically.
We'll have mutual trade.
It'll be good for both of us.
And they'll liberalize because once they realize it's good to be part of the world economy, then they won't be tyrants anymore.
And instead, they just took all the chips off the table and said, no, actually, I'm going to double down on this and we're going to get more tyrannical, not less.
I mean, Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao.
So I think that if we're going to hold together, we have to make a decision.
Either fundamentally the American system is good but flawed, we need to work on the flaws within the system, or fundamentally the American system sucks and was rooted in slavery and bigotry and we need to rip down the entire system.
The latter is not really a great recipe.
So we can have normal political arguments within the former or the country is toast.
As far as what goes down in November, Look, right now the polling data says Trump gets skunked.
I mean, right now the polling data's got Biden up 10, 12 points in the polls.
So on the national data, the final RealClearPolitics poll average was like three points.
Hillary won by three points in the popular vote.
The state polls were really wrong, particularly in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania.
On this one, because Trump is universally losing in like all the swing states and is in spitting distance in Texas, he's got a lot of ground to make up right now.
Listen, Biden is running almost the ideal campaign.
He's not alive.
He's a not alive person.
And as it turns out, beating a dead horse is actually kind of tough, right?