Jan. 24, 2024 - America First - Nicholas J. Fuentes
03:38:22
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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It's the ugliest nightmare born from the prettiest dreams Millions of people trying to get on the scene And everyone's selling their souls, everyone's selling their kids | |
| Everyone's saying they want, but they sleepwalking dead eyes closed LA. | ||
| Monster. | ||
| I pray the Lord my soul to keep. | ||
| Lord, save these people. | ||
| They are sweet. | ||
| Hey, let it stay. | ||
| Anyone is sweet. | ||
| Lord, save us from L.A. | ||
| I am limelighton. | ||
| Blueprint 5 mic. | ||
| Go get his Rhyme-Lite. | ||
| Should've been signed twice. | ||
| Most imitated. | ||
| Grammy nominated. | ||
| Hotel accommodated. | ||
| Cheerleader prom dated. | ||
| Barbershop player hated. | ||
| Mom and Pop, who played it? | ||
| Felt like it rained till the roof caved in. | ||
| Two words. | ||
| Goddamn crazy. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| So I live by two words. | ||
| Fuck you, pay me. | ||
| Pay me. | ||
| Scream me. | ||
| Tease me. | ||
| Save me. | ||
| You know how the game be. | ||
| I can't let him change me. | ||
| His own judgment. His own judgment. | ||
| His own judgment. | ||
| His own judgment. | ||
| Sorry to keep you waiting, complicated business. | ||
| The End The more that a broken system tells you that you're wrong, the more certain you should be that you must keep pushing ahead. | ||
| Because it's the outsiders who change the world. | ||
| And it'll make a real and lasting difference. | ||
| Nothing worth doing ever came easy. | ||
| Treat the word impossible as nothing more than motivation. | ||
| The future belongs to the people who follow their heart no matter what the critics say. | ||
| We must always remember that we share one home and one future. | ||
| Glorious destiny. | ||
| We all bleed the same red blood of patriots. | ||
| We all salute the same great American flag. | ||
| Our best days are yet to come. | ||
| I am officially running for president of the United States. | ||
| We need a leader. | ||
| I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. | ||
| It can be wonderful if you have smart people. | ||
| But we have people that are stupid. | ||
| The American dream is dead. | ||
| But if I get elected president, I will bring it back. | ||
| Bigger and better and stronger than ever before. | ||
|
unidentified
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The American dream. | |
| Bigger and better and stronger than ever before. | ||
| And we will make America great again. | ||
| Bigger and better and stronger than ever before. | ||
| and we will make America great again, and we will make America great again, and and we will make America great | ||
|
unidentified
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again, and we will make America great again, and we will make and we will make America great again, and we will make America | |
| We want to go! | ||
| And nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. | ||
| We want to go! | ||
| And we will make America great again. | ||
| We will make America great again. | ||
| We will make America great again. | ||
| And we will make America great again. | ||
| And we will make America great again. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We will make America great again. | ||
| America great again. | ||
| Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Donald Trump were all cut from the same cloth. | ||
| And that cloth is very, very large. | ||
| It's not too big, is it? | ||
| It's wrong, isn't it? | ||
| It just feels so right. | ||
| Kill yourself. | ||
| It's wrong, isn't it? | ||
| It feels so right. | ||
| And it's a deal? | ||
| I put together something really impressive. | ||
| Yes. . | ||
| Go big or go home! | ||
| Donald Trump! | ||
| You know, you're really beautiful. | ||
| Donald Trump You know, you're really beautiful A woman that looks like that Has to have a special set It's the night Oh my God | ||
| Hey Donald Oh, you look great Fuck, thank you very much I'm Donald Trump. | ||
| Listen, are you begging him? | ||
| Huh? | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Are you doing this? | ||
| Are you just mad? | ||
| I'm going to be just mad. | ||
| Look at this right here on the street. | ||
| It's Donald Trump. | ||
| What? | ||
| Donald is here. | ||
| What? | ||
| Everything's set for tonight, Mr. Trump. | ||
| I wonder what Trump's game is this time. | ||
| Trump's got a new day. | ||
| Trump's got a new deal. | ||
| What's your game, though? | ||
| Heard about Trump's new deal? | ||
| What? | ||
| Trump has a new game. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Mr. Trump. | ||
| What's your game? | ||
| My new game is Trump. | ||
| The game. | ||
| Trump. | ||
| The Geese. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Listen, this sounds like political presidential talk. | ||
| You said, though, that if you did run for president, you'd believe you'd win. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning. | ||
| I'd never go on to lose. | ||
| I've never gone on to lose in my life. | ||
| I don't know how your audience feels, but I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off. | ||
| That's the guy on fire, right? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's what people always say, isn't it? | ||
| They say, can we really go back? | ||
| And the answer is, whether you're conservative or liberal, right what you're left with, the answer is no. | ||
| We're never going back. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's done. | |
| It's gone. | ||
| All of that is gone. | ||
| But I would call myself something like a Christian futurist instead. | ||
| Because Jesus Christ was our past before any of us were born or conceived. | ||
| Jesus Christ is our present now. | ||
| And Jesus Christ is our future after we die on earth. | ||
|
unidentified
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We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet earth. | |
| We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet earth. | ||
| We love everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
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And we want people that can burn, really, more than anybody. | |
| But this country can no longer be held hostage by a small minority that doesn't believe in real hell. | ||
|
unidentified
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The mission of our movement is to make this country a Christian country. | |
| The mission is to create a Christian, Hey, what's up everybody? | ||
| It's me, Nick Fuentes. | ||
| Live here today on Rumble, we're gonna be watching the Destiny vs. Ben Shapiro debate. | ||
| Hosted by Lex Friedman. | ||
| And I think this just came out yesterday, or two days ago. | ||
| So we're gonna be watching the whole thing, or as much of it as I can tolerate, to be honest. | ||
| But I'm never gonna make that kind of commitment again. | ||
| I think I've committed to watching long videos like this, and I always tap out after like an hour, so... | ||
| So we're gonna be watching the debate. | ||
| Check in on the live chat if you're here. | ||
| Say what's up. | ||
| Let me know you're here if you're in the live chat watching right now. | ||
| Say what's up. | ||
| And we'll see who we got tuning in today. | ||
| We got Arthur Friend Spexo. | ||
| Good afternoon Spexo. | ||
| We got Laffy King. | ||
| CoolCheeseGuy, AFP, Chad King, what's up? | ||
| Vito Carlucci, favorites. | ||
| Trombone Zoomer, great guy. | ||
| What do we got? | ||
| Okay, it's moving a little too fast. | ||
| Now we got Andy Stew, MSG, Shiny Flake, Gallon, Nitro Super, some new faces, some old faces, new faces. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Harris Walker? | ||
| No fucking way. | ||
| Harris Walker? | ||
| Good afternoon, buddy. | ||
| He says, what's up, Nick? | ||
| What's up with you, dude? | ||
| Nomad Groyper. | ||
| Dalton. | ||
| Is that Dalton Clawd? | ||
| No, that's Dalton Kleinfelter. | ||
| That's Dalton Kleinfelter. | ||
| Don't get it twisted. | ||
| Well, good afternoon, everybody. | ||
| I think we'll just get into it. | ||
| We're here. | ||
| I think this is my first Rumble exclusive daytime stream in a few weeks. | ||
| So it's been a minute, but it's gonna be fun. | ||
| And remember to follow me. | ||
| I'm gonna shill the rumble this time. | ||
| Follow me on rumble before we get into it. | ||
| Smash the follow button and the like button on the video. | ||
| And remember I'm going live tonight. | ||
| I'm going live tonight. | ||
| Like 10 o'clock Central Time to do America First. | ||
| There's a lot of big other news going on. | ||
| We gotta cover what's happening at the border with Texas. | ||
| And what's happening in the Middle East? | ||
| United States withdrawing from Iraq, but re-engaging Yemen. | ||
| So it's gonna be a packed show tonight, but... Okay, let's just get into it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's just... let's just do this thing. | |
| Strap in. | ||
| It's Destiny vs. Ben Shapiro, Lex Fridman. | ||
| I guess they filmed this... or they had planned on filming this in November. | ||
| And they had to postpone it. | ||
| So, this has been a few months coming. | ||
| And, you know, it's notable that they're both Zionists. | ||
| I think that's the only reason maybe why Shapiro agreed to it is because Destiny is a hardcore Zionist, just like Shapiro. | ||
| So imagine that. | ||
| You know, you think you're getting the far left versus the far right. | ||
| In reality, you're getting two Zionists bickering over who is a better president. | ||
| But, I'm sure we will get into that and everything else so let's just There has to be some diplomatic bilateral communication there. | ||
| No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran. | ||
| History moves in one direction. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because of time? | ||
| Communism, Nazism, all of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| Do you think that today Donald Trump knows that he lost the election? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, I don't. | ||
| This is one of the areas where we get into this. | ||
| I don't understand if there's like brain breaking happening or what's going on. | ||
| I don't know what world we can ever live in. | ||
| Well, we say that Trump is less divisive for the country than Biden. | ||
| Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| What about supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? | ||
| What about pneumoultramicroscopics? | ||
| Or the science terms. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Or what about the 7,000-letter thing that's from part of Biochemistry? | ||
|
unidentified
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I got my education in the Soviet Union, so we just did math. | |
| That's why you're a useful person. | ||
|
unidentified
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Does body count matter? | |
| This preview is already giving me AIDS. | ||
| I'm already, that was a 55 second preview. | ||
| I'm already filled with regret. | ||
| And by the way, the comments are even worse. | ||
| Let's just preface. | ||
| Let's look at the, let's just get a little preview here. | ||
| So it's going to be liberalism versus conservatism, education, Trump and Biden, foreign policy, Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, January 6th, abuse of power, wokeism, Institutional capture, monogamy versus open relationships, and rapid-fire questions. | ||
| Lex hosting the Super Bowl for nerds is a great gift to us all. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| I enjoy this type of debate. | ||
| No screaming over each other. | ||
| Just a conversation where the content is more important than the show. | ||
| Nine hours of debate compressed into two and a half hour video. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| It is actually so weird seeing them in the same room, but pretty refreshing. | ||
| Actually, pretty refreshing. | ||
| Absurdly refreshing to see two people who are familiar with the subject matter across a what? | ||
| Familiar, that's a stretch. | ||
| Across a wide variety of topics making arguments based on factual, verifiable claims and if-then logic as opposed to just name-calling. | ||
| One big takeaway is that there's a lot of agreement between certain camps, at least between the ones interested in reaching conclusions based on data, rather than reaching data based on conclusions. | ||
| Kill yourself in Fortnite, okay? | ||
| Can we say, is that against Rumble's terms of service? | ||
| Can I say kill yourself? | ||
| Some platforms are really touchy about that. | ||
| You can't say kill yourself. | ||
| But if you can't say it on Rumble, then it was just a joke and I didn't mean it. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I need... I gotta text my connection to ask Chris directly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is it against the TOS to say kill yourself? | |
| I also need some clarity. | ||
| Does kill yourself against the TOS is like... Can we say the F slur? | ||
| Can I say the N word? | ||
| Can I say... | ||
| You know, we need a little clarity here on what we can say. | ||
|
unidentified
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...and destiny, each arguably representing the right and the left of American politics, respectively. | |
| They are two of the most influential and skilled political debaters in the world. | ||
| This debate has been a long time coming, for many years. | ||
| It's about 2.5 hours, and we could have easily gone for many more, and I'm sure we will. | ||
| It is only round one. | ||
| This is the Lex Freeman Podcast. | ||
| To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. | ||
| And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro and Destiny. | ||
| Ben, you're conservative. | ||
| Destiny, you're a liberal. | ||
| Can you each describe what key values underpin your philosophy on politics? | ||
| And maybe light. | ||
| Also, we have to acknowledge, just quickly, before we get into it, they are all Zionist liberals. | ||
| Okay, and that's not just me saying that. | ||
| That is objectively true, and I think they would all identify that way. | ||
| Lex Friedman is a Jewish Zionist. | ||
| Ben Shapiro is a Jewish Zionist. | ||
| And Destiny's a Zionist. | ||
| Lex Friedman is a liberal. | ||
| He is in favor of capitalism, markets, human rights, egalitarianism, democracy. | ||
| So is Ben Shapiro. | ||
| So is Destiny. | ||
| So, and I just want to point that out at the very beginning. | ||
| I promise I'll let it play, but I just want to point that out. | ||
| They say it, and they're setting it up like it's two opposites coming together and having this debate, but they're really not opposites. | ||
| They're really both coming from generally the same place. | ||
| It's really like center-right versus barely center-left. | ||
| And the presuppositions they all agree with. | ||
| So I just want to put that out there. | ||
| Okay, now we'll get into it. | ||
| Yeah, so I think that we have a huge country full of a lot of people, a lot of individual talents, capabilities. | ||
| And I think that the goal of government, broadly speaking, should be to try to ensure that everybody's able to achieve as much as possible. | ||
| So on a liberal level, that usually means some people might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to things like education. | ||
| They might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to providing certain necessities like housing or food or clothing. | ||
| But broadly speaking, I mean, I'm still a liberal, not a communist or a socialist. | ||
| I don't believe in the, you know, total command economy, total communist takeover of all of the, you know... Whenever anybody says things like, broadly speaking, that means they're an idiot. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Whenever anybody says, broadly speaking, or whenever... This is another one of my favorites. | ||
| Whenever somebody says, a 20,000 foot view, The macro level... That means you're a fucking idiot. | ||
| Also, we're gonna get a lot of this. | ||
| There it is again, by the way. | ||
| We're going to get a lot of this. | ||
| There it is again, by the way. | ||
| You know, economy. | ||
| But I think that, broadly speaking, the government can kick in and help people when they need it. | ||
|
unidentified
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And that government can and should be big. | |
| Not necessarily. | ||
| I notice that when liberals talk about government, especially taxes, it seems like they talk about it for taxes' sake or bigness' sake. | ||
| So people talk about taxes sometimes as like a punishment, like tax the rich. | ||
| I think taxing the rich is fine insofar as it funds the programs that we want to fund, but Democrats have a really big problem demonizing success or wealth, and I don't think that's a bad thing. | ||
| I don't think it's a bad thing to be wealthy, to be a billionaire or whatever, as long as we're funding what we need to fund. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ben, what do you think it means to be a conservative? | |
| What's the philosophy that underlies your political view? | ||
| So first of all, I'm glad that Destiny you're already coming out as a Republican. | ||
| That's exciting. | ||
| I mean, we hold a lot in common in terms of, you know, the basic idea that People ought to have as much opportunity as possible and also insofar as the government should do the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people's lives in order to pursue certain functions, particularly at the local level. | ||
| So a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level end up being discussions about where government ought to be involved, but also at what level government ought to be. | ||
| And I have an incredibly subsidiary view of government. | ||
| I think that, you know, local governments, because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent, are capable of doing more things. | ||
| And as you abstract up the chain, it becomes more and more impractical and more and more divisive to do more things. | ||
| In my view, government is basically there to preserve Certain key liberties. | ||
| Those key liberties pre-exist the government insofar as they are more important than what priorities the government has. | ||
| The job of government is to maintain, for example, national defense, Protection of property rights, protection of religious freedom. | ||
| These are the key focuses of government, as generally expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. | ||
| And I agree with the general philosophy of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't do more on a governmental level, again, as you get closer to the ground, which, by the way, is also embedded in the Constitution. | ||
| People forget the Constitution was originally applied to the federal government, not to local and state governments. | ||
| If I were going to define conservatism, it would actually be a little broader than that, because I think to understand how people interact with government, you have to go to kind of core values. | ||
| And so for me, there are a couple of premises. | ||
| One, human beings have a nature. | ||
| That nature is neither good nor bad. | ||
| We have aspects of goodness and we have aspects of badness. | ||
| Human beings are sinful. | ||
| We have temptations. | ||
| And what that means is that we have to be careful not to incentivize the bad and that we should incentivize the good. | ||
| Human beings do have agency and are capable of making decisions in the vast majority of circumstances and it is better for society if we act as though they do. | ||
| Second, the basic idea of human nature, there is an idea in my view that all human beings have equal value before the law. | ||
| I'm a religious person, so I'd say equal value before God, but I think that's also sort of a key tenet of Western civilization, being non-religious or religious, that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms. | ||
| But that does not necessarily mean that every person is equally equipped to do everything equally well. | ||
| And so it is not the job of government to rectify every imbalance of life. | ||
| The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell suggests, is something that government is generally incapable of doing, and more often than not botches and makes things worse. | ||
| So those are a few key tenets, and that tends to materialize in a variety of ways. | ||
| The easiest way to sum that up, the traditional kind of three legs of the conservative stool, although now obviously there's a very fragmented conservative movement in the United States, would be a socially conservative view in which family is the chief institution of society, like the little platoons of society, as Edmund Burke suggested, in which | ||
| Free market and property rights are extraordinarily valuable and necessary because every individual has the ability to be creative with their property and to freely alienate that property. | ||
| And finally, I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy that suggests that the world is not filled with wonderful people who all agree with us and think like us. | ||
| And those people will pursue adversarial interests if we do not protect our own interests. | ||
| Can I ask a question on that? | ||
| I'm so curious. | ||
| What's interesting, okay, I just want to jump in here. | ||
| What's interesting about Ben Shapiro being a Jew is that Jews don't believe that Gentiles have to follow God's law. | ||
| They don't believe that God accepts repentance from Gentiles and they believe that Gentiles effectively cannot God doesn't ask the Gentiles to repent, and therefore God doesn't accept their repentance, and therefore Gentiles can do whatever they want. | ||
| They only have to follow seven of the Noahide laws. | ||
| And so, it's interesting. | ||
| I mean, he says he believes in equality before God. | ||
| He doesn't. | ||
| Jews don't believe in equality before God. | ||
| They believe that Jews, rather than Gentiles, are the only ones that can access God directly. | ||
| They don't believe that Gentiles can have that level of spiritual development. | ||
| And, Jews and Gentiles are not equal before Jewish law. | ||
| So there is the civil law, there's the law of the government, and then there is Jewish religious law. | ||
| And that's what Judaism is. | ||
| It's a codex of law that comes from the Hebrew Bible, which is summed up in the Mishnah, interpreted in the Talmud, enforced by the rabbis. | ||
| So it's interesting that liberalism is really an ideology which proceeds from a Jewish disposition. | ||
| Of course Jews are liberal. | ||
| Of course Jews have this view of government that says everyone should be allowed to do what they want. | ||
| The government's job is to call balls and strikes. | ||
| It's just there to protect human rights. | ||
| Because, and again, notice how the so-called conservative position is basically identical to the liberal position. | ||
| There's just a little tweak. | ||
| They both believe the government's job is to protect rights. | ||
| They both believe the government's job is to protect property. | ||
| They both believe that the government should provide some level of basic necessities. | ||
| They both believe in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. | ||
| They both believe in the power of markets. | ||
| They both believe in a hawkish foreign policy. | ||
| So there's wide agreement. | ||
| The only thing that they disagree on is maybe the size of that social safety net and a sort of guaranteed minimum standard of living that's subsidized by the government or provided by government services. | ||
| That's the only disagreement. | ||
| I imagine Ben Shapiro supports public schools and supports whether it's a negative income tax or some form of UBI or some minimal level, you know, some scaling back of the present welfare system. | ||
| He basically supports a welfare state. | ||
| I think Destiny supports one that's just a little bit bigger. | ||
| But they fundamentally agree. | ||
| And the point is, I'm a Catholic. | ||
| And the true reactionary position, the true right-wing oppositional position, is to say that we reject liberalism. | ||
| We reject democracy. | ||
| We reject the idea that government's job is to facilitate people's material wants and needs. | ||
| Because a truly radical point of view would say that government's job is to get people to heaven. | ||
| that kings and leaders of men are appointed by God, and the purpose of government is actually to provide not just for people's material well-being, but their spiritual well-being as well, which means not just disincentivizing our sinful nature, but actually punishing it. | ||
| Actually punishing it and getting government involved in moving people towards heaven. | ||
| So, for example, here's the difference. | ||
| Catholics would support banning pornography. | ||
| I don't know where Ben stands on that. | ||
| Dennis Prager, who's a Jew, he's against that. | ||
| He thinks that porn should be legal. | ||
| He thinks porn's good. | ||
| He thinks porn and masturbation aren't even sinful. | ||
| And that's a classic That's a Jewish innovation. | ||
| Jews and Christians and a classic difference between a Jewish liberal position on the role of government and a Christian's position on the role of government this kind of separation in church and state that's a Jewish innovation so I just want to put that out there that there there is nothing in Christianity that says that government should be separate from religion or that the government shouldn't be Christian | ||
| That's something that, you know, religious pluralism benefits Jews. | ||
| It doesn't really, maybe it benefits the Christian denomination that may be persecuted if you look at the history of the United States and the history of the Reformation and the religious wars, but But certainly in the present day, not having a Christian government, it's something that benefits Jews and atheists. | ||
| It doesn't really benefit Christians. | ||
|
unidentified
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So I just want to put that out there. | |
| I'm excited for this conversation because I consider you to be really intelligent. | ||
| But I feel like sometimes there are ways that conservatives talk about certain issues that seem to defy logic and reason, I guess. | ||
| So here- and I'm sure you feel the same way about progre- well, I feel the same way about progressives. | ||
| But even some liberals, for sure. | ||
| Before I ask this question, it's going to relate to education. | ||
| We can agree, broadly speaking, that statistics are- There it is. | ||
| Didn't I just say that at the beginning? | ||
| People that always say these kinds of words, what they- When they say that, what they mean is I'm about to say something imprecise. | ||
| I'm about to say something ambiguous and imprecise. | ||
| Broadly speaking, broadly speaking, generally, on a macro level, on a 20,000 foot view, if you say that, you are a fucking idiot. | ||
| And I haven't even seen this yet, by the way. | ||
| I haven't watched any of this. | ||
| But yeah, I that's my that's I have a big problem with when people do that broadly speaking broadly speaking Just be precise, you know just Use language and just be precise about what you're saying. | ||
| It's just it's sort of like a hedge if you're about to say something that is not precise or not true or Stupid if it's unintelligible, then you get to say. | ||
| Oh, I said broadly. | ||
| I mean generally, I mean So that's like a nice little way to kind of save yourself. | ||
| It's a little mulligan. | ||
| I asked this question, I feel the same way about progressives, but even some liberals for sure. | ||
| Before I ask this question, it's going to relate to education. | ||
| We can agree, broadly speaking, that statistics are real and that not everybody could do everything. | ||
| So for a grounded example... I hate, dude, I hate the way he moves his hands. | ||
| He does that same like, first of all, his tiny hands. | ||
| That's how you, by the way, that's how you know he's a pussy. | ||
| It's because not only is he small... I mean, listen. | ||
| Some people are shorter than other people. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| But, I mean, I'm not the tallest guy on campus, okay? | ||
| But you know he's a pussy because he has these tiny little baby hands. | ||
| He has those Junior Whopper hands. | ||
| And I hate that he does all these TikTok hand motions. | ||
| He does these faggoty... My hand movements are good. | ||
| My gesticulation is good. | ||
| His is gay. | ||
| And I hate it. | ||
| And I hate his tiny hands. | ||
| Life was pretty bad. | ||
| I got into streaming and I turned my life around and that was really cool, but I can't expect everybody to do what I did, right? | ||
| Like everybody being able to join the NBA or to be like a streamer. | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| Everybody has different qualities. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I used to be a lot more libertarian when I was 20, 21. | ||
| And one of the things that dramatically changed kind of my view on government Manipulation of things in society came when it came time to deal with my son and the school that he went to. | ||
| And one of the things that I noticed was when it came time to send my son to school, I could either do private education or I could do public. | ||
| Personally, I did 12 years of Catholic private education. | ||
| However, the public schools in Nebraska, depending on where you lived, were very, very, very good. | ||
| And I opted for a certain district. | ||
| I bought a house there. | ||
| I moved there. | ||
| And then my son was able to go to those schools. | ||
| And he's been going through those schools. | ||
| And the difference of availability of like technology, like these kids are taking home iPads in like first grade. | ||
| They've got like huge computer labs and everything. | ||
| Do you think that there is some type of, I don't want to say injustice or unfairness, because I'm not even looking at it that way, just pragmatically, just pragmatically, that there might be children that are in certain schools that if they just had better funding or more access to technologies or things available to them, that those kids would become more productive members of society that would like a little bit of a help that they could actually achieve more and do better for all of society. | ||
| So I think that on the list of priorities, when it comes to education, the availability of technology is actually fairly low on the list of Sure, the two things I've heard are food availability and I think air conditioning I think are the two biggest ones that I hear, but sure. | ||
| Well, I mean the biggest thing in terms of education itself, not just the physical facilities that we're talking about, would actually be two-parent family households. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| Communities that have fathers in them is actually the number one decisor according to Roland Fryer and many studies done on this particular topic. | ||
| And the idea that money alone, that investment of resources is the top priority in schooling is belied by the fact that LAUSD, which is where I went to school when I was younger, they pour an enormous amount of money into LAUSD. | ||
| We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars very often per student, and it does not result in better schooling outcomes. | ||
| And so when you say, if we could give every kid an iPad, would you give every kid an iPad? | ||
| The question is not. | ||
| If I had a replicator machine from Star Trek, would I give everybody an enormous amount of stuff? | ||
| Sure, I would. | ||
| Every resource is finite, every resource is limited, and you have to prioritize what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means with which you are seeking them. | ||
| And so, again, I think that the question is... I quibble with the premise of the question, which is that Again, the chief injustice when it comes to education on the list of injustices is lack of availability to technology or that it's a funding problem. | ||
| I just don't think that's the case. | ||
| Sure, and I can half agree with you there, but I don't think any amount of changes in the schools will create two-parent households, right? | ||
| We can't bring a... I totally agree with you. | ||
| That's why I think that the fundamental educational problem is not, in fact, a schooling problem. | ||
| I think that it pre-exists that. | ||
| Sure, but then I feel like we're now I feel like this is kind of the conservative merry-go-round where it's like what can we do to help with schools? | ||
| So two of the things that I've seen I think that are usually brought up in research is one is air conditioning that children in hotter environments just don't learn as well. | ||
| And then the second one is access to food. | ||
| So, like, kids that are given, like, a breakfast or a lunch that's provided at school, like, increases educational outcomes. | ||
| Now, I agree that neither of these things might be determinative in, like, well, 20% of kids are graduating, and now 80% of kids are graduating. | ||
| Or these kids are all going, you know, with their GEDs into the workforce, and now these kids are all suddenly becoming engineers. | ||
| But in terms of where we can help, do you think there should be, like, some... Okay, so, I mean, he just admitted his whole argument is moot. | ||
| Talk about... See, this is why this guy is such a slippery debater. | ||
| So, if you're following this line of argument, he said, well, what made me a liberal is seeing how, when I got rich, I moved to a nice zip code and I put my son in a nice public school. | ||
| And it's not fair that other kids, whose parents aren't wealthy, can't go to a nice public school with, you know, a well-funded facility. | ||
| But now he's saying, well, maybe it's not determinative how well-funded the school is. | ||
| Okay, then, but what? | ||
| Maybe it's not determinative. | ||
| I guess it isn't determinative, then. | ||
| Maybe it's not decisive at all, the level of funding the school receives. | ||
| But, it's like, but what? | ||
| So you became a liberal because you felt bad about the fact that inequality exists? | ||
| At least in terms of schooling. | ||
| But I mean really it's a question of equality in general. | ||
| That is the fundamental question. | ||
| It's about equality. | ||
| And the fact that there is no equality. | ||
| And there is no way that you can... And that's really the question I think that conservatives and liberals grapple with. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is... | |
| It's the fact that men and women and, you know, and within men and women were all created unequal. | ||
| And there's combating with this question of fairness. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| Is it fair that some people are born stupid? | ||
| And then there's the secondary question of, well, if we can't control How people are born well, we can give everybody if we could give the children a fair opportunity because it's a question one of Decision and it's a question of birth people are born unequal and then people make decisions and their life is a product of their decisions plus their starting position plus circumstance | ||
| And I guess liberals want to go in there and they want to say, well, school, education should be a place where the state kind of resets it so that everyone has a level playing field. | ||
| That's basically what it is. | ||
| And same thing with like health care and same thing with other things. | ||
| They basically think that some institutions, like the inequality of the world, should not be allowed through the door. | ||
| Schools, hospitals, Um, but it doesn't work that way. | ||
| If you're richer, you get more healthcare. | ||
| It just is what it is. | ||
| If you're richer and you have more resources, then you get more healthcare. | ||
| It's just what it is. | ||
| And that works, by the way, no matter what. | ||
| You wanna know why? | ||
| Even if you live in a socialist country, you could always get on a plane and fly to another jurisdiction where you can pay more for healthcare. | ||
| If you have tons and tons of money. | ||
| And same thing with schooling. | ||
| No matter what happens in the world, if you pay more money, you will get better education. | ||
| Your children will get better education. | ||
| Your children will have a better opportunity at a good life. | ||
| But liberals kind of want to circumscribe equality around the school, around the hospital, around a child age 0 to 16. | ||
| You know, but it doesn't work that way. | ||
| So, that's where you get this kind of, he's like retreating from the position where he says, well, maybe it doesn't matter what school you go to, but, you know, can't government help a little bit? | ||
| And if the argument is like, things should be better, yeah, then we agree. | ||
| But the question is not that some schools don't get enough money. | ||
| The question is the kinds of people that are employed. | ||
| And then you get into questions about who these teachers are and how the resources are spent and who's going to these schools. | ||
| I mean, like, for example, I went to a very good school. | ||
| My parents made a lot of sacrifices so that they could pay high property tax so I could go to a good public school. | ||
| And we live paycheck to paycheck. | ||
| And the thing is though, my school wasn't, it wasn't like it was a super rich grade school. | ||
| What made it good is that it was a great community. | ||
| That all the parents were very involved, and they were involved with the teachers, and they were involved with the extracurriculars, and the whole community was involved with the school. | ||
| And, you know, so that's a problem that you just can't solve with money, which is something like what liberals always believe, which is that, you know, if something isn't going right, it's just because government hasn't been giving them enough money. | ||
| But sometimes communities just suck. | ||
| Sometimes you get a bunch of communities full of transient people who just suck. | ||
| They're not involved, you know, or they can't be involved for one reason or another, and it's really too bad, but that's also just the way it is. | ||
| And you're always gonna have that. | ||
| You're always gonna have some level of that. | ||
|
unidentified
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So... Anyway. | |
| Minimum threshold or minimum baseline of, like, at the very least, every school should have a non-leaky gym. | ||
| Or every school should have, uh, if children can't afford lunch or breakfast, like, some sort of food provided. | ||
| Or every school should have these, like, baseline things. | ||
| So... The food provided is crazy! | ||
| The parent... What's the role of the parents? | ||
| The parents should be able to feed their kids. | ||
| The school's gotta provide- Okay, maybe lunch. | ||
| But then you get into this outrageous stuff where the school's providing like daycare and preschool and breakfast, lunch, and dinner. | ||
| I mean, what's the responsibility of the parents? | ||
| The parents have kids. | ||
| They don't feel obligated to feed the kids breakfast? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That's on the government now? | ||
| Again, at some point, you gotta introduce some culpability. | ||
| Again, I'm going to quibble with the premise of the question because I think when it comes to, for example, food insecurity, school food programs, again, you can always pour money into any program and at the margins create change. | ||
| I mean, there's no doubt that pouring money onto anything will create change in a marginal way. | ||
| The question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement, right? | ||
| So the delta is what I'm looking at. | ||
| And so I think that you're starting at a second order question. | ||
| Which is, what if we ignore what I would think are the big primary questions of education? | ||
| Namely, family structure, value of education at home, how much you have parents who are capable or willing to help with homework. | ||
| What are the incentive structures we can set up for a society that actually facilitate that? | ||
| How local communities take ownership of their schools is a big one, right? | ||
| All of these issues we're ignoring in favor of, say, air conditioning or lunch programs. | ||
| And so in a vacuum, if you say, air conditioning and lunch programs, Sounds great in a vacuum. | ||
| In terms of prioritization of values and cost structure, are those the things that I think are going to move the needle in a major way in terms of public policy? | ||
| I do not. | ||
| And in fact, I think that many of them end up being disproportionate wastes of money. | ||
| I mean, I've talked before, pretty controversially, about the fact that an enormous amount of school lunch programs are thrown out. | ||
| Like, an enormous amount of that food ends up in the garbage can. | ||
| Is there a better way to do that? | ||
| If there is a better way to do it, then I'm perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it. | ||
| But it seems to me that one of the big flaws in the way that many people of the left approach government is, what if we hit every gnat with a hammer? | ||
| And my question is, what if the gnat isn't even the problem? | ||
| What if there's a much bigger substructure problem that needs to be solved in order to... If you're shifting deck chairs on the Titanic, sure, you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented. | ||
| But the real question is the water that's gaping into the Titanic, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I agree with you 100%, but again, I feel like we're on the conservative merry-go-round, then, of never wanting to address... That's not a conservative merry-go-round. | ||
| I can give you ten ways. | ||
| Well, sure, but so, like, here would be the merry-go-round. | ||
| I would say that, like, there is a minimum funding for schools that I think would help children. | ||
| And then we go, well, the thing that would help them the most is two-parent households. | ||
| Then I go, okay, well, two-parent households actually aren't the problem. | ||
| The issue is access to things like birth controls, that people don't have children early on. | ||
| And it's like, but the issue isn't actually birth control. | ||
| The issue is actually, you need a certain amount of money to move out early and to get married and then to have a two-parent household. | ||
| So it's actually like economic opportunity. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Well, it's not, you know. | ||
| No, just two-parent households. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it. | |
| Yeah, but like, what is the, what are the precursors? | ||
| Don't fuck people before you're married and have babies. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Done. | ||
| That's great we can say that and try to fight against, you know, however many hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, but people will have sex and people will make babies. | ||
| And then they used to get married. | ||
| The vast majority of people in this country, with kids, used to be married. | ||
| The vast majority of people with kids in this country, now, are not married increasingly. | ||
| That is obviously a societal change. | ||
| Something changed, it wasn't human evolution. | ||
| But a lot of those things in terms of resting on whether or not- W? | ||
| Woah! | ||
| W, Ben! | ||
| Get fucked! | ||
| Combo! | ||
| C-c-c-combo! | ||
| Okay, W. Shapiro on that one. | ||
| Rare Jewish document. | ||
| have to do with financials. | ||
| Rare Jewish W. | ||
| Do you have the money? | ||
| People are worse off now than they were 50, 60 years ago when the marriage rates were higher? | ||
| People are delaying the start of their careers because education is becoming increasingly important. | ||
| So in other words, people are richer now and they have more education now, and yet they're having more babies out of wedlock now because they're richer and have more education? | ||
| I'm saying that one of the biggest indicators for whether or not somebody is willing to get married is how much money both people are making if they can move out of their household. | ||
| People don't tend to want to get married at 22 when they've just finished college, when they don't have the money to move out and they can't afford a house. | ||
| Because we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture. | ||
| Meaning that everyone, poor, rich, and in-between, used to get married. | ||
| By the way, a huge percentage of marriages in the United States used to be what they would call shotgun marriages, meaning that somebody knocked somebody up, and because they did not want the baby to be born outside of a two-parent household, they would then get married. | ||
| Do we think that shotgun marriages, though, are a way to bring back equilibrium to education? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Yes, 100%. | ||
| A child deserves a mother and a father, because that is the basis for all of this, including education. | ||
| Do we think that shotgun marriages are, well, let's say this, do we think that that's a reasonable direction that society would ever take? | ||
| Or is this like, it was the reasonable direction for nearly all of modern history? | ||
| It was, but history moves in one direction, right? | ||
| Because of time? | ||
| I mean, people don't think that. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| I don't think we've ever regressed social standards back to, like, oh, well, let's go 100 years back and do things that, you know, used to exist before. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| The entire left right now is arguing that we regressed social standards by rejecting Roe vs. Wade, so that's obviously not true. | ||
| The Roe vs. Wade is not a social standard, it's a Supreme Court ruling, number one. | ||
| Number two, if you read the actual majority opinion on Roe v. Wade, we can see that socially we actually never made huge progress on how society viewed abortion. | ||
| This has always been an incredibly divisive thing, right? | ||
| I think part of Alito's writing on it was that things like gay marriage, for instance, we've kind of moved past and it's not really as debated anymore, but abortion was never a settled topic, despite Roe v. Wade. | ||
| The notion that the arc of history constantly moves in one direction is belied by nearly all of the 20th century. | ||
| What do we mean by that? | ||
| I mean, in terms of like, women's rights, civil rights... Barbarism, communism, Nazism, all of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| That's not true at all. | ||
| Nazism and communism were a regression from what was going on in 1905? | ||
| Well, in terms of like, communism being a regression, for instance, I'm not a communist, but like, the industrialization of the Soviet Union happened under a communist society. | ||
| Nazism was the product of what had been happening! | ||
| It was not a regression at all! | ||
| It was the fulfillment of what had been happening. | ||
| That he doesn't see, that he doesn't see Nazism as the product of science, and Darwin, and Freud, and Hegel, and in a sense Marx. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Nazism was the fulfillment of what European civilization was building towards for hundreds of years. | ||
| So I totally disagree with that. | ||
| You know, Ben is just on a different... He's just on a different trajectory. | ||
| Okay, when Destiny talks about regression and Ben talks about regression, they're actually quite similar. | ||
| Okay, the regression was the Enlightenment. | ||
| The regression was... Modernism. | ||
| That was the regression. | ||
| The regression was the French Revolution, the American Revolution. | ||
| That was the regression. | ||
| The regression was the three great monarchies under attack by the Jewish banking-dominated West, which was Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary. | ||
| So no, you have it twisted. | ||
| You have it all wrong. | ||
| It's a murder of tens of millions of people. | ||
| I consider that a regression, a moral regression, which is what we are talking about now, moral regression. | ||
| And you're suggesting that moral regression – I wouldn't term a return to traditional values a moral regression. | ||
| You would. | ||
| But your suggestion is that history only moves in one direction, and I'm suggesting that history does not only move in one direction. | ||
| It tends to move actually back and forth. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't think that all of history moves in one direction. | ||
| There are going to be wars. | ||
| There are going to be times of peace. | ||
| I think in general, we're more peaceful now than we have been in the past. | ||
| But I think when we look at the way that people live their lives, I think that we tend to move in a certain direction socially. | ||
| So when it comes to things like racism or when it comes to things like slavery or women's rights, I think that there are two huge things that probably aren't changing in the U.S. | ||
| and one is access to contraception and one is women working jobs. | ||
| I think that these two things are probably huge things that are moving us off of shotgun marriages or- This guy's such an idiot, dude. | ||
| This guy is really an idiot. | ||
| That's, you know, it was so valuable that we found all these clips showing what he doesn't know because you listen to him talk and you realize this is just not a high-level thinker when he says, these are probably two huge things that aren't gonna change. | ||
| So do you think that all of human possibility is limited by what your imagination says is plausible on a very short-term timeline? | ||
| Because that's what it sounds like. | ||
| That all of human possibilities in this century and the next century in the world is limited by your imagination, limited by what you find sensible and your discretion. | ||
| Do you really believe that? | ||
| Erm, these are probably like huge things that aren't changing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I don't think so, pal. | ||
| I think things... It's like Ben Shapiro says. | ||
| I mean, I hate to admit it, but it's true that things do go back and forth. | ||
| It just depends on how big your time frame is. | ||
| But that's the progressive view. | ||
| That is the theory of progress that all liberals kind of inherently believe in, which is the idea that That history is this linear marching forward, going towards more freedom and more understanding and our nature is improving as technology develops. | ||
| And that's just not true. | ||
| If you look at the long arc of history, it just isn't that way. | ||
| Married very early on. | ||
| And I don't see those... Do you think that those two things are going to change fundamentally? | ||
| First of all, what the data tend to show is that actually more highly educated people, as you were saying, tend to get married more. | ||
| So if the idea is that women getting an education somehow throws them off marriage, it's the opposite. | ||
| Usually it's women who are not educated who are getting married. | ||
| But those women aren't getting shotgun marriages. | ||
| Yeah, but now you're shifting the topic. | ||
| My topic was how to get more people married. | ||
| And you suggested that higher levels of education are delaying marriage and making it less probable. | ||
| And what I'm telling you, because this is what the data suggests, is that actually as you raise up the educational ladder, people tend to be married more than they are lower down on the educational ladder. | ||
| If you're a high school graduate, you're less likely to be married than if you're a postdoc. | ||
| I agree with you, but that's because one of the biggest precursors to getting married is having, like, a level of economic stability. | ||
| So as people get more educated, they obtain this economic stability, and then they're in a more comfortable position to explore more serious relationships. | ||
| There's another confound there. | ||
| I mean, the confound is that people in stable marriages tend to be the children of stable marriages, and there's only one way to break that cycle, which is to create a stable marriage, and that is something that is in everyone's hands. | ||
| Again, this notion that it is somehow an unbreakable, unshatterable barrier to get married and have kids, I don't understand where this is coming from. | ||
| Why is that such a challenge? | ||
| I don't think it's unbreakable or unshatterable. | ||
| The initial point was for school, if we can provide a minimum level of educational stuff for children, that'd probably be good. | ||
| But when we retreat back to, well, it has to be the families that are fixed first, fixing families is a multivariate problem. | ||
| I am fine within my local community. | ||
| We all vote. | ||
| Again, I've suggested that there's a difference between local community and federal. | ||
| I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches or air conditioning or whatever it is that we all agree to do because the more local you get, the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest and the more interest you have in your neighbors. | ||
| All of that's fine. | ||
| I'm part of a very, very solid community. | ||
| In our community, we give to each other. | ||
| We have minimum standards of helping one another. | ||
| All of that's wonderful. | ||
| By the way, how much you want to bet he lives in like a mostly Jewish community in Florida? | ||
| What's the, what's the over-under? | ||
| Okay, odds? | ||
| What are the odds that Ben Shapiro lives in a Jewish, like an Orthodox Jewish community in South Florida? | ||
| Or somewhere in Florida? | ||
| Because that's my money is on that, which is pretty ironic. | ||
| I just want to put that out there. | ||
| It comes to the actual problem of education. | ||
| What I object to in the political sphere, and this happens all the time, is everybody is arguing on top of the iceberg about how we can move the needle 0.5 percentage points, as opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them. | ||
| And we just ignore that. | ||
| We pretend that that's just, you know, sort of the natural consequence of things. | ||
| The arc of history suggests that people are never going to get married again. | ||
| Well, I mean, actually, what the arc of history suggests, realistically speaking, is that the people who are not getting married are not going to be having kids. | ||
| And what it also suggests, the people who are married are going to be having kids. | ||
| And so the demographic profile actually over time is rather going to shift toward people who are having lots and lots of kids. | ||
| I'm married. | ||
| I have four kids. | ||
| Everyone in my community is married. | ||
| That's like minimum buy-in in my community is four kids. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And so what's happening actually in terms of demographics is that the people who are more religious and getting married are having more kids. | ||
| And so if you're talking about the arc of history shifting toward marriage, I would suggest that actually demographically over time, long periods of time, not over one generation, over long periods of time the only cure for low birth rate is going to be the people who get married and have lots of kids. | ||
| Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but I'm just saying that, again... What are you saying? | ||
| I think that there are good conversations to be had about people getting married, because stable families produce stable children that are less likely to commit crime, that are more likely to go to school, that are more likely to be productive members of society, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I'm not going to disagree with you on any of that. | ||
| All of that is true. | ||
| It's just frustrating that sometimes when you bring up any problem, all of it will circle back to other things that makes it seem like we can't make any progress in any area without... | ||
| Dude, he's just getting dominated by Shapiro. | ||
| Just dominated. | ||
| Because remember how this started. | ||
| Destiny said I'm a liberal because I was able to put my son in a good public school. | ||
| And then it turns into, well, maybe funding for public schools isn't determinative, to, okay, you're right, being in a two-parent household's the most important thing, but being in a two-parent household requires this, and he gets beaten back all the way to saying, well, I'm just frustrated that when we have these conversations... So it started out with, I'm a liberal because the government doesn't provide a minimum level of quality of schooling, | ||
| To, I'm frustrated about conversations. | ||
| Where it feels like any suggestion that we could approve anything is shot down because blah blah blah. | ||
| But that's the problem with liberals, is they always start in the middle of the story. | ||
| Which is, these kids are in these shitty schools, or not getting education, and you always gotta rewind the story to, how did we end up here? | ||
| Why is the gym leaky? | ||
| Is it a money problem? | ||
| I think more likely it's a they're-not-doing-their-job problem. | ||
| Or the parents-aren't-involved problem. | ||
| Or the parents-don't-give-a-shit-and-aren't-married problem. | ||
| And they didn't do that because they were irresponsible. | ||
| And that's where liberals make everybody's problems everybody else's fault. | ||
| And, you know, on some level I think that government should provide a net. | ||
| But that's what it should be, is a net. | ||
| It's not supposed to be everybody is going to be taken care of if they just don't do their part. | ||
| It should be that they will not completely fall into hell. | ||
| You know, the floor and the ground won't open up and they'll be swallowed by hell if they make bad decisions. | ||
| That's why it's a net. | ||
| We're not providing a minimum standard of living for everybody. | ||
| That's decent. | ||
| It's supposed to say you're not going to fall into a complete catastrophe. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| I mean, I literally just told you that on the local level, I'm fine with people voting for air conditioning. | ||
| Yeah, but so, for instance, on the local level, so for school funding, school funding is done, I think, generally per district. | ||
| So what do you do when you have poor districts that can't afford air conditioning for their schools? | ||
| I mean, the idea there would be that presumably if the society, meaning the state, and I generally don't mean the federal state, I mean like the state of California, for example, decides that everybody ought to have air conditioning, people will vote for air conditioning, and that's perfectly legal, and I don't think there's anything morally objectionable about that per se. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| I also don't think that that's going to heal anything remotely like the central problem. | ||
| Sure, I agree. | ||
| And I think that what tends to happen in terms of government is people love arguing about the problems that can be solved by opening a wallet, and nobody likes to solve a problem by You know, closing their sex life to one person, for example, or having kids within a stable religious community, like the things that actually build society. | ||
| I'm fine with arguing about each of these policies and whether we apply them or not is a matter generally of pragmatism. | ||
| Not morality. | ||
| It's a matter of incentive structures, not, per se, morality. | ||
| Because incentive structures do have moral underpinnings. | ||
| There's such a thing as, for example, if you're going to use a welfare program, you have to decide how effective it is, to what crowd it applies, where the cutoffs are, does it disincentivize work, does it not? | ||
| All of these are pragmatic concerns. | ||
| But on a moral level, the generalized objection that I have to people on the left side of the aisle is that they like to focus... | ||
| In these conversations, very often it feels as though it's a conversation with people who are drunk searching under the lamp for their keys. | ||
| The problems they want to look at are the problems that are solvable by government. | ||
| And then all the problems they don't want to look at, which are the actual giant monsters lurking in the dark, and not particularly solvable by government, are the ones they want to ignore and assume are just the natural state of things. | ||
| And I don't think that's correct at all. | ||
| And I one billion percent agree. | ||
| And then obviously my criticism for the conservative side is the exact opposite, where there are parts where government could remedy some issues. | ||
| For instance, you know, children having sex. | ||
| I disagree though because government does have a huge role to play. | ||
| That's where a Christian would disagree with a Jew and say that the thing is about Jews is they're willing to say that let's let the government step out and let people figure out their own problems, but it ignores the fact that There's an asymmetry between people and society. | ||
| There's an asymmetry between people in large firms, people in the media, people in Hollywood, and the government's job is to get in the middle of that, and the government's job is to regulate behavior as well as money. | ||
| So Shapiro says, well, liberals want to look at every problem like we could open up our wallet. | ||
| Well, I would say the government is not just about money, it's also about guns. | ||
| And the government should be able to go in there and say, no more pornography. | ||
| If you make pornography, we will send men with guns to arrest you. | ||
| That's a perfect example of something where that's an extremely profitable thing. | ||
| It is something that has totally penetrated the household and the family. | ||
| You can't control that. | ||
| You can't control the proliferation of pornography on these devices inside a home. | ||
| I mean, you can. | ||
| I mean, you really... I mean, technically you can. | ||
| But it's very difficult. | ||
| It's very difficult to prevent a child from accessing that stuff. | ||
| And the same goes in the old days for television and for other forms of mass media. | ||
| So I think the government does have a role to get in the middle of some of those things. | ||
| And the government does have a role, for example, with marriage. | ||
| Are we going to pretend that marriage as an institution is completely spontaneous? | ||
| That it's completely... | ||
| Everything that's happening there is a result of people's decisions, or is there an incentive structure within marriage as well? | ||
| You know, Shapiro can say, well, all of our families are married, but that's because he's talking about Orthodox Jews. | ||
| What about all the Gentiles out here that do not have a nation, like the Jews have, that provides for each other, that has a sense of community and identity? | ||
| These are things that are not easily rebuilt. | ||
| Things like no-fault divorce, things like feminism, and these schools that push women to go to college. | ||
| And Shapiro's right that higher educated people are more likely to be married, but it delays marriage. | ||
| And for a lot of people, when marriage is delayed for women, they're out having promiscuous sex, and then by the time they get married, it's more likely that they'll get divorced. | ||
| So I disagree about, you know, like, let's leave everybody to their own devices. | ||
| I think government has a role in shaping society, and it should. | ||
| ...producing other children out of wedlock. | ||
| Like, sometimes having after-school programs is nice to prevent that. | ||
| Like, I didn't have time for these things when I was in school. | ||
| I was doing football practice. | ||
| I was doing cross-country practice. | ||
| I went in early for a band, you know? | ||
| I agree with you that sometimes people only focus on one end of the problem. | ||
| As a... I hate to be that guy, but as somebody that... Have you ever watched The Wire? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm not going to cite the wires of your life example, but like obviously there's only so much you can do in a school when the children coming in are so beyond destroyed because of the family life and everything prior to them even getting to school that day. | ||
| So I agree. | ||
| Government is not like the solution to broken families. | ||
| That would never be the case. | ||
| And it's actually not the solution to education, depending on the kind of solutions that you're talking about. | ||
| Some solutions, yes. | ||
| Some solutions, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the only thing I'm looking at is, as I said earlier, just like these minimum threshold things where it's like, where can government make, because you mentioned marginal, which I think is a really minimum You know, he always says that whenever he's losing the argument, he just uses affect. | ||
| He uses these weasel words and these rhetorical tactics to say, well, I'm just saying, you know, minimal. | ||
| We're talking minimal. | ||
| I'm talking anything. | ||
| Make an argument, bro. | ||
| Make an argument. | ||
| What's the standard? | ||
| But whenever he's losing, it always resorts to these weasel words. | ||
| Again, he started out saying, I'm a liberal because I could afford a good public school for my kid and that makes the difference. | ||
| And that's not fair. | ||
| And then you fast forward to the end and he says, Well, government could do the minimal thing. | ||
| You're arguing they can't do anything minimal even if it's not determinative at all? | ||
| Okay, so you're just full of shit. | ||
| You don't even know what you believe. | ||
| He just got raped on that. | ||
| He just got absolutely dominated on that topic. | ||
| larger utility to things where the first thousand dollars per student you spend might give you a huge return but the extra twenty thousand after i think these are all pragmatic discussions actually this is what we used to hash out in legislatures before they turned into platforms for people grandstanding but yes sure okay yeah as we descend from the heavens of philosophical discussion he just got raped on that he just got absolutely dominated on that topic wasn't even funny conservatism liberalism Let's go to the pragmatic muck of politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trump versus Biden. | |
| Between the two of them, who was in their first term the better president? | ||
| And thus, who should win if the two of them are, in fact our choices, should win a second term in 2024? | ||
| Ben? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So in terms of actual job performance, you have to separate it into a few categories. | ||
| In terms of actual performance in foreign policy, I think Trump's foreign policy record is significantly better than Biden's. | ||
| The world being on fire right now being a fairly good example of that. | ||
| And we can get into each aspect of the world being on fire and where the incentive structures came from and how all of that happened in a moment. | ||
| When it comes to the economy, I think that Trump's economic record was better than Biden's. | ||
| Doesn't mean he didn't overspend. | ||
| He did. | ||
| He wildly overspent. | ||
| But he also had a very solid record of job creation. | ||
| A huge percentage of the gains in the economy went to people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. | ||
| Actually, the gross income to the average American was about $6,000 during his term. | ||
| The unemployment rates were very, very low before COVID. | ||
| I think that you almost have to separate the Trump administration into sort of before COVID and during COVID, because COVID obviously is sort of a black swan event. | ||
| The most signal Change in politics in our lifetime. | ||
| And so, you know, governance during COVID is almost its own category, which we can discuss. | ||
| But, you know, in terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic policy, I think that Trump was significantly better than Biden has been. | ||
| And that's on the upside for Trump. | ||
| On the downside for Biden, obviously, you're talking four-year highs in inflation. | ||
| You're talking about savings being eaten away. | ||
| You're talking about everything being 20 to 30 percent more expensive. | ||
| You're talking about Massive increases to the deficit, even at a rate that was unknown under Trump. | ||
| The deficit under Trump raised by about a little under a trillion dollars every year up until 2020. | ||
| Again, 2020 was COVID year, so everybody decided that we're going to fire hose money at things. | ||
| But then Joe Biden continued to fire hose money at things in 21, 22, and 23. | ||
| That obviously is, in my opinion, bad economic policy. | ||
| And then you get to the rhetoric and you get to the stuff that Donald Trump says. | ||
| And as I've said before, My view is that on Donald Trump's epitaph, on his gravestone, it will say, Donald Trump, he's had a lot of shit. | ||
| I think that Donald Trump does say a lot of things. | ||
| I think that that is basically baked into the cake, which is why everyone who's bewildered by the polls is ignoring human nature, which is, at the beginning, when you see something very shocking, it's very shocking. | ||
| And then if you see it over and over and over and over for years on end, it is no longer shocking. | ||
| It is just part of the background noise, like tinnitus. | ||
| It just becomes, you know, something that your brain adjusts for. | ||
| And so, do I like a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric? | ||
| No, and I never have. | ||
| Do I think that that is dispositive as to his presidency? | ||
| No, I do not. | ||
| When it comes to Biden, again, I think he's underperforming economically. | ||
| I think that his foreign policy has been really a problem. | ||
| Even the things I think he's done right are, I think, band-aids for things that he created by doing wrong. | ||
| And when it comes to his own rhetoric, You can argue that it's grading on a curve because Trump was coming in with such wild rhetoric that just a maintenance of that wild rhetoric doesn't really change, again, the baseline. | ||
| For Biden, he came in. | ||
| In the same way that Obama did, on the sort of soaring rhetoric of American unity, I'm the president for all—like, Trump came in, he's like, listen, I'm the president for what I am, and, you know, I'm going to say the things I want to say, I'm going to be on the toilet, and I'm tweeting. | ||
| And we're like, okay, you know, that's what it is. | ||
| With Biden, he came in with, I'm the president for all Americans, I'm trying to unify everybody, and that pretty quickly broke down into a lot of oppositional language about his political opponents in particular, an attempt to lump in, for example, Huge swaths of the conservative movement with the people who participated, for example, in January 6th or who are fans of January 6th. | ||
| And, you know, the sort of lumping in of everybody into MAGA Republicans who wasn't personally signed on to an infrastructure bill with him. | ||
| That sort of stuff, I think, has been truly terrible. | ||
| I thought his Philadelphia speech was truly terrible. | ||
| And again, I think that you do have the problem of He is no longer capable of, certainly rhetorically, unifying the country when every speech from him feels like watching Nick Melenda walk across a volcano on a tightrope. | ||
| It really is like you're just sort of waiting for him to fall. | ||
| It's sad to say, I mean, the other day he was speaking for what was, in effect, his campaign kickoff. | ||
| And this is in Valley Forge. | ||
| And I mean, Jill rushed up there like off that off. | ||
| As soon as he was done, Jill rushed up there, you know, like she'd been shot out of a cannon to come and try to guide him away. | ||
| So he didn't become the Shane Gillis Roomba. | ||
| And, you know, that's not really, you know, let's put it this way. | ||
| It does not quiet the soul to watch Joe Biden rhetorically. | ||
| Again, it's a different problem than Trump's problem. | ||
| But that's my analysis. | ||
| This is one of the areas where we get it. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| Honestly, though. | ||
| When people talk about presidents, it's this is almost. | ||
| Like a diversionary tactic to talk about presidents, because in this unique situation. | ||
| Scenario, I think that the president is effective when we're talking about Trump versus Biden But under normal circumstances the president is not and so to talk about American society and how it moves by talking about the presidency It's not like Shapiro doesn't know how the country actually works. | ||
| It's just to talk about it any other way would actually get to the heart of the matter, which I think he doesn't want to do. | ||
| That's why I think the president talk is just really a diversion to say, oh, Trump versus, you know, people love to talk shop about Trump versus Biden and Pelosi and all these political characters, but the things that are going on are much deeper than that, deeper than the level of the presidency. | ||
| I don't understand if there's brain-breaking happening or what's going on. | ||
| I don't know what world we can ever live in where we say that Trump is less divisive for the country than Biden. | ||
| I think it is so patently obvious. | ||
| Trump is so divisive. | ||
| Not only does Trump make an enemy out of every person in the opposition party, he makes an enemy out of his own party and every single person around him. | ||
| We all watched him bully You know, Jeff Sessions, we all watched him bully his own party on Twitter. | ||
| We all watched, like, all of these people walk away from him. | ||
| Even recently, I think, the Secretary of Defense Esper and John Kelly, the Chief of Staff, were, you know, saying, I think Trump is a threat to democracy. | ||
| You know, you've got all of his prior people that were around him, some of his closest allies. | ||
| You've got Bill Barr that won't cosign a single thing that he says. | ||
| You've got all these people that he used to work with that all say Trump is a horrible, evil person, he is ineffective as a leader, he doesn't accomplish anything, and he didn't. | ||
| To say that Biden has failed at bipartisanship when we've gotten the CHIPS Act, we've gotten the IRA, we've gotten the ARP, we've gotten the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, when we've gotten all this major legislation that is working in this historically divided Congress, as opposed to Trump that got us tax cuts and deficit spending? | ||
| I don't understand where we ever are in this world where Biden is somehow More divisive than Trump. | ||
| Even the speeches that Ben is bringing up, they always bring up, I remember that one, I think we might have even done it on our episode, the one speech that Biden gave where at one point the background is red. | ||
| Yeah, the Philly speech I referenced. | ||
| Yeah, and they're like, oh my god, it's over, this is the end. | ||
| And then meanwhile, you've got Donald Trump coming into office saying things like, if you burn the flag, you should have your citizenship revoked. | ||
| Or talking about MSDNC, that I'm going to investigate every single one of these media organizations for corruptness. | ||
| I'm going to open the libel and defamation laws. | ||
| I'm going to take all of these guys to court. | ||
| You've got this weird Project 2025 stuff where... | ||
| John Paschal, I think, is talking about we're going to investigate all of these people and we're going to try to throw crimes at all these people. | ||
| Trump is like the most divisive president I think we've ever had in at least in my lifetime of being an American citizen. | ||
| And the rhetoric from him is just it's on a whole other level in terms of the demonization of political opponents. | ||
| I mean, this is a guy that's known for giving his political opponents bad nicknames, right? | ||
| Like, that's what Trump does. | ||
| You know, like, it's funny, but even as a resident of Florida, if Florida had another natural disaster, do you think Trump would withhold aid? | ||
| Because you had, I think that was one of the few nice things that DeSantis actually said about Biden, was it like, hey, listen, you know, when the buildings collapsed in Miami Beach, yeah. | ||
| That, you know, for the hurricane stuff, that Biden was there. | ||
| He was saying, if you guys need aid, however many billions, you can have it. | ||
| Meanwhile, Trump, I think, was threatening to withhold federal funding from blue states that wouldn't... I think it had to do with the National Guard stuff, the deployment of the National Guard, that they weren't, like, doing enough for the riots. | ||
| And Trump was threatening to withhold aid from some of these blue states. | ||
| Yeah, Trump is literally the most divisive person in the world. | ||
| I don't see how on any metric he is ever succeeding in the divisive category. | ||
| In terms of the economy, I do think it's funny that Republicans are very keen to say that, like, well, we can't really grade Trump, you know, post-COVID because obviously COVID messed everything up, which is fair. | ||
| But pre-COVID, what did Trump do? | ||
| Yeah, he did deficit spending tax cuts. | ||
| He presided over historical interest rates and an economy that was already, like, blazing past the final years of Obama. | ||
| We were posting all-time highs on all the stock markets of 2013 onwards. | ||
| You know, unemployment rates were falling. | ||
| Now under Biden, unemployment rates are even lower than they were under Trump. | ||
| But it sucks that for Trump, we can say, well, we can't really hold him accountable for 2020. | ||
| That was COVID. | ||
| Well, all we have for Biden is post-COVID. | ||
| We don't have any pre-COVID Biden, you know, economy. | ||
| And it was the same thing for Obama too, coming in right after the housing collapse as well. | ||
| And it sucks that Republicans are able to walk out of office, you know, having burned the entire American society to the ground economically. | ||
| And now we've got to try to evaluate, okay, well, What did Obama do during his first two to three to four years just trying to recover from where the housing crash left it? | ||
| And then we look at Biden now who's trying to recover from COVID and now we're grading him on a totally different scale than what Trump is being graded on. | ||
| Yeah, that sucks, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
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Can you comment on the foreign policy? | |
| On the foreign policy, I'm going to be honest, I am very liberal. | ||
| I'm very not progressive. | ||
| I'll probably come off as more hawkish than others, because I'm not a big fan of this. | ||
| Which also, if Ben agrees, I think people like Trump are going to be the most dovish isolationist people ever. | ||
| They don't want to do anything internationally. | ||
| They just want to, you know, This guy's just an idiot. | ||
| Just like a straight up idiot. | ||
| Don't do anything internationally, which is why he was constantly undermining NATO and constantly attacking the European Union and cheering on the UK for Brexiting away from the EU. | ||
| I think that being said, I think that Biden has done a phenomenal job when it comes to foreign policy. | ||
| I think that the coalition – This guy is just an idiot, just like a straight-up idiot. | ||
| He just has no idea what he's talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Guys like Trump are going to be, like, dovish and, like, not do anything internationally. | |
| what What a fucking retard. | ||
| Obviously, I mean, and don't get me wrong, Trump had an America First foreign policy, but the simplistic terms, well, when you're an isolationist or a non-interventionist, that's when you don't do anything internationally, like, He didn't not do anything internationally. | ||
| He renegotiated NAFTA, attempted to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela, he walked into North Korea and did brinksmanship with North Korea for four years and negotiated them down from doing WMD testing, ICBM testing, attempted a backdoor regime change in Iran, drew our troops down in Syria, paved the way for withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying, well that's why he wanted to take apart NATO! | ||
| He was the one that greenlit lethal aid to Ukraine, pulled America out of the Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile Treaty, and redeployed medium-range ballistic missiles to Eastern Europe, which was a huge deal. | ||
| Engage China in a trade war. | ||
| Am I missing anything? | ||
| He killed Qasem Soleimani. | ||
| Did a huge arms deal with Saudi Arabia. | ||
| The Abraham Accords with the Emirates. | ||
| Almost Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Morocco and South Sudan. | ||
| The idea that he... That's when you do nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When you're in non-intervention, that's when you do nothing. | |
| Destroyed ISIS, somebody says. | ||
| Ended regime change against Assad. | ||
| Pulled the United States out of the JCPOA. | ||
| So this like, well, that's when you do nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the whole thing about, you know, well, what did he do for the economy? | |
| Slashed, he killed thousands of regulations, cut the corporate tax rate by 14%. | ||
| And then the trade war, which was a huge deal. | ||
| Put tariffs on...threaten tariffs on Mexico, tariffs on China, build 500 miles of border wall, remain in Mexico policy. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, this whole...what did he even do? | |
| The stock market was high after Obama too! | ||
| Guy doesn't know, he doesn't know anything about anything. | ||
| Crane Russia, and I'm so happy that he decided to go to our European allies and our NATO allies and try to build a coalition of people to help Ukraine so that that wasn't only the United States. | ||
| Personally, especially after doing a whole bunch of research, I do tend to side with Israel over Palestine and a lot of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. | ||
| I'm glad that Biden, while remaining a staunch defender of Israel, Is that what he thinks is happening? | ||
| Does he think Biden is telling Israel what to do? | ||
| the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. | ||
| I'm proud that Biden said, hey, listen, we're going to delay some of these attacks. | ||
| Hey, listen, we are going to allow humanitarian aid here. | ||
| Hey, listen, we are going to try to, you know, not kill as many Palestinian people down there while still, you know, signaling that he would be a staunch supporter of Israel in the conflict, assuming the civilian— Is that what he thinks is happening? | ||
| Does he think Biden is telling Israel what to do? | ||
| What a fucking idiot, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Biden went in and said, hey, we're not going to kill Palestinians and the Israelis were like, oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause that's how it's been going. | ||
| That, that describes what has been taking place there for a hundred days. | ||
| Don't go too high. | ||
| Um, for foreign policy, I mean, blemishes, I mean like the, the biggest one you can give to Biden is Afghanistan and the poll out there, but man, Are we going to talk about, you know, the Inspector General report that says that one of the biggest reasons why the Afghanistan pullout was so disastrous was because of the Doha Accords, where Donald Trump headed talks that didn't even include the Afghanistan army? | ||
| I mean, like, these were disasters. | ||
| Like, when Biden took office, we had 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan. | ||
| Like, what was the options even afforded to Biden at that point? | ||
| Obviously, you've got the abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria, you know, for the Turkish armies to lay waste to. | ||
| You're talking about Iran and North Korea, although I'm not sure where Ben would land on those, but yeah, that's a broadly... That's a lawful... There it is again! | ||
| There it is again! | ||
| You hear that? | ||
| Ben would land on those, but yeah, that's a broadly... That's a lawful... | ||
|
unidentified
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But pick something where you disagree with here. | |
| Well, I mean, there's a lot. | ||
| So I mean, I want to ask a few questions on each one of these. | ||
| So let's let's talk about divisiveness for a second. | ||
| So there's no one who can make the case that Donald Trump is not divisive. | ||
| Of course, he's incredibly divisive. | ||
| It's a given. | ||
| Do you treat Biden's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness that you treat Trump's rhetoric? | ||
| I should probably put that the other way around. | ||
| Should we treat Trump's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness as Joe Biden or, say, Barack Obama's rhetoric? | ||
| I'm going to try to be concise when I say this. | ||
| Broadly speaking, especially in studying Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia, I try not to take politicians at their word because sometimes they just say stuff to say stuff. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| But broadly speaking, I'm going to look at the rhetoric— They just say stuff to say stuff. | ||
| - Dude, you're a fucking doofus, dude. - The actions, and I am gonna grade them the same. | ||
| So yes, I would hold Biden and Trump to the same standards. - Right, so my feeling is, and this is one area where for clarification we're gonna have a division, is that I of course don't treat Trump's rhetoric in the same way that I treat Biden's or Obama's. | ||
| He's utterly uncalibrated and he says whatever he wants to at any given time, and it doesn't even match up with his policy very often. - Can I ask you, like, for our head of state, our chief executive, shouldn't rhetoric be arguably one of the most important things that he does? | ||
| I mean, the answer would be yes. | ||
| And now I've been given a choice between a person who I think in calibrated ways says things that are divisive and a person who in uncalibrated ways says things that are divisive. | ||
| And so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive is every poll taken. | ||
| Since essentially August of 2021. | ||
| He is, by all available metrics, incredibly divisive. | ||
| A huge percentage of Americans are deeply unhappy, not only with his performance, but don't believe he's a uniter. | ||
| That's just the reality. | ||
| And that may just be a reflection. | ||
| I mean, honestly, we may be putting too much on Trump or Biden personally. | ||
| It may just be that the American people themselves are rhetorically divided because of social media, and social media can in fact be assessable. | ||
| One thing that I would ask you about that, though, is I agree, especially when you look at the favorability, but sometimes when I look at these polls, when you start to disaggregate them by party, I wonder if it's actually, is Biden historically divisive? | ||
| I'm trying to think of a really polite way to say this. | ||
| The people that like Trump worship Trump. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like, one of the most prescient things that Trump could have probably ever said was that I could kill someone on Fifth Street and nobody would hold me accountable. | ||
| And he could! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I would still love him! | |
| Is it really that Biden is historically divisive, or is it that every single Trump supporter will always say that Trump is great and always say that Biden is bad? | ||
| No, the reason I would say that Biden is, in fact, historically divisive is because Republicans felt much more strongly about Barack Obama than Joe Biden, actually. | ||
| But they didn't feel as strongly about Trump as they did about, like, Romney or McCain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| what way i mean and the allegiance to oh no there's certainly more allegiance to trump than is to romney or mccain largely because trump won in 2016 but beyond that the the point that i'm making is that if you're looking at the stats in terms of divisiveness republicans always find the democratic president divisive the question is where the rest of the country is and right now there are a lot of democrats who either don't agree with biden or you know find advice there are a lot of independents who find him divisive so when you're when we're comparing these things i don't think they're leagues apart in terms of the divisive effect of what they say Right? | ||
| And I'm separating that off from, like, the inherent content of what they say, because obviously what Trump says is more divisive just on, like, the raw level. | ||
| I mean, if he's insulting people as opposed to Joe Biden doing MAGA Republicans, like, if I were to just — if I were an alien and come down from space and look at these two statements, I'd say, this one's more divisive than this one. | ||
| But then there's the reality of being a human being in the world, and that is everyone has baked Donald Trump into the cake. | ||
| And Joe Biden, again, started off with a patina of being non-divisive and now has emerged as divisive. | ||
| If you don't mind, I actually want to get to the foreign policy questions, because this one is actually slightly less interesting to me. | ||
| Just one quick thing, I guess, because we can say the reality of it and we can look at opinion polls. | ||
| What if we look at legislative accomplishments? | ||
| Biden is working on a 50-50 divided Senate. | ||
| Donald Trump had both House of Congress and the Supreme Court and got no major legislation passed. | ||
| Biden had the House and the Senate. | ||
| Well, I mean, he did lose Congress in 2018. | ||
| But sure. | ||
| But prior to that, we got the we got the infrastructure bill, I think, in one year, which Trump promised for his entire presidency. | ||
| Didn't get anywhere. | ||
| I mean, yes, his Republican base was not in favor of mass spending on infrastructure. | ||
| And neither am I. So there's that. | ||
| I think that's mostly a state. | ||
| But they were in favor of mass spending for tax cuts. | ||
| That's not a spending. | ||
| I mean, effectively it is, right? | ||
| Effectively it's not. | ||
| Well, if you're cutting tax receipts but you're not changing the level of spending, like Biden did with the IRA. | ||
| Again, we have a fundamental philosophical difference here. | ||
| I think that when the government takes my money, that is not the government Somehow being more fiscally responsible, and when the government allows me to keep my money, I don't see that as the government spending. | ||
| I see that as my money, and the government is taking less of it. | ||
| That's great, but at the end of the day, the government is still going to be in a deficit spending, and they're going to have to borrow money from the Treasury. | ||
| Right, we have a spending problem, in other words, not a receipts problem, is the case that I'm making. | ||
| The problem with Donald Trump is not that he lowered taxes. | ||
| The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems on the planet, and in fact, if you wish to have a European-style social welfare state, what you actually need is to tax the middle class to death. | ||
| I mean, the reality is that the top 20% of the American population pays literally all net taxes in the United States after state benefits and all of this. | ||
| So, if you actually wanted to have the kind of social welfare state that many liberals seem to want to have, like Northern Europe, for example, you'd actually have to tax people who make 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars. | ||
| And I don't want that. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| So how do you explain the lack of legislation? | ||
| I mean, if he's like such a uniter. | ||
| Because I think the Republican Party itself is quite divided. | ||
| And I think that Trump's- But isn't that his job? | ||
| He's the head of the Republican Party. | ||
| He's the president, Republican president of the United States. | ||
| I mean, again, I don't think that- This is just like a dumb argument. | ||
| Biden has passed wildly historic legislation. | ||
| The infrastructure bill was the largest, like- So here's the problem. | ||
| If you're a Republican, the only bills that you can get consensus on tend to be bills that either, that Let's be real about this. | ||
| There are tax cuts because, as you would, I think, agree with, when it comes to polling data, Americans constantly say they want to cut the government. | ||
| And then the minute you ask them which program, they have no idea. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And so it's much harder to come up with a bill to cut things than it is to come up with a bill to add things, which is why spending was out of control under Trump as well. | ||
| But there are some Republicans who still don't want to spend on those things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So inherently, the task that This goes back to the first question. | ||
| The task that Republicans think government is there to do is different than the task that Democrats think that government is there to do. | ||
| So the way that the very metric of success for a Democratic president versus a Republican president, namely, for example, pieces of legislation passed. | ||
| As a Republican, one of my goals is to pass nearly no legislation because I don't actually want the government involved in more areas of our life. | ||
| I want to ask a couple questions on the foreign policy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, okay, wait, real quick. | ||
| So, for instance, like, Donald Trump wanted to punish China, and he wanted to bring microprocessor manufacturing to the United States. | ||
| Biden did that with legislation, with the CHIPS Act. | ||
| You talk about, like, spending being out of control, and I mean, I can agree with that. | ||
| I think anybody that looks at the numbers has to agree with that. | ||
| But why not pass legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, which is at least, like, spending neutral? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, why are there not bills where Donald Trump could take— Well, I mean, first of all, I think that whenever the government says something is spending neutral, it rarely materializes that way. | ||
| That is not going to be a spending neutral bill. | ||
| Sure, but there's a difference between, like, at least they say it's spending neutral versus this is a $500 billion bill over, like, 10 years, right? | ||
| Well, but again, I don't see a tax cut as a matter of, quote, spending neutrality. | ||
| The big problem is they keep spending, not that they are allowing me to keep the money that I earned and they did not earn. | ||
| Okay, so then just to understand, so if somebody just did massive, like, reductions in tax receipts, so tax cut after tax cut after tax cut, but they didn't change spending at all, you wouldn't consider that, like, an increase in deficit spending or out-of-control spending? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You would just— That's not spending! | |
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How does he— But that's not spending. | |
| The deficit would go up, but that doesn't constitute spending. | ||
| No, the opposite. | ||
| I would consider it a wild overspending. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So then was it under Trump then when he did the tax? | ||
| I mean, the deficit spending, by the way, under Biden is way worse than it was under Trump. | ||
| Of course, but we're in post-COVID, right? | ||
| COVID ended effectively... I mean, you live in Florida. | ||
| COVID effectively ended in the state of Florida by the middle of 2021. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, even if you're a vaccine fan, by like April, May of 2021, there was wide availability of vaccines, whether or not you liked the vaccines. | ||
| And at that point, We were done. | ||
| I agree, but like we're in a post, like how many trillions of dollars have been dumped in worldwide that are like leading to inflation, right? | ||
| The inflation is like a worldwide issue right now because of the economy shutting down for a year or two. | ||
| It's not like those effects are gone in one year, right? | ||
| COVID might be gone, but the after effects of all the stimulus spending and the unemployment and everything else. | ||
| The definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. | ||
| So pouring more money on top of that makes for more inflation. | ||
| That's what it does. | ||
| Sure, I agree. | ||
| But like, there's also the definition of when do you deficit spend is when economies are headed for recessions, right? | ||
| Rather than when economies are doing really well, like they were under Trump, and he was deficit spending, whereas Biden can at least make the argument that I should, I ought to be deficit spending because the economy is headed for potential recession. | ||
| So here's the thing, I don't think that the economy is actually headed for a recession. | ||
| In fact, if you look at the economic statistics... Every economist said it was. | ||
| They're still saying that there's like a recession coming, right? | ||
| Right, but that was largely because of the after effects of inflation, meaning if you inflate the economy, what you are going to end up doing is bursting a bubble. | ||
| And then when that bubble bursts, you'll get a recession. | ||
| I mean that was the basic idea, right? | ||
| The question was whether you're going to get a soft landing. | ||
| But if you actually look at, for example, the employment statistics or the economic growth statistics in the United States, what they look like under the last year's Obama and then Trump, I mean this is what the chart looks like, is it looks like this. | ||
| And then it hits March of 2020. | ||
| It goes like that. | ||
| And then by like September, it bounces back up, right? | ||
| It's a V-shaped recovery. | ||
| And then it starts to peter out. | ||
| A lot because of the American recovery plan, right, that Biden did as well? | ||
| Four million jobs? | ||
| No, I'm not going to attribute it to that because the rates of growth in job growth from September, October, November, were actually very similar to the rates of job growth after Joe Biden took office. | ||
| What you see is actually kind of a straight line. | ||
| In any case, on the foreign policy stuff, this is getting abstruse, but on the foreign policy stuff. | ||
| So the questions that I have with regard to Biden on foreign policy. | ||
| Very, very simple question. | ||
| Do you think that the situation in the Middle East is better now than it was under Donald Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably... That's a hard one. | |
| The factors that I'm making right now... How is that? | ||
| W. Ben, how is that hard? | ||
| Obviously, you've got the Israel-Palestinian war that's going on right now, which is kind of bad, but broadly speaking, I'm not sure how much that affects the Middle East as much as the collapse of Syria. | ||
| So we got a twofer there. | ||
| Well, the Israel-Palestine conflict is kind of bad, but it doesn't affect the whole region. | ||
| And then we got another, broadly speaking. | ||
| Then we got another, broadly speaking. | ||
| How many is that? | ||
| Has anybody been keeping score on that? | ||
| Has anybody been counting? | ||
| Broadly speaking. | ||
| First of all, in this case, maybe that's actually appropriate to use that phrase. | ||
| Broadly speaking about the Middle East. | ||
| But you got the wrong answer! | ||
| Yeah, the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't affecting the whole region, for sure. | ||
| Just kind of bad, but, like, broadly speaking, I'm not sure how much that affects the Middle East as much as, like, the collapse of Syria. | ||
| 2013 Syrian Civil War sent millions of immigrants throughout all of Europe. | ||
| Millions! | ||
| Millions! | ||
| This war isn't displacing people? | ||
| This war hasn't displaced millions of people, you fucking idiot? | ||
| If you just say it like that. | ||
| But when you're Destiny, you could just say it like that and that's an argument. | ||
| If you just say millions, all the economists with this weird Jewish accent. | ||
| Why does Destiny have like a Jewish accent? | ||
| He's from Nebraska. | ||
| He's from Nebraska and he sounds like a Jew. | ||
| Why does he say, why does he say all? | ||
| All. | ||
| All of those things, broadly speaking, you're from Nebraska. | ||
| Buddy, what's with the Jew accent? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You know what that is? | ||
| That's autism. | ||
| Autistic people tend to emulate these other speech patterns, if you've ever noticed that. | ||
| They talk like, they adopt these weird accents. | ||
| If you know anybody with Asperger's, I'm sure you know somebody who does something similar. | ||
| So that's what that is for sure, but that's hilarious. | ||
| Millions of people! | ||
| Yeah, millions have been displaced by this too, retard. | ||
| Which was under Obama and continued under Trump. | ||
| Trump didn't do anything to alleviate any of the Syrian civil war. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| Why did Syria end up as a preserve of Russia again? | ||
| How did Syria end up as a preserve of Russia? | ||
| Yes, why did it end up being essentially a client state of Russia? | ||
| I know that Putin enjoys access to the ports down there. | ||
| I don't know, you tell me. | ||
| I mean, the reason is because Barack Obama suggested that there was a red line that would be drawn in the face of chemical weapons use. | ||
| Bashar al-Assad then used chemical weapons in Syria, and Barack Obama was unwilling to then essentially create consequences for Syria in the form of any sort of Western strike, and so instead he outsourced it to Russia. | ||
| This is 2013-2014. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Do you think there might have been some hesitancy after, like, seeing how Libya ended up, that maybe us, like, intervening? | ||
| Who was president during Libya? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does that have to do with anything? | ||
| There might have been like a mistake learned. | ||
| The point that I'm making is that actually the Middle East, I mean, just historically speaking, was historically good under Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, it's very difficult to make the case that either before or after Trump were better than during Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, the Syrian, I don't think that Trump contributed to the Syrian situation improving much. | ||
| He did wreck ISIS, which was in the West. | ||
| I mean, ISIS had been getting wrecked by the Kurds in Iraq, by every single person, by Assad's army by Putin, by Turkey. | ||
| Literally everybody was fighting against ISIS at that point. | ||
| There's a spike in violence. | ||
| And then the Trump, I mean, you get credit for when you're president, presumably. | ||
| I mean, things got better with ISIS under Trump. | ||
| I mean, yeah, they did. | ||
| Things got worse with ISIS under Obama. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| He called them the JV squad. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then they became not the JV squad. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't know if ISIS is originating in Syria and Baghdadi and all of the growth of that is necessarily Obama's fault. | ||
| I know that we like to say that Obama created ISIS. | ||
| I don't know if you say that, but I've heard that saying a lot. | ||
| I think that's a little bit simplistic. | ||
| I don't think that when I'm looking at actions that presidents have taken, the The biggest criticism I have for Middle Eastern policy is, I think the Doha Accords were a disaster, and I think that's one of the biggest blemishes that we have right now. | ||
| I would also argue that moving the embassy to Jerusalem was also kind of silly, and arguably contributed to some of the conflict we see right now between Israel and Palestine. | ||
| I would argue precisely the opposite, especially given the fact that after the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords continued to sign and actually expand. | ||
| And that if Donald Trump had been elected, I have no doubt in my mind that Saudi Arabia would now be a part of the Abraham Accords. | ||
| In fact, that was basically pre-negotiated. | ||
| And then when Joe Biden took office, Joe Biden took a very anti-Saudi stance on a wide variety of issues. | ||
| The biggest single effect in the Middle East of Joe Biden's presidency, and again, I agree with you that not every foreign policy issue can be laid at the hands of a president. | ||
| Joe Biden's main approach to the Middle East was very similar to the Obama approach, which is why the Middle East was chaotic under Obama and chaotic under Biden. | ||
| And that was to alienate allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, and instead to try to make common cause or cut deals with Iran. | ||
| What that did is incentivize terrorism from Iran. | ||
| What we're watching in the Middle East is Iran attempting to use every one of its terror proxies in the Middle East, and it was specifically launched in an attempt to avoid what Biden actually was trying to do, which was good, which was After two years of failure with Saudi Arabia, try to bring them into the Abraham Accords, right? | ||
| That was what was burgeoning at the end of last year. | ||
| And Iran saw that, and Iran decided that they were going to throw a grenade into the middle of those negotiations by essentially activating Hamas. | ||
| Hamas activates, Hamas commits. | ||
| October 7th, Israel, as a sovereign nation-state, has to respond to the murder of 1,200 of its citizens and the taken kidnapping of 240. | ||
| Israel has to do that not only to go after its own hostages and try to restore them, but also to reestablish military deterrence in the most violent region of the world. | ||
| Hezbollah gets active. | ||
| On Israel's northern border. | ||
| Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hezbollah! | |
| They get active on the northern border. | ||
| The Houthis in Yemen get active. | ||
| The only reason all this is happening at the same time is because Iran is doing this, right? | ||
| But not just that. | ||
| They are threatening global shipping. | ||
| If you're talking about the effects of global supply lines, which I totally agree had a major inflationary effect on the economy thanks to COVID. | ||
| Right now, the cost of shipping is nearly double what it was just a few weeks ago, and that is because a ragtag group of hoodie barbarians are attacking international shipping and forcing everybody to stop using the Babel Mound and straight instead of going around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. | ||
| All of that is the result of the fact that Joe Biden reoriented the United States in the very early days in favor of a more pro-Iranian stance. | ||
| He appointed Robert Malley to negotiate the Iran deal, who, as it turns out, was using proxies. | ||
| Many of his aides were actually taking money from Iran. | ||
| The Biden administration, literally one of their first acts was to delist the Houthis as a terror organization and end sanctions against the Houthis. | ||
| These are all moves that Biden made very early on. | ||
| They were disastrous moves. | ||
| But when it comes to domestic policy, I think he hasn't been nearly as damaging as domestic policy as he hasn't been on foreign policy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| So just on a couple of Middle Eastern things. | ||
| So one of the big things that threw the Middle East into disaster. | ||
| Shapiro, by the way, Shapiro is wrong about some of this. | ||
| But his answer to destiny is just like, I mean, Shapiro is wrong because he's a Zionist. | ||
| So, he's interpreting everything through the lens of what benefits Israel. | ||
| Destiny's just ignorant. | ||
| Destiny just doesn't even know what he's talking about. | ||
| He says that, like Shapiro says, the Middle East was objectively stable under Trump from 2017 until 2021. | ||
| Inarguably, it was more stable than it had been at any other time in this century. | ||
| Whether it's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, period of the rise of ISIS, Syrian civil war, what's happening now. | ||
| Just inarguably. | ||
| Right now there's fighting happening on every single front. | ||
| There's a major ground war in Gaza. | ||
| There's potentially going to be a major ground operation in Lebanon. | ||
| The United States is now directly bombing Yemen. | ||
| Of course, they were assisting the Saudis in bombing Yemen during their civil war under Trump, but now we're directly involved. | ||
| Terrorism in Iran. | ||
| So, just objectively, it was more stable under Trump, and moving the embassy, much as I disagree with that, has nothing to do with what's happening now. | ||
| The moving of the embassy has nothing to do with what's going on today and what happened on October 7th, because Shapiro's right. | ||
| Whether, and I don't agree that Iran activated Hamas, I think that probably Hamas acted of their own volition, although it's possible that Iran activated them, It had everything to do with a potential Saudi inclusion in the Abraham Accords, which Shapiro's right, Biden was negotiating in August. | ||
| And they were going to promise Saudi Arabia a security guarantee. | ||
| So it had nothing to do with the embassy. | ||
| The biggest disaster was, we are all traumatized by it now, was the Iraq invasion, which happened under a Republican president. | ||
| You agree with that, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The deposition of Saddam Hussein and everything that followed after probably contributed more to the growth of ISIS and the destabilization of that entire region, probably more than anything else. | ||
| I think that under, prior to Bush, for Clinton, and even at the beginning of Bush's presidency, we were on some kind of road to normalcy with Iran, which I think has to happen, whether we like them or not, until Bush, for whatever reason, decides to W Destiny. | ||
| Shapiro hated that. | ||
| Shapiro just hates Iran because he's a Jew. | ||
| So Shapiro's like, Biden made the mistake of trying to have rapprochement with Iran and Destiny says, well that's inevitable. | ||
| Look at Shapiro's face when he says that. | ||
| It has to happen, whether we like them or not, until Bush, for whatever reason, decides to throw Iran into the axis of evil. | ||
| That means that we're on a road to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s. | ||
| That we're on a road to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s. | ||
| My understanding is that, yeah, from the late 90s and prior to the axis of evil labeling of Iran, that there was going to be some path forward to where we could start to normalize relationships with them. | ||
| I find that very difficult to believe, and I don't see a lot of evidence. | ||
| I mean, we can just disagree on that. | ||
| Sure, we can disagree on that, but I know that once it got going... By the way, the after-effects, just a quick note, the after-effect of the Iraq war that was the most devastating was the increase in power of Iran. | ||
| I agree, yeah, because of the destabilization of Iraq, and Iraq not having a government there that was functional for at least a decade. | ||
| And was, in fact, a Sunni government, right? | ||
| Originally it was a Sunni government. | ||
| Disbanding the Sunni army was one of the worst things that the Bush administration did. | ||
| Banning all the former Ba'ath parties, all horrible under a Republican president. | ||
| Don't disagree. | ||
| Yeah, that that probably contributed more to ISIS, to the growth of power in Iran, maybe even to the de-civilization of Syria, probably more than anything that Obama did. | ||
| Also, when we look at Iran funding people in the region, I don't disagree with that as well. | ||
| I think Iran is the number one instigator of bad guy things right now in the Middle East. | ||
| Iran, the IRGC, I supported when Donald Trump killed Soleimani. | ||
| I think that was a great thing. | ||
| I think that Iran is a major problem. | ||
| However, I don't know if the path forward is constantly being a belligerent to Iran or trying to figure out some road to normalcy. | ||
| I don't know if the collapse of Iran or the destruction of that country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yo, W! | |
| Considering how unpopular. | ||
| The Ayatollah even is there, like the citizens of Iran, I don't think are big supporters of the government there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, gay? | |
| No, they all love him. | ||
| I feel like moving on a path where, you know, let's do our nuclear inspections, we had that Iranian nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of, let's do the nuclear inspections, make sure you're not on the way to nuclear weapons, let's unfreeze some funds, let's move in some direction where we get on a good term with you, I feel like that's the most important thing that needs to happen in the Middle East. | ||
| As much as people like to look at the Abraham Accords, who cares if, what was it, Bahrain, I think Oman, UAE and Morocco. | ||
| The UAE and Morocco, yeah. | ||
| All of these people, even Saudi Arabia, already have de facto normalization with Israel anyway. | ||
| They're all trading. | ||
| To pretend that anybody even 15 years ago would have been talking about normalization, Saudi Arabia and Israel is insane. | ||
| They were already on that path. | ||
| They were already de facto trading partners with each other. | ||
| They had already been collaborating and doing things. | ||
| That's a wild claim that Israel and Saudi Arabia were going to normalize 15 years ago. | ||
| 15 years ago might have been a wild claim. | ||
| But after Turkey, after Jordan, and then in the past like 20 years of like economic relations and ties with each other, all of the leadership in the Middle East, and you'll agree with this, look at Israel and they go, okay, well we've got Palestinians who, you know, God bless them. | ||
| Do nothing. | ||
| And then you've got Israel, which is on a region with no natural resources to somehow become like an economic giant. | ||
| They're good to trade with. | ||
| Their population is educated. | ||
| They have military power. | ||
| All of the leadership in these Middle Eastern countries are wanting to be friendly with Israel and are engaging in trade de facto with Israel. | ||
| And the idea that, like, the UAE and Bahrain were brought in to say, like, oh, well, now we're going to officially say this, I just— Those were the first steps toward, obviously, the formation of a new Middle East in which economics would predominate over sectarian conflict. | ||
| The chief obstacle to that is Iran. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| The notion that negotiations with the Ayatollah were going to be a solution to any of this is absolutely benign. | ||
| But do we think— Is it the Abraham Accords that's convincing Saudi Arabia to take a stance against Iran? | ||
| No, they're already fighting with each other. | ||
| I don't think the Abraham Accords moved us any closer towards any type of real peace in the region. | ||
| What has to happen is something has to happen with Iran. | ||
| There has to be some diplomatic bilateral communication there. | ||
| No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran, which was what was taking place with the increased normalization with the Sunni Arab world and Israel combined with significant economic sanctions. | ||
| The notion that there's this far-fetched notion in foreign policy circles that diplomacy can sort of be wish-cast out of thin air. | ||
| That if you sit around a table that you can always come to an agreement with somebody. | ||
| The Ayatollahs do not have common interests with the United States. | ||
| They do not. | ||
| And this idea that they are willing to take money in exchange for, for example, some sort of peaceful acquiescence to Israel's existence is obviously untrue. | ||
| Hasn't that been the case, though? | ||
| That you've had a region with tons of sectarian violence for a long time, and then finally Turkey was like, you know what? | ||
| This isn't worth it. | ||
| The United States paid them a lot of money. | ||
| They had conversations with Israel, and you know what? | ||
| The economy, the economic gains... Jordan, same thing with... Not to get into Turkish politics, but the situation with Turkey was actually quite warm between Israel and Turkey in the 90s when you had the Because Turkey recognized Israel in the 40s, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| of Kamauhtar in place, and now Erdogan has joined in the fray, and Erdogan is significantly more radical than what came before. | ||
| - Sure, I'm so sorry. | ||
| If I said Turkey, I meant Egypt, my bad. | ||
| - Yeah, okay, so, yeah. | ||
| - Right, so, yeah. | ||
| - So in terms of like Egypt and Jordan, right? - Because Turkey recognized Israel in the '40s, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| They recognized Israel right after independence. | ||
| That's, I thought that he meant, 'cause he kept saying Turkey and Jordan, but Turkey didn't need a deal from the United States to normalize ties They did it shortly after Israel's founding, which was unique among the Arab states. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not that Turkey is Arab, but among the Muslim states, I should say. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| What a fucking idiot. | ||
| That's like the one thing that he didn't need to do. | ||
| That he had to not do was make like a serious blunder like that. | ||
| Turkey. | ||
| Oh, did I say Turkey? | ||
| Oh, I meant Egypt. | ||
| Yeah, common mistake. | ||
| It's like the same country. | ||
| Not. | ||
| Yeah, Turkey and Egypt. | ||
| Everybody gets those mixed up. | ||
| Kind of like Russia and China. | ||
| You say Russia, but you mean China. | ||
| That's crazy, dude. | ||
| You need big ones. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| Is it possible that you could theoretically come to a deal with Iran only with a new leadership group? | ||
| This is true for every peace agreement in the region. | ||
| Israel could not have made peace with... Well, they made peace with Egypt and Sadat was the leader for Yom Kippur, right? | ||
| They did not make peace with Nasser. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The point is that this is a different regime. | ||
| You need a different regime. | ||
| But I'm saying the same regime that did part of the Yom Kippur War was the same regime that negotiated peace with Israel. | ||
| I mean, that's true. | ||
| It is also true that that is a relationship that could be cultivated specifically because It was Sadat who made clear he was going to come to the table. | ||
| Have the Iranians ever made clear that they would come to the table over, for example, the existence of the State of Israel? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Ben just got BTFO'd there. | ||
| But that's his neocon Jewish lens getting in the way of reality. | ||
| He says, well, the only way anyone can go to the table is with regime change! | ||
| And Destiny's like, yeah, what about Anwar Sadat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, well, uh, uh, uh, well, because he, well, he wanted to make peace. | |
| Okay, so, seems like your little heuristic is just completely wrong then, isn't it? | ||
| Uh, no. | ||
| That is not a thing that's going to happen. | ||
| But I think people probably felt the same. | ||
| Every single one of their proxy groups, every one of them, not only calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, they also call for the destruction of America. | ||
| I mean, this is literally the Houthi slogan. | ||
| They're busy hitting ships, and their slogan is literally, Allahu Akbar, death to America, death to the Jews, death to Israel. | ||
| It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, and it's not all that catchy, but that is, in fact, their slogan. | ||
| The notion that the regime that propagates that is going to be approached with diplomacy is not only wrong, the problem is that it's easy to say that the stakes of diplomacy are, okay, so we try to talk, right? | ||
| Jaw-jaw is better than war-war. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The only problem is that in the Middle East, weakness is taken as a sign that aggression might be an appropriate response. | ||
| That is how things work in the Middle East. | ||
| And the fact that Joe Biden... | ||
| By the way, I think the logic of violence in the Middle East is actually closer to what most international politics looks like than we wish that it were. | ||
| conflagrations, these sort of brush fires breaking out everywhere that Iran has borders with either the West or Israel or both. | ||
| Any place that's happening is leading to brush fires because, again, the logic of violence in the Middle East is not quite the logic of violence in other places in the world. | ||
| By the way, I think the logic of violence in the Middle East is actually closer to what most international politics looks like than we wish that it were. | ||
| I mean, I think that's part of what's happening in Ukraine as well. | ||
| So you think that- Which brings me, by the way, here's my question about Ukraine. | ||
| I don't mean to skip around. | ||
| Well, just real quick and then you can answer this on that one. | ||
| So you think that for Iran, right, a country that has been sanctioned for God knows how many years now, you think that for Iran just continuing to sanction them and contain them is an effective way, is more effective than trying to engage them in bilateral or multilateral peace talks? | ||
| Yes, 100%. | ||
| And the proof's in the pudding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Before we go to Ukraine, can I ask about Israel? | |
| So, you're both mostly in agreement, but what is Israel- I was about to say that. | ||
| Okay, but as I'm learning, what is Israel doing right? | ||
| What is Israel doing wrong in this very specific current war in Gaza? | ||
| I mean, frankly, I think that what Israel's doing wrong is if I were Israel, okay? | ||
| Like, again, America's interests are not coincident with Israel's interests. | ||
| If I were an Israeli leader, I would have swiveled up and I would have knocked the bleep out of Hezbollah. | ||
| BLEEP! | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Yoav Galant, who is the Defense Minister of Israel, was encouraging Netanyahu, who is the Prime Minister, and the war cabinet, including Benny Gantz. | ||
| So whenever people talk about the Netanyahu government, that's not what's in place right now. | ||
| There's a unity war government in place that includes the political opposition. | ||
| The reason I point that out is because there are a lot of people politically who will suggest that the actions Israel is currently taking are somehow the Manifestation of a right-wing government. | ||
| Israel currently does not have a quote-unquote right-wing government. | ||
| They have a unity government that includes the opposition. | ||
| In any case, Yoav Galant was urging in the very early days of the war that Israel should turn north and instead of hitting Hamas, they should actually take the opportunity to knock Hezbollah out because Hezbollah is significantly more dangerous to the existence of the State of Israel than Hamas. | ||
| I actually agree with that. | ||
| As far as what Israel has been doing wrong in the actual war, I mean, I think that Again, from an American perspective, I think that Israel is doing pretty well. | ||
| From an Israeli perspective, if I were Israeli, I would actually want Israel to be less loose about sending its soldiers in on the ground level. | ||
| So Israel's attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and the cost of that has been the highest. | ||
| Military death toll that Israel has had since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. | ||
| I mean, I personally know, through one degree of separation, three separate people have been killed in Gaza. | ||
| And that's because they're going in door-to-door, it's because they're attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and they're losing a lot of guys in this particular war. | ||
| The problem that Israel has had, historically speaking, is that Israel got very complacent about its own security situation. | ||
| They believed the technology was going to somehow correct for the hatred on the other side of the wall. | ||
| Okay, so our people have to live underground for two weeks at a time while some rockets fall, but at least it's not a war. | ||
| And that complacence bred What happened on October 7th. | ||
| So to me, what Israel did wrong was years and years and years of complacence and belief in an Oslo system that is at root a failure because you cannot make a peace agreement with people who do not want to make peace with you. | ||
| So that's what I think Israel is doing wrong. | ||
| I have a feeling there's going to be wide divergence on this point. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| So in terms of, broadly speaking, I generally oppose settlement expansion. | ||
| Well, in terms of, broadly speaking, I generally oppose settlement expansion. | ||
| It's a thing that Israel does incorrectly, but I think it's kind of, like, provocative to at least all the Palestinians in the West Bank, and it probably energizes hatred in the Gaza Strip for them as well. | ||
| In terms of conducting warfare, the one thing that I always say to everybody, especially Americans, is you can't evaluate things from an American perspective. | ||
| It's very stupid. | ||
| It happened a lot with Ukraine, where people are like, oh, well, didn't they work with the Nazis? | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Really? | ||
| weren't the Soviets the good guys? | ||
| And it's like, well, in other parts of the world, it's not quite as simple. | ||
| And I think the same is true for Israel-Palestine, that a lot of Americans will analyze the conflict as just being one between only Israel and Palestine, which it's not. | ||
| It's a conflict between Israel and then Palestine, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. | ||
| Right now it is. | ||
| I think that the, however, one... | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Brilliant. | ||
| Yeah, most Americans are not operating at this level. | ||
| What was that little preamble about the Soviet Union and the Nazis? | ||
| This guy's just on another level of stupid. | ||
| He's just an idiot. | ||
|
unidentified
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We have to remember, Israel's not just at war with Hamas. | |
| What's he gonna say next? | ||
| Well, they're also at war with Hezbollah and the Houthis. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Wow, bro is breaking out the knowledge! | ||
| Well, what I'll break with, Ben, is I think that minimizing civilian casualties and everything is very, very, very important, I think, on the Israeli side. | ||
| I don't think it's important so that the U.S. | ||
| will stay with them, because I think the U.S. | ||
| is probably going to stick with Israel, as long as they're not doing anything crazy. | ||
| And I don't even think it matters for the international community. | ||
| It definitely doesn't matter for the U.N., because Jesus Christ. | ||
| However, I think it's really, really, really important that I think that in the Middle East, broadly speaking, I think that leadership, especially in the Gulf, has gotten over the Palestinian issue. | ||
| I think that leadership is kind of like they don't care as much anymore, but the populations still care quite a bit. | ||
| And I think that the main issue that Israel could run into is if the civilian death toll does climb too high and if they start to hit this 40, 50, 60,000 number of civilian casualties, they run the risk of the civilian populations in the surrounding Middle Eastern states becoming so antagonistic towards Israel that they start to take steps back towards normalization in the they run the risk of the civilian populations in the surrounding So, for instance, I know that Bahrain, I think, already pulled out their ambassador to Israel. | ||
| My guess is going to be it's temporary. | ||
| I know that on the public speaking side, you've got a lot of people condemning Israel for the attacks. | ||
| And on the private side, you've got people telling Israel, please kill all of Hamas, because this is untenable. | ||
| Nobody wants to work in this situation. | ||
| I don't know if this ended up being true or not. | ||
| I'm guessing it didn't. | ||
| But I saw on a couple of Twitter accounts, it was leaked that potentially Saudi Arabia was considering installing a government in the West Bank that they would run. | ||
| No, I mean, I think Israel would love nothing better than that, but that is not helping the Saudis. | ||
| One of the big problems in the Middle East is literally no one wants to preside over the Palestinians. | ||
| No one. | ||
| In the Arab states, Israel, no one. | ||
| So I think the issue, and I think, and I'm largely actually, I'm very sympathetic towards the Palestinians because I think that for, since 1948 and onwards, I think that all of the Arab states super gassed them up on that. | ||
| They wanted the Palestinians to fight because they wanted to fight with Israel. | ||
| However, as time has gone on and they've realized that it's kind of a lost cause, states have started to drop out. | ||
| So you're getting these bilateral peace treaties with Egypt and with Jordan. | ||
| You're getting multilateral agreements like the Abraham Accords. | ||
| And now the Palestinians are looking around and like, OK, well, you guys told us to fight all this time. | ||
| And now the only people that we have supporting us are Iranian proxies. | ||
| So the Palestinians are in a very weird spot where they've lost all their support. | ||
| Yeah, I think that Israel, what I would say to be quote-unquote critical of Israel, is Israel needs to take strong steps towards peace that probably involves them enduring some undue hardship. | ||
| So, not the October 7th attacks, because Jesus, that's way too much, but, you know, other types of, you know, attacks that they might have to deal with, that might cause some civilians to die, that they don't come out over the top with and retaliate with, if there's ever going to be peace in that region. | ||
| However, another thing that I've always said is a huge problem between Israel and Palestine is I think that both sides think that if they continue to fight, it will be good for them. | ||
| But the problem is one side is delusional. | ||
| Israel, I think Israel wants to continue to fight because they get justifications for the annexation of the Golan Heights. | ||
| They get justifications for expansions, especially in Area C that I think they're probably going to try to annex soon. | ||
| They get justifications for the increased military posturing towards the Gaza Strip and the embargoes. | ||
| And Israel is right that if the conflict continues, really the situation only improves for Israel over time. | ||
| But the Palestinians also all believe that if they keep fighting, they thought this since 2000 under Arafat, that if they just keep fighting, they'll get better gains too. | ||
| But that's not the case. | ||
|
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Is there a difference between Palestinian citizens and the leadership when you say that? | |
| I love all people. | ||
| I love all people around the world. | ||
| And I think that when we analyze issues, I think that we have to be very honest with what the people on the ground think. | ||
| And the idea that Hamas is just this one-off thing in the Gaza Strip is not only incorrect with the situation on the ground. | ||
| It's also incredibly ahistorical. | ||
| And the idea that like the Palestinians in the West Bank, of which I believe the most recent polling shows, I want to say 75 to 80 percent support the October 7th attacks. | ||
| Um... | ||
| Palestinians in general want to fight in violent conflict with Israel. | ||
| That's not just the position of the government. | ||
| That's not just people. | ||
| There's a reason why Abbas doesn't want to do elections in the West Bank, and it's because the Palestinian people really do want to fight with Israel. | ||
| But to combat that problem is like... | ||
| You have to get the UN on board. | ||
| We've got to do an actual addressing of the Palestinian refugee problem, which is handled like a joke right now. | ||
| Iran has to be brought to the table in terms of negotiations. | ||
| There has to be huge efforts made to economically revitalize these Palestinian areas, even though they're one of the highest recipients of aid in the world. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Based? | ||
| Let's fucking go. | ||
| Okay, based? | ||
| the embargo and the blockade in the Gaza Strip, which isn't just maintained by Israel. | ||
| It's also maintained by Egypt. | ||
| You should ask why. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of things that have to happen to fix that problem. | ||
| But the reality is, is I don't think Israel really wants to because they get to continue their expansion into the West Bank. | ||
| And I don't think anybody around the world really cares that much. | ||
| So I will argue with that. | ||
| The idea that Israel does not want to end the conflict is belied by the history of what just happened with the Gaza Strip. | ||
| So when we talk about- Okay, based? | ||
| It's actually a W. Israel wants the fighting to continue so they can annex everything and the world doesn't give a shit. - Yeah. | ||
| Settlements, for example, Israel did have settlements inside the Gaza Strip. | ||
| There were 8,000 Jews who were living inside the Gaza Strip in Gush Katif. | ||
| Up until 2005, they withdrew all of those people, I mean, took them literally out of their homes. | ||
| And the result was not the burgeoning of a better attitude toward the state of Israel with regard to, for example, You know, the Palestinian population in Gaza, in fact, is more radical in Gaza than it was in the West Bank. | ||
| The result was obviously the election of Hamas, the October 7th attacks, in which unfortunately many civilians took part in the October 7th attacks. | ||
| There's video of people rushing, who are civilians and dressed in civilian clothing, into That is 100% true, obviously. | ||
| And when it comes to, you know, Area C and Israel's, you know, supposed deep and abiding desire for territorial expansion in Area C. Area C, so for those who are not familiar with the Oslo Accords, and again, this is getting very abstruse, but the Oslo Accords are broken down into three areas of the West Bank. | ||
| Area A is under full Palestinian control. | ||
| That'd be like Jenin and Nablus, the major cities, for example. | ||
| There's Area B, which is mixed Israeli-Palestinian control, where Israel provides Some level of military security and control. | ||
| And then there's Area C. And Area C was like to be decided later. | ||
| It was left up for possible concessions to the Palestinian Authority if the Oslo Accords had moved forward. | ||
| Those are disputed territories. | ||
| There is building taking place in areas by both actually – no one talks about this – but by Palestinians as well as Israelis. | ||
| And the question is whether – if Israel stopped building, there have been many settlement freezes in the past, including some undertaken by Netanyahu. | ||
| And it actually has not done one iota of good in moving the ball forward in terms of actual negotiations. | ||
| Again, the biggest problem is that the leadership for Palestinians has spent every day since really 67. | ||
| It's not even 48 because after – between 48 and 67, Jordan was in charge of the West Bank and Egypt was in charge of the Gaza Strip. | ||
| And at no point did either of those powers say, hey, maybe we ought to hand this over to an independent Palestinian state, which was originally the division that was promoted by the UN Partition Plan in 47. | ||
| But Because of that, the leadership post-67 and really starting in 64, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 64, and it called for the liberation of the land in 64. | ||
| They had the West Bank and they had the Gaza Strip, so they're talking about Tel Aviv. | ||
| When it was founded in 64, The basic idea, as you know, kind of indicated by that, was Israel will not exist. | ||
| And that was a promise that's been made by pretty much every Palestinian leader in Arabic to the people that they are talking to. | ||
| Yasser Arafat famously would do this sort of thing. | ||
| He'd speak in English and talk about how he wanted a two-state solution, and then he'd go back to his own people and say, this is a Trojan horse. | ||
| If Israel could, if you think that Israeli parents want to send their kids at the age of 18 to go and monitor Jenin and Nablus and be in Khan Yunis, you're out of your mind. | ||
| You're out of your mind. | ||
| Israelis do not want that. | ||
| In fact, Israelis didn't want that so much that they allowed rockets to fall in their cities for full-on 18 years in order to avoid sending soldiers en masse back into the Gaza Strip. | ||
| True, but I think Israel does want to continue to expand settlements into the West Bank, right? | ||
| They want to continue to build. | ||
| They want to have all of Jerusalem. | ||
| East Jerusalem as well. | ||
| They want all of it. | ||
| They want all of it. | ||
| And destiny is correct in this. | ||
| Which they are! | ||
| has already been annexed. | ||
| So East Jerusalem is, according to Israel, a part of Israel. | ||
| That's not a settlement. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| With regard to, does Israel have an interest in expanding settlements in the West Bank? | ||
| Why would they not until there's a peace partner? | ||
| - Sure, that's what I mean. | ||
| But I'm saying as long as the conflict continues. | ||
| 'Cause even when you talk about the-- - No, but your suggestion is that they're incentivizing the conflict to continue so they can grab more land. | ||
| - Well, no, let me-- - Which they are, which they are. - So some people say, for instance-- Listen, the Jews love war. | ||
| They love killing, and they love war, and they love suffering and misery. | ||
| That's why they inflict it on the world, because they're greedy for land, and they want more stuff. | ||
| And everyone knows that. | ||
| And that's why anti-Semitism is so prominent. | ||
| He was funding the people in the Gaza Strip by allowing Qatari money to come in, even though he was actually speaking in opposition to Abbas, allowing the Gaza Strip to fall for Netanyahu to clear it out for him and then give it back, etc, etc. | ||
| I'm not claiming those theories. | ||
| I'm just saying that I think that Israel will take a relatively neutral stance towards conflict enduring, because as long as the conflict endures and as long as the settlements can expand, I think that ultimately benefits Israel. | ||
| Let's put it this way. | ||
| If suddenly there arose among the Palestinians a deep and abiding desire for peace, approved by a vast majority of the population with serious security guarantees, I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find Israelis who would not be willing to at least consider that. | ||
| In return for not expanding bathrooms in a frat. | ||
| I kind of, I would have agreed with you on October 6th. | ||
| I think we're probably a year or two away from that right now. | ||
| No, but the point I'm making is that Israelis now realize that the entire peace process was a sham, meaning the people who are on the other side of the table were using it as a Trojan horse in the first place. | ||
| The death of Oslo is not the death of Israeli hopefulness. | ||
| It's the death of the illusion that on the other side of the table was anyone worth bargaining with. | ||
| That's what's happening, and that's why you have this sort of insane disconnect right now between the United States and the Israeli government. | ||
| Again, it's a unity government. | ||
| No one in Israel is talking about making concessions to the Palestinian Authority for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah continues to pay actual families of terrorists who kill Jews. | ||
| Sure, the Mark Fund, yeah. | ||
| Which is from the moderate West Bank. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So, again, the taste in Israel for this is... | ||
| Even the people who are the Chilonim, right? | ||
| Those are the most secular people in Israel. | ||
| Which was, by the way, the place that was attacked on October 7th. | ||
| I mean, what people should understand is that October 7th was not an attack against settlements in the West Bank. | ||
| It was an attack on peace villages that were essentially disarmed. | ||
| And many of these people who were killed were peace activists who were literally trying to work with people in Gaza to get them... | ||
| What a coincidence. | ||
| It's almost like that was by design. | ||
| It's mind-boggling. | ||
| That's why you've had this ground shift in Israel. | ||
| The next 20 years in Israel is going to be about security and economic development, period. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| Everything else goes second, third place. | ||
| And I will say, I agree essentially with everything you're saying. | ||
| Not to loop back on another topic, but this is one of the reasons then why I was so critical. | ||
| I don't want to say critical, but like kind of nonchalant about the Abraham Accords because they didn't address anything with the Palestinians whatsoever. | ||
| They brought up countries that weren't super relevant to the conflict. | ||
| They didn't bring in Qatar, which is where a lot of the money and support for the Gaza Strip comes from. | ||
| It didn't involve Iran at all. | ||
| They involved bilateral peacekeepers. | ||
| No, but it totally changed the mentality. | ||
| And this is why – what I'm seeing right now, this is why – listen, I think that Biden has done better than I certainly expected him to do in terms of support for Israel. | ||
| Like Obama was way less supportive of Israel than Biden by every metric. | ||
| With that said, the rhetoric that he's been using recently and the Blinken have been using recently about Israel needs to make painful concessions for peace. | ||
| Israel needs to be re-centering this issue at the center of relations in the Middle East is doomed to failure. | ||
| The magic, magic is a strong word, the benefit of the Abraham Accords was proof Of what you're saying, which is true, which is that all of these surrounding countries, in reality, have abandoned the idea that there is a centrality to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. | ||
| That is not the central conflict in the Middle East. | ||
| And by the way, one of the reasons it's not the central conflict in the Middle East is because actually, ironically, because of the rise of Iran. | ||
| It's Sunni states that are largely signing up with Israel because they're realizing they need some sort of counterweight to a burgeoning nuclear power in Iran. | ||
|
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Can we talk about Ukraine? | |
| Sure. | ||
| Do you have a disagreement with what Destiny said? | ||
| My main problem with Biden's policy with regard to Ukraine is that he outsourced the end goal of the war to Zelensky early on. | ||
| Now, that might make sense if that goal were something that he was willing to fund to the point of achievement, or if Zelensky could have achieved it on his own. | ||
| But right now, and this has been true since pretty early on in the war, this point Henry Kissinger made, that pretty early on in the war it was very clear that, for example, Crimea was going nowhere. | ||
| The Russians had control of Crimea, barring the United States giving permission to fly F-16s over Crimea. | ||
| Nothing was going to change over there. | ||
| The same thing was true in most of the Donbass, right, in Luhansk and Donetsk. | ||
| That was not going to change. | ||
| Zelensky stated goal, and you understand it, he's the leader of Ukraine, right, is that there was a predation on his territory in 2014, and that the Russians sent their little green men across the border, and then they took all of these areas. | ||
| And so he, as leader of Ukraine, is saying, okay, I want all of that back. | ||
| Now, the reality is that the U.S.' 's interest had largely been achieved in the first few months of the war, meaning the revocation of the ability of Russia to take Ukraine and just ingest it, and two, the devastation of Russia's military capability. | ||
| I mean, Russia has just been wrecked. | ||
| I mean, their military is in serious straight because of the war in Ukraine. | ||
| From an American perspective, I'm very much pro all of that. | ||
| I think that we have an interest in Ukraine maintaining a buffer status against a territorially aggressive Russia. | ||
| I think that the United States does have an interest in degrading the Russian military to the extent that it can't threaten the Baltic states or threaten Kazakhstan or other countries in the region. | ||
| The problem I have with Biden's strategy is As always, I think that it's a muddle, and I think muddles tend to end with misperceptions. | ||
| War tends to break out and maintain because of misperception. | ||
| Misperception of the other side's strength, the other side's intentions, and all of the rest. | ||
| People misperceive what's going to happen. | ||
| They say, I'll cross that line and nothing will happen, right? | ||
| This is what Putin thought. | ||
| He thought, I'll cross that line, they'll greet me as a liberator, and because the United States just surrendered in Afghanistan, essentially they won't do anything, and the West is fragmenting, because NATO's fragmenting, and all the rest of this, and obviously he was wrong on all of those scores. | ||
| The problem for Biden is that As with virtually every war, no end line was set. | ||
| And so it became out recently that it was widely reported that actually there was a peace deal that was on the table in the first few months that Putin was on board with that basically would have ceded Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea to Russia in return for solidification of those lines, American and Western security guarantees to Ukraine, right? | ||
| Ukraine wouldn't formally join NATO, but there would be security guarantees to Ukraine. | ||
| We're ending up there anyway. | ||
| It's just taking a lot more money and a lot more time to get there. | ||
|
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And do you think Trump would have helped push that piece? | |
| Yes, and I think that Biden actually did Zelensky a bit of a disservice because Zelensky knows where this war is going to end. | ||
| It's not going to end with Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea in Ukrainian hands. | ||
| It's just not going to, and he knows that. | ||
| What actually, in my opinion, Zelensky needed was for Joe Biden to be the person who foisted that deal upon him so that he could then go back to his own people and say, listen, guys, I wanted all those things, but the Americans weren't willing to allow me to have all those things. | ||
| And so we did an amazing job. | ||
| We did a heroic job in defending our own land. | ||
| We devastated the Russian military, even though no one expected us to, but we can't get back those things because it's unrealistic to get back to those things because America, basically, they're a big funder and they're the ones who want the deal. | ||
| Instead, what Biden said, and this was reported in the Washington Post last year, the Biden administration said, We're going to fight for as long as it takes with as much as it takes. | ||
| And when they were asked until when, they said, whatever Zelensky says. | ||
| And that's not a policy. | ||
| That's just a recipe for a frozen conflict with endless funding. | ||
| Now, it may be that Putin has walked away from the table and that deal is no longer available. | ||
| If that deal is available right now, I certainly hope that's being pursued behind closed doors. | ||
| My main critique, again, of Biden is that When you outsource the end goal to another country without stating what America's interest is, that's a problem. | ||
| I also think that Biden did... The problem is the war should have never happened, okay? | ||
| The problem is that Putin... Forget about the deal in the first few months of the war. | ||
| Putin came to Trump in the fall of 2020 and said, let's negotiate about the intermediate-range ballistic missile treaty. | ||
| Let's negotiate about missiles in Eastern Europe. | ||
| And the deal was that they would trade inspections of their missile facilities and try and draw some of them back. | ||
| And Trump didn't take that deal and didn't even negotiate. | ||
| And Putin made the same deal to Biden, as he surrounded Ukraine in the fall. | ||
| And this totally ignores what ignited the conflict, which is that in February, Zelensky came out and said Ukraine should have a nuclear arsenal. | ||
| So Ukraine was in the process of acceding to NATO. | ||
| They had never given up on that prospect. | ||
| NATO was supplying Ukraine with lethal aid and drones, which was changing the tide of the conflict in Donbass. | ||
| Deploying short and medium-range ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe. | ||
| And then they refused the negotiation. | ||
| So that's why Putin went in. | ||
| This idea that he was coming for the Baltics and he's coming for Kazakhstan. | ||
| Kazakhstan. | ||
| Just totally flies in the face of what was happening in the months leading up to that. | ||
| So they should have taken the deal. | ||
| They should have committed in 2008 that Ukraine wouldn't join NATO. | ||
| They should have never overthrown the regime in 2014 in Ukraine. | ||
| Yanukovych. | ||
| And they replaced him with Petro Poroshenko, and that's what started this whole thing. | ||
| So, they always try to portray Putin as one of the dictators in the axis of evil that is gobbling up territory and slaughtering people, and preying upon our weakness. | ||
| Like, if you pay attention, that's the theme. | ||
| If Israel doesn't do this, Iran will attack, because in the Middle East, that's how it works. | ||
| They prey on weakness. | ||
| If we didn't back up, when we abandoned Afghanistan, Putin preyed on our weakness. | ||
| But it's the complete reverse. | ||
| It was the Euromaidan which was the first shot in the war. | ||
| Putin drew a red line in 2008 and said Ukraine will never join NATO. | ||
| And we performed a second color revolution in Ukraine in 2014 with the Euromaidan overthrowing Yanukovych because Yanukovych was trying to join the European Union and NATO And Putin gave him a better deal to join the CIS and their own bilateral trade deal. | ||
| So Yanukovych took that deal. | ||
| So then the State Department went in with the National Endowment for Democracy and the other NGOs and they overthrew the then pro-Russian government in Kiev. | ||
| And that's when Putin went in to seize Crimea, because the prospect of a pro-Western government in Ukraine is unacceptable. | ||
| It always has been. | ||
| The idea that, and by the way, Crimea was a semi-autonomous oblast in Ukraine, which fielded Russia's naval base at Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet. | ||
| I believe it's their only year-round Naval base that has access to the sea because the the port in st. | ||
| Petersburg in the port in the east I Forget the name of the city Novgorod I think both of those ports are not year-round ports because they freeze in the winter because they're so far north so the prospect of Crimea falling under the control of NATO is obviously unacceptable to Russia and And the prospect of NATO missiles in Ukraine, and NATO training exercises, and a NATO presence in Ukraine, which is historically Russian. | ||
| There is no such thing as Ukrainian. | ||
| Ukraine just means borderland. | ||
| The borderland of what? | ||
| Russia. | ||
| So, you could go back a hundred years. | ||
| And the creation of a Ukrainian state is an anomaly of how Joseph Stalin divided up the various territories when the Soviets took over Russia after the end of the Russian Civil War. | ||
| So, and even, and by the way, Crimea didn't even initially belong to Ukraine. | ||
| It was given to Ukraine by Khrushchev in the 50s. | ||
| So, this premise that Ukraine was going to be an independent nation This is a result of the historic weakness of Russia after Brest-Litovsk, the historic weakness of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Crimea even being a part of that is its own unique historical anomaly. | ||
| But the United States could never let it go. | ||
| The United States wanted to, just like they did in Georgia, they wanted to bring Ukraine into the EU, into NATO. | ||
| Putin said no. | ||
| We didn't accept that, so we overthrew their government, and yeah, we didn't invade, because that's not what we do in the 20th century, 21st century, but we overthrew their government in a color revolution and we thought we were going to steal it away that way. | ||
| And Putin, that is when Putin invaded. | ||
| That's when the little green men crossed the border, the Russian proxies that seceded in Luhansk and Donetsk. | ||
| And the whole point of the secessionist war, one, One, it was because as long as Ukraine was engaged in internal conflict, they could never join NATO. | ||
| It's a precondition for NATO that Ukraine was stable. | ||
| So as long as Putin kept a simmering, low-boil conflict, In the Donbass, Ukraine would be precluded from joining NATO. | ||
| That was the whole point of it. | ||
| And then, but it just got worse. | ||
| The United States, so really you could go back to 2014. | ||
| If in 2014, the United States abandoned its designs on Ukraine, maybe there could have been peace nine years ago. | ||
| But that wasn't enough. | ||
| Trump only escalated things. | ||
| You know, Obama was sending the non-lethal aid. | ||
| Trump got into office, began sending lethal aid. | ||
| Again, pulled us out of the missile treaty and deployed missiles into Poland. | ||
| And that's when things began to escalate. | ||
| So, again, but the kind of perception they're trying to create is that Putin is this land-hungry dictator, power-hungry dictator, that if you're not constantly on your guard, they're just gonna gobble up all the territory on their border. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| We were responsible for the initial incursion. | ||
| Why is the United States in Ukraine? | ||
| Do you know how far Ukraine is from the United States? | ||
| Do you know how far Ukraine is from Moscow? | ||
| And yet we were there, overthrowing their government, wanting to integrate them into Europe and into the security framework over there. | ||
| It's unacceptable to Russia. | ||
| So Russia responded. | ||
| We didn't let it go. | ||
| We kept pushing. | ||
| So Russia responded. | ||
| But the way that he portrays it, it's like, well, if we didn't, you know, if we didn't bomb Russia, if we didn't give Ukraine all our material, well, then they would have invaded the Baltics and they would have invaded Central Asia. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Totally ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
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So that's just not, it's just a lie. | |
| Really quite a poor job of sort of explaining what America's realistic interests are. | ||
| I don't like it when American leaders, um, It's weird for me to say this, but I'm not a huge fan of the we're-in-it-to-protect-democracy kind of rhetoric. | ||
| Because, frankly, we are allied with many, many countries that are not democracies, and that's not actually how foreign policy works. | ||
| We should, as an overall, you know, 30,000-foot goal, advance democracy and... There it is! | ||
| 30,000-foot goal! | ||
| ...right where we can. | ||
| But the reason that we were fighting In favor of Ukraine, and when I say fighting, I mean giving them money and giving them weaponry. | ||
| The reason that we were doing that in favor of Ukraine is not because of Ukraine's long history of clean voting and non-corruption. | ||
| The reason that we were doing that is to counter Russian interests in the region. | ||
| I mean, it was a pure realpolitik play, and that realpolitik play is hard to deny no matter what side of the aisle you're on. | ||
| I think that what many Americans are going to, are reverting to, is we have no interest there. | ||
| Why are we spending money there and not spending money here? | ||
| And that kind of stuff. | ||
| And that argument can always be applied unless you actually articulate the reason why it is good for Americans beyond simply the ideological for the United States to be involved in a thing. | ||
| So for example, I think right now, when Biden is talking, I think that what Biden just did, the United States as we speak, is striking the Houthis. | ||
| I think that that's a really, really good thing. | ||
| I think that's a necessary thing. | ||
| Of course you do! | ||
| I think American people should understand why that is happening. | ||
| It's not because of quote-unquote ideology. | ||
| It is, I mean, on a very root level, but really it's because You're screwing up the straits. | ||
| I mean, you can't do that. | ||
| It's happening because we can't keep Israel in check. | ||
| The Houthis say that they're attacking the straits because Israel will not implement a ceasefire in Gaza, which the United States is asking them to do. | ||
| So... No. | ||
| That's obviously... It's got nothing to do... Of course, that is the idea. | ||
| Well, we've got to go after Houthis. | ||
| That's the nominal reason. | ||
| That's the pretext. | ||
| We have to bomb the Houthis because they're attacking the shipping. | ||
| Okay, but why are they attacking the shipping? | ||
| It's because Israel is engaging Iran on every front. | ||
| And screw up free trade, and Americans have an interest in not seeing all of our prices at the grocery store. | ||
| But there's a pattern. | ||
| But it's the same thing. | ||
| Just like we antagonized Russia, Israel permitted Hamas to attack. | ||
| The idea that Israel did not anticipate the attack by Hamas, it's just ridiculous. | ||
| No serious person would believe that it was a lapse in security, that Israel did not see the attack from Hamas, and that it took them seven hours to repel them across the border. | ||
| It's just ridiculous. | ||
| So they wanted that attack to justify and to serve as a pretext for an expansion into Gaza. | ||
| And ultimately so they could engage Hezbollah and Iran's other proxies, which they are now doing. | ||
| So Ben said a lot there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you disagree with any aspect on the Ukrainian side? | |
| A little bit, yeah. | ||
| I think on the macro, I agree. | ||
| Maybe we get at the weasel a little bit on some things. | ||
| On the final thing that he said, though, I wish that Americans could have honest conversations about foreign policy. | ||
| I think that it would just be better for everybody. | ||
| I don't know if it's, you know, Red Scare. | ||
| When you're an idiot and you're losing the debate, that's when you start talking about conversations. | ||
| That's when you start talking about basically something completely without substance. | ||
| And you don't actually make any claims about the subject of the debate, you just start talking about the debate itself. | ||
| When you're an idiot and you have nothing to say, or you've lost the debate definitively, that's when you zoom out and say, well, I just wish that these conversations are so great. | ||
| Okay, so you have now left the actual conversation and now you're talking about it like some spectator. | ||
| Now you're talking about it like someone who's not actually in it. | ||
| If you're in the debate, you're talking about the subject of the debate. | ||
| You're not talking about debating as a concept. | ||
| You can't! | ||
|
unidentified
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You can't! | |
| I asked you that and you couldn't do it! | ||
| literally the behemoths were fighting against communism. | ||
| And we felt like after 91, every single foreign policy decision needs to be able to be explained in seven words, like he's the bad guy and that's it. | ||
| I wish we had more honest conversations about what our foreign policy interest is in a particular region, because I don't think most Americans honestly could even articulate why Israel would be an important ally. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can't! | |
| You can't! | ||
| I asked you that and you couldn't do it! | ||
| I literally asked him, "I wonder if I could even find it right now?" I mean, I'm not going to because that would be a pain in the ass. | ||
| But literally, when me and Destiny debated in July, that was the first thing I asked him. | ||
| I said, why is Israel our closest ally? | ||
| And he had no answer for that. | ||
| You couldn't answer it now. | ||
| And you've got Turkey confused with Egypt? | ||
| Do you think Egypt shares a border with Russia? | ||
| You still don't know who Erdogan is. | ||
| You still can't recognize Assad. | ||
| You still don't know who Mahmoud Abbas is. | ||
| You can't find any of these countries on a map. | ||
| You thought the Bible was written in Arabic because you didn't know the Arabs weren't in that place until 800 years, 700 years later? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's important. | |
| Well, it's important to have conversations and not be retarded idiots. | ||
| Brother, you are a retarded idiot. | ||
| To defend Ukraine against Russia or why should we care about Taiwan at all? | ||
| I don't know if most Americans could articulate anything there, even though they might have very strong opinions about why we ought to be involved in certain conflicts. | ||
| So I do agree with that. | ||
| I wish we had more honest conversations about foreign policy in terms of how Biden is. | ||
| That's just the language of losers. | ||
| When you are a fucking loser, that is the kind of nonsense that you say. | ||
| I just wish we had more honest conversations. | ||
| That is what you say when you're a fucking loser and you have lost the debate completely. | ||
| Can we all just agree that having honest conversations with nuance is really freaking important? | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I liked the most were one that he was very clear in the beginning about what we wouldn't do. | ||
| So Biden saying that we're not going to do not a red line, no fly zones over Ukraine. | ||
| We're not going to be deploying troops on the ground in Ukraine. | ||
| We're not going to be doing anything that would have, you know, US soldiers and Russian soldiers crossing swords with each other. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| I liked that he made that very clear at the beginning. | ||
| And I liked that he coalition like that little hand motion each other. | ||
| That's not going to be doing What is that? | ||
| I like that little move. | ||
| That was a cute little move, right? | ||
| Russian soldiers crossing swords with each other. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| I like anything that would have U.S. soldiers and Russian soldiers crossing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like that little move. | |
| That was a cute little move, right? | ||
| Good little visual for all of the dumb Americans in his audience that don't know anything. | ||
| Okay, now this is Russia's sword. | ||
| This is our sword. | ||
| This is them crossing. | ||
| This is them engaging in combat. | ||
|
unidentified
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This guy sucks. | |
| This guy sucks, dude. | ||
| This guy is so stupid. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Between NATO and the EU? | ||
| Brother! | ||
| other that's not going to happen doing anything that would have you know u.s soldiers and russian soldiers crossing swords with each other that's not going to happen i like that he made that very clear at the beginning um and i like that he coalition built between nato and the eu to get people to send uh between nato and the eu brother he coalition built with nato and the eu that's hilarious Funds, training, soldiers, airplanes, and everything to Ukraine. | ||
| I thought those two things were really good. | ||
| In terms of basically writing Zelensky a blank check, I would like to hope that Biden and the entire United States learned a lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan that open-ended missions with unlimited budgets and no clear goal are like the worst foreign policy decisions you can ever do. | ||
| They've like defined U.S. | ||
| foreign policy for the past two or three decades, which is unfortunate, but seems to be the case. | ||
| My feeling would be—and this is just a feeling, I don't know if internal cables have leaked that say otherwise—is the Biden administration has probably always had a quiet position of, at some point, there's going to be an off-ramp here. | ||
| And I think even a month or two ago, I think those talks were being leaked, that discussion had begun with Zelensky looking for an off-ramp. | ||
| But publicly, of course, the United States is never going to come out and say, we're going to support you guys to fight as much as you want for three months. | ||
| And then after that, it's no more. | ||
| Obviously, that can't be the statement. | ||
| It's always going to be that we're going to support you in your fight against Russia. | ||
| Yeah, we tried that under Obama with Afghanistan. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| We'll escalate the troop levels to X, but only for six months. | ||
| Yeah, you just can't do that. | ||
| It's always going to come off as, we're going to support you forever, and as long as it takes, and as long as you need, whatever we have to do to defend freedom and democracy in your country. | ||
| And any other statement would be absurd. | ||
| So I can understand why it feels like, on a public level, a blank check and an indefinite time period was granted to Zelensky, but I don't think that's going to be the case. | ||
| I think, again, I hope we've learned our lessons in the Middle East about the forever wars, that this isn't going to be a forever funding to Ukraine to fight for as long as they want. | ||
| I do disagree. | ||
| I feel like we're playing a little bit retrospectively, saying that, like, well, it's obvious that they're not going to capture the Donbass. | ||
| It's obvious that they're not going to capture Crimea. | ||
| I agree for Crimea, that was incredibly obvious. | ||
| But it was also really obvious that in two weeks, Russia would own Kiev and Ukraine was going to be Belarus 2.0. | ||
| I think that even for a lot of military people and analysts around the world, that that was an expectation, or at least a significant probability. | ||
| Nobody knew, the phrase that's thrown around now is paper tiger, that Russia's military was as ill-equipped as they were. | ||
| So I can understand why, especially if you're Ukraine and if you've repelled an invasion from one of the world's largest This guy's just hopeless. | ||
| feel like well fuck it you know let's fight for a few months let's fight for a year let's see what if you're crane you're gonna be like fucking let's just fight for it does it this guy's just hopeless he just does not bring he just does not bring a the minimum level of iq to discuss these matters or maybe ukraine was like um guys did we just beat did we just repel russia Fuck it. | ||
| Let's keep fighting for a few months. | ||
| Erm, did we just repel Russia? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eh, fuck it. | |
| Let's keep fighting for, like, this is, this is what's happening. | ||
| This is how, this is how war works. | ||
| Uh-huh, yeah. | ||
| Erm, Russia's right behind me. | ||
| Aren't they? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And I can understand the United States supporting them, but I agree that there has to be some reasonable off-ramp where we're not going to fight forever. | ||
| I think the U.S. | ||
| State Department has already begun those conversations with Zelensky to look at what that off-ramp looks like. | ||
| But yeah, I'm not too sure. | ||
| Other than explicitly stating publicly, like, you can only fight until this date, I don't really know what else I would change. | ||
| I don't think the Biden administration should have done that. | ||
| I don't know what else. | ||
| Do you think Biden should cut this deal on the funding? | ||
| Meaning there's this $105 billion deal that's been held up by debate between Republicans and Democrats over border, right? | ||
| So basically it contains $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, another several billion dollars for Taiwanese defense against China, and that includes some border funding and some border provisions. | ||
| Republicans want the border funding and the border provisions because we can get into the illegal immigration issue. | ||
| That's a pretty serious issue. | ||
| And Biden and Democrats have been unwilling to hold that up. | ||
| And that seems to me like, just from, put aside Republican Democrats, it seems like political malpractice. | ||
| Meaning there's a widespread perception in the United States that the border is a disaster area. | ||
| Joe Biden wants these things. | ||
| Many Republicans don't want these things. | ||
| If he caves on the border stuff, he gets all the things that he wants. | ||
| And he's going to be able to go back to the moderates in the country and say, I did something about the border. | ||
| It seems like such an obvious win. | ||
| If he caves on the border stuff, you mean on the Ukraine stuff? | ||
| Yes, because then he gets the whole package. | ||
| He can go back to his own base and he can say, listen guys, I wanted to be easy on the border. | ||
| The Republicans forced me to it, but we needed the Ukraine aid. | ||
| We needed the Taiwan aid. | ||
| Honestly, you're going to be more educated than me on this. | ||
| I don't like, or maybe I just don't know enough. | ||
| I don't like the principle that when we negotiate things in the United States, there's like 50 million hostages at all points in time for every single thing. | ||
| Like, oh boy, here comes the debt ceiling. | ||
| What do the Republicans want? | ||
| What do the Democrats want? | ||
| Oh boy, like here, you know, we can't fund our government. | ||
| But I mean, obviously, the argument is going to be that if the Ukraine funding doesn't come in this bill, and if Biden and his administration feel like it's really important that unilaterally, or not unilaterally, but as a single issue, it's not going to pass. | ||
| So, um, I would say that at this point, and I don't know what the conversations look like between the Biden administration and Zelensky, I would say at this point that it's probably fair to start making contingencies on the money that we give to Ukraine that, listen, like, this, uh, conflict has, you know, waged on now, like, now we need to start looking for potential- Waged on. | ||
| This conflict has waged on for so long. | ||
| We can't just write you an unlimited check. | ||
| Wagey wagey! | ||
| So I mean, if those strings are attached, I'd be okay with it. | ||
| But the broader question of like, is it okay to make this particular piece of legislation with all this funding contingent on Ukrainian funding? | ||
| I mean, that just seems to be the way the government works now, unfortunately. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Quick pause. | |
| Bathroom break. | ||
| One of the big issues in this presidential election is going to be January 6th. | ||
| It's in the news now and I think it's going to get, become bigger and bigger and bigger. | ||
| So question for Destiny first. | ||
| Did Donald Trump incite an insurrection on January 6th, 2021? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Uh, this is probably ignoring every other issue we've talked about, of which I think there are plenty that I would say disqualify Trump from holding office. | ||
| Um, I think that the conduct and the behavior leading up to and including January 6th, I think is wildly indefensible. | ||
| I am excited to see Ben. | ||
| The three to four stages are the taking, what I think any reasonable person would say, knowingly false information about elections being rigged, or ballot boxes being stuffed, or Ruby Freeman running a ballot three times in Georgia. | ||
| Taking that knowingly false information and trying to call state secretaries and stuff to have them flip their electoral vote. | ||
| That was horrible. | ||
| The plot that Eastman hatched in order to have these like false slates of electors where all seven states had citizens go in and falsely say that they were the duly elected electors that could submit votes to Congress, that was insane. | ||
| That happened. | ||
| Asking or begging Pence to accept these false states of electors initially and then just say, you should just throw it out completely and throw it to the House delegation, which was majority Republican. | ||
| That was absolutely unbelievable. | ||
| And then on the day of January 6th, trying to capitalize on the violence by him, Giuliani, and Eastman making phone calls to senators and congressmen saying, well, Don't you think maybe you guys should delay the vote a little bit? | ||
| You know, don't you think they're just really mad about the election? | ||
| I think you said to McCarthy, they're more upset than you. | ||
| And his utter dereliction of duty in not doing anything to stop the rioting that happened on January 6th, because he was too busy taking advantage of it. | ||
| I think all of these things are horrible. | ||
| I look forward to seeing the Jack Smith indictments play out in court, maybe even the Georgia Rico case. | ||
| But yeah, I think all of these things are unfathomable. | ||
| And I think when you look at the plot from start to finish, Clearly the goal the entire time was to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| That was the goal from start to finish. | ||
| Whether it was through false claims, whether it was through illegal schemes, or whether it was through violence at the Capitol to delay the certification of the vote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ben? | |
| So I'm glad you're excited. | ||
| It's always fun. | ||
| So there are two elements to incitement of insurrection. | ||
| One is incitement. | ||
| The other is insurrection. | ||
| So incitement has a legal standard. | ||
| So does insurrection. | ||
| Neither of those standards are met. | ||
| So if you're asking me, morally speaking, did Donald Trump do the right thing between November 4th and January 6th? | ||
| I said, I will continue to say, no, he did not. | ||
| I think he was saying things that are false, just factually false, about his theories with regard to the election, about the election being stolen, about fraud. | ||
| This is all adjudicated in court. | ||
| He did not even bring many of the claims that he has brought publicly and all the rest of that. | ||
| If we're talking about incitement of insurrection as a legal standard, it doesn't meet any of those standards. | ||
| When it comes to incitement, it has to be incitement to immediate lawless action. | ||
| That's the standard for incitement. | ||
| And I'm very meticulous in how I use this because I happen to speak publicly a lot, and that means there are lots of people who listen to me, which means some of those people are probably crazy. | ||
| And some of them may go and do a crazy thing. | ||
| Did I incite them? | ||
| The media tends to use the word incitement very loosely with regard to this sort of stuff in the same way that Bernie Sanders quote-unquote incited the congressional baseball shooting. | ||
| He did not. | ||
| Bernie Sanders has a lot of things I disagree with. | ||
| I think Bernie's a schmuck. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| He did not incite that. | ||
| So saying bad things is not the same thing as inciting violence. | ||
| Inciting violence, the legal standard in the United States is, I want you to go punch that guy in the face. | ||
| That's inciting. | ||
| With regard to insurrection, typically in insurrection, and there are some descriptions in case law, though none in statutory law as far as I'm aware, the typical description in case law is the replacement of one legitimate government of the United States with another by violent means. | ||
| The notion that Donald Trump coordinated any such insurrection is belied by the FBI itself. | ||
| The FBI put out a report in, I believe it was August of 2021, suggesting that there was no well-coordinated insurrectionist attempt coordinated by the White House. | ||
| In fact, what you had was Donald Trump thrashing around like That weird alien in the movie Life. | ||
| I don't know if you ever saw Jake Gyllenhaal or he's like kind of thrashing up against this glass box. | ||
| Just an alien just thrashing up against the glass. | ||
| That I think is more what you were seeing from November 4th to January 6th. | ||
| And then again, the claim that January 6th itself was an insurrection. | ||
| So, virtually, I'm not aware that anyone was charged with actual insurrection. | ||
| There were some people who were charged with seditious conspiracy. | ||
| There are insurrection statutes that do exist. | ||
| No one was charged under those particular statutes. | ||
| There were some people who you could say informally had insurrectionist ideas. | ||
| Those would be the people who wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi or kill Mike Pence. | ||
| And those people are in jail right now. | ||
| Do not. | ||
| Do not do that. | ||
| The election went forward. - Do not do that. - The election was certified. | ||
| Mike Pence presided over the certification. | ||
| Mitch McConnell presided over the certification. | ||
| Joe Biden has been the president for the last three years. | ||
| So Donald Trump, by the way, was still president at that point. | ||
| If he had actively wanted to do what other people who have actually launched coups have done, he would have theoretically called the National Guard not to put down the riot, but to actually depose the sitting government of the United States in the name of a specious legal theory. | ||
| He did not do that. | ||
| He did not attempt that. | ||
| Nobody working for him did that. | ||
| The most you can say, I think, about what everybody was doing is that, you know, and I want to say everybody. | ||
| We can talk about Trump because this is really about Trump. | ||
| He used a phrase that Trump was disseminating knowingly false information. | ||
| The word that's carrying a lot of weight there is the word knowingly. | ||
| So knowingly implies a knower. | ||
| Do I think the information he was disseminating was false? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do I think that Donald Trump has unique capacity to convince himself of nearly anything that is to his own benefit? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think that that's actually what Donald Trump was doing there, and the evidence of that is Donald Trump being a human and all of us watching him for the last several years. | ||
| So the idea that he knew it to be false, I'm not even sure those standards apply in any – just assessing him as a human, which is really what we're being asked to do because there's an intent element to this crime. | ||
| Does Donald Trump – do you think that today Donald Trump knows that he lost the election? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So I don't, actually. | ||
| So I'm glad that you have the attorney background. | ||
| When we are assessing mens rea, when we're looking at certain criminal statutes where intent is required, it's a reasonable person standard, right? | ||
| Would a reasonable person have known that they were... No, it depends on the mens rea standard. | ||
| So it's not the same in every case. | ||
| If you have to establish individual intent, then it's not enough to say a reasonable person should have known. | ||
| That would be enough for a negligence statute. | ||
| Usually when you're talking about reasonable people, person statutes, just legally speaking, a reasonable person statute is, should a reasonable person have known, that's when you get to, like, manslaughter. | ||
| You can't do a reasonable person standard on, like, first-degree murder. | ||
| You have to establish actual motive in first-degree murder. | ||
| But for first-degree murder, you don't need the statement of, I plan to kill this person, or I intend to kill this person. | ||
| We can prove that state of mind. | ||
| You can talk about circumstantial evidence. | ||
| Correct, yes. | ||
| Yeah, so I feel like my feeling for Donald Trump was there were all these people around him that he trusted to investigate election fraud. | ||
| He trusted Barr and the DOJ. | ||
| He asked Pence, his vice president, to look into it. | ||
| He asked his chief of staff. | ||
| He asked his legal counsel. | ||
| So many people that, ostensibly, he trusts them if he's asking them to look into it. | ||
| And when all of them looked into it and reported back to him, no, we found nothing. | ||
| Unless we're going to literally make the concession that Trump might actually be a delusional psycho man. | ||
| At that point, should he not have realized like, well, okay, maybe that's not a thing. | ||
| I think he should have realized the day of the election that he lost the election, but that's not the question. | ||
| Sure, but I'm just saying that like at that point, should he not have known that for him to go and propagate those claims that he'd asked all of the people he trusted to research, and then for him to take those claims to Michigan and to Georgia and then publicly and to try to convince people to throw out the election, you don't think that... But you're doing the same thing. | ||
| You're reverting to, should a reasonable person have known? | ||
| Yes, a reasonable person should have known. | ||
| Did Donald Trump know? | ||
| That's a different question. | ||
| And so, conflating those two questions is going to get you into some mess of territory. | ||
| By the way, this is why Jack Smith charged the way Jack Smith charged. | ||
| Yeah, which wasn't... Jack Smith did not charge conspiracy. | ||
| Jack Smith did not charge insurrection. | ||
| He did not charge seditious conspiracy, right? | ||
| The reason is because... Jack Smith is a good lawyer. | ||
| What he's doing is he's actually... | ||
| Broadly, I would say pretty obviously expanding statutory coverage in weird areas in order to cover a thing that doesn't quite fit into any of these legal categories. | ||
| But the point that I'm making is that Jack Smith is on my side of this. | ||
| He doesn't think that he can actually establish the intent necessary to convict under a seditious conspiracy or an insurrection charge. | ||
| But I think a lot of the underlying facts, though, because he does bring up those calls to Raffensperger in Georgia, he does bring up in the indictments that they were knowingly false information. | ||
| So it seems like that's going to be part of the case, maybe not to convict on any of the four particular charges that he mentioned, but it seems like that's probably going to be part of the case. | ||
| What he's going to have to establish in court to convict Trump. | ||
| So, I want to look at the actual text of the charges. | ||
| So, I'm sorry that I don't have them memorized, but I believe one's a fraud charge that generally does not apply to cases like this. | ||
| Generally, the fraud charge is like you're trying to steal money from the government. | ||
| Sure, fraud has been used pretty broadly in the past, though it doesn't have to just be, because Smith has done oral arguments in response to a lot of the claims by Trump's lawyers. | ||
| This was one of them. | ||
| The infinite civil and criminal immunity was another one of them, where he cites past cases where these types of things, because I think it was to defraud of civil rights, I think was the fourth charge. | ||
| Right, so the defraud of civil rights is usually somebody standing in the actual like voting house door and preventing you from voting, not you have a specious legal theory that you espouse in court about whether those votes should be thrown out. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Although I don't like that when we say specious legal theory and novel application, which I do agree some of these in some ways is novel. | ||
| I don't think we've ever also had a president try to do this before. | ||
| It is a novel situation where somebody has resisted the peaceful transfer of power this Well, if you're talking about the legal cases, I mean that's not true, but Gore sued in 2000. | ||
| If this is comparable to Gore... I'm not saying it's comparable to Gore. | ||
| I'm saying that if the idea is that espousing a legal theory in court amounts to de facto Some form of election denial or interference in some way that can't—that's not—as a general principle, it's over-inclusive. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Gore wasn't trying to decertify the vote, though, for states, right? | ||
| They challenged their thing to the Supreme Court. | ||
| They lost their case in the Supreme Court, and then power transfer happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And Donald Trump had a bunch of legal challenges, and then he had a rally, and then there was a riot, and then he left power. | ||
| Yeah, but the Eastman theory of what Pence could do in Congress is a far cry away from- A truly shitty theory. | ||
| I mean, make no mistake, it's a really- But not just shitty. | ||
| I think that if any Democrat had done this, I feel like we'd be looking at it in a far different lens. | ||
| As in, we would be using terms like attempted coup, subversion of peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| If a Democrat vice president tried to- Look at how the argument has just completely fallen apart. | ||
| It's like this with every topic. | ||
| It's just like this cascading, like the argument just falls apart piece by piece, piece by delicious piece. | ||
| Starts out by saying, well, Trump knew that the election was rigged because, well, everyone told him. | ||
| So, or rather, knew that the election was legitimate. | ||
| Well, he knew that the election was legitimate, but resisted the transfer anyway. | ||
| And he had to know that it was false because people just simply told him. | ||
| So he's wrong about incitement. | ||
| He's wrong about insurrection. | ||
| He just kind of folded on both of those. | ||
| And then it turns into, well, you know, maybe, you know, maybe we can, maybe in normal circumstances, we would say that this is an incitement. | ||
| Maybe under normal circumstances, we wouldn't say this is fraud, but this is a very novel circumstance. | ||
| And Shapiro says, well, no, it isn't. | ||
| Because Al Gore challenged the election 20 years ago. | ||
| And Destiny says, well, yeah, but, you know, he didn't try to decertify it. | ||
| Shapiro says, yeah, okay, well, but Trump had legal challenges, held a rally, there was a riot, then he left. | ||
| Just like Al Gore, minus the riot and the rally. | ||
| And now it turns into, well, but if a Democrat did it... So, again, what's the argument? | ||
| The argument is that if a Democrat did what Trump did, it would be considered or perceived differently? | ||
| Again, what's even the claim here? | ||
| Is that the substantive argument? | ||
| Because it went from Trump committed incitement and insurrection, and I can't wait. | ||
| This is exciting. | ||
| I can't wait to hear you defend this. | ||
| He committed incitement and insurrection. | ||
| That was the initial claim. | ||
| Now the claim is, well, maybe it wasn't incitement. | ||
| Maybe it wasn't insurrection. | ||
| Maybe it's not even fraud. | ||
| Maybe it isn't all that novel, but hey, if a Democrat did it, this would be perceived very differently. | ||
| We would look at this very differently. | ||
| Again, what are we even arguing at this point? | ||
| It's like at the beginning when he said, I'm a liberal because education is a difference maker and we need to fund it at a minimum level to like, well, I just, broadly speaking, would you fund air conditioners? | ||
| So... The guy has no argument. | ||
| Ben Shapiro is dominating just because... | ||
| Honestly, Ben Shapiro is what Destiny pretends to be. | ||
| Ben Shapiro is a motor-mouth nerd who has done all the reading and he actually is an expert. | ||
| He is a lawyer and he has been doing this actually longer, I think, than Destiny and at a very high level professionally. | ||
| It's interesting because I think they're roughly the same age. | ||
| I think Shapiro's maybe slightly older. | ||
| But look at the difference! | ||
| Shapiro has a billion-dollar company, he's got a wife and kids, His hair is cut, his beard is groomed, Destiny's gone through two divorces, deadbeat dad to a kid, he's like a low millionaire on drugs, his wife just left him, streaming on YouTube, and he doesn't know anything! | ||
| At least Shapiro went to law school and was a lawyer for a time and did a lot of writing, actually had a career. | ||
| This guy's got nothing going on. | ||
| So, I think what I want to get to here actually, so we can be more specific, is why are these terms important? | ||
| We agree on, largely speaking, what happened. | ||
| I think the characterization of the term, are we bouncing around between two different categories? | ||
| We can dump the legal stuff, actually. | ||
| We're not looking at incitement, because like you said, Jack Smith, nobody's charging with incitement, and I don't believe insurrection is a part of it. | ||
| So we can dump legal. | ||
| Just in terms of a president that is trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| So we can call that a bloodless coup, or a coup, or whatever contemporaneous term you want to use. | ||
| Right, so prevent the peaceful transfer of power with all means, or using means that are inappropriate, not quite the same thing. | ||
| Using means that are inappropriate or illegal. | ||
| Inappropriate, okay, so illegal, I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think that these charges actually meet the criteria for the various charges, and we can discuss each case if you want. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| As far as inappropriate, sure, I think tons of inappropriate stuff. | ||
| I mean, inappropriate seems not— The reason why I don't like the word inappropriate, though, is because then conservatives are very quick to say, well, sure, he was inappropriate, but everybody was inappropriate. | ||
| I mean, I'll concede that he's more inappropriate than others. | ||
| I just don't see that... He's most inappropriate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, conservatives would say... Okay, that's important to me, though. | |
| Does it not bother you that, like, Donald Trump sought through legal and extra-legal and Trump-magical ways of trying to entrench his power as president past when he should have been able to? | ||
| Is that not something that is incredibly troublesome? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| The question to me is the bigger question that I think the Democrats are trying to promote in this election cycle, which is this means he is a threat to democracy sufficient that if he were to win the election, there would not be another. | ||
| But he tried to do that last time. | ||
| Could he not try to do it next time? | ||
| I mean, he could try to do whatever he wants, presumably, and he would fail the same way that he did last time. | ||
| Why do we think that? | ||
| Because he failed. | ||
| Because there was a riot and it was in three hours. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, let's say hypothetically. | ||
| Lord, save me. | ||
| Let's say, hypothetically, Giuliani was the next head of the Department of Justice. | ||
| Giuliani was the next Attorney General. | ||
| How would he be confirmed? | ||
| Well, I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| Because so much of the Republican Party, despite feeling like they don't support Trump, when it comes time to actually back him in Congress— Also, I'd have to check whether he would be barred by criminal conviction from holding—I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Especially the 14th Amendment. | ||
| I'm figuring out a lot of this right now. | ||
| But I mean like, say if not Giuliani, say if there are any other number of insane people that Trump could theoretically put on his side of the government that wouldn't tell him no next time. | ||
| Because there were a lot of people that rebuked him. | ||
| There were Republicans in a lot of the states, right? | ||
| Raffensperger is one of them. | ||
| There were Republicans in his own administration. | ||
| You've got Rosen. | ||
| You've got Barr. | ||
| There was his own vice president. | ||
| But like theoretically next time, and I feel like last time going in, I'm going to do a little bit of mind reading and macro. | ||
| I think that Trump kind of thought, one, I don't think Trump knows much at all about how the government works. | ||
| I think we probably agree on that. | ||
| I think Trump probably thought that if he had people that were like at least in his party and kind of camp, that they'll basically do whatever needs to be done to give him what he wants and with no respect for process. | ||
| But now that he sees it, well, it's not enough to just have allies. | ||
| I need people that are fiercely allegiant to me. | ||
| Would we not be worried that a guy that tried to essentially steal the election for real wouldn't try to pick people that would be more amenable to his plans in the next administration? | ||
| I believe in the checks and balances of American government. | ||
| I believe they worked on January 6th. | ||
| So if you're asking me, do I think that Trump has bad intent or could have bad intent with that sort of stuff? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Do I believe that the guardrails held and will continue to hold? | ||
| Also, sure. | ||
| Can we just skip this segment? | ||
| This segment is boring me. | ||
| We already did this segment on running the Krasenstein debates. | ||
| I'm just going to skip ahead because I just can't I just have no ...bandwidth for this right now, because we watched this debate. | ||
| We watched Destiny do this same debate with Glenn Greenwald and Darren Beatty and Alex Jones for, like, a hundred hours last week. | ||
| The only thing he cares about is Donald Trump. | ||
| I don't think it's the only thing he cares about. | ||
| I think it's certainly the largest thing he cares about. | ||
| It's the largest thing he cares about, right? | ||
| ...but, man, the phrasing, for as much as our governmental founding fathers, everybody else, you know, wrote nice amendments... Governmental founding fathers. | ||
| ...wrote nice amendments. | ||
| Some of the phrasing is very, very, very bleh. | ||
| And the, uh, Section 3, um, The political future of the United States, it's probably not healthy that the leading opposition candidate is now going to be barred from the ballot. | ||
| It's probably not healthy for us. | ||
| You're talking about threats to democracy. | ||
| That would be a pretty serious one. | ||
| It would be, however, like that threat to democracy was earned by Donald Trump and the conservatives that supported him. | ||
| I think conservatives made a dangerous gamble when they threw Trump into office, and now, like, all of the fallout from that is something that we all, as Americans, have to deal with. | ||
| I mean, I think that the unprecedented legal theory that a state can simply bar somebody from the ballot on the basis of, in an informal way, believing that he is, quote-unquote, an insurrectionist, is pretty wild. | ||
| I mean, that's... You can say it's pretty wild, but there is an amendment in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, that says that if they have engaged in this, they shall not be, or you shall, I don't remember the phrasing, because it doesn't require conviction, but it's a self-executing, arguably, thing. | ||
| If we're getting into constitutional law, I mean, there are a number of provisions that suggest that this is, number one, not self-executing. | ||
| Minority opinions in the Colorado Supreme Court case are pretty thorough. | ||
| The number one contention, which is that this is not self-executing because other elements are not self-executing, that ignores subsequent actual law that happened. | ||
| I mean, Congress passed a law, for example, in 1872 defining who was an insurrectionist, who was not an insurrectionist for purposes of elections. | ||
| In 1994, Congress passed a law that specifically defined insurrection as a criminal activity so that somebody could theoretically be convicted of insurrection and therefore ineligible to run for office. | ||
| It is unlike, say, the analogs that are used by the majority opinion, like age. | ||
| Obviously, this is not the same thing. | ||
| We can all tell what somebody's age is by looking at their birth certificate. | ||
| I can't tell whether somebody's an insurrectionist without any reference to a legal statute or a definition of the term. | ||
| I would also be careful with that because remember, one of Trump's first big political actions was challenging Obama's birth certificate. | ||
| Well, and I thought that was dumb at the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, I like that. | |
| One of his first big political actions was... Both said 100% chance that Trump will try to go for third term and 0% chance, which statistically... Third term? | ||
| He's done, man. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
|
unidentified
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He would want to. | |
| No, he should go for three. | ||
| Trump's going to walk around, hands up high. | ||
| He's going to be like, I'm a two-term president. | ||
| I'm the only president since Grover Cleveland. | ||
| He wouldn't know. | ||
| But since Grover Cleveland, who served two non-consecutive terms, I kicked Joe Biden out of office, and I kicked Hillary Clinton out of office. | ||
| Dude would be like, he'd be living large. | ||
| He doesn't want the presidency anymore. | ||
| No, he should go for three. | ||
| He should go for three. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely not. | ||
| He should go for three. | ||
| He should never leave. | ||
| He should never leave the White House after he gets elected. | ||
| I just think that the, I think it's scary that like Donald Trump, it feels like for all of the accusations that are made sometimes against Democrats, like Biden is ordering Garland to investigate Donald Trump and blah blah blah. | ||
| It seems like Donald Trump would actually do that with his DOJ, would give them orders. | ||
| He didn't! | ||
|
unidentified
|
He didn't! | |
| Well, he kind of did, though, right? | ||
| So, for instance, with Jeffrey Clark, Jeffrey Clark went to Rosen and Donahue and said, hey, listen, I need you guys to sign off on a letter that we're going to use essentially to bully states into overturning their elections by saying we found significant election fraud. | ||
| And part of that threat was Jeffrey Clark saying, listen, if you're not going to do it, Rosen, you know, Trump's going to fire you and just make me the acting attorney general. | ||
| That was the threat that he carried, and I think Trump repeated that threat in a meeting later on that was, I only rebuked when I think like half the White House staff said, if you do this, we're resigning. | ||
| Okay, so that's a slightly different topic, because now you're getting into all the election shenanigans and all this, but... Sure, I'm saying he threatened to fire his acting attorney general if he wouldn't carry the same platform, essentially. | ||
| Like, if Trump could order his DOJ to do something, would he? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not beyond the pale for him, right? | |
| It's not beyond the pale for him to order them to do it, and then it's not beyond the pale for them to reject him doing that, which is the story of his entire administration. | ||
| Whereas Joe Biden orders his DOJ to do things, and then they just do them. | ||
| Well, we can get into specifics there. | ||
| This is one of the big problems that I have with, I mean, for example, all this talk about Trump tyrant, Trump executive power. | ||
| I mean, Joe Biden has used executive power in ways that far outstrip anything that Trump does. | ||
| Every president has been stretching and stretching and stretching executive power. | ||
| Joe Biden is going like... | ||
| Joe Biden has gone well beyond anything Trump even remotely attempted to maintain via just pure executive power. | ||
| Actually, Trump's use of executive power is nowhere near even what Obama— It doesn't matter because we want Trump to go even further. | ||
| We want him to go even further beyond anything that any president has ever imagined or thought of. | ||
| We want him to go bolder and further and more aggressive in the expansion of executive power than any president You're talking about the past. | ||
| You're talking about the past. | ||
| would fear that they would roll over in their graves and that's what we want to happen and that is what we desire for the future so you're talking about the past you're talking about the past you're talking about other men we're talking about the future and we're talking about what ought to be So this is just completely irrelevant. | ||
| Yes, yes, Biden had more executive orders than Trump. | ||
| But this doesn't matter because we would ideally like one final decree. | ||
| Because ideally we would like the final executive order to be the dissolution of any government outside of the personal regime of Donald Trump. | ||
| So I don't really see how this is even relevant anymore. | ||
| I mean, Trump's inability to get border policy passed literally had him using executive power to march the military down to the border to do border policy. | ||
| I mean... I mean, Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down VAX mandates on 80 million Americans. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| He literally said, I cannot relieve student loan debt, and then tried to relieve hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt. | ||
| Yeah, but what happened to that? | ||
| It got struck down by the Supreme Court, and then they still did it! | ||
| They still did it! | ||
| Biden brags about it! | ||
| For what he was able to relieve, which I think were related to particular types of student loan debt. | ||
| Sounds like a loot goblin from Realm Royale. | ||
| You ever see that? | ||
| You ever play that game? | ||
| Saying that like, well, the guardrails are holding with Biden as much as they're holding with Trump. | ||
| The only difference is that once Biden, you know, exhausts his executive power, he's not running around like lying to people or trying to extort people or trying to concoct insane schemes. | ||
| Well, I mean, so here's the way I would think of this. | ||
| Think of the guardrails holding as the filter, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Meaning, like, the coffee is in the filter, some of it's, you know, what you want is gonna get through and all this stuff. | ||
| Coffee? | ||
| The guardrails prevent the other stuff from getting through. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where? | |
| Now the question becomes, what liquid are you pouring into the filter? | ||
| Meaning, so if the filter exists, if the guardrails hold, and if Donald Trump can't steal elections, what's the policy that comes through the other end of the filter? | ||
| The policy I get from Donald Trump on the other end of the filter is a bunch of stuff that I like. | ||
| The policy that I get from Joe Biden on the other end of the filter is a bunch of bullshit I don't. | ||
| So that's the basic calculation. | ||
| Okay, so then the idea is essentially that Donald Trump's rhetoric is insane, but we don't care. | ||
| Donald Trump would probably try to steal an election if he could, but he probably won't be able to. | ||
| He's not going to do it again. | ||
| I told you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's not... You don't think he has any... Why not? | |
| Because he won't be eligible to be on the ballot in 20... I mean, by the way, you want to talk about 14th Amendment? | ||
| That's where the 14th Amendment applies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| That's where it actually applies. | ||
| Meaning, you cannot... He is not qualified to be on the ballot in 2028 if he is the President of the United States. | ||
| States can literally, in self-executing fashion, take him off the ballot. | ||
| Just like he's past the age of 35. | ||
| Once you have been President two times, you're no longer eligible to be President of the United States. | ||
| Why would the 14th Amendment stop him if he thought Vice President Pence could unilaterally decide the outcome of the election? | ||
| When he's not on the ballot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's just skip ahead. | |
| Recently in the news, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT failed to fully denounce calls for genocide. | ||
| And that rose questions about the influence of DEI programs at universities. | ||
| And so maybe either looking at this or zooming out more broadly at identity politics at universities or identity politics, wokeism in our culture, how big of a threat is it to our culture, to Western civilization? | ||
| So obviously I'm going to say it's a huge threat. | ||
| The reason that I think there's a huge threat, I want to give a definition of wokeism because people are very often accused of not using wokeism properly or believing that it's sort of a catch-all phrase. | ||
| I don't think it's a catch-all term. | ||
| I think that wokeism has its roots in postmodernism, which essentially suggests that every principle is a reflection of underlying structures of power, and that therefore any inequality that emerges under such a system is a reflection, again, of that structure of power. | ||
| That used to be applied in sort of Marxist ways, the suggestion being that economic inequality was the result of misallocation of power in the structure preserved by an upper crust of people who wanted to cram down exploitation on people. | ||
| That was sort of the Marxist version of postmodernism and then got transmuted into sort of a racial version of postmodernism in which the systems of the United States are white supremacist in orientation and are perpetuated by a group of people who are in fact in favor of the preservation of white power and white supremacy. | ||
| That is the generalized theory of critical race theory as proposed by for example That has taken a softer form that we refer to as DEI. | ||
| The key in DEI is the E, meaning equity. | ||
| So equity is a term that does not mean equality. | ||
| People mix it up. | ||
| Equality is the idea that we all ought to have equal rights, that we all ought to be treated equally by the law. | ||
| Equity is the idea that if there is an inequality that emerges from any system, it is therefore due to discrimination. | ||
| And the best way to tell whether somebody has been victimized is by dint of their race. | ||
| And we can tell whether you're a member of an oppressed group or an oppressor group by the intersectional identity that you carry and by the nature of your group's success or failure, predominantly along economic and power lines in American life. | ||
| This means that if one group is predominantly successful economically, they must be a member of the victimizing class. | ||
| And the only corrective for that would be, as Ibram X. Kendi likes to suggest, effectively anti-racist policy is racism in the service of destroying racism. | ||
| That you're going to have to discriminate on the basis of race in order to correct for discrimination that's baked into the system. | ||
| That's incredibly dangerous. | ||
| It leads to a victim-victimizer narrative that is unhealthy for individuals and terrible for societies. | ||
| It relieves people of individual responsibility, and it destroys the very notion of an objective metric by which we can decide meritocracy. | ||
| And meritocracy is the only system human beings have ever devised that has positive externalities in literally any area of life. | ||
| Every other distribution of wealth, power, done along other lines that is not having to do with merit has negative externalities. | ||
| Every system having to do with merit has positive externalities because presumably the most effective and useful people are going to succeed under those systems. | ||
| That's the very basis of a meritocracy. | ||
| And the externalities of that mean that other people benefit from the meritorious and excellent performance of those people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe you'd be good to get your comments, your old stomping ground, Harvard. | |
| Do you think the president of Harvard should have been fired? | ||
| I mean, I think she should have been fired not over the plagiarism allegations. | ||
| I think she should have been fired based on her performance just at that congressional hearing. | ||
| If the word black had been substituted for Jew in that statement by Elise Stefanik that she was asking about, or trans, or literally any other minority in America, maybe with the exception of Asian, then the answer would have been very different coming from Cloudy and Gay. | ||
| With that said, I don't think the firing of Cloudy and Gay really accomplishes very much. | ||
| Did she get what she deserved? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Does that mean that the underlying DEI equity-based system has been in any way severely damaged? | ||
| No, I think that this is a way for Universities, as truthful as McGillipan also, to basically throw somebody overboard as the sacrifice to maintain the underlying system that continues to predominate at American universities, where they spend literally billions of dollars every year on DEI initiatives and diversity hires and diversity administrators and all of this. | ||
| I mean, one of the costs of education escalating is in the massive administrative function that is now undertaken by universities, as opposed to teaching and cost of dorms and such. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You guys probably agree on a lot of this, right? | |
| Kind of, maybe, yeah. | ||
| I don't know what makes things do this, but it feels like we can never have a good thing and then have it end as a good thing. | ||
| Things always get taken to their extreme and then we have to fight on those extremes. | ||
| I would argue that Back in my day, we called it SJWs, Social Justice Warriors, before it became WOKE, like 2013 onwards, whatever. | ||
| Like, there are aspects to WOKEism that I think are good. | ||
| Like, I like the additional representation that we have in media now. | ||
| I like how, as much as people complain about the internet and how it's regulated, that there are way more groups that are represented on the internet, whether we're talking X, the platform formerly known as Twitter or Facebook or whatever. | ||
| I think in some ways, or whether we're pushing, you know, like women's achievements in school and in the wider workforce, I think that these are all good things. | ||
| The issue that you run into is people don't ever have a stopping point, and I think people kind of get lost in this woke-for-woke sake thing, where we start to see these very weird warpings of these, like, academic, I guess, arguments that are used for really horrible things. | ||
| So, for instance, I think that you can talk about in the United States things like white supremacy or things like oppression or certain demographics, especially with Jim Crow laws and pre-Jim Crow. | ||
| And you can even talk about effects from that. | ||
| But then when you run into this weird world where we've kind of warped these things so that not only is white supremacy still as present today as it ever has been, well, actually, black people and other minorities can't even be racist. | ||
| They don't have the power to because we're going to use a different definition of racism. | ||
| And we can only talk about punching up as opposed to punching down. | ||
| And we're actually going to say it's totally okay for these people to say or do whatever they want, and it's never bad, but like white people who have always been the oppressors, even if you're like a trailer park guy whose family's addicted to meth, you know, you have all this privilege, etc, etc. | ||
| I think that you run into these issues where wokeism, it starts off as like a really good idea, and I would argue has achieved really good things, especially in regards to like women's education and everything. | ||
| And then it just gets so academia-ie, so there's a word there, academic, whatever, where you take something and you put it into school too much and then it comes out as some Frankenstein, you know, cancer baby of, like, horrible things, such that today, when I'm reading stuff, and I know Ben is the same way, like, if I even hear somebody say the word, like, anti-racism, I'm probably ignoring every other thing you have to say. | ||
| If you utter the word, like, colonial anything, I'm probably gonna say you probably don't have anything good to say. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of it is just taken way too far. | ||
| But you know what I will blame, on some of this, is I will blame conservatives for some of this. | ||
| Because I think one issue that happens, and I think Ben might even agree with me here too, is I think there's two huge problems that have happened in the United States, I think broadly speaking, is that one, we've become more different than we ever have been, and two, we've become more similar than we ever have been. | ||
| And when I say this, what I mean is that like we're splitting off into these groups, and then these groups- Shut up! | ||
| Shut up! | ||
| Is this supposed to be edifying for anybody? | ||
| Does anybody find this to be interesting, insightful, profound? | ||
| The problem is wokeism has gone too far and that's because it got too academia-ized and I'm gonna blame conservatives for wokeism. | ||
| This guy has no ideas. | ||
| You're not a serious intellectual. | ||
| ...are enforcing this insane homogeneity between these two separate groups. | ||
| And I think one of these schisms has been conservatives' reluctancy to participate in things related to higher education. | ||
| So for a long time, conservatives are saying, like, oh, you know, the educational institutions are against us. | ||
| You know, Rush Limbaugh talks about how evil the colleges are and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then what happens is, is conservatives are less and less willing to engage in them. | ||
| So then you get this scenario or this environment where everybody that's engaged in Academia on the administrative side are fucking insane. | ||
| They're, like, even more so to— and I also want to draw a distinction between, like, the administrators and the faculty, because oftentimes when you're reading story after story after story of, like, all of these insane admins that are pushing further and further left, usually the faculty is fighting against it. | ||
| A lot of the tenured professors, a lot of people in their departments are saying, like, hold on, well, we actually don't agree with this. | ||
| But I feel like because conservatives for so long have demonized these institutions rather than, like, critically evaluated them, And try to, like, have, like, honest critique and engagement that they've just, like, completely broken off. | ||
| And when you only have a bunch of lefties or righties together, all they'll do is they'll veer off, like, even more into their insane directions. | ||
| I feel like that's a big problem that we run into in the country to where conservatives have totally broken off some conversations, broken away from, where they won't participate in them anymore. | ||
| And then the people that you have left just run as far to the left as possible. | ||
| Certainly when you look at certain institutions, I think that one of the things that people on both sides of the aisle are constantly looking at is, has the institution suffered such capture that there is just no capacity to fix it? | ||
| And when you talk about the universities, I'm not going to blame conservatives for the failure of the universities because they haven't been present in major positions at universities since effectively the late 1960s. | ||
| You can go read Shelby Steele's work on this where he talks about how, you know, he used to be, he's now a conservative Black person. | ||
| He was a liberal black person at the time. | ||
| He was actually quite a radical black activist at the time in the 60s. | ||
| And he talks about walking into the office of liberal administrators who are largely on his side with regard to civil rights and being a radical, him claiming that the systems of the university were inherently broken, were inherently wrong, unfixable. | ||
| And he talks about this very, it's a very evocative episode where he's talking about how he's smoking. | ||
| And as he's smoking, the ash is growing more and more. | ||
| And the ash falls down on this very expensive carpet. | ||
| And the president of the university, who's listening to him rant and rave, he said, Shelby Steele says, I thought he was going to say something about this. | ||
| I mean, I was wrecking like a thousand dollar carpet in his office being a jackass. | ||
| And instead I could see him wilt inside. | ||
| I could see him collapse. | ||
| He didn't have the institutional credibility or the intellect or sort of the spiritual strength to just say, listen, I agree with you on some of these things, but you're acting like a jackass. | ||
| And what you see in the late 1960s and early 1970s is, in fact, the collapse of these institutions to the point where, by the time I was going to college, there was this radical disproportion between conservatives and liberals. | ||
| And the problem is that when it comes to a system like the universities, basically you have to separate the universities off into two separate categories. | ||
| One is STEM, where the universities are still pretty damn good. | ||
| American universities, when it comes to STEM, are still leading universities in the world. | ||
| Harvard's main creations these days are coming from actual hard science fields. | ||
| Then you have the liberal arts field in which you basically have a self-perpetuating elite because that's actually how dissertations work. | ||
| If you have somebody who's very far to the left and you decide that you're going to write a dissertation on the history of American gun rights, the chances that that is going to be approved by your dissertation advisor are much lower than if you happen to write something that tends to agree with the political positions of your dissertation advisor. | ||
| Now, listen, I think there are open and tolerant professors even in the liberal arts at these universities. | ||
| I went to these universities. | ||
| I went to UCLA. | ||
| I went to Harvard Law School. | ||
| When I was at Harvard Law School, one of my favorite professors was Lani Guinier. | ||
| Lani Guinier, they tried to appoint her, I believe, Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and she was too liberal, and she got rejected. | ||
| So she was like a full-on communist. | ||
| By the time I went there, she was great. | ||
| We had debates every day. | ||
| It was wonderful. | ||
| She used to write me recommendations for my legal jobs after we left. | ||
| Randall Kennedy, I don't agree with him very much. | ||
| Randall Kennedy was a terrific professor. | ||
| There are some professors who are like this, unfortunately. | ||
| There tends to be in these echo chambers more and more ideological conformity that is rigorously enforced, and it is by left on left. | ||
| So, for example, when I was at Harvard Law School, the president of the university was another president who ended up being ousted, Larry Summers. | ||
| Larry Summers had been the Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton, and he made the critical error of suggesting that perhaps the dearth of women in hard sciences in prestigious positions was due to Possibly. | ||
| Two factors that people were refusing to talk about. | ||
| One was the possibility that women actually didn't want to be in hard sciences at nearly the rates that men do. | ||
| Which happens to be true. | ||
| And two was the distribution of STEM IQ. | ||
| Which is something that you certainly were not allowed to talk about. | ||
| The idea that the men's bell curve when it comes to IQ, particularly on STEM subjects, tends to be shallower than the women's bell curve. | ||
| So when you get to the very end of the bell curve, what you tend to see is a lot of really dumb... Okay, okay, okay, okay. | ||
| Too much yapping. | ||
| Let's just get to the end. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rapid-fire questions. | |
| I'm tapping out. | ||
| Honestly, the yapping is just, it's yap, yap, yap. | ||
| I don't agree with either of them. | ||
| One of them is just a complete outclassed moron. | ||
| And the answer, my answer was go to church. | ||
| Religion. | ||
| Yeah, I figured. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we could talk about religion. | |
| And the answer, my answer was have fewer and fewer and fewer children. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rapid-fire questions. | |
| And the answer, my answer was go to church. | ||
| Religion. | ||
| Yeah, I figured. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, we could talk about religion, but that's not rapid fire at all. | ||
| Let me ask, this is from the internet. | ||
| Does body count matter? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| You're really bringing up the red pill stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you avoiding answering? | |
| I mean, it's totally, it depends on who you are. | ||
| If you're somebody that doesn't care about it, it doesn't. | ||
| If you're somebody that does care about it, yeah, it does, of course. | ||
| Depends on the... The answer is yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Should porn be banned? | ||
| No. | ||
| If you could do it, yes. | ||
| There is no benefit to pornography. | ||
| It's a waste of time and destructive to the human soul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't believe I'm asking this question. | |
| Is OnlyFans empowering or destructive for women? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| These are rapid-fire? | ||
| Yeah, just... I mean, it's probably empowering for the ones that are making a lot of money off it. | ||
| It probably feels disempowering for others that feel affected by the cultural norms set by women that do OnlyFans. | ||
| There's my rapid-fire answer. | ||
| It's destructive to even the ones who are making a lot of money because when you degrade yourself to being just a set of human body characteristics that other people jack off to, it's bad for you and it's bad for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is rap music? | |
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you evolved on this? | |
| Have I evolved on this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Again, I'm going to go to, what's the definition of music? | ||
| My original argument about rap was that music involves the following three elements, rhythm, melody, harmony. | ||
| Rap typically involves maybe one of those. | ||
| There may be a melody, maybe, sometimes. | ||
| So it depends on the kind of rap. | ||
| With that said, I could be convinced on this issue. | ||
| Listen, I'm a classical violinist. | ||
| I mean, that's how I was raised. | ||
| I listened to Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart, like, in the car with my kids. | ||
| Dude, based! | ||
| Ben is so based! | ||
| You know what's amazing is, like, they're such a mirror image. | ||
| How old are they? | ||
| I know Stephen Bunnell is, like, 35. | ||
| How old's Ben? | ||
| Ben is 40. | ||
| Okay, so Ben, it's crazy how they're like a mirror. | ||
| Yeah, so he's 35. life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, so they're five years apart. | |
| Ben Shapiro, classical violinist. | ||
| Okay, genius. | ||
| Harvard Law School. | ||
| Billion dollar company. | ||
| Millions of followers. | ||
| Destiny. | ||
| Dropped out of music school in Nebraska. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100,000 followers. | |
| Not a billionaire. | ||
| Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Married. | ||
| Four kids. | ||
| Stephen Bunnell. | ||
| Divorced twice. | ||
| Wife left him. | ||
| One child that he abandoned. | ||
| Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Serious intellectual. | ||
| Went to Harvard. | ||
| Was a lawyer. | ||
| Destiny. | ||
| Dropped out of music school. | ||
| Is not a serious intellectual. | ||
| Doesn't know where Israel is on a map. | ||
| Never had a real job. | ||
| Worked at a casino and then was a semi-professional gamer. | ||
| It's kind of depressing. | ||
| If I were Bunnell, I would honestly just do something about that. | ||
| Category is Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart. | ||
| I have a very hard time sticking it in the same category as that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| You're both world-class debaters, even public intellectuals, if I can say that. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I'm going real hard here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| You both care about the truth. | ||
| What is your process of arriving at the truth? | ||
| I think it's really important to—everybody will say that they're objective and that they are nonpartisan. | ||
| I think it's really important to have mental safeguards for bad opinions. | ||
| So, for instance, like, a couple things that I'll ask myself is, for a particular debate that I'm having, like, can I argue convincingly both sides of the debate? | ||
| If I can't, I won't bother having the debate because I realize that I'm probably too partisanly dug in if I can't even represent like an opposite argument here. | ||
| Another question that you might ask yourself is like, well, what would it take to convince you out of a certain position? | ||
| If you know, if you feel very strongly that, you know, Medicare for all is a good system. | ||
| system by which to run the United States healthcare. | ||
| And somebody says, well, what would it take you to convince you otherwise? | ||
| If you can't even fathom, like, well, what would it take to convince me otherwise? | ||
| You're probably too dug into a position. | ||
| So I think if you go through life saying like, well, I try my best to be unbiased rather than saying, I try my best to be aware of my biases because the latter is more realistic and the former is literally impossible unless you're a computer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think having like actual mental practices that you engage in. | ||
| We're all biased. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you know that we're all biased? | |
| I think everyone knows that. | ||
| I think everybody knows that every human being has biases. | ||
| This is not profound. | ||
| Try to counter some of the biases that you have. | ||
| It's more important than trying to pretend that you're free of all biases, and then consuming all your media from one source. | ||
| Ben? | ||
| So, I mean, I agree with a lot of that. | ||
| I think that the easiest practical guide is read a bunch of different things from a bunch of different sources, and where they cross is probably the set of facts, and then everything else is extrapolated opinion from different premises. | ||
| That's sort of the short story. | ||
| So read The New York Times and Breitbart, and they're going to disagree on a lot, but if the core of the story... And The Daily Wire. | ||
| Certainly read The Daily Wire. | ||
| If you read The Daily Wire and you read The Washington Post, and there's a nexus of the same thing, then you can pretty well guarantee that at least, you know, if we're all blind men feeling the elephant, at least if we're all feeling the trunk, we know that there's a trunk there, right? | ||
| You may not know what the elephant is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if you're feeling frisky, then watch Destiny as well. | |
| You've talked about, you know, having a conversation, debating Ben for a long time. | ||
| What is your favorite thing about Ben Shapiro? | ||
| My favorite thing about Ben Shapiro is, at least when we're in election season, he's very critical of his own party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate that. | |
| I feel like Ben generally tries to adhere more to the fact-based arguments than other conservatives that I listen to, which is something that I appreciate because it's more fun to fight on kind of like the factual grounds of discussing things like foreign policy or whatever, rather than people that only inhabit the idealistic or philosophical grounds because they don't want to learn about any of the facts. | ||
| So I appreciate that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ben, you've gotten a chance to talk to Destiny. | |
| Now, what do you like about the guy? | ||
| A lot of the same sorts of things, but it's really fun to see how you do your process. | ||
| That is a cool thing. | ||
| That is a cool thing. | ||
| And it's a gift to the audience because, honestly, doing what we do, so much of what we do is sitting and reading and being behind closed doors and educating yourself and talking with people. | ||
| But getting to watch you do it in real time is a really cool window into how people think and how people learn. | ||
| So that's a really neat thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, gentlemen, this was incredible. | |
| It's an honor. | ||
| Thank you for doing this today. | ||
| Hey, thanks a lot. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| That was brutal. | ||
| That was hard to watch. | ||
| And honestly, I don't know, I feel like every debate we watch is really difficult. | ||
| Do you guys feel that way too? | ||
| Is it just me? | ||
| Am I just, do I just not like anything? | ||
| Because I feel like every debate we watch I'm complaining, but all these are just tough to get through. | ||
| At least with Destiny. | ||
| I think Shapiro is not the worst. | ||
| I mean, he's bad in other ways. | ||
| I don't think he's... I don't think he's that difficult to listen to. | ||
| Everyone says they agree. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's hard listening to Destiny because I just find his personality to be completely odious. | ||
| And I just don't think he's that smart. | ||
| The things that he says and the way he says them Like he's making a point. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| And it's clear that he just is an amateur. | ||
| Just doesn't know what he's talking about on a lot of these subjects. | ||
| And it's pretty clear when he debates somebody like Shapiro, who actually does have, I think, real deep background. | ||
| I think it's pretty clear that it's head and shoulders. | ||
| I think that it's hard to say this was even a debate. | ||
| I think he was just outclassed. | ||
| I think what happens is when Destiny debates anybody who actually knows what they're talking about, it just turns into more of like a teaching session. | ||
| And what I mean by that is when Shapiro is talking about things, he's actually explaining and introducing new information. | ||
| And I think when Destiny talks, he's just giving an opinion. | ||
| He's not actually providing information. | ||
| He's just... What Destiny is saying, I feel like this. | ||
| In my opinion, this. | ||
| Broadly speaking, this. | ||
| And when Shapiro talks, agree or disagree, he's giving information. | ||
| And I feel like I'm the same way. | ||
| When Shapiro argues about the Middle East, Or even the war in Ukraine. | ||
| There's a very clear thesis. | ||
| It's well supported. | ||
| He introduces evidence to talk about it. | ||
| When Destiny talks about these things, I don't know that I've learned anything here. | ||
| And there's a lot of basic blunders. | ||
| I think the ideas are very simplistic. | ||
| Like when Shapiro talks about Ukraine, you know, it's actually a valid... It's actually a valid position to say that degrading the Russian army And repelling Russian aggression as a limited strategic goal might have been valuable if they stopped there. | ||
| If they stopped within the first few months. | ||
| That's a valid thesis. | ||
| Like I said, for my reasons I disagree with that, but that's a valid position. | ||
| But remind me again, what was Destiny's position on the war? | ||
| He said something like, Biden built a coalition with NATO and the European Union? | ||
| Which, in context, doesn't even make any sense. | ||
| It's really not even true. | ||
| And, you know, we could get into that. | ||
| But he said something like, I'm glad that Biden said... What did he say? | ||
| He said something like Biden said what he wouldn't do. | ||
| Biden said that he wouldn't establish a no-fly zone, he wouldn't sell F-16s or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| That's your position. | ||
| I mean, when you look at the Russia-Ukraine war as a whole, and the question is, what's your position? | ||
| What insight do you have on the whole conflict? | ||
| Which is, of course, a very big story. | ||
| It's a very big story about Russia and the United States, about the United States and the rest of the world, about the United States and the unipolar age, about deterrence, about Russia and China. | ||
| It's a big story. | ||
| And his insight was, well, I like that Biden said what he wouldn't do. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's kind of like a given. | ||
| And then on these other things... | ||
| Like, from the very beginning, it's almost like Destiny doesn't even know what he believes or why he believes it. | ||
| Everybody gives him these flowers like, oh, you're really well-researched and fact-based and all. | ||
| One, we find out that he really doesn't know anything. | ||
| He doesn't actually have a very wide background at all. | ||
| And then two, his positions seem to... | ||
| They just lack foundation. | ||
| He said, well, I'm a liberal because I was able to move to a zip code where the public schools were good and other poor families, they're no fault to their own, have to send their children to a school that doesn't have the same resources like laptops and iPads. | ||
| And this argument just got annihilated. | ||
| Now, where do you go from there? | ||
| If the debate opens up with, I'm a liberal because, and your because just gets wiped out instantly, just, I mean, in 15 minutes, where do you go from there? | ||
| Where do you go with a person like that? | ||
| I'm a liberal because this. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| None of that is true. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, anyway, let's talk about Trump and Biden now. | ||
| Actually, I think we need to rewind and figure out what exactly is the basis there, or is there a basis at all? | ||
| Because I don't think there is one. | ||
| I think he's just a fake. | ||
| I think he's a fake. | ||
| I think he's a fraud. | ||
| I think that, you know, and I'll say this to show that I'm being fair. | ||
| Shapiro, I don't agree with. | ||
| And I think that he is not a patriot. | ||
| And I think that he is, I think he's a bit of a Pied Piper. | ||
| I think he has that effect on American conservatives. | ||
| But what I can say about Shapiro is that I have immense respect for him, even though he doesn't reciprocate that. | ||
| He doesn't like me at all and he would never say anything positive about me. | ||
| But Shapiro, I'd say that he's got a family and he's protective of his wife and kids. | ||
| I would say that he's built a company. | ||
| I think he works hard, at least if what he's saying is true about his life. | ||
| I think he works hard. | ||
| I think he does have an aptitude for what he does. | ||
| I don't find him charming, but he's a good talker. | ||
| My problem with Shapiro is that he's not on our team. | ||
| You know, he's not a Christian, he's not an American, he's an American Jew. | ||
| So that's really my issue, and I think that as a consequence, he interprets everything through the lens of what's good for the Jews and what's good for Israel, and he doesn't share our Christian morality. | ||
| So that's a big source of disagreement, but I have immense respect for him. | ||
| As a guy, he's obviously tremendously successful, and I think some of that is nepotism. | ||
| But, you know, nepotism doesn't really get activated unless you work hard. | ||
| I think he'd resent that I say that, but if you look at his background, it's just true. | ||
| And that's not me saying that I've resentment, you know, because I'm I'm saying I think he's a hard worker I don't think that he would have gotten to this point if he wasn't skilled, but I can't say the same about destiny He doesn't have the credentials And the thing is, I mean, I'm also a college dropout, maybe that sounds hypocritical, but I, of course, am in a very different boat. | ||
| Destiny is a liberal. | ||
| And when you're a liberal, you really, the world is your oyster. | ||
| So, if Cenk Uygur could do it, and if other people could do it, he could do it. | ||
| He hasn't really built anything. | ||
| There's no institution there. | ||
| There's no mind towards building anything. | ||
| I mean, he's a pure streamer. | ||
| He's a pure, degenerate streamer. | ||
| I mean, even me, I'm excluded from the system and I'm excluded from society in many ways. | ||
| But even me, I have a mind towards building. | ||
| That's why I have a non-profit. | ||
| That's why I do a convention. | ||
| That's why I'm not just someone who talks about politics. | ||
| I engage in politics. | ||
| I have an actual show as opposed to I'm just hanging out every day playing video games. | ||
| With him, it's literally, it's a lifestyle of sex, drugs, Travel, and then turn on the webcam, play video games, and read Wikipedia articles? | ||
| Like, so this is just not a serious person. | ||
| So, I mean, in a nutshell, that's not, I don't, I guess that's not too succinct, but that's not, I mean, that's really my problem with Destiny, is that I basically just think he's a fraud. | ||
| I think he's masquerading as a serious person, and I don't think that about every liberal. | ||
| I don't think that about everybody that's on the left, but I do think that about him. | ||
| So, it's just not enjoyable at that point. | ||
| But... Someone says, Nicholas doesn't just hang out every day playing video games. | ||
| Well, maybe I play video games frequently. | ||
| But the point is, when I do a show, I prepare and I'm not on time, so yeah. | ||
| Maybe I shouldn't be critiquing everybody else, but... | ||
| I prepare a monologue, and when I'm doing the show, I'm doing the show. | ||
| I wear a suit, I get my hair straight, I have a set, I have a structure, it's organized. | ||
| When I do the show, I mean, it doesn't always happen on time, but when I do the show, you get an hour of prepared monologue, you get an hour of super chats, and I'm dressed for the occasion. | ||
| With him, it's a little bit different. | ||
| With him, I mean, he literally rolls out of bed in sweatpants. | ||
| Turns on the camera and for long stretches of the stream he's playing a video game. | ||
| Not even talking. | ||
| So that's a little bit different. | ||
| Or he's calling a friend or he's reading an article. | ||
| So this is a little bit different. | ||
| It's not... The point is about the preparation there. | ||
| So... Anyway... Yeah, I didn't really enjoy that. | ||
| Alright, let's see. | ||
| Do we have any super chats? | ||
| Usually we don't do too many super chats on the daytime streams. | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| We got a few. | ||
| I guess I'll read these and then I gotta get out of here, okay? | ||
| Jimbo Zoomer sent $10. | ||
| Jughead Raid, thank you for juicing my Trump Wave video. | ||
| You rock! | ||
| Hey, thanks for the raid, Jimbo! | ||
| 07 to the Jugheads. | ||
| Everybody, if you don't already, follow Jimbo Zoomer on Cozy and any of his other platforms. | ||
| He's got a great show. | ||
| It's one of the only shows I watch. | ||
| What's the link? | ||
| I think it's just Cozy.TV slash Jimbo. | ||
| Where's the JimboZoomer? | ||
| I want to get it right where is it I Hang on. | ||
| Why can't I find it on this website? | ||
| Oh, JimboZoomer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cozy.TV slash JimboZoomer. | ||
| Check him out. | ||
| Great streamer. | ||
| And I appreciate the raid. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I'm high test. | |
| I'm high testosterone. | ||
| That's why I have a strong brow ridge. | ||
| That's why I have a good jawline. | ||
| That's why I have big hands. | ||
| That's why I'm aggressive. | ||
| Because I'm a high testosterone. | ||
| That's how you know that I'm legit. | ||
| If I were 5'9", but I had tiny little hands, you would know I'm a faggot. | ||
| But if I'm 5'9", 5'10", but I have huge hands, that's how you know I'm a boss. | ||
| That's how you know I was born to be a boss. | ||
| I was born to kill! | ||
| I was born to choke people to death. | ||
| So... I can palm a basketball. | ||
| That's how you know I'm a real nigga. | ||
| Cause I got... Cause I got hands for scheming. | ||
| I got hands that I can rub together. | ||
| When I'm planning. | ||
| When I'm plotting. | ||
| I have hands to wrap around the globe. | ||
| That's real though. | ||
| That's a very... But that is true. | ||
| I mean, it sounds like I'm joking, but I'm not. | ||
| Spence sent $3. | ||
| Do you know if Lex Friedman is an intelligence agent? | ||
| This guy came from nowhere and suddenly has this huge podcast. | ||
| He's not interesting at all and there is nothing appealing about him. | ||
| Yeah, everyone says that. | ||
| I think it's true. | ||
| Spence sent $3. | ||
| Also thanks for all the content recently. | ||
| Hey, thank you for the super chat! | ||
| FatJuicyWop sent $3. | ||
| Destiny aka UsefulGoycause he is an easy beat in debates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| Michael Haskin sent $3. | ||
| Distance yourself from the overt jag of racists and Jew haters, although I agree, or you'll be relegated to rumble, with twits commenting on their Jew cats for the rest of your political career. | ||
| I am re... In case you haven't noticed, I am relegated to rumble. | ||
| So I don't know what that's supposed to mean. | ||
| And if I'm not talking about Jews, I'm just... You're not talking about anything, basically. | ||
| RJ sent $3. | ||
| Did you see Rumble has partnered with Barstool Sports and they got a huge chunk of shares in Rumble. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They will most likely ban you now. | |
| Dave Portnoy Jew ass coming for you. | ||
| Yeah, I heard about that. | ||
| That's a little bit worrisome. | ||
| I hope Dave Portnoy don't ban. | ||
| You know, Israel's okay. | ||
| Hey, I love sports as much as the next guy. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, it's maybe over. | ||
| Benjamin Stack sent $3. | ||
| I'm going to try to be precise when I say this. | ||
| Broadly speaking, Destiny is a retard. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| Richard Percival sent $10. | ||
| Nick won the debate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Those guys suck. | |
| True. | ||
| Grow upper man sent $3, new joke idea I'm working out. | ||
| The only reason Muslims are able to stay sober forever in Islam is because they all force women to shut the fuck up forever. | ||
| The two are tied. | ||
| Free bit for you King07. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That sucks dude. | |
| Noma sent $3, I will broadly rape you. | ||
| Good job. | ||
| Dude, shut the fuck up, loser. | ||
| Get away from me. | ||
| Yes I did, retard. | ||
| I said that at the beginning, stupid. | ||
| I almost said the n-word just now. | ||
| - Sent $3. | ||
| 07, Nick didn't know Lex was a Jew. | ||
| - Yes I did, retard. | ||
| I said that at the beginning, stupid. | ||
| I almost said the N word just now. - Albert Castro sent $3. | ||
| I hate when destiny starts writing. - Yeah, me too. | ||
| Sounds fake. | ||
| $10. | ||
| You should look more into Operation High Jump. | ||
| It's not fake. | ||
| Admiral Byrd said in the future we will be faced by an enemy that can fly pole to pole. | ||
| Two Nazi submarines were found after the war in Argentina and they were headed to Antarctica and U.S. ships were heavily damaged after the operation. | ||
| Sounds fake. | ||
| Spanish Grow Eye percent $3. | ||
| Myron Colab again eventually. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Cozy Golf Alfa sent $5. | ||
| Destiny made the comment about Americans not knowing why Israel is our biggest ally hoping Shapiro would give him the answer. | ||
| Clever. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Pants Raider sent $5. | ||
| With end time prophecy in mind, why not just let Israel and its neighbors get on with it? | ||
| Retarded idea. | ||
| Black Row I Persever. | ||
| Hey, I'm a millionaire too, buddy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just... I've read most of that. | |
| Yeah, I'm a... Hey, what are you talking and watching me for, huh? | ||
| reddit retard for the left and you're deplatformed for speaking inconvenient truths about jewish power hey i'm a millionaire hey i'm a millionaire too buddy black grow i percent ten dollars we're living i just i've read most of that yeah i'm hey what are you watching me for huh i'm doing great mike 5 18 cent five dollars this dude destiny was dead ass sucking random dick at the same time as his wife That's true. | ||
| I don't think you ever recover from that as a human. 07 That is true. | ||
| Yeah, he was like bragging about it. | ||
| When I saw him last, we were in Miami, he said something like, he meets up with dudes on grinders and sucks their dicks. | ||
| And, uh... So he's just, he just hates himself. | ||
| He's just into this degradation stuff. | ||
| That's the only... Because you know what's, and I said this before, you know what's interesting about Destiny? | ||
| He says that he's, he doesn't kiss guys. | ||
| He's not romantically into guys. | ||
| He just sucks their dicks. | ||
| Not to get gross and vulgar, but... | ||
| But listen to this. | ||
| So, if he's not, like, homoromantic, so to speak, if he's not attracted to men in that way, he just likes doing that, doing that degrading act, then I think that tells you a lot about his psychology. | ||
| I think that kind of tells you everything, doesn't it? | ||
| Because, you know, not even women, I don't even think women like sucking dicks. | ||
| I don't know, I'm... | ||
| Never had a girlfriend, but I'm an incel, so what do I know? | ||
| I'm just totally outside my realm here. | ||
| Broadly speaking, I think women don't even like giving head, but Destiny does. | ||
| But he's not, but he doesn't love guys. | ||
| Women love guys, they don't suck dicks. | ||
| They suck dicks because they love guys. | ||
| Destiny doesn't love guys, but he likes sucking dicks. | ||
| So what does that tell you? | ||
| What does that tell you about him as a guy? | ||
| I think that tells you that he is A freak. | ||
| Self-hating. | ||
| People are saying they love it. | ||
| Everyone in the live chat is saying they love it. | ||
| They like it. | ||
| Women love that. | ||
| Some do. | ||
| People are saying they love it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, hey, I don't know. | |
| But I think that tells you that he's into some sick shit. | ||
| Iowa Catholic sent $5, Destiny is good talking fast, redirecting, and poor comparisons. | ||
| As soon as he is challenged on his weak argument, he quickly makes a "well what if" comparison and redirects. | ||
| Broadly speaking of coer, Oscar sent $3, Funny how destiny suddenly gets a two-hour debate with Shapiro right after he begins to speak in favor of Israel. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that's a coincidence. | ||
| I think he did that maybe to get the debate, or secure the debate in some way. | ||
| Altered crates sent $20. | ||
| X isn't the same without Autumn Groyper. | ||
| Hopefully he'll come back soon. | ||
| Thanks for your sacrifices. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. | ||
| My life isn't the same without X, without Twitter, but that's okay. | ||
| But I'm hanging in there. | ||
| Okay! | ||
| Alright, that's our last Super Chat. | ||
| I gotta get out of here. | ||
| I got stuff to do, okay? | ||
| I'm a busy man. | ||
| I got stuff to do. | ||
| So, that's gonna do it for me on this stream. | ||
| Thanks for watching. | ||
| Thanks to the Super Chatters. | ||
| I hope you enjoyed. | ||
| I'll be back though. | ||
| I'll be back doing my show in about 4 hours. | ||
| Around 10 o'clock Central Time. | ||
| Give or take a little bit, but roughly 10 o'clock. | ||
| Broadly speaking, it'll be about 10 o'clock central time. | ||
| So I'll see you then. | ||
| Thanks for watching. | ||
| Don't forget to subscribe to the Rumble channel now. | ||
| Subscribe to the channel right now if you're not already. | ||
| If you're watching this content for free, this is the least you could do. | ||
| Honestly, the least you could do is give me money. | ||
| But if you're really black, and you just have no money to give me, then just follow the channel, please. | ||
| So, follow me on here, and I'll be back in about four hours, something like that. | ||
| So I'll see you then. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| Let me pick a song. | ||
| I think we'll play... Let's play this. | ||
| And I'll get out of here. | ||
| Thanks for watching. | ||
| I'll see you tonight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll see you tonight. | |
| Let's go for a drive. | ||
| So you hate the Hollywood fakes. | ||
| It's a cheapskate taste. | ||
| But you know you can relate. | ||
| We're all waiting for our break. | ||
| Looking for something to praise. | ||
| Looking for something to blame. | ||
| Anything you escape from is. | ||
| Big city, big city appetite. | ||
| Big city's gonna eat you alive tonight. | ||
| Big city, big city appetite. | ||
| Big city's gonna eat you alive. | ||
| So put your hand down, baby, let's go. | ||
| We're good to go. |
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