Feb. 21, 2026 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
01:48:13
THOUGHTCRIME Ep 116 - What Is 'White Culture'? Eric Swalwell's Poetry? Thomas Massie, Friend or Foe?
THOUGHTCRIME Ep 116 dissects "white culture" through Jeremy Carl’s controversial book The Unprotected Class, where he argues discrimination against whites is acceptable, and AOC’s dismissal of "whiteness" as an "imaginary thing," exposing contradictions in racialized identity claims. The hosts critique AI censorship (e.g., Sony blocking Breaking Bad from ByteDance models) and cultural appropriation debates, while mocking Eric Swalwell’s poetry and California’s top-two primaries. They pivot to speculative risks of alien contact—from Fermi paradox theories to biblical interpretations like Ezekiel’s wheels—and warn that Republican fractures over Trump could weaken the party’s libertarian base. Ultimately, the episode blends culture wars with cosmic skepticism, questioning both identity politics and humanity’s place in the universe. [Automatically generated summary]
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We're here, and it's Thought Crime Thursday, and helping us to navigate all of the various thought crimes is Cliff Maloney backed by Popular Demand.
Cliff, welcome back, man.
It's good to see y'all.
It's been a while.
I know.
We needed a break from you, but now we're ready again.
Just kidding.
Good to be here.
Just kidding.
You know, we're going to talk about Thomas Massey later in the show.
So I think that's what we're saying.
Yeah.
You've got to step up for your man.
Yeah, exactly.
A lot of people are getting very agitated about him.
But that's not where we're starting.
And by the way, Tyler Boyer is going to be joining us in just a minute.
Allegedly, we'll see.
He better get his.
I just saw him.
He's around.
We delayed our start for him.
He's got to hustle up.
So the first topic up for bids is white people.
What is white colours?
Which is another reason we had Cliff Maloney.
Exactly.
Yeah, we needed to get America's math.
We needed a white person to make sure.
We needed to make sure we had a white person around to discuss this topic.
I'm insufficiently white, apparently.
He's too Mexican.
Yeah, I've never seen this.
No, but this is how you'd called that too.
So, no, we wanted to talk about this.
So we had Trump nominee, Jeremy Carl, on the show the other day.
He also is up for a nomination in Congress, and they really interrogated him because he wrote a book, The Unprotected Class, that's about how it's okay to discriminate against white people in America.
Kill all wits.
Yes, kill all wits, it says on the cover.
And they also, they specifically pressed him.
I believe it was Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut was like pressing at him to define what like white identity or white culture was in the context of things.
In fact, we actually have that clip.
We could just show that real quick.
267.
Tell me how you define white identity and what you think is being erased about white identity.
I am concerned with the majority common American culture that we had for some time that through particularly mass immigration, I think has become much more balkanized.
And I think that weakens us.
And again, I'm not running away from that comment.
I'm not apologizing for it.
So they went back and forth a little bit about that.
But there's a bigger context of what's going on where some people have criticized the idea that it exists.
And so AOC was, for some reason, at the Munich Security Conference.
I think we know what AOC was.
Oh, yes, indeed.
And so she was there and she talked very incoherently about a lot of security topics, but she also talked about those darn whites.
And so we have this, we have this clip, 610.
There's a very big difference between whiteness and national, like your actual culture, right?
Whiteness is an imaginary thing.
Being German is real.
Being Italian is real.
You know, being English.
These are rich cultural heritages that are based on values and they are so much a part of what make our cultures and our societies what they are.
Why do I feel like she's trying to strangle whiteness while she's talking about white people?
I'm actually, I'm thinking of her like being, yeah, like a witch like conjuring up like ball lightning.
It's getting different.
I also want to submit that it should be heritage I.
I don't know why, but heritage is, I don't know.
I just so I think, I think that's kind of, that's the starting point for this conversation is what AOC was saying.
She was saying there is German culture, there is English culture, French culture, Italian culture, whatever you like, but there's no such thing as white culture.
And I think that's, I think that's an interesting question.
Does it exist?
And I think it's an important thing to ask because if you're chats on this, if you're most of, I think if you're most Americans, you're kind of a Euro-mutt.
So I don't think any of us have a strong sense of being specifically Italian or Polish or whatever.
And if we have any identity that's other than just big American, but with every other group in America, you know, we'll have American identity and subgroup identity.
So does a white culture exist?
And if so, what actually is it?
I think we need to throw Cliff Maloney in the hot seat.
Cliff, to you, you're first.
Does it exist?
I don't necessarily think a white culture exists, but I think that we have laws that pretty much exclude whites or include everyone that is not white.
And so you kind of have to think of it.
Like Chris Murphy, this is going to sound weird because usually when I think of politicians, I really think that they have a deeper understanding.
I think he believes what he's saying.
I think when he asked Jeremy, like, hey, do you like, are you really thinking that whites are the most, you know, pervasive when it comes to racism against them?
I think Chris Murphy buys the BS that he's been fed that, you know, whites have to have white guilt.
And of course, you know, we have it better than everybody else.
And he just, he believes what he's saying.
And I just, I love when they kind of get called on this.
So do I think there's a white culture?
I think that there is enough out there that puts whites in a box, whether it's for good or for bad, that yes, we've kind of had this situation where, you know, I'm what?
Scottish, Irish, Welsh, you know, we're all mutts, as you would say.
But I don't ever identify as with a white culture.
I just think that in certain things, we just get lumped into that box.
All right.
I'm proud to be white.
Okay.
Okay.
But does it mean white culture?
Singing Sweet Caroline at every wedding I go to.
Ooh, brutal.
With every white in the audience singing along.
But also, like, yeah, look, okay, like all of us will band together on that one.
No, but at a wedding, I'll do it.
Resilience, determination, inevitable genius.
Like, take a 100 random Europeans from different countries.
Okay.
So we got like Scotland, Wales, like different areas of even the UK.
Take Slovakia, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and put them all in Antarctica with everything they need to survive.
Leave them for 500 years and you come back to this great civilization.
And every single migrant in the world, every single Muslim, once they see this great civilization in Antarctica, will want to move there.
White people are great at building.
They're great at resilience, figuring out whatever they need to figure out.
They're great at surviving.
But here's the thing about white people.
Like, what are we of the world's population?
Like, 7%?
Something like that?
America or white people?
No white people.
It's like at like 10% now.
Maybe I think it's going down.
It used to be 35%.
Actually, Elon Musk tweeted about this.
It was like 35% at some point is high watermark.
And now we're down to like 10%.
Yeah.
But to say that there is no white culture because there's so many different factions of white culture, like German, Italian, French from the UK, is to say that there's no Spanish culture, even though there's like so many different factions of Spanish speakers.
Genuinely, I think the most important point to illustrate that there probably is a white culture is if we were to say, is there a black culture in the United States distinct from just being American?
We would obviously say yes.
There's a ton of cultural traits that make black people stand out from the rest of the country.
And they're still American.
There's still a lot of other cultural traits there that make black people, black Americans stand out from Nigerians.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, what I would say, as you said, as Cliff said, like, there's laws that discriminate against us in America.
So clearly, white people are seen as being a discrete group if they can be discriminated against.
I'm going to cut through the noise here.
Of course, there's a white culture.
Of course, there's a white culture.
I'm sorry, but I'll go to a football game in the South or in the upper Midwest or wherever, and all the white people celebrate that football game just about the same.
Now, the Eagles fans may beg to differ.
Cliff Maloney may feel like there's only one fan base that does it the right way.
But it's like we all know the same drinking games.
We all know the same movies.
We all know the same songs.
We all know the same stupid line dances and all the things, even if you don't know exactly the words or exactly the steps.
Like we're aware.
There is absolutely a white culture.
It's a hegemonic, a hegemonic culture in this country.
That's what upsets them all.
Okay.
But you can't fault us for the fact that this was established essentially from the turn of the last century into about the 1960s or 70s when there was no basic, no mass migration going on between the Great Depression and 1965.
And that is when this great congealing happened.
We won a world war.
We started dominating the manufacturing around the world and productivity around the world.
And it just congealed altogether.
We were actually able to assimilate the Polish and the Italians and this second wave of white immigration that we experienced at the latter half, well, the last couple decades of the 1800s and the early part of the 20th century.
But yes, there is absolutely a white culture, and that is all rooted in Anglo-culture.
Why?
Because it was the Brits and the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish that all came together and created an Anglo-centric culture.
That's where we get our laws, our customs, our norms, our language.
We are an Anglo-culture.
We are an Anglo-white culture that's spiced up with a few different varietals from other parts of the world.
And it's a beautiful thing.
There's nobody in the world that is going to say this white American is like this Australian white person.
Nobody in the world is going to say this Canadian, well, Canadian's a little bit different, or this British is like this American, because over the years, it's congealed and formed, as cultures do, they're living organisms, into its own thing.
And guess what?
It's a beautiful thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a thing that landed on the moon.
All you moon truthers get off my back here.
That won two world wars, that settled the plains, that built up a beautiful civilization, that built really rad cars and Hollywood and all this.
We have our culture.
We like baseball.
White culture likes baseball.
We like hot dogs.
All of this stuff is incredibly American.
And to suggest that it doesn't exist is the height of insanity.
And it's deeply infuriating, actually, which is why you're seeing the rise of a white identity in the United States.
Yeah, well, I think that's actually, that gets at what I would say is truly a white cultural practice in the United States.
And there is a certain self-effacing aspect to it.
So, for example, I would say it is specifically in America a white cultural trait to want to sort of efface race as a factor to someone else.
Well, because we were dominating for so long.
No, I don't even think it's that.
I think that's actually a little bit more innate than that because notably we kind of continue to do it even as we're nearly not a majority of the country.
There is a desire to not have any bias towards an in-group towards your own group just for the sake of it.
Every other group?
Every other group does in favor of it.
Every other group openly does.
You can run the poll where it'll say, they'll ask people what do you on average rate different races as and every race will like rate their own high and white people low.
And then white people are very careful to just rate them every race the exact same.
I think that actually higher practices.
I don't mean to go backwards on this.
So did Secretary Arubio do this at the Hofbruy house upstairs?
I don't think so.
Okay.
As long as that wasn't, that didn't happen, then we're good.
Dude, what?
Are you just doing a Hitler thing?
I'm not doing a Hitler.
How dare you say that?
I'm laying.
The Hofbruy House in Munich is a great place for families to go and enjoy a great day.
Nothing historically important there.
Nothing historic has happened upstairs.
No historic things have happened in Munich beer halls named the Hofbru House.
Okay.
Which they have one in Vegas, but I don't think they have his music.
I guess you have a Nazi upstairs.
But look, put an Australian, a British person, you know, us in a room with a bunch of Chinese, Kazakhstani, you know, Japanese.
What are the Kazakhstanis?
Africans.
And we will, all the white people will bond together.
We'll figure it out.
Sage.
Me and the British person, you know, they'll come over and be like, oh, look, I love you guys.
Listen, I think Trump lost his mind above it.
Trump's lost his mind, but we're on the same page.
Listen, common history, right?
Common history.
You're talking with a black British accent, though, right?
Yeah, you are.
No, no, Mike is not.
No, I was definitely not a person.
Blake and I were just there recently.
Wait, that's not a black British accent?
No, it's not.
Give me your best black British accent.
Well, they all sound the same.
So here's the deal.
No, that's not true.
Here's the deal, though.
What he's explaining is actually really true.
It's not that different races are not able to share the same culture.
It's the distance between culture actually is felt socially.
Black Culture Sharing00:16:01
Meaning, I might have a really great black friend, and that's great.
But if you put me in a room full of strangers, I'm going to naturally share more in common with other white people from other countries.
And you see that play out culturally because the distance, cultural distance is shorter.
Yeah.
And that's okay.
We shouldn't be so afraid of that.
Culture is emergent as well.
So why do white people exist?
Are white people a discrete group?
Yes, they are, because everyone basically says they are.
Our statistics all say they are.
All popular discourse says they do.
And then are there things that are there cultural practices that white people in particular do in America?
And you know, you know, there are because for the past five, six years, we've had endless freakouts over things that are too white.
I remember our national parks were too white.
Do you remember the black, the Smithsonian, the African American Museum that literally defined whiteness?
On top of that, but not even just that.
It's that like go to a go, I'll pick my favorite.
I've been to a few heavy metal concerts in my time, and I went to a Judas Priest and Saxon concert in Judas Priest and Saxon in Washington, D.C. In Washington, D.C.
And I'll say Washington, D.C. is a very diverse city.
Any number of Hispanics and black people and Indians and whoever could have gone there.
And I will say that was a very European crowd and one Native American favorite.
You're saying there was an Anglo-Saxon Saxon crowd at the Saxon.
Yes.
Here is my unexpected.
This is my theory.
What was that one Supreme Court justice that said, you know porn when you see it?
Mm-hmm.
Whatever that is.
Oh, I can't remember who said it.
Someone else.
So, but this is the thing.
And Cliff, I'm about to flash one of your favorites here.
You know, whiteness when you see it.
Throw up 592.
Ron Paul.
Throw up image.
There.
Whiteness.
That is white culture.
Gavin News.
That is family.
That is Dawson's Creek.
See, I knew Cliff was going to have my bag.
Yeah, I guess.
A little shout out to James Vanderbeek, who we lost.
Good man, a good family, man.
Six babies, by the way.
He had six kids.
God bless him.
Great, great white guy.
This is a real 10 out of 10.
10 out of 10, white guy, Eddie.
It would have been so funny for us to like rate.
That's our culture, people.
Dawson's Creek is our culture.
Cliff, do you agree that you know it when you see it?
Am I wrong?
No, you're right.
And I think you guys use me as a guinea pig to start here.
And when I say, like, what I think of white culture, no, you're right.
I mean, it's, it's, it's, I do think humans avoid assimilation, right?
I mean, we, we, we want to be with people we look like, that we get along with, that we connect with.
I mean, this is the big argument with a lot of the migration in the U.S. is like, or around the world, you know, you look at Europe, like the refusal to want to assimilate.
So, yes, I think you know white culture when you see it, or whiteness, or whatever you're saying.
Um, but yes, Dawson's Creek, great reference.
By the way, if people are confused about the B-roll right now, we're literally just flashing through B-rolls of white culture.
Wake.
It sucks.
No, Cliff has in the background.
He's got lots of white culture behind him right now.
He's got a Ron Paul sign, super white.
Super white.
Super white.
Did Ron Paul not appeal to the minorities?
I would say this.
I would say his policies could be appealing.
But if you looked in the Ron Paul Revolution of between 2008 and 2012, it was a very white crowd.
You know what's interesting?
I got mad because Ron, like always, was ahead of his time.
But in like 2018, he said at some event that like multiculturalism is bad.
And like all these radical left libertarians were like losing it, you know, and like, I mean, he was once again ahead of his time.
But like, that was, nobody was talking about that back then, right?
That the migration and just, you know, everyone thought, oh, well, you know, multiculturalism, hanging out with each other.
Of course, that's a good thing.
It was like the height of woke.
And he was like the one guy saying that.
So let me just be very clear.
On that note.
Who's on who's waiting on the painting behind you?
Up here?
Yeah.
Where am I?
Yeah, right there.
All right.
This is a gag gift.
Let me figure out how to do that.
Are gag gifts white culture?
Of course.
Hold on.
Only white people give each other gag gifts.
Is that Martin Van Buren?
Yes, it's Martin Van Buren.
I know that portrait.
White culture.
White culture.
I couldn't even see the face.
I could just see the pose.
I knew it was the pose of the face painted on Martin Van Buren's.
Yes.
That was a great gag gift.
Nothing's wider than gag gifts.
That's first.
All right, but here's what we're saying.
Listen, I think race does sometimes matter.
It does.
I mean, just ask the NBA.
But what we're talking about is African-American over here.
They've been waiting on that.
Didn't you say that Jesse Jackson was the guy who popularized African culture?
Yeah, African-American, that Jesse Jackson popularized that.
Which is which is news to me.
So here's the deal.
But you, if so, for example, I went to high school with a bunch of kids that were not white, but they kind of grew up in the dominant American culture.
I didn't feel any separation from them.
And this is the thing.
So, when you talk about multiculturalism, multiculturalism is where you celebrate all the groups staying distinct and they move here and then you got the Indian neighborhood and you're just going to celebrate the Indians and say, oh, the food or whatever.
They've been sitting on a bunch of these.
I can tell.
This is fun.
Okay.
But I mean, genuinely, to Ron Paul's point, probably, I didn't see what he said, but multiculturalism actually does make us weaker because we don't have a dominant central through line of our culture, shared values, shared morals, and shared heroes, shared myths, shared legends.
And that's really, really, I think, what people don't like living around because they don't, they don't go to, like, if my kids go to school with those, those kids, or those people's kids, they're not going to like celebrate Easter together.
They're not going to, the, the holidays are going to be different.
The, the language is going to be different.
Everything's going to be different.
And that's not what you want.
You want your kids going to school with a bunch of people that share the culture and share the holidays and share the interactions and that share culture more broadly.
And I think there's actually a genuine weird fear that to acknowledge that there just might be some things, certain groups just naturally, for whatever reason, like more than other people.
Like there's going to be going to black pilots again.
No, no, there's going to be this like folk.
There's going to be some folk concert.
It's going to be a bunch of white people with guitars and they're going to be singing their folk songs and it's going to be really annoying.
And I would hate it.
I would hate it.
I actually hate that music.
But I acknowledge it's a ton of white people who like that sort of thing.
They love their Bob Dylan and whatever.
And I know that these organizations are just endlessly having meltdowns because they're all white libs and they freak out because not enough people who aren't white libs like it.
And nevertheless, that's white culture because it's something a bunch of white people like and want to do and will do if not blocked from doing it by things like having a gigantic politics related meltdown.
Hey, look, white culture is so incredible that you have people that aren't white, Mexicans like Andrew.
Trying to pretend they are white.
No, I would actually say this.
So this is how America works.
White people.
Explain to us how America works.
America works very similarly.
Black culture, white people try to copy all the time.
So they adopt black culture.
It causes a lot of damage in the areas.
You can say his name.
Just say his name.
Eminem.
Okay, good.
Clothing, all that stuff, like words that we say.
It's actually like white people trying to steal black culture.
White trash culture, Mexicans steal all the time.
All the time.
Just because they wear this.
I actually true.
I actually have favorite things about Mexican immigrants.
They love pro-wrestling.
They love launcher trucks.
They love pizza parties at Pizza Hut.
They love all this stuff.
I love that.
No, I love that about our parks.
They're going to park parties and parks.
Oh, my God.
They love stuff that is like fallen autumn.
I'm sorry about that.
Sitting on their lawn.
Saturday on their lawn.
Saturday lawn.
Saturday in California.
It's like you just died at the parks.
Every park.
Don't even try to do that.
Fishing off like a dock.
Sunday on the other side.
No, but I actually got so true though.
Oh, yeah.
On rivers, like just posting up along rivers and creeks and things like that.
What are some examples of white people stealing black culture?
This was me in high school.
You guys should see photos of me in 10th grade.
Oh, I went to very, very, how do I put this without offending my white neighbors?
Philadelphia.
High school outside of Philadelphia.
Let's put it that way.
And I had to assimilate and I had to try.
I had the huge stud earring, just my left ear pierce.
I would wear the foo boo pants.
Yeah.
There's some big baggy pants.
But the number one thing that I changed is I wanted to play cards and gamble at lunch.
And only the black folks were like out there actually doing this.
And so I had to assimilate and join the culture and play tunk to try to gamble some lunch money.
So that was a lot of fun.
I could just imagine Blake with his or Blake, Cliff with his foo boo pants and his stud earring, like smoking a black and mild at their gambling at recess.
High schoolers are peak are peak white kids trying to adopt black culture.
100%.
It's because of rap.
It's rap, listening to rap music.
I also think that white kids have been told that their culture sucks.
And so they're looking for beyond that.
It's cool.
It's like there's a level of cool and swagger that black culture produces in America that's promoted by the media that is cool.
This is why my theory behind Gen Z. Gen Z is adopting cowboy costumes, almost like a lot of them wear boots and they like to go to country concerts and rodeos.
I think it's because they're looking for something that's defined.
That's something that they could be like, oh, I can do that.
I can wear those clothes and I can feel black.
I belong.
Black culture has created a whole thing around, especially around products and things like that.
Cars, specific cars, brands of cars, rims.
Our era, our era, remember, it went.
Big subworkers, subs.
That came from black culture.
This entire era of American culture was a blight on my life and on America.
So come on.
Dr. Dre, chronic.
Come on.
Yeah, I have clips guys.
I'm not making of all the songs I love off that album.
I definitely was that high school kid that was like bumping.
Speaking of people on this, and then we should.
A final thought on this, and then we'll pivot to the next thing.
If you want to get a good sense of what white culture is, go look at what Japanese people do when they're ripping off stuff from America because they're great at imitating American subcultures.
There are Japanese people who really love the greaser subculture from the 50s, like wear leather jackets.
Oh, I've seen that.
They have motorcycle culture.
They love, they also love jazz.
I guess that's an element of black culture there.
But they really are good at skate.
They're really good at skateboarding.
So skateboarding, like Tony Hot, 80s California culture.
They pick up a lot of that stuff.
It's more of like a 90s, right?
80s, 90s.
No, I definitely listened to rap in high school.
Well, you had like Dr. Dre.
Yeah.
No, mine is like Young Thug, Travis Scott, the Baby.
We got a dumbest baby.
All right.
The fact that we are laughing at it means we're part of white humans.
Oh, man.
We got a great from Zuzu's Pedals.
We'll close it out with this.
$5.
1980s John Hughes movies were the best of things ever and appealed to white teenage audiences.
Now people would say these amazing movies aren't diverse enough.
That actually is a very good point.
those films are very suburban white culture of the 80s uh and they were definitely yeah home alone didn't have a single black person in it Yes, it did.
No, it did not.
Wait, what are the other John Hughes movies?
He had 16 Candles, 16 Candles, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Pretty in Pink.
People always say I looked at the colours.
I didn't know what I was doing.
Breakfast Club.
I did science.
Yeah, was there a pinata and breakfast club?
I haven't seen the Breakfast Club.
I don't think so.
People always say I look like the kid from 16 Candles.
Uncle Buck?
Uncle Buck is dancing.
Okay, I can see you younger.
Yeah, you think fancy.
All of these things.
All of those things are great.
My son looks more like everybody.
This is a good transition point because John Hughes, sadly, he died.
He retired pretty young and then died quite young.
He was like out of Hollywood by the time he was 50.
But we could make more John Hughes movies today because the AI that we've been covering ever since this show is created has advanced remarkably quickly.
And we're now at the point where there are just absolutely terrifying AI recreations of every actor, every film you could ever imagine.
Sea Dance.
Sea Dance is the latest Chinese AI model that is being used for making these videos.
And we'll watch some clips here and you'll think, okay, that's not 100% the same as a movie.
But remember, everything you see with AI, it is like today's AI is the worst it will ever be versus the future.
That's kind of get better.
So let's go.
We have a fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
$5.84.
So tell me, do you guys think that looked real?
Looks pretty good.
It looks like them.
It definitely did.
Why could they pain actors?
I could nitpick the fighting about it, but the actual, like, the face is 100%.
Can I say 587?
Alrighty, let's do that one.
Will Smith fights a spaghetti monster?
I just, I've seen the other one.
I would watch this movie.
I would watch this movie.
I think I would find this movie entertaining.
I think my children would find that movie entertaining.
My worry is that there's going to be no creative art anymore.
Like actors will just sign a contract.
Wait, what about Niel for $10 million?
That's like you need actors anymore.
You just create new NILs.
Well, and the part of, well, part of what's amazing, though, is this gets into another cultural factor, which is we don't really generate new movie stars anymore.
Like, who is a super famous movie star on par on par with Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt when Timothy Chalame was moving?
Yeah, that's the only one.
Timothy Chalame.
And besides him?
Sidney Sweeney.
Sidney Sweeney.
Okay.
Oh, well, what's a Sydney Sweetie movie you've watched?
Dude, who are the new...
Okay, Glenn Powell is another one.
There's so much.
That's a hammer.
No, no, there's no Army Hammer.
He's in like one thing.
No, I mean, on terms of being, think what I actually don't know who that is.
Miles Teller.
Miles Teller also used to.
I don't know who that is.
Maybe you're just watching old movies.
I don't watch that many movies overall, but I mean, they might be famous.
They might be well paid, but on par with how big Brad Pitt was when he was 35, on par with how big Tom Cruise was.
Leonardo DiCaprio.
Like Leonardo DiCaprio, those guys are huge names and they've been huge name.
McDonald's of Hollywood Actors00:02:29
They were huge names in their 20s.
Every film that was released by them was like a big event.
Every Tom Cruise film is massive.
I don't think there's anyone out there where every film they make is a presumed tentpole big deal event.
Even Timothy Chalamet.
Sidney Sweeney.
Sidney Sweeney's movie is bomb.
She was in a movie that no one watched.
Partly because movies are bomb.
Movies are done.
That is part of it.
But I think I will go to every Sidney Sweeney movie.
This is all set up.
This is all set up to say.
He's doing research for Ballad Chasers.
This is all set up.
Hey, if we had an army of Sidney Sweeneys, we would never lose out.
This is all set up to say we don't have that many famous actors, but people are endlessly attached to the same old ones.
Tom Cruise is still making action movies.
He's in his 60s.
And he's in his 60s.
No, okay, that's not actor's fault.
That's not actors' fault.
He's subscription models.
Yeah, but he has TV shows.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is.
His point is adoption in specific archetypes around actors.
And that's in the heavy decline.
And the point is, Tom Cruise.
In 2020, didn't help.
Tom Cruise.
I want to finish this thought.
Tom Cruise would, in the past, Tom Cruise, by the time he's 65, he would fade out of being this big action star.
But he keeps being one because he is the big brand name.
We basically can't make new action stars on par with Tom Cruise or Arnold or any of the ones we had in the 80s.
And that creates the opening where you just sell away Tom Cruise's AI rights and you just get Tom Cruise forever.
In fact, we could de-age him.
So we have 40-year-old Tom Cruise.
Well, this is the same with fast food restaurants and chains, I would make the argument.
There's only so many that can make into the marketplace, like new ideas.
And people become so accustomed to that.
It's like McDonald's has grown huge.
Subway, like Subway's not the best sandwich, but Subway's still the largest chain in America or second largest or third largest chain in America.
I think first in food because people just become so accustomed to something that they can't get off it.
So how does that, that shrinks over time, maybe, but like, again, that goes back, I think actors is like, there's a branded actor that you.
I think that's Blake's point.
You didn't see this in the past because the whole mechanism of delivering the new food, if you will, the new actor was so powerful that it would overcome the barriers to entry and we would get new entrants into the space.
And we don't really do that anymore because I think our attention is so diverted and so siloed.
Everybody's balkanized, to use Jeremy Carl's word.
Breaking Bad Clip Controversy00:02:24
Wait, can we just, I just can we watch 591?
Sure.
Yeah, do it.
I'll say my name.
iceberg what you're holding is mine So for those watching that later, that was Captain America and Scarlett Johansson from the Smarlax.
I can't remember her superhero title.
And it was Heisenberg from Breaking Bad, the Ted Rock show.
They did not cross over in real life.
Brian Cranston.
But now they have crossed over in the world of AI movies.
And then Scarlett Johansen beat them up.
Did you ever watch Breaking Bad?
No, Charlie used to give me such a chance.
I haven't watched it either.
Dude, it's one of my greatest things.
Best television show in each other.
I can make it even more bad.
How did you make it through all of COVID and you didn't watch Breaking Bad?
I can make it even worse.
I watched two episodes of Breaking Bad and didn't find it that interesting and I stopped.
Ooh.
I did lock down a day.
I judge every single opinion you ever have from here on out, Blake, by the fact that you couldn't get through two episodes of Breaking Bad.
I got through two and then I didn't really want to watch it.
Should we watch this together?
If you want, I guess.
Let's force watch it.
Cliff, get in here, man.
What are you thinking?
Yeah, it is the best GIF or GIF, whatever.
We don't have to have that argument ever for door knocking, which is the Walter White, I am the one who knocks.
You gotta get that show.
That is awkward.
No, there was somebody that did a, took all of the seasons and did a super cut and put them into like three hours and made it like a cinematic movie.
And it was out on the internet.
I think you still find it like on straight into your veins, distill version.
No, but they said like, I didn't get a chance to watch it, but it's in like the dark web or like Pirates Bay or whatever.
You can do it, like download it.
But it's three hours and it's supposed to be incredible, like a full-length movie, but it's all like, and they've only taken the most important parts, but they edited it perfectly.
Automatic Phone Locks?00:11:44
And I'll believe that when I see it.
By the way, we're supposed to be like, people watch it and people were like raving about it.
It was like big deals on the internet.
By the way, since we had that Breaking Bad clip, this is where we're headed.
Sony actually just sent Byte Dance, who are the guys, they, I believe, is Byte Dance the company that was also behind TikTok?
Well, they also are behind the sea dance model, and they got a letter from Sony that says, you have to take all of our breaking bad and Spider-Man stuff out of your AI training data.
I'm sure China will get right on that one.
But I think that's the future.
Like, it's kind of interesting that the great blocker on AI development might not be computer chips.
It might not be science.
It might be that all of the big legacy media outputlets are going to come in and get the courts to say you can't just take everyone's stuff and use it to make AI.
It's garbage in, garbage out.
So, but right now they're stealing the best stuff that human beings have ever created and using that to generate their AI models.
So, if you block successfully what they're able to ingest, it would beg to, you know, it could be a way to block some of them.
And that could be what's actually interesting is I can see a positive outcome here where that is actually what causes more original stuff to be made using AI.
Because let's say they win and they say, okay, you can't use a bunch of this pre-existing stuff in the training data.
As a result, AI becomes really bad at replicating Batman, Superman, Star Wars, what have you, but it's better at more generic stuff.
And so they use the generic outputs.
Okay, here's star battles, and it's totally different from Star Wars.
It's interesting also to me that your Upper Midwest accents takes that word generic.
What did they say?
Generic or something?
Generic.
Generic.
I say it with a long E.
This is my white person folk way.
That's a different white culture.
I don't recognize this white person.
My white culture is pronouncing things the way God intended the way a South.
I think this kind of melds really well with the next topic.
Social media ban for kids.
I think this is fascinating.
Well, we can't quite move on to that.
Before we do that, we have to have the GOAT and the Exploding Gas Station.
So really quick, play 588, the Exploding Gas Station.
Sure.
I'll take those, please.
You need to pay for those.
Oh, I seem to have forgotten my money.
You would ban children from accessing social media to view that clip?
I just think it's a fascinating debate, and we should have it.
Why don't we play 598?
This is Ana Paulina Luna, HR 7399, to prohibit users who are under the age of 13 from accessing social media to prohibit the use of personalized recommendation systems on individuals under age 17 and limit the use of social media in schools.
So there's three parts to that.
If you're under 13, no social media at all.
To prohibit the use of personalized recommendation systems on those under 17 and limit the use of social media in schools.
Is this good or bad, Cliff Maloney?
Gosh.
You're getting it.
We all get to like pile on when you say something that we disagree with.
Yeah, my views on this have vastly shifted in the last five years.
You know, I used to be much more libertarian and think, you know, the government shouldn't get involved.
But honestly, I think a lot of this stems from the idea that if there's one thing the government should do, it should be to protect those under the age of 18.
You know, we've seen that with all the transition surgeries and all the woke BS with that, ruining people's lives.
Cigarettes.
Guns.
I'm on board.
I do think it's the one thing that the government should come in and set some parameters to make sure the kids are not getting mind warped at 10 years old.
Not a Republican government.
What's your take?
A Republican government should not do that.
My take.
Some people would be so pissed.
My take is that social media.
My take is that social media was a mistake.
We should ban all social media.
And if someone tries to recreate it, they get the death penalty.
Okay.
Okay, you're caught with like an Instagram-like app in your home computer lab.
Tyler has kids.
Tyler to ban or not to ban.
Like you, I have children.
Here's the, we kept our kids.
So my oldest kid is 17, which is crazy.
He has had a phone since he was 12 or 13.
Which is too hard.
I didn't even have a phone.
His mom wouldn't even have a phone because of getting a hold of him.
But we had it on lockdown, so he couldn't download any apps.
He was not allowed to download social media until he turned 16.
So I'm kind of like okay with it because like I personally in my own house was like, I don't think my, I didn't want my kids on social media before they turned 13.
I don't think like I, if I, if it was up to me, I probably wouldn't have given my kids, I wouldn't give my kids a cell phone until they're 16.
But so what's a little old school?
Okay, one thing I think we could all agree on, and maybe we can't, I don't know, but I would think banning, so I'm, I'm like for full ban of tablets, devices, phones at school.
Yeah, 100%.
Or restaurants.
And they basically found that within about six months, kids start acting like students did like in 2000 or 2005.
So they revert back.
They actually get their attention spans back.
They're cool and they start smoking cigarettes.
Yeah, they go gambling out in the quad with Black and Miles and Cliff.
They're playing POGS.
They got POG.
POGS came back.
Wow.
Talk about banning yo-yos.
When we talk about banning phones in school, it's always the focus is on the kids, but we actually need to make the parents more normal too.
Because when they've tried to do this in some schools, they get so much pushback from the parents who flip out.
I can't immediately contact my child at all times.
No, you can have a phone like in a backpack or something.
But like, honestly, I think.
There's a locker.
Keep it in your locker.
Yeah, you can't get it.
I think the old-fashioned way.
If your parents need to reach you, call the school.
Yeah, but they're going to push back because of school shooting.
People.
Agers.
Whatever.
Well, honestly, what they should do is you can have a phone, but it has to be a flip phone.
It has to be a dumb phone, not a smartphone.
No, just keep it in your locker.
You can access it at lunch.
No, but if there's no school shooting, in theory, you couldn't get a phone call.
Can I tell you them having the phone isn't going to save their life?
Can I blow your mind right now?
We're not that far away from.
So I just had this thought that came to me, and I don't really understand it.
When my phone's on airplane mode, why can't I set a setting so that it automatically texts people who call me and tells them that I'm on a plane if it's I'm on airplane mode?
Anyways, this brings me to this point is we're not that far away from when kids are at school, there being an automatic setting that locks down their phone essentially by being there where you can still make calls like a flip phone.
You can't do any of the data.
Like you could probably, a state could probably pass a law, but it's like the technology is not that far off.
It's probably there already.
You're there.
You can't do data.
You have airplane.
You're in airplane mode.
You have school mode.
Yeah.
So there should be a little toggle.
Yeah, but that's, you can't do an opt-in.
It has to be like.
But they could force it with the GPU.
Tyler's right.
You can do this.
So there's a company called Brick.
Okay.
And so it like sticks onto your fridge.
Yep.
And so a lot of Gen Z people are addicted to social media.
So they buy this company called Brick.
And what you do is when you get home for the day, all you do is you take your phone and you touch it to the brick.
It's like a little box.
And it automatically shuts off and locks all social media on your phone for six hours or five hours or two hours.
You can preset it.
So there can be companies that once you enter school, you brick your phone at the door.
So no social media is allowed.
No texting is allowed.
Only a phone call to your parent.
Like only phone calls are only phone calls.
That sounds awesome.
Yeah.
So you can do that.
That is the thing.
Tyler's right.
So do you have to like where they touch the brick and they can't talk for six hours?
This is totally tension though.
This is totally plausible right now.
Like, we should be able to do that.
But you know, there's going to be all these civil libertarians like Cliff that are going to be already gaming out how this gets abused by the censors or whatever.
I think schools, so here's my baseline.
Schools, kids got to be learning from books, old school books.
And here's the tension a lot of schools have run into is they'll institute a phone ban or a device ban in the school, but then they'll give them homework that requires a device in order to complete it.
And so this is central tension: is we tell all these schools, hey, no phones, none of this.
But we also want you to be at the cutting edge of AI.
We want you to be the cutting edge of programming and all these, you know.
So how do you bridge that divide?
How do you square that circle?
Because our kids are getting good at these things that'll be the tools of the future when they're young.
But if you block them from developing those skills, then we're not going to be leading those fields.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
I don't know.
All I can think is I don't know that there's any top AI person or really any top computer person in general who got there because of their public school computer programming class that they took to fill their elective in high school.
I don't know.
It's also emergent.
It's tough to know exactly where the next iterations are going.
I mean, the AI world right now is essentially progressed by about 200 engineers across the world.
There's 200 people that are just waiting for us.
There's like literally 200 people that are advancing the field dramatically.
That's what drives.
That's best computer engineers.
That makes it good.
That makes me feel like I'm back in Dallas again.
Whole neighborhoods of Dallas, by the way.
So Zuzu's Pedals has another Rumble rant.
She says, we have so many videos of bullies beating up a kid in school, and it's the camera phone that happened to catch it so they could post it.
And no social media in school.
Oh, wait, the camera phone was on waiting for it to happen to post it.
So I think she's saying we shouldn't have social media in school because people are literally beating other kids up to post it on social media.
I think that's a black girl that just absolutely beat up that young white girl.
On the other hand, it exposes those.
It does expose things.
I think a lot of crazy left-wing teachers get caught because of recordings in school.
Well, that's why we should just have cameras in classrooms.
Well, how about you keep the camera on and you keep the phones on and everything else is off?
What if all classrooms were just a permanent panopticon?
You could just log into any class in America and watch it.
Nice.
Every single teacher is 100% of the time just visible to smoke out a lot of wokeys that way.
We would smoke out a lot of things that general teachers couldn't do anything.
The most conservative teachers would have like woke parents down their neck.
Like, why are you saying this about the Constitution?
It would be mayhem, actually.
But, but we probably, I mean, this is what happened during COVID, is that we saw a lot of what our students were learning across the country.
People were outraged.
I think it would certainly demystify a lot of what modern education is like.
It's very clear a lot of people are attached to like one good teacher they had 30 years ago, and that informs their entire understanding of how modern education is.
They totally black out all the bad ones.
Mitch on Epstein and Politics00:15:59
That's true.
But I think this is really interesting because it kind of plays into another topic here.
We're talking, of course, about civil liberties.
We're talking about the concern that we might be censoring people if we put social media bans on people.
By the way, this whole thing is happening at a court house, a superior court in Los Angeles, where Meta and Google are getting sued because a young woman named KGM, this is her acronym in the courthouse, is suing that they've made it too addictive and that she has depression, anxiety.
By the way, all of which is true.
Young women, especially that go on social media, have massive spikes in anxiety and all this stuff.
So there is a downside.
This is very real.
But it rubs up and they're delusional.
Who is?
The women on the internet.
They are.
That's all they are.
They're definitely not doing great.
They're not doing great.
No.
So Jim Brose and a lot of women are not in a great place.
That's true.
So, but then we have Thomas Massey, who is a libertarian-minded Kentucky congressman who is now at odds with President Trump, basically the whole Trump administration.
I mean, they love to tee off on, so we did get, I wanted to get this.
So JM Denton donated $50.
Thank you very much, Jam.
And he said this: Thomas Massey is a grandstander.
His principles are only present when convenient.
See his votes against funding the wall.
What those show.
Meanwhile, his principles didn't stop Biden's continuing resolution.
So that's what JM says.
I will say to that point, Thomas Massey did not seem to care about the Epstein files when President Biden was in office.
Yeah, what do you have to say, Cliff?
Sounds like your number one best friend is being criticized.
Cliff's going to be like that at GC this week, the episode.
He's like, on what's going on?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I can't.
You're cut out.
It's breaking up here.
And then you just answer the question.
He loves Thomas Massey.
There it is.
I do love Thomas Massey.
I think on the Epstein thing, I think a lot of people have cherry-picked some of the, well, he wasn't that vocal during Biden.
He was able to get it through.
The president signed the bill.
I think there's been a lot of dropballs here.
I think there's a lot of things that, you know, we could have done differently.
Massey could have done some of the things differently.
But I think it's so easy for people.
What I get mad at is that the Republican establishment always puts him in a position, or him plus a couple of the Freedom Caucus members, to be the ones that have to make the tough vote because they put up some sort of moderate bill, right?
It's never Don Bacon.
It's never Don Bacon that has to be the one or two no votes because the bill was too conservative or too Trumpy.
And I think that's why I always do stick with Thomas because I think a lot of the things he's doing, people can argue, well, he's too principled and we only have a one or two seat majority.
Okay, you could make that argument, but like, why aren't we testing the moderates instead of having to test the people that I would argue are much more America first?
That bothers me.
That's a fair point.
I hear that.
I'm trying to think of actual examples.
Tyler might know this better than I would because you run the scorecard over turning point action.
Oh, I can give you, I can give you Tommy Massey's current score.
Hey, are you interested?
Yeah.
While you're pulling that up, do you buy into this whole theory that he's changed since he got remarried, Cliff?
I was at his wedding, so I think I'm positioned to answer this.
No.
And I don't appreciate certain people taking shots at his new wife.
She's wonderful.
And I think a lot of people have kind of cherry-picked.
I'll say this, and he might not like that I say this, but at the ceremony, they talked about his ex or his wife away, Rhonda.
And I thought it was, I thought it was beautiful because a lot of people try to jump on the fact that he got remarried too quickly.
He was one of the best husbands to Rhonda, the best dad.
I totally believe.
I believe that completely.
That I've ever met.
And he did everything right.
Started dating Carolyn a couple, you know, after she passed away.
So that bothers me a lot that people have kind of gone low on that issue.
And what's Carolyn supposed to do?
You know, when these things are blown up, like she has no way to respond.
And so, no, I don't think he's changed at all.
He's one of the best people I know.
And, you know, he's been principled in Congress for years, but now it matters because we have such a slim majority.
I will say, this is something I had forgotten about, but I remember being very upset about it at the time.
And it's really irking me again to be reminded of it.
Right after Charlie's death, they asked Massey about it.
And he said everyone needed to turn down their rhetoric, but especially the president, where he complained, he said there is a lot of rhetoric and the president himself engages in it.
He called it a hostile act to co-sponsor the Epstein resolution.
And maybe I'm being nitpicky because it's something so personally close to me, but I don't really like that Massey took a left-winger murdering Charlie and said, yeah, but like, let's remember that the president got mad at me for co-sponsoring an Epstein resolution.
I didn't like that.
Yeah, it seems like, so Cliff, I actually totally ascribe to a couple of things.
I think Thomas Massey is a remarkable man.
I think he is unique.
The stuff he does at his home and living off the grid.
And that's all cool.
That's all very cool.
And I think he was a great husband.
I think he's a great family man.
I think he has a stellar personal sort of like, there's no skeletons in Thomas Massey's closet, if you will.
But it does feel like he's become so animated, especially after Trump came after him.
And maybe, listen, you know, I know that that probably came with personal cost.
I know that that probably has increased his security detail.
And I know that those wounds go deep, deep when you feel actually afraid for your own life because somebody of prominence is attacking you.
I understand that intimately.
But it does feel like he's kind of animated by this feud with President Trump, and it's kind of clouding some of the messaging, some of the judgment, some of what he majors on.
And it does kind of feel like, you know, he's against us now.
I mean, I would say he, there was that blow up on the internet.
I actually was confused about it too.
He voted no on the rule, but he eventually voted yes on the Save Act.
So I think some of it gets lost in disinformation online.
But that's my vibe.
Yeah, I would say this.
You know, Thomas Massey's actually been a friend of the organization for a long time.
He spoke at a lot.
He spoke at a ton of turning point events.
Came on our show.
Similar to Ram Paul.
Came on the show.
Same type of thing is that there's been this departure over the course of the last year during the next Trump presidency where there's just been some vitriol pointed at the president.
And some of it's a little bit concerning to me because, and again, this is a similar type of conversation.
And, you know, this isn't pointed at, you know, just pointed at Cliff here.
But, you know, there's purest like Republican libertarianism where it's like, there's some things that I think Rand Paul and Thomas Massey have done that are exquisite and it's pulled the party more to the right and it's good and it's really it's really healthy and it's really great.
And I like the policies that some elected officials and legislative bodies have where they just vote no on everything because they don't believe that the government should grow and that they shouldn't be passing anything.
And that's generally been the MO of Thomas Massey.
And he's crossed some lines.
Well, I know.
I'm saying, but over the course of this last year in particular, there's been a little bit of a departure, but there's signs of this that are a little bit challenging because, you know, there was some, there's some jockeying, some brokering that happened in Kentucky that I don't like.
And this is specific to these two gentlemen because there's a lot of like wheeling and dealing with the McConnell people.
And like they basically had like, like, again, a truce in that state.
And Cliff can speak a little bit more to this.
I won't put him on the spot to speak to why, as to why, but like where Mitch McConnell really wouldn't attack Rand Paul.
Rand Paul wouldn't attack Mitch McConnell.
And, you know, and again, that was not like 100% because Rand Paul would have.
you know, some words about policies that they, but they wouldn't attack each other.
And I don't think that was helpful in Kentucky.
Like, I think in Kentucky, you have two of the most pro-liberty guys.
And at the same time, you have one of the worst representations of the DC swamp and Mitch McConnell.
And now you have a situation, too, where it's like they've kind of stayed out of this race for, and I could be totally wrong about this, but from what I've seen, they've largely stayed out of this race to replace Mitch McConnell.
And that doesn't help.
And I'm a little bit more of like a pragmatist when it comes to this.
It's like, we want the most conservative guy possible getting elected and use your muscle for good.
I just think like my, all this to say, instead of attacking Donald Trump, which you're not going to change the president by attacking Donald Trump if you're Thomas Massey, but what can you do at home?
Well, you could get, you know, a really great guy elected in the U.S. Senate to replace Mitch McConnell.
And are you doing, are you spending all of your political capital to do that?
No, he's not spending it.
He's doing this instead.
Watch this clip.
603.
That's what bothers me.
Donald Trump told us that even though he had dinner with these kinds of people in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent, but he's not.
He's still in with the Epstein class.
This is the Epstein administration, and they're attacking me for trying to get these files released.
And again, I'm going to say President Trump has not been accused of anything criminal.
I think there is a lot of truth to just, unfortunately, Massey's had friction with President Trump all the way back to his first term.
Trump was trying to primary him out even then over he wasn't voting for stuff the president wanted.
And I think a very real trend is when someone, when a lot of people, get in friction with President Trump, you can see some people they handle it better than others.
Like there are some senators who've had big spats I think even Lindsey Graham's had some spats with Trump and he just he glides with it.
He knows what he wants and he's very good at getting back in the president's graces and just deals with it and so on.
And others they're very aware.
Okay, sometimes Trump fixates on people and that's just how it is.
But for some people they get in it with Trump and after that it just gradually curdles everything and it starts to consume everything about them.
You know what the difference is?
You're totally right.
And we go back to white culture I was thinking of, like Albion Seed or whatever right, how?
Actually he's a border.
It's because he's a border no, so here's the thing.
Look at, compare Thomas Massey's reaction to Trump, attacks to Marco Rubio's.
Marco Rubio Latin, little Cuban.
So you can do it if you want, although that's a Mexican song, but the point is he's Let it roll off.
They buried the hatchet, as it were, and now Marco's like a rocket ship.
Whereas Thomas Massey, he's like, you know, Appalachia.
He's like, he's an honor society guy.
You're right that different people handle it differently, but I don't know that I'd associate Cuban with burying the hatchet and not caring about that.
Well, I think he cared, obviously, for a while, but he's much more sort of like sly.
And I think, listen, they buried the hatchet.
That's the bottom line.
Massey has got that honor culture.
And Trump came after his honor.
And he's going to, like, you don't just bury that hatchet.
Yeah.
Oh, he's from Kentucky.
He's from, I think, is that where the Hatfields and McCoy's were?
Go ahead.
Well, I think that was West Virginia, wasn't it?
Same type of country.
Yeah, but it's similar.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Cliff.
Yeah, so two major things to not push back on, but to at least respond with.
Number one, I don't think Massey has changed in terms of his voting pattern at all.
I think what's changed is that the margins are so narrow that now him being Mr. No ramifications for the Trump administration for passing legislation.
It's real, right?
Ron Paul voted no for years, but guess what?
We had a 20-seat advantage for most of the time that he was in, right?
Or they were in the minority and just it didn't matter.
So I think that's number one.
Number two, I think the line in the sand, the difference here is that when Trump decided to go all in against Massey, what do politicians do when they're fighting for their political life?
They're going to figure out ways that they can kind of push back.
And this is not a shout at Thomas, but we teach this, right?
What do politicians care about?
They care about getting elected, re-elected, and elected to higher office, right?
That's all.
Even the good guys.
That's what they do.
So his path to getting re-elected is he can't align with Trump if Trump's going after him every single day.
He's able to raise money on certain things because he's, you know, they're amplifying when he's, I don't want to say anti-Trump, but yes, I think we're seeing much more of the rhetoric.
But I always say to people, like, what do you expect in your political lifestyle?
Either A, you retire or B, you fight to try to win.
I think Thomas Massey wins his reelection with 55 to 60 points.
That's what I think.
I could be wrong.
Oh, I think he's going to win.
And, you know, over the next couple of months for the May 19th primary.
But I think if he wins, my dream, let me say this.
I'll say this for Rand and for Thomas.
My dream is we get through this cycle, we can make amends, bring together more of a better coalition that's America first.
I know you guys laugh about it now, but there have been a lot of people that have kind of come full circle.
And I'd like to expose the moderates, not the people that are far right.
But that goes back to my point.
That's like, so that's what's so frustrating is that, you know, Rand did the truce thing with Mitch, which was, and again, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, Cliff.
So I'm not expecting a response from you because we love you and I want to do that to you.
But it's, you know, it's like, you know, Rand could have used his political capital to go after Mitch, you know, all for all these years.
And from time to time, I think it's easy.
I think it's a cheap shot, you know, to go after the president.
You know, it's a cheap shot to know that we only have a couple of a couple seat majority, you know, in both chambers, you know, and to use that, leverage that against the president's administration.
It's the harder to go after the moderates.
It's harder to take out the moderates and make this country a better place by going after the uniparty.
And again, that's not to say that both of these guys haven't been warriors on that.
It's they haven't been focused enough warriors.
And the left is really good at going after our people in a focused way where they don't do this kind of stuff.
They never like Joe Biden couldn't turn on a light switch in the White House by himself, you know, at the end of his term.
And his party wasn't attacking him.
Left's Focus Tactics00:04:34
They're like, oh, he's so great.
You know, we're going to miss him so much.
That was so cost him from the presidency.
No, but no, he, no, that's not what they said.
They were like, that was so brave of him to step down.
Like, that was so brave.
And our side is like our best warriors, you know, can't remain focused enough to go after the radical commie left and the una party who's aiding those guys.
So that's my, that's my one big thing.
And I know that's exactly what you're saying in so many ways, Cliff, is that like, I, I have that dream too, is that like, hopefully, you know, people will win.
And that's what elections are for and primary elections are for.
And then everyone can lay off and then they can be friends again.
And Trump's really good at that.
He's really good at being like, oh, well, you know, now we're friends again.
And we figured out ways to work together.
And he's always actually been really good at that.
And he deserves a lot of credit if that happens.
But I'm a little bit worried that, you know, if it goes the other direction and let's say, you know, something bad happens and he loses, right?
Like that people are going to be like, pick up, you know, take their ball and go home type thing.
And the liberty community within the Republican Party is super important in a lot of different states for the Republican Party to survive and be good.
And they're a big part of Maha.
And there's a big part of a big elements of like kind of the neo, you know, Trump 2.0 world that we have here that I think is really unhealthy for the direction that we could go if we don't have them as part of the table.
So I'm actually horrified by the idea that that could happen because I don't that I think that fractures the party.
I think he's going to win.
I think he's going to win.
Yeah, I think he's going to win too.
But I your point's made.
He makes the coalition stronger if we can all sort of sing from the same song shit.
But yeah, like to Cliff's point, if they don't come together, like we're still fractured as if he lost.
Right.
Like, so like you, you have a situation here where it's like, guys, the Republican Party has to realize we're kind of like kids in Jim at in elementary school when we had that big, you know, that big parachute tarp thing that they made all American kids.
Talk about white culture full circle here.
Like they made all of us like you lift it up and you pull it down and everybody's under there for a few seconds.
Everyone's like, we're all friends.
Everything's great.
Like everyone's, but it takes everybody to do that together for it to work.
That's a big tent party you just described.
It's, it's a, it's a PE parachute party is what it is.
PE parachute party.
I mean, I don't like big tent.
We're a PE parachute party.
What percentage of the conservative movement, Cliff, do you think is kind of like this liberty movement, this libertarian right, you know, segment of it?
Well, I separate it by people that live in reality and don't, right?
If you're not willing to vote Republican, then, you know, I don't put you in that camp of like, hey, you're a realist.
You understand that losers don't legislate.
Like either you get that or you don't.
Right.
So I think it's probably a solid 10 to 20% of the Republican wing is what I would call still Tea Party libertarian.
It's not 50%, right?
I mean, most people, this is not a shot of voters, but as we all know, most Republican voters are working class trying to put food on the table, taking their kids to basketball practice, right?
They're not ideal.
But I think it is somewhere between 10, 10 to 20% that I would consider to be hardcore liberty slash Tea Party slash, hey, the debt's a problem.
We need less government.
I wish it was more.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Charlie used to rage.
Like he used to be a little bit more libertarian-minded, but then he started raging against it because he thought a lot of bad ideas worked their way into the conservative movement because of it.
But it doesn't mean that it's all bad.
Some of the abstractions are pretty fun to think through.
But yeah, to your point, if they're realist, then we can work with them.
And the question with Thomas Massey is, if, say, you get a new president there, will he be able to work willing to work with like a JD Vance or Marco Rubio?
No, no, no.
It's an interesting question.
I think 2028, JD Vance, you know, let's, God willing, gets in the White House, right?
I think you're going to see a big liberty push.
I think JD is going to embrace a lot of it.
And that doesn't mean he's disagreeing with Trump.
I'm just saying, I just think the timing of that, if Massey and Rand, I think the Freedom Claw is, I think JD is going to be, you know, one of the best presidents of our lifetime.
And I think it's going to be a huge opportunity.
But like Tyler said, if it doesn't happen under JD, it's not going to happen.
I mean, I would argue for 30 or 40 years that the actual limited government wing has a voice.
This is probably the biggest opportunity we have.
And right now, everybody's fighting, which is a problem.
Jd Vance And The Liberty Push00:04:52
Yes, it is.
All right.
Final topic.
Well, we wanted to read this.
We talked about it a little bit the other day, but we really need to marinate in the lovely poetry of perennial Charlie punching back Eric Swalwell.
Who's, by the way, the leading.
They do a jungle primary in California, and he's the leading Dem.
I'll take it.
The sad thing is, is I'll take it.
There's some really bad dems in that pile.
Who's the girl we were talking about?
Porter?
Yeah, Porter.
I can't make fun of Porter as much as I want.
A lot of people got upset because we made fun of KD Porter's appearance too much.
So I will not make any comments on Katie Porter's appearance.
Listen, listen.
You won't.
You call ugly ugly, all right?
And Eric Swalwell stupid.
I mean, he's just a, I mean, it is pervy.
It is scary that that could be a governor.
Like, if Eric Swalwell can become a governor, I was, I mean, in no, in no normal country do they let guys like Eric Swalwell become governor.
Yeah.
Well, we're not a normal country.
We're the United States of America.
What I love about this story, by the way, is that Eric Swalwell's old poetry was discovered by a big favorite of mine.
It was conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert.
That name will not mean anything to anyone, but Joel Gilbert did the Trayvon hoax.
Does anyone know about that one?
He also did the, he did the, he did the Michelle Obama's going to run for president.
Yeah, that one didn't pan out as much, but the Trayvon hoax is a must-watch because he basically proves that the prosecution team in the George Zimmerman trial engaged in witness fraud.
Rachel Jantel, they had her as Trayvon Martin's girlfriend, and she was total imposter case.
They were faking everything.
And he proves it's stone cold.
You can find it.
I think it's on YouTube somewhere.
You can watch it.
Proves it's stone cold.
Anyway, this guy went.
He's a great, he's a great friendly autist, as I like to say.
He's really a big details guy, really dives into it.
And he went and he dug up all the old college writings of Eric Swalwell, which includes this lovely poem that he published.
If you have children watching this show, for whatever reason, you may want to lead them away.
It is not entirely appropriate, but it is funny.
Hung over from Burgundy.
And there beauty was.
Can we get a music track here?
Yeah, if we can get, if we have any smooth jazz or something like romance music.
Picture this man reading this.
Imagine this man on a stage.
He's doing this at a poetry slam at whatever school, Campbell University, hungover from Burgundy.
And there beauty was, formless and magnificent, a flurry of limbs and nails.
She chased and I ran.
I chased and she ran.
Atop my hotel, she stopped and I leapt for cloth and tan.
My anxious arm, she bit.
My scar is beautiful.
While I screamed, she bent her lips to mine.
Kissing till veins imploded and exploded, till blood rolled down our chins, for bounded mouths cannot speak of parting.
In the morning, I awoke beside Beauty's shadow, her form sloppy, her legs pale, my scar lost, my lips cracked and dry, and we groaned simultaneously.
Gosh, this is gross.
Is this like weird like vampire sex stuff?
Yeah, why is he biting?
I think they're drinking wine, so it's burgundy, and it gets them animated.
But then they bite each other.
That's how I read it.
Yours is way giving him way too much credit.
This is weird.
He's probably some weird.
He's like rubbing some penny in the middle of the night.
No, he's some goober.
There's something weird.
He likes like female books, like vampire books.
I bet he reads that trashy, like, what do you call those?
Those romance novels that are basically female poor and looking romance novels?
I think he does.
Yeah, then he has that.
He actually wrote an op-ed in the Campbell newspaper saying, I'm not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat.
Is there really a difference between an elephant and a donkey?
He also did columns like on his spring break trips and stuff.
He talked about going to Cancun.
Why does it say the conservatives companion?
I'm not sure why.
I'm not sure why.
Don't forget.
Did he consider himself he might have?
I think he might have rejected all labels.
Maybe he was the most conservative guy they had at Campbell University.
Maybe this is a good sign for California if he wins.
But here's the thing.
I can't tell who's uglier, Eric Swalwell or Katie Porter.
Ruben Gallego's Mysterious Identity00:06:13
Oh, come on.
Show that picture of him.
Oh, come on.
He's got like he is pretty freaky.
There's some like smoothness going on.
Like it's.
Describe him, Andrew, with the music.
It just looks like... There's just something...
The wrinkle of the chin.
There's like fat in the wrong places or something.
I can't.
I don't know.
It just, it just, I don't know.
Okay, well, we're going to get a very different voice.
This is him describing his trip to Cancun, which instead of being, you know, poetry voice has to be, I guess, dude bro voice.
At each club, we did a stage show, usually karaoke to various popular summer anthems.
But we were not limited to song and dance.
One club asked a friend and me if we would be interested in being honorary guest judges of the largest swimsuit contest in Cancun.
Being the opportunist that we are, we gladly obliged.
Other perks included unlimited jet skiing the whole week, complimentary meals at fat Tuesdays, and a heavily discounted scuba diving trip to Cozumel.
Yeah.
And he goes on like that for several pages.
So we have right on Eric Swalwell.
Yeah.
The most horrifying picture ever taken was this one of a Swalwell and Ruben Gallego shirtless on camels.
We got it.
We're just about to put it up.
There it is.
The Swalwell on a camel.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Who's that other guy?
Is that Ruben Gallego?
That's Ruben Gallego.
That's Fatty Gallego.
That's amazing.
I can't believe it.
That's Ruben Marine Lorena.
So I mean his actual name.
That's his dad, his cartel that and Barack Obama.
Do you know this?
Barack Obama.
Is that Ralph Ruben?
Ruben Gallego.
Ruben Gallego.
No, there's Malik in the front, right?
That's Malik.
Barack.
That's Malik.
No, no.
But no, Ruben, his actual name is Ruben Maureen Lorena.
He changed it because his dad's a cartel felon.
Didn't he like win his wife or something when she was pregnant?
So, no, this is how crazy it is.
Ruben's actual name that you just changed like a handful of years ago.
His name's Ruben Maureen Larina.
His dad was a cartel pawn.
He's like thrown in the slammer.
It's like a total, like, it's like a real thing.
Like, you can Google it.
It's like everywhere.
This all makes sense.
And he changed his name to his stepdad's name or whatever, Gallego.
Marries Kate, who is the mayor of Phoenix.
Her name's Kate Gallego now.
And then they got divorced and she kept his name.
So she's Mayor Gallego.
That wasn't even like a blood name.
He just changed his name.
But that probably helps her get elected as a Democrat.
Well, yeah.
I mean, it's just an easier name to remember.
So didn't he dump his wife when she was pregnant, though?
It's like a whole thing.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then the other thing is, so I ran into, so I was doing a Fox hit in DC and I'm walking out.
And there's like a, there's NBC.
There's all these other outlets that are there.
I'm walking out and I go past Ruben Gallego.
And I didn't even recognize him at first.
I just heard people talking off to myself.
Oh, he's only four feet tall.
And yeah, he's very short.
That was the thing that shocked me.
You can easily miss him.
Yeah, it's not short.
Where is Ruben?
And I heard a guy just swearing up a storm, like swearing like a sailor.
Brah, bra, brah, like three or four like in a row.
And I look over, I'm like, dude, that's Ruben Gallego is just swearing like a sailor, right?
In the lobby of, you know, to get into the Fox Bureau.
And I was like, yeah, that, that, that fits.
And now that I hear that he has cartel ties.
This is did you see that?
Did you see all those love handles that Eric Swalwell was having onto?
Throw it up again.
I don't want it to be thrown up again.
They were sharing a camel at one point.
I feel like right into the Egyptian sunset.
It was just Eric Swalwell and Ruben Gallego.
I feel like Eric Swalwell needs a bro.
Dude, what if it's top two?
It's top two.
Obviously, we want a Republican to advance in California, but what if Swalwell could get both of the top two spots?
Because we could have dude bro Eric Swalwell and we could have tender lover Eric Swalwell.
And then California voters could choose between like AI Swalwell.
We could have AI conservative, the conservative option or whatever he called himself.
This has been wonderful.
Last question.
Is there any chance that two Republicans get the top two or is that math?
Totally possible if the Democrats don't drop out.
Yeah, they just keep splitting the vote.
There's a chance, but I mean, it's very slim.
What needs to happen?
One of the Republicans needs to drop out and consolidate.
And obviously, Charlie endorsed Steve Hilton.
So Chad Bianco, we would just love for you to consolidate forces right behind Steve Hilton and make sure we got a Republican on that ticket.
But I would argue I think the best chance is honestly that idea of like, because of the top two, the voter registration numbers, the reality is that for a Republican to win in the general is like almost is very difficult.
I mean, you're like under a million votes.
Yeah, but we got voter ID on the ballot too.
There's going to be a lot that is going to generate a lot of energy for the I get it.
But what Cliff's saying is like that would be an awesome situation if like Steve and Chad manage to squeak out a situation where they make it through and in the top two primary.
That may be the reason why Democrats want to eliminate the top two primary in a state like California is if that happens because this type of thing may never happen again or for a long time because Democrats are really good at like trying to game the system.
Yeah, scare everybody out of the race.
Usually the Republicans in California, they'll run like 15 candidates and then the Democrats run like one or two and then the Dems end up a lot of times winning the top two in each of these in these races.
This is part of the reason why the Republican Party has been eradicated in California because it's the top two primaries.
Javier Becerra, you got Antonio Villa Rogosa.
Do you know that Antonio, we're talking about last names of Galligo?
His last name used to be Tony Villar.
Magical Post Scarcity Economy00:08:30
Ew.
And he literally changed it to get the Hispanic vote when he ran for LA mayor to Antonio.
Robert Francis O'Rourke became Beto.
Meanwhile, Rafael Cruz goes by Ted.
I think that that is like the greatest illustration of American sort of politics in that.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
You get Hispanics always pick it up on white tracks.
White trader culture.
Like Ted would never pad her Ana Paulina.
Like Wayne.
He just would call her Ana Paulina because that was her name.
And then she added the Luna to run in Florida.
Well, that's neither here nor there.
This has been fun.
Cliff, thanks for joining us tonight on our Thursday Thought Crime.
And Tyler, and actually, I missed a few, so I'm excited to be here.
Yes, no, it's a lot of fun.
But you know, who wasn't here was Jack, and he's been on every single episode.
So he wanted to make sure he would get involved.
So we did do a segment.
What'd you talk about?
We talked about Barack Obama and whether he confirmed aliens existed, whether aliens do exist, whether aliens should exist, whether it might be good if they destroyed us all.
Trump chimed in on that today.
He did, but unfortunately.
Obama just, you know, disclosed some classified material, and he shouldn't have done that.
Big trouble.
He might bail him out in the next one.
Well, we don't have time travel abilities, so we weren't able to hit that, but we hit a lot of other very fun stuff.
So we'll make this transition by throwing to that guy himself, Obama.
Are aliens real?
They're real, but I haven't seen them.
And they're not being kept in, what is it?
Area 51.
Area 51.
There's no underground facility.
Unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.
Jeff.
Whoa, whoa.
So I want to let everyone in on this.
So, you know, we're pre-recording this.
Obviously, as you can see, it is Ash Wednesday where I'm at.
I am currently with the president right now, probably on Air Force One at the moment, flying with him around on this Board of Peace situation and then going down to Georgia for the speech that he's having over there, seeing if we're going to strike Iran anytime soon.
So doing all that.
It occurs to me, Jack, that by the time people remiss if I missed a thought crime.
So here I am virtually.
It does occur to me, Jack.
By the time people see this and hear this, we might be like deep in it.
Like you might be on the plane as they just blow up Tehran or whatever.
That could be like really dramatic.
Look at it this way.
Like if there's anywhere you want to be, it's Air Force One, right?
It's like literally the safest, like the safest plane you could be on.
It's designed to be.
But Jack, it's not where you want to be.
You would want to be with us covering it live because I assume we've got to be going live if that does in fact happen.
So we'll see.
Well, we certainly know.
We certainly know that that's what Charlie would have wanted.
Yes.
Go live.
Also, I don't know how safe it would be because if President Obama is telling the truth and the aliens are real, I'm pretty sure they could take out Air Force One like they're just swatting down a fly.
So well, so here's the thing, though.
If he knows aliens are real, but they haven't revealed himself to Obama, then it's sort of like, have they revealed themselves to Trump?
Does Trump know about the secret?
Maybe what if they did that?
Like they revealed themselves to Trump and he says, why didn't you reveal yourselves to Obama?
And they're like, well, we needed to wait for a real president or like a more, or the aliens watch too much TV and too much movies and they only think it's a real president if he looks more TV appropriate.
It's kind of like, wasn't that the plot of that Galaxy Quest movie?
Like it was a civilization that based itself on watching Star Trek episodes that got beamed into space.
I think you're, I haven't seen that in forever.
I think you're right, though.
It was something like that.
I'm don't, don't play dumb with me, Jack.
I know, I know that you're watching.
No, I've watched every single episode of Star Trek.
I know you.
You're going to.
I've watched.
Okay.
So I've watched all of TNG.
I've watched all of Deep Space Nine, which is, of course, the best trek.
And I've watched most of Enterprise.
But not the original?
I've not watched all the original, no.
I've seen all the movies except Beyond, like the most recent of the JJ Abrams movies.
Okay.
I've seen, I think I've seen about 15 to 20 TNG episodes, and that's it.
Believe it or not, Jack, I am not a big Star Trek guy.
Wow, that is weird.
That is, I didn't, I have not had you pegged for that at all, as a matter of fact.
I'm a man is full of surprises.
Well, it's what's crazy, though, is the people who believe in like, so I'm, I'm 100% sure that Barack Obama is a huge Star Trek guy and more than likely a TNG guy, which is the next generation for people who, you know, are following at home.
Because TNG is like, it's basically like libchard future.
And it's like, are you just wildly speculating, Jack?
Because I remember, I think right when he took office, there was some notorious white kind of all the guys soy facing, except soy face wasn't a meme yet, because he did the, he did the Vulcan salute to somebody.
He totally did the thing.
Yeah.
No, he totally did this.
He played that up that, you know, that because, but for people who like believe in Star Trek as like a political ideology, they sit there and go like, well, wouldn't it be great if we have like, cause there were a bunch of episodes in The Next Generation where they kind of like crap on capitalism and they say like, oh, we've, there's, there's one episode where a guy who's like a businessman was, I don't know, he's like cryogenically frozen or something.
And he gets, he gets reanimated in the 24th century and he starts kind of talking about like business and stuff like that.
And Picard is sort of like hoo-pooing him and say, oh, we've, we've outdone, we've, we've all, we've, you know, moved beyond such outdated versions of capitalism.
And I remember money and we don't have those things anymore.
Yeah.
I remember it's like one of the people you serve for.
And they're like, we serve for the progress of science.
I remember one of the few episodes I have seen, it was like he has he intervened.
It was like someone was posing as a magical goddess who'd blessed this planet.
And like Picard has to come in and, you know, he reveals that she's a charlatan because it's like they thought that she'd save them from destruction, but they'd saved themselves.
And the way they'd saved themselves is they dismantled their backwards industrial economy and moved to an agrarian socialist economy.
And this had saved them from annihilation.
It might be one of the movies, actually.
It was definitely an episode.
I remember because it was when I was on like that's like similar to that.
But it's not.
It's very clear that like next generation is extremely anti-religion.
It's extremely, it's again, it's, it's just very communistic.
It's very social.
It's probably like democrat socialism more than communism directly because it's this weird idea that like, oh, if you remove scarcity, then everyone's just going to get along.
And like the Klingons are bad because they just, they just don't go along with the rules-based order of the federation.
And it's, it's, it's, it's like the globalist future.
And they, they have this.
And of course, the question comes up, it's like, how do you, okay, so how do you get rid of the scarcity problem?
And the scarcity problem is, of course, resources.
So competition for resources is what we have in the United in not just the US, the whole world, right?
So this is why, you know, wars do tend to break out.
We have scarcity of land, scarcity of minerals, et cetera, et cetera, right?
So how do they get away with that in Star Trek?
Magic.
Literally, they had to come up with magic called, which is something called the replicator.
And the replicator is this magical device, which again, they don't even try to explain in Star Trek that just gives you whatever food or whatever like drink or beverage or meal you want.
At, like you know the, the snap of your fingers, and and of course, Picard is always like gee oh ray hot, you know.
And it just appears and it's like well well, what went in?
Like like, even if you have a 3d printer, like you have to put something into that.
It's just a true perfect matter converter.
And yeah, just magical post scarcity situation.
Alien Intelligence: Possible or Improbable?00:04:49
Uh, and it's.
It's so funny because I know there's been other works of fiction where they develop the same thing like oh, they have perfect post scarcity.
And some of them are interesting because a lot of those societies, the way they portray them is they get like total ennui, like nothing can give them interest or joy anymore.
So, like they like, they literally like want to kill themselves, they want to.
Just like in the Expanse series um, which i'm actually not a fan of, but I have read all of it and seen all of it.
It's, it's a long story I have.
I have I have a love-hate relationship with sci-fi, as you could tell.
Um, they're like jack, you've seen every episode of the Next Generation.
Yes, do you like it?
No, but then why did you?
Don't ask, but getting, getting back.
And but they, so they have the same thing.
They have universal basic income on Earth and it's like people, just sort of like, but it's still like a wastrel, kind of like waste of of time and space and people don't really have jobs because you know, it's sort of like okay well, we have this basic income and yet everything still sucks anyway.
But then also Earth gets destroyed in that series and like nobody seems to care.
Again, it's a long story.
Yeah, I have, I haven't seen it.
But to get back, so kind of to get back to the original, obviously some people are like, oh, Obama has confirmed that the aliens are real.
I find it unlikely he would reveal it that way, but I guess, why don't we ask Jack, do you think that aliens are real, especially both alien life generally and intelligent life of any kind?
And if not, why not?
We could, we could explore that.
Do you have a belief on that one?
Um, I mean, i'm open-minded on it, right I I?
I think it's possible.
I certainly think it's possible.
I like the old uh, I forget what it may have been Carl Sagan or someone else, who said, you know if, if there isn't, if there isn't anything, that's an awful, awful big waste of space.
Um too, you know and and and, when you look at probabilities um, you know, the probability of this many planets and galaxies existing in the universe would would tend to, you know, tend to to show that you, that that life could have arisen on other planets somewhere out there and we just haven't found it yet.
I also, you know, this idea of uh, interdimensional type things, that there's higher dimensions that we don't know about.
Perhaps there's something going on, totally open-minded to all that stuff, love reading about it, think it's super cool, and i'm not one of those people who's like oh it's, it couldn't possibly exist.
So no, i'm not like that.
But at the same time, you know, i'm also not really and i'll just say it like i'm not really a big believer in this whole.
Like you know, the UAPS and the government is secretly the secret programs and stuff, and I just i'm, i'm not, i'm not, and I say that as like a guy who is literally in the intelligence community, that i'm i'm, i'm like, i've just never seen anything that that strikes me as credible.
There yeah, I guess I would just lean towards.
I guess man, I want to have a more decisive one, since you're a little more on the fence.
If I had to say I, i'm gonna go, i'm gonna embrace, like I feel like maybe it just hasn't happened or maybe i'd say probably no intelligent life out there.
I kind of go towards, um, what's the big?
Who's the guy who predicted the singularity?
Uh, What's his name?
Like the singularity is near a guy.
It's not Fermi, is it?
Ray Kurzweil.
Ray Kurzweil, that's who it was.
Ray Kurzweil, he had an interesting take where he, since he believes in the singularity, he actually would argue humans are the first form of intelligent life that's ever emerged.
And he believes it because he thinks kind of the singularity is, you know, super intelligence that would then, he thinks we would immediately permeate the whole universe.
We'd kind of turn the whole universe into circuitry.
And his argument is that that's so inevitable if there were intelligent life, that humans must be the first form of intelligent life because we don't see the evidence of that in our own galaxy or anywhere else in the universe.
And I kind of, I'm sympathetic to that.
I think, you know, there's the classic Fermi paradox.
Where is everybody?
If it seems like there's a gazillion stars and there's even more planets orbiting those stars, it seems like it should have happened.
And I think it might really be that Earth, like a habitable Earth-like planet that can have life, that is given enough time to become intelligent life that can then, and then that that in turn develops technology that is able to do things.
I could lean towards that being the only ones who are out there.
But like you, I don't think.
Well, but then there's the other corollary to that is, of course, the great filter, right?
The Kardashov, the Kardashiov scale.
So which I guess needs what's your great filter, Jack?
What are your top three great filters that are keeping civilization from going to the stars?
Well, so these are the great, let me explain it for the audience.
So the great filter theory is like kind of the response to this that says, that says, okay, well, what if there's a problem that exists?
Great Filter Theory00:02:45
And this, this is sort of going back to that Star Trek thinking of, you know, industrial societies and being, you know, inherently destructive, that the great filter is that some, for some reason, societies only progress to the point where they're just about to, you know, embark on space travel.
And then something happens that either destroys the society, destroys the planet, kills all life, or, you know, just prevents them from being able to embark on that level of a society.
So, I mean, you know, probably, you know, probably just that just nuclear war or something along those lines is not able to do it.
Jack, it's not.
Of course, by the way, relativity, just relativity itself is a huge problem.
Jack, I mean, I think we can agree.
Wouldn't the greatest great filter be libtards?
Yes, exactly.
Just so you know, we found it's like you're reading the archives of like some historian in a lost civilization and he's like viewing the patterns and he's just like, we found this civilization and then we found another civilization on this other planet and all of them destroyed themselves.
And every single one of them, it was they reached a certain level of development and then they all started soy facing and dying, dying, the things growing out of their heads different colors and stopping, they cease to reproduce and all of that.
Yeah, no, that reminds me of some of the those, what do you call them?
The mouse, you know, the mouse utopia experiments where when a society gets to a certain point of self-sufficiency, that it becomes almost like it's, it's, it's, this, this is what we actually, this is the response, by the way,
to the replicator argument that when a society has too many resources, when you eliminate the need for resource scarcity or you eliminate all resource scarcity, that this actually breaks down society because society is actually governed and along a hierarchy of resource distribution.
And so when there is no competition, you get people who check out of society, you get low fertility rates, you get a, I'll just say it, they saw a rise in same-sex relationships again among the mice in these experiments.
And you had people who were constantly worried about, or mice, I should say, mice, mice, mice, not people, who were constantly worried about their looks, who were trying to look max, as the kids would say these days.
And they lend themselves towards essentially destroying their society rather than, and it created a behavioral sink where they couldn't even raise kids anymore.
And then the ones who did end up kids had not been raised by parents themselves.
And it just essentially destroyed their society.
Speculating On First Contact00:06:20
That's a great filter right there.
Man, your Angelo's message us, he's telling us about the dark forest theory.
That is that the dark forest theory is that life is all over the place.
Like every other planet has people on it.
But the smart ones, aka everyone but us, realizes that you don't talk to everyone in space because if you do, it's like you're walking through a dark forest full of wolves and you're screaming, hey, everybody.
and then the wolves come and eat you.
That's dark.
Wow.
What was that from?
Is that like the soundtrack?
So because we're not, you know, so we're not stealthing ourselves.
Oh, wait.
I just saw in the chat that you put in the Fermi paradox.
I wasn't even reading the stuff you're writing.
That, yeah, so it's like, it's like, because we're not using our cloaking systems, you know, we're the ones who are going to get, we're the ones who are going to get wrecked when we might leave.
I mean, it does feel very like utopian in hindsight, where as soon as we get radio waves, we're just blasting them out into space that we have SETI and we're just saying, hey, we're here.
Is anyone else out there?
We're sending the Pioneer Probe with those naked people on it.
And we put Beethoven on it, I think.
We put a recording on it, all of that.
And then we're sending that out there.
And yeah, you can just imagine it gets found by the deep space version of.
Dude, we were just watching.
I showed my kids the first movie adaptation of War of the Worlds, the 1950s version with like the long, the long necks that pop out and the heat rays are just like blasting everybody.
And what's interesting about that is like this even comes up in there where they first say, oh my gosh, this is, you know, it's first contact.
This is great.
And then it's like, you know, and then immediately they just start killing everybody.
And it's like, and it's like, yeah, that's, that's probably something that could happen.
And then the fact though, that, so, you know, spoiler alert, even though this came out like 100 years ago, um, they get, they get killed by human bacteria.
The problem though is, of course, what if the aliens have like Martian bacteria that we've never experienced before and they kill all of us, which could, which I think Stephen Hawking even talked about before, that just direct contact with alien life might be enough to kill us.
It would be that would be a darkly interesting, that would be like a good sci-fi horror thing, I think.
Like there's first contact between two species and the end would just be they both mutually destroy each other and like just of disease, everyone drops dead and like that, that's the takeaway.
I've never encountered that.
And I wonder if it's been that's coming out.
This is like a huge part of it.
I read the book and then a while ago, and if I remember correctly, that that was a huge issue they had where it was like, so it's, it's, you know, in the movie, it's going to be Ryan Gosling, but then they, so he's like in his pod and then he connects with an alien pod and they're communicating, but they can never, they can never leave their pods because they're worried about that.
No, that's interesting.
And so I'm thinking about what, since we're pre-taping this, we can't see the emails or messages, but I'm thinking of what has come in when we've discussed this before.
And I know a lot of people, they take the point of view that if aliens do exist, this is actually something we've heard.
Tucker's talked about it, just the belief things we think are aliens are actually demonic entities, or that just in general, there can't be aliens because they're not mentioned in the Bible or scriptures.
So they can't exist for that reason.
I guess I would push back on that.
I think I would adhere C.S. Lewis said this, that there's nothing really innately implausible that God could create non-human creatures that are still, you could say, human in the biblical sense, that they are ensouled beings because they have human levels of cognitive development, wisdom, whatever we would believe in that sense.
I know I've also, I've mentioned this before.
I've read short fiction that even speculates there could be aliens that exist.
And because they exist, they also need their own version of the incarnation, which in theory is possible.
People have speculated that Christ appears in the Old Testament.
He's just not identified as Christ.
I know one take is that Methuselah is actually like an incarnate, a case of the incarnation.
Not Methuselah, Melchizedek, that Melchizedek is like a Christ appearance in the Old Testament, or that when the three men visit Abraham, that that is the Trinity visiting him.
It's interesting to speculate upon, in my opinion.
Yeah, there's also a couple things in the Bible, in the Old Testament, again.
Ezekiel's wheels, of course, is like a common thing that people refer to, the wheels within wheels with eyes.
And now some people say, well, that was angels.
But then other people point out to say, you know, could that have been some kind of extraterrestrial being or extra-dimensional in this case, being?
Elijah's chariot, of course, the chariot of fire that Elijah took to heaven.
Could that have been a UFO?
Could that have been a spacecraft?
The Nephilim, which of course come up in Genesis, these sons of God or humans who mated with some kind of, did they mate with fallen angels?
Did that turn into, you know, did that turn into something?
And again, you know, of course, Tucker has talked about this.
A lot of people, Joe Rogan has gotten into this, Mel Gibson, that, you know, could what we describe as aliens just be non-human life that's from another plane of existence.
And so when I was talking about interdimensional or extra-dimensional earlier on, you know, the Bible certainly talks about beings from other planes of existence, ones which are benevolent angels and ones which are malevolent, which are demons, which we would refer to.
And so it's, it's simply just, you know, I would say a point of view or a matter of perspective as to say, well, would those count as aliens or something like that?
Because the Bible certainly does talk quite a bit about non-human entities.
Exactly.
It's, I think it's what I always would caution people who say like, oh, the Bible says emphatically that there can't be aliens is, among other things, I would just say, well, then what if we find them?
Is that going to disprove the Bible for you?
Illuminati Decline & Masonic Influence00:04:10
And sometimes I'll get angry.
It doesn't mention America.
Yeah, the Bible is, that's why someone said that's why America is unbiblical.
That's why America is a demonic entity.
America is the Masonic.
Something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not biblical.
So they put the weird Mason eye on the US dollar.
Actually, I was messing with a quick, quick side note, but since we're on the show, I might as well mention, if folks were, long-term super listeners and OGs might remember that when Charlie spoke at the RNC in 2024, they were doing like theme nights at the RNC.
And he was, his night was Make America Wealthy Again.
And like you and I were there together.
And because he spoke that night, they had, while he was speaking on the stage behind him, they were using like stock images of money and they happened to have the all-seeing eye like directly behind him when he was speaking.
And I remember giving him so much crap about that.
I was like, Charlie Kirk, Illuminati, confirmed.
And he was like, I'll just say it.
He was like, he was like, he was like, I asked them about that.
I said, can we just get like an American flag or something?
They were so sold on this, you know, no, it's, it's, it's wealth, it's money, that's a picture of money that's something on it.
And it's like, it's like, gosh, you know, do you guys know how the internet is going to react to that?
But then, of course, Blake, what if it was actually the Illuminati behind the whole thing to begin with?
Man, I feel like Illuminati conspiracies have really have petered out a bit.
That was so big.
Fallen off.
Totally fallen off.
Yeah, it's totally fallen off.
There was so much of that.
You know, a great historical note I love.
The first, the first political party in America, and I think maybe the first political party in like world history to have a political platform explicitly published, I believe was the Anti-Masonic Party, the Anti-Mason conspiracy party that the U.S. had in the 1830s and 40s, I think is when they grew out.
If I remember right, I think the anti-Masonic party even basically evolved into like the same people who were into it.
A lot of them were then in the Know Nothing Party, which then a lot of those people went into the Republican Party.
And so fun, fun American political history there.
You know, and I'll certainly put this out, you know, you know, Catholics, it is still on the books in Catholic doctrine that you cannot be a Catholic in good standing and be a member of the Freemasons.
You can't, or I think any secret society, correct?
Yes, Obama is the Antichrist.
Alex Jones joining us all of a sudden.
Well, Alex Jones, I remember he said once that the reason the Illuminati and, you know, the Masons like aren't as powerful as they used to be is that they're just in control of the Intel community now.
Oh, man.
Yeah, you think about the purposes, like why, why that actually came out is that the Masons and their secret meetings were vectors for anti-religious sentiment.
And it was almost like the secretive deep state group chats of their day that you could have these meetings that you would plot to overthrow the church, overthrow monarchy.
And nowadays, yeah, you could just have that as your signal chat where you guys coordinate on how to undermine the Trump.
These things did exist.
And they existed for a reason.
And there certainly were conspiracies to overthrow monarchies.
Like we saw them.
We saw them happen in real life.
And so, and it made sense because if you, you know, if you spoke out against the crown when the crown was still in power, like you're done for.
You were out.
You know, the same way that there are, you know, many secret society.
It's like, it's like there's secret societies in China right now.
There are, you know, secret societies in Russia, I'm sure.
Gosh.
Secret societies in Russia.
Conspiracies and Secret Societies00:03:15
You have any Russian music?
Got nothing.
They got nothing.
Heartbreaking.
All right.
Secret societies in really, guys.
Really?
The Jeopardy?
Secret Societies in Mexico.
There we are.
Secret societies all over the place, but you're not allowed to join them.
You are Catholic and good standard.
Societies, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you're in a secret society, we should, we should do like a late night episode where we do just like Art Bell style.
If you, if anyone remembers the old Art Bell Coast to Coast AM.
Remember?
I think that's still on air, isn't it?
It's on air, but he hasn't run it anymore because he ascended to a higher plane.
I think George Norty runs it.
But he used to do these things where he'd be like, he'd be like, all right, time travelers, call in.
It's time traveler hour.
If you're a time traveler, call in and people would call in.
So good.
Fast content.
So if you're in a secret society, send us your email.
And if you're a time traveler, also, please send us your email.
Tell us what bets to make.
Tell us how to win all the prediction market stuff.
Tell us everything.
Tell us the Super Bowl winners.
the rest of it.
Please do because we need to make all the money.
Tell us how the guy who brought us, who started this, tell us how Barack Obama is remembered in the Chinese language histories that they write about this country 200 years from now.
Have you heard that?
By the way, have you heard that?
Because it's now the year of the horse in China that Draco Malfoy has from Harry Potter has now become like the mascot of the year of the horse.
Why Draco Malfoy?
Because like Mafu is means like, that's how you say horse in like horse year or horse something in Chinese.
And so it's, it's like the same as his, the way his name is transliterated.
So if you go, I'm dead serious.
If you go and look up anything about horse year in China, it's like Draco Malfoy is everywhere.
Okay, then.
Yeah, apparently it's that his name, his translation is Mao Fu, and that basically means horse and fortune, which for me because I believe it's specifically, I believe it's specifically the year of the fire horse, and that is a bad luck omen.
Yeah, that would be hua, like hua ma fire.
Yeah, because it is specifically that year, and it's so severe.
If you, if you check, like the number of births they'll have will drop by a third because no one wants to have a kid during the fire horse year because it is inauspicious.
Could you imagine having a kid during the fire horse year?
Couldn't be me.
Couldn't be me.
All right, but they're telling us, they're telling us we're at time, Blake, telling us we're at time.
Of course, I've got all the time in the world because I only exist virtually in this space.
Or do I?
Perhaps I am a time traveler because I am a time traveler.