James Smith and Michael Malice dissect how "woke" identity politics prioritizes upper-middle-class grievances over the severe poverty plaguing communities like Camden, New Jersey. They critique the media's manipulation of outrage, comparing modern witch hunts to Stalinist purges while noting that policies like affirmative action often benefit the already privileged rather than solving root causes like family disintegration. Ultimately, the hosts argue that democracy fails because emotional dogma overrides logical consistency, rendering philosophical defenses of capitalism ineffective against a culture controlled by the hard left. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Mindset, Envy, and Inequality00:14:35
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We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Dear Johns, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
And I choose that word welcome very intentionally because the crossover continues.
We are joined once again by the incomparable Michael Malice.
How are you, sir?
Next week, we're supposed to be at Freedom Fest, so I'm a little bummed about that.
What are you talking about?
I just bought my tickets.
Oh, I'm not getting mine refunded, by the way.
Not even like credit?
Yeah.
That's like, so I've had, I think, three flights now, three round trip flights that I have on credit.
So I got a bunch of credit with airlines.
It's like Dogecoin.
Yeah, they do this annoying thing too, where they're like, it's good for the next year.
And I'm like, why would there be a limit on it?
Yeah, it's like I gave you the money for this flight.
I didn't pay you in milk.
Yeah, right.
Well, the thing that's really annoying, this one I'll eat a little bit, but the thing that's really annoying is that the, you know, the first two, it was like when everything got locked down.
Like you're like, you can't, you can't blame anyone for canceling a flight.
There's, I'm sure half these flights weren't even flying.
Right, right.
Oh, God, that's awful.
Well, it is what it is.
You know, it's a, it is, and maybe this is actually kind of something that the left is correct about.
But, you know, a lot of people, like, when they talk about income inequality and traditional right-winger might, you know, say, or a free market type, might say, like, well, income inequality doesn't really matter.
If everyone's getting wealthier, you know, it's it's fine.
You know, like if we all start out at the bottom and we all move up and it's a rising tide, but there's more disparity between two groups, doesn't matter because everyone got wealthier.
But you can't really deny that it does breed resentment if there is inequality within a society, like economic inequality.
Oh, I disagree completely.
Okay, fair enough to say, but let me just finish this point and then I'm curious to hear what your take.
But I was just saying that it's like, I've lost a lot of money since the lockdowns have happened, but I'm still so much better off than so many people who have been just completely fucked over by it that it is very, it makes me like, it's like, I really can't feel bad for myself because, I mean, I'm still supporting my family.
Still have my career and all that.
But go ahead.
Well, a friend of mine had to have their phone turned off because they couldn't pay it.
And I was going to pay them for a month, but they were kind of in arrears and it was hundreds of dollars.
And it's like, and that's not the only person I know who's in financial straits.
So I'm going to just one little caveat.
And I know you're not doing this, but I think this is something that I like to point out because I think I needed to hear it.
And I think a lot of other people need to hear it.
And this specifically does not apply to you.
If you're in a bad position, just because someone is worse, it's still okay to feel bad.
You know, like when people think about their childhoods, they're like, oh, well, my dad never beat the crap out of me, threw me down the stairs.
So who am I to complain that he was just cold and unloving?
You're entitled to your pain.
So I think a lot of times we try to trick ourselves and we repress emotions, responses that are like, oh, you know, I can't complain about my girlfriend, my boyfriend.
They're not hitting me and they have these nice qualities.
No, no, no, you have that right.
You know, if it's grounded in something, just because someone has it worse doesn't mean you don't have it bad.
Obviously, you don't have it particularly bad if you're supporting your family.
I just want to put that out there, but we tend to trick ourselves.
I do think a lot of David Bose, I was, I talked to him once at a talk, and he had made the point that I said if you had the income tax repealed, it would be a lot harder to have these kind of articles ginning up envy over wealthy people because you wouldn't know how much money they're making, right?
Because you wouldn't have that income tax.
And he's like, well, they'd see their big houses.
And this is one of the reasons we need like a regressive income tax or something to that effect because it's going to mitigate envy.
I don't think envy, this is how I think envy works and how like depression and anxiety works.
You get the emotion first, the resentment, then you find an external cause for it.
Like anxiety is like you're stressed out and then you're like, well, it's because I, you know, I'm single or I'm stressed out because no one's called me back about my book proposal, something like that.
If all those, if you weren't single and your book proposal was en route, your brain would still find something to be anxious about.
The emotional response precedes the rational reason.
And I think the same things with envy.
If you are convinced that you're a big shot and you deserve this, this, and that, and you see some loser, me or you, look at Asshole Malice and Asshole Smith.
They've got their own shows.
Oh, he's bragging about how he could take care of his family.
My show's better than his.
It's not really about you in that case.
And it's not really about the inequality.
It's about that person's mindset.
And I think this is exploited very effectively.
This is the basis of much of leftism, which is that person is wealthy because you're poor.
And it's not just that they should be helping you.
It's that you deserve what they have.
And at an extreme, they've taken it from you.
It was yours to begin with.
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
I also think that there's a lot of bad impulses that people have.
And it's on a communal level or a cultural level.
You want to not encourage those.
And what the left ends up doing is really encouraging anybody who has that emotional response of envy toward, you know, some or wanting to blame someone else for their position in life.
And it's really destructive.
But conservatives do it too.
They'll be like, oh, look, if I was on the left, I could speak my mind on Twitter and I wouldn't have problems.
And I can't.
And I have to sit here and bite my tongue, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, grumble, grumble, grumble.
So there's plenty of envy to go around.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
So, you know, one thing that I wanted to talk with you about, I want to talk about a few things just about the state of the Black Lives Matter protest and kind of get your thoughts on some things that I've been thinking about.
But first, I did want to mention something that caught my eye that I thought would be interesting for us to talk about.
I don't know if you saw, but it looks like Noam Chomsky is being canceled on social media.
Unfortunately, for the social media mob, Noam Chomsky's like 90 and he's not on social media.
He's literally 90.
So it's going to be.
It's going to be tough to cancel him.
Like, you can't boot him off Twitter.
He's not on Twitter.
He's Noam Chomsky, for God's sakes.
And anyway, but it was, so he is getting a lot of heat because he signed on to this letter.
Oh, the cancel college culture thing?
It was called A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.
In the letter, they basically said that the forces of illiberalism are gaining strength.
This is a quote actually from the letter.
The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.
So they slam Donald Trump and they've got it, though.
That's smart of them to posture themselves in that way.
Like, we're opening it up against Trump.
So we're on your team.
I completely agree.
And I think that, you know, this is something my good friend Scott Horton always says, but that you attack, if you want to be effective, you attack the left from the left and the right from the right.
So they're letting you know that, look, we're coming from the position of we're on your team.
We're not asking you, we're not telling you your identity is wrong.
We're telling you your identity is right and you can keep that identity, but here's the problem.
And they basically went on to say that the resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma and coercion, which right-wing Democrats are already exploiting.
The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has been set on all sides.
And they go on to say that there is this culture of trying to ruin people for stepping out of line that's very troubling.
And so, of course, to prove them right, they're now kind of going after Chomsky, particularly.
There were some other intellectuals who signed on to it, but to me, he's the most interesting one.
And Chomsky has, to his credit, always had this position.
He was in the 70s an advocate of Holocaust deniers' right to argue that the Holocaust didn't happen and neo-Nazis' right to speak.
And he was very passionate about this and he took a lot of heat for it back then.
And of course, the simpletons try to say, like, oh, well, you're supporting the Nazis if you support their right to speak and all this dumb stuff.
But I was curious if you, did you see any of that on Twitter?
So Chomsky's an interesting case.
I have his book on my shelf, The Creation, what's it called?
Manufactured Consent.
Manufacturing Consent.
I wince a little bit every time people on Twitter will claim that someone can't be a left-wing anarchist because I'm like, learn your history.
Anarchism was originally a left-wing philosophy.
It came out of the hard left, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Joseph Most, and a few others.
And Chomsky, who calls himself a libertarian and an anarchist, is very much in that tradition.
And that is a tradition that was far older than Murray Rothbard.
I think he is a very mixed bag.
I think he's smart, idiosyncratic.
I was impressed by this letter, and it spoke to me of two things, historical things.
The Stalin purges, the Great Terror from 1936 to 38, I believe, and jihad.
Because the first, when I went to Turkey to talk to Bodrum, to speak at Hoppe's property and freedom conference, what it's called.
And it's a resort town.
And before that, I'd never been in a majority Muslim country.
And I had been under the belief that if push came to shove, they would be siding with like al-Qaeda over us.
And when you step foot there, you're like, oh, no, it's not even close.
These people are, maybe they're not liberal in the sense of Greenwich Village, but they are not at all close to that kind of mentality.
And this is why they're the first ones targeted.
Because if you are a radical Muslim and you kill all this, not first of all, you hate it already because you think it's a liberal and bad.
But then you're forced to choice, like, we're the only ones left who are your path to Allah and peace, it's going to make it a lot trickier for the people who are left.
And also, they're going to be scared and they're going to be physically proximate to you.
What happened in the Stalin purges is first they found people who could be blamed for things.
Then they were all tortured and they had to name names and they were just pulling names out of their ass just to stop the torture.
And it took out like the numbers of how many it took out was absolutely insane.
In fact, there's an essay by Eugene Genovese called The Question, I believe.
Such a great essay.
Yeah, I would highly recommend it.
It might bring tears to your eyes because he's a former communist and then he saw the light.
And then the point of this essay is: if you're a communist, what did you know and when did you know it?
That's the question.
That's the question.
What did you know about the gulags?
What did you know about the Hall of Devor?
What did you know about these atrocities?
And there's this one point where he's reading a book by Medvedev, who's a historian, I believe.
And according to this book, Stalin killed more communists than all the fascist, imperialists, capitalists, like all the other issues combined.
And Genovese in this essay goes, I asked myself, was Comrade Medvedev drinking to make this accusation?
And I sat down and I did the math, and he goes, and you don't have to be that good at math to do this math.
And sure enough, nope, Comrade Medvedev had not been drinking.
But how these purges work is...
I mean, he's Russian.
He might have been drinking, but he was right.
He was still right about the math.
But how these things work, they are viral, just like coronavirus.
You find one person, then you go after them, and then the people they're associated with.
And it kind of feeds on itself in this non-rational manner.
So it's not surprising they went with anyone.
The thing that I found very interesting about this list, and this is the most kind of cogent thing I've heard in weeks from anyone, was J.K. Rowling.
Because she put on her boxing gloves and she's like, here we go.
She goes, I think all of this, a lot of this trans stuff is left-wing homophobia.
Trans Issues as Left-Wing Homophobia00:04:59
I remember growing up, it was a very big deal for gay men to have to convince Americans that they are fully male.
They're not secretly women.
Right.
That I'm a dude that they would say and that they want to be with dudes.
I'm not secretly a girl.
I'm not confused about my gender.
This is my identity.
They fought for this very hard.
And now, according to Rowling, a lot of these young men who are coming into their own, no one who's 14 knows who they are.
Everyone's except for maybe Ayn Rand.
And they're being put, she's like, they're being chemically castrated because they're not going to be able to reproduce because they're in female hormones, all this other stuff.
And she goes, this is experimentation on children and it is trying to destroy an entire generation of gay people.
And to hear her say those, and of course, you know, people are melting down.
And she's like, I don't care, bring it.
And she brings the receipts about, you know, how is it that the number of people who are identifying as trans is up like 10,000%.
Like, is that really something that could have happened?
I mean, these are being talked to by trained professionals, just like in school.
Instead of talking to a little boy, let's just get him on some medication.
Then he'll be quiet and shut up, put him on his Riddle In.
It's the same thing.
Oh, you're confused about your sexuality and gender?
Here we go.
Pump you up.
Problem solved.
Get out of my office.
And people who are maybe, people who maybe aren't particularly fond of the LGBT scene can certainly appreciate all of us who are total skeptics of how over-medicated this country is.
And I know it's kind of a cliche at this point, but it is very, very true.
It is much better in my view.
And there's no shame in taking medication for your depression or anxiety, none.
But if it is something that can be treated without having to go on medication and all the side effects, and it's something that's an issue that you can work through, that is something that would be preferable.
And it's always preferable to try to self-improve anyway.
So even if it doesn't work, at least you're going to understand your thinking a lot better.
So I think that was the cogent part here.
And I think all the boomer cons who think the left is a monolith, like here is their proof that they're wrong.
Yeah, yeah, no, there's certainly not a monolith.
And the people who are not who are on the left, who are not on board with the wokeism stuff, many of them really live in fear.
And I think, and this is just very, this is just like kind of a very rough like hypothesis or not even a hypothesis, but I'm just kind of thinking out loud about this.
But I do think that there's there tends, like there are personality traits that would predict the likelihood of someone being more left-wing or someone being more right-wing.
And I think that people who are left-wing tend to be like I, my guess would be they would be higher in like trait agreeable agreeableness.
I think that it's a little bit harder for them to stand up to the wokeism, which is part of the reason why it's spread like wildfire.
And I think that now things are getting scary enough that a lot of them are like, somebody's got to do something about this.
And it's probably going to be the people who are already a little bit established and don't have as much to lose.
Because it's a lot more to ask someone who's 25, just starting out their career, doesn't have too much money in the bank to ruin their career than J.K. Rawlings or even Noam Chomsky or someone like that, who's basically like, you can't really ruin him at this point.
He's probably got five years left on his life.
So what are you going to do to him, really?
And it's like this.
Let's suppose I'm like your hero Charlie Kirk, right?
If all these people come after Charlie Kirk.
To the extent he supports Romney.
Yeah, all these people go after Charlie Kirk.
That's a huge cost.
But Charlie Kirk can leverage this, talk to his audience, be like, look, you and I do this to some extent also.
And fairly, these people are coming after me.
If it wasn't me, they're going to be coming after you and your jobs.
So like a little support would be appreciated, though not expected.
People are like, yeah, you're right.
Like you are sticking your necks on the line.
But we do have the backup.
But if you're on the left, right, like the hard left or like in this culture and you're speaking out like this and J.K. Rowling, no one has your back because now this is your world.
These are your people.
And then it gets really scary really quick.
And she's obviously, she literally has more money than Queen Elizabeth.
But like you're saying, what if you're this like 20-year-old gay dude and you're like, I don't want to take estrogen.
I'm a dude.
What are you talking about?
And if you have a friend who's like thinking is trans, like, dudes, let's think this through.
Is this really what you want?
You really want that surgery?
You really want to take being hormonal is going to mess with your head.
This is very known.
Men on steroids, women who are pregnant, hormonal messes with your capacity to think logically.
Like you're going to do this to your body.
And, you know, is this really what you want?
To not have that space is got to be really, especially when you're young, it's a horrible, horrible thing.
Toilet Paper and Logical Consistency00:02:58
So I'm delighted that this is happening.
I am also saddened whenever I hear these boomer cons think, oh, just hand wave.
Oh, it's all the same.
Oh, they all really want the same thing.
It's all Marxism, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, okay, fine.
Even if it was all Marxism, the Marxists kill the other Marxists.
So even if that's true that they're all Marxists, that still doesn't mean they're all the same.
Yeah.
And look, I mean, there are certain things that kind of in a broad kind of umbrella that might tie them together, where they're all generally on the left and they have these qualities in common.
But it's just, it's you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't distinguish between the different groups.
And of course, like, you know, it's as silly as when you see people on the left lump libertarians and neo-Nazis together.
And they're like, oh, they're all far right wingers.
I mean, if you listen to what they're saying, they are advocating for very, very different things.
And that same thing is true on the left.
I mean, there is a very, very big difference between a Noam Chomsky and anything having to do with the woke social justice world.
Or Joe Biden.
Oh, yeah, right.
Yeah, of course.
If you even consider that, you know, to be the left, which the hard left certainly wouldn't.
And that's why I think Sean Hannity does the country a tremendous disservice when every night on his show, he goes, the far left, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden, the radical left, as if that really represents the radical left when they're, I mean, they're corporatist centrists, honestly, which I like.
But that's not for everybody, I understand.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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Narratives That Control Communities00:15:30
You know, it's one thing because I've been thinking a lot about the Black Lives Matter movement, and particularly because I've seen a lot of people in the libertarian world kind of, you know, sympathize, support, side with them.
And on the surface, it kind of makes sense that libertarians have been, you know, against the militarization of the police, against police abuses for a long time.
And now here's this movement that's like, hey, the police are, you know, out of control.
And so why wouldn't we kind of go along with them?
But, you know, it's like there's a lot of problems with that.
Because number one, it's pretty clear to anyone who spends more than two seconds looking at the Black Lives Matter movement.
This is not just about cops enforcing drug laws.
There's a whole lot more to it than that.
And this is why you're seeing violence and looting and demands for statues being torn down and demands for Aunt Jemima being taken down.
And you're like, well, there's also this whole other part.
And when they just say like, we're protesting racism, as much as libertarians might want that to mean legalizing weed, I think it actually means a lot more than just that.
And I've been, you know, I just did a show with Pete Quinones.
We're doing like a two-part show, just like really looking into some of the leaders of Black Lives Matter.
And I think a lot of people, because it's not reported in the press at all, don't know that there are, this is not to characterize the entire movement and saying everyone protesting falls under this, but there are hardcore Marxists who are in very high positions within this decentralized movement.
And it makes me a little uneasy to see libertarians supporting a Marxist, at least quasi-Marxist movement.
It makes me upset to have people who think it's their job to insist that other people take organizations at face value.
Yeah.
Right?
Like if you had someone yelling at you, no, the Democratic Party is for liberal democracy and for letting everyone have a voice, you would think, okay, there's no point talking to this person.
They're blue pilled beyond belief.
They have a cookie cutter perception of politics.
And if someone says, the Republican Party will bring you balanced budgets and a constitutional government and blah, blah, blah, you're like, okay, cool, cool, cool.
And then it's the same exact thing with, you know what the voice of the next generation is?
It's Pepsi.
I saw it on that box in my house, which is a window.
And it's the same thing, this insistence that don't look behind the curtain.
They say this is what it is.
Therefore, that's what it is.
It is, to me, demented to apply that approach to literally any organization in our culture.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And you also, while trying to be as nuanced and as fair as possible, you can't just judge a group by their best people or by the things that they do the best.
You kind of have to judge them by what they do the worst.
Like we don't look at North Korea and say, oh, Kim Jong-un is really good to these five politically connected people.
So, you know, he treats them really fair.
You go, no, I'm looking at the concentration camps.
Like, I'm looking at the worst of what he does, and I'm holding him responsible for that.
And I think that to some degree, that's got to apply for Black Lives Matter too.
It can't just be, it's like, okay, yes, they have a legitimate grievance.
By the way, so does everybody.
So does all of the worst people throughout the world.
They always start with a legitimate grievance and then they just kind of build from there into a really ugly place.
I remember this is one of the points that Jordan Peterson made, who's he's really great on the issue of like, he's studied the rise of totalitarian regimes in real detail.
And he makes the point that the narrative that leads to genocide is never like as simple as we hate this group of people.
They're evil.
Let's kill them.
It always starts with some victim narrative.
It always starts with like, we have been victimized by this group of people and therefore we are justified in exterminating all of them.
And even oftentimes the initial gripe is somewhat legitimate, probably not fair at who ends up getting blamed.
But like, look, if you take the example of the Nazis, absolutely that you could point to World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, and the way the German people were treated, and they were legitimately victimized.
Now, that doesn't mean you have to take it to the next level of saying it's okay to shove children into fucking gas chambers.
Obviously, that's evil.
But so there might be a kernel of truth or more than a kernel of truth to the initial narrative that, like, hey, the way cops treat black people is unfair.
Okay, fine.
But that does not mean it doesn't follow that then I have to get on board with this kind of totalitarian streak of wanting to control the language, the statues, the products, the thoughts of an entire country because we label it all as part of this systemic racism.
And that to me, I think, should be pushed back on.
There is a, it's very interesting because I think we've all forgotten, and I just remembered it today.
It wasn't that long ago.
We're all Biden now.
We all have Alzheimer's.
As soon as I'm going to say this, everyone's going to remember it.
It wasn't that long ago, three years, four years, where the cathedral was telling us that Black Lives Matter was an embarrassment because they would have all those videos, them blocking the streets, and we'd all laugh because they'd get hit by a car.
Like, what'd you expect?
There were all those scenes of people having a brunch, white people, and they coming in yelling Black Lives Matter.
And it was like, what are you people doing?
This is ridiculous.
And they were posited and positioned as a joke or at least an embarrassment.
And now it's like, oh, no, no, this is the second.
So it's a very good demonstration of the power of who controls the narrative in this country.
And people were saying on Twitter, I said, if Biden gets elected, you can easily make the case that this unrest gets worse or it goes away or it stays the same.
You can imagine all these three scenarios, or at least I can.
And the point is, without the media kind of whipping them up into a froth and without all this corporate backing, you cannot sustain outrage and physicality for that long.
It would fizzle out at some point.
And there would be the political will to send in the tanks and take care of this overnight.
They do not have the weapons to make this happen on a sustained fashion.
So this is something that's interesting to watch as different elements are manipulated in order to kind of control the larger population.
And it's also fascinating to me how they're now kind of making, you know, I have these polls, which are like two bad choices.
They are trying to force people to choose between white supremacy and white submission, forcing you to think of yourself as a white person.
And since white supremacy is not on the table, and I don't know any white person, well, I know very few because of my book, who would advocate for white supremacy, certainly not by name.
Well, if that's not the option, then the only option is choice B, white submission.
And they're, you know, this is the only way to win when you don't have the numbers in a democracy.
You have to force the people who have the numbers to kind of shake their head and go home and say, okay, I deserve kind of this.
And I would encourage everyone listening to this to ask their Facebook friend, is it a continuation of white supremacy for a white person to hire people of color as their subordinates?
And I would love to hear them flipping out in the mental gymnastics that happen as a consequence of there, because we're about a few months away from them telling us that it's immoral for white people to hire minorities.
Yeah, it really is goofy, the trajectory of this whole thing.
I think it's a really important point that you made about how most of the corporate press's narrative on Black Lives Matter at first was not nearly as friendly and supportive as it is now.
And I was, you know, I was talking about this when I was talking about the Chaz in Seattle and the little zone that they set up in New York, which didn't last very long.
Of course, New York is an open carry, so it makes it a lot easier for the cops to go in and just kind of be like, nope, sorry, we're not doing this.
But I just, I was making the point, two people on the left and two people who might be supportive of those areas.
I was like, look, just look at Waco, okay?
These people, they would not hesitate to kill all of you if they thought that was in their benefit to do so.
They are allowing you to have your little fun make-believe area because they think this helps them in general.
They think, now, I don't know exactly the details of their agenda, but my guess is they think they can harness all this energy to make Trump look bad, get Trump out of office.
So they're going on board, but just know that this is their, you know, like they're doing this because they see it as being in their interest.
However, what's also worth noting is that they're not always right.
And these are dangerous games that they play.
There's an amazing tape.
I've talked about it before.
I don't know if anybody has not listened to it.
The tape of John Kerry when he's unknowingly being recorded.
And he's talking about the rise of ISIS in Syria.
And he's basically saying that, like, look, we knew that the weapons that we were sending into Syria were going into the hands of ISIS.
We watched the rise of the Islamic State and we saw this happening.
But we thought what would happen was that this would put pressure on Assad and he would have to come to the table to negotiate and be like, okay, help me get these ISIS maniacs out of here and I'll play ball with you guys or maybe I'll step down and a different regime can come over.
So it was all about a regime change or at least, you know, you know, pushing a regime into submitting.
And this was the plan.
But then both groups did not act the way they thought they would.
So ISIS then goes and invades Iraq and finds all the stockpiled American weapons there and the army we've been supporting in Iraq just abandons, pulls off their uniforms and runs away.
And they're like, what the fuck?
And then Assad calls in Russia and Russia comes into Syrian airspace and is now defending them.
And they're like, what the fuck?
What the fuck?
Like none of this went the way the plan was supposed to go.
And just thinking of that as just one example, there's a lot of examples like that.
But they are kind of playing with some real deal communists.
And this thing may not go exactly the way they want it to.
I agree with you.
We don't know for sure where it would go in a Biden presidency or in Trump's second term either.
But it's a dangerous game that they're playing.
And this could go in a lot of different directions.
And I think there is not, amongst people like you and me, there is.
But in the general public, there is just not the healthy fear of communists that there should be.
We certainly have a fear of Nazis, but we do not have a fear of communists.
It is the job of corporate America in any sphere, music, movies, books, to take ideas that are dangerous and threatening, to consume them, and to excrete them in a manner that is palatable to the middle American.
And it is their job to take Chairman Mao and make him look like modern family.
And they do this constantly.
And they also do it the other way.
They will take Trump's new logo, which is the bald eagle, and say it's the Nazi eagle.
So they can turn the screw in this direction.
They can turn it in this direction.
And there are people who have been trained all their lives to take their marching orders from the media.
And they do so proudly.
And like, look, I'm staying in.
I'm informed by current events.
I'm a responsible citizen.
I'll participate in democracy.
I read the New York Times.
I watch NPR.
You know, I'm smart.
And now I learn these things.
And I will repeat them on Facebook and yell at you if you don't know them.
Because I read my articles, therefore I'm smart.
I can think for myself.
So this is something that we see.
There is not a fear because we're told constantly, look, if McDonald's and Nike and every other organization, which you welcome into your home, which you clothe your kids in, feed your kids in, are telling you this organization isn't just fine, but send its support.
And then Dave Smith comes on here and tells you these are commies and this is Maoism being snuck in through the back door.
It's like, okay, why is McDonald's supporting Maoism?
Okay, Comic Dave Smith.
Cool story, bro.
But that is exactly what is happening.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And it's really, you know, there's different levels of kind of tragedy to all of this.
One of the things that's really fucked up to me is that, and I know maybe I'm not living up to my image here as the right-wing racists or whatever that I'm supposed to be.
But the thing that's really tragic is that Black lives actually do matter.
And there are real problems in the Black community throughout this country.
And none of them are being sincerely or seriously addressed through any of this.
I mean, I've like, me and Jay, me and Jay Okerson, we used to do shows in Philadelphia a lot.
And we would always, we would drive through Camden on the way back.
And half of it is because it's like a rush to drive through Camden.
Like it's, it's terrifying.
You're like, you feel, you're like, if my, if the car broke down here, we might die.
Like this is really, really bad.
Hey, you drive through Camden.
It is, you're just driving through a third world country in the middle of America.
And I mean, I'm not like saying that in like a pejorative sense.
I'm saying like, that's what you're in.
Every other door is boarded up.
There are children four years old out at two in the morning with no shoes on.
You're like, who the hell is taking care of these kids?
Like, no one.
The answer is no one.
There's crackheads and hookers.
And it's just, it's horrible.
I mean, the level of crime and poverty and all this.
And that's just one of several areas in New Jersey that's like that.
You know, like parts of Newark, parts of Patterson, in New York, where when I grew up, the South Bronx was like that.
East New York and Brooklyn was like that.
And this is all over the country.
There are these little pockets of like hellscapes that are mostly black and brown communities.
Now, also, you have black middle class people who are pretty much fine and there's no problem with that.
But the people in these communities are fucked.
I mean, it's like, and no one, it's like in a serious manner talks about this and what can actually solve this problem.
I mean, even libertarians, we have our dogma about how repealing the war on drugs and ending the welfare state would help.
And I do agree that those things would help or that they're currently hurting and we should stop hurting.
But I don't know that repealing those things is going to be a magical snap your fingers and all these problems are solved.
CBD Benefits vs. Magical Solutions00:02:50
I remember just real quickly, and then I'm interested to get your thoughts on this.
But I remember Obama said, I think he was talking about climate change.
It might have been the economy, but it's pissed me off so much when he said it.
But he said, he was like, look, we know we can solve these problems because these problems were man-made.
And it's like, what?
That does not logically follow.
Just man can destroy a lot more than he can undestroy.
What if I give you uranium and give you cancer?
Right.
Well, we can destroy the world, but we can't build a new world.
I mean, so the fact that government policies destroyed something, repealing those government policies while a good idea does not guarantee that it will undestroy something.
These communities have been decimated.
And it's a much bigger problem than just the cops.
I mean, I'm not saying the cops make it any better, but like it's, or maybe they make it worse, but it's a much bigger problem than that.
And no one care.
Like no one really cares or really seems to talk about this.
That's an exaggeration, but not enough.
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Wokeism and Upper-Middle-Class Grievances00:14:58
I had this tweet when all the rioting was going on.
And I just said, imagine you are a young black male, right, in one of these communities, and you turn on the TV and you see Don Lemon and Caitlin Collins are supposed to be the ones who are speaking for you and representing you.
It is hard to kind of wrap your head around the hubris that that entails, that you look at this guy's like, oh, yeah, this guy speaks for me.
He understands my plight.
You know, but only when you have this really, this is the part of identity politics that drives me.
I find it very offensive, and that's not a word I ever use.
To define people by race, like to kind of say that Chinese and Korean and Japanese are all effectively the same because their skin tone is similar.
And look at Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam.
Like anyone with the slightest knowledge of history knows that these nations have profoundly different histories, profoundly different cultures, and a lot of animus toward whatnot.
We're not always that nice to each other.
No, no, not at all.
Rape of Nanking.
But you're just going to, oh, well, you know, basically, since we want to have like all black Americans under one bucket, because then it's easier to have for demographic purposes to further political agendas here, we're going to have to extrapolate that worldwide.
And then, you know, Asian, it's like there's more than there's a billion people in China alone.
And to equivocate between all these peoples is so, not even just North and South Korea.
Let's just talk about Korean.
I mean, that's also in and of itself, you know, a kind of over-exaggeration.
So that is the kind of thing that really does bother me.
And the problem with being poor and marginalized, and this has been a problem for blacks historically, is you don't have a voice.
That is literally the complaint.
This is the thing you could say that's quite positive about the civil rights movement is that for a long time, when people talk about Margaret Sanger and like, oh, people wanted to hate the black people, no one cared.
They were completely invisible.
You don't see them anywhere.
People were happy to pretend that black Americans didn't exist because they didn't know what you had the problem.
And any situation, meaning the oppression and comparative poverty of the black communities, you had half the country who's making sure no one's going to get anything done on my watch.
They're digging in their heels.
The South, the North is like, I'm not taking up this struggle.
I don't care.
Let's just keep them in the corner.
And it's, you know, for the first time that you would have a black woman on TV who wasn't a maid was like Diane Carroll, who was Julia in Whoopi Goldberg when she was a kid.
I have mentioned this to you, I think, before, was like, mom, there's a black lady on TV and she's not a maid.
So, but by definition almost, if you're poor and marginalized, you're not going to have a voice.
You know, when people talk about the president's cabinet is diverse, he's not going to have poor people there.
He's not going to have people on disability.
Maybe Tammy Duckworth.
So maybe I take that back.
But this is the whole thing.
Very patriotic.
The very patriotic.
She loves America even more than she loves power.
Just ask her.
When you are in these communities, yeah, you are voiceless.
And it's got to be a source of frustration, and correctly so, because that sense of powerlessness is much worse than that sense of poverty.
Because it's a lot easier to handle, you know, okay, maybe I don't have a nice apartment than I have no hope of anyone ever caring about me.
Yeah.
And it's not only that Don Lemon is supposed to represent that kid in Camden, but all of the policy proposals and all of the concern seems to be to make Don Lemon's life easier.
And this is one of the things that I hate about the wokeism social justice wing of the left is that it's always about like, you know, like the grievances always start with some slight that an upper middle class black person might have to deal with.
Yeah, maybe someone got off the elevator.
Right.
You know, someone got off the elevator.
Like, who the fuck cares?
There is a four-year-old who doesn't have shoes on in Camden at three in the morning.
That's who I care about.
Upper middle class black person, cry me a river.
Like, I don't know what to say.
It's, I'm just not that worked up about your struggle.
And so we, and this has always been true where we have these policies like affirmative action.
Affirmative action has been very successful for upper middle class black people.
Like it's, it's something where now, if you are, if you're like a black college student who gets really good grades, you can go to any grad school you want to.
I mean, before, maybe you would have gone to like, you know, I don't know, you would have gone to the University of Wisconsin's graduate program and now you can go to Harvard.
Thank you, affirmative action.
So that person who was already going to be fine maybe can get a little bit better off in life.
And meanwhile, that kid still has no shoes at three in the morning in Camden.
And no one seems to be advocating for that guy to your point of being voiceless and powerless.
And that really is horrible.
Like we should all, and they kind of invoke the humanity in all of us to care about that kid to make sure that Don Lemon gets the 8 p.m. hour, even though he is way too stupid, even by the corporate press standards, to have, to be an anchor of the 8 p.m. hour, 9 p.m., whatever he is.
But that's what we get for it.
Right.
And this is leftism at its best is caring about people who are completely marginalized, who don't have a voice.
And it is something you're not going to see much of in places like the New York Times, or they will have that one person who's like a sob story, but they don't look at it as a systemic thing.
And they don't really look at it as what part the government has to play in this.
It's always like, well, we could just throw money at this problem.
Listen, if that kid had a pair of shoes at two in the morning and no one's looking after him, he's not saved.
It is kind of scary that just visually it's disturbing, but that is in a very real sense the least of his problems, not having shoes.
Yes.
Yeah.
And all of the kind of, I mean, shoes would be nice, but all of the solutions like the, well, we need better schools or better outreach with the police or any of these things.
I mean, this is just, this does nothing.
This is nothing.
I mean, I can tell you having a one and a half year old.
And this is something that you don't have to have kids to notice, but it really gets driven into your mind when you have a kid.
There is every minute of the day is nurturing, educating, preparing my daughter.
I mean, you go over like, you know, body parts, like, where's your nose?
Where's your ears?
Where's this letters, colors, talking, playing, eye contact, skin to skin contact?
There are all these things that are so important in the healthy development of a person.
And if you, if you get none of that, I don't care how good your school is.
You're talking about intervening when the kid is six or seven years old.
It is way past the point of actually doing anything.
It's all surface level, you know, trying to put a band-aid on a bullet wound.
None of this is going to really solve the problem.
And I don't know that I have the best answer for what would solve the problem, but it seems like no one's even attempting, which is really sad.
Yeah.
The thing that also bothers me is when conservatives are like, oh, how come you don't care about black and black crime?
They do care.
Like, sure.
Because it's kind of like conservatives saying, well, why do you care about income tax rates when there's muggings and burglaries?
These are separate issues.
It's a lot easier in one sense to have police reform or to address this issue if they perceive this to be an issue than to address this other issue.
It's no one is campaigning.
No one is defending people who black people kill other black people.
There are plenty of people defending the police and saying this isn't a problem.
Few bet apples, few bad apples, few bed apples.
What about, what about, what about?
Yeah.
No, well, listen, I agree with that.
So it is a separate conversation, but separately, it does seem like the plight of black people in America and the obstacles that these specific areas, these specific geographical areas that are largely disproportionately black neighborhoods and stuff, the problems they have, it does seem like killer cops is not the biggest issue.
And that, you know, truthfully speaking, just like the crime rate is a much bigger issue.
The disintegration of the family is a big issue.
There's all these other problems that I think also it's just, you know, there's not an easy solution for it.
And so it makes, it doesn't make bumper stickers.
And this kind of hand waving, it's like, well, it's black people doing the robbing.
It's like, yeah, but if I'm living there and I'm a black person who's not doing the robbing, why do you get to shrug your shoulders at me and be like, well, you should have voted Republican?
Like, like, literally, what am I supposed to do?
I remember I'm getting robbed and it's like, well, that guy's the same color as you.
So this is what you want.
It's like, I don't.
I remember Tupac said this once.
And I might have been, I was like, I don't know, like 10 or something or 11 when I heard him say this, but it was in an interview.
I might have been a little bit older than that, maybe like 13 or something.
But he was in an interview and he said, he said, you have to understand that the same element of black crime that white people are scared of, black people are scared of.
We're also scared of that.
He goes, what?
I'm supposed to live next to the killers because I'm black.
So we'll all just get along or something like that.
And I remember at the time, just being a kid, I was like, oh, wow, that's a really good point.
Like, that's a really good point.
That, like, oh, yeah, it's not any less scary to black people to be around killers than it would be for me to be around a black killer.
It's all pretty bad.
And I also find it disturbing when people who claim to love freedom are perfectly happy.
Like, well, you all voted for the wrong political party.
So basically anything that happens to you, it's just too damn bad.
I'm like, that is the totalitarian mindset.
Like, if you're not a member of the one true party, basically, I don't care about you and you can get raped and murdered.
And, well, too bad you asked for it.
It's like, I don't think they, I don't think people who vote Democrat, even if they come at it from an uninformed place or an informed place are coming out and being like, you know what?
I think I want more rape and murder.
It's a very, I mean, this boomer con stuff has been getting to me recently, especially because if they think Trump is going to get more of the black vote, yelling, what about black and black crime, in my view, is not going to be the way to achieve this goal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To be honest, I mean, I don't even know that it's a goal that I want to be achieved at this point.
I just don't know that, you know, I think whatever positives there were to Trump being elected have we basically gotten them already.
We got the kind of undermining of the systems and we got the mocking the press for years.
And I'm just, you know, it's like, I don't know exactly what is like, I don't know if I should even, like, I don't care if Biden or Trump wins at this point.
I mean, I could see kind of to what you were saying before, I could see scenarios where Biden winning is better and I could see scenarios where Trump winning is better.
And I'm really not sure that one is preferable to the other at this point.
Or I should say one certainly is preferable to the other, but I'm not certain which one that is at this point.
Yeah, I agree.
I was making that point today.
It's like Biden has, Biden is the Democratic Party drawing a line against the people to their left.
Biden is the corporate part of the Democratic Party retrenching themselves.
And again, all those corporations who are, you know, working up huge populations in this country just as easily could be like, oh, look, we've got an adult in the White House now.
Playtime is over, kids.
Sit down and go home.
And Middle America will be like, yeah, yeah, okay.
We did our part.
We had our black square on Instagram.
Why are they still complaining?
Go home and sit down.
George Floyd hasn't been killed again.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny.
It's difficult to deal with the liberals versus the leftists or the Democrat establishment type versus the far left guys.
I think it was Will Gregg, the late great Will Gregg.
I think he was the one who said this.
I might be attributing this quote to the wrong person, but he said something along the lines.
He said, the only redeeming quality of a liberal is that they're not a leftist.
And the only redeeming quality of a leftist is that they're not a liberal.
Like they're basically, it's like you're like, the only redeeming quality about like a Democratic socialist is that you're not one of these like Warhawk Democrats.
And the only redeeming quality about the Warhawk Democrats is like, well, at least you're not a socialist.
I mean, at least you'll do all this, but you're like, you'll still let us have prices, which is like a really big deal.
Like it's the difference between us starving in the streets and not.
So like prices are huge.
But the people who instant, the guy who instituted wage and price controls was Nixon.
Yes.
So it's a, it's a, but I mean, but when I say let us have prices, I mean straight up, like let us have prices at all.
Not even that there are some price controls, but I'm saying like straight up, like they would like have like centralized committees running, you know what I mean, like production to the point where you're like, okay, we will all starve to death if we do this.
It's just amazing how much people still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, have it into their heads that democracy works.
And if you want a policy, you vote for it in that direction and you will get it.
And I said just today on Twitter, I said, if I told you that voting in Clinton would get you a balanced budget, you would laugh in my face.
And then when it actually happened, you have excuses where like, oh, I couldn't have predicted it.
Or it's this, blah, blah, blah, hand wave.
Oh, and it doesn't even matter.
Look, if your worldview doesn't predict or account for major socioeconomic events, then there is at the very least some flaw with this program as a predictive measure.
And that's all I'm saying.
And Biden was the one who had the crime bill.
I'm not saying Biden is going to be coming in there like another Reagan.
I'm saying the claim that it is obvious that if Biden becomes president, Black Lives Matter is going to take over every city and they're all going to be raised to the ground does not at all follow.
Yes, yes, no, I agree.
And it's sometimes, I mean, look, like the true nature, right, of the red pill is understanding how things actually work as opposed to how they're presented.
And, you know, I think many times libertarians are very good at understanding how the state actually operates.
But that doesn't necessarily lead to libertarians understanding how people operate.
Populism Over Pure Logic00:05:32
And there's something, you know, something I've been thinking about a lot lately, where it's just like, we've got to almost get out of the, like our own limitations and realize that the vast majority of people are not like us and don't think like us.
They just don't.
They're not, most people are not really concerned with philosophy, with logical consistency.
I mean, how many times, I think I might have said this the other day, but how many times are people listening to the show, have you gotten in an argument with a left-winger or a right-winger and you've been like, aha, I got you in a contradiction.
You are not being logically consistent here.
And then you realize they do not care.
This doesn't fuck with them even in the slightest.
This is the type of thing that would keep you up at night if someone found a logical inconsistency in your worldview and you'd be up till three in the morning punching yourself in the head like, fuck, I have this inconsistent.
They don't care.
They're very happy to just go back to their dogma, go back to their emotional reaction and work off that.
But that's a very, now we can just feel superior for that and go, we're better.
Right, right.
But that's a very important piece of information that you might want to take in and actually like say, okay, now how do I adjust to this reality rather than feeling superior to this reality?
And it's also not a numbers game because the vast majority of people are ballast.
And if they're in Germany in the 30s, they're going to be a Nazi.
And then if they're in Iran today, they're going to be a hardcore Muslim.
And if they're in the U.S., they're going to be a boomer con.
They will just tacitly accept the views of the majority culture.
This is why, if you look at it in America, one of the reasons why, it's not like the red and blue votes are distributed randomly.
There are pockets.
Part of that has to do with the economics of rural versus urban, sure.
But part of it also has to do with we tend to absorb the views of those who are around us.
At the very least, if you don't care, if I don't care about politics and there's a cost for choosing team A and there's a benefit for choosing team B and I don't care, I'm choosing team B.
It's insane not to because there's no, and that is a great way to get people to do whatever you want.
So people who think, oh, we need to convince the majority, it's not that way.
No one ever votes themselves in to kind of majority.
It's like you get the people at the top and the majority follows suit as night follows day.
Yeah, yeah.
And the truth Truth is that if you are going to whip up support, which you need at least some degree of either tacit or you know, enthusiastic support, it's going, it's not going to be to playing to people's desires to understand philosophy or to really understand economics.
That's not going to be it.
It's going to have to be some type of populist emotional appeal.
Like that's that's what would work up uh people who actually kind of more or less support the idea of liberty.
Um, and and that's to me what's so dangerous about the Black Lives Matter, the hard left kind of culture is that if you if you create a culture, and this is why the leftists are very smart, this is why they win and we don't, um, is that when you kind of, you know, we might just be focused on logical arguments for why the state shouldn't be involved.
And they're like, yeah, yeah, you have fun with that.
We're going to take over Hollywood, the press, academia, and we'll see who ends up winning out.
And then even though we feel like we won the logical argument, we're like, oh, we lost everything.
And they've created a culture where disparities are seen as wrong.
Like prima facie, if there is a disparity in outcome, that's evidence of, you know, discrimination or something like that.
And that type of culture is incompatible with liberty.
The Seattle City Council right now are having meetings where they're told explicitly that objectivity is a function of white supremacy.
So what happens?
Okay, we sit down, we persuade you that we're logical and you're illogical.
Oh, cool.
Here comes your boss.
Logic is a tool of white supremacy.
Now what?
So it's really a fool's errand to go on that round.
I'm just going to leave it with this one point.
One of the craziest things Ayn Rand ever said is that she was of the belief that Barry Goldwater in 64 could have won if he had a more full-throated, philosophical defense of capitalism.
And I read a book, I read every book about her up to a certain year.
And just one of her followers later quipped and goes, I don't think I've ever heard of a presidential candidate discussing epistemology.
So, but you know what I mean?
Like, if she thinks that you're going to win by being more cerebral, it is so removed from all the data that I have seen and all the things I've experienced that I don't even know where to start unpacking this.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, it's one more thing.
Can you just imagine like any politician standing up and giving the gold speech?
Yeah.
Like, and they're going to win anything.
What?
Yeah.
It's just, it's sad and tragic in a way because it's Ayn Rand projecting herself onto the world.
Right.
Like this is what they would want to hear because this is what would resonate with me.
Me.
But unfortunately, this is not what resonates.
Unfortunately, Ayn Rand, if you didn't notice, you're different.
You're a bit different than most people, like every single other person that ever existed.