Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller analyze the 2024 election, noting Wolfe's vote for Trump due to New York's crime and rent control failures. They critique progressive prosecutors for eroding safety through leniency on shoplifting and sidewalk sleeping, while debating whether racial equity arguments effectively advance libertarian views on bodily autonomy. The guests praise independent media like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan for challenging homogeneous narratives, contrasting this with corporate outlets' repetitive talking points. Ultimately, they argue that "woke" ideology is losing traction as voters prioritize immediate safety and first-principles reasoning over demographic monoliths or untested policy convictions. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Let's start the show.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm very happy today to be joined by the hosts of Just Asking Questions, Zach Weissmuller and Liz Wolf over at Reason, of course.
Their show is great, by the way, if you haven't seen it.
I've been on it several times and always really enjoy it.
We'll also put the, I believe you guys just started a new YouTube channel.
So we will put that link in the episode description for today.
Make sure you go subscribe over there and check them out.
Thank you guys both for joining me.
How are you?
Doing great.
Thanks, Dave.
Yeah, we're not allowed to have you on our show anymore because we have you on too often.
And so now we have to go on your show to get our fix.
There is no more podcast law is a tricky thing to manage, but we all try our way to get there's lots of loopholes in there.
Don't worry.
I think as long as it's like a business expense, you can have me on one more time before Christmas or something.
Once the calendar year resets, we're good.
We're in the clear.
So don't worry.
Yeah, yeah.
Then we start it all over again.
Or if like a major war is started, then we get to have you on also.
So, you know, win some, you lose some.
It'll be easier at this point to have me on when a major war isn't started.
I don't even know what counts as major or minor wars anymore.
Is bombing Russia with U.S. weapons?
Does that count as major?
Because that seems pretty big to me.
Seems bad.
All right.
So there's obviously a lot going on in the world.
And I'm curious to get both of your takes on this.
Maybe I would start with this.
I know.
So Reason, for people who don't know, Reason Magazine for many years is like, I think the longest running libertarian publication that's out there.
Of course, in the new era, now I always call it Reason Magazine, but it's now there's obviously there's podcasts and videos and stuff like that.
But one of the things that's kind of a reason tradition is that they, you, you guys always put out before election day kind of, what's the word?
Not a poll, but you know, who everybody reason.
Yes, right, exactly.
A weird libertarian ritual of confessing, you know, your participation in the religion of the state.
LA Homelessness and Uniparty Rule00:10:00
And one of the things that I thought caught a lot of people's eye was that, Liz, you were the only one at Reason who said you were considering voting for Donald Trump.
So I'm curious, did you end up voting for him?
And how do you feel about it now?
Well, first of all, I was not technically the only one.
There was also Jerry Too Chili, which we both independently came to the exact same conclusion, which was like, I don't know about actually getting my butt down to the polls.
I don't even know if I'll vote at all.
If I do vote, it will probably be for Trump.
But, you know, barring anything truly horrifying that he does between the time we have to file this and the time we actually have to go to the polls.
Yeah, I did end up voting for Trump.
I feel thoroughly fine about it.
Took my kid to the polls with me.
I felt bad about my kid having to see the process of voting because that seems sort of inappropriate for children.
But yeah, I mean, it was thoroughly fine.
I'm a New Yorker.
My vote doesn't really count.
I think so many people are able to work themselves into a tizzy about this idea of like, my vote is so significant.
And so it like, honestly, like, yeah, I voted for Trump.
Like it didn't matter, I don't really think.
I think it's, I was fascinated by the ultimate results that came out of New York City where we saw a drastic shift across, I'm pretty sure every borough, but especially the outer boroughs like Queens, where I live, where New Yorkers are just so fed up with the sort of like uniparty rule.
You know, Democrats have been in power in New York for so long and New York consistently votes for Democrats for the presidency.
And when you actually look at what Democrat rule gets us on a local level, I'm sorry.
We have rampant crime.
We have a subway system where people are constantly, you know, evading fare, hopping the turnstile.
The subway system is absolutely garbage in total disrepair.
We're constantly seen as cash cows.
The richer you are, the more likely you are to be seen as cash cows.
We have an exodus of rich people from the city and an exodus of children from the city.
Cost of living is obscenely high.
We have rent control and rent stabilization that makes it hard to afford to raise a family here.
I'm sorry, but like I am not cool with raising kids and stepping over passed out, you know, fentanyl addicts on my way to get on the train.
Like it's just a really bad status quo.
And I think it's important that on a local level, Democrats get the message that New Yorkers are not cool with this.
And then on a national level, yeah, I mean, I just see the Harris Waltz ticket as a stunningly weak ticket.
And to the extent that I think like, you know, votes are self-serving, right?
I'm a self-interested, rational actor to the next, you know, as much as the next guy is.
And I just won't be able to continue to afford my life and living in New York City and raising my kid if we continue to have these crazy inflationary conditions like what we saw under the Biden administration.
I'm sorry, but I'm just sick of it.
Yeah, it's hard to argue with any of that.
There is really good food in the city, though.
That should be pointed out, despite all those other problems.
I love New York.
I mean, I think part of the reason why I'm hard on it is because I want it to be good and I want to raise a family here.
I want to stay here.
Yeah, no, listen, I mean, I don't live in New York anymore, but I spent my entire life.
I'm from there and I lived my entire life there.
And I, I, you know, I feel the same way.
It like hurts to see the city not doing well.
And by the way, I, you know, I did move out of the city in large part because of the last thing you mentioned that I got little kids and I didn't want them to be constantly seeing homeless people and these kind of ugly things in life that I would rather put off.
And it's nice to be away from that.
I really do miss the food though.
Man, the food is so much better there than it is in the country.
It's also kind of annoying because I think so many people caricature like what you just said and they're like, oh, well, like you don't want to see, you know, drug addicts or you don't want to see homeless people.
And it's like, well, I mean, yeah, because I think that's a sign of like a decaying low trust society where, you know, we're incredibly wealthy and yet we can't take care of the least of these.
And that's very sad.
But also there are these like very real threats to safety.
And I don't think that, you know, if I'm going to pay such a high price to live in New York, I don't think I should also have to pay such a high price in terms of safety and comfort and well-being.
And I mean, just expecting better of our politicians doesn't seem like such a crazy belief to me.
But a lot of people want to mock it and say that it's, you know, too earnest or sort of an absurd retro type belief.
It's not.
Yeah.
I mean, they can mock it, but their city is going to continue to circle the drain as they mock it.
This exodus of particularly young families out of cities was happening before the pandemic already for about 10 years.
People were leaving New York leading up to that.
And well, not New York, but at least the sort of inner boroughs, but a lot of the big West Coast cities, which I left during the pandemic, LA.
And then, of course, after that, everything just accelerated.
And so you can scoff at it all you want, but you need those people.
These are the people who are productive and also literally the future of your city.
So if you don't do something other than mock it and actually start addressing these real people's concerns, there is going to be no turnaround.
We've seen what happens when cities get hollowed out, Detroit being like the worst case scenario.
That really can happen.
Yeah, you know, this is something I've argued with libertarians about kind of somewhat, I don't know, infamously in the libertarian world over the last few years.
But there's always, it seems to me that there's almost among some libertarians, there's almost a like a given that's kind of unexamined about where the hierarchy of priorities are supposed to be.
And I, you know, like when I would complain about that and say that like, yo, I don't think that homeless encampments should be allowed to take over major city blocks, whether we're talking in San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York City or San Diego has a big problem with it.
Like I just like, no, I don't think public property is, I don't think any of us have the right to sleep on public property.
And certainly like in playgrounds and public parks and spaces that are kind of for children.
And the response I get from a lot of libertarians is like, somehow I'm being heartless to the plight of homeless people and all of the government policies that create homelessness, which by the way, on those policies, I'd imagine we're all in agreement.
You know, like there's, there's wild government policies that make the price of housing too expensive, that make it very difficult, if not impossible, for people to help the homeless when they really want to.
And so like, I'm with all of that.
Although I don't know, you know, what the homeless problem as I see it, it's not exactly summed up by the price of house going, you know, like not monocausal at all.
I mean, Zach and I produced a documentary on this, I believe it was two years ago at this point, maybe longer ago, where we traveled from Austin to Houston to San Antonio.
And we're really trying, we interviewed a ton of people involved in what is essentially this industry of provision of services for the homeless.
Some of them have partnerships with the city.
Others do it more independently.
We found that, you know, there's, it's, first of all, it's not really a monocausal thing.
But to the extent that you can pull a specific lever and have your outcomes majorly affected, really Houston's extreme deregulated environment when it comes to zoning and the ability to supply more housing, as well as the fact that the city doesn't really have any natural barriers.
So you can sort of keep infinitely sprawling outward.
You know, that really made a big difference.
And it's not clear to me that that strategy is possible to replicate in a place like Los Angeles.
But also consider that like all of the people working to serve this industry, I mean, they have an, they don't really have an incentive to solve it, right?
They have an incentive to continue to ask for more funding from the people, you know, they're making their pleasures and the governments that they're partnering with.
So I think sometimes the incentives are a little warped and they're not necessarily incentivized to show results.
Yeah, but then I mean, another takeaway I took from that story, as well as my experience in Los Angeles, I've made about three documentaries on this topic from the one Liz is talking about back into my time when I was in Los Angeles.
And I experienced a lot of the same pushback you're talking about, Dave, because, you know, the idea that you're going to paint someone as heartless for saying that you shouldn't let people just sort of decay on the street is sort of messed up in itself.
I mean, I was sitting there interviewing in LA a pastor who was running the giant, the biggest shelter in downtown LA.
This guy lost his leg to a staph infection that he got on Skid Row.
And people are calling him heartless because he doesn't think people should be shooting up on the sidewalks and then should instead be ushered inside.
And so, like, one of the takeaways I took from interacting with him and also going to San Antonio was one of the cities that we went to is the housing is one component, but also seems really simple and straightforward, but just don't let people like sleep on the sidewalk.
You know, there are rules that you have to enforce.
Shelter had like a drug treatment program and the expectation that you'd be working toward getting clean, right?
Like that was a stipulation.
And like, I'm sorry, but like both carrot and stick matter here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It took it took a human behavior into account because it said, look, we're going to build this big place where you can go.
We're not just going to throw you in a prison.
You can go here.
You can either go on our drug treatment program and job training program, and then you're going to get to stay in a dorm.
Or if you don't want to do that, we have a big open space where at least there's a roof over your head.
It's not going to be as nice, but there's at least taking some sort of incentives and human nature into account that has been absent in this entire conversation for the past decade, decade and a half.
Shelter Rules and Carrot Stick00:12:59
Yeah, well, that's all very good points.
And I just, I always thought that it was like, is it really so obvious that the humane thing to do is to just let like people who have like serious mental illness and drug addiction problems to just allow them to sleep on the street?
Like just doesn't, that doesn't feel like the right, but even more than that.
So what started, what happened with me, so this was in late 2022.
So I, my, my son, when he, so when my son was born, he had a congenital heart defect and he needed open heart surgery.
And so the place, the best place in the world to do it is in New York City at Columbia Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital.
So that's where we went.
Now, I live like an hour outside of New York City, but my mother has an apartment on the Upper West Side.
So we went for a month while my son was in the NICU.
We went and stayed with my mother.
So my daughter was almost three at the time.
So she was about to be three.
So we got a three-year-old.
We also have my pregnant wife.
And then we had to deliver a baby, have surgery.
So I'm bouncing back and forth, you know, from the NICU to my mother's house to go spend time with my daughter.
So we're on the Upper West Side.
And there's, I took my daughter.
Again, she's, she's, must be a couple months shy of three years old at this time.
So I took her to the playground down the block from my mother's house.
And there is like literally a passed out, shirtless, homeless person with a needle next to him.
And if you could put yourself back in New York in 22, this is like still the height of, you know, there's outdoor masks.
People are giving me a weird look because I, other parents are giving me weird looks because my three-year-old is not in a mask.
Like this was the time.
And I was just, you know, by the way, I didn't do anything except go on Twitter.
You know, I didn't like, but I was just like, I was like, this is insane.
Like, how do these freaking cops?
Like, whatever New York City, I think it's the 13th biggest army in the world or something like that is the NYPD.
Like most countries in the world, the NYPD could take out if they wanted to.
And I'm just like, I mean, listen, could we just like remove these people from a kid's playground?
And anyway, some of the responses I got were pretty wild that people are like, well, if you have a problem with it, you should just leave.
And it's like, have you ever brought like a two and a half year old to a playground and then tried to just leave?
Like, it's not that easy to just like be like, we're not doing this anymore.
You know, like, that's going to be a whole thing.
But look, I think the real point that to me was that it's just like, listen, I am not like, I'm a bleeding heart libertarian.
The reason I'm a libertarian is because governments ruin innocent people's lives and I'm against that and I don't like it.
But if you want me to have some sympathy for this homeless heroin addict who's passed out, I could get there.
Sure.
I'm sure he had a much harder life than I've had.
I'm sure there's been lots of forces.
I'm very, you know, like I try to preach gratitude.
I'm very lucky that I have the life I have.
I've worked toward it, but like things have worked out that were out of my control.
However, are you actually expecting me in this hierarchy of priorities to prioritize that above like the safety of my wife and children?
Because that is just never going to happen.
And like any ideology that would be asking me to prioritize anything above my family's immediate safety is going like, sorry, you're going to lose me.
And I don't think there's anything in libertarian principles that demand that I care more about a junkie than I do about my three-year-old girl not seeing that.
Yeah, I don't think so.
And it's the priority.
That's the way the prioritization feels in the city.
So this is partly what wore me down in LA.
That's a very similar situation.
Luckily, I mean, I'm sorry you went through all that with these medical issues with your children.
I can't imagine that.
Luckily, I've never experienced that.
But, you know, during the lockdowns, those of us with young children know that going to the playground was one of the only things you were allowed to do, except in LA, you weren't allowed to do it.
And there were these amazing scenes where there's the caution tape over the playground, but then there's a man sleeping inside of the caution tape on the playground and nobody's doing anything about it.
And that sort of contradiction and prioritization sort of drives you crazy.
And then it also undermines the ability of us to talk about what would be the humane thing, what would be like the quote unquote bleeding heart libertarian approach.
Like I think we're still in agreement that, you know, the drug war has made things worse in this regard and that some way of mitigating, like some rethink on that has to happen.
It's harder to have that conversation when you can't, when all the sympathies seem to be going in this one direction and everyone then associates the, you know, harm reduction and like alleviating the black market with all the chaos and disorder that they see on the streets.
Dude, that's such a good point, man.
And I'll tell you, this is, I've, I've experienced this a lot where there is, man, there's really something to the dynamic of like when one side overplays its hand so much, if you're trying to make a point that even sounds like that side, it's just impossible to make it now.
You know, like it's like, it's like once the, once the riots in 2020 really kicked off, try making an argument about, you know, police reform or criminal justice reform or something like that.
It's everybody's like, what are you talking about?
Bring in the military.
Shut this thing down.
It's just like no one wants to hear.
And I know I've had this experience before where like I've been like I've called things racist.
And as I say the word out loud, I'm like, wait, don't I'm not like, not like those guys call everything racist.
You know what I mean?
No, I actually mean this was racist.
Like, and it's just, there is something where it makes the libertarian argument much more difficult when you have these kind of the rise of progressive prosecutors who have come in and decided like, you know, for years we could be sitting here saying like, hey, it's crazy that like people face jail time over possession or even distribution of drugs.
I mean, come on.
Like, you know, this is not, this isn't really like a horrific violent crime.
And by the way, we have an attitude about drugs that's so phony in this in this country.
Like, what do you think?
You know, like, how many people do you think, like, say like the Fox News building, okay?
The news corp building there.
How many people inside that thing you think do cocaine?
Quite a few.
95, obviously.
95%.
All over the place.
That's cocaine.
But your favorite Fox News host is probably done some drugs in their life, but then you could turn around and do, okay, so we can make these arguments.
We can make the arguments about, but once these progressive prosecutors come in and say, we're legalizing carjacking in effect, no one wants to hear anything.
I think what you're doing.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, the thing that makes me so frustrated about all of this is it's just like the actual users, like problem users, actual addicts lose out in many cases when these types of policies are pursued, right?
Like lots of people in the actual throes of addiction do not need a criminal justice system that gives them endless license to destroy their lives.
Frankly, what you need to do is you need to build up their communities and their families and have treatment facilities that are available to them.
That way people can actually get the help that they need.
But I also think that there's something really awful when we as city dwellers cede our cities to, you know, people who will essentially transform this into a low trust society, right?
Like none of us want to go to pharmacies and have all of the wares locked up.
None of us want to see shoplifting under, if it's under $1,000, the shoplifter gets off scot free and nobody will pursue them, right?
Like that's not a society that I want to live in where I have to explain to my kid why I'm that dumb chump who's always paying for things at the register when he sees other people just simply walking out of the store with the goods.
To me, that's just such a, it just shows this like perversion of values and people have this mindset of like, oh, well, you know, who really cares?
Who's really hurt by this?
And it's like, well, lots of people are hurt by the erosion of sort of like common shared values and principles that we ought to operate off of.
But the other thing that's really crazy is it's like, again and again, of course, random progressive male shitposters on Twitter don't really give a shit about this and want to just mock those of us who earnestly care about the future that, you know, our kids inherit.
But frankly, it's people who are more vulnerable, right?
Like women and children who are in positions where it's like physically we can't defend ourselves quite as well.
And I don't want a bunch of dudes to then have to step in when they see erratic people on the subway.
Like right now, we're waiting for the verdict and the trial of the killing of a subway performer by a Maureen, Daniel Penny.
And it's not totally clear whether how this will be resolved and how New Yorkers will react to the verdict.
But it's basically this sort of like vigilante killing.
But seemingly, you know, one side is trying to make the case that it was done basically to defend the other people on the train who were threatened by this homeless, super erratic, schizophrenic guy.
It's very, it's kind of this worshipper for how New Yorkers feel about these issues with public disorder.
But for me, at least, one of the most radicalizing things that I ever encountered was when I was living in Austin, when I was pregnant with my son in 2022, I was attacked by a homeless woman and she started like coming.
She came up out of nowhere and started punching me like sort of to the side, like right beside my belly.
And it was absolutely just like stunning to me.
I ran into the street to try to get away from her.
I'm a fast runner and it was, you know, easy to do.
But then I was really shocked by the fact that like it's kind of a strip that's barren and there aren't very many people around or establishments.
And so it was, I was basically trying to signal to drivers into cars, like help me.
This woman's following me.
And she, she like, she attacked me.
Eventually, like the cops showed up.
It only took 10, 15 minutes.
My husband came too.
But there's a certain amount of like, I think that really connected the dots for me of like, why is it that I, a law-abiding normal person who's just trying to like grow a baby inside of my belly and I was carrying groceries at the time trying to walk home, trying to get my step count up.
Why is it that I have to suffer when I did nothing to instigate this?
And there's some other person with really fucked up, untreated drug issues or mental illness issues.
And like, I'm sorry, but I have the expectation that we have a society where laws are enforced and when you, where you can't just do that type of crazy thing and get off without consequence.
To me, it's just like it shows this naivete that people haven't considered that people are put into that situation, right?
But like for me, it feels very vivid, right?
Whenever I get pregnant again, I don't want to be in that same type of situation.
And I, I don't think it's unreasonable to say I expect better of our cities.
I don't think the answer is just to move out and live on this rural compound like Sweet Zach has done in Florida.
But like, you know, it's like legitimately, like, I don't think I have to do the exodus from the cities.
I don't want to give up on them.
And I don't think I should have to just because a bunch of progressive voters have tried to ruin it for me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I don't agree with that.
I don't think so.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't think you should have to give up on it either, Liz.
And I'm rooting for a renaissance to happen in the cities despite fleeing myself.
Maybe I can come back one day.
Will you move back to LA if it gets better?
No.
Maybe Miami or something like that.
But yeah, you know, I think like the thing you were talking about, Dave, about being a sort of, it's like cringe now to talk about some of these actually real libertarian principles, criminal justice reform or drug legalization.
I speaking sort of from inside of that movement and seeing what happened, my take on how we got here is that there was an alliance made.
It was a coalition between progressives and libertarians to promote criminal justice reform and drug liberalization.
And some good came of that.
I mean, I think marijuana laws were liberalized in a way that I still to this day, even though there's some backlash to that now, I think overall it's been more good than bad.
And even some of the criminal justice reforms have been good.
Criminal Justice Reform Coalition00:03:30
The problem is the progressives really were in the driver's seat.
And I think libertarians sort of went along for the ride and let the liber, the progressives put forth not only the arguments, but really shape the policy.
And these progressive prosecutors that you brought up are a great example because there's some good ideas in the progressive prosecutor package and then a whole bunch of bad ideas that have to, it's like, you know, we're not going to prosecute, you know, possession of marijuana.
Good idea.
We're also not going to bring down the hammer on shoplifting.
Clearly a bad idea.
But there was a reluctance, I think, to speak up in the moment because some of the good ideas were getting smuggled in.
And now we're due for a course correction.
And that's partly what we're trying to do with the show by engaging some critics of how this stuff has been implemented and like having a serious conversation and like retrospective and hopefully looking forward to how can we sort of keep the good and toss out all the garbage that came along with it.
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Yeah, I think that, so one of the things that I've kind of tried to focus on, and I think you're like hit the nail on the head, where it's like, essentially the problem is that whatever arguments libertarians were making, libertarian prosecutors didn't rise up around the country.
Progressive prosecutors did.
And by the way, I remember when many of them were running, not that long ago, by the way, none of them ran on this.
I mean, they ran on not giving harsh sentences for small amounts of drugs.
And they ran on, you know, like reforming the bail system, which I think there's still a legitimate case to be made.
I mean, it is a little messed up that like, if you have the money, you can get out, but if you don't have the money, you have to sit in jail till your trial.
That certainly doesn't seem just to me.
And so like they had to, but none of them were ever saying like, you know, vote for me and I'm going to make sure that you only get a ticket if you steal $1,000 worth of things.
And but then that, you know, it really is a flaw in theory and philosophy, because I think a lot of times it's easy for libertarians, particularly when they agree with leftists, to just kind of go along with the issue.
Latino Voter Political Narratives00:14:59
I remember like back when I first started podcasting, one of the big topics in New York City at the time was stop and frisk, which was a policy that was, I believe it was really put into place with Bloomberg.
Maybe it started with Giuliani and then Bloomberg kind of ramped it up.
But this was, you know, about as anti-libertarian a policy as you could have, where you could just stop young people and publicly humiliate them with no suspicion of a crime and just go through their stuff.
Then they would turn around and brag and go, oh, but we found a lot of drugs and guns by doing this and therefore it's a success.
And I was totally against it, still totally against it.
But I remember leftists would be making this argument about how it disproportionately impacts minorities.
And I remember at the time just being like, listen, I know I'm on your side kind of on this issue, but this is just bad argumentation.
Because like, if like, I don't care who it affects, I don't care if it's 100% Asians or 70% Hispanics or 100% white or whatever.
It's either a violation of people's rights or it's not.
And if it is a violation of their rights, I'm against it.
And if it's not, then I shouldn't have a problem with it.
But because the issue is once you go into that thinking, you're almost kind of like, wait a minute.
So are you telling me that if we just increase the number of white people who are being stopped and frisked, then this would be okay?
Like if we got it up to match the proportions of society, then somehow it wouldn't be a problem.
You know what I mean?
And it was the same with COVID vaccines, right?
Right, right.
Exactly.
Or they actually, but well, then conveniently, they didn't really seem to care when the, when like the vaccine passports were going to disproportionately affect, you know, black people or immigrants or anything like that.
But yeah, we didn't talk about that.
That was misinformation.
Yes, that's right.
All of a sudden, those concerns go away.
But I think that there was, this was so like embedded in the worldview of so many of these progressive prosecutors that they would then apply it to it's like, well, hey guys, look, 80% of the shoplifting arrests are this demographic.
And so we have to do something to stop that.
And we have, and it was never like what I think us libertarians would want the standard to be.
Like, who cares what demographic it's happening to?
It's either right or it's wrong.
And property crimes are wrong.
That's not a victimless crime.
And so, like, it doesn't like, look, there, there might be, I'm not like a genetic reductionist or something.
I'm not saying the reason it happens is because these people are just more prone to that.
There's probably a multitude of factors that lead to these disparate outcomes.
But that mentality is just poisonous because it's like, no, and it infects everything.
Yeah, and I mean, oh, go ahead, Zach.
Oh, yeah, I was just going to say a really specific example of that is with traffic speeding cameras.
I think it was done in DC.
It might have been the city.
I don't remember which city it was, but there was a study of it.
And the hand ring was about it had a disproportionate impact on minority communities.
More of them got the automated speed tickets.
But then it ignored the fact that the benefit, which was less traffic fatalities, also disproportionately affected the minority communities.
So it's very selectively applied in these criminal justice cases, especially, because often when there's a disproportionate effect on the criminal justice side, there's then also a disproportionate improvement in the quality of life or safety improvement.
And we have to be able to have like a rational discussion about this without being afraid of that being, you know, a beat over the head with that.
Sorry, Liz.
I think I was just going to say, I think I feel a little bit guilty of this because I recall, I think earlier in the pandemic, maybe in 20, early in 2021, for Reason writing a piece trying to make the sort of racial equity argument,
unfortunately, about how, you know, ideally something that maybe left libertarians can get behind this idea of, well, when you attempt to mandate shots, vaccines for all New Yorkers to be able to go out to restaurants and participate in society and be able to go to work, you are going to have this situation where, you know, we saw that vaccine uptake from Black New Yorkers was a lot lower than other groups.
And so you will have a situation where a lot of Black people are barred from existing in society and going to work in New York.
Is that what you want?
And I actually, I kind of regret having made that argument.
I thought it would be compelling to the left libertarians who I think were more sympathetic to vaccine mandates.
But I actually think that it was kind of the wrong argument to make because, and I wrote another piece, I believe, that was more based on the actual principle of the mandate being totally a total violation of bodily autonomy, completely discriminatory, a complete misuse and abuse of power by the state, which I think is the correct argument and the correct tact to take.
I dislike that I framed it in the racial equity terms.
You know, I think sometimes libertarians fall into this trap.
And I know because I myself have fallen into this trap before, but we fall into this trap of thinking, well, if we sort of use some of these racial equity arguments and talk about the actual impact of these policies, maybe more leftists will sort of understand where we're coming from and be persuaded and come to our side.
And I think increasingly, as the years go on, the more I realize that like, I don't think that that strategy works really.
And I also don't think that it is the correct place to be arguing from.
I think it really has to be a first principles type thing where it's like, no, vaccine mandates are bad because that is coercion on the part of the state, attempting to infringe on people's rights to put what they want into their bodies.
And I'm sorry, but we just have to oppose that at every turn.
Yeah.
Well, I agree with your point.
I mean, I'm sure I've fallen into that as well.
I mean, sometimes you're just almost trying to be like, well, look, by your own stated values, you should be against this.
So like, you know, keep your whole identity and just accept that like this is, this doesn't work with it.
And I certainly, you know, I attempt to do that when I can.
But it also, I do get your point that it's like, really, the problem with even like accepting that framework is then that it just leads to all types of crazy outcomes.
And, you know, like really, Thomas Sowell is so good on this.
I don't know if you guys read his book, was it Discrimination and Disparities, I believe was the title of it.
It was a more recent book that he put out maybe like five, six years ago.
But it's just so good where it just tears apart like all of these like arguments about like, you know, you look at like the amount of controls that you'd have to do to really get a sense of like this, just looking at the outcomes of this group or that group.
Like he goes through them in the book and like one of them was like the net worth of Asians compared to Latinos.
And then he goes, well, now let's just do a control for their age because like Asians are older than Latinos on average, which is not something I knew until reading this book.
And then you're like, oh, that explains like 80% of it.
Like 80% of it's like gone now because older people have higher net worths than younger people.
And I guess like Asian Americans tend to wait longer to have kids.
And you know what I mean?
And so it's just like, there's just all of these factors that then, and look, as people who believe in free markets, you're, there's never really been a system with any amount of liberty where you get equal outcomes across different groups.
And there's really no reason to expect that you ever would.
And there's so many different factors that go into it that it's almost impossible to pick them all apart.
Like even ones that aren't for any environmental or genetic reason, you know, like I guess it's environmental, but like Irish people are disproportionately firefighters.
Like why?
Tradition.
I don't know.
It's just what they've kind of gone into over the years.
It's not, and that doesn't need to be equalized for, like, whatever.
It's fine.
Let them do it.
As long as we're free, it should be fine.
It's also just so disrespectful to the individual, right?
Like it's collapsing all of the individualism and all of the distinctions from person to person, acting as if they're these groups that behave as a monolith.
I mean, I think we even see that with some of the political commentary following like Latino voters specifically, which was a huge theme following the Trump results where it's like, oh, turns out Latino voters tend to be a little bit more conservative than we realize.
Maybe the Democratic Party was wrong to be counting on them as this solid Democratic bloc forevermore.
And it's like, well, like, how dare you, like, how disrespectful?
I don't know.
If I were, I think if I were in one of these minority groups, which I guess technically I'm a woman, so I should be, I should be, I'm a white person.
That's a majority group, by the way, Liz.
This is true.
We actually have been moving more in the Trump voter, married women.
More in the Trump voter direction.
But no, I just find there to be something so profoundly disrespectful about acting as if all of these people behave as monoliths and think the same way based off of the same values.
I think that that's...
Latino is a very strange one.
Like, it's just like based on the language, but it's like across this huge geographic and cultural diversity.
I mean, you'd be more sensible to talk about, like, like, why don't we talk about like, how did the Italians, like, how did the Italian vote go in 2024?
It's, it's just, it's all becoming sort of outmoded at this point.
And I'm frankly glad to see it.
Well, also, it always just seems like, and I say, I guess maybe because I grew up in New York City, and so I was from a very, very early age exposed to lots of different groups of people.
It almost seems like it's like it seems like when you see people on like on the cable news talking about the Latino community, it's like you're like, have you ever met one member of this community?
Like, you think this is a community?
You think Cubans and Dominicans and Mexicans are a community.
Like, I mean, okay, I don't know.
Meet one of them.
Hang out with one of them because you'll find out pretty quickly it's not that.
And I got to say, man, it is so, one of the most fascinating dynamics since Trump's victory on election day is.
So, I mean, like, listen, obviously, on the face of it, you have these, the way they all look at it, like the black vote and the Latino vote, and every single one of them have just demonstrated they have no understanding of these communities whatsoever.
I mean, they literally told you Donald Trump is the most racist, you know, Hitlerian figure of modern American history.
And the real awful thing that makes him so racist is that he called Mexicans rapists and separated families and wanted to build a wall.
And then he turns around and gets the best results any Republican presidential candidate has ever gotten with black men and Latino men.
And then it's like the corporate media goes, well, the answer is that they're all sexist.
It's like they just have to pull it back.
I remember a friend of mine, very funny comedian, old friend of mine, this guy, Dave Kinney.
I remember we were talking about, it was during the 2012 election, and I was talking about how ridiculous it is that Mitt Romney kept calling Obama soft on terrorism.
We're like, Obama is like, at this point already, I mean, it was 2012.
It was before, I guess, they launched the war in Yemen, but he had already overthrown Gaddafi and had already started the civil war there in Syria, was talking about regime change.
And started drone war.
Like the guy who started the drone war.
The drone campaign in Pakistan had been raging on for years.
He had announced that the world was now all part of the war on terrorism, like everywhere in the world, had signed all types of crazy presidential powers into law.
Like was clearly a hawk.
He was more hawkish than George W. Bush.
And I was like, and this guy's still out here just calling him soft on defense.
And I just remember my buddy Dave Kenny, I thought it was so funny as he just goes out.
He goes, well, my card says weak on defense.
So that's what I'm going to go with.
You know, it's like they just, it's just like they have this script and it's the only thing that their brain can process.
And so the answer must be that like black men just really hate black women turns out.
And that's why they voted for Donald Trump.
It's like wild to see.
But Dave, this is why the super cuts will save us all, right?
Like, I don't know if you saw that super cut that Tom Elliott was circulating.
He's following the Hunter Biden.
One of the best followers on Twitter.
Yeah, he's the one.
I played it on the show yesterday.
It was awesome, though.
But like, so the viewers have seen it.
Like following the Hunter Biden party.
I mean, my God, you have nine solid minutes of every cable news pundit talking about how, you know, well, Biden really promised that he would never pardon his total miscreant son and over and over again.
And they're just, they're so fawning.
They're so credulous.
And they also just say the same thing over and over again.
And it's like, okay, I'm sorry.
Super cuts will be the thing that save us all because nobody wants that boring drone.
Like, I mean, these people are carbon copies of each other.
You know, it doesn't really matter what flavor it is, whether it's CNN or MSNBC, or even frankly, like I think Fox can be guilty of this at times, though not to the same degree as the others.
But there's just a certain amount of like this narrative takes hold.
And it's just, I mean, thank God for independent media.
Thank God for the super cuts.
I think people are waking up to this total fucking farce.
It's amazing.
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Democrat Candidate Platform Shifts00:16:00
All right, let's get back into the show.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
And I think that it's, and no, I mean, Fox News is totally guilty of it.
Like, that was one of the things that I thought was very refreshing about Tucker Carlson when he was on Fox News, which, you know, I really like Tucker a lot and I agree with a lot of his politics, not all of it.
But he would at least be different.
Like he'd have a different, his own take.
Whereas like, if you watch Fox News or MSNBC or CNN, I mean, the 1 p.m. hour completely agrees with the 2 p.m. hour, with the 3 p.m. hour, with the 4 p.m. hour.
It is over.
I mean, to the point that I could just do the show for you.
I could tell you what all of them have to say with that.
It's like, I don't even know.
Okay.
I don't know the schedule, like the rotation right now, but let me tell you what the 4 p.m. hour at MSNBC believes.
I don't know who I'm talking about right now, but climate, climate change is an existential threat.
And we live in a white supremacist society.
And you know what I mean?
Like you could go through, give me any, and I promise I'm right about this.
Like they do agree.
And same with Fox News.
Like you could do what every single one of them, you know, thinks.
And it's just, I don't know, man.
It's like, come on, dude.
If you have like an IQ over 90, isn't that just so boring?
But it's all going to die.
But here's the thing.
It's all going to die, right?
Because nobody gives a shit what Gensaki thinks.
Nobody wants to be streaming her clock record style into their eyeballs all day long.
It's just not interesting.
She's obviously a fucking mouthpiece of the administration, the outgoing administration, which was a total, complete failure.
She's not particularly compelling or entertaining.
Now we'll see whether Corine Jean-Pierre has the same type of slot handed to her, right?
But like nobody cares.
And I think that you look at the success of a show like Gutfeld, which I think is actually kind of what you're talking about.
Like you were talking about how Tucker Carlson used to play this role at Fox.
I think we're also kind of seeing this with Gutfeld, this disruption within the space of late night, the sort of political late night sector, where it's just like nobody cares about Samantha B or John Oliver.
But frankly, Guttfeld has really good ratings because there's something very fresh about what they're bringing.
It's a little bit more approachable.
It's a little bit more down to earth.
There's an unpredictable element to it.
Some of this is just because like, you know, I'm friends with Timp.
I think she does good work.
She just personally appeals to my taste.
I think she's hilarious.
And also both Guttfeld and Kat Timp are pretty damn libertarian.
But there's just a certain amount of like, I'm sorry, the proof is just in the numbers, right?
Like they're beating out all of their competitors in terms of ratings.
And to me, that just indicates that people are so hungry for something totally different.
They don't want more Gensaki.
They want more of Gutfeld and independent media.
The proof is also where the presidential candidates went during this election.
They went on podcasts.
They went on the Theovan.
Trump went on the Theovan and Rogan podcasts.
And those were like the most, some of the most talked about news events.
Like how many other interviews did these, I mean, Kamal Harris didn't do many others, but Trump did a ton of interviews.
How dare you desecrate the name of Alexander?
Yeah.
Yeah, I know you watched.
No, I watched the Brene Brown sit down.
I did.
I did watch clips of Default Her Daddy when I didn't actually make it through the whole thing, but I kind of had to for, you know, to do the show.
At least that's what I'm telling myself.
I had to.
It was for work.
No, but I think that's right, Zach.
And there is, you know, I was.
I was kind of having this argument with Mehdi Hassan off camera, who was a real, real nice, interesting person to talk to off camera.
Then the camera came on and I was like, Jesus Christ, this guy is.
Yes, we've all seen him on camera.
Oh, my God.
He was such a blowhard.
And like, I'm like, dude, I think I agree with half of what you're saying.
So like, just stop.
Anyway, but we had a really nice conversation off air.
And like, it just got into like, you know, like he, we were talking about like Justin Ramondo and anti-war.com in the 90s and all of this stuff.
And, and then we were talking about, um, it was like a few days after Trump had gone on Rogan.
And I was like, you know, honestly, I was like, I think the best thing that's going to come out of this is that when Donald Trump wins this election, it's going to be the deathblow to the whole corporate media structure.
I mean, it's just like the narrative already writes itself.
Like she refused to go on and he did.
And that carried him into the White House.
And then he was telling me like what a tragedy it is because he's like, well, listen, they don't, they're not giving him tough interviews and they're not grilling him about his policies.
They're just having conversations and then, you know, and so he was kind of arguing, well, no, we need this, this real journalist class to hold the politicians' feet to the fire.
And like my response to him was, I was like, but where is that?
What are you acting like?
Are you telling me that like if, you know, and me and Mehdi Hassan, I think, have a lot of fairly similar foreign policy views.
But I was like, do you think that if Donald Trump were to go on a CNN interview, they're going to ask him about like the OPCW whistleblowers who said that Assad didn't actually gas his own people and that none of the physical evidence really indicated that he did.
And then Trump went on a bombing campaign there afterward.
Like, did you get to, that'll never come up.
CNN has no interest in asking him that because they love that he bombed Syria.
You know what I mean?
Like that was one of the few things they really celebrated Donald Trump for.
They'll ask about January 6th for the umpteenth millionth time.
They'll ask a million gotcha questions.
And so from my perspective, I'm like, well, good.
At least let's wash all that away.
And now at least we have a standard of like candidates are expected to go do an unscripted three-hour show where you have to at least be somewhat unguarded and give like, I don't know.
I see this as just a clear improvement over the old order.
I don't know what your guys' thoughts are.
No, for sure.
And I think that it is after this election, there's no going back because if you, I don't know if you listened to the post-mortem that the Harris campaign did on Pod Save America, but they spent a good 20 minutes or so just talking about how big a fuck up it was for her not to have gone on Rogan and how this would have been just would have been something everyone was talking about.
And it would have been the one chance in this abbreviated campaign for people to people outside of her bubble to actually get to know her as a real person.
And yeah, he would have, you know, talk, you know, your journalists challenging people.
Like he would have challenged her, I think, on some things that nobody else was talking about.
So that was the risk for her.
But clearly, given the outcome, it's a risk that she should have taken.
And that if the Democratic Party does course correct, they will be taking in the future, I think.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, I don't know.
You know, I look in hindsight, it's easy to say it was a mistake for her not to go.
I'm not so sure.
Like, it's, it is planned.
Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think there was something about Kamala Harris that was there.
She had an intense desire to guard against you ever seeing who she really was.
And I don't know exactly why that is.
It's some type of insecurity about it.
I think that the truth is that Kamala Harris was not a person who has deeply held views about policies.
I just don't think there's there was ever anything that I thought like, oh, she really cared about this.
And she wanted to just kind of like, you know, repeat these, these canned lines about that that turned into a punchline about I'm from a middle class family and all this kind of nonsense.
Which is kind of bullshit, right?
Like, I'm sorry.
She was like the child of academics.
Like, it depends on how expensive your idea of middle class is, right?
But like the whole, oh, I worked at McDonald's to pay my bills.
It's like, okay, like, you know, as like a college job, right?
Like, fairly normal, by the way.
Like, none of this is like anything that makes me like, wow, what an awesome person.
I do think that there's there are certain candidates who really believe in something and have something to say.
That doesn't mean like that, you know, any of us agree with them necessarily, but they have convictions, you know, like Bernie Sanders has convictions and he has his thing that he wants to say as awful as most of it is.
But like he could go do a long form show.
I think there's certain candidates like Kamala Harris are just not built for that.
It's true in media too.
I mean, I remember, you know, there are, this is something I was always like kind of fascinated by in a weird way, but when you do like the cable news scene, like the panels and stuff, which I did for years, there are just people who are on cable news every day who like have nothing to say.
I mean, we do these segments that were so ridiculously short, you know, like everyone gets like 30 seconds to chime in.
And there'd be people who were like just basically filling it.
Like they didn't even have 30 seconds worth of stuff to say on it, let alone have like three hours worth of stuff to say.
And I do think that that's going to be a big part of this kind of reshuffling is that you're going to have to now, like the Democrats are going to have to figure out how they can run a candidate who could theoretically go on a Joe Rogan or a similar type platform.
And I do, you know, and also get over the, also get over the, oh, this is icky.
Like Bernie Sanders went on the Joe Rogan experience and then got attacked by his own side because Joe Rogan is a fascist or something.
That way of thinking is, I think, gone now.
But guys, isn't that just AOC?
Like, hate to say it.
But like, I'm sorry.
Isn't that just, she's about to turn 35.
She's technically going to be eligible this time around.
She's good on TikTok, but can she do three hours?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I think.
I think she can.
And that's what makes me so afraid, right?
Like, I don't think she's as much of an empty suit.
I mean, she's obviously super attractive and very good in the short form, very fiery, feisty.
But I also think her DNC speech this past year kind of showed that she's actually like, she's very talented at giving speeches.
She's very talented.
She gets people going in this longer format too.
And she also is, I don't know, I think she's expressed some amount of interest in like, hey, if you are somebody who voted for me and you voted for Donald Trump and you're a ticket splitter in this way, tell me why.
Like tell me about it.
And she's kind of interested in mining the commonality and whether there's almost like a part of Trump's populist approach that she can co-opt, right?
Like I, I'm a little afraid.
I think I, okay, first of all, I think she's going to run.
I don't, just all the, all the signal from her seems to be that she's, that's what's in her mind.
And including the taking her, uh, her pronouns out of her Twitter bio.
I did, I did think that was a very interesting little nugget.
Um, I don't think she should be underestimated.
I've been saying this for years.
There's something about, you know, it's like when people would be like Donald Trump, they'll be like, well, he had like three bankruptcies or something.
You're like, okay, listen, he, he oversaw multi-billion dollar companies.
Come on, that's a little bit impressive.
Like however you feel about the guy, you don't have to love everything about him.
The AOC made herself, first of all, she was a congresswoman at like 29 or something like that and made herself like maybe the most famous congresswoman in the country.
That's kind of impressive.
Like however you feel about her.
And there is, you know, look, like what pops into my mind is if you remember when she was first, when she first came on the scene, she really stumbled on the, when she got grilled over Israel-Palestine.
And I think, by the way, I actually kind of agreed with the first point that she made, but then she really did not know anything and couldn't back it up and fell apart, like really fell apart after just like a couple follow-up questions, like specifically, what do you mean?
And she's like, I don't know really what I mean.
So I do, I don't know.
I don't know how good she would do in that environment.
But I would say there's look, the Democrats have a short bench.
And look, it shows how bad their bench is that everybody for the last three years, as we were all speculating about who would actually end up being the nominee, because clearly Joe Biden is not going to have much of a chance of making it.
And we all obviously skipped over Kamala Harris because nobody thought she would be the cat, but everyone went to Gavin Newsom.
And like the obvious problem, as you guys kind of touched on earlier here, is you're like, yeah, but how could the governor of California run on his track record?
I mean, that just, and the reason people are going to him is they're like, because who else is there?
And Bernie Sanders is too old.
Elizabeth Warren totally lost her appeal with the left wing.
John Fetterman's a little too dumb, honestly.
It's too weird.
It's not going to be Fetterman.
If we're going by, you can handle yourself on Joe Rogan.
It's going to be John Fetterman.
I'm planning my flag there right now.
I mean, it's crazy.
You might be right.
I mean, I don't know.
You know, maybe it'll be someone entering from out of nowhere or someone who we're not.
It could be Whitmer.
It could be Shapiro.
Whitmer, I think maybe there's some possibility, but I just don't know whether she's quite charismatic enough.
It seems like there's been a little bit of Democratic schizophrenia where it's like Hillary needs to run on the essence of womanness and really needs to emphasize that she's a woman and that she would be the first woman president that should be historic.
Whereas with Harris, I think they somewhat smartly decided to be a little bit less narcissistic and a little bit less focused on like, oh, you know, I'm with her.
And we're like, okay, well, what exactly is she going to do for you?
I think they still ended up botching that Very terribly.
But I think they're sort of trying to figure out like, how is it that they ought to brand a lady candidate?
And it's not clear to me that Whitmer has a really big selling proposition beyond that.
I mean, her governance in Michigan has been all right if you look past some of the COVID stuff, which I'm not really willing to do.
Michigan's kind of an interesting place to attempt to govern.
And so, like, you know, I think that they could like, I'm just thinking from the Democratic strategist perspective, like maybe that's what they're thinking.
But I just ultimately think the AOC, they don't even have to emphasize any of the diversity stuff.
It's apparent that's sort of how she got her start.
She started off more progressive, and now it seems like she shifted more and more toward figuring out how to play nice with the rest of the party in a way that just is frankly pretty pragmatic and looks like somebody who's angling to win the total support of her whole party.
Well, the other, you know, the interesting kind of factor here too to me is that you've got, I mean, look, if you were going to say, look, Donald Trump's a one-term president going forward, one more term.
And okay, so after it, obviously, probably JD Vance would be positioned to perhaps take the mantle and run with it.
You have guys like Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for president this time and clearly has ambitions, you know, in the future.
But then there are these two figures in Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, who were both lifelong Democrats and yes, switched over and came here.
Now, they've both obviously have not been confirmed yet, but they've both been given major roles in the, you know, and I've assumed they would be in his administration in some way, but I am actually fairly surprised and quite pleasantly surprised that, I mean, he gave them both really important positions.
And if they have something tangible that they can point to, is it possible that they could run as Democrats?
Woke Culture War Backlash00:03:07
I mean, it seems a little unlikely to me.
It seems a little difficult to be a Trump supporter and then come back to the Democratic Party, but it is possible, particularly with Bobby Kennedy.
I think it is possible that if he has like tangibly great results that he can point to at the health department and can then kind of, you know, kind of replay on this, like he is Bobby Kennedy's son and Jack Kennedy's nephew.
And maybe there's a possibility there.
I don't know.
I mean, he did run as a Democrat at the beginning of this presidential cycle.
So you think he would be embraced by the Democratic Party overlords ever?
No.
No, no, no.
I mean, I think that's that's probably a deal breaker.
It would have to be for him to win that nomination, it would have to be like Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination in 2016, where you just overwhelm them with popular support to the fact that if you remember back in 2016, who is it?
Reines Priebus, who was the head of the RNC at the time, but they were floating out the idea of changing the rules at convention to try to stop Donald Trump from getting the delegates he needed.
Like they were trying to do whatever they could.
And it was just like, it wasn't 56% of the room wanted Donald Trump.
It was 96% of the, you know, like there was no, you just can't really fudge anything when it's, it's such overwhelming support.
So no, Bobby would have to do something like that in order to win.
Again, I'm not like predicting that happens.
I'm just kind of thinking on the spot here, like, where do the Democrats go?
The one thing I will say that I'm pretty solid in is that, okay, as you guys have probably seen already, the woke stuff is getting thrown under the bus because that is the only thing that the corporate media and the Democratic establishment is prepared to throw under the bus, which kind of reveals the whole thing in a way right there.
There was never really a deep conviction about this.
This was always something that they thought they could weaponize and get away with.
They can't throw under the bus like the deep-seated corruption in the Democratic, you know, the Democratic Party or the country or anything like that.
But it does, I do think that in this environment of like the long form three hour podcast, I just think wokeism can't.
It's like plants trying to survive without sunlight or something like that.
Like it just really can't work.
It's a, you, you really can't, you know, like if you think on your guys' show when you had Chase Oliver on and Liz, you asked him really just a few questions about the trans and the kids position, and it immediately just falls apart because there's really no argument behind any of it.
I think the woke stuff relies on shutting down conversation, calling someone a bigot if they don't agree with you.
But it's just going to be very, very, I mean, I don't know if you guys have ever seen, there's been a few people who have tried to really make woke arguments on Rogan's podcast.
It was, what was the guy, Adam Conover?
Is that his, it was Adam Ruins Everything?
Is that the guy?
Yeah, yeah.
Adam Conover.
Yes.
So he tried to make it, and I don't know, you know the clip I'm talking about, Zach?
Libertarianism vs Culture Wars00:12:47
I do.
I mean, it went really bad for him because there's just like, there's just kind of no defending that.
And so I do think that stuff is going to have to be abandoned, which is what's interesting about AOC taking the pronouns out of her bio.
Like it's almost kind of like, okay, four years out is enough time to be like, if I do that now, maybe there'll almost be no real memory of it by 2028.
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Okay, let's get back into the show.
Yeah, I mean.
Oh, I ended up getting a lot of heat for the Chase Oliver back and forth, which was kind of funny to me.
And I think it's a little bit, it's not quite just that these types of views fall apart upon questioning.
There was also, I think, this very palpable sense when speaking with him that he was attempting to portray his positions as sort of the appropriate libertarian positions, where of course this should be fully within the realm of, you know, the decisions made by doctors and parents in consultation with the children.
And, you know, there ought to be no safeguards to prevent against, oh, I don't know, like really young children going on puberty blockers and moving in the surgery direction and receiving surgery as minors, which is totally different than what I believe.
But there was this interesting sense that I got from him, which is that he was almost this like attempting to represent a type of libertarianism that I find to be very tired.
It feels like the libertarianism of quite a few years ago before some of these culture war issues really came online and on stage to the degree that they have, where it just felt sort of retro, this very like live and let live type thing, which like, yes, I mean, I'm a libertarian.
Of course, I believe live and let live, but it's also fairly easy for me to look at areas where the culture has really attempted to, I think, in my view, just like do harm toward children.
And there's a lot of parents who have been swept up in this crazy.
And I think it's libertarianism doesn't exactly give you a super clear-cut solution as to when safeguards ought to be in place to ensure that children's lives aren't ruined by parents who are co-opted by this really messed up ideology, which isn't to say that there aren't cases of like authentic, I don't know, gender dysphoria.
And I think it's totally fine for adults to make that decision.
But there's just a certain amount of it.
It felt like he was trying to act like this is libertarian gospel.
And this is what good, true libertarians believe.
And it's like, well, I don't know, man.
I think you've lost a lot of us on this one.
I believe I don't want the state to be all powerful and able to trump parental rights.
And I think there's very complex questions.
It gets very thorny about what sort of power the parent ought to have and what sort of power the state ought to have.
But it's just very clear to me that this is an area where a terrible ideology has really made a lot of parents believe in that they're doing something very benevolent toward their kid, which I really don't think they are.
It's very concerning to me.
It's a very difficult, it's a difficult situation to kind of extrapolate from libertarianism 101 what the correct answer is.
It's not totally clear to me, but his answer just felt kind of condescending where it was just like, wait, look, I completely agree, but especially when this ideology has so clearly been pumped through these essentially government programs.
I mean, like, like all of college is a government program.
I mean, the whole thing is like they're all either like directly funded with taxpayer dollars or the whole system is propped up by government issued loans.
You know what I mean?
That would never be issued.
I mean, first they were government-backed loans and now they're just issued directly from the government.
And so when you have that, you're like, well, what is that exactly?
I mean, it's certainly not an organic market phenomenon.
So it's not exactly clear.
But also, I mean, the thing to me in your questioning was then when Chase went off on his thing where he said his niece or something like that, like wanted to get a tattoo at 16 and we were like, no, you got to wait till 18.
And you're like, wait a minute.
So are you, are you actually reduced to arguing that it is a more significant, irreversible decision for a 16-year-old to get an ankle tattoo than for a 12-year-old to like suppress puberty?
I've gotten 20 fucking tattoos and I haven't chopped my breasts off.
I'm sorry.
These things are not anywhere close to comparable.
And it's kind of insulting to me to claim that they are.
Yes.
I mean, like, I'm sorry.
And like, and by the way, I agree with the 18 for tattoos.
Okay.
But also, whatever.
But I can also say like, no, a 16-year-old getting a tattoo is so much less important.
Like, obviously, I mean, come on.
Like, there's also not an entire activist class that has been focused on trying to tell you that, you know, if you don't get a tattoo, you might kill yourself, right?
Like, there's the.
Well, I, yes.
And I debated that.
I think that that's kind of consequential here, too.
I debated a left libertarian who, like, I don't have anything against the guy, but I debate.
He's a bright guy.
But I debated a left libertarian on trans issues once.
And he said at one point, he was like, listen, if kids are telling you this is how they feel, then you know that's real.
Like that's organic and coming from these kids.
And my response was like, oh, let me ask you a question I already know the answer to.
Do you have kids?
And he was like, no.
And I was like, exactly, because nobody who actually has kids thinks that kids are not malleable and that all of the ideas that come from them are just truly organic and came out of them.
Like, it's one of the things I think that you realize when you have kids, and that it's a very awesome power that you're not supposed to wield in a tyrannical way, is that you can just totally mind fuck your child.
It's like a really, you know, like there is almost in some ways, there's no more awesome power that you'll ever have over anyone because it's just you can totally manipulate them.
You just have this advantage of having a fully developed brain where they don't.
And there's something where it's like such a betrayal for you to use that in an injust way.
And like, no, I'm sorry, but when you see these 12-year-olds who are like, I identify as a girl, and also so does my, so do my two brothers.
And my mom just happens to be a trans activist.
You're like, you know, I'm sorry.
I'm not buying this.
Go ahead, Zach.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think the reason Liz and I both are not only willing, but eager to engage in those kind of topics is because they can really derail libertarian, like libertarianism, basically.
Because when you're talking about kids, or we were earlier talking about homeless people in the throes of addiction, or you're talking about severe mental illness, people, severe mental illnesses, these are all cases where it complicates, you know, purist libertarian theory because these are not wholly rational actors.
And so somebody is making a decision on behalf of a child.
We want it to usually be the parent, although the parent can make an abusive decision where we would say, in that case, yes, that is the role of the state to protect people against abuse.
And when that gets, when there's confusion about that, it makes it harder to make the case in when we are talking about adults, when we are talking about protecting someone who just wants to, they're an adult, they're fully rational in a sense, and they want to live as the other sex.
One of our upcoming episodes is with Brianna Wu, who is a leftist journalist, trans woman who now is over it.
She's over the left.
She over being trans, to be clear.
She's still trans.
I still feel trans before going.
No.
Although we had her podcasting co-host on TOF, who does regret transitioning or has at times regretted transitioning.
So that does happen.
That does happen.
But now she's kind of stuck where she is because she's gone so far.
But Brianna basically watched what happened with this election and the role that the trans issue played in it, where the Trump campaign was spending tens of millions of dollars in the final stretch running those ads saying Kamala stands with they, them, Trump stands with you.
And it was like testing off the charts for with the voters.
And she's like, we are, people like me are going to lose it all because we're fighting these battles over children, over playing in sports leagues where it's not appropriate and going into locker rooms where with anatomy that people don't want to see.
We need to like choose our battles a little more wisely here and realize when there has been overreach.
And I think to the same, in the same vein, libertarians need to think about that.
We need to think about when.
How are we applying our principles consistently, but also, are we sort of stretching in a way that just undermines everything and makes it impossible to sell anything?
That's such a good point, man.
And and, by the way, this was uh.
You know, I did a debate.
If anybody wants to watch, I did a debate on uh, just asking questions over the immigration topic.
Yeah, and this has always been one of my big like.
I have a whole argument about why I don't think open borders is the correct libertarian position.
But even aside from that, that like you just said it, Zach, in such a great way.
Like my, my essential thing is always like, guys, we will be laughed out of the room and never heard from again if you approach the American people with our answer is right now under current situations to just open the border.
Like that's it.
I mean, 100% of the right wing will never listen to you and 90% of the left wing will never listen to you.
And there just is something like that.
And, you know, with the, I've always said for years, you know, there's always like this profound nurture versus nature debate in psychology and sociology.
And any side, like on the hard right, you'll find people who reduce everything to nature.
So, you know, genetic determinism or, you know, demographics equals destiny or, you know, the, you know, international jewelry or like whatever the root, the, the complete argument is in genetics.
And then on the furthest on the left, you find this, um, like the polar opposite, that everything is just environment and there's no constraints of biological reality.
And I'm just saying, anytime, if you ever go full nurture or full nature, you're going to end up in a really bad place, like in a really bad place where your argument falls apart because to deny the other force is just insane.
Closing Thoughts and Subscribe00:01:34
And like, there's not, you could, by the way, if you're an adult person who was born a man and wants to live your life as a woman, I, as I've always said, you should own your, you own your body and you should be able to choose what you do with it.
And generally speaking, extra libertarian belief, don't be a dick to that person.
She shouldn't be a dick in life.
That's not a good thing.
So it's a rule I think I violated with Chase Oliver.
So I wish I'd been a little nicer.
Listen, I've violated the rule plenty of times myself, but it's still a good rule to aspire toward.
But to sit here in a conversation and then you're going to say to me, like, trans women are women.
And it's like, okay, come on.
Like, what claim are you actually making here?
Like, are you actually telling me that this isn't a man living their life as a woman?
This is a woman.
No, I'm sorry.
However, any of us feel about it, objective biological realities are still there.
Listen, I got to wrap up because we're over time here.
Liz, Zach, thank you guys so much for coming on.
Guys, please go check out their show.
Subscribe to Just Asking Questions if you haven't already.
We should definitely do this again.
But guys, if anything else you guys want to plug, please feel free.
We're just so grateful.
Thank you, Dave.
We can't wait to be working on our show.
Yeah, really grateful.
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