March 18, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| All right, so as you guys know, I've spent a lot of time on the Rubin Report talking about the current status of the left. | ||
| As I've said many times, I believe the regressive left, the group of people who use illiberal tactics to silence those defending liberal principles, to be the left's version of the Tea Party. | ||
| If we don't rein them in now, then the left in America will end up as fractured as the right. | ||
| Evidence of the fractured right is everywhere, with basically every mainstream conservative actively trying to stop the party's front runner, Donald Trump. | ||
| Has there ever been a time when a frontrunner on either side was so hated by his own party's establishment? | ||
| Not that I know of. | ||
| And interestingly, this mess is actually of the GOP's own doing. | ||
| They didn't see the rise of the Tea Party until it was too late, which set the GOP establishment against their own base. | ||
| Ironically, had the Tea Partyers been willing to negotiate with anyone, perhaps the Republican Party would be in a better state than the ideological mess it's in right now. | ||
| That didn't happen though, and when you couple a fractured right with the rise of the regressive left, who refuse to talk honestly about issues like Islamic extremism and immigration, we now have the rise of Donald Trump. | ||
| Before I continue, let me say a couple positive things about Donald Trump, believe it or not. | ||
| I probably should have issued a trigger warning there, but get in your safe space, here we go. | ||
| Alright, he has absolutely exposed our robotic politicians who are bought and sold by campaign contributors openly mocking Hillary Clinton for showing up to his wedding because he gave her a donation. | ||
| In many ways his message of a broken system corrupted by money is exactly the same thing that Bernie Sanders is saying. | ||
| Trump has also talked about America's awful trade deals with China and Mexico, and promised to negotiate better ones. | ||
| And actually there's every reason to believe that he would be good at this. | ||
| After all, making deals is what he has built his empire on. | ||
| People actually attack Trump for having his Trump brand ties made in Mexico, but that actually proves his point about our bad trade deals. | ||
| He's making things to sell where cost is cheap and profit will be maximum. | ||
| As an American businessman, he's doing what's best for his business by making ties in Mexico. | ||
| It's not the fault of the businessman who uses the system, that's the fault of the politicians who set up the bad deals which enable it. | ||
| Trump has also brought the issue of immigration to the front and center of the debate. | ||
| He says he'll build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. | ||
| While I think that Mexico actually may end up building the wall and paying for it to keep Americans out if he becomes president, he makes a serious populist point with the wall. | ||
| Trump always says we either have a country or we don't. | ||
| A wall in and of itself isn't racist. | ||
| It may not be wise, and it may not address the real problems, but when he talks in simple language like that, he scores points with many voters. | ||
| Having a secure border shouldn't be a partisan issue, but because of our politically correct climate, it's become one. | ||
| You can be for better border security and still not be a bigot. | ||
| That shouldn't be too hard to understand. | ||
| Finally, he has also scored points with many people when talking about the spread of Islamic extremism. | ||
| While Trump never takes the time to make the distinction between Islamic extremism and the average Muslim person, he scores points by even talking about Islamic extremism in the first place because the left in this country refuses to do so. | ||
| This failure on the left to tackle the topic of Islamic extremism honestly by linking doctrine with action actually helps feed those like Trump who come in with easy answers with no nuance or real understanding. | ||
| Trump sees an opening for an easy answer here like banning all Muslims from entry to the country and he runs with it. | ||
| Turn on any cable news channel to see the list of bad things about Donald Trump. | ||
| We've heard them all before, so I'm actually going to take a different road here. | ||
| Let's talk about what the real threat of a Donald Trump presidency is. | ||
| Donald Trump is a businessman making business decisions, but he's also a reality TV host winning the world's biggest reality TV show. | ||
| Over the course of his presidential campaign, Trump has made it clear that he will say anything, literally anything, just to be elected. | ||
| He uses the media's need for clicks and views to fuel his rise, knowing full well the more outlandish his statements are and the more clownish he acts, the more free TV time he's going to get. | ||
| He has mastered the age-old adage, any publicity is good publicity. | ||
| People like Trump for his lack of political correctness, but it's not what he says that they're responding to, it's just that he's saying nothing and everything at the same time without sounding like a career politician. | ||
| Is he really against gay marriage now, even though he used to be for it? | ||
| Is he really against abortion now, even though he used to be pro-choice? | ||
| I have no idea what's in his heart, but I do know what's in his head. | ||
| He wants to be the contestant who doesn't get fired on the season finale. | ||
| Many people in this country want to feel like America is winning again, and Trump has wisely used this notion to fuel his campaign. | ||
| But the question is, what does electing Trump actually mean? | ||
| If he wins, does anyone think he'll actually adhere to the Constitution? | ||
| Will he care about due process or respect the three branches of government? | ||
| Will he sue reporters who investigate the White House? | ||
| Will we get into a war over a mistaken retweet? | ||
| His gruff language and loose use of facts are only the micro problem here. | ||
| The macro problem is that nobody really knows what this guy stands for other than winning. | ||
| And that's the real risk of a Trump presidency. | ||
| We have no idea what the country will look like after we elect someone who cares more about his own rules than the law of the land. | ||
| You know, he says Starbucks will put Merry Christmas back on cups when he's president. | ||
| Does he know that the president doesn't get to decide what a private company does with their products? | ||
| As a businessman, yeah, he does know. | ||
| But as a presidential candidate, he doesn't care. | ||
| If winning at all costs for a temporary feel-good moment is good enough for you, then by all means, you should vote for Donald Trump. | ||
| But don't be fooled. | ||
| You're being sold a bill of goods by someone who only cares about making the deal. | ||
| When the product sucks, don't expect to get a refund. | ||
| My guest this week is the author of Guerrilla Mindset, a lawyer, a tweeter, and a free speech activist, Mike Cernovich. | ||
| Welcome to the show. | ||
| Thanks, Dave, for having me on. | ||
| It's good to have you here. | ||
| We've done this in 140 characters. | ||
| I say that to a lot of my guests, but the whole nature of our relationship is 140 characters. | ||
| And are you going to be able to expand on the 140? | ||
| Yeah, I have a podcast, too. | ||
| I can run my mouth, so we'll see who outtalks each other. | ||
| Alright, there you go. | ||
| So, let's start off, just so, for the people that don't know you, tell me a little bit about your history, where you come from, and what got you to write the book, and then we'll dive into that. | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| So I grew up a small-town kid, flyover state, which everybody hates now because we're all redneck, backwoods, you know, hateful, bigoted people. | ||
| Which flyover state was that? | ||
| Illinois. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I grew up in the middle of Illinois, nothing but cornfields and soybean farms. | ||
| And I realized, ah, I don't really like this. | ||
| I want to do something more with my life. | ||
| Growing up, I was also kind of a fat kid, got bullied a lot, got picked on. | ||
| Then I got into martial arts and started beating up the people who bullied me and created that little conflict cycle. | ||
| Got that out of my system. | ||
| That's the bully dream, right? | ||
| I guess that's the bullied kid dream is that you get bullied for a while, learn some martial arts, you kick some ass. | ||
| Well, I got back at everybody but one guy, but he went to prison before I could get to him. | ||
| So I was actually home when I was 22, and I saw this guy went into the bathroom, and I was gonna go and just slam his head in. | ||
| My friend goes, what is wrong with you, man? | ||
| This happened when you were like 13. | ||
| You're 22 now, you know? | ||
| I was like, yeah, okay. | ||
| Got that out of my system. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because a lot of people do seem to repeat the things that happened to them when they were 13. | ||
| Like if you were bullied, they then become the bullies as adults. | ||
| Right, and that's probably why I hate bullies so much now. | ||
| You realize these people are trying to ruin lives and it's a bad vibe. | ||
| When you're a kid now, I don't really like calling adults being bullied. | ||
| Okay, you're an adult. | ||
| You should know how to, or you're being online bullied. | ||
| Okay, you should learn how to kind of chill out a little bit. | ||
| But I don't like a lot of the online bullying stuff that goes on in terms of, oh, you tweeted something wrong. | ||
| Let's ruin this guy's life. | ||
| Let's get him fired. | ||
| In many ways, let's get a guy fired over a tweet is probably worse than throwing a kid in a locker room because that guy has a family, has his livelihood. | ||
| Or what happened with, say, Justine Sacco. | ||
| You know, you can't find a job and you're like, well, maybe that is even a little bit worse than what happens. | ||
| Wait, so that's a little bit of a sidebar, but just in her case, you want to just lay that out, because it was really amazing. | ||
| Nobody really knew who this woman was. | ||
| She put out one tweet. | ||
| Yeah, Justine Sacco is the best example of the outrage culture. | ||
| She was a nobody, 120 followers, all of her friends, and she tweeted, heading to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. | ||
| Oh wait, I can't, I'm white. | ||
| LOL, right? | ||
| Bad joke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just stupid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She was a hipster. | ||
| She was actually trying to be ironic. | ||
| And she gets on a plane for Africa. | ||
| Back then you'd have Wi-Fi on the plane to Africa. | ||
| And she's in the air. | ||
| And I shouldn't laugh. | ||
| It's actually a tragic story. | ||
| They start a hashtag. | ||
| Has Justine landed yet? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody now hates Justine Sacco. | ||
| She's evil. | ||
| Nobody said, hey, you know, what'd you mean by this? | ||
| You know, what's going on? | ||
| And to be clear, nobody really knew who this person was. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So this was just the perfect example of the internet going crazy. | ||
| Yeah, she was a nobody. | ||
| She wasn't a public figure. | ||
| She didn't work in tech. | ||
| What happened, probably one of her coworkers saw it and wanted to do a little backstabbing. | ||
| It was somebody made personal drama, international news. | ||
| Everybody went after her. | ||
| And it touches on so many themes where, well, I mean, that's a woman. | ||
| She was getting rape threats. | ||
| Are the people, the social justice warriors, the activists, If you're leading a sort of hate mob on a woman who gets rape threats, well, wait, isn't that what you say I do? | ||
| But I've never done that. | ||
| I would never do that. | ||
| Okay, so let's hold off on some of the social justice stuff first. | ||
| And by the way, I want to go on the record, I did not jump on that Twitter bandwagon because I remember thinking, this is crazy. | ||
| This is just some person who said some stupid thing. | ||
| So I can't be outraged by somebody I never heard of until I saw this little tweet. | ||
| But a little bit back to your history and then we'll move on. | ||
| Yeah, so then I was deciding on where to go to law school. | ||
| I looked at a map. | ||
| I read the data. | ||
| The data says you're going to live within 50 miles of where you go to law school, statistically speaking. | ||
| And I go, well, if I go to law school in Illinois, that means my life will be a little strip on Illinois. | ||
| I said, I'll move to California. | ||
| Kind of too big of a Okay, language. | ||
| Too afraid to go live in LA, to go to UCLA. | ||
| I was too big of a pussy to go live in LA. | ||
| I'm a small town kid. | ||
| I'm driving on the 10 for the first time. | ||
| Like, oh shit, you know, how do people, how do people drive in this traffic? | ||
| But I figured I could go to Pepperdine. | ||
| It's in Malibu. | ||
| And then I could kind of visit LA as I wanted to. | ||
| So Malibu has a very small town vibe. | ||
| Best of both worlds. | ||
| Yeah, and you're right on the beach. | ||
| It's a pretty sweet operation over there at Pepperdine. | ||
| Yeah, but you know how it is. | ||
| Wherever you are, you don't appreciate what you have. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The first couple of days, it's magical, majestic. | ||
| After that, you're just looking through law books anyway. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, so you became a lawyer, but then really what put you into the public space was you wrote your book, The Gorilla Mindset. | ||
| And it's very much, I'll let you explain it, but my main takeaway is sort of that you control your destiny, is sort of the takeaway that I got. | ||
| But what made you write it, and do you think that's a fair assessment? | ||
| Yeah, you define within certain confines your own reality. | ||
| You're Dave Rubin. | ||
| I'm Mike Cernovich. | ||
| Your life is your life. | ||
| My life is my life. | ||
| But we're going to have different experiences in terms of how you live on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| But we got the same drama. | ||
| We're pissed off at people. | ||
| We don't feel like we got recognition. | ||
| We wonder if we're going to lose our jobs. | ||
| How am I going to make money doing this? | ||
| What if I ask that girl or guy out on a date? | ||
| What if they think I'm dumb? | ||
| I'm afraid to go on TV because people think I look stupid, I sound funny, what if I say the wrong thing? | ||
| We all got the same problems. | ||
| You know, how am I going to pay my bills? | ||
| So, ultimately you want to control your thoughts, you want to control your emotions, learn how to not lose it, essentially. | ||
| And the reason I wrote it is because I went through a lot of drama You know, you grew up poor, now you're in the big city, you've got to figure it out. | ||
| You see this in a lot of writing, actually, where people tend to be ashamed of their upbringing. | ||
| So, instead of saying, hey, I grew up a poor kid in a small town, but hey, here I am now, you want to say, yeah, I hate rednecks, because you want to get away from that, right? | ||
| So you kind of overreact. | ||
| Well, why is that? | ||
| Well, it's because your mindset, it's the way you're framing your background. | ||
| So what we tend to do is we think, well, I grew up this poor, dumb kid. | ||
| What will I ever do with my life? | ||
| But you can just say, well, I mean, I grew up a poor, dumb kid. | ||
| I'm here. | ||
| I made it somehow. | ||
| I've learned and I've grown. | ||
| And I start to take these background experiences and create a new future out of those. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting the way we sort of fetishize being the recipient of bullying or being the recipient of sort of anything bad. | ||
| So I think for me, I was bullied as much as I bullied other kids. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like I really, I had some kids that I probably bullied. | ||
| I don't like the word either. | ||
| It just, it's so played out. | ||
| It doesn't even mean anything, but I probably treated some kids pretty shitty. | ||
| And the kids that were higher on the social thing in high school treated me pretty shitty. | ||
| And here I am. | ||
| So, so big wheel, big deal. | ||
| But we have this idea somehow that if you're always on the recipient end of it, that somehow you're better. | ||
| And that's a really bizarre thing. | ||
| And I guess that goes to the heart of your book. | ||
| You have to be the one to say, well, I'm not going to be bullied anymore, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, we ultimately define our realities based on other people, and there's a lot of reasons for that, and I teach you don't do that. | ||
| So, for example, shame. | ||
| We've all been ashamed. | ||
| Oh my God, I'm embarrassed. | ||
| Well, why? | ||
| Oh, some complete stranger thinks you're an idiot. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Well, why are you letting that other person define your own reality? | ||
| Which is what you do when you let people shame you, attack you, sort of bully you. | ||
| You're now saying, well, I'm going to let other people control how I feel. | ||
| And then you start to think, well, why would I let other people control how I feel? | ||
| How does this make any sense in my life? | ||
| And then you start to reframe that kind of stuff. | ||
| Yeah, so that concept is very much in line with the online culture, and I know you're a big part of this because I see you fighting with people online, you're calling people out, people are attacking you, I mean you're really in it, in the sort of like back and forth piece of it. | ||
| So I guess the way you deal with that is that you just don't take any of it too personally, right? | ||
| You can't take him personally and you always have to, you always got to take a negative, reframe it as a positive. | ||
| It sounds cliche, but you could say, oh my God, I have all these people saying mean things about me. | ||
| Or you could just say, wow, this is great. | ||
| How the hell do these idiots that I've never heard of hear about me? | ||
| Well, I must be doing something right. | ||
| I must be making impact. | ||
| So you can let criticism define you. | ||
| Madonna said this once, actually. | ||
| She goes, if I go into a room and there are 100 people and 99 people like me, and one person doesn't, that one person who doesn't like me, that's what sticks with me. | ||
| And we tend to be hardwired as human beings to let criticism bother us. | ||
| Which makes sense, because if we're living in a small tribe, You know, 150 people there. | ||
| If five guys don't like you, you know, they might take you out on a hunting trip and kill you, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we're not in that environment anymore. | ||
| We're in a big global environment. | ||
| I've even written about, you know, you just have to niche. | ||
| If 99% of the world hates me, 1% like me, dude, I would be filthy rich. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| You know, I would love to have 99% of the world hate me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, that always reminds me of a thing from Howard Stern's book and in the movie when they're talking about the executives are like, you know, the people that like you watch you for four minutes and the people that hate you listen to you for three hours or something. | ||
| Well, my haters will dredge up posts that I wrote, maybe when I was in a bad mood or whatever, and I'll, I don't even remember this. | ||
| Like, how do you guys find this stuff? | ||
| Or they'll, they'll, like, confront me with things. | ||
| I don't even, I'm like, wow, you guys are great. | ||
| You're, you're pulling up these archives that I don't even remember. | ||
| Right, so that's a good transition for everything I think that's going on in the country right now. | ||
| Because everyone's outraged all the time, we're all offended all the time, we're looking for people to attack all the time. | ||
| In comes Donald Trump into this thing. | ||
| Now you're a Donald Trump supporter, right? | ||
| Yeah, I endorse Donald Trump. | ||
| Alright, you've endorsed Donald Trump. | ||
| I believe you're the first Trump supporter that I've had on the show, so congratulations on that. | ||
| I shared my feelings at the beginning about Trump, but before I give you more of my feelings, so give me why is this working for Trump? | ||
| It's working. | ||
| Like him or not, this is working. | ||
| Nobody's debating that. | ||
| Okay, so when you have a reaction, you're gonna have a counter-reaction. | ||
| Here's the world we live in. | ||
| You're a liberal. | ||
| You're a reasonable guy, okay? | ||
| That's not most liberals. | ||
| That's just not. | ||
| Sadly, I'm with you on that. | ||
| That's just reality. | ||
| We've now taken God, who's dead. | ||
| We don't have religion. | ||
| We now have the religion of political correctness. | ||
| The liberals have now turned it to a religion where, you know, I can say, well, you believe these things. | ||
| Boy, I think you're wrong. | ||
| Maybe if we talk about it, I'll just get through to you. | ||
| Well, now, I don't even look at how you live. | ||
| You make a bad tweet, you're evil. | ||
| You think something about this, you're a bad person. | ||
| I always use an example of, You know, like, a lot of people have Facebook drama by people who knew him. | ||
| And this happened recently. | ||
| So we know this guy. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| He's actually liberal. | ||
| All these liberal friends. | ||
| And he posted, you know, guys, I just think it's weird that Bruce Jenner now, like, is a woman and is Caitlyn Jenner. | ||
| I just think it's really weird that you would want to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And his friends were like, oh, my God, you're transphobic big. | ||
| I can't believe you said this. | ||
| They were texting back channel. | ||
| I thought this was a good person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is a guy who you've only known to be a decent guy for all time. | ||
| He says something that probably a lot of people are actually thinking privately. | ||
| Like, there's something... I don't want to say weird. | ||
| I know trans people. | ||
| Trans people are great people. | ||
| I have obviously no issue with them. | ||
| But somebody could say that and that in and of itself doesn't make them a bigot. | ||
| I'm weird. | ||
| You're weird. | ||
| Why do you want to be on TV? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Why do I have a podcast? | ||
| Why do I troll the internet? | ||
| Because I was bullied when I was 5 and I'm trolling now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| It's this concept that if you live a lifestyle that is deviant. | ||
| Deviant doesn't necessarily always mean bad. | ||
| Weird doesn't mean... | ||
| A moral judgment. | ||
| It just means, wow, that's out of the realm of my experience, right? | ||
| A lot of people saw what I did early on before I caught on. | ||
| I was like, no, trust me. | ||
| I know what I'm doing. | ||
| But they're like, dude, you're on Twitter. | ||
| You're just a maniac. | ||
| What are people going to think? | ||
| And I go, just trust me. | ||
| But if people said, Mike, I think that's weird. | ||
| I think that's a waste of time. | ||
| Maybe you're mentally ill. | ||
| I would say, eh. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I don't think you're a bad person for making that judgment. | ||
| So, a lot of times we want to now think everything is a character attack, when ultimately you're just saying, well, this is fucking weird. | ||
| I don't really understand it. | ||
| And the way you do when somebody doesn't understand something, you say, well, actually, I mean, is gender binary? | ||
| What about, you know, brain? | ||
| But then you get into other issues, too, where you say, well, I thought gender is a social construct and there is no male-female brain. | ||
| But if there's no male brain and no female brain, then how can I be a male body with a female brain? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And it's hard to extrapolate all that on Twitter, so instead people are just like, you're a transphobia. | ||
| You're an evil person, you're a bigot, you hate everybody. | ||
| So the interesting thing, and then we'll get back to Trump, with the trans situation is that But, you know, Caitlyn Jenner now, people are turning, the left is turning on her now because she said that she's supporting Ted Cruz. | ||
| And I watched, I've never watched any of that show, but I did watch the little five minute part where she was sort of defending why she's a Republican and, you know, they're debating and the people, you know, she's arguing with these housewives or whatever these people are that have no idea what they're talking about. | ||
| But I've seen now people on the left turning on her because she has a different political view. | ||
| So two months ago she was a hero to them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Think differently politically, so now you're evil. | ||
| There's a danger there. | ||
| Yeah, and I'll confess that I did watch the show for research. | ||
| We'll call it research. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| And Caitlin's position was, hey, we're $7 trillion in debt. | ||
| Yeah, we should be able to use the same restrooms, but come on. | ||
| If the country falls, everybody's gone. | ||
| You know, so it isn't even that the views are wrong. | ||
| The views are just, hey, I'm focused on bigger issues. | ||
| You know, what happens to a country if our economy collapses? | ||
| Well, you're going to have a lot bigger worries than, can you use a unisex bathroom? | ||
| But people, you know, they don't want to see it. | ||
| So what happens now is you get fixated on this marginal issue, this issue that only affects a real small group of people, and then you're not allowed to focus on any other issues or else you're evil. | ||
| So yeah, Caitlyn would say, well, I support Ted Cruz. | ||
| Ted Cruz is wrong about this, but hey, we got really bigger issues, and that makes you a bad person. | ||
| Right, so for the person that loves identity politics, this is like a real disconnect for them, right? | ||
| Because they're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're trans, so the thing that you're supposed to care about most is trans, and here you have someone saying, Well, actually, I care more about the economy, or security, or whatever it is. | ||
| And identity politics, as I always say, whittles us down to the point where if you jump out of that little box, people start freaking out. | ||
| Well, here's what everybody says now. | ||
| Well, as a white, straight, cis man, my experience is this. | ||
| Well, as a gay man, my experience is this. | ||
| So we've taken this sort of personal narrative and now we treat that as like absolute reality. | ||
| There is no issue other than your narrow slice of experience. | ||
| And I think that is not, I don't think it's a fun way to live. | ||
| I don't know why anybody would want to live that way. | ||
| It's a very narcissistic narrow view on the world where what you want to do is you want to think, well there's a lot of us. | ||
| We live in a pluralistic society. | ||
| We got gay issues, Muslims, blacks, whites, everybody else. | ||
| Why don't we just figure out how to get along because we're stuck here together? | ||
| Right, and it's almost as if all of those groups that you just cited have people within them who think different things than the bigger group. | ||
| I don't know why that's such a revolutionary thought, but it seems to be for a lot of people. | ||
| So wait, we started here with Trump. | ||
| I don't know how we got over there. | ||
| So okay, so you take all of this social justice stuff and this fear of saying what you think and all that, and that basically has led us to Trump, right? | ||
| Right, because Trump says anything. | ||
| Here's what people say. | ||
| Why do you like Trump? | ||
| Because he'll say what's on his mind. | ||
| And then people go, well, we say what's on our mind when we tell you that if you're a white man, you hate everybody, you know, you're bigoted. | ||
| It's like, yeah, and now you have the counterculture. | ||
| The counterculture is, well Trump is just gonna say whatever's on his mind, that's counter to your narrative, and people like that, people respect it. | ||
| Okay, so I'm with you on that portion of that piece of Trump. | ||
| I understand, I hate political correctness, the whole show has been devoted to fighting it, so I understand that portion of it with Trump, but I think you just said something interesting. | ||
| He'll say anything. | ||
| And that's where I see the biggest problem. | ||
| This guy, people keep saying, oh, I like him because he'll say anything, but he's also saying nothing at the same time. | ||
| He's taken every position on everything. | ||
| You watch him in the debates. | ||
| He stands now for things he used to be against. | ||
| In many ways, he's actually for big government. | ||
| He's certainly not a conservative, all those things. | ||
| So is that enough for you? | ||
| That's the part that I just don't understand. | ||
| I get people are on it on the emotional level, But is that, in and of itself, enough for you to vote for somebody and be like, let this guy be the president? | ||
| Okay, I'll talk about people first and then I'll talk about me. | ||
| So people first. | ||
| Everybody now knows people lie, okay? | ||
| Obama said in the debates, what, eight years ago? | ||
| He was asked if he supported gay marriage. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Yeah, he didn't at the time. | ||
| But he did. | ||
| We all know he did. | ||
| We all know that Obama isn't a Muslim. | ||
| We all know that Obama is almost certainly agnostic. | ||
| He's certainly not a Muslim. | ||
| He's almost certainly not a Christian. | ||
| We all knew in those debates that he supported gay marriage, but he couldn't say it. | ||
| So now the ruse, it's all over. | ||
| We know they're all liars. | ||
| They're all scammers. | ||
| Obama's drone struck people, killed all kinds of innocent people. | ||
| Those wars keep going on. | ||
| Not a single Wall Street executive has been indicted. | ||
| We know if Clinton, oh I'm tough on Wall Street, we know not a single person on Wall Street, we all know it's bullshit. | ||
| We all know it's a scam. | ||
| So then what happens if it's a scam? | ||
| Well, then you just go with the best showman. | ||
| And that's where we are now in life. | ||
| We're going to go with the best showman. | ||
| That's people. | ||
| Now, me personally, here's what I think Trump is. | ||
| Ultimately, and this could be my own delusions, but my views and Trump's are very similar in that I'm a Libertarian with nationalist tendencies. | ||
| And what that means is you got to close the border. | ||
| You got to make sure the right people get in. | ||
| You can't let intolerant people in. | ||
| And then large amounts of social freedom within the country. | ||
| And that's always been Trump's position. | ||
| That's why I say, well, Trump is a liberal on this. | ||
| Of course he is. | ||
| Of course he is. | ||
| If you live in a society where people can kind of get along, and you let in the right people, then you can be socially liberal. | ||
| Right, but do you think that the ends justify the means? | ||
| I guess that's where I'm struggling with this situation with him, because I think that ultimately, and this is what I said at the top of the show, if he got in, this is not someone who would respect any law that we have. | ||
| I don't think he would accept That the executive branch, that the president is only one third of the government. | ||
| I think he would do whatever he wants. | ||
| The example I gave is that, you know, because he says anything, he said, well, I'm going to, when I'm president, Starbucks is going to put Merry Christmas back on their coffee cups. | ||
| I know, I got you already. | ||
| He's just saying something crazy. | ||
| But I think that that line of thinking is actually dangerous. | ||
| Isn't that what leads us to fascism? | ||
| When you have a guy who comes in and says, I'm going to do whatever I want. | ||
| I mean, he's telling us right now, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, one of my specialties is actually con law. | ||
| The three branches of government, as you mentioned. | ||
| Who has the power to declare war? | ||
| The sole power to declare war? | ||
| Congress has the power to declare war. | ||
| How many wars have we had since World War II? | ||
| Probably 15? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
600? | |
| I'm not sure. | ||
| And how many times has Congress declared war? | ||
| Right, probably once or twice. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| It hasn't happened. | ||
| So we've had Vietnam, we've had Korea War police action, the Iraq, the first one, the second Iraq War, Afghanistan, right? | ||
| Libya, which Obama did. | ||
| So the executive hasn't respected the legislative branch for a long time and what's interesting is that you can go back to before Obama was elected And you can see liberals saying, we have an executive out of control. | ||
| And then when Obama's elected, the conservatives at the Cato Institute and everybody are like, Obama's out of control, but they all flip-flopped on the issue. | ||
| So again, as a constitutional law scholar, and I actually am a constitutional law scholar, it's all bullshit anyway. | ||
| Everybody flip-flops on who now? | ||
| Trump, what can he really do, right? | ||
| You can't really do that much. | ||
| That's the idea that the president is that powerful. | ||
| He's going to be stopped. | ||
| He's going to be stopped meaning what? | ||
| Meaning he's, the really crazy stuff that people think. | ||
| You're not going to round up 12 million people, okay? | ||
| You're not going to create a federal police force, round up 12 million people, start kicking down doors. | ||
| It's just, it's not going to happen. | ||
| Right, and actually, I don't think that's really what he wants also, but he's saying it. | ||
| That's what I'm saying here, that this idea, if you just follow the ideas of what he's saying, this leads us to a bad place. | ||
| This is in no defense of the establishment, and I get it. | ||
| I've given Obama shit on, right now, we're bombing Syria right as we sit here with no congressional authorization, so I get it. | ||
| They all do this terrible stuff, but I think the through line of the Trump thinking leads us to a guy four years later, who will be next? | ||
| That's what I fear here. | ||
| Who will be next? | ||
| I don't know, right? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I wish I could see the future. | ||
| But what if Trump actually does a great job? | ||
| What if Trump actually takes on Wall Street? | ||
| What if Trump does solve the problem with the border? | ||
| Which is a problem. | ||
| Our social services are way overstressed now. | ||
| Anybody who's ever gone to an ER in California, talk to any ER doctor. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is a real mess. | ||
| So what Trump is doing is he's setting a cultural tone. | ||
| He's just saying, OK, we got to figure this stuff out, which which is what we need to do. | ||
| OK, adults need to sit down at the table and figure out, OK, we have illegal immigrants. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| Well, the path that everybody has taken is to say, well, yeah, well, maybe amnesty, maybe, you know, a path to citizenship, maybe this and maybe we'll clear up the border and maybe we'll do this. | ||
| Maybe we'll do that. | ||
| Well, it's time to actually take an extreme position, because what happens, right? | ||
| The Overton, well, you know in negotiation, how much do you want? | ||
| Well, I want a billion dollars a year. | ||
| You're out of your mind, but now you've anchored, and all this stuff is cognitive bias, persuasion, the anchoring bias, right? | ||
| He's very open about this, by the way, about how he would negotiate. | ||
| He says, I'm just staking out something crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there have been all these studies that'll show if I say, well, how many books do you think were in the library of Alexandria? | ||
| 20 million or 1 million? | ||
| Well, depending on if I say 20, if I say, do you think there was 20 million or more? | ||
| You'll say, well, I think there was 30 million, right? | ||
| But if I say, well, do you think there was more than 1 million or less than a million books in there? | ||
| You're going to be closer to a million, all because of the anchoring cognitive bias. | ||
| So Trump is just creating an anchor, a really strong anchor point. | ||
| And then from there, you work your way down. | ||
| And most people don't do that in your real life. | ||
| Most people you think, OK, I want this job. | ||
| Well, I better ask for a salary pretty close to what I think they'll give me. | ||
| Ask for 50% more, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because they're not going to say, well, you've asked for way too much, you're just not going to hire at all. | ||
| Now you've anchored a bigger number on them, and now you have a little bit of leverage, and then you work from there. | ||
| So interestingly, what Trump is doing in a certain way is really what people on the left do, which is use feeling over fact. | ||
| So I don't think you're defending him on the fact-based stuff, right? | ||
| This is all emotional. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're defending him on the emotional basis. | ||
| So that's that's fascinating because I see people on the right all the time, say Ben Shapiro, who sat in that chair a couple of weeks ago saying, you know, all the people on the left care about feeling more than fact. | ||
| And what you're saying basically is that Trump is using that very tactic and yet he's running on the right. | ||
| So by all humans. | ||
| So he really should be running on the left and then they would all love him because he's giving them feel... if it was just the feel-good stuff that they feel good about. | ||
| He's just giving the people on the right something that they feel good about. | ||
| I'm Ted Cruz and I'm a constitutionalist who believes in liberty and the founding fathers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, is there a logical statement there that you can analyze? | ||
| Well, he believes in liberty and that he doesn't want people to marry who they want to marry. | ||
| Well, yeah, what does liberty mean, right? | ||
| Liberty is you impose. | ||
| There was a great scene in Magnolia, I think, that musical movie, and they go, liberty, fraternity. | ||
| Well, who could oppose liberty? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We all do, but we have a different conception of liberty. | ||
| A fundamentalist Christian, well, I want religious liberty, and I think religious liberty means I shouldn't have to bake a cake for gay people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay? | ||
| If you're gay, you think, well, I'm an adult, I should be able to enter into contracts about my relationship with other consenting adults. | ||
| So if I just say, well, I support liberty, so then what you do is you say, well, Ted Cruz doesn't really support my conception of liberty, but it's all bullshit. | ||
| I support the Constitution! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fuck, what does that even mean, right? | ||
| There's a lot in the Constitution. | ||
| Do you believe abortion is in the Constitution or not, right? | ||
| What does it protect? | ||
| So, the idea that politicians run on these logical points and that people make their conclusions based on logic is nonsense. | ||
| So, yeah, it is funny when facts over feelings. | ||
| Well, I mean, look at that, you know, not to get too far ahead, look at that Michelle Fields incident we just had, you know? | ||
| Oh, I was grabbed and almost thrown to the ground, and this man, and then he watched the video. | ||
| Eh, you know. | ||
| It's still unclear to me, so for people that don't know what you're talking about, basically Trump's campaign manager Yeah, it's all been overplayed. | ||
| who was a Breitbart reporter. | ||
| She showed a little bit of a bruise on her arm in a picture. | ||
| I've watched the video a thousand times. | ||
| It's still, I don't know. | ||
| I've been in those scrums a little bit when I've been to those things. | ||
| People get pushed and pulled and whatever. | ||
| So I don't really know what happens. | ||
| So I'll leave it there. | ||
| But your basic take on it is that she's a bullshit artist, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's all been overplayed. | ||
| She said on TV, "Well, other than my dad dying." | ||
| This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my life. | ||
| Everybody, every, come on. | ||
| Everybody uses feelings to manipulate people. | ||
| If, if you're about to be fired from a job, you can make two cases. | ||
| Well, you know, here's an Excel sheet. | ||
| Here's how many views I bring. | ||
| You can bring that in too. | ||
| Man, we go way back and you promise me this. | ||
| Well, that's all emotions, right? | ||
| We make most of our decisions based on emotions. | ||
| We respect leaders based on... We're monkeys. | ||
| We're fucking monkeys, okay? | ||
| We want to think we're better than that. | ||
| And Donald Trump right now is the big alpha monkey. | ||
| So, okay, so let's talk about the alpha part, because I definitely think that's part of it, and he just is up there exerting his alpha maleness, and the rest of these guys simply aren't alpha males. | ||
| So you can take a Marco Rubio, who even though I disagree with him on most things, I think he's probably a decent human being, and he's in the right line of work. | ||
| He's actually looked kind of human. | ||
| Now that he's realized it's over, he's looking kind of human, | ||
| as opposed to the robot that we've been seeing up there. | ||
| But you look at him, that's certainly not an alpha male. | ||
| You look at Ted Cruz, just a creepy car salesman. | ||
| The rest of them, Ben Carson, basically asleep. | ||
| So is that really part of it? | ||
| That we really are just looking for somebody to just get that feeling from us? | ||
| And it's like, now I'll follow you. | ||
| It's a vibe. | ||
| You know, it is, it's definitely a vibe. | ||
| It's all unconscious, 90% of communication. | ||
| I mean, you know this, right? | ||
| Anybody who's ever dated, you know, if you're across from a woman, well, a man, you know, whatever the case is, you know, the person's like this, looking at their phone, that's a vibe, right? | ||
| And we go based on vibes, but we as human beings want to believe that we're logical | ||
| and that we make conclusions based on what we—we look at the evidence and we have all | ||
| this information and stuff. | ||
| We don't know—we don't have all the information. | ||
| The media lies about things. | ||
| The government lies about things. | ||
| We have no idea. | ||
| The Federal Reserve has never been audited. | ||
| We have no idea about anything. | ||
| And that's scary. | ||
| It's scary to think that I'm just a regular schmuck who knows nothing, has no control, but that's where the guerrilla mindset comes in. | ||
| I'm sort of like, so people are always like, oh yeah, you're, you're probably this, you're probably that. | ||
| I'm like, man, if you meet, and you know, we have met in real life, I'm pretty like mellow in real life. | ||
| Cause I realized like, I don't have fucking control over shit, man. | ||
| Like little, I have control over how I feel. | ||
| You're much more measured here than you are on Twitter. | ||
| I didn't know what I was walking into today. | ||
| I have a little bit of control over how I feel and what I think. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| The rest of the world is sort of out of my control. | ||
| So, we talked about this pre-show, you know, your life is your life. | ||
| People think Obama is going to save them or ruin them. | ||
| People think that Sanders is going to save them or ruin them. | ||
| People think that Hillary is going to ruin their life. | ||
| The same with Trump. | ||
| Why is Trump going to ruin your life or make your life? | ||
| And that isn't even really a healthy way to go about it. | ||
| People view him as a savior, though, but back to the original point is that, yeah, he's got that vibe, he's got that swagger, he's got... Watch him work an audience, right? | ||
| I always tell people, turn off... He's doing stand-up half the time. | ||
| Hey, oh, this guy said this, and Obama's a Muslim! | ||
| And Trump's, oh, I didn't say it, he said it. | ||
| Oh, well, I'll repeat what he said. | ||
| Well, don't you dare say that I said Obama's a Muslim! | ||
| I just, or what, that Ted Cruz is a pussy. | ||
| Well, I didn't say it, but, oh, you didn't hear what he said? | ||
| Oh, well, that guy said Ted Cruz is a pussy, but, come on, I would never say that. | ||
| I'm running for president. | ||
| I mean, that's good shit, man. | ||
| So that's the, that's the interesting thing here, because I want people to say whatever they want, and we all know it's bullshit, and they go into Congress, and they say, oh, the gentleman from blah, and it's like, we know you all hate each and you're all making side deals and all that. | ||
| So unmasking that is all good. | ||
| And that's the part of the Trump thing, the train that I can get on. | ||
| So maybe there will be some good. | ||
| The other part, I can't get there. | ||
| The part about the policy stuff and what he really believes. | ||
| And I get what you're saying. | ||
| You're basically saying that stuff doesn't matter 'cause there's, 'cause shit's gonna go down either way. | ||
| I just can't get there on that, but I do, I accept your premise as to why other people | ||
| can get there. | ||
| Trump is politically, if I had to guess, politically centrist. | ||
| I would put him to the right of Obama, but to the left of everybody else running. | ||
| Which is why it all cracks me up that everybody on the left is scared shitless of Trump. | ||
| Trump is actually, he's a Rockefeller liberal, a New York liberal, but he does want to do something about immigration. | ||
| He's raised the discussion that And I've traveled the Middle East. | ||
| I've met Muslims. | ||
| There's more to it than America knows. | ||
| We don't know the full story on Muslims. | ||
| But we do know that ISIS is sending people in as refugees. | ||
| I know that I went to Budapest, Hungary, and I saw the refugees, and they look like you, me, and people like this, and way younger. | ||
| They're 70% men. | ||
| And if you take in 70% men. | ||
| You don't have enough women, right? | ||
| Because they're mostly heterosexual. | ||
| You now have gender disbalance. | ||
| How are they going to get laid? | ||
| What's going to happen? | ||
| Are they going to get violent? | ||
| These are things that reasonable people should be able to ask. | ||
| But if you even ask that question, you're done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you might as well just say, fuck it. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Don't let any of them in. | ||
| Because people are going to say you're done anyway, right? | ||
| So if I just said, well, you know, I went to Hungary. | ||
| I went to the train stations. | ||
| I investigated it for myself. | ||
| I did reporting on it. | ||
| They're all men. | ||
| They're all able-bodied. | ||
| They're all prime fighting age. | ||
| Why are they leaving the women back home? | ||
| What is really going on? | ||
| Well, if you say that, you're persona non grata anyway. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's why you look, even if you look at the pictures coming out where the migrants are crossing into Greece and they're crossing into Germany and wherever else they're going. | ||
| It's all men. | ||
| It's all men in their twenties and thirties. | ||
| Not a hundred percent, but a huge percentage of it. | ||
| And this is where I, as a liberal, have been painted into a corner here. | ||
| For the eight months that I've been doing this show, I've tried to talk about the difference between ideas and people, and doctrine versus the average person that may or may not be religious and probably isn't oppressing anyone and doesn't want to blow anything up. | ||
| But I've been left, basically, with my 10 guys on the left, and the whole conversation has been handed to Trump. | ||
| So he's just taking the meat, right? | ||
| He's just taking the red meat on this. | ||
| Well, because here's what I learned, too, and that's why I'm kind of a little bit wild on Twitter. | ||
| I realize that if people ask me, Mike, what do you really believe about the world? | ||
| I would say, well, I think that generally speaking, women enjoy being more feminine and a more supportive role of a man who's more dominant. | ||
| But if you want to be a woman and you want to be a lawyer or a CEO, I don't think anybody should stop you. | ||
| And I think you should be careful not to tell women what they have to do. | ||
| Those are some pretty boring shit. | ||
| It's basic shit. | ||
| But if you put that online, you're contributing to a culture of internalized misogyny. | ||
| Patriarchy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you can't even say that, so you might as well say, fuck it. | ||
| The best sex is rough sex and women are crazy and they have wild sexual fantasies and everything. | ||
| Because they're going to come after you anyway. | ||
| So you're doing the Trump tactic yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| And you're admitting it because basically you're saying, I'm a pretty moderate guy. | ||
| Women can do whatever they want to do. | ||
| In my view, maybe they're better off at home, but they can do whatever they want to do. | ||
| But when you're online, you're staking out this stuff because you just want to keep rattling the cage. | ||
| Because they're going to come after you anyway. | ||
| That's the thing is feelings versus facts. | ||
| People don't sit down and just have a rational conversation. | ||
| Well, what do you really think about this? | ||
| People have written about me before, written about my tweets. | ||
| Nobody's ever said, hey, I read this tweet. | ||
| Where he told a guy to go kill himself. | ||
| What did you really mean? | ||
| Well, the guy he told to kill himself had actually tried to kill his ex-girlfriend, was at a rehab and burned a girl with cigarettes. | ||
| Real bad guy, right? | ||
| And he was a troll who wasn't really going to kill himself. | ||
| He was doing the whole, I'm having a meltdown, therefore I'm mentally ill. | ||
| Because that's what you do when you do bad things now, right? | ||
| You go to rehab or you claim mental illness. | ||
| But nobody says, hey, what's the context, man? | ||
| What's the backstory? | ||
| So you realize, well, you might as well Be a maniac. | ||
| You put on a good show. | ||
| The people love it. | ||
| So when Trump started... I didn't know about Trump. | ||
| That's the funny thing and that's probably why I saw early on why he was going to do so well. | ||
| I watched one season of The Apprentice when I was in law school 10 years ago. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So I didn't really know anything about Trump, and I looked at what he did and I go, fuck, he's just doing what I do, but on a scale that is way bigger than I do. | ||
| And what you're doing is you realize that, okay, what do people love? | ||
| Men, women, drama. | ||
| People love drama. | ||
| People love conflict. | ||
| Conflict is attention. | ||
| Negative attention, positive, because you can take a hater and turn that hater into a lover, but you can't turn people who don't know about you into anything. | ||
| Yeah, so you want to get maximum attention. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I don't watch any reality shows. | ||
| I've maybe watched five minutes of Survivor, ever. | ||
| I never watched American Idol, any of that stuff. | ||
| The only reality show that I've watched is The Celebrity Apprentice. | ||
| So, and this was, you know, five years ago before he was running for president. | ||
| So that, I guess, says it right there. | ||
| There is something about him. | ||
| You're not gonna convince me to vote for him by the end of this, but that I can understand the logic of it. | ||
| And I thought also that, you know, having someone on that's a Trump supporter would be interesting because everyone's just screaming at each other, right? | ||
| So we should match, the media would love us to be sitting here screaming at each other. | ||
| That would help the narrative, right? | ||
| Yeah, it would help the narrative, you know. | ||
| I would get a lot of interview requests, I used to. | ||
| They stopped calling me, they don't email anymore. | ||
| Because they talked to me, like, wait a minute, you know. | ||
| They want me to play a pro wrestling character. | ||
| This is what the media wants. | ||
| And that's why I do it a little bit online, because I realize, like, okay, I grew up watching 80s pro wrestling. | ||
| I'm just the heel. | ||
| I'm the bad guy. | ||
| I might as well be Ric Flair, the million dollar man, you know. | ||
| I might as well just be, because they're going to make me one anyway, as Mike Tyson said. | ||
| I could speak to you all eloquently, but you're going to call me a fucking rapist anyway. | ||
| So I might as well, right? | ||
| Just be crazy. | ||
| Now let me think for a second. | ||
| Jake the Snake Roberts was my favorite wrestler in the 80s. | ||
| He was a good one, yeah. | ||
| He was a good guy, but didn't have many friends on his side. | ||
| So I feel like maybe that was the right guy for me. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But think about it, right? | ||
| Think about Trump. | ||
| How hard is the media game? | ||
| Right? | ||
| How hard is it? | ||
| Well, I guess if you're Trump, it's not that hard. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| So you have all these people in the media. | ||
| You have a personal brand, I have a personal brand. | ||
| But you'll see some guy that have a job with the Washington Post and say, Trump doesn't know what he's doing, he's an idiot. | ||
| I'll go on the guy's Twitter account, and I'm like, dude, you're right at the Washington Post, and you have like 1,500 followers. | ||
| Like, I have 31, and it's all organic following, you know, I sell more books than these guys and everything, because I'm real, I know who does what, because you can look at the Amazon sales ranks. | ||
| You don't get it. | ||
| The media game is hard. | ||
| Trump is winning it. | ||
| So maybe instead of saying, well, this guy's evil, why don't you just take a step back, breathe, and say, well, what is he doing? | ||
| And then say, well, why is he doing it? | ||
| So that's interesting because I've noticed in the last few days since the rally at Chicago that got canceled, that the media definitely, I hate using the phrase the media as it's this monolith, but the mainstream media and even a lot of the online stuff, they've really doubled down now on Trump is evil and all that stuff. | ||
| Now again, I started this show by giving a litany of reasons why I'm not voting for this guy. | ||
| But I think that every time BuzzFeed puts out an article saying why he's evil, or every time Politico does it, or especially anything that's on the left, right, so New York Magazine or anything, I think they're just strengthening him. | ||
| And they, what I don't understand is, do you guys not understand Psych 101? | ||
| Did none of you go to college because all you're doing is making him stronger? | ||
| Okay, so everybody, most of them don't understand it, but some of them do. | ||
| But ultimately, we're all in a big media matrix. | ||
| Okay, I'll uncover a media hoax, and then the next day, I'll be like, oh yeah, I read this article and the whatever that I just said yesterday is a piece of shit. | ||
| You know, and now I'm saying, whoa, that's an interesting story on this. | ||
| So we're all kind of caught in the matrix, and in that regard, The savvy people know that they are ultimately building his brand, but they're getting clicks, they're getting views, and that's what they want. | ||
| So we just all deserve the bullshit that we get at the end of the day, right? | ||
| Because everything... I know for a fact that if we did this show a little bit differently, so you know, in the YouTube game for example, if we titled things a little differently, we could double our clicks like that. | ||
| And I've had many meetings with my guys and I'm just like, I'm not gonna do it. | ||
| I just don't want to build something in that way. | ||
| But plenty of other people are. | ||
| So we all deserve the crap that we're getting because we're building the crap. | ||
| Yeah, I tried to have a debate with a guy once and we had a real civil talk just like we're talking now. | ||
| And then the YouTube thing went on, and he's just blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And I thought, are we going to scream at each other? | ||
| But that's what people want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that is what moves them. | ||
| Everybody screams at everybody. | ||
| Everybody online is just saying, well, you're an MRI, evil, MRI, men's rights activist, evil this, you're evil this, you're evil feminist, you're an evil that. | ||
| Yeah, that's what people want, but then it becomes, you know, you as an artist, you have to find your own integrity. | ||
| And my integrity, and I think Trump's integrity, too, is I ultimately have a very good message. | ||
| I wrap it up in drama, conflict, and all that other stuff, but smart people see through it. | ||
| They can kind of say, okay, I kind of see what's going on. | ||
| I see through the theatrics. | ||
| Trump is somebody who cares a lot about America, and he does what nobody else running does. | ||
| We are Americans. | ||
| We have the right to have an identity as a nation. | ||
| We have the right to have a culture. | ||
| We have the right to say, you as an American, I care more about you than I care about people in China. | ||
| Bangladesh, Romania, Nigeria. | ||
| Nobody else is saying that, and that's where nationalism comes in, and that's another reason that he's doing well, is this idea that, yeah, I'm an American, you don't hear that much now. | ||
| A lot of people, even the sort of chattering class, the so-called intellectuals, will say, well, nationalism's bad, and you're part of a global society. | ||
| You think you're part of a global society, but go travel somewhere, and you'll find right away that they don't think you're part of a global society. | ||
| So is that why his slogan even, make America great again. | ||
| First off, everyone wants things to be great. | ||
| So that's good. | ||
| But also throwing the word again in there implies that we lost something great. | ||
| We're going to get that thing back versus Bernie's, which is a future to believe in. | ||
| So Bernie's not talking about getting a feeling back. | ||
| He's saying, well, something out there is pretty good. | ||
| And Trump's going, we lost some shit. | ||
| So really it's just about which part of the brain these guys are Trump packs more information in a slogan or a tweet than anybody else does. | ||
| He jams in a lot and does worse. | ||
| So yeah, make America great again. | ||
| If you're in advertising or marketing, that's aspirational. | ||
| You know that if you're in marketing, you want to be an aspirational good. | ||
| Trump is an aspirational. | ||
| This is all, this is what pisses me, this is all fucking marketing! | ||
| You know, how can all these people who claim they know marketing not just sit and say, okay, Trump is running an ad campaign. | ||
| Trump is an aspirational good. | ||
| Trump is saying, make America great again, that's an aspirational slogan, and it's tying on nationalistic feelings, like America, and make is a very sort of can-do word, and Americans have a can-do attitude. | ||
| I mean, the guy wrote a book about it, right? | ||
| He's just doing what's in his book. | ||
| Right, so this stuff used to sort of, you know, that's where I have to use the gorilla mindset, it's like maddening. | ||
| I'm like, don't you, you are intelligent people, you can't just analyze this, but again, that's because That's my own weakness. | ||
| I'm thinking that people are logical. | ||
| If you're logical, you would just sit down and say, okay, here's what Trump does. | ||
| You read his tweets. | ||
| Many people have said that I'm the greatest man in the world. | ||
| Well, what has he done there? | ||
| Well, social proof. | ||
| Many people, because we are monkeys, well, if many people think it must be true, he's not bragging. | ||
| Because he's not saying that. | ||
| That's what many people are saying. | ||
| So a lot of times, you could just sit down and look at Trump's tweets, read them, and really see, this guy uses language well. | ||
| So they go, he's an idiot, he's a buffoon. | ||
| And I say, no, no, no, you're the fucking buffoon. | ||
| Because I can explain it, just very logically. | ||
| He uses social proof, he uses cognitive biases. | ||
| You know, in college you learn the logical fallacies to make good arguments. | ||
| Well, what if you're a sophist, and you take the logical fallacies, To trick people. | ||
| To be a sophist. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Maybe you're not dumb. | ||
| Maybe you're the smart guy because the reason that you learn to analyze logical fallacies is because we are lazy thinkers and fallacies work. | ||
| It's just a good way of manipulating people, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So maybe, you know, people are like, oh, if you use a logical fallacy, you're stupid. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But if you're using a logical fallacy, you get people to draw false inferences. | ||
| Marco Rubio's in a phone party. | ||
| Well, I haven't said. | ||
| I haven't said anything. | ||
| But Marco Rubio said that he was in a phone party. | ||
| Well, I'm now using the fallacy of getting you to draw a false inference. | ||
| That it must have been some gay thing, and is he really in the closet? | ||
| Well, I didn't say that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You've said it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I get it. | ||
| I fully get what you're saying. | ||
| It's such a dangerous, slippery slope, and some people are going to play the game. | ||
| So I guess that's what it is. | ||
| People are angry at him because he's playing the game at a higher level. | ||
| So I tweeted a day or two ago, and it's taking off right this second, saying about, it was three things, and it was one, I don't support Trump. | ||
| I do believe in free speech. | ||
| If you use your free speech to take away someone else's, then one day they will come for you. | ||
| And I think that really sums up what's going on here, because if you look at what happened at the rally the other night, it wasn't the government that came in, so it wasn't a First Amendment issue. | ||
| The government didn't say, you're not allowed to say this. | ||
| But if we start getting to a place, and I'm not saying this is exactly what happened that night because it's a little unclear who started what and whatever, but if we get to a place where everyone is just using their free speech to shout down everybody else, well then we don't have free speech and it has nothing to do with the government. | ||
| So there's a huge free speech play here too, right? | ||
| Yeah, well they call that the heckler's veto. | ||
| You're going to let one guy scream everybody else down. | ||
| So then whoever is the biggest heckler is the person who controls the debate. | ||
| And then, yeah, the broader point you make is perfect because, not to plug my documentary | ||
| that we're doing that we want to talk to you about— Plug away. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| It pissed off a lot of my guys because it's called Silenced, our war on free speech. | ||
| And they go, no, it's not our war, it's the war. | ||
| And we want to think, well, there's a war on all of us free thinkers and everything, but it isn't the government censoring us. | ||
| We're fucking doing it to each other. | ||
| I'm afraid if I say the wrong thing to you, you're going to think I'm a shitty person. | ||
| You're afraid that if you post the wrong thing on Twitter, you're going to get fired from your job or people are going to come after you, they're going to call your advertisers. | ||
| One wrong thing. | ||
| So we're all kind of censoring each other, where really, why don't we just say, well, you know, you said that. | ||
| What do you really mean? | ||
| Oh, you're a Trump supporter. | ||
| Well, why are you a Trump supporter? | ||
| Well, maybe somebody would say, well, I'm a Trump supporter because I believe America has the right to exist as a nation. | ||
| OK, well, I don't know. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Right? | ||
| You just talk. | ||
| That's what people should do. | ||
| You listen to one another. | ||
| And right now we don't. | ||
| We're all declaring war on each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So that's interesting, but it goes to the people that are taking the higher road here are almost destined to lose then, right? | ||
| Because if you're taking the higher road here and you're saying, I'm going to respect your free speech, you know, I don't like what you say, but I'm going to defend your right to say it. | ||
| If you take that road, well, basically from everything you've said here, there's going to be a huge swell of people That won't do that and thus will always win with the heckler's veto, right? | ||
| That's where I see this all going. | ||
| That's why I've been talking. | ||
| They were winning. | ||
| But now there's a massive counterculture where people are saying, you know, me and Lauren, the director of The Silence, we say we're going to make free speech cool again. | ||
| You know, we don't have an agenda. | ||
| We just want people to know that, you know, it's cool to share your point of view. | ||
| It's cool to talk. | ||
| And more people are getting that. | ||
| If you look at whose profiles are being raised on Twitter, which is kind of Twitter is where the future's headed. | ||
| That's why I love Twitter, and we could do a whole hour on just why I love Twitter. | ||
| Twitter is the future. | ||
| The future is people like you. | ||
| Even though the business is crumbling. | ||
| You mean the ideas behind Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, because the people who are kind of, I don't like the word thought leaders, but hip, smart, tech savvy people, here's what they're thinking. | ||
| They like people like you. | ||
| They like people like Laura Southern. | ||
| They like people like Milo. | ||
| They like people like Gavin McGuiness. | ||
| My profile's going. | ||
| So the people who are sort of pro-free speech, their profiles are growing. | ||
| And then there's a pushback against the regressive left. | ||
| So what had happened is we had given everybody the heckler's veto to call you a homophobe, a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, if you say one wrong thing. | ||
| And now you're realizing Well, that's shutting everybody's speech down. | ||
| Now, before we had the regressive left, the SJWs, we had the moral majority. | ||
| We had Tipper Gore trying to say, you can't listen to... because you and I, you know, I don't want to say we're old. | ||
| We're handsome men. | ||
| We're fucking old, man. | ||
| Ice-T, Body Count, Cop Killer. | ||
| Oh my God, you know, he's inciting violence. | ||
| I used to play Mortal Kombat. | ||
| I never ripped anyone's spine out. | ||
| Oh my god, this kid committed suicide after listening to Judas Priest. | ||
| This is satanic music. | ||
| We gotta ban it. | ||
| That's the right. | ||
| And then you fought off the right. | ||
| The left did. | ||
| And then the left came in and now they're fucking doing it. | ||
| And now instead of saying, well, video games make you violent, they say, well, video games make you hate women. | ||
| And then we have a new counterculture that's going to push that back. | ||
| And then guess what? | ||
| Sisyphus is rock. | ||
| You know, guys like you and me, our whole fucking lives, we're going to be like, in 10 years, we'll be fighting the right again. | ||
| And then in another 10 years, we'll be fighting the left again. | ||
| Yeah, so that center and that, you know, it's interesting, the people that you just mentioned, they're like Laura and Lauren and Milo and the rest of them, they're all to the right. | ||
| And again, I always feel like, oh God, I'm the last man standing over here. | ||
| But yes, it is growing. | ||
| So how do we then coalesce around that? | ||
| Knowing that we're not gonna support, I'm not sure who I'm gonna vote for at this point, but that we can sit here and do this. | ||
| How do we coalesce around that idea? | ||
| We need conversation more than we need everyone judging everybody into oblivion. | ||
| I'm a little bit of an idealist and I truly believe if we're talking to each other, we're not killing each other. | ||
| That's a start, right? | ||
| What a lot of people don't realize if they haven't studied a lot of history, We think we can't have a Cambodian Holocaust. | ||
| We think that we can't have an Armenian Genocide. | ||
| We think we can't have Miles Great Leap Forward or what they had in the Soviet Union. | ||
| Why can't we? | ||
| Why are we so special? | ||
| Well, that all started with censorship culture. | ||
| You can't say certain things. | ||
| That started with us versus them for the Cambodian Genocide you had. | ||
| The farmers were the real people and the city people were the bad people. | ||
| That was identity politics, even within a single race of people. | ||
| And then what happens, you don't talk, you go to the underground. | ||
| And then the fucking lunatics talk to only other lunatics, because they're still going to talk. | ||
| And then you have all the lunatics and the underground talking to each other. | ||
| That's how you get people blowing shit up. | ||
| That's how you get people killing each other. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in an instance where, you know, I saw two videos this week where one, a Trump supporter was at a rally screaming, go back to Auschwitz. | ||
| And then another one, he was screaming at a black person, go back to Africa. | ||
| I think what you're saying is that there's actually something good there because it's being unearthed as opposed to these people just festering? | ||
| They're screaming at you. | ||
| Nobody's hitting each other. | ||
| Well, people are hitting each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some people are. | |
| Well, the protests. | ||
| There's no more than a music festival, though. | ||
| The line I always use is, people, you need to get out more. | ||
| Go to a rock music festival. | ||
| Probably Burning Man, nobody fights. | ||
| But if you go to a rock concert, a rap concert, you have people. | ||
| You're going to have people kind of fighting each other. | ||
| And that's, again, media manipulation. | ||
| Logic versus cognitive bias. | ||
| Okay, logically speaking, if you have multiple rallies with 25,000 people there, and you have 10 of them, and there's one fight, what is that? | ||
| One in 100,000? | ||
| That would be the safest city in the world, right? | ||
| But you focus on that one fight, and that becomes the narrative. | ||
| Well, there's violence. | ||
| Well, it was one 78-year-old guy. | ||
| Punched a guy in the face, sucker punched him. | ||
| There have been all these rallies and there's a couple instances. | ||
| Logically speaking, statistically speaking, that isn't really a big deal. | ||
| Well first off, but just to push back on that a little bit, I mean Trump is also offering to pay that guy's legal fees, which seems pretty crazy to me. | ||
| A 78-year-old man punched a black guy walking out, regardless of his race, but punched the | ||
| guy and Trump saying, "I'll pay for your illegal piece." | ||
| Can you give me that one? | ||
| He offered, that was a different time. | ||
| You've conflated different stories. | ||
| That was a different riot. | ||
| So I guess there's a couple riots going on. | ||
| There are people swinging punches. | ||
| Did you see what happened when, I don't want to give the guy free publicity, but there | ||
| was a conservative Breitbart speaker who gave a talk at Cal State Los Angeles. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I have videos of a Breitbart intern being thrown to the ground by a Black Lives Matter protester. | ||
| I have the video. | ||
| Lauren Feldman, the director for Silence. | ||
| We have it. | ||
| That didn't make news. | ||
| Well, violence goes both ways. | ||
| The media likes what the media likes, but I have no doubt that violence goes both ways. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Everybody's doing it. | ||
| That's the interesting thing, too, about logic versus not logic. | ||
| Why don't we objectively count how much drama is going on at a Sanders event? | ||
| Well, he had a Bernie Sanders supporter jump over a guardrail. | ||
| To try to go to attack Trump, right? | ||
| I read the guy's tweets. | ||
| The guy is a total nutjob. | ||
| Yeah, he's a nutjob. | ||
| He goes on CNN and they treat him like he stood up to a bully, right? | ||
| Well, why is he standing up to a bully, Trump? | ||
| Why don't you say, well, hey, you don't like Trump. | ||
| Trump's talking. | ||
| Now you're trying to jump over guardrail to attack a guy you'd posted on Twitter before how he wanted to kill Trump. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Yeah, it's sort of a nice way to wrap this thing up, although clearly we could have gone a lot longer than this. | ||
| But it shows what a moral mess everybody's in, because I do agree with that. | ||
| Look, I'm not thrilled with the things Trump's saying. | ||
| Again, I'm not supporting the guy. | ||
| But when that guy rushed the stage, if you look at the history of this guy's tweets, he's a bit of a nutbag. | ||
| He said some crazy things. | ||
| And then CNN treated him like a hero. | ||
| Now, meanwhile, if a Trump supporter If Trump had bumrushed Bernie Sanders, everyone not only would say this guy should be in jail, but they wouldn't have given him an interview on CNN, but they'd also be blaming Trump. | ||
| So yeah, there is an unevenness here that we got to wrap up, but I think we did a little evening of the playing field here. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Because we're not logical, right? | ||
| We're creatures. | ||
| We want stories. | ||
| We want simple stories of the world. | ||
| Trump understands it. | ||
| He's playing the game better than everyone else. | ||
| That's why they don't like him. | ||
| But yeah, as long as we're talking, you're a human, I'm a human, you know, I don't want to kill gay people, you know, because I know a gay guy, right? | ||
| I don't want to kill straight white guys even though I know they're the worst. | ||
| Yeah, ultimately that's what happens with people as you talk to each other. | ||
| You think, well, I mean, you're saying gay people are this or this is that, but I know a guy and he's not like that. | ||
| Well, that's not really logical. | ||
| I know a guy, therefore all gay people are this or that is illogical, but that's the way we think. | ||
| So yeah, as long as you're talking, you're reaching out to people who disagree with you, Your own illogical brain helps you become a better person. | ||
| That's how you end an interview. | ||
| All right, so I want to thank Mike Cernovich, and you can check out his book, Guerrilla Mindset, how to control your thoughts and emotions to live life on your terms. | ||
| Oh, and direct all hate directly to him. | ||
| It's at Cernovich on the Twitter. |
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