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Some of you may have noticed that I recently did a nine-day total online shutdown. | ||
Yeah, that's right. | ||
For nine all-too-brief days, I did not look at my phone, I did not check email, I did not look at Twitter, and I did not open Facebook. | ||
I also did not open Snapchat, but that was mainly because I couldn't figure it out. | ||
Instead, I took the time and escaped for a belated honeymoon and an overdue vacation in Cabo, Mexico. | ||
Most of my time there was spent laying on the beach, staring out into the ocean, and drinking copious amounts of mojitos. | ||
I got a little mojito hint for you, by the way. | ||
Just get it without the sugar. | ||
You don't lose much in taste, and you'll save a lot in health. | ||
Anyway, besides learning this lesson about mojitos, I also had a vital revelation. | ||
Taking a break from the online madness is not only incredibly important, I now view it as absolutely necessary. | ||
Think about how much time we all spend staring into this little device. | ||
We check work emails when we're with loved ones. | ||
We Instagram pictures of food so it looks tastier than it is. | ||
And we live tweet the minutia of our lives. | ||
To be 100% clear, I am guilty of all of these things to varying degrees, and I've been working hard to control this ever-growing online beast. | ||
It's not just the silly, often egocentric things that we're doing online, though. | ||
It's also the real-world events that we're missing out on while we stare into that little black mirror. | ||
When I wasn't staring into the ocean or the skyline or when I was on the beach, I did plenty of people watching. | ||
I saw people from all ages, probably from about 8 years old into their 70s, just staring down at their phones almost all day long. | ||
People were ignoring their friends and family around them and totally missing out on the amazing ocean view that they paid to have right in front of them. | ||
One afternoon, I actually spent about two hours watching a little kid play Dangerously Close to the Waves while his parents were just sucked into the Matrix the whole time. | ||
Actually, much of the experience did remind me of the movie The Matrix, where we, the humans, are really just batteries for this digital world. | ||
We might not be quite there yet, but we're certainly on our way. | ||
Or, actually, maybe we are there and we don't even know it yet. | ||
I guess I'm just waiting for Morpheus to offer me the red pill, though unfortunately I think most people are going to go blue pill all the way. | ||
After a couple days being offline, I felt more present, less anxious, and truly freer than I've felt in a long time. | ||
When I got back and I turned my phone on, I had this feeling of dread, like, here we go again, more than anything else. | ||
Fortunately, I quickly realized after scanning my emails, checking my Twitter mentions, and scrolling through Facebook, that not much had actually changed without me. | ||
I missed a couple debates, our Stephen Fry interview went viral for all the wrong reasons, and I got a lot of nice notes from you guys. | ||
But beyond that, the world just kept spinning, even if I wasn't locked into it. | ||
Of course, we all know the world doesn't stop without us, but it felt good to know that it keeps humming along with the good and the bad, whether or not we're paying attention the whole time. | ||
Of course, I admit I make my living here, so this is a bit of a catch-22. | ||
I am here in the online world. | ||
Not only that, but I do love most of it. | ||
Having honest conversations about important issues, connecting with you guys, and reshaping my beliefs along the way have become my life's ethos. | ||
None of that would be possible without this little gadget. | ||
Despite that, like everything else in life, there's a good and a bad, a yin and a yang. | ||
A little more balance in life probably never hurt any of us. | ||
My guest this week is Stephen Crowder. | ||
Like me, Stephen is creating his success with an online show with many modes of distribution and by using social media to amplify his voice. | ||
Interestingly, while I've spent so much of my time trying to fix what I see wrong with my side, the left, Stephen has spent much of his time trying to fix what he sees wrong with his side, the right. | ||
I realize more and more every day the traditional labels of left and right are losing all meaning, and the important piece of the puzzle is finding people who will have a good-faith battle of ideas and let the chips fall where they may. | ||
Now close all the other apps you have open, ignore the other person in the room with you, and let's have a discussion about politics. | ||
Or go outside for a breath of fresh air and look up in the stars. | ||
Though if you do that, please click play on our next video. | ||
It's all about the clicks these days, you know? | ||
All about the clicks. | ||
My guest this week is the self-proclaimed strangest animal of talk radio and the host of Louder with Crowder. | ||
Steven Crowder, welcome to the show. | ||
Thank you very much for, well I don't proclaim that, that's Gowan's song, but I appreciate you attributing that lofty praise, so I'll take it. | ||
I was told it was self-proclaimed. | ||
We do some serious research around here. | ||
You've just allowed it to become part of the lore? | ||
Yeah, exactly, I've allowed it, and I don't even think we have the rights to the music, but I appreciate that, you know, you started off as a comedian, as did I, yet you do actual research, and I feel compelled to, whereas a lot of other media, half the time I'm going like, what? | ||
Are none of you going to fact-check this? | ||
Why am I the one to do this? | ||
And I see you doing that a lot too, so regardless of politics, you know, I appreciate it. | ||
Yeah, well that is gonna be sort of the thrust of everything we talk about for the next hour, because yes, whether we agree on everything or not is irrelevant, but I know you do do your research, and you fact-checked a lot of things that I see in the media that are nonsense, and you do a great job with it, which is why I wanted to have you on, and I've been on your show, and we're gonna do a little something for you after, and this is cross-promotion-a-palooza. | ||
Wait, do a little something for me after. | ||
Hold on, people listening, he's going to come on the show, and it doesn't have anything to do with his queer party friends. | ||
No, none of that kind of stuff. | ||
We're on Skype, but everyone's going to stay closed. | ||
Okay, let's start here. | ||
So Crowder, I know a little bit about your history, but for the people that know nothing about you, first off, you're in Michigan right now, is that correct? | ||
No, let's not talk about it. | ||
My show is based out of Michigan. | ||
I don't need my whereabouts disclosed. | ||
Oh gosh, this is a problem with live television. | ||
Yeah, I was born in Detroit, raised in Montreal. | ||
And so I started acting at a young age, 12 years old, was doing voice work and TV, and started doing stand-up in my mid-teens. | ||
Which then brought me to New York, L.A. | ||
as soon as I was old enough to be in a bar in the States. | ||
And, uh, it kinda came full circle. | ||
I was a young, libertarian, sort of edgy, I guess considered comic, getting banned from clubs and, uh, colleges. | ||
And then went to the Internet, and then here we are. | ||
But yeah, it all started out, was raised in Montreal, acting, stand-up, that was my bread and butter, really up until I was pulled into this political arena at, uh, I wanna say 21 at Fox News. | ||
Yeah, you know, it's funny, I also feel like I was sort of pulled into this. | ||
I've always loved politics and I studied politics in college, but in this recent incarnation in the last couple years, I do feel like there's this pull, whether I like it or not. | ||
So were you always into politics? | ||
You were getting banned at clubs, what were you doing? | ||
Yeah, colleges. | ||
Well, I remember the first thing was a multicultural fair, and Muslims complained. | ||
And this was long before Achmed the Dead Terrorist or any of that. | ||
You know, if you watch, I've done plenty of material on Islam, and I've made fun of literally every single group or politician on our program, particularly people subscribed to the podcast. | ||
Our commercials are nothing but sketches and parodies, and so everyone, no one is safe there. | ||
I just made a joke about some kind of like a Muslim guy beating his wife. | ||
I don't remember what it was. | ||
I might have been 17 at the time, beating his wife in order to keep quiet about the fact that he beat her. | ||
And people got offended, and then Asians got offended because I had some jokes about anime. | ||
I remember being young, just thinking, this is comedy, right? | ||
Like some other guy just got up talking about a three-way at a truck stop, and my stuff is relatively benign. | ||
It's offensive, but it's not dirty. | ||
So it started with that and then just meetings in back rooms, you know, with Viacom and MTV and people saying, you really shouldn't be saying this. | ||
So it just sort of happened organically. | ||
I was always conservative because I was raised in a socialist province. | ||
My parents were, you know, like my dad taught me. | ||
That's how you do it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yes! | ||
Well, you know what? | ||
And that's true. | ||
A lot of people don't understand, if you talk to people who've left those places, very, very few of them still support socialism. | ||
People who are in it who don't know any better, you'll probably get a lot of Canadians who like their free healthcare. | ||
But once you have Canadians who've experienced the quality of American healthcare, At best, you'll get them saying, yeah, the quality's better here, but I still like the Safety Net of Canada. | ||
So it started with me as a kid, you know, at 12 years old, 13 years old, making pretty significant checks doing this show Arthur at PBS. | ||
I got to meet Garfunkel when I was there, and it was during his phase where we were coached, do not mention Paul Simon. | ||
So I'm a 13-year-old kid, like, listen, Garfunkel's coming in, don't ever say the name Paul Simon. | ||
That's not easy. | ||
No, it's not easy. | ||
I mean, you really didn't do a lot without the Simon. | ||
And my dad explained to me, listen, this is your check. | ||
52% is going to be gone for rent, went down the list. | ||
And as a kid, you know, that's my money. | ||
I still have to make up the time I left school to go to the studio. | ||
And so it developed pretty organically. | ||
And I do attribute it to a good dad. | ||
You know, even though you and him would disagree on a lot, he always encouraged me to answer questions and think critically. | ||
He didn't say, you're a conservative, you're a Christian. | ||
Say, why do you believe this? | ||
And, you know, substantiate your claim. | ||
And so there was no moment of genius. | ||
It just sort of happened that way. | ||
Yeah, and I know you know this, but I love talking to people that I would disagree with. | ||
I'd rather talk to people that I would disagree with, but someone that's coming from a principled place. | ||
So like you, for example, I mean, I've seen you do things that many of my friends on the left would say are incredibly offensive things. | ||
Things about trans people or handicapped people. | ||
Or Muslims, or whatever it is. | ||
But to me, your style is sort of more the Seth MacFarlane Family Guy style, which is, we literally make fun of everyone, period. | ||
And that's sort of the egalitarian way of comedy that it should be done, I think. | ||
Yeah, I don't, I don't, what have I done about handicapped people? | ||
I can't, I mean we have, I'm sure, I have no doubt. | ||
Well, you did, you were in the wheelchair. | ||
No, I actually had knee surgery. | ||
Oh, that was, I thought, well I know you had knee surgery, but I thought that was part of the... No, that was legitimate! | ||
That was legitimate! | ||
Yeah, the journey for Bernie. | ||
No, I actually had knee surgery. | ||
But now... Boy, you really take comedy far, that you go ahead and have knee surgery just for the bit. | ||
That's commitment. | ||
It is commitment. | ||
Well, that was commitment. | ||
That was a journey for Bernie, where Jean-Guy Tremblay went in for nine hours at a Bernie rally. | ||
I mean, you know, at the end of the day, it's either funny or it's not, and I know you'll get people in the comments section going, this is why conservatives can't be funny. | ||
I've never been of that school. | ||
I think Jon Stewart is hilarious. | ||
One of my favorite comedians is Kathleen Madigan. | ||
I think Bill Maher can be so horrendously unfunny, it's unwatchable, because all he does is throw up his hands and make a political statement. | ||
There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
unidentified
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Right? | |
Oh, these teabaggers! | ||
Like, that's just hack to me. | ||
Love Bill Maher. | ||
Love Bill Maher. | ||
Sorry, he can be funny, but when he does that, you just need to say, okay, your comedy hat is off. | ||
And I do give them more leeway than people who don't claim to be comedians, but it has to be funny, and I do think, and I wrote about this at Big Hollywood, back when Andrew Breitbart was a good friend, before it was Breitbart, Shapiro, myself, Adam Baldwin were some of the first writers, and I wrote about the Tina Fey doctrine. | ||
I said there's been a noticeable shift in comedy, and if you'll see this on SNL, where Tina Fey will forgo the funny joke deliberately to push an agenda. | ||
And she did that with Palin and McCain during that election cycle, and it just wasn't funny. | ||
And that's my biggest issue with it. | ||
Not that you can't do it. | ||
You can do it. | ||
Just be honest about it. | ||
I tell people all the time, yeah, I'm pretty biased. | ||
And every now and then, I'm going to use my platform to push an agenda that I agree with. | ||
And if I could take Koch Brother money, I'd have it on a Flav of Flav necklace with a spinning K clock. | ||
I would be gaudy about it. | ||
I wish I had all the special interest money people claim that I do. | ||
I don't, but I would take it if I could. | ||
Yeah, so that's an interesting spot for the comic to be in, because I do find in general that comics, you know, from going back to Lenny Bruce to George Carlin to Chris Rock to anybody, you know, to Chappelle and anyone that's doing any kind of edgy stuff today, we do find ourselves in a spot where the good ones, we want to tell the truth and we also want to be funny. | ||
And I think what you're saying is, at least in your view, in the Tina Fey situation or some of the SNL stuff, | ||
it's like the agenda overrode the funny. | ||
But part of that's just that it's a big corporate operation over there, right? | ||
NBC's owned by GE and there's a paycheck there. | ||
Oh, I don't know about all the corporate stuff. | ||
I know Lana Dunham is horrendously unfunny and her dad's, she has a job | ||
because her dad drew angry vaginas. | ||
That's why Lana Dunham has a job. | ||
Have you ever Googled Carol Dunham? | ||
No, but I've never Googled angry vagina, believe it or not. | ||
No, Google Carol Dunham. | ||
All her father did was draw, bent on all fours, spread angry vaginas. | ||
When we were on Joe Rogan Show, he didn't believe me. | ||
I said, bring it up now. | ||
Just Google Carol Dunham. | ||
More angry, hairy vaginas than you could, and not like, the women have no face. | ||
It's just vaginas. | ||
Um, and he was a famous artist, and that was a big reason for Lena Dunham to get back toward him. | ||
She's not funny, is a good example. | ||
There are plenty of women who are funny out there. | ||
She's not, and she puts on this cloak of, it's because I'm a woman! | ||
It's because I'm fat! | ||
It's because I'm snaggletoothed, or I smell bad, or whatever it is that day that's the newest form of discrimination. | ||
That's my issue. | ||
If you go out there, you let your material stand, and you take your licks, Fine. | ||
But that's not what comedians are doing now. | ||
And one thing that you haven't run into, Dave, respectfully, is, yeah, there is a bias against people who are to the right of center in the entertainment industry. | ||
I have no doubt there is. | ||
Well, I have no doubt there is, and I can see already what's happening with me, even though I've never voted for a Republican, I've never considered myself on the right. | ||
My whole show is to try to save what I see with the left, and I know you're trying to save the right, so we'll get into some of that in a sec. | ||
But yeah, I see people trying to paint me as right now because I don't fit into the exact box that they want on the left, which is extremely disappointing to say the least. | ||
No, absolutely. | ||
But I think you see this too. | ||
I don't think Chris Rock is funny. | ||
I think Richard Pryor was hilarious, Eddie Murphy. | ||
I've never thought Chris Rock was funny. | ||
I was there watching him backstage because I was a seat filler as a kid at the Just for Laughs festival. | ||
So, 12, 13, he was coming out in his jeans jackets. | ||
I just didn't think he was funny. | ||
But he was talking about how he won't do colleges because it's too PC. | ||
Okay, good for you, Chris Rock, I understand it. | ||
Or Sarah Silverman saying that. | ||
Then Sarah Silverman comes out and says, well, you can't say that's gay in a pejorative way. | ||
Or Chris Rock says, well, you know, black kids are being shot, no one wants... And then they want the social justice warrior PC culture when it's convenient for them. | ||
And they deserve to be devoured by this monster that they've created. | ||
And I don't just say this to blow smoke. | ||
I know that you don't do that. | ||
But that is incredibly rare. | ||
So, I mean, when we get into the meme wanting to save the right and you at the left, I wonder what there is to save about the left at this point, because this has been their path to destruction for decades. | ||
Yeah, well, look, it's definitely been an evolution with me seeing it for a while, and Milo did his best to convert me to the right. | ||
It didn't quite work. | ||
I'll give you an opportunity as well. | ||
You know, the Sarah Silverman thing, I'm totally with you on that, because her whole career was based on saying these outlandish and offensive, intentionally upsetting things, and then suddenly, now she made it, and then backtracked and said, well, don't say these Absolutely. | ||
And we wrote about that extensively on Sarah Silverman. | ||
you build your whole operation? | ||
So how do you expect the young guy, how do you expect the next Sarah Silverman to go | ||
ahead and be edgy when now you as the once edgy person has set up some new rules of operation? | ||
Absolutely. | ||
And we wrote about that extensively on Sarah Silverman. | ||
A good example is Bill Burr. | ||
I think he's as good as any comedian who's ever walked the planet of any generation. | ||
And he's not a political guy, but he's going up and he's saying things that inherently are political now, and offending people, and they get mad, and people protest. | ||
He's just funny. | ||
It doesn't mean that you can't be a political comedian. | ||
I mean, you do it. | ||
Kathleen Madigan does it from the left. | ||
A guy named Jeff Caldwell, I find... | ||
He's hysterical and he's very far to the left. | ||
Dennis Miller. | ||
I'm not saying there's only one type of comedian, but Sarah Silverman, like you said, made her living off of that. | ||
You know, joking about whatever it was, Ethiopian famine victims and rape and it was very, very funny. | ||
It was very cutting edge at the time, but what's okay for her is not for you and she wants to slam the door shut behind her because all of a sudden she has depression and she's made an indie film about it and I just think that's horse crap. | ||
So basically, you just want a sort of consistent set of principles, right? | ||
I mean, is that really what's going on here? | ||
The way that you've been trying to talk about what's going on on the right, you just want that applied to comedy as well, because these people are talking about real issues, so you want them to be consistent. | ||
So if you're a liberal, you should be for free speech, right? | ||
And allowing people to be offended and all that. | ||
And that's what you want these guys to stand up for. | ||
Yeah, but I don't think liberal—you know, we use this term, and people get mad, and so, you know, they say anti-authoritarian, and then libertarian, but like you talk about Milo, and then you have these libertarians who are supporting Trump, which is completely and totally indefensible. | ||
I mean, I am conservative. | ||
I am a Christian conservative. | ||
I'm open about that. | ||
I would certainly, if you looked at my policies and put me on that little quadrant without the biased questions in that online questionnaire, I would be considered much more libertarian. | ||
Like, I'm a Christian, so pro-life, absolutely, because I believe it's murder! | ||
And I believe that's a tenable position, that's why atheists have made it. | ||
Drugs? | ||
States have the right to do whatever they want. | ||
I don't think drugs are good, but if states want to legalize heroin, fine. | ||
Now, that doesn't make me popular with libertarians because they say, well, that's a cop-out. | ||
Well, no, I have to be consistent and believe in states' rights. | ||
Why would a libertarian say that's a cop-out? | ||
Because aren't you saying, go ahead and do it? | ||
Would you personally vote to legalize drugs? | ||
I'm like, in my state? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Probably not if you look at the results of Colorado. | ||
I probably just wouldn't fill out that voting ticket. | ||
And they go, well then you're not for personal liberty. | ||
Listen, you don't have to personally support something to understand the government's legitimate role. | ||
So, yeah, I'm personally a Christian, conservative. | ||
I know I'll take licks for that. | ||
I'm open about it. | ||
But I would be much more of a libertarian regarding policy. | ||
That's why the guy who I want to be president is the guy who wants the job the least. | ||
You want the Ron Swanson. | ||
The guy who doesn't even believe the job should really be doing all that much. | ||
That's who I want. | ||
Okay, so let's get into some of the politics stuff. | ||
So all my people know my situation with the left, but you have been in a very similar situation with the right. | ||
I know a couple of people in a similar situation as you, but basically, But your sense, I think, is that the Trump situation has sort of hijacked the party. | ||
Nobody's really talking about issues anymore. | ||
It's really just become personality-driven. | ||
This is why Milo loves it, actually. | ||
And I can get on board some of that because it's so against, you know, the social justice warriors and all that. | ||
And I like that part of it. | ||
But you're a policy guy, and that's why you do these videos breaking down policy and calling out bullshit and all that. | ||
So is that really what you're struggling with here, that it's not – this election almost has nothing, at least on the | ||
Republican side, has nothing to do with policy? | ||
Well, it's not a struggle for me at all. | ||
I mean, that's one thing. | ||
I have complete respect for people who say, you know what, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I just want someone who's going to come in and piss people off and I'm angry so I'm voting for Trump. | ||
That's fine. | ||
I have no problem with it. | ||
I have much, I don't want to say a problem, but I have far less respect for people who have claimed to be Tea Party conservatives, or Christian conservatives, doing these sort of mental gymnastics to justify the actions of somebody who basically wants to come in and Take the greatest power grab the executive office has had, if you look at his proposals. | ||
Not once has Donald Trump's answer been, I don't think the government can fix this. | ||
Every now and then, every now and then, wouldn't it just be good to hear politicians say, nah, yeah, damn, you know, that sucks. | ||
I don't really know if I can fix it for you. | ||
I would just like to hear someone say that. | ||
So that's why you would want a real libertarian candidate then. | ||
Would you vote for Gary Johnson if he was a legit third party guy? | ||
If he could get into the debate at 15%, would you go for him? | ||
I've said this, if it's Trump versus Hillary, probably. | ||
Just because I don't believe, at this point, I think they're two sides of the same coin. | ||
I don't believe any of them are pro-life. | ||
I know Gary Johnson's not pro-life, but I genuinely believe that he probably attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. | ||
I know he has no choice. | ||
I'm a big supporter of the two-party system, because I come from Canada, which is a parliamentary system. | ||
The reason the two-party system exists is to avoid this quagmire that you see in the primary, where someone can hijack a party and can't get over that 36% ceiling of the vote. | ||
Listen, I thought Donald Trump coming in, like you said, I like that he pisses off the right people. | ||
That's great! | ||
I get it. | ||
I like that he's coming in and he's speaking in a way that, like you said, the media just, they don't know what to do. | ||
All these analysts and talking heads. | ||
I mean, that's how I got on Fox News at 21, and I would just go on and, like, make fun of them. | ||
And they didn't know how to handle it, because this is how you conduct a debate at a roundtable. | ||
So I understand all that, but at a certain point I was saying, I need to hear something Anything, at any point, espousing some kind of constitutional conservatism. | ||
And I haven't seen that. | ||
I don't care if things are ugly. | ||
I don't care if people are politically divided. | ||
Listen, I'm fine with being politically divided over the right issues. | ||
If someone wants to ban students for using offensive words on campus or they want to enact speech laws, I'm fine with being politically divisive with that person. | ||
But I also do think, I think we agree on that, but there are certain issues, maybe you can help me with this, where I've never heard a single leftist rationalization that makes sense. | ||
Like, I get it, pro-life, okay, you're pro-you-don't-think-it's-murder, there's science on both sides, I understand it. | ||
Healthcare, you think you're entitled to everything for free, courtesy of my tax dollars as a human right, because Bernie Sanders says so, I can understand how you justify that. | ||
But how can anyone on the left be against, for example, charter schools? | ||
Or a voucher program attached to the student, as opposed to no choice, sending them to the school. | ||
How can a leftist be against drug testing or working for welfare? | ||
As we saw in Mississippi. | ||
Okay, you want to get your welfare, you show up, you work, we place you in a job placement program. | ||
I've never heard a rational argument against Some key issues, and it always reverts back to more government power. | ||
And I think that both of us, who have a problem with both George Bush and Barack Obama, and this executive power grab, should feel incredibly uncomfortable with the rhetoric from people like Hillary Clinton, or Bernie, or Trump. | ||
And I know you're not a Cruz guy, but of those people, he's the one saying he'll do the least, or Gary Johnson. | ||
I guess that's what Cruz is saying. | ||
He just reeks of me of used car salesman of the worst kind. | ||
I don't, I get what you're saying and we can get into a couple of those issues so we'll talk about some of our differences on those issues. | ||
But Cruz to me is just, and this is, I mean this more at like Not a policy place or... Gut level. | ||
I mean it just at a gut level. | ||
I watch him in those debates. | ||
There is something so slimy about him. | ||
And you know this thing that, what does he have? | ||
Finally he got one guy in the Senate to back him. | ||
I think Jeff Sessions or maybe one or two others now have been sort of forced into it. | ||
I think Lindsey Graham systematically endorsed everyone else first and then the day that he had endorsed people they would drop out. | ||
I'm pretty sure now he's... See I love that! | ||
I love that, and that's the shit that Trump people claim they like, right? | ||
Oh, he's gonna go in, he's gonna piss everybody off. | ||
No, he doesn't. | ||
They're all willing to work with him. | ||
All the Democrats have widely acknowledged that he's much more of a dealmaker, that he's unprincipled. | ||
And Ted Cruz, they hate him because he went in and he said, Mitch McConnell, you're a liar. | ||
Hey, John Boehner, you're kind of a piece of crap. | ||
I like that. | ||
I don't want a guy who's going in to make friends at this point. | ||
I understand it, and it's a valid criticism, but it's the same thing they use to praise Trump When it's untrue, and then criticize Cruz. | ||
Yeah, he's unliked. | ||
He's polarizing, because he is the outsider, and I understand that. | ||
I actually like that, but I also understand, you know, you need someone who can work with both sides. | ||
What do you think about him on just that gut level? | ||
Because a lot of people, what I'm saying about that, just that feeling about him. | ||
You get a feeling about all of these people, and I can gladly tell you my feelings about the rest of them. | ||
But you just sometimes get a feeling about them, and I think most people are with me on this. | ||
What do you think about that? | ||
Well, I think the media's done a really unfair... I think a good example is studying home state. | ||
Ted Cruz vs. Marco Rubio. | ||
Ted Cruz won his home state overwhelmingly. | ||
Marco Rubio lost it by a big margin. | ||
That's because people voted for Ted Cruz. | ||
He did exactly what he said he was going to do. | ||
People were happy with him, whereas Marco Rubio sort of betrayed his voting constituency. | ||
And I like Marco Rubio, but he kind of screwed the pooch in the Gang of Eight. | ||
So I think it's important to know, OK, we feel that way, but has he been consistent? | ||
And how do people who voted for him, who said, OK, you have the job, feel about him? | ||
What do they think about him? | ||
And the numbers are incredibly consistent. | ||
Yeah, I agree with you. | ||
We had him on the show, and actually on our show is where he was the best. | ||
He was a little bit loose in the shoulders. | ||
Yeah, it's that way where, well, let me tell you a story, and they go, ah, okay, I get it, and then Donald Trump just says, you know, ah, he's a prick, he's a lie detector, piece of shit, and people like that. | ||
Well, Cruz always tells a joke, and then when he releases the punchline at the end, you're like, wait, did you get to the punchline? | ||
Well, you're a comedian, that's not fair. | ||
I mean, if Hillary Clinton tells a joke, it usually involves devouring someone's head on stage, so they both have their weaknesses when it comes to delivering a punchline. | ||
But I certainly wouldn't say it's unfounded. | ||
If you could just take a better delivery, I understand that gut level. | ||
I mean, I've had him on the program, I've dealt with his people, and they were always very, very honest and very professional. | ||
And we've dealt with a lot of candidates on the show. | ||
So I can say that on a personal level, and then on a record, on a policy record, the guy's been pretty consistent. | ||
He wasn't my first choice, but, you know, here we are. | ||
So I suspect if it ended up being Cruz versus Bernie, in a way that's sort of your dream situation, right? | ||
Because then there is a clear battle of ideas. | ||
Like if you get Hillary and Trump, We know that really they're both centrists, and Trump, you know, the reason we don't know what he thinks about anything is because he's taken every position because he just wants to win, I get it, and Hillary's done a lot of the same thing. | ||
But you'd really like the Bernie, even though you would hate Bernie as president, but you like the idea of the Bernie Cruz thing, because then we can go, here's a set, here's the, what is the role of government, and let's have it out. | ||
Yeah, I think it would be a beautiful election in sort of this puritanical sense of, okay, you have pure socialism, and you do have constitutional conservatism. | ||
And listen, I'm not going to lie, it's a little scary that socialism might win in the United States. | ||
I love to say, well, it's democratic socialism! | ||
Like, well, democratic slavery, democratic dictatorship. | ||
You can bring someone in through democracy, and then it destroys everything. | ||
It doesn't make it any nicer. | ||
Democratic... I don't know. | ||
Arby's, right? | ||
It's still Arby's. | ||
No one wants to go to Arby's, but if people democratically elect that everyone eats Arby's, it doesn't mean it's a good thing. | ||
So that's a sort of sleight of hand that he's pulled by just adding Democratic in front of it. | ||
But yeah, I would like to see that. | ||
For all of Bernie's faults, he's been relatively respectful of Hillary Clinton. | ||
He could go after her in a way that Donald Trump could only hope to after these Republican candidates, so he has to make stuff up. | ||
Bernie doesn't do it. | ||
He sticks to policy, he sticks to disagreement, and I do think that with him and Cruz, you'd have a contrast. | ||
So I know it's just sort of the political hobbyist in me, but yeah, I'd much rather see that than Trump and Hillary Clinton. | ||
By the way, if it's Trump versus Hillary, I think he's gonna turn heel, as we say in wrestling, and I don't think he's going to be as hard on Hillary as he's been on Republicans. | ||
I think they have too much dirt in each other, sort of mutually assured destruction. | ||
I could be wrong. | ||
No, I agree with that. | ||
I agree with that. | ||
I think also that he would know that she's the only one that would be able to counter some of his stuff. | ||
You know, the little Marco stuff, or nobody likes Ted Cruz, or Jeb, you can't get it up, or whatever else he was saying about these guys. | ||
I think Hillary... I think that's a little bit of opining on your end. | ||
Was that a bit? | ||
Did I stretch that one a little? | ||
I think it was some of you. | ||
You never boned your wife or something? | ||
Whatever it is, but I think that he knows Hillary, for all the flaws she has, which are obviously many, she is so seasoned and so good and if she had to sit there across from Trump, I think it would be the first time that he would be back on his heels a little bit. | ||
We've seen him back on his heels and it was Carly Fiorina. | ||
Well, right, so you get the woman element there. | ||
It wasn't even a woman element, it was just someone with balls. | ||
Carly Fiorina was the only other one. | ||
Listen, I know people don't... I liked Carly Fiorina. | ||
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Why? | |
I thought she was conservative enough, and I thought she could beat Hillary Clinton, and she is someone who you ask a question, she will answer that question. | ||
What about the running a company into a ground thing? | ||
Did that bother you? | ||
Does it bother me? | ||
It depends. | ||
Let's see what happens in two years with Aura. | ||
You never know, Dan. | ||
I'll blame it on you. | ||
Did Carly Fiorina just take over Aura? | ||
Is that what you're telling me? | ||
I don't know. | ||
You can do that with CEO pay. | ||
Let's say a company is losing $800 million a year, and they bring in a new CEO, and they're losing $400 million a year. | ||
It's losing 400 million here, yeah, but it's losing 400 million less. | ||
And if you look at HP compared to other companies that we're developing, I mean, also during that time, the iPhone was created, right? | ||
Things rapidly evolved, not a lot of tech companies. | ||
That doesn't mean she's a great CEO, but Donald Trump isn't a great businessman either. | ||
But yeah, I understand the flaws. | ||
We asked her about that on the show, point blank, and she answered. | ||
I said, listen, your tenure at HP is not impressive. | ||
How do you answer your critics? | ||
And she went boom, boom, boom, boom, down the list. | ||
And she answered it in a way that I thought was adequate. | ||
Anyway, my point to say is we did see Donald Trump back up when he made fun of her face, and then on stage said, by the way, she's got a great face. | ||
That's the closest you get to an apology from Donald Trump. | ||
So you've had a bunch of these guys on. | ||
You've had Huckabee on, you've had Cruz, you've had... Not just guys, you sexist prick! | ||
Guys and gals. | ||
You've had Huckabee, you've had Cruz, you've had... Gals? | ||
Do you get a Mad Men haircut and now you're talking like you're from the early 60s? | ||
A chick? | ||
How about a chick? | ||
Can I say that? | ||
That's going to upset somebody. | ||
Bitches and hoes. | ||
B's and H's. | ||
That works. | ||
Exactly. | ||
Have you had any of the other, anyone else? | ||
We've had Fiorina, Cruz, Huckabee. | ||
Gosh, we had Santorum on at some point. | ||
I don't know exactly. | ||
We've extended invitations to all of them. | ||
And Trump obviously won't come on. | ||
They don't really like the impressions. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I'd have to get back. | ||
But those are the ones that, you know, stood out because at that point they were sort of transitioning from second stage to first stage or they were kind of surging. | ||
So those are the ones that stick in mind. | ||
And I don't think many of them will come back. | ||
I mean, you can only have a presidential candidate come up and then someone goes, did you do this show? | ||
We're in the very next segment. | ||
Crowder plates spot the tranny. | ||
And that's why I don't want to endorse anyone because it will do more harm than good. | ||
Right, so I've watched your interviews with those three, and what I thought you did do well is, no, it's a really slippery game interviewing these people, and this is where the mainstream media has failed miserably. | ||
They ask softball questions constantly because they want to get a second interview, and they want a third interview, and a fourth interview, and Chuck Todd knows if he stands up in the White House press room, not that Obama does a lot of press conferences anymore, or ever, but if he asks a tough question, Then Obama's just going to turn to somebody else, or the list in front of him, because I think he's picking it off a predetermined list, he's just going to go elsewhere, right? | ||
But I have noticed that you've tried your best to go in and out, and I know when I'm interviewing people that are not as influential as presidential candidates, sometimes you have to—my policy is I'll ask a sort of more broad question, because I want to hear people's thoughts, and then let them hang themselves if that's where they're going to go. | ||
But how aware are you of that when you're talking to them? | ||
Like, oh, I want to get this guy back, or, you know, I'm going to do the segment after, or any of that stuff? | ||
Well, it's funny that you said, you know, give him kind of enough rope to hang himself. | ||
We had to change our policy after one of our guests was caught masturbating in the closet and hung himself. | ||
So we said that we maybe played this poorly, overplayed our hand. | ||
Wait, is that real? | ||
No, no one Karate'd themselves in the studio, aside from Nat Gage. | ||
Karate'd? | ||
Yeah, that's the name I was going for. | ||
Oh my gosh, that was so awkward. | ||
I remember when I was watching that movie Life as a House, and it was Hayden Christensen, and there was that scene where he's choking himself in the closet, and my girlfriend at the time and her mom were like, oh my gosh, that's so sad, he's trying to kill himself. | ||
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And I was going, no, no, I think you're missing the concept of the scene. | |
Like, what are you talking about? | ||
And I had to explain to them, like, people do that? | ||
You, a good Christian conservative, had to explain that to your poor wife? | ||
That is very sad. | ||
No, it wasn't my wife. | ||
It was a girlfriend at the time, and I also had to explain to them that World War II happened because they were actually German, and I was watching Saving Private Ryan once, and they're like, AHH! | ||
Turn it off! | ||
So it was that kind of a serious German family. | ||
The question was, yeah, you know, my thing is... | ||
And I think you're good about this, too. | ||
Ask them. | ||
Give them the ability to answer. | ||
And if they don't, follow up. | ||
Hold them to it. | ||
And my job is not to have them back. | ||
That's not my job. | ||
My job is to get the questions answered that I think the audience wants to hear. | ||
And I try and do the best job of it that I can. | ||
This is not something I signed up for when I was planning a career. | ||
I'm grateful to have the opportunity. | ||
And I will say, Carly and Ted, We're very good in answering the questions when they felt that their guard was a little bit down. | ||
And that impressed me. | ||
And that's what we don't have. | ||
We don't have a lot of local politicians or any of this stuff. | ||
It's a podcast that happens to be syndicated on radio. | ||
And the problem with traditional media is these people, they send out these press releases. | ||
You get like 20 a day begging for some state rep to be on. | ||
And I just, listen, we're not going to do it. | ||
Our job is to entertain the audience, to inform the audience. | ||
If it's not entertaining, informative, or insightful, it gets scrapped from the program. | ||
So that's how we try and run it. | ||
So a lot of this stuff, I always vacillate between that everything bad in the world is the media's fault, and everything is politicians' fault. | ||
But really it's both of them, right? | ||
Like when you watch the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and you really see how close these guys are. | ||
And, you know, they call it nerd prom, and they think they're so edgy and cool, because they're all nerds together. | ||
But it's like, you guys are going to parties together. | ||
You guys are going to dinners together. | ||
There are a gajillion examples of politicians being married to members of the media, or their children are in the media, or every type of nepotistic connection you can possibly imagine. | ||
Do you think it's basically 50-50 at who's at fault over how screwed up our whole conversation is? | ||
No, I think it's entirely due to the left. | ||
No, listen, you talk about media, entertainment industry, it's entirely to the left. | ||
Wildly to the left. | ||
And so you're right about these relationships, these cozy relationships between media and members of office. | ||
But then they try and take this and they go, "So, mainstream media is just, it's funded by the Koch brothers | ||
and Big Oil." | ||
Listen, you cannot tune in to CNN, MSNBC, they could go, "Fox News, Fox News, Fox News." | ||
Okay, what about ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC? | ||
Every single other news source that's not Fox News is pushing the man-made global climate change agenda. | ||
Sorry, I have to get that right. | ||
It's not global warming. | ||
They're always pushing the LGBTQAAIP agenda right now with the laws in North Carolina. | ||
They're always pushing the anti-corporate, anti-Republican agenda. | ||
So people think because there's some kind of corporate influence that it automatically means that media is conservative. | ||
It couldn't be further from the truth. | ||
You can look at the numbers. | ||
You can look at the statistics. | ||
an overwhelming number of people, not only in executive positions, but people who work | ||
in the industry, whether it's Hollywood, music, or media, are entirely, entirely left. | ||
So if people watch it and they think that they're dishonest, or they feel like the mainstream | ||
media has misled them, I would agree that rests entirely at the feet of the left. | ||
Republicans have had plenty of opportunities and they've screwed it up too. | ||
Fox News included, and a lot of AM radio. | ||
I get it. | ||
But the reason Fox News and AM radio are singled out by the left is because those are the only two mediums that aren't 100% dominated by far-left influencers. | ||
So I want to make sure people who are watching this, you know, the young audience, good corporate media, man, it's still to the left. | ||
Very far to the left, and I hope people realize that. | ||
Yeah, Ben Shapiro laid out a very similar case for that when he was on. | ||
But all right, I know a lot of my audience is going to be shaking their fists at some of the things you just said, so let's back up a little bit. | ||
Climate change. | ||
Now, I had Michael Mann, Dr. Michael Mann from Penn State. | ||
He's one of the most respected climate scientists in the world. | ||
He laid out the case for climate change. | ||
He laid out the 97% of scientists in this field that believe that man-made climate change is real. | ||
Bullshit. | ||
I let him on for an hour and laid it out, so I'll give you two minutes to debunk it. | ||
Go. | ||
Listen, I'm not going to debunk climate change, but the 97% is bullshit. | ||
If you look at the questionnaire, basically if you didn't believe in climate change, you were not included in the sample study. | ||
This is taken from two examples. | ||
People can look it up, we've written about it on the website. | ||
There is a petition out there. | ||
Now again, I'm not a scientist, so I'm not going to talk from the point of view of a scientist, but I will talk from the point of view of consensus. | ||
Little known fact, science isn't governed by consensus, it's governed by what's right. | ||
But if we're going to use the consensus argument, there's a petition out there with over 30,000 registered scientists, several thousand atmospheric scientists, which means that right away you're in double-digit percentage points of the qualified atmospheric scientists proactively going out of their way to sign a pledge saying, we don't believe in either Man-made climate change, or that man-made climate change will have the catastrophic results that these people are pushing. | ||
That number is patent bullshit. | ||
And a great example, and we ran this, is when you have Ted Cruz in there with a Sierra Club, the head of the Sierra Club, and he asks them about the pause. | ||
This is the head of the Sierra Club, the most influential environmental impact lobby in D.C. | ||
We want to talk about corruption? | ||
And Ted Cruz says, well, I want to know how you explain the pause. | ||
The head of the Sierra Club goes, To his intern, well, we would like to rely on the consensus of the 97%. | ||
But those scientists are pointing to people like the Sierra Club. | ||
And the head of the Sierra Club doesn't have any numbers to back it up. | ||
Do I think that the climate is changing? | ||
Yes. | ||
Is it possible that there's man-made climate change? | ||
Maybe. | ||
Will that have catastrophic results? | ||
We can't prove that yet. | ||
People don't agree on that. | ||
So you want to wait until Miami is... | ||
Miami's already supposed to be gone, Dave! | ||
Anyone who watched An Inconvenient Truth, which was the big catalyst that put Al Gore on a board at Apple to collect billions of dollars while masseuses were rubbing his feet and he was doing their arches, know that all these predictions were wrong. | ||
They were verifiably false. | ||
There's more ice in the Antarctic than ever before. | ||
I'm not saying there's no way that humans could be contributing to climate change, but to believe that it is going to have catastrophic results, and to believe that the United States government can fix it, Is ridiculous. | ||
And how do they want to fix it? | ||
More legislation. | ||
More control. | ||
More power. | ||
If someone has a vested interest here, again, if I could get big oil money, if I could get big fracking money, I would take it and let you know. | ||
I've not received a dime. | ||
But if someone's grant depends on them saying that the earth is warming and we need to fix it now, those people have a vested interest in proving their theory, and they're not disclosing it. | ||
And all they do is say I'm funded by big oil. | ||
I'm just saying that I'm pretty skeptical, and I've looked at the list of 30,000 scientists signing a petition. | ||
Just that list means the 97% number is complete bullshit, if that were a valid scientific argument. | ||
Which it isn't. | ||
Alright, well in the spirit of healthy discussion, I had man on. | ||
I gave you your two minutes, you took every second of it, and now let people do a little Googling. | ||
That's a thing, right? | ||
And let them see what they think, and then I'll bring- And I'm not mad at you, I just know- No! | ||
This guy's not a scientist. | ||
I'm not a scientist. | ||
I'm not claiming to be a scientist. | ||
By the way, big fracking money, is that a thing? | ||
Because I would love to be, oh, I'm funded by the big fracking people. | ||
That just sounds good. | ||
Well, that's a big part of what's contributed to nearly all of the new employment under Barack Obama's presidency, despite his best efforts. | ||
It is an amazing, it is a miracle. | ||
Fracking is an absolute miracle for United States energy dependence. | ||
But I guess leftists want us to be dependent on countries like Saudi Arabia, where they have no EPAs, they couldn't give two shits about a clean atmosphere, and ship it on tankers overseas. | ||
The BP oil spill, Exxon Valdez, that happens every year, multiple times a year, in the middle of the ocean. | ||
You just don't see it. | ||
So there's no seagull caught in the oil spill that people feel bad about on a CNBC report. | ||
And people act like we're getting... Where do you think your electric car, where do you think the energy comes from? | ||
Two giant non-recyclable batteries. | ||
Most of our electricity in the United States, a significant portion, still comes from coal. | ||
You're plugging it in. | ||
You're using coal energy. | ||
People just don't use it. | ||
It's a white guilt thing. | ||
It's a social justice warrior white guilt. | ||
And I'm not saying that someone cannot make a valid argument for climate change. | ||
I'm not saying that, and if that scientist were on here with me, he would eat my lunch, I absolutely agree. | ||
But, when you are trying to take away my private rights as an American citizen, that's where I have the right to be skeptical. | ||
And, uh, you have Bill Nye saying that we should be jailed now. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
All right, so, I'm with you on that, and of course, as a more limited government guy, I'm with you on the idea that government can't solve everything if the climate really is out of control. | ||
The idea that the United States government, or even the UN, you know, they get together and they have all the Kyoto Conference and the Paris thing that they had and all this stuff, they get together, they say all these things, literally everything they say is non-binding. | ||
There's no enforcement that the UN has to do any of these things, so they sign these papers, they say, oh, this is what we're going to do over the course of the next 30 years, and You know, whether they do it or... I've been there, you know. | ||
Yeah? | ||
I went to the climate summit. | ||
Yeah, the one in Cancun. | ||
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Yeah. | |
For people who say, oh, it was fear-mongering, first off, the Kyoto Protocol is total and complete utter horseshit, and it would destroy people in third-world countries who need energy. | ||
You know, these people aren't talking about running their cars. | ||
They're trying to heat a can of beans over an ironing board in a trash can, right? | ||
So your solar panels might feel good if you're living out there in Palm Springs. | ||
These people can't afford it. | ||
Secondly, I was there. | ||
I was there when Ted Turner got up on stage and proposed communist China's one-child policy. | ||
He wanted that to be binding on the protocol. | ||
I was there when he proposed that. | ||
So when people say, I'm the extremist? | ||
Just saying, hey, let's wait a little bit? | ||
And this guy is getting up with world leaders proposing a one-child policy. | ||
By the way, how do you enforce that? | ||
Again, do the Googling. | ||
It's not by writing an angry letter. | ||
These people are extremists. | ||
They're religious extremists, and that's my issue. | ||
Not a debate over scientific consensus. | ||
But when someone wants to tell me I can't have more than one child, government mandated, we have some problems. | ||
Okay, so let's split the difference for the sake of the conversation. | ||
Between Michael Mann and what you've said, that the truth is somewhere in between maybe it's a little human-made and let's say something's happening, let's say maybe it's not even human-made, but let's just say something's happening right now. | ||
Sure. | ||
So for you as someone that obviously economics is a big part of what you think and what you care about, what the government's role should be is based in economics, don't you think that the government could Perhaps do a little more to invest in green energy so that there's still an economy there. | ||
So maybe we'll burn less coal, but there's a lot of money to be made in wind power and solar power and all of those other things. | ||
So you're not losing. | ||
You're just shifting where money is, not losing money. | ||
Are you out of your tree, sir? | ||
What's that? | ||
Are you out of your tree, sir? | ||
Solyndra? | ||
Look at green companies. | ||
The biggest green company, I think, in the world. | ||
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No, I know. | |
Everyone yells Solyndra. | ||
I know. | ||
That's one. | ||
That's one. | ||
Not Solyndra, but another one last week just went bankrupt. | ||
They don't have it in front of me. | ||
We wrote about it on the website. | ||
It consistently doesn't work. | ||
When you try and force the market and manipulate the market, that's how you end up with big bank bailouts. | ||
That's how you end up with the housing crisis. | ||
That's how you end up with Solyndra. | ||
It doesn't work. | ||
There are people who are going to respond to market forces, and we're going to get better energy. | ||
We're going to find other ways to power us through the next century. | ||
By the way, we have more than enough energy right now and natural resources for more than a century. | ||
The peak oil myth is another thing. | ||
It's a myth, particularly now that you include fracking into the equation. | ||
No, I don't think the government should step in and force companies to... The only way they can do that now is force companies to invest in wind or solar, and inevitably they end up going bankrupt because it doesn't work. | ||
And by the way, a big reason it doesn't work? | ||
It's because of Democrats, right? | ||
Why were wind turbines killed out there on the East Coast? | ||
Because of people like Ted Turner, who didn't want to look at them and they were killing eagles or whatever it was. | ||
Why were solar panels killed in the Mojave Desert? | ||
Because of some endangered species of mosquito or insect. | ||
I don't even know why mosquitoes exist. | ||
I think you could feed fish with something that is much less annoying. | ||
I don't get it. | ||
But that was the reason, in the Mojave Desert. | ||
If you can't put solar panels in the Mojave Desert, and you can't put wind turbines off the coast of Cape Cod, you can't do it. | ||
Yeah, you know, I was driving up to—a couple months back, I was driving up to Sonoma from here in L.A., and there's a huge swath of area where you pass tons and tons of turbines in the mountains. | ||
You know, nobody lives near them or anything. | ||
I actually thought it looked really cool. | ||
Like, it felt like I was like, oh, this is what the future is. | ||
But yeah, I guess people don't want that in their backyard. | ||
But all right, let's leave that one. | ||
No, but liberals do it, that's the problem. | ||
Liberals say you have to invest in this, and then screw you on the other side. | ||
We're going to give you a grant, or we're going to punish you with some kind of tariff if you don't invest enough green energy. | ||
Okay, fine, let's put up these panels in the Mojave Desert. | ||
Can't do that, there's a mosquito. | ||
Are you shitting me? | ||
That's the process. | ||
They're wrong on every turn. | ||
I'm just saying, let them do what's most profitable, as long as they're obeying the rules, and then we don't have to screw a company and bail them out with taxpayer dollars. | ||
I think you think you're being the true environmentalist by not killing the birds that are flying into these things. | ||
I don't care about birds. | ||
Birds are jerks. | ||
All right, good finish for that one. | ||
All right, so let's talk about the abortion thing for a little bit, because this is the one that I think there is so Little middle ground, and I think if people really would talk about it in an honest way and not constantly demonize everyone else's intent, I think we could make a little headway. | ||
So, you're against abortion altogether, right? | ||
Do you have some exceptions? | ||
Here's what I'd do. | ||
Okay, yeah, I think it's murder. | ||
Do I think the best way to deal with an incest or a rape problem is to kill the child? | ||
No. | ||
But, since it's less than a single percentage point of abortions, okay, let's take it off the table. | ||
Let's say, fine, for that. | ||
Are liberals, are leftists willing to do anything else to curb abortions? | ||
Are they willing at all to deviate from free abortion, on demand, anytime, period? | ||
And they're not. | ||
Okay, so I'm with you on the—so I think, I'll say it, you took a principled approach there. | ||
You're saying that there's this one percent—now, everyone makes it sound like the rape situation or the mother dying is a much bigger percentage than it is. | ||
So I'm going to take your word that it is one percent. | ||
I'll go with you on that one. | ||
Don't fact check me at all. | ||
Just take my word for it. | ||
That's what I live for, Dave. | ||
Again, Google people. | ||
But OK, so that you're taking a—you're saying, "I'm willing, as someone that believes | ||
this is murder, I'm willing to just throw that out for the sort of good of the conversation." | ||
So, OK, I think that's a pretty decent place to start. | ||
I mean, my feeling on it is, at some point, I do believe that it is murder. | ||
I mean, I don't know. | ||
For me, it's like I don't know what the point is. | ||
I don't know if that's at—and this is, of course, what scientists and philosophers | ||
and people have debated forever. | ||
You know, is it the second the sperm touches the egg? | ||
I don't think so. | ||
I think there might be a couple months in there where it's the cosmic stew before it is a human. | ||
But, you know, I've had people on my show when I've talked about abortion who have said, until it is literally out of the woman's body, you can have an abortion. | ||
I would never go for that. | ||
I mean, there are babies born at five months because something's wrong, and they live their perfectly normal lives. | ||
Well, and President Obama voted to not defend babies that were born from survived abortions and being tossed in a linen closet in Illinois. | ||
He was the only person of any Democrat or Republican in the state who said, no, we don't need to protect them. | ||
These babies who have survived abortions, let them die in a linen closet. | ||
And he said because there were already laws in the books. | ||
The reason this was there on the floor for a vote was because it wasn't working. | ||
So again, if we want to talk radical, babies who are breathing, who are crying, who are left in a linen closet to die, Barack Obama voted to ensure that could still happen, as opposed to voting present, which he did a significant amount of time. | ||
Again, so I don't think it's extremist for me to say, alright, let's toss those out. | ||
What can we do to limit abortions versus someone saying, even if they survive the abortion, that's the lady's choice, let it die. | ||
And again, it's been painted from the social justice where you're left, because right away I'm a sexist. | ||
Or even you, for what you said, you would have feminists who would be all over you. | ||
You have no right at any point. | ||
Even though there's a scientific argument to be made. | ||
At conception, or much earlier than feminists want to admit, it doesn't matter. | ||
We're considered the extremists because we're against it at all. | ||
And I don't think that what I'm saying is untenable or less reasonable than Barack Obama's voting record on abortion. | ||
I think it's far more reasonable. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Well, that's why this discussion is so stupid, because the right makes it sound like the left just wants to kill babies, and the left makes it sound like the right just hates women, and neither one of those things are true. | ||
Oh, the left wants to kill babies. | ||
You're married to a woman, aren't you? | ||
So I'm pretty sure you're pro-woman. | ||
I'm not you, Dave. | ||
I'm married to a woman. | ||
That's what marriage has always been. | ||
Oh, right, right, right. | ||
We'll get to that one, too. | ||
So, okay, so, I would... He's a homosexual! | ||
So stupid, I'm so- I heard that in Palm Beach. | ||
There was an old person that was in the beach. | ||
It didn't real- HE'S A HOMOSEXUAL! | ||
unidentified
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And I was sitting there with my wife, just like, I can't believe- About you? | |
Someone was talking about you? | ||
No, no, no, not about me, but about someone else who clearly was. | ||
I don't know. | ||
It's just been ringing in my head. | ||
I was looking for an excuse to do it. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
Well, you're working out too much, you know what I mean? | ||
That's the tip-off for a lot of people. | ||
So, okay, so with the abortion thing, so if you take the position as you've just laid out, and you were to force, not force women to have babies, it sounds silly, but, you know, say a woman can't have an abortion, but she can't afford it, she doesn't want the child, etc., etc., would you be for Having the government help in some way once that child is in the world. | ||
Because that's where I think we can maybe get to a little common ground on this. | ||
It's one thing to say, all right, well, I'm against abortion, but then, you know what, there's still a child there who's ultimately the victim because of the parent's poor decision to either have sex in the first place or go ahead and do what they had to do. | ||
Well, I disagree with your premise. | ||
Forced to have a baby, you know, again, if we're taking away the less than a percentage point of a percent with rape and incest... No, no, no, I get it. | ||
People are... No one's forced you to have sex. | ||
No, no, I get that, but I'm talking about after that. | ||
People are going to make mistakes. | ||
Yeah, after that. | ||
People are going to do stupid things. | ||
But it's important because they oppose anything that would prevent that situation. | ||
A great example is, listen, and I'm not a huge fan of all the foreign aid that George Bush did, but Who did the most good for Africa, the AIDS epidemic? | ||
All presidents combined. | ||
It was George Bush. | ||
And it wasn't even close. | ||
And it wasn't just because of money. | ||
It was because he was the first guy. | ||
People don't like him because he's a Christian. | ||
And they hate the abstinence education. | ||
But he went in and said, hey, if you rape a virgin, you're still going to have AIDS. | ||
You guys should actually abstain from sex. | ||
Let's teach them morality as it relates to sex. | ||
And then throw some condoms at them. | ||
And it worked. | ||
Verifiably it worked. | ||
Same thing with Christian conservatives here in the United States. | ||
Someone saying, listen, The only thing that stops this idea that abstinence-only education, that's not a mainstream thing, it's not a thing, okay? | ||
Abstinence-only means the only thing that works is abstinence. | ||
The only thing that can guarantee you won't get pregnant or prevent an STD is abstinence. | ||
Leftists don't want to do that because that's a moral absolute. | ||
That needs to be taught to kids, and then you can teach them to be more responsible. | ||
But the leftist voting constituency? | ||
Listen, they're not becoming more sexually responsible. | ||
The left has done a great... Listen, let's just talk about the black American community. | ||
A huge disservice. | ||
A black child has the likelihood of being born as they do of being aborted at this point. | ||
It's almost a 50-50 shot. | ||
And that was a proactive setup from people like Sanger and in underprivileged neighborhoods. | ||
There is no reason in 2016 that they shouldn't learn, and if the Democrats want to talk about helping impoverished communities, that they should not have measurably improved these numbers of people getting pregnant or accidental pregnancies. | ||
They haven't. | ||
They have no interest in doing that. | ||
So, my fight has always been along further on the beginning of that logic bus, right, where you can ding-ding, let's get off here, and the left doesn't want to because inevitably it comes back to more control and Planned Parenthood and federal funding. | ||
Yes, I support adoption. | ||
We've considered adopting. | ||
I think that's a great thing. | ||
If you look at people who adopt, it tends to be Christian conservatives, as a general rule, or transsexuals, depending on what the theme of the day is, if you're watching I Am Kate. | ||
But it's true. | ||
They were all upset at IMK. | ||
unidentified
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They're like, can you believe that I have to disclose that I'm trans? | |
Yes! | ||
If you're trying to adopt a child as a mother, I think it would be pertinent information that you have a dick. | ||
I don't think that's hate speech to check that box. | ||
That's not allowed to make here. | ||
You said bullshit like five times. | ||
Yeah, no, you're allowed. | ||
Hey, listen, you know, I told you I have a crack team of researchers here. | ||
They just flashed in front of me as you were talking that on your 1% stat on the rape thing, they're saying the closest they can find to the 1% thing was a study done in 1989. | ||
So there you go. | ||
So, but I think your point is that maybe it's 5%, maybe it's 1%. | ||
I would like to hear them come up with a different number, because again, the left doesn't even want to present a number. | ||
They just want to say, well, what about? | ||
What about if there's a Siamese... I've even heard this in college humanities class, right? | ||
unidentified
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Right when you learn, correlation does not equal causation! | |
And a few buzzwords. | ||
Or like Young Turks, where they just play the drinking game with mainstream media, right? | ||
But they don't want to educate themselves on what that actually means. | ||
The left should present some numbers on that. | ||
They don't want to. | ||
They operate in the dark. | ||
I want to shine a light on as much of it as possible. | ||
But yeah, it's hard to get those numbers because people don't want to report rape. | ||
And so the left says, you just have to take our word for it. | ||
One in four women is raped. | ||
And if you argue against it, you're sexist. | ||
Which is a complete, total BS number. | ||
That means one of every four women we know has been raped. | ||
Anyone with a shred of common sense knows it's a lie. | ||
Yeah, well that goes to the lack of trust that I think the mainstream media, without using that as the pejorative style, but just, you know, the cable news operation has just become just terrible in the way that it reports | ||
news. | ||
You know, they're basically just doing panels all day of people that got everything wrong | ||
six months before and they just trope them out again. | ||
Right? | ||
I mean, you can literally, I was watching CNN the other day and it's like, oh, there's | ||
Gloria Borger again. | ||
She predicted everything wrong. | ||
Now what's she going to predict? | ||
And they do this with everybody. | ||
And then, of course, it's also campaign managers debating other campaign managers. | ||
You are never going to get anything remotely close to true. | ||
And then, of course, their analysts are also former administration officials whose jobs it used to be to lie. | ||
You know, if you're Jay Carney, the press secretary, now you're supposed to be an analyst. | ||
It's the height of stupidity. | ||
So that's mainstream media, fine. | ||
It's easy to knock it, as you just alluded to. | ||
But I also think there's a huge danger now with what's going on with the online media that has completely dropped the ball. | ||
I think there was a moment, there was about a three-year window a couple years back where the online media started doing some really beautiful stuff. | ||
Really talking about things in a new way, talking about money in politics, talking about real issues that just couldn't percolate up to the mainstream, and then what happened is everyone jumped in and said, well, I'm a news guy, I'm a, you know, and I say this with all due irony, I do the best I can here, but I'm, you know, I'm in the online world, I hold myself to a- No, but you, don't sell yourself short. | ||
Listen, you actually try. | ||
You're not just regurgitating, you do this, you have this whole studio, you do original content, you're not just regurgitating clickbait crap, right? | ||
For sure. | ||
And I respect that. | ||
So people watching should appreciate that about you. | ||
You have people out there who've made millions in online media and never so much as written an original column because they've just figured out we spend X amount on advertising and we make this amount back by just aggregating the best stories with a hat tip at the bottom. | ||
And you're right, it's a real problem. | ||
Right, so there's a lot of that, and there's just new sites popping up every day, funded by, a lot of times, people with a lot of money, to push an agenda, and it's all being presented as news. | ||
So how do you navigate what you find is true and what you find is worth listening to? | ||
I think it's really hard to do. | ||
I mean, even when, you know, I try to follow things that I don't agree with, and I follow some things I agree with, and half the time I'm like, I don't know if either one of these are giving me anything close to the truth. | ||
No, I think you're right, and that's a real problem. | ||
We've been plagiarized a lot, and I know people, they'll excuse anyone of being clickbait, because we do anywhere from four to six articles a day, compared to 60 or 70, which is typical of these places, just have staffs of people, and all they do is find out a title. | ||
You know, like for me it was a point where we severed relationships just when they were | ||
just Marco Rubio, billionaire, secret closeted gay boy toy. | ||
And I was like, okay, you know, this is enough. | ||
I, you know, I can't, can't even be friends with you people. | ||
That's been a big problem with the Trump situation. | ||
You know, you have these people who support Trump, who work for some of these big sites | ||
and you know, we've even received backroom threats if we don't step up and get in line | ||
for Trump from conservatives. | ||
They see me as more of an enemy than leftists. | ||
And I've praised Trump when he's been right and I've criticized him when he's been wrong. | ||
Same thing with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. | ||
But the issue is they'll also go out and go, look, we have these numbers, you know, a few | ||
of these conservative sites that sites that supported Trump did way better than those | ||
who didn't. | ||
It's changing guys. | ||
But all that says is you're just, you know, clickbait crap and you're proud of it. | ||
It doesn't matter if it's true. | ||
It doesn't matter if it's honest. | ||
It doesn't matter if there's original content. | ||
And yeah, it is a real problem. | ||
What I do, and what I recommend people do, if they're trying to figure out the truth, I'll follow you. | ||
People like the Young Turks, I can't stand them. | ||
They're almost always wrong. | ||
HuffPo, Salon, that's why we're the first at louderwithcrowder.com. | ||
Like, we only have me. | ||
Not Gay Jared, Courtney, Casey, Brody. | ||
That's our entire staff, but we're constantly reading Salon and HuffPo and BuzzFeed, and then responding to it, because most conservatives don't even have it on their radar. | ||
So I always recommend just, listen, no one is unbiased. | ||
Have stuff that's far to the left, have stuff that's far to the right, so you at least know what both sides are saying, and then draw your own conclusions. | ||
Trying to do the CNN, we're straight down the middle thing, it's a lie, it's never existed. | ||
So I always recommend that people have both clear left and right and make their decisions, because Either way, someone's going to try and pitch you. | ||
Yeah, so is the real irony here that, you know, everyone says, well, you know, the mainstream media is funded by the corporations and those are the same corporations that are funding the candidates and blah blah blah, and there's obviously some truth to that without question, and that shows why some of it sucks, but that the online media, I don't think people have sort of caught up to what you just said, which it is because it's just driven by clicks. | ||
The truth is the first thing out the window, because all you want to do is write the most salacious headline, get somebody to click at a Twitter, get somebody to watch that ad on YouTube, and all that. | ||
And I know very much from what we did from literally day one—it was the first thing that I did on this show—was lay out the rules of how I'm going to guide this show. | ||
And I said, we're not going to do clickbait. | ||
And I know, even sometimes, I'll talk to my producers after, and we'll know that we can get more views if we frame this a certain way or if we try to rig the system, and we go out of our way not to do it because I'm trying to do something that I'm proud of. | ||
But a lot of these guys, they just want clicks, and that's no better than being funded by a corporation or anything else. | ||
No, no, absolutely not. | ||
We know that we could do twice the numbers. | ||
We'd run the numbers if we just talked about Trump non-stop. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And we don't. | ||
We just don't do it. | ||
Now there's a difference, you know, you want people to click your content, you want to grow. | ||
You know, our rule is, anything we title, people, it's a window, right? | ||
The window to a shop, they know exactly what they're getting, and they come in because they want more. | ||
unidentified
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Whoa, the bombshell Donald Trump dropped that you won't believe! | |
You know, our title would be something like, Donald Trump accuses Ted Cruz of extramarital affairs. | ||
Here's the evidence. | ||
I like the head wave you did with the other one. | ||
Could you do that more? | ||
unidentified
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Well, you won't believe! | |
Absolutely smashing, Marco Rubio! | ||
You see these all the time. | ||
unidentified
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Or Bernie Sanders lets the cat out of the bag on Hillary Clinton. | |
If it doesn't let anyone know and they have to click it to find out what it is, that's clickbait. | ||
Having a title that people want to click and learn more, and we've learned, listen, long term, we've seen a lot of companies drop like flies, and listen, we're not perfect and we've screwed up, but our interactions on social media, as opposed to clicks, far outnumber clicks because the people who do read it Click it, share it, want other people to be informed. | ||
And so a lot of these people have taken a crap on social media or YouTube by just getting the click, but the retention rate is terrible or people leave. | ||
And that's being fixed. | ||
There's an anti-conservative bias at Facebook. | ||
But yeah, I appreciate that you do have integrity with this program and that you do try and frame it that way. | ||
A lot of people out there don't. | ||
And I will say it's probably worse in the conservative community than the left because... Wow, you're conceding some ground. | ||
Well, I can see ground all the time! | ||
Listen, your hair is better than me right now, you've got a better makeup team, you had a better vacation than I did, you made better choices with that. | ||
That's true, that's true. | ||
This is true. | ||
Listen, you're prettier than I am, but yeah, I think, no, I think there's a lot of ground to be conceded. | ||
The thing I like about Donald Trump is that he doesn't apologize when he doesn't think he's wrong. | ||
The problem is he never thinks he's wrong. | ||
If I'm wrong, I'll apologize. | ||
If I don't think I'm wrong, I'm not going to apologize because someone marches me out. | ||
And that's a big difference, too, between me and other conservatives who you may have had on the show. | ||
No one pays me. | ||
You know, we make ad revenue, or YouTube, or starting a membership. | ||
It won't change the free content. | ||
I pay my employees, and hopefully pay myself, because I've worked for other people. | ||
And I know you've been in that situation, and it's a really tough situation to be in, because someone else has final call. | ||
You know, I mean, a good example would be like, I know you don't want to talk about them because you worked there, but like the Young Turks. | ||
I mean, the stuff that they just say, it's just, it's just untrue. | ||
It's just untrue, or they go on now, and they don't even try, right? | ||
unidentified
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It's just Jenks and, hey, come on. | |
Simple stuff, folks. | ||
unidentified
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Okay? | |
Don't be ridiculous. | ||
And then Anita's like, "Yeah, yeah!" | ||
And then they have that guy who's clearly just trotted out because he's gay, and he | ||
just reiterates what Anita says. | ||
Like there's... | ||
Is it Anita? | ||
I don't know her name. | ||
I always forget her name. | ||
Um... | ||
Anita? | ||
I'm just letting you go here. | ||
Is it Anita? | ||
I'm just letting you go. | ||
I don't know if it's Anita. | ||
Okay, fine, whatever it is. | ||
But they have that guy come out, she's like, "Yeah, yeah, I totally think you're right." | ||
It was kind of like when Rachel Maddow started, and she would just come on and say, "I agree | ||
with you, Keith," and that was it. | ||
It's just... | ||
And it gets to a point where there's no one on there to question them. | ||
So, they can bitch about mainstream media all they want, but they do have funding. | ||
Of course, people know. | ||
It's not like it's always been entirely independently run or they've built their own studios. | ||
People know that there's some money behind them. | ||
And they have a vested interest in protecting a narrative. | ||
My only thing is I just ask that people be honest. | ||
I just ask people be honest about their point of view, and then let the cards fall where they may. | ||
If people do that, we do not have a problem. | ||
Even if you're Jesse Ventura, fluoride in a tap and deodorant is a government form of mind control, go with it as long as you're honest about it. | ||
That's my man, Jesse Ventura. | ||
And Aura. | ||
Oh, that's right. | ||
Sorry, I forgot he's at Aura. | ||
We'll edit that out. | ||
Guess what? | ||
We don't have to edit that out because Aura said it. | ||
He's going to school us on the facts. | ||
Jesse Ventura's know the facts. | ||
Fly it in your tap. | ||
You know, it's a beautiful thing. | ||
I've said this before, but the beauty of my situation with Aura is from day one, they said to me, don't make the show that you think we want you to make, make the show you want to make. | ||
And they have never once said literally one word to me about editorial or any of the direction we're doing. | ||
Anyway, listen, we could talk forever. | ||
And I've thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
And this is what the battle of ideas is all about. | ||
So to wrap this thing up, do you think that By 2020, that we will have a viable third party, because it's pretty obvious to me that there is a new center growing, a group of people who are a little more socially liberal, and I know you're obviously not as socially liberal as I am, but who have a little more of that, who want a smaller government, who want to figure out a fairer tax system, but still believe in strong defense. | ||
I think there's something really growing here, who really believe in free speech, of course, and all that. | ||
So do you think there is a moment where we might get a third party coming in 2020? | ||
That's my hope out of all the craziness from this situation. | ||
Well, I have two questions for that, and I know we have to go. | ||
Where do you think that I'm not as socially liberal as you? | ||
Well, I think we skipped over the whole gay marriage thing, but I know you're basically okay on it, and I know you like to kind of joke about it, but you're basically, it doesn't really... Well, it's a state issue, and the Supreme Court, again, it's a power grab that they had no authority to take, just like George Bush... Well, it was equal protection clause, but we could argue about the legalities of that all day long, but I know you're basically there. | ||
Well, my whole point is that people will say, well, Ted Cruz wants to ban dildos, is like an example. | ||
See, he's... No, he didn't. | ||
He was fighting for states' rights because there was some kind of dildo-banning thing in states. | ||
I don't think there should be a federal Department of Education. | ||
There was a dildo-banning thing? | ||
Did that go completely out of hand? | ||
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
This is the whole thing, of course, that's put out. | ||
He was fighting for states' rights in front of a... I don't know which high court it was. | ||
I don't know if it was a Supreme Court. | ||
The point is, yeah, listen, there can be a state law that bans scary-looking hats. | ||
They've existed. | ||
I think they're silly, but I think a state has the right to do that. | ||
I think a state has the right to declare polygamy legal if they want to, right, if we're at that point. | ||
The problem with people is the Supreme Court. | ||
When people talk about abortion or talk about social issues, like, I think drugs are a state issue. | ||
And so people think because I'm I'm deeply Christian conservative myself, and I'm open about it, that somehow I believe that should be enforced. | ||
I don't. | ||
So I wanted to just clarify that. | ||
As far as third party, well, you know, you say fair tax. | ||
I don't know. | ||
People need to put a number on it. | ||
I'm not going to be standing in the centrist party if I don't agree with these people on policy and ideas. | ||
Free speech is great. | ||
But there's got to be more to it than that. | ||
And so, you know, I think the Tea Party was effective in taking over the Republican Party and keeping it accountable for a season, and now we have this big problem. | ||
Maybe you'll see that with the Democrat Party. | ||
I don't think you're going to see a third party anytime soon that's viable. | ||
And I don't want to see a fracturing of the votes where, like in Canada, you can have a Prime Minister who's elected with 35% of the vote. | ||
You know, listen, that's the reason the two-party system exists. | ||
This guy doesn't represent everyone, but 50% or so of the population on both sides feel like there is enough of a representation. | ||
And that's better than 15 candidates representing this specific niche really, really well. | ||
That's how you fragment it, and you get democratic socialism, because all of a sudden you have enough of a mob who bands together, and they can democratically vote to take away someone else's rights. | ||
Yeah, I mean, I hear you on that, but the more I think about it, I see that 50-50 thing as just being this much of something that's really this big, and we don't talk about all those other ideas out there. | ||
This is going to be a gif. | ||
Dave Rubin doing... Oh no! | ||
I walked right into that one. | ||
Alright, listen, we're going to flip the script right now, and I'm going to join you on your show, so we're going to put the link below, right over there on the YouTube machine. | ||
Give me a plug! | ||
Give my side a plug! | ||
You didn't even plug anything. | ||
I'm about to do the plugs. | ||
You guys can check out Louder with Crowder. | ||
It's on the YouTube and it's pretty much everywhere. | ||
You have like 18,000 methods of distribution, but it's youtube.com slash Stephen Crowder. | ||
That's Stephen with a V. And do you want to do one other pimping? | ||
Yeah, well it's ladderwithcrowder.com because sometimes we'll get banned stuff either from YouTube or Facebook so ladderwithcrowder.com is where people can subscribe to anything and there are articles. |