Dec. 9, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:07:52
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unidentified
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[outro music] | |
| Alright, people! | ||
| I believe we are live. | ||
| Minor technical difficulties here in the brand spanking new studio. | ||
| We're in Google Livestream and across from me, across the pond, I've got Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. | ||
| Carl, how are you? | ||
| Very glad to finally have it all working. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I have to say you're a very patient person because when the stream went down, you're very calm. | ||
| Are you on the drugs? | ||
| No, I'm just used to Google Hangouts. | ||
| Once we get the studio fully going, we have some like fancy TriCaster stuff that'll, we won't have to do it through Hangouts, so we're doing the best we can in this crazy time. | ||
| How do you like our sort of, well this is the new set and we faked it a little to look like there's just some stuff going on. | ||
| How does that look to you? | ||
| It looks in progress. | ||
| In progress. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| There's a ton I want to talk to you about. | ||
| And, you know, when we did this, I had you on my show, I think a little over a year ago now. | ||
| I said to you that when I was sort of having my kind of awakening about what was going on with the left and that I felt that liberals were no longer liberal, they were becoming illiberal and progressives were becoming regressives. | ||
| When I started tweeting about this stuff and sort of awakening to it, everybody online on Twitter And on Facebook was saying Sargon of Akkad's the guy you have to talk to. | ||
| This is what he's been talking about and all that stuff. | ||
| So for the people that don't know who you are, first just tell me a little bit about yourself privately and then sort of when you woke up to what you now see as a big problem on the left. | ||
| There are people who don't know who I am. | ||
| I'd like to meet them. | ||
| For the three or four people who just got the internet this week, you know? | ||
| I only say that, but I've actually had people in real life say, my friend's a really big fan of yours. | ||
| And I was thinking, oh my God, you know, that's, that's worrying, isn't it? | ||
| Like. | ||
| It's like, you just sit in a little room and you talk, and then holy cow, people are watching. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah, I guess it was about three years ago now. | ||
| Well, I mean, it must have been before that. | ||
| But I just, in the news, I just kept seeing things that were just objectionable. | ||
| And normally these objectionable things would be coming from the right. | ||
| But this was coming from the left, and it was coming from people who I thought should know better, and from people who had a great deal of influence, and amongst the mainstream media, like newspapers and television outlets and stuff like this, and I'm thinking, why are they effectively, why are they doing all this? | ||
| Why are they going so far outside of the bounds of what you would think is an appropriate position? | ||
| So give me an example of something that you saw that you were like, wait a minute, wait a minute, what's happening here? | ||
| God, this is years ago now. | ||
| I can't even remember. | ||
| I can barely remember what I saw last week. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, well, okay, so without giving specifics. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Forgetting the specifics then. | ||
| Give me your liberal cred, because one of the things that I see pop up sometimes is that for those of us that are on the left, that criticize the left, and as I say all the time, there's a zillion of us that criticize the right. | ||
| I criticize the right too, but yes, I focus on the left because I want my team to be better. | ||
| Can you give me some of your liberal credentials so that people will say, people will go, oh, he actually is a liberal or a classical liberal. | ||
| What do you even consider yourself? | ||
| Really, I do consider myself to be a classical liberal. | ||
| I am very concerned that all people be treated the same in the eyes of the law. | ||
| That's one thing that really concerns me. | ||
| Liberalism springs from individual rights and the very idea of group rights is just the complete opposite of what they're trying to achieve. | ||
| In fact, that was the thing that liberalism was really trying to defeat. | ||
| If you have a system of universal rights and then you give a certain group a certain number of rights that the other people don't have, A, not only is that obviously by default not universal, but B, it creates a group of people who have different rules to the rest of you. | ||
| How is that any different to an aristocracy? | ||
| I just can't get over that. | ||
| That is the fundamental point of why I dislike group rights. | ||
| And any liberal should be against group rights, whereas progressives seem remarkably in favour of group rights. | ||
| And I'm just in awe that they don't seem to understand that that's an anti-liberal position to hold. | ||
| You know, when they say, okay, we want this for black people, we want this for women, you know, quotas or anything of the sort, it's like, no, you know, we're all equals, we're all going to be treated as equals under the law and we're going to have no special favours. | ||
| Because in what world does being black or a woman or any other kind of minority category inform you really about that person. | ||
| You can't ever say well yeah well he's black therefore and they're a woman therefore. | ||
| You know you can never tell anything about anyone's kind of personality or anything like that or the character or their achievements or you know anything and so it just really drives me crazy when I guess it was I mean looking back I guess it was the increasing encroachment of identity politics into the left and not even encroachment just this sort of steamrolling of the left from identity politics it's been infuriating because it it's inherently chauvinistic it drives me crazy it's like okay so i mean if we take it like an example like um violence against women you think oh my god let's have domestic violence against women that's awful and then you look at the statistics 40 of domestic violence is against men so if you're going to say right okay we're concerned with violence against women you are | ||
| Implicitly saying you're not caring about violence against men, and it's not even the fact that violence is going on that's really the problem, it's the fact that women are suffering as a group, rather than individuals. | ||
| Whoever's suffering from violence, because everyone suffers from violence. | ||
| When someone has something done to them, they suffer. | ||
| I don't think we should really even be considering who suffers more. | ||
| We've got systems in place that say, right, you don't abuse each other. | ||
| If someone's been the recipient of abuse, why does it matter what their characteristics are? | ||
| Right, so basically, as a classical liberal, you believe in individual liberty, you believe in the individual versus the collective, you want everyone to be treated equally. | ||
| Now, I try my best, and I probably fail at this all the time, but I try not to impugn the motivations of the progressives. | ||
| Now, obviously, I think the progressives have lost their mind, hence they've gone from progressive to regressive. | ||
| But do you believe that they knowingly are doing something bad? | ||
| Like, it's hard to say. | ||
| And I know that goes from, you know, you've got the leaders of the movement versus the average. | ||
| You know, a lot of these ideas sound good to kids, which is why socialism suddenly sounds good to kids, even though we know it's never done any good anywhere. | ||
| But what do you think about the motivations of these people? | ||
| Because a lot of them, you know, they say, well, we want minorities to be treated equal, so we should have quotas. | ||
| Now, I get why that doesn't really work in reality, of course. | ||
| But that concept. | ||
| We want minorities to be treated equally than quotas. | ||
| I mean that's not an equal treatment unless you're going to have a quota of white people. | ||
| They have this in the British Broadcasting Corporation in Britain where they will literally advertise jobs and say This is open to non-whites, they call them Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic in Britain, but basically they just mean non-whites and it's not, I mean if it was for say like a television program or something that was a period piece or something like that, say in Africa or something, I would say of course you're not gonna have like you know white people in pre-colonial Africa, but when it's for like a research position, like an 18 grand a year research position, | ||
| Why on earth can you justify saying, well, you know what? | ||
| We just don't want white people for that. | ||
| And it's just crazy. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| What was the first part of the question again? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sorry. | |
| Well, do you think they all sort of know this? | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Like, we know that it's bad. | ||
| We know that it's obviously bad. | ||
| And that's why I'm always for the individual. | ||
| I would be for what Martin Luther King said. | ||
| Don't judge someone by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. | ||
| But do you think that all of the people that we're railing against all the time, do you think they fully get it? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It is a lot like socialism, as you say. | ||
| A lot of it sounds good on paper and this draws a lot of people in because it's always pitched as a moral attitude. | ||
| This is the good thing to do and, you know, being for individual liberty is... I don't want to say a bad thing because they never frame it in those terms because I don't think they really think deep enough to categorize it like that. | ||
| Well, they tell you you're selfish, right? | ||
| If you're for individualism, it somehow sounds selfish, even though I would argue that you should do what is good for you, and then you might do also what's good for your family and your extended community and your local community and all that. | ||
| It's actually more simple than that. | ||
| If you're arguing for group rights, you're arguing for rights that I don't get to have. | ||
| I can't imagine anything more selfish than that. | ||
| I'm arguing for rights everyone has. | ||
| There's nothing more altruistic than that, as far as I can think of. | ||
| It's just, by definition, that can't be the selfish position if you're saying that other people must have something I can't have. | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| It's absolutely terrible. | ||
| But no, I don't think they're all bad people or anything like that. In fact, | ||
| the majority of people are well-meaning, without a doubt. | ||
| You know, they... | ||
| These are the people who, they log on, they watch certain online news venues, and they think, yeah, okay, I agree, of course, and right, and then they just carry on with their day, and they don't really think about it. | ||
| But there are definitely people who are I don't know what you call them, thought leaders or something like that? | ||
| Who, I mean there are definitely certain individuals who are doing what they're doing willfully and they're pushing things for specific agendas. | ||
| I mean there are some people, I mean Guardian author Jessica Valenti is just, she's just I mean she can't possibly think that she's doing something altruistically and if she does that just speaks more to her mental state than anything. | ||
| I mean she actually in an article she actually called just outright for men to be paid less money than women on the basis that they're men as a solution to closing the wage gap. | ||
| In the article, she got informed by a lawyer that that would in fact be illegal, because we have laws to say that you can't pay people differently based on their gender. | ||
| And all she was like, well, bummer. | ||
| I mean, they were her literal words in the article. | ||
| It's like, this person's a lunatic. | ||
| Why does she have a job at the Guardian? | ||
| I mean, don't get me wrong, that's actually the wrong question to ask. | ||
| Of course she has a job at the Guardian. | ||
| But you see, I come from a time when I, you know, from the 90s when the Guardian was respectable paper and they didn't push this sort of to the level they do now. | ||
| But what are you going to do? | ||
| I don't know necessarily, but there are definitely certain individuals who are using social justice advocacy and the extreme progressivism as a cover for their own bad actions. | ||
| Because this is what drives me crazy about it the most. | ||
| It's so collectivist, it's lost sight of the individual. | ||
| Look at their definition of racism, for example. | ||
| So if they say that racism isn't just prejudice based on race, which is the definition everyone else uses. | ||
| You know, you're being prejudiced for this person. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because he's black. | ||
| That's racism. | ||
| Well, if they then redefine racism to mean systemic oppression or prejudice based on race or oppression, whichever they wanted to use, then an individual can never be accused of being racist. | ||
| Because that individual is not the organization. | ||
| I mean, at best, you could say a representative of an organization could be a racist because he represents that organization in an official capacity. | ||
| But otherwise, it just doesn't make sense. | ||
| And then mathematics is terrible as well. | ||
| I mean, I'm terrible at math as well. | ||
| But even I know that if you have, if racism is power plus prejudice, if power is zero, it's just racism is prejudice. | ||
| From a mathematics point of view, even I know this. | ||
| If they had any brains between them, they'd have gone, racism is power times prejudice. | ||
| So is that the issue though? | ||
| Is that the issue? | ||
| That it really, in a way, it's sort of a brain power issue because if you were to think a lot of this stuff through, if you were to think what being a human is all about, how government should treat us, how we should treat our neighbor and all of that, none of it really makes sense. | ||
| But it just kind of sounds good, which goes to, you know, someone like Ben Shapiro always says, you know, it's feelings over facts, right? | ||
| And that it all kind of feels good. | ||
| And I know even in my personal life now, even though most people know my opinions on things, | ||
| when I'll meet someone new and I'll talk about some stuff in there, | ||
| they feel a lot of this bullshit. | ||
| When I start talking to them about it, I can see it's like a personal affront. | ||
| It doesn't become a political conversation. | ||
| It's as if I'm just attacking the person. | ||
| And that's a really dangerous place to be, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this disregard for the individual is it permeates the whole ideology. | ||
| And I mean, I read an article today, in fact, where there was a woman talking about how her ex-boyfriend had gone to a Black Lives Matter protest after dedicating himself to being a full-time social justice activist. | ||
| And he had been, I don't know, manhandled by the cops and they pushed him onto the floor and she, and I swear she wrote this, she said, I wasn't worried for his safety because the cops usually, some of them kill more black people more often than white people and so she didn't have a fear for his safety. | ||
| It's like, yeah, but what if that is a psychotic cop and he's really pissed off with that guy and he just pulls out his gun and shoots him? | ||
| You'd be like, well, I mean, they don't usually do that. | ||
| It wouldn't change anything, the guy's still dead. | ||
| Right, and they also shoot plenty of white people, too. | ||
| Yeah, well, per capita, they shoot more white people than black people. | ||
| Not per capita, sorry. | ||
| In total, in aggregate, they shoot more white people than black people. | ||
| It's just per capita, it's disproportionately black. | ||
| But I imagine that's probably something to do with crime rates. | ||
| Crazy, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so... This isn't to exonerate the police, though, either, because The US police definitely have, in certain departments, are definitely overbearing and authoritarian. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't want to get into a tussle with the LA cops. | ||
| I would be very respectful and do exactly what they said when they said it, just because. | ||
| But just to condemn police in general, and again, it's collective blame and collective guilt and individual blame. | ||
| They want to, you know, if something happens with them, like with Black Lives Matter and Trevor Noah, Tommy Lahren, That interview infuriated me. | ||
| I got to the point where I wanted to ask, what does Black Lives Matter have to do for you to stop supporting them Trevor? | ||
| They've murdered cops, they chant for dead cops all the time, they riot, they loot, they burn. | ||
| They beat people based on their, you know, there are members who beat people on the racial status. | ||
| So, I mean, what has to happen for him to go, okay, maybe this has gone too far? | ||
| But he just wants to, you know, whimsy it away going, well, that's just those people, but the grand narrative of Black Lives Matter isn't about that. | ||
| It's like, well, it doesn't matter, does it? | ||
| Well, it's almost like you're kind of caught at that point in your collectivist bubble, right? | ||
| You're caught between, well, we're doing something that's collectivist. | ||
| Now we've got some bad apples here, but we don't want to be judged as a collective, but Yeah, it's your rules. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. But the second a white man does something, then it's all white men. | ||
| If you're a white man, you're oppressing women, you're oppressing black people, you're oppressing gays. | ||
| You are doing all of this stuff, even if you as an individual aren't doing it, | ||
| because they are interested in the group and not the individual. | ||
| And it's like, look, you want to have your cake and eat it too. | ||
| You can either have, I am responsible, and then in turn Black Lives Matter is responsible for the crimes members of Black Lives Matter commit, or those individuals are responsible for that, and I as an individual are responsible for what I do, and you know, I'm responsible for my slaves, okay? | ||
| I gotcha, I gotcha. | ||
| It's just one of these things where intellectual laziness is really what I think it is. | ||
| There's a parody series on YouTube called Regressives, and the tagline is, think regressive, I can't remember, it's easier or something. | ||
| It's just easier. | ||
| And it really is. | ||
| It's a lot easier to say, well, this is white people's fault, or this is men's fault, or this is... | ||
| That doesn't answer anything and that's not actionable in any way. | ||
| What do you think we're going to do? | ||
| Start demoting men's pay, garnishing men's pay on the basis that they're men? | ||
| It's the most illiberal thing I can imagine and it's this kind of desire for forced equality I find baffling because in a free society the last thing you'd expect to see is sort of a perfect equality of anything, anywhere. | ||
| You'd expect to see lots of individual people all progressing through this society at different rates because they've got different interests, different abilities, they come from different backgrounds, they want to do different things. | ||
| You would never expect to see like 50% men, 50% women as CEOs. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why would that happen? | ||
| These people have made different life choices to arrive at the position that they're at. | ||
| There is absolutely no rational reason to expect it to be 50-50 and I'm still waiting for the justification to make it 50-50. | ||
| Why should that happen? | ||
| I mean, why? | ||
| For diversity? | ||
| Well, that's not a good enough reason, I'm afraid. | ||
| Especially not to... There was an Australian CEO, she was a woman, and she was... Was it a CEO or was it the press who were reporting on it? | ||
| I can't remember exactly who it was, but it was an Australian article I saw, and I'm sure it was a CEO that was being interviewed, and the woman literally said, well, yes, some men are going to have to lose their jobs for diversity. | ||
| And I was like, well, there we go. | ||
| That's exactly my point. | ||
| These people who have worked their whole lives, they've done nothing wrong, and they've obviously earned everything they've got, are about to lose it on the basis that they were born wrong. | ||
| And I can't countenance that. I'm sorry. That's unacceptable and it has to stop. You know, I've | ||
| heard a parallel on that, which is that you'll hear, and I think Oprah said this once, | ||
| talking about racists, that, you know, you just, we just need this older generation to die. And I | ||
| remember thinking, and you hear this idea a lot, you know, that older Americans are more racist, | ||
| so we just need them to die. | ||
| And it's like, that's such a dangerous endgame of why progressivism will eventually eat itself. | ||
| Because you always need a new oppression. | ||
| So one day, even if you've lived your whole life, As the most progressive person ever, there may be something that comes down the pike 30 years from now that you're like, you know what, I don't think people should have sex with robots while in pools, you know, but the progressives want it. | ||
| Now they're going to want you dead too. | ||
| Not that I have a problem with robot water sex, but you know, but that's the problem that it just will eat itself. | ||
| And it's like, yeah. | ||
| That's because it's a purity test. | ||
| The whole damn thing is a purity test. | ||
| And I've... | ||
| I feel sorry for those sort of, the white progressive college professors who, and again this is another thing that I've seen, a woman professor who's saying that she can't have kids because if she has kids they'll be white and she will be contributing to racism because of course all white people are racist because you live in, we all live in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy where all white people are Privileged and by virtue of that, oppressing non-white people. | ||
| And it's like, okay. | ||
| And then, but I love on the same hand that they're like, yeah, and so, you know, I'm actually really pro-immigration. | ||
| It's like, why? | ||
| Why would you want to bring non-white people into an oppressive white society? | ||
| That's the worst thing you can do for them. | ||
| That is the least humanitarian thing, if you're a progressive. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| There is no internal consistency in their ideology. | ||
| It's funny, I was speaking at a high school a couple weeks ago, and they had, you know, a libertarian, and a liberal, and an anarchist, and a socialist, blah blah. | ||
| And the socialist, white guy, kept going on and on about the evil male patriarchy, and white men have pillaged this, and white men have destroyed that. | ||
| And I literally turned to him on the thing, and I said, you know, you're white. | ||
| So it's like, Just the lack of self-awareness, even, is just crazy. | ||
| But quick segue here, because I know we could do this for the full hour, is what makes, for all of the things that you've said, I think a lot of people would listen to everything you've said, say, okay, that all kind of makes sense, but actually, Carl, and probably Dave, too, they're libertarians. | ||
| What makes you not a libertarian and more of a classical liberal? | ||
| Right, okay, now this is, Oh god, this is getting into territory I didn't think we were going to go into. | ||
| I'm not against the concept of government. | ||
| Now I understand that libertarians are, I think they're therefore limited government, small government, and by that definition, to me that just sounds like common sense. | ||
| Why waste money on something that you don't need? | ||
| If you don't need to have a giant monolithic government entity, why have it? | ||
| Why pay for it? | ||
| But I often find that libertarians tend to go far too far with that. | ||
| For example, in America they seem to be very much against social health care and the welfare state. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, there are definitive problems with the welfare state. | ||
| And the rest of the world, the modern world, is looking at you thinking you don't have universal healthcare. | ||
| Everyone else does, and we're getting along okay. | ||
| But I mean, I hear your healthcare is really good quality. | ||
| So there's that but I always hear stories of people getting sick and then going bankrupt from getting sick and I think wow that is the least humanitarian thing ever. | ||
| I was actually going to bring this up a bit later on in actually but since we're at it let's talk about it now. | ||
| So I think the difference comes from the fundamental definition of freedom that I have and I think that differs from libertarians because libertarians They're very focused on government, and I don't blame them, because the US government is a giant, almost out-of-control monster when you look at the things the US government is doing around the world. | ||
| And that's not even the worst it could be doing. | ||
| It's actually surprisingly restrained for such a giant beast. | ||
| But it is doing terrible things, and it has in the past done terrible things. | ||
| And so I can understand, and especially the sort of disconnect between the people and the government these days, Honestly, part of the fun of watching Trump's campaign was watching all of the powers that be align behind Hillary Clinton and then watching her lose. | ||
| She spent 1.4 billion on her campaign. | ||
| Wall Street, all the banks, almost all the politicians, almost all the press, all the academics, anyone who thought they were anyone. | ||
| We're all like, well, hey, you've all got to get behind Hillary. | ||
| She's definitely going to win. | ||
| Trump has no chance. | ||
| Anyone who says otherwise is insane. | ||
| And then Trump wins. | ||
| And we see this just total catastrophic collapse of their own worldview. | ||
| I mean, what can they say to justify any of this? | ||
| Well, I mean, we didn't mean it. | ||
| What are you supposed to say? | ||
| Sorry, I'm getting off topic. | ||
| Basically, my issue is the definition of freedom. | ||
| I agree that being wary of a giant government power is definitely something that anyone with any kind of liberty-minded frame of mind should be concerned about. | ||
| Obviously, government is a dire source of power. | ||
| But that's not the only thing that can prevent a person from being free. | ||
| Libertarians seem to define freedom as just freedom from government interference. | ||
| Whereas if you look at liberalism historically, it wasn't necessarily afraid of government, it was afraid of tyranny. | ||
| And there's definitely forms of tyranny that come from without the government. | ||
| I mean, the SJWs are the perfect example. | ||
| They are social tyrants. | ||
| And they will, I mean, it's really heartening to see the number of professors, it's only about a handful, it's only like five or six, who have come out and in direct opposition to social justice, like Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, and a few others, and Christine Hoff Summers, who are stridently anti-social justice, almost universally on the fact that it's illiberal. | ||
| And that sort of chilling effect, I think it has kept a lot of people quiet. | ||
| And that's in itself a form of control. | ||
| It's a form of oppression and it doesn't come from the government. | ||
| And so this is what I think libertarians need to understand. | ||
| Like, for example, poverty is a man who has no house, who has no food, who has no water, he can't shower, he can't wash, he can't dress himself properly. | ||
| That's not a free man. | ||
| Even though the government isn't going to be keeping him, you know, their thumb on his... He's not paying any tax, but he's not a free man. | ||
| He can't do anything. | ||
| I mean, who's going to employ this person? | ||
| Where's he going to sleep? | ||
| He's just... This is not freedom. | ||
| This is just slavery to poverty. | ||
| And so one of the things about classical liberalism is it's not necessarily against helping the poor. | ||
| I mean, I've got... | ||
| I've got my copy of The Road to Serfdom here, and I'm looking forward to the Libertarians explaining to me page 124 and 125, which I happen to have bookmarked, not specifically for this interview, but just because I've had this argument a few times, where he literally says, well, there's nothing wrong with having a safety net. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with social health care. | ||
| These things are not in violation of anyone's individual rights, because they protect everyone in the society. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| And one of the things I think that people on the left have forgotten, and this is why I think so many of them think right wing when they think classical liberal, is they've listened to libertarians who have said, look, we just don't want any interference at all. | ||
| It's like, OK, well, I appreciate that that's what you want, but it's not what you're going to get. | ||
| Because the second you get that is the second you get a communist revolution or something like that. | ||
| Because the people who need help, you know, good for libertarians for being, you know, upwardly mobile, intelligent, active, earning, you know, that they are all really positive qualities, good for you. | ||
| Most, well, not most, but a lot of people in society aren't like that. | ||
| And I think it was Mark Carney, the, I think it's the governor of the Bank of England, came out yesterday and said look we've got to stop paying more attention to what's happening to the poorest in society because they're getting restless their lot is getting too bad and he's right you know it's about it's purely about self-interest to be honest because if you're not providing them with any alternative you're just saying well you know what screw yourselves we're not a problem then there is nothing | ||
| Nothing at all preventing some kind of populist from coming along and saying, hey, I'll sort your problems out, just vote for me. | ||
| And I think we've discovered in the past year that they will do that en masse to the point where everyone's like, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's, well, that's why I don't like to say I told you so, but this is exactly what I've spent the last two years talking about. | ||
| you know, when it comes to immigration and Islam and a whole bunch of other stuff and all this | ||
| trigger warning and safe space stuff. And people would say to me, you know, Dave, you're blowing | ||
| this out of proportion, who cares if these college kids don't want this or that or whatever. And it's | ||
| like, no, actually, there is something happening to our society. People are afraid to say what | ||
| they think. And when they're afraid to say what they think, guess what? | ||
| It's very easy for a populist or a demagogue or whatever else to come in and give them some easy answers. | ||
| So that actually makes me want to back up to Trump for a second because I think you and I were kind of in the same thing with Trump, which was that I was thoroughly enjoying seeing The elite and the media and all of these bullshit artists and these talking heads that just talk and don't have anything really to say. | ||
| And get paid a huge amount. | ||
| Yeah, they all get paid a ton of money, of course. | ||
| Far more than we're making on YouTube, I assure you. | ||
| But all of the power, all of the money, all of this stuff, they lost. | ||
| And the night of the election, I was on with Andrew Klavan. | ||
| I'm not sure if you know him, but he's a... I do know him, yeah. | ||
| He's a really funny guy. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| Yeah, and he's a hardcore conservative. | ||
| I just had him on the show a couple weeks ago, but he said something that I thought was just spectacular that night. | ||
| He said, look, all of the elites, all the power, all the money, all the media, all everybody wanted Hillary to win. | ||
| Trump won, and what that shows you is that the power of the people in this country is still so powerful that it's the most important thing that we have, that everyone worldwide, pretty much in every country in the world, would be jealous of what we have. | ||
| And here it is, we have it. | ||
| So my question for you, really, is that you saw this coming too, and I saw you were getting a lot of shit. | ||
| People were saying, see, you're supporting Trump. | ||
| I didn't think it was going to happen. | ||
| Like with Brexit, I thought it would be close. | ||
| I thought it would be the narrowest of narrow margins, you know, and I thought that it would be a good sort of smack to the face and give them a wake-up call and say, okay, right, we've got to start thinking about changing. | ||
| But I mean, this is actually better because now they've lost. | ||
| So now they have no choice but to have some sort of introspection. | ||
| But sorry, what was your... I interrupted you. | ||
| Well, no, no, I'll go from there. | ||
| Do you think they're having introspection? | ||
| Because I don't sense it. | ||
| There were a couple days where I thought maybe they were going to and I saw a piece in the New York Times saying the liberals have to rethink themselves and something in New York Magazine. | ||
| So a couple of the The elite elite said yeah we have to think about it but on the ground and in terms of the usual cast of characters that are leading this thing, I don't see any introspection. | ||
| I see doubling down on racism and bigotry. | ||
| I see doubling down on silencing people and screaming over everybody. | ||
| Are you seeing it? | ||
| Maybe you're seeing it and I'm not. | ||
| Oh, it is everywhere. | ||
| It absolutely is everywhere. | ||
| And the more sort of radical leftist... I don't want to call them journalists, I'm just going to call them bloggers. | ||
| And I'm going to call them bloggers because most of their journalism comes from Twitter. | ||
| I'm so tired of Donald Trump's Twitter account being news. | ||
| Don't you get off your fat arses anymore and actually go and investigate? | ||
| Oh, but it's a lot easier to just get your phone and... | ||
| Yeah, way easier. | ||
| Sorry, I just got distracted. | ||
| What was the question again? | ||
| No, well, they don't even give you a chance. | ||
| They don't even give you a chance to be outraged anymore because they're sitting there monitoring his Twitter feed so that they can get outraged and tell you that you're outraged. | ||
| Yeah, but no, you're right. | ||
| There has been an awful lot of doubling down. | ||
| When Bernie Sanders came out against identity politics that was an important thing and I think that a lot of Bernie supporters didn't know how to take that and that I think spun... was it the Atlantic and the New York Times that wrote pieces that criticized identity politics saying we're going to have to move beyond this? | ||
| I think they both have, at New York Magazine and a couple others, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they've identified the problem, but you're right, the backlash is terrible. | ||
| I mean, I've seen, and again, these are mainstream media articles in like, you know, The Guardian, The Independent, places like this, where they are just ridiculing the concept, saying that this is like the eternal howl of the white man, or something like this, and it's just like... | ||
| You're fucking idiots! | ||
| You don't even understand! | ||
| It's the fact that you constantly play this game of divide and conquer, and it's just, you've lost. | ||
| You've conquered a tiny, irrelevant area of the internet, and people aren't paying attention to you. | ||
| If you look at the numbers across the board, they're just sliding down. | ||
| Everyone's getting sick of their crap, and yet our numbers just keep going up, and they won't listen. | ||
| They just won't listen. | ||
| So that's a perfect segue for what I think the meat of what we can talk about here is, in case we haven't got to the meat yet, which is that we're online media people. | ||
| I don't really consider myself a journalist in that I'm not out in the field doing journalism. | ||
| I talk to people, I interview people, I share my thoughts on things, whatever you want to call that, that's fine. | ||
| But I think one of the things that really the narrative that really got constructed over the course of this election is that we know that mainstream media has been crumbling forever. | ||
| They're purging their numbers. | ||
| Nobody trusts them anymore. | ||
| They've all gone partisan, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And the online people that have been doing this for a few years, our numbers are all going up. | ||
| People are paying attention to us more. | ||
| They trust us more. | ||
| All that stuff, and I think it got to perfect parity, and now we're starting to win. | ||
| And I'm curious, do you think that they are gonna come down on us? | ||
| And this can also sort of segue into some of this YouTube censorship stuff and what's going on on Twitter, and the rest of it. | ||
| I mean, they have a lot of money and a lot of power still, and, you know, we're on a webcam and Google Hangout at the moment. | ||
| So where do you think that all falls out? | ||
| Oh, God, who knows? | ||
| I think they will. | ||
| I mean, we are... | ||
| When you attack a man's livelihood and the source of his income, then he's going to do everything he can to protect that. | ||
| And not, you know, when I say a man, anyone. | ||
| They will do everything. | ||
| Nah, you only meant men. | ||
| I know what you meant. | ||
| You meant white, heterosexual, cisgender men. | ||
| Not even black men. | ||
| Not Asian men. | ||
| Just the white men. | ||
| No. | ||
| So yeah, they will do everything in their power, but thankfully their power is actually quite limited. | ||
| They don't have control over YouTube, for example. | ||
| I mean, like, if I do a video and use a few clips from, say, The Guardian, or... I actually did that one regarding Trevor Noah with Viacom. | ||
| I got a copyright strike on it immediately, and I won it within a day or two. | ||
| YouTube came down on my side saying, no, this is fair use, and he can do this, and bully-free Viacom. | ||
| So, you know, YouTube It's under pressure from the sort of activists, but it's not as bad as people think. | ||
| It's just it could be as bad as people think. | ||
| And I'm not saying that it won't become bad in the future, it might, but at the moment it's not that bad. | ||
| It's just that there are kind of storm clouds on the horizon. | ||
| But I don't think they, I don't think it's the mainstream media that really have the power to do this anymore. | ||
| It was honestly, I think the, I think when like historians look back at this, they'll look back and it'll be, it was the New York Times who issued the apology that they had become cheerleaders and not journalists and they were rededicating themselves to honest reporting by doing so implicitly saying that everything they'd done before was dishonest. | ||
| I appreciate the sentiment, but you understand how awful it seems that you have to do that. | ||
| I guess it's power had gone to their head or something, or, you know, ideological conformity had gone to their head. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But it's kind of a beautiful thing, don't you think? | ||
| It's a beautiful thing, sort of watching it, watching it crumble, and also that all of these people, it's like they have all these, all the cable news people and all of the big media companies, but they have all this money, all these resources, and it's like people don't care anymore. | ||
| You had your chance and you screwed up. | ||
| You know, and by no means am I saying that I'm perfect or that you're perfect. | ||
| And by the way, the whole idea of online media, it raises a whole other set of problems because anyone can do this. | ||
| So the bar of entry is so low. | ||
| So how do you figure out who you trust? | ||
| Because I'm really struggling with that. | ||
| And people ask me that all the time. | ||
| And it's like, even when I'm reading articles, I'm like, man, I got to read five articles about the same thing just to piece them together to figure out what might actually have happened. | ||
| That's actually what I do. | ||
| To its credit, the one thing that the mainstream media is actually good at is reporting facts if they want to. | ||
| That's a backhanded compliment if I ever heard one. | ||
| Isn't it just? | ||
| Because the greatest crime of the mainstream media is lies by omission. | ||
| Everyone knows it. | ||
| Everyone knows if you go to the Guardian, you're going to get half the story. | ||
| If you go to the Daily Mail or whatever, Fox News, you're going to get half the story. | ||
| To get a more comprehensive view, you actually do have to, like you say, read five articles from different sources to make sure that, you know, and you will find there is specific, not necessarily I don't know. | ||
| I don't want to call them open lies because I don't even know if these people know that they're doing what they're doing. | ||
| Because I think a lot of these people are so partisan by this point that they don't really understand what they're doing is dishonest. | ||
| I think they just think that, well, you know, I mean, the number of times I hear something go, well, that's right wing, or they'll say, or they're just doing it for money. | ||
| It's like, okay, they aren't Refutations. | ||
| They're delegitimizing tactics. | ||
| You know, if you can tell me how it's wrong, then I'm all ears. | ||
| But if you're just going to go, well, I don't like it because of the source, then you've not disproven anything and I'm going to treat it as valid until you can. | ||
| You know, especially if I can't find anything, obviously. | ||
| So yeah, it's tough and it's going to get more difficult, especially as the, oh my God, the fake news thing really drives me crazy. | ||
| The irony is Quite delicious, I have to say. | ||
| And the problem is they have a point. | ||
| There is a lot going around on the internet that is just flat-out nonsense and it gets, you know, often millions of views and people share it, people think it's true and it's one of those things where you've just got to be discerning. | ||
| You just have to understand the landscape and what is likely to happen from the context of what has already previously happened and who is reporting what to you. | ||
| Most people aren't that informed. | ||
| Most people just don't have the time to be that informed. | ||
| I mean, they've got jobs, they've got families, they've got lives to deal with. | ||
| They expect to read a newspaper and even if they don't say, look, we're gonna give equal time to the alt-right as we do to the SJWs, you would at least expect some sort of distance from one's own biases and emotions when they're writing the piece but unfortunately that's just something they don't do and so you have to go out of your way and it's rare. | ||
| My favorite articles are the ones that are actually written from an objective standpoint and at the end I don't even mind if they say well yeah and we think that this or I think this or whatever but just give me the facts without trying to put a spin on it for the love of God. | ||
| Well, it's just incredible to me that the bullshit news that we've all been calling out is now calling everything else fake news. | ||
| And when I say that, I fully acknowledge that your point stands, which is that there's a lot of nonsense out there and fakery. | ||
| But just to show you how there is something going on here that's kind of bigger than us. | ||
| Like, doesn't it seem pretty obvious to you that there was somehow, I don't know who it was from, | ||
| and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I would always say extraordinary claims | ||
| require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan said. | ||
| Sorry, Pizzagate fans. | ||
| The Pizzagate thing, people keep asking me why I don't talk about it. | ||
| It's like, because there's no evidence. | ||
| You know, everything you're seeing is conjecture. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, I would never let Joe Biden near any of my children. | ||
| There are some of those videos with Biden and the kids are really gross. | ||
| It's disgusting, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, just what does he think he's doing? | ||
| But anyway, sorry, carry on. | ||
| Well, but your point on Pizzagate actually stands because I feel the same way. | ||
| A lot of people keep tweeting it at me saying, why aren't you talking about this? | ||
| And it's like, I can't even garner the slightest bit of what's really happening here. | ||
| So I'll wait. | ||
| And if something is proven, then of course I'll talk about it. | ||
| But my point was that This meme of fake news now, that all the mainstream media is saying that everything is fake, shows me that somehow there's some coordination somewhere. | ||
| I don't know what that means exactly. | ||
| I'm not saying it's a bunch of guys at a table, but there's got to be something. | ||
| And that's actually the most worrying part, right, is I think that it's actually So in Gamergate, when Gamergate was happening, what we saw from the media was something that they called a cascade effect. | ||
| I think it's a good term because I think it makes a lot of sense. | ||
| So basically a thought leader in their community, someone who you know everyone else tends to follow, would put out an article and then I mean you know a lot of their columns now are like five paragraphs long so it'd take half an hour to knock this up that basically says the same thing and then you slap it up on your own website and then everyone's oh god that's a good point right and then it just propagates. | ||
| It doesn't need to have any kind of organization because they're all basically taking cues from one another and going okay yep yep okay we're all on the same team great because that is how they operate. | ||
| I mean we saw like with Ezra Klein's journalists, they do operate as a faction. | ||
| These outlets are meant to be in competition with each other and yet they're conspiring together. | ||
| And they actually do it with malicious intent as well. | ||
| So it's just one of those things where it's just like... | ||
| Okay, and this isn't just nonsense. | ||
| We can name the people on the list. | ||
| We have it all. | ||
| It was all leaked. | ||
| And the same with the emails from Hillary Clinton. | ||
| These things, they do actually happen. | ||
| And I tell you what, I've got some advice for conspiracy theorists, because I love a good conspiracy. | ||
| I love conspiracies. | ||
| But if you can't name the they, You can't report it as fact. | ||
| You don't know it's true. | ||
| If you can't name them by name, it's nonsense. | ||
| And so that's the important thing. | ||
| So like John Podesta, Tony Podesta, you know, Biden or whoever, if there's any hard evidence connecting them, then yeah, that's something. | ||
| But to say like, you know, the New World Order wants to poison the fish and turn the frogs gay or something, that's nonsense. | ||
| You know, they, who, you know, it's too broad, it's too nonsense, it doesn't mean anything. | ||
| Well, I like sort of the direction there, because you're basically saying that it's the groupthink that's doing it. | ||
| It's not a group of thinkers doing it. | ||
| It's not a group of thinkers, but it's actually groupthink. | ||
| They're all taking these cues from each other and going with this stuff. | ||
| So, look, we're starting to win, which I think is nice, but this now will bring us back to where we started, and it combines both of these things. | ||
| The fight that you and I are trying to do here and really save the left, if it can be saved, do you think that we really can win? | ||
| Because I'll go depressing for just a second and then I'll let you answer. | ||
| Is that my fear at this point is this thing has gotten so out of control. | ||
| And now because of Trump, because of what they view him to be, whether he is or not, but he's such a good bad guy for them. | ||
| That there's almost nothing that we can say within the rational part of their brain that's going to work. | ||
| So, for example, if I say to them, well, you know what? | ||
| You guys were really against money in politics. | ||
| Hillary had all the money. | ||
| Trump won. | ||
| So that's good. | ||
| Trump isn't a Christian conservative. | ||
| Everyone knows he doesn't care about gay marriage and weed and abortion. | ||
| Yes, you know, like the Republicans, one of the things they hammer about is he's not a real conservative. | ||
| It's like, yes I know, everyone knows he's Donald Trump. | ||
| He's not really, you know, I don't think Donald Trump cares about a lot of the things that both sides care about. | ||
| I really think he doesn't care at all. | ||
| So what do you think about the idea that, so I've been pushing this idea, or at least talking about this idea, that I think as a populist, of course there's danger with the populist. | ||
| Hitler was a populist, so of course there's danger. | ||
| But that someone like him, he's not an ideologue in that he's not Mike Pence who would take his Christian conservative views to govern with. | ||
| That we might, as a population, we might be able to push him to do some good stuff if we can kind of agree on what good stuff is, because he wants to be liked. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair point? | ||
| I made exactly this point when I did an interview for a channel called None of the Above and I made that exact point. | ||
| It's that Donald Trump, even if it's because he's a narcissist, I mean he wants to hear you saying Trump, Trump, Trump. | ||
| Just tell him what you want. | ||
| You know, make it obvious to him. | ||
| You know, mass tweet at him. | ||
| He obviously pays attention to what goes on on Twitter. | ||
| So if he gets 10,000 tweets in an hour of people going, you know, don't sign the TPP or whatever the issue is, he's already killed that, hasn't he? | ||
| He's already killed the TPP. | ||
| He's already saved a bunch of jobs. | ||
| Everyone's complaining about him like anything, but he's actually got quite a lot done before he's even assumed the office. | ||
| So he might not be that bad. | ||
| He might just have been, I don't know, playing the crowd or something. | ||
| With regards to the left though, the social justice warriors themselves, the ideologue activists who are doing this because they think it makes them good people, will never change their mind. | ||
| We will never change their mind. | ||
| They're totally indoctrinated into this ideology and they won't change and they don't want to. | ||
| The whole world view is basically unfalsifiable because if you say right okay well I have a suggestion they'll say yes but you're a white man you would say that and that just diffuses everything you can ever say. | ||
| It's like okay well I guess it is coming from a white man you know and if that is enough to delegitimize me then I mean we literally have nothing to say to each other and thankfully that's a very unpopular position with well both any race really any gender most people aren't on board with this so this is why they're lost but when it comes to reforming the left we have to | ||
| We have to make these people understand that they are the fundamentalist Christians. | ||
| They are the flat earthers of the left. | ||
| These people have lost. | ||
| They have lost badly. | ||
| They held the reins of power for about eight years under Barack Obama and look how it's ended. | ||
| You've got Brexit. | ||
| You've got Trump. | ||
| Le Pen's coming up. | ||
| Italy just lost their bloody referendum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I haven't even looked into yet but Merkel just banned the burqa today. | |
| Yeah, Merkel's arguing for banning the burqa. | ||
| Look, whatever you think about your own ideology, it's a practical failure. | ||
| It hasn't worked. | ||
| It's turned people against you, and now you are the most hated people in society. | ||
| People hate you more than they hate the Fundamentalist Christians, and they used to hate the Fundamentalist Christians. | ||
| And so in the marketplace of ideas, your ideas were deemed wanting, and they have failed. | ||
| So if they ever come to you and say, well this isn't right, I don't care what you say, you're wrong to argue that position. | ||
| We know that position has been discredited. | ||
| It's absolutely nonsense. | ||
| So what needs to happen is a root and branch ideological reform on the left, where people have to get back to the fundamental principles and why that they're on the left. | ||
| What is it they think they're advocating for? | ||
| Because I saw this the other day. | ||
| 25% of homeless people are women in the papers. | ||
| Isn't that a good thing? | ||
| Isn't that, like, hardly any of them are women? | ||
| But no, no, that was the problem. | ||
| Okay, what do we need to do? | ||
| We need to solve the homeless women problem, okay? | ||
| So, 75% of the homeless are okay. | ||
| That's an acceptable number. | ||
| It's just the 25... This is the problem with identity politics. | ||
| There is no benefit to being a man when you're homeless, you know? | ||
| Very marginal benefit, if anything. | ||
| And being homeless is a much heavier burden for anyone to bear. | ||
| So the fact that they're women, it doesn't matter. | ||
| The fact that they're homeless is the problem. | ||
| So we need to basically transition from identity politics to issue politics. | ||
| So what's the problem, right? | ||
| Homelessness, right? | ||
| Does it matter who's homeless? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| It matters that anyone's homeless. | ||
| So what do we need to do, right? | ||
| We need to get whatever shelters, get housing programs, get them off the streets, get them in some sort of rehabilitation schemes, get them to become productive members of society again, which I'm sure they want as well. | ||
| You know, I'm sure they would. | ||
| I speak to homeless people sometimes because I actually, I never give to charity. | ||
| I don't trust any of these big charities, but I do give change to homeless people when I pass them in the streets. | ||
| So I always look at that guy and think, if that were me, My god, I would just love it if someone gave me a bit of change. | ||
| I really hate the nefarious myth of, oh, they just spend it on drugs. | ||
| Okay, the dude's homeless. | ||
| If I had some drugs, I'd give them to him myself. | ||
| This dude lives on the street and begs for food, and you're worried about, oh, he might spend it on drugs. | ||
| Fuck, I don't care! | ||
| And so I like to see when the money's going. | ||
| I like to know that someone who actually needs it is getting it. | ||
| I would never, ever recommend giving money to the Clinton Foundation. | ||
| By the way, the Clinton Foundation, last I saw, I think about a week ago, their donations were down something around 40%, which just proves what the point was the whole time. | ||
| If they were doing such great work and all of their people, all of their donors were doing it just because it was so great, well then of course you'd keep giving the donations. | ||
| But it wasn't about that. | ||
| It was about access. | ||
| And now that she will have less influence, you will get less access. | ||
| It's like all of the stuff just kind of crumbled at once. | ||
| But I like what you're saying. | ||
| I like what you're saying about the issues idea. | ||
| And that's how we can win. | ||
| Because we can't win on Breaking the people that are... This is the danger of calling everyone a racist. | ||
| It's so hard to break out of that if you've accused someone of being the scum of the earth for years. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And not only that, I mean a lot of people aren't going to want to listen to the SJW types who spout this constantly anyway. | ||
| I mean, you can go to any online newspaper. | ||
| And look at the comments on these SJW articles. | ||
| People are just angry. | ||
| People are pushing back. | ||
| They have been for a while and they should have seen it coming. | ||
| They should have seen the popular discontent. | ||
| And again, I hate this kind of collective guilt individual responsibility. | ||
| Just because we said this doesn't mean that, you know, you're all saying this. | ||
| You have to understand that the public, if you want to talk in groups and generalizations, then the public is seeing this wall of hate coming from the left-wing media. | ||
| And the left-wing media is populist, it's arrogant, it's everywhere. | ||
| And for some reason people keep giving credence, especially with their op-eds. | ||
| I just can't understand why anyone reads them. | ||
| But for some reason they do. | ||
| So yeah, basically these people, they have to be... I mean literally everyone, when they talk to them, they have to go, no you lost, you're wrong. | ||
| And they'll be like, yeah but I've got all these fancy justifications. | ||
| Well it doesn't matter. | ||
| Even if I don't know how they're wrong, well you failed. | ||
| I mean you can't appeal to voters with it, therefore you can never win the power back. | ||
| Therefore you can never get any of these things done. | ||
| Therefore You've lost. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't even matter what you're saying. | ||
| Even if what you're saying was brilliant, and it's not. | ||
| It's retarded. | ||
| But even if what you're saying is brilliant, it doesn't matter. | ||
| It just doesn't work. | ||
| It's like communism. | ||
| It's just not going to work. | ||
| It's a great philosophy, but it's never going to work for human beings. | ||
| And so this is the same thing. | ||
| It's just not possible. | ||
| So I want them to understand they have to change and if they're not prepared to change then they can't be part of the conversation. | ||
| I'm sorry to say it but these people are a drag. | ||
| They hold the left. | ||
| I mean they are the reason the left has lost. | ||
| So yeah we definitely need to transition from identity politics to issue politics and we need to understand Why we care about these things. | ||
| Go back to the the root principles of liberalism. | ||
| What it was designed for and why. | ||
| And the just the the five sort of principles that are the pillars of western civilization were there for a reason. | ||
| You know, people look up to those things for a reason. | ||
| I mean, and I don't want to sound like a Western chauvinist, but I am. | ||
| There isn't a better system. | ||
| It's pretty good. | ||
| It's pretty good, the West. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This is the thing, right? | ||
| Oh, if Donald Trump wins, I'm going to move to Canada. | ||
| No, move to Mexico. | ||
| Shut up and move to the next country. | ||
| Oh, you don't want to? | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Don't even get in. | ||
| Move to Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Don't move to Canada. | ||
| That's full of white people. | ||
| You don't want to go there. | ||
| By the way, Lena Dunham did not move for the record. | ||
| No, of course they didn't. | ||
| No one did. | ||
| They're full of shit. | ||
| I can't understand why anyone listens to celebrities on anything. | ||
| I mean, in ancient Rome, actors and musicians were considered about the same social level as prostitutes. | ||
| For what they could add to society and so I really thought I think we maybe should go back to that kind of mindset again when George Clooney says oh we need to take loads of refugees we just go okay George how many are you taking you know that's very noble of you but these people obviously don't need live anywhere near any of the things that are going on they don't care they're not interested they just want to virtue signal and feel good about themselves and I'm sick of it and I'm sure a lot of other people are sick of it and yeah suck it I don't care. | ||
| I was on a radio show, a progressive radio show, maybe eight months or so ago, and the guy was being incredibly hostile to me, even though he was an old friend of mine, actually. | ||
| He was being really hostile to me, and I was not being hostile. | ||
| And we started talking about immigration, and I said, look, I don't know what our vetting is. | ||
| It's impossible to know what's going on. | ||
| It's clear Look what's happening at the borders in Europe. | ||
| Like, we have to figure out what's going on here. | ||
| And he kept trying to imply that I was somehow being bigoted or racist or something like that. | ||
| And then I said to him, I was like, you know, if you're so for immigration, you make a lot more money than me. | ||
| I know roughly how much you make. | ||
| And you work at a big media company. | ||
| Why don't you, you know, maybe take in a couple immigrants, take a couple migrants into your house? | ||
| And then suddenly he freaked out. | ||
| Well, that's not really how it works. | ||
| And it's like, No, if you show these people that this is not just theory, you can't just have your shit in theory, you have to have it in practice too, they crumble pretty quick. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, one of the reasons that the people in the EU are getting to the point where they understand is, A, the way the votes and the polls have been going recently. | ||
| But an EU official's daughter was murdered by a migrant the other Okay, well now you know how everyone else is feeling. | ||
| I'll find a map and I'll send it to you after this. | ||
| It's basically on Google, a live map of all of the crimes that have been done by migrants in Germany. | ||
| It's the whole country and it's thick with just, you know, you've got things just constant dots everywhere and it's just like, my god, I mean the German figures released from the German police in 2016, was it 2016? | ||
| 2015 I think it was actually, 400,000 crimes were committed by these migrants. | ||
| I mean, you know, most of them were petty crimes. | ||
| Like, thefts and muggings and stuff like that. | ||
| So it's not like life-ending. | ||
| But there are still thousands of people who have been raped, who have been murdered, and it's just... It's just like, look, you didn't vet these people at all. | ||
| You don't know who they are. | ||
| You don't know why they've come. | ||
| I've had people from Syria commenting on my videos going, I know people have gone. | ||
| They've just gone for the money. | ||
| They've just gone because they know that the Germans will put them in a refugee camp and give them money each month. | ||
| And then as soon as they stop giving money, they leave. | ||
| I mean, like, when the Danish government said that they weren't going to give benefits to migrants, suddenly 4,000 of them left. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Okay, well, there we go. | ||
| It's not that there was a war, it's that you thought you were going to get some free money. | ||
| And the thing is, it drives me crazy, the whole sort of... | ||
| I mean, what did you think was going to happen? | ||
| You know, you say, oh yeah, you can all come. | ||
| We've got micro... I mean, obviously that's going to incentivize people who aren't actually there for the real reason. | ||
| You know, it's obviously going to do that. | ||
| And then I've heard like plans of, oh, what we're going to do is we're going to pay them to go home. | ||
| It's like, no, no, that's retarded. | ||
| We know that doesn't work because of the Vikings. | ||
| That's exactly what the French and English kings did. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| Oh, more Vikings came because they went back with a big ton of treasure and gone, yeah, these things gave it to us. | ||
| It just incentivizes people to come. | ||
| Unfortunately, you're going to have to do effectively what Eastern Europe is doing and just say no. | ||
| The answer is no. | ||
| Go away. | ||
| Go to China, ask them. | ||
| Go to Iran, ask them. | ||
| Oh, they're going to say no as well? | ||
| Well, there we go. | ||
| I don't want to sound heartless but there are so many problems that have come along with this and it's been so... nobody apart from the political elite have had any input in any of this. | ||
| They haven't cared. | ||
| Merkel has been under such pressure not to do this and yet she did it anyway, almost like an article of faith. | ||
| When you see her talking about it, she would be talking about it almost as if this was some kind of religious duty that she was doing. | ||
| And it's like, that's dangerous, you know? | ||
| Right, and she did her religious duty, and what happened? | ||
| A million and a half people came in, the system is under strain, the crime that you just mentioned, and then as of the time that we're taping this today, she's proposing this burqa ban. | ||
| So it's like, this is a lot of road to hell, man, road to hell. | ||
| Yeah, I really trust you to get that sorted, Merkel. | ||
| I trust that you're going to be the one to do all this. | ||
| Forgive me if I'm cynical here. | ||
| Ultimately, this migrant crisis might end up with the EU breaking up, which in my opinion is a good thing, but surely they're not all looking at that and going, that's a great thing themselves. | ||
| They must be furious. | ||
| Yeah, but getting back to the reform of the left, I really think this is the most important thing for left-leaning people to talk about. | ||
| It's to understand how social justice works, why it thinks what it thinks, and then to identify the people who are pushing it and tell them they have to change or they have to leave. | ||
| Because they do. | ||
| They absolutely do. | ||
| There just cannot be any room for this kind of bigotry. | ||
| And that's what it is. | ||
| To say, well, it's because you're white, that is a generalisation based on race. | ||
| That is the thing you complain about. | ||
| When it happens to black people I don't care what your systems of oppression say on an individual level that's an unacceptable thing to do even if you think it's justified and they do and that's why like your friend like you're saying he was he was being really hostile to you when you were being polite there's no excuse for that But they think they're acting in service of a greater good and that's one thing that I think there are so many just like elementary concepts that these people forgot. | ||
| I mean the greater good or the common good? | ||
| Well the common good is for everyone. | ||
| The greater good is for a certain section of people and almost I mean I can't think of an ideology in the 20th century that didn't butcher people that didn't also have a greater good in mind when they were butchering people. | ||
| And then Fidel Castro dies and you see Trudeau like oh Oh, my hero! | ||
| Dude, he had firing squads! | ||
| Just execution squads! | ||
| This guy was a monster! | ||
| I can't believe it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, everything's kind of backwards. | ||
| You know, it all sort of leads me to, I think, where we should probably end this for today, although next time we're going to get you in the States, finally, we're going to do this live. | ||
| But for people with flexible minds, because I think that's the through line here, is that as a classical liberal, as what a liberal is supposed to be, I think we have flexible minds. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that there's no information, if I could prove to you was true, that you would, you might not like it at first, you might try to argue against it, but if I consistently prove something to be true, that you would eventually come around. | ||
| And that's what a flexible mind is all about, not being beholden to an ideology, but being rational, being beholden to the truth. | ||
| And we seem to live in a time that everyone's using this phrase post-truth now, where everyone just kind of makes up their own truth. | ||
| But we live in a time where it's like the loudest people are screaming and the loudest people are getting the most retweets and the most views and all the clickbait and all that stuff where it's for people like us and I think for the people that like that are watching this right now that like the stuff that we're doing and we're putting out there it makes our job a little harder because having a flexible mind also means I think I want to live a pretty decent life too. | ||
| I want to not devote every bit of energy that I have to fighting with people and all that stuff and not becoming a demagogue that I would hate at the same time. | ||
| So basically I just view this as our job is a little harder because being rational in an irrational world is a little harder. | ||
| I think that our job is made more difficult than everyone else's job by the fact that we don't have an identity. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| But you've been arguing against identity politics the whole time? | ||
| I know I have! | ||
| I know, and I'm not suggesting that identity is a panacea for anything, but there's... | ||
| The alt-right became a really powerful force, but if you look at it, the alt-right's tiny. | ||
| The alt-right's really small. | ||
| I mean, the biggest alt-right bloggers have got like 30,000, 40,000 subscribers. | ||
| You know, that's a tiny movement, and yet they were just dedicated and noisy online. | ||
| They caused a lot of trouble, and suddenly Hillary Clinton is legitimizing them in a speech. | ||
| It's like, oh my god, that shitposting has gone from the internet to Hillary Clinton's mouth, where she's denouncing a cartoon frog. | ||
| She's literally reading Milo's Breitbart articles. | ||
| And by the way, Milo isn't even considered alt-right enough for the true alt-right people. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's a gay Jew, of course he's not part of the alt-right! | |
| He just likes them because they're fun. | ||
| You know, you've got to handle them. | ||
| Memes are funny. | ||
| Well, that's the irony. | ||
| Everything has been flipped on its head right now. | ||
| There's such self-righteous drivel coming out of the left right now that nothing's funny. | ||
| The Daily Show is not funny. | ||
| The What's-Her-Name that has that TBS show, I keep watching these commercials. | ||
| It's like, it's not funny. | ||
| You're all lecturers. | ||
| And actually, the stuff that is funny, I don't like. | ||
| I don't like the swastika, I don't like Nazis, but the stuff that's coming out of the right is actually the subversive stuff now. | ||
| Comedy is supposed to be subversive, it's supposed to be against the power, and the left is just sucking up to the machine. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The left have been pontificating for years. | ||
| It's exactly the same. | ||
| The Daily Show and, what was it, Samantha Bee? | ||
| Oh, that's the one I was thinking of. | ||
| I mean, it's appallingly horrible! | ||
| It's just not funny. | ||
| You're not funny at all, so stop, please, guys. | ||
| But that's the thing, they've got a narrative they want to project and they can't mock their own narrative. | ||
| They're the ones trying to set a normative, no, this is how it should be. | ||
| And it's like, well, no, it shouldn't. | ||
| It's nonsense and these guys are just mocking you relentlessly. | ||
| I mean, the thing with the facts, I totally agree. | ||
| There should be no facts that are forbidden. | ||
| And that's, again, I mean that is probably one of the key crutches of the left. | ||
| For example, like, there is no denying that black people on average have a lower distribution of IQ than some other races like white people and Asians, right? | ||
| There's no doubting that. | ||
| But what drives me, I mean that's a scientific fact, but what drives me crazy about the alt-right is when they go, right, so now we can do something. | ||
| So no we can't. | ||
| No, we can't. | ||
| We don't penalize people for having a low IQ at all. | ||
| And you're not trying to do anything about the white people with low IQ. | ||
| So that just means you're targeting black people because they're black. | ||
| You don't care about the IQ at all. | ||
| That's just a convenient foil. | ||
| We're not going to do anything to any of these people based on their IQ. | ||
| We don't do that. | ||
| We're not going to start now. | ||
| Stop asking. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| You know, this is some ridiculous... It's like SJW saying, right, okay, we'll have everyone at the same level at some point. | ||
| No, that's not gonna happen either. | ||
| You've both got this utopian, ridiculous But what's worse is it's going to necessitate totalitarianism. | ||
| To make sure everyone marches in lockstep with what you want done, you're going to have to become totalitarians, and I'm really comfortable with a free, open and liberal society, so the answer is no to both of them. | ||
| They can both go hang as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| But the left just needs to learn how to be funny again, frankly. | ||
| Maybe it can do that now that it's kind of lost all the power and failed completely. | ||
| I mean, that could be the saving grace, that suddenly they're going to have to fight the power again. | ||
| And maybe that will actually lead liberalism to go back to its liberal roots. | ||
| Listen, Carl, I could do easily another hour with you, but I got to run. | ||
| We got a ton to do to get this thing in order for next week. | ||
| But it was a pleasure talking to you, as always. | ||
| And, you know, look, some of these ideas are getting out there. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing. | ||
| And we just got to keep pressing. | ||
| And yeah, our job may be harder, but if not us, you know, who else is going to do it? | ||
| Well, that's the thing, isn't it? | ||
| If not us, then who? | ||
| If not now, then when? | ||
| Okay, so I'll leave you with the last thing. | ||
| The people who are sort of rational liberals, they need an identity. | ||
| They need some sort of, like the alt-right has, like intersectional social justice advocates have, you need some kind of unifying identity. | ||
| And it's not for yourselves that you need this. | ||
| It's for other people that you need this. | ||
| It's so the media can say, oh, well, these new liberals are doing something. | ||
| Or, you know, the alt-right attacking the new liberals or something like that. | ||
| It's to get a sort of political map in people's minds and stake out your place in that map. | ||
| And so people can recognize you as a force that needs to be dealt with. | ||
| Because, I mean, between us, we're coming on a million subscribers and yet I don't feel like we're getting anything done, and I think it's because people don't have a mental map of us. | ||
| They don't really know where to place us. | ||
| They're just seeing individuals with large audiences and thinking, well, it's just one guy. | ||
| Okay, he's got a big reach, but I'll just ignore him, I'll block him or something, and then he's gone. | ||
| But if we can find a label that we're all generally happy to use, that we can push, and coordinate on hashtags and things like that, then we could actually start seeing us breaking into the mainstream, just like the alt-right. | ||
| That's exactly how the alt-right did it. | ||
| That's exactly, honestly, it's probably how feminists did it, to be honest. | ||
| I should go and check their history, but it's having a name. | ||
| One thing, sorry, a very quick last thing. | ||
| Everyone always gets hung up on the idea of community and the sort of purity of the community. | ||
| Drop it. | ||
| Just drop it. | ||
| Just drop it. | ||
| I mean communities are just something people do. | ||
| A group of people hanging out together is a community. | ||
| It's no big deal to call something a community and Okay, well, I'm happy to not have collective blame as long as we don't need collective guilt and responsibility. | ||
| So that's fine. | ||
| If someone in the community is bad, then we'll say, okay, that person was a problem. | ||
| We're sorry. | ||
| We've disavowed him. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| It's not a big deal. | ||
| People act like you're signing up to an organization, you're getting a card, and now you've got a whole list of rules to follow. | ||
| No, it's just Do what the alt-right did, do what the feminists did, do what every social movement's doing online, find an identity and push it. | ||
| And so you can at least, and we can all at least agree on like four or five basic principles like, you know, secularism, skepticism, individual rights, freedom of expression, and what democracy or, you know, these sort of five points. | ||
| Who's in disagreement with that, you know? | ||
| There are going to be millions of people and this is what drives me crazy because if we had some kind of identity we could probably activate Millions of people. | ||
| If we could just get on, you know, get on TV and be like, no, this is what we are. | ||
| This is what we stand for because you failed and you're horrible. | ||
| So, you know, this is what we want. | ||
| I think we would get a huge flood of people coming to us because I think most people are on our side. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I started this by saying that I don't know that we can win, but I think you just did a beautiful two minute job of what our work should be for 2017. | ||
| So I'm going to keep working. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, that's all I do. | |
| All right, brother. | ||
| Well, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, this is it. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| And I know that people hear you. | ||
| They hear me. | ||
| They hear this other gang of amorphous people that are coming together. | ||
| And I think that the next wave of this is in our favor, and we're going to keep pushing. |
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