April 17, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:32:24
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unidentified
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the next one. Thank you. | |
| All right. We are live on the YouTube and the Facebook. | ||
| Joining me today is an award-winning journalist and world traveler who goes pretty much wherever the story is, Tim Pool. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I feel like we already did an interview. | ||
| Oh, yeah, we've been, like, great conversation. | ||
| We've been talking a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, everything. | ||
| You half interviewed me, I half interviewed you, but I guess now we'll do this for the people. | ||
| So you were on the show once before via Skype when you fled Milwaukee. | ||
| I fled. | ||
| You kind of fled. | ||
| But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| I mean, you said out of all of the places you've been to, and you've been to Venezuela and Egypt and a whole bunch of places, you said that the violence that you saw there then, it was the first place that you ever left because of fear for your life, right? | ||
| No, Venezuela was. | ||
| Venezuela, you did leave Venezuela because of fear. | ||
| But should we go right into the Venezuela story? | ||
| We don't have to go right there, but I was just framing that you're a guy who gets out there. | ||
| But it has to do with the anarchists and Antifa. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's start with Venezuela. | ||
| So for people that know nothing about you, just give me a little backstory on who you are, how you got involved in journalism, and then we'll get to the specifics. | ||
| I'm a hacker. | ||
| I was, you know, probably like an anonymous kind of a narco hacker when I was younger, and then my friends | ||
| wanted to improve the lines of communication as one of the tenants of | ||
| like the hacker communities. So I went to Occupy Wall Street to produce information. I have | ||
| no background in journalism. I'm a high school dropout. And then I got a ton of attention for the | ||
| work I was doing with new technology, live streaming, drones. | ||
| Started working for Vice a few years later, and I was the first hire for Vice News and one of the founding members. | ||
| Worked for Fusion for a couple years, and now, since I left that, I'm totally independent, producing everything on my own YouTube channel and Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, and you pretty much go anywhere, right? | ||
| Like, you don't have anything off-limits. | ||
| I mean, you've been to the hotspots, and we're gonna get to a bunch of them. | ||
| I mean, I haven't been to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, but I was in Egypt during the revolution, the second revolution. | ||
| I was in Venezuela. | ||
| But, you know, basically low-grade war. | ||
| I haven't done any full-on international conflict. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Although you did do Sweden, which could be veering in that direction. | ||
| Yeah, it's, you know, there's not two fronts armed, you know, and firing tanks or anything like that, but it's, we're in a new era of conflict. | ||
| Things are dramatically different than they used to be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let's just start with what's happened the last couple of days. | ||
| So let's talk about Berkeley. | ||
| Now everyone knows this was at one time the home for free speech and free expression in America. | ||
| It has since become just a, Dare I say, just a cesspool of craziness, of competing ideas, but it's being couched in violence. | ||
| So what we saw over the last couple of days basically was the Antifa. | ||
| Now these are supposedly the anti-fascists, right? | ||
| They dress like Cobra soldiers from G.I. | ||
| Joe, but apparently these are the anti-fascists, even though they seem to be using tactics of fascism, violence, to silence their opinions. | ||
| And they were a counter-rally to the free speech rally. | ||
| Did I frame that correctly so far? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, now take it from there. | ||
| What happened over the last couple days? | ||
| Well, so, you know, when I saw this flyer for Patriots Day, and I know a lot of people on the left and the right, and they were saying it was a free speech event, but you see people, you know, Lauren Southern, Brittany Pettibone, Baked Alaska, I'm like, these are, these are you know, the new right, whatever you want to call it, | ||
| the Trump supporters. | ||
| That's actually how I framed the event. | ||
| I was calling it an alt-right event because I assumed that a lot of people there, | ||
| I mean, one person was holding a sign that said, DeGoyim no, you know, and it was one person. | ||
| Parentheses, frogs, the whole thing. | ||
| Exactly, and so. | ||
| But as it turns out, I met a bunch of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters peacefully attending the event. | ||
| Stereotypical old hippie liberals. | ||
| I'd say the event was mostly conservative, but I stopped calling it a right-wing or a Trump event when I realized there were actually liberals attending peacefully. | ||
| To a degree where I saw a red bandana wearing woman with a no DAPL shirt on, cleaning up trash with people wearing MAGA hats. | ||
| And so then I started asking myself, then who are the Antifas? | ||
| If they're not aligned with, like the left and the right are here, it's mostly right, but if they're working together, who are the Antifas and why are they so violent? | ||
| Why are they attacking this group and accusing everyone of being a Nazi white supremacist? | ||
| Okay, so before we get to the Antifa guys, that first batch of people, you've got Trump supporters, you've got old school liberals. | ||
| It sounds like it's sort of an amorphous thing. | ||
| They were basically there to support free speech. | ||
| That was the basic premise. | ||
| Okay, so now the Antifa people, and these are the people that everyone sees. | ||
| They're wearing bandanas and all black and all that. | ||
| Where are these people coming from, first off? | ||
| Based on what I heard and what I know about them, I believe that the entire group that was in Berkeley are Bay Area activists. | ||
| There's a group that some journalists, we refer to as the tourists, because they will travel around to various protests and join the anarchists or the left. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| Dare I say it, cultish. | ||
| They recruit people, they spread these ideas, and then all of a sudden you have this extreme rhetoric of, you are in the revolution. | ||
| These people are all fascists. | ||
| You have to fight back. | ||
| They literally wear uniform. | ||
| I'm not gonna say, it's not a uniform, but they are in uniform. | ||
| And I interviewed some of them. | ||
| They flat out told me they believe they are justified in using violence to push political ideology. | ||
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unidentified
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So what is it that these people believe? | |
| For as much as you can tell. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I can't speak for all of them, obviously, but when there's a group of people that all agree to wear the same clothing and defend each other, protect each other from accountability, then, you know, one voice may be representative of many. | ||
| They believe that the U.S. | ||
| government is, you know, colonializing, imperialistic, fascism. | ||
| Trump is literally Hitler. | ||
| Anyone who supports Trump is a Nazi. | ||
| Anyone who's to the right of them is a traitor. | ||
| If you're a minority, you're a race traitor. | ||
| White supremacy is a stranglehold over this country. | ||
| They literally call this the revolution. | ||
| They truly believe they're fighting a revolution. | ||
| Obviously, not all of them. | ||
| There are some people who just think Trump's a fascist or a racist, but they call it the revolution. | ||
| Who's the leader of this thing? | ||
| When you're talking to people out there, first off, do any of these people show their faces or is literally every single one of them covered? | ||
| There were a few people. | ||
| I would say maybe only a handful out of the group of several hundred that weren't wearing masks. | ||
| Towards the end of the event, some of them had taken their masks off. | ||
| And actually, I talked to a young man who not only did he take his mask and goggles off, but he talked to me for a little while and even showed me the knife he brought to the event. | ||
| You know, I don't know what they think they're doing by wearing masks because clearly it's, you know, at least some of them don't care to protect their identities. | ||
| But, you know, what they do say is it's just to show solidarity. | ||
| It's to align ourselves with the group so that people know where we stand. | ||
| Right, okay, so let's pause for a second. | ||
| So if the first group of people, this, you know, conglomeration of Trump people and liberals and just free speech people and probably a couple people that just showed up for no reason. | ||
| To fight. | ||
| If the other, or and then probably some to show up for sure. | ||
| So that, okay, so that's my question then. | ||
| If the Antifa people had not shown up, was violence going to happen? | ||
| No. | ||
| So that's really the crux of this. | ||
| So these people would have just had this amorphous group of people saying, we're here for free speech. | ||
| They would have been sort of politically diverse, but basically there would have been no violence. | ||
| Yeah, and this is exemplified. | ||
| Look, I've got a two-hour live stream up on YouTube if you want to watch the whole raw thing. | ||
| But once the event started with the speakers, most of that group just went and listened to the speeches while the Antifa were screaming and yelling and doing their chants, holding their signs. | ||
| There was one point where I was actually concerned the event would get shut down because in the middle of this park is a divider, and you've got all of Antifa up against it yelling, and then the rally attendees started trickling to the event, and that's when I realized there's no one on the front line, on the rally side. | ||
| Antifa's probably just gonna march straight over, and the police, there weren't that many police. | ||
| So what's going on there? | ||
| Because it seems to me when I've seen these things, when we saw the first Milo thing at Berkeley and a couple of subsequent things, it seems like the police are often just standing there as violence is happening, as you see firecrackers thrown into crowds, as you see people punched and kicked and, you know, signs grabbed out of their hands and all that. | ||
| It seems like the cops are just kind of letting it happen. | ||
| Is that... | ||
| Is that a fair estimation? | ||
| Yeah, I tweeted about it. | ||
| I've never seen that before. | ||
| Even in San Jose, when there was a big mob of anti-Trump people attacking individuals, the police came in and started to block the group and take some action. | ||
| The police yesterday, or I don't know if it was yesterday, the police at the Berkeley event, there was very few, maybe a dozen, maybe a little bit more. | ||
| They did have masks, they had gas masks and helmets. | ||
| They stayed in the park, and they mostly stayed between the divider. | ||
| At one point, Antifa left the park and tried entering the rally from behind, and that's when everything went truly crazy. | ||
| We had already seen them throwing M80s and mortars into the crowd. | ||
| That was Antifa doing that. | ||
| So they're doing that. | ||
| They're throwing this stuff into the crowd, and the cops are just watching, in effect. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| People, I saw an older woman go up to the police and start demanding that the police take action because they're throwing explosives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the police were just like, just standing there. | ||
| They didn't leave the park. | ||
| Right, so what do you make of that? | ||
| I know you're not in law enforcement and you can't speak for the people up there, but what do you make of knowing that something's gonna happen, right? | ||
| It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out, that they put a very small group of police there and then they're not doing anything. | ||
| Money. | ||
| If you look at revolution, if you look at historically, if you can't guarantee the reward for the risk, the cops aren't going to do anything. | ||
| So it's not just about, are the cops being compensated enough? | ||
| But it's also, does this jurisdiction of Berkeley have the resources to continually be putting out officers on overtime with the equipment to fight against this? | ||
| Or are they getting to the point where they said, we can no longer foot the bill for this fighting? | ||
| what else are we supposed to do? | ||
| I think it's an issue of resources, not only in supplying the officers, | ||
| but convincing a police officer for the third time to go out and get in between people | ||
| who are literally throwing explosives at one crowd, bringing knives, people are being left bloody. | ||
| At some point, the cop's gonna say, it's too much. | ||
| It's too much. | ||
| So when I read some of the articles about this, it seemed like almost every article that I read | ||
| was basically trying to draw equivalence between both sides. | ||
| It made it seem like there's violence on both sides. | ||
| The one image, the real image that I think people will stick with out of this | ||
| was the guy who appeared to be a Trump supporter, I guess, punching that woman. | ||
| And a lot of people were saying he sucker punched her and all that. | ||
| Now, from what I saw, she was in his face screaming too. | ||
| I'm not defending anyone using violence or any of that kind of thing. | ||
| But the whole thing seemed like we're, They're trying to draw equivalence from listening to you and watching what you did and watching your follow-up. | ||
| Wasn't really equivalence on the violent side, correct? | ||
| No. | ||
| And I'll say this. | ||
| There was a moment, I think there were two moments that I caught where people from the rally side jumped the barricade and then started punching Antifa. | ||
| Some guy came up to me, he's probably about six feet tall, and he had a mask on with a skull on it, and he said, what are you? | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| He's like, who are you here with? | ||
| And I was like, YouTube, I was live streaming. | ||
| And he goes, left or right? | ||
| And I said, neither. | ||
| And then he turned and then jumped the barricade and just BAM! | ||
| Right into an Antifa face. | ||
| So, I believe if I said left, he would have hit me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because he immediately jumped the barricade and hit somebody. | ||
| And I talked to some of the rally attendees about that. | ||
| And I said, look, there are people on this side that jumped the barricade too. | ||
| And the typical response was, Antifa came here to shut our event down. | ||
| We didn't come to their event. | ||
| So if someone here is going to fight, it's started by Antifa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you see that as basically a valid claim? | ||
| Yeah, it's not so black and white for the most part, yes. | ||
| You know, Antifo, their goal was to shut the event down. | ||
| They were throwing M80s, they were throwing mortars. | ||
| And so if someone then decides, I'm gonna go and start hitting these people... I don't agree with, you know, when there's no fighting, jumping the barricade and punching somebody, but I'm not surprised and... | ||
| I will absolutely condemn a group like Antifa marching into an event where people are just speaking and throwing explosives and beating people. | ||
| And I will even to a certain degree condemn the other side jumping the barricade and then instigating a fight in between because it's grains of sand in a heap, right? | ||
| That moment helps escalate tensions and so I do think one side is particularly worse than the other. | ||
| So is there a weird thing though with the cops, like whether it's resources or there's some political motivation for not having enough people there or whatever it is, that if, let's say they had had the right numbers there and the right equipment there and whatever, and they had really cracked down on the Antifa people, that in a way, that just feeds their grievance, right? | ||
| So we're really caught between a rock and a hard place. | ||
| Either we let the inmates run the asylum, which is what's happening right now, | ||
| which I don't think is good, or we really crack down on them, | ||
| which probably does make more sense in terms of how society should work, | ||
| but also just feeds their cause, and then it's sort of like throwing water on gremlins. | ||
| I think there's this idea where if the police engage Antifa, then you'll end up with police brutality protests. | ||
| You'll end up with videos of the police looking bad, and that will actually make Antifa bigger, | ||
| and it will increase the likelihood Antifa will hold their own individual rallies in opposition | ||
| of the police. | ||
| So it's almost like that's what they want, really. | ||
| But by the police standing down and making it about the rally versus the Antifa, the rally is one thing right now. | ||
| You know, there's not going to be another instance where Antifa could make the rally happen again. | ||
| But, you know, let's say the police intervene, pisses off Antifa, media circulates making the cops look bad, then Antifa can just say, we're coming to Oakland, or we're coming to Berkeley, and we will protest the police. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So they would allow Antifa to create a violent situation. | ||
| Right, so does Antifa ever do events themselves? | ||
| Like, do they only show up to protest other people's speech and try to silence other people? | ||
| Or do they ever actually do events where they get their ideas out? | ||
| And I suspect that the free speech people probably don't try to shut them down. | ||
| So we're not looking at, you know, there's equivalence. | ||
| It ain't here, right? | ||
| I mean, do you know of any events where they've tried to say, we're holding an event at Berkeley right now, and these are our ideas, and we're gonna get them out there, and we respect the way society is supposed to be? | ||
| What I will say is, there's a lot of people who are probably with Antifa, who are aligned with other groups that have done similar things, but there's extreme paranoia in Antifa. | ||
| So it's important to realize that Antifa has overlaps with many other hard left groups. | ||
| Anti-cap, anti-capitalists, anti-fascists. | ||
| They're all flying the red and black flag. | ||
| It's a very similar group of people. | ||
| Irony, they don't get irony at all, right? | ||
| Antifa, anti-fascists, while they're using violence to silence other people. | ||
| Is this completely, have you asked them about that? | ||
| I have, I have, but I'll say this. | ||
| They're so close. | ||
| But they don't believe in, you know, they're open borders, they're anarchists, they don't like nations. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So fascism being, you know, usually described as authoritarian nationalism, sure, they can be opposed to that, but they are authoritarians. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What I try to tell people is don't call Antifa fascist, because that's a specific, as a meaning, but they're authoritarian in that as individuals, they believe they have the right, the absolute right to harm others, to push their politics. | ||
| Right, so they don't want to control you via the government yet, because they're not in charge of the government. | ||
| But if they became part of the government, yes, they would be full-blown fascists at that point, right? | ||
| You know, I talked to two of them. | ||
| I was receiving death threats from these people the day before, so most of them know who I am. | ||
| They won't talk to me. | ||
| But I talked to a couple, and they said they were communists. | ||
| They weren't anarchists. | ||
| So there is a mix. | ||
| It's just a lot of, you know, some people have the anarchist flag. | ||
| But as communists, they do believe they have, you know, not only the right to use violence to push their politics, but the right to control others at a macro level as a nation state. | ||
| And the right to use their iPhones while they tell you how bad capitalism is. | ||
| Well, actually, the funny thing was, when I was interviewing this young man, and I was explaining to him that he was authoritarian, that he brought a knife to a political rally, he said, I wish I had my phone so I could look this up. | ||
| And I'm just like... That's as good as it gets right there. | ||
| That's many levels. | ||
| Many levels of just not knowing what you're talking about, wanting to use an international tool that was developed through international trade. | ||
| It's very confusing, I guess. | ||
| For you covering this stuff... | ||
| Do you ever fear that by covering it the way you do, and even by us doing this right now, that it gives credence to them? | ||
| It gives some sort of legitimacy? | ||
| Because I kind of feel that way with some of like the more extreme alt-right stuff, the stuff that might actually be racist. | ||
| I'm not just talking about Pepe the Frog, but like the stuff that actually might be based in White supremacy or whatever, that the more we talk about it, we're just adding legitimacy to it, as opposed to if you just didn't cover any of this, and they had their little thing, and whatever it was, and everyone just ignored it, that eventually it would go away. | ||
| Do you think about that at all? | ||
| I know it's for a journalist. | ||
| It's a shitty option, right? | ||
| If only we could see the future, because there's two problems. | ||
| Ignore it, it grows. | ||
| Confront it, it maybe grows. | ||
| Are we adding fuel to the fire? | ||
| But I'm... | ||
| Coming from a place where people have a right to know what is happening. | ||
| So that means I go on the ground, and I film stuff. | ||
| I actually don't do a lot of interviews. | ||
| Most of what I do is experiential. | ||
| You see me going to an event and watching what's happening, and I'll talk to some people. | ||
| When I do interviews, I usually let them just say what they have to say. | ||
| Because I think one of the big challenges is that everyone views each other as this one-dimensional monster. | ||
| If you're left, therefore you believe all of these things, and so it's important to kind of show the nuance. | ||
| But then what ends up happening is people are selective in what they'll watch, even of what I produce. | ||
| The left will tweet out my live stream as soon as the cop swings a baton, and the right will tweet out my live stream as soon as a protester throws a bottle. | ||
| So then what ends up happening is the right will only see that bottle thrown, the left will only see that baton swing. | ||
| Very few people are willing to sit through a two hour event and just watch the whole thing and experience it all, but I can only try, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, so that's sort of the perfect segue to what do you think social media is doing to all of us? | ||
| It's making it worse. | ||
| Is it making it all worse? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And again, that goes to you're trying to do good journalism. | ||
| People always ask me, who do I trust? | ||
| Who do I watch and think is doing good work? | ||
| And I include you in that group because I consistently see that you're trying, you know what I mean? | ||
| That you were trying to say. | ||
| Even with your video the other day, you had titled it one thing originally, right? | ||
| What was the original title? | ||
| It was Antifa vs. Alt-Right. | ||
| And then you changed it after you just explained why you changed it. | ||
| Yeah, I explained it. | ||
| So you changed it to? | ||
| Antifa vs. Free Speech Rally. | ||
| Right, because you saw that it wasn't just this alt-right thing. | ||
| So that to me shows a degree of journalistic integrity. | ||
| You're going, I saw something, it wasn't exactly what I expected. | ||
| There we are. | ||
| I mean, one of the videos I put up, I put up I think three videos in a live stream. | ||
| It's this guy, he's wearing all black, he's got crazy long hair. | ||
| You saw him on the street, you would not think he's a Trump supporter, but he was fighting on the rally side. | ||
| And after he got smacked in the head and left bloody, it was the rally side that brought him in and applied first aid. | ||
| And that was one of the things I saw where I'm like, this guy looks like those guys, but he's not wearing a mask or glasses. | ||
| And he was fighting on the rally side. | ||
| It's not a stereotypical group. | ||
| It's not a uniform group here at the rally. | ||
| It is mostly conservative, but they were people of all types. | ||
| You need a chart to just figure out who all these people are. | ||
| Back to that idea of the media framing this as 50-50, or even, because I follow a lot of liberal people, obviously, or people on the left, it made it seem like the Trump people were the bad guys. | ||
| Why would you call them Trump people? | ||
| The rally people. | ||
| Well, because you didn't see, except for you, I didn't see anything about there being hippies there or other free speech. | ||
| If you look at all the headlines and the way it's framed on Twitter, it's all those, these Trump people. | ||
| I didn't see any pictures of the whole hippie. | ||
| But what about that? | ||
| Because there is this idea in the mainstream media that it's the Trump people who are putting out all the violence. | ||
| Does that give you pause when you hear that in other stories? | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| Have there been right-wing people and Trump people who have been violent? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We've seen that video where the protester was walking out and the guy punched him in the face. | ||
| We've seen more than that. | ||
| 80% of the time, it's anti-Trump protesters running people down. | ||
| I've watched old people get thrown to the ground and stomped. | ||
| I've watched, in San Jose, an old couple was shoved to the ground, their hat was ripped off and set on fire. | ||
| There was an immigrant who was trying to walk past where the event was taking place. | ||
| Nothing to do with either event, and they broke his nose. | ||
| It's just this fervent, emotional anger. | ||
| It's this mob mentality. | ||
| How much of this then just goes to what's going on with the mainstream media right now, that they are just almost negligent, and you could argue worse, that they're actually proactively promoting this nonsense? | ||
| So going back to what you said about the 50-50, the narrative they're putting out, it's not 50-50. | ||
| It's 80% Antifa, 20% rally. | ||
| 50-50. It's 80% Antifa, 20% rally. Antifa, let me, I could put this out to anyone watching | ||
| Would you condemn the throwing of a mortar into a crowd of people? | ||
| And you know what they're all going to say? | ||
| I'd say like 99%? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I talked to two Antifa people and they both wouldn't condemn it. | ||
| The first woman said, it was actually the woman who got punched in the face that you were talking about earlier, she said, well the revolution isn't effing easy. | ||
| And then I asked another young man, would you condemn the throwing of explosives into a crowd? | ||
| And he goes, well, it's context. | ||
| I mean, we're defending ourselves. | ||
| That is not moderate. | ||
| That is not rational. | ||
| And that is not a 50-50 viewpoint. | ||
| These are fringe extremists who are throwing explosives. | ||
| And the media is portraying it like the left and the right. | ||
| No. | ||
| Moderate liberals, even social justice activists, not Antifa. | ||
| Like, you go to any liberal in LA and ask them, would you condemn throwing an explosive? | ||
| And they're going to say yes. | ||
| So people are, well, this is what people do. | ||
| They have these ideals, and then the second it becomes hard to have them, they suddenly lose them. | ||
| But I would argue, for all the shit that I give the social justice worries, I would argue that a huge percentage of them would say, no, you can't do that. | ||
| But they're being led by, unfortunately, their worst parts. | ||
| But what about the media then? | ||
| What do you think is actually happening? | ||
| Because you've been sort of part of mainstream media too. | ||
| You had an interesting thing happen to you with Fusion. | ||
| Actually, why don't we just jump into that quick? | ||
| Because I think it might kind of explain a little bit of what's happening with mainstream. | ||
| Fusion's a crazy story, man. | ||
| You know, and they'll disagree with me, that's fine. | ||
| But they actually have... | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and close out the meeting. | ||
| portraits or posters up on the walls of the office that say we will not be partisan. | ||
| And then when I first started there I think there was a huge desire to be very | ||
| vice-like. | ||
| Probably one of the reasons they hired me coming from Vice News. | ||
| And then things changed and I, you know, not speaking specifically towards Fusion | ||
| but one thing I can see that affected them and affects other companies is marketers | ||
| saying young people are liberal and want liberal politics. | ||
| You have to produce this for them. And so then what ends up happening is these | ||
| companies thinking they're thinking they are being moderate | ||
| when they say okay look if the majority of people believe this is what's | ||
| rational then we want to follow this. | ||
| But it's just not true. | ||
| And in my opinion, and what I advised people at Fusion about is, look, if you choose the left, you are cutting your market share in half. | ||
| You're telling half of this country that you're not going to make a product for them either. | ||
| And so that's detrimental to your business. | ||
| In talking about why many companies like Fusion, I can call out a million other companies, but I'll stick with the one I worked for. | ||
| They hire people who are liberal, and sometimes it's on purpose. | ||
| When you say liberal, I just have to pause for a second, because this is what I've spent the last two years doing, making this distinction between liberal and the left. | ||
| You do make that distinction, right? | ||
| Between sort of modern, what real liberalism is versus left. | ||
| I'm only pausing you because I know a lot of people are gonna jump on you. | ||
| I have to clarify. | ||
| They hire social justice activists and people who are aligned with third wave or modern feminism, whatever you'd call it. | ||
| I'm just cleaning up the comments. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| There's two big reasons. | ||
| One is that in the instance of Fusion, I was actually told that we're here to side with the audience, and the audience is liberal. | ||
| But you also have the issue of people who are from cities tend to lean left, and many of these people will then hire people they think are being honest, who reflect their own political bias. | ||
| And so what we end up seeing is, there was a Washington Post article from a couple years ago that only 7% of journalists are Republican. | ||
| Journalists in big cities tend to lean left, and they're going to hire people who they think are nice or honest, and that's going to reflect their own personal politics. | ||
| Then we're going to see companies start pushing this narrative. | ||
| But to elaborate further, and this is a fascinating concept that I've been looking at, why are so many new media companies hard left? | ||
| Social justice, feminist. | ||
| It's not necessarily because marketers are telling them to do that. | ||
| Marketers are telling big corporate entities to do that. | ||
| But what happened was, at the dawn of the Internet, young people started producing content that was politically aligned. | ||
| People liked confirmation bias. | ||
| They started clicking these articles, started getting a ton of traffic, making money. | ||
| Investors saw that, gave them more money. | ||
| And now, a media outlet that was built around being a feminist publication just received $10 million from venture capital, and now we're seeing so many of the new media companies being outright feminist publications. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you also see this, you see it less on the right, but there is Breitbart, which is conservative, there is the Daily Caller. | ||
| Confirmation bias in partisan media works. | ||
| So where does that leave, you know, I really believe that for the, getting out of media for a second, that most of the country is really center. | ||
| I think they're basically fiscally conservative and socially liberal and you can, you know, don't have to agree on every little thing here and there. | ||
| But for those of us that are in this new media thing and are trying to make some sense of that, where does that leave us? | ||
| I mean, even, I was just telling you before we started the video that we put up this morning, This very morning that I shot a couple days ago with Yasmin Mohammed, who's ex-Muslim, they demonetized it before we even put it up. | ||
| We couldn't even get the option because of our meta tags that said either Islam or whatever. | ||
| You're in a similar position. | ||
| You're also on Patreon, but you had your videos this weekend weren't monetized, right? | ||
| Actually, so here's the weird thing. | ||
| My live stream was age-restricted and monetized. | ||
| And looking at my analytics, for those that aren't familiar who are watching... I know it's a little insider baseball, but people do appreciate us talking about this because it's why and how we have to frame what we do. | ||
| So check this out. | ||
| I had 25,000 viewers between 2 and 3 p.m. | ||
| on my live stream. | ||
| I had 26,000 between 3 and 4 p.m. | ||
| and you see these in the analytics. | ||
| YouTube then age restricts the stream and it drops down to 4,000. | ||
| Age restriction also demonetizes. | ||
| So that means anything after that point, I will not make a cent on. | ||
| When it comes to the videos I make every, I make a video every day, typically about news topics, and I'm fairly moderate, I don't, you know, I don't make refugee bashing content or anything like that, but simply by having the word migrant or refugee, before, as soon as the video is uploaded, before publishing, it will be deemed not advertiser friendly, I will lose revenue, and then what happens is I submit it for review, but after 48 hours when everyone's already watched the video, I haven't made any money. | ||
| They then reinstate ads and I'll make maybe five cents if I'm lucky. | ||
| So when you talk about the hit, we mentioned this right before we started, but I was telling you that I think our last 30 days, we've taken, I think it's now almost like 60% hit, making 60% less rev here. | ||
| You were saying you're even more than that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because they demonetized almost... I mean, in the past week, out of six videos, five were instantly demonetized and weren't reinstated for days. | ||
| One of them, I think, But they did approve, and this is also strange, | ||
| that I have a video of a man covered in blood from the rally, monetized. | ||
| And it says, the title of the video is Man Left Bloody After Fighting Antifa, Monetized. | ||
| So does some of that then, you know, I'm always, I always say the Carl Sagan quote, you know, | ||
| oh my God, I'm forgetting my favorite Carl Sagan quote. | ||
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. | ||
| So we don't have any evidence that there's a political machine behind this, but this is simply just money. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I will say, I made a video on YouTube. | ||
| Remember that whole fiasco where Wall Street Journal did a story about PewDiePie, another story about, for people that may not be familiar, ads were running on racist or terror or war content. | ||
| So to prove a point, I created an ad campaign using a verified Coca-Cola video that linked to the KKK's website that would only run on KKK videos. | ||
| I created that campaign. | ||
| You can take any video you want and place that video as an ad on any other video. | ||
| There is an approval process. | ||
| I didn't let it get to the point where they would have approved or otherwise because I don't want to get sued by anybody. | ||
| So after I made the campaign, I deleted it. | ||
| But it's an issue of There's this feud going on between, or let me put it this way, I feel for the companies, because I wouldn't want my product to appear on a KKK video either, and Google does have problems, but I think they're going about it the wrong way. | ||
| Anyone can make an ad, anyone can put that ad anywhere they want, and they can't determine what is actually in the video, so they're targeting keywords, and all that serves to do is eliminate news. | ||
| News creators are suffering because of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think of just sort of the general state of online media? | ||
| Because as a base thing, it's good that we are all free to do this. | ||
| We're just two guys who happen to start doing this and we built something and people like it | ||
| and that's great and okay. | ||
| At the same time, anyone can pretend to know what they're talking about. | ||
| Anyone can do all the clickbait. | ||
| Anyone can put on a suit and sit at a desk and say, this is what the truth is. | ||
| And then again, it goes to the funneling that you were talking about, where we just pick what we like and we just keep going back to all that. | ||
| How dangerous is all this? | ||
| As someone that's right in the thick of it. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| It makes me sad. | ||
| I know that if I started making skateboarding prank videos, I'd be a millionaire. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But I do news, and I try to be... | ||
| Honest and balanced. | ||
| I don't like saying balanced. | ||
| I just try to be respectful and honest. | ||
| I'll let someone, no matter how crazy, have their free speech too. | ||
| And what ends up happening is, there's one instance. | ||
| I did a video about it. | ||
| There was a feminist art gallery in Ukraine. | ||
| A friend of mine is a curator there. | ||
| Ukrainian nationalists stormed in and started beating people, pepper spraying them and smashing things. | ||
| And it gets 50% thumbs down. | ||
| If I cover an issue like Sweden, the only people Google searching Sweden crime are conservatives. | ||
| They start following me. | ||
| And that means when I report on something that is more of interest to a liberal or maybe counters the perception of someone conservative, they will unfollow me. | ||
| So it's very difficult to actually build a base because it's much, much easier for, say, Alex Jones, who sticks to his narrative. | ||
| It's not just about being biased, it's also about what you do report on. | ||
| If I only ever report on migrant issues, yeah, people will keep following me. | ||
| But I try to make sure I look at all aspects of an issue and cover things far and wide. | ||
| The ultimate irony there though is that if you only covered the migrant stuff, you'd probably be demonetized 90% of the time, yet your audience would grow, right? | ||
| You'd start growing an audience that would lean a little bit to the right, so those numbers would grow, and at the same time your money numbers would go down. | ||
| And again, this is insider baseball stuff, but it's interesting just relative to how Every creator has to deal with this stuff. | ||
| I'll say this too, and this is partly anecdotal but also based that there's a company I know that produces a lot of YouTube stuff, they have a big network, and they told me that their audience is, it leans right, mostly conservative. | ||
| And I found the same thing with my content. | ||
| And I think most people will find on YouTube that things that are hard left get thumbs down, things that are hard right are more likely to get thumbs up. | ||
| And what I have found is that Among my friends and my audience, liberals tend not to search for news topics related to foreign policy, economics, internal politics. | ||
| They look for more social issues. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Racism, sexism. | ||
| And so, as somebody who... I'm not covering identity politics. | ||
| I'm covering actual foreign policy, war, conflict. | ||
| YouTube is telling the people who watch my channel that they would also like InfoWars and Paul Joseph Watson and things like that. | ||
| But I'm totally on the, we do not agree on these issues. | ||
| And so, to me, that just shows that the left, whatever you wanna call it, they're not interested in these topics. | ||
| When you see those guys, like the Infowars guys, and I've had Paul Joseph Watson on the show, and I've been on Alex Jones' show, when you see those guys, do you think that there is a necessary space Paul Joseph Watson, I basically like and I agree with him on a lot of stuff. | ||
| Yes, he's more over the top than I am for sure. | ||
| He's more of a provocateur than I am for sure. | ||
| I don't agree with everything he says. | ||
| He's mean sometimes, all of those things. | ||
| But I do think there is a space for those guys because mainstream has been so terrible. | ||
| And people will be like, wow, Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, it's all bullshit, it's all lies, it's all conspiracies. | ||
| You watch the mainstream, you get a ton of that too. | ||
| It's just the mainstream bullshit that we've been accepting, so we're a little more tolerant of just their nonsense. | ||
| You know, here's what I tell people. | ||
| Journalists... | ||
| Just because someone's a journalist doesn't mean what they're writing is true. | ||
| You take somebody who's sitting in the New York Times newsroom, and they're going to write a story about Berkeley. | ||
| They're not there. | ||
| They're on the other side of the country. | ||
| And so they're going to write this story based on what they saw on the internet and some phone calls they did. | ||
| And then people who are actually there are going to say, that's fake news. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| That's how it's always been. | ||
| But social media allows us to fact check. | ||
| And that we can then see that CNN today is no more or less wrong or right than they ever were in the past. | ||
| It's just that we can see it a little bit more. | ||
| And now we're starting to be able to fact check at an instant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This doesn't open up the pitfalls, though, of finding fake news websites that will fact check. | ||
| You know, a certain idea for you, right? | ||
| Do you think it's possible, though, that they are a little sloppier and more agenda-driven, or you really don't think that is? | ||
| Because I do see now... Agenda-driven. | ||
| And maybe it is that we have the fact-checking immediately, and when CNN clips videos, you know, a couple weeks ago I talked about that video with Tommy Sotomayor about the woman who was saying, go burn down the rich people's houses, remember that? | ||
| A couple weeks back, or a couple months ago, at one of the many police things. | ||
| But that basically, you know, that they edit things in a way that once you edit something and then you put it up on CNN, if anyone on the internet can be like, wait a minute, if you would have played that 10 seconds longer, it would have been a completely worse story. | ||
| So is that sloppiness or agenda, do you think? | ||
| I think it's a little bit of both. | ||
| There's three things to consider. | ||
| Sometimes, and I don't think it's most of the time, there's an editing for time. | ||
| You know, the person watching it has their own personal bias and they're well-intentioned and they think, here's the story, and so they cut some things out. | ||
| Then you have the, you know, agenda-driven, it's on purpose. | ||
| And then you have, are you familiar with Hanlon's Razor? | ||
| Never attribute to malice that which is easily explained by incompetence. | ||
| So I tend to think these people are just bad at their jobs. | ||
| And it's easier to say they're bad at their jobs than to think there's a conspiracy, that they're being ordered to do so. | ||
| I think most people are well-meaning idiots, basically. | ||
| Even the social justice warriors that I rail against all the time, I think their leaders are genuinely either wrong in their ideas or have bad intentions. | ||
| But the most of the people that are following, I think that their intentions are good. | ||
| I'm trying to wake some of them up to this stuff. | ||
| But I don't think they're evil people because they want what they think is equality, even though I may not agree that that's what actual equality is. | ||
| You know, I've only ever met one person I would consider to be an evil social justice activist, because even the ones that are wrong and are knowingly producing bad information aren't trying to hurt people, they're not even thinking about it. | ||
| So it's kind of this banality of evil, I suppose. | ||
| But I have met one moderately well-known social justice activist who flat-out said, I want to fan the flames to create destruction. | ||
| To me, it's like, if you're willfully trying to hurt people, that's evil. | ||
| If there's like this, you know, there's the banality of evil, there's the, I just don't care, and if it creates suffering. | ||
| But, you know, yeah, for the most part, well-intentioned, just not well-read. | ||
| All right, so here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| So we are doing this live right now. | ||
| Tim and I are gonna go for about 10 more minutes. | ||
| We posted this on Patreon, so if you have questions for Tim and you're on Patreon, you can comment right there. | ||
| And we're gonna do the Super Chat thing here on YouTube, so you can start that right now, and we'll put them in a queue in about 10 minutes from now. | ||
| We'll do a live Q&A. | ||
| Let's circle back to Sweden for a second. | ||
| So you were in Sweden. | ||
| Sweden's become this sort of hot-button thing that I think very few people really understand what's going on. | ||
| About a year ago, I had a Swedish economist, Tino Sanandajian. | ||
| Do you know who he is? | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| He's one of the few people willing to talk about this. | ||
| And I kept getting all these emails from people in Sweden saying, you've got to talk to this guy. | ||
| I hunted him down. | ||
| It took a long time. | ||
| And he really laid out a very scary case of what's happening in Sweden. | ||
| Now, if you listen to the mainstream media, when Trump talked about Sweden, it's all a lie. | ||
| It's all a lie. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You, Tim, went there. | ||
| What's going on in Sweden? | ||
| The first thing I'm gonna do, I gotta call it Don Lemon. | ||
| He had Ami Horowitz on his show and flat out said that the Swedish statistics, known as BRA, showed crime was declining. | ||
| And that is just not true. | ||
| What the Washington Post did, everybody was so quick to say Trump was wrong, he made something up. | ||
| The Washington Post took stats for lethal crime from 1980 till today. | ||
| If you pick an arbitrary time frame, sure, you can show that murders go down. | ||
| But when it gets to 2012, you see murders spike. | ||
| The important thing to consider as to why many people are saying that murders are down, murders are down around the world because of cell phones. | ||
| Because if someone shoots you, someone can call 911 immediately and you'll get treated. | ||
| So now we're seeing attempted murders are actually, you know, are also down, but murders have become attempted murder. | ||
| Sweden is seeing more crime. | ||
| They're seeing more instances of sexual assault, of rape, of hate crimes, too. | ||
| The important thing to consider, though, is that much of this isn't coming from refugees. | ||
| It's coming from first-generation immigrants. | ||
| It's coming from the children or the children of children. | ||
| Sweden, in my opinion, based on what I learned and who I talked to, did a really poor job of integrating migrants and refugees 20 years ago. | ||
| And so they created these ghettos where these kids would grow up with no national identity. | ||
| They wouldn't identify with Sweden as their country. | ||
| And people actually call them immigrants even though they were born in Sweden. | ||
| When they go back to visit their grandparents, they're called Swedish. | ||
| When they go to Sweden, they're called immigrants. | ||
| So this creates these external cultural pockets. | ||
| They exist sort of outside of mainstream Swedish culture, and they're growing. | ||
| So what's going to happen? | ||
| They're not going to respect the authority of the mainstream, you know, the official Swedish government. | ||
| They're not going to respect the police. | ||
| The police, they're totally different. | ||
| They're going to make money by their own means, sell drugs, join gangs, and they're going to have no respect for Swedish people. | ||
| And now we're seeing crime, violence. | ||
| There is, however, with the refugees that have come in, some new phenomenon. | ||
| Phenomenon, whatever the plural is. | ||
| There's a thing with the young Afghan and Moroccan youths where they will surround women and, you know, sexually assault them. | ||
| And that was confirmed to me by a former police officer who showed me the report from the police. | ||
| So here's what I'll say about the whole thing. | ||
| Trump said, his quote was, You look at Sweden, you look last night Sweden, they | ||
| brought in all of these people and they're seeing problems they never thought possible. | ||
| It's a little vague, but it's true. | ||
| And it was strange to me to see so many people immediately jump on it and say he's stupid, he's wrong. | ||
| You know, Trump supporters get the gist of what he's trying to say. | ||
| And it seems like the mainstream media and many on the left have become lawyers all of a sudden because they're going | ||
| to nitpick every single word. | ||
| But the reality was Sweden has brought in all these people and they're absolutely seeing problems they never thought possible. | ||
| I think if Sweden thought it was possible someone would drive a truck through a public space and kill several people, they wouldn't have let that person in, right? | ||
| So they didn't think it was possible, and it happened. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a great way of explaining that, and I'm gonna use it, I'll credit you for now on, but the basic idea that he says something that has a nugget of truth to it, or a general amount of truth, and then the left becomes the lawyers against it, and then it makes them look ridiculous, because they nitpick it into hell, and then you see a truck drive into a group of people, and you go, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're telling me, That this isn't basically what he said? | ||
| I mean, there's something really there. | ||
| So what does this also tell you about the welfare state in general? | ||
| Because I know a lot of people on the left will say, while this is happening now, but especially before, they'll say, look at those countries like Sweden, they're doing it right by having a big welfare state. | ||
| But this is actually the reverse argument, right? | ||
| You let people in, you give them a lot of things, they ghettoize themselves. | ||
| And now look what's happened. | ||
| Oh, I mean, in terms of the ghettoization, I don't blame the migrants, I blame the government. | ||
| Right, well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
|
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Like, if you give in, then you're certain. | |
| Oh, the country itself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and, you know, I was asked by a lot of people in Sweden why was America so obsessed | ||
| with what's going on there. | ||
| And it's because they have a very high standard of living. | ||
| And the left in the United States uses that as an example of socialist policies. | ||
| But Sweden's also a very, very small country. | ||
| Ten million or so people live there. | ||
| The entire country is the population of New York's metro. | ||
| Policies for those countries aren't going to work for us and vice versa. | ||
| And to say the same thing, what they're doing with refugees, it's a totally different country, different policies. | ||
| It's possible if we brought in the same amount of refugees, we would not see what they're seeing. | ||
| It's also possible it'd be worse here because we have More freedom. | ||
| I would absolutely say that. | ||
| But particularly referencing that there's only technically free speech in Sweden. | ||
| They have hate speech laws. | ||
| You actually go to jail for being racist or things like that. | ||
| I just don't think you can compare. | ||
| A tiny country to a massive nation of 300 people, or 300 million people, sorry. | ||
| Right, right, and also they, except for these last 20 years, basically we're a very homogenous society while we're a hugely multicultural society and all that stuff. | ||
| I think I saw in one of your videos on that that you were having trouble actually getting people to talk to you, right? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Like you couldn't get, you know, born and bred Swedes to just chat with you about just the general feeling about this. | ||
| They have what many people refer to as the opinion corridor. | ||
| And it's very narrow, that if you deviate in any way, your life is over. | ||
| So, I spoke with a psychologist, I spoke with a journalist, and they basically said, factual questions will turn to moral questions. | ||
| So, if you ask, how much will it cost to bring in another group of refugees? | ||
| Instead of answering, you will say, what's your motive? | ||
| Why are you saying this? | ||
| Are you a racist? | ||
| There's also a scary phenomenon that happens there. | ||
| Expressen, which is one of their largest newspapers, hacked a comment system called Discus to track down individuals who held opinions outside of the corridor and broadcast their identities, their faces. | ||
| And so there are people who are now scared to even anonymously post online how they feel about what's happening. | ||
| But crime? | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| You know, one thing a lot of people do, and I even said this, too, is, you know, crime in Malmo, for example, it's a small town. | ||
| It's very close to Denmark. | ||
| Well, it's a city. | ||
| It's 300,000 people. | ||
| They're seeing more violent crime, many more murders. | ||
| But they only had 11 or 13 murders last year. | ||
| And so they say that's nothing compared to Chicago. | ||
| And then, look, the Chicagoland area has over 10 million people, 2.5 million in the city. | ||
| Per capita, Chicago sees significantly more murders. | ||
| But just because some places are bad doesn't mean Malmo isn't getting worse. | ||
| And it doesn't mean them bringing refugees isn't a problem. | ||
| What one person in Sweden says to me, if you want to compare Sweden to Chicago, if you want to compare it to somewhere that's worse, just compare it to Somalia, where many of these people are coming from. | ||
| Why stop at Chicago? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, so of course the rest of the world can be worse, but they are seeing more problems. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's still a very nice place. | ||
| I'll say that. | ||
| Sweden's beautiful. | ||
| I don't wanna overheat. | ||
| Yeah, when you were there, and when you've done some of the research on this stuff, | ||
| how much of this do you think is related to the religious component? | ||
| Because we've talked about the economic part and the ghettoization and not integrating well. | ||
| Is there a religious piece of this? | ||
| Because Tino gave me a little bit of both, and that's what most people say, it's a little bit of both. | ||
| I think it's a little bit. | ||
| I think, you know, one of the issues is, look, The United States has been engaged in a ground war in some Muslim nations for 30 years. | ||
| And so we're seeing a lot of refugees from Afghanistan, and they're Muslim. | ||
| But, you know, I'll ask you, if you take anyone, and you destroy their home, and you then bring them to a culture that's totally alien to them, they don't understand, you don't give them opportunity to learn the language, you don't give them work, and you put them in a festering hole. | ||
| They know that your country... Sweden produces weapons and they sell them. | ||
| So you have these refugees coming in being told you can live here, they can't find work, they can't go to school, they're being put in camps, they're being put in ghettos, and they're sitting in this country where they're like, you're the ones who blew up my country in the first place. | ||
| And then, you know... | ||
| You see acts of terrorism. | ||
| Sometimes, absolutely, it's religious. | ||
| But it's also important to realize that sometimes it's a depressed individual who's getting revenge, it's vengeance, and they just happen to be Islamic or a Muslim. | ||
| Now if Sweden makes some weapons, they're not the ones that are... | ||
| Going across the Middle East and having all these big wars, that's the irony. | ||
| They're allowing these people in at the same time. | ||
| So it's really complex. | ||
| What some of the activists down there told me is that, and this is more of a conspiracy, but just to give the perspective of the hard left in Sweden, and they're really left because Sweden's already left, is that Sweden builds weapons. | ||
| They then sell them to NATO, to other countries, to dictators. | ||
| And then the United States, NATO, we bomb these countries and destroy their communities. | ||
| And then Sweden welcomes in the refugees as sort of a surplus of that war, like a reward. | ||
| You bring these people in and they will bolster your economy by creating a cheap workforce. | ||
| That's what they believe. | ||
| Even though what you're saying is there's really not a lot of evidence for that. | ||
| Of course not, it's just conspiracy. | ||
| But that's their perspective, is that Sweden is doing it all on purpose and then bringing the refugees. | ||
| Because what we do know, and Sweden has said, that the reason they're bringing in refugees is because they have a declining population, and so they have to maintain the economy with new people in the workforce. | ||
| So then people will make the conspiracy theory that, oh, Sweden's sending these weapons on purpose because they need the people, and things like that. | ||
| Yeah, all right, here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| We're gonna take like a one minute break. | ||
| We're gonna do the super chat thing. | ||
| So if you're on the YouTube chat right now, if you throw in a couple bucks, your chat gets bumped up. | ||
| Sorry to the, I know the live chat can be a little nuts and the trolls go a little crazy, but for a dollar or two or a couple bucks, you can jump in on that and we're gonna answer some questions on Patreon. | ||
|
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So hang on and more with Tim in a sec. | |
| Alright guys we're back with Tim Poolce. | ||
| So we are live. | ||
| This, I think, is our only second or maybe second, maybe third live interview of all time. | ||
| We're gonna be doing more of these. | ||
| And it's time to get you guys involved. | ||
| So people have been asking questions on Patreon, and you can jump in on Super Chat right here. | ||
| We already got a gajillion questions, roughly. | ||
| So let's just jump right into it. | ||
| Does the EU need to die to save freedom of speech from PC and immigration overload? | ||
| That's a good one, considering where we ended the interview. | ||
| I know you're not a- That's complicated. | ||
| Yeah, you're not an EU expert. | ||
| But just that chill factor around free speech, which we ended on, how intense is this? | ||
| Well, let's talk specifically about Sweden. | ||
| They claim to be proponents of free speech. | ||
| No way. | ||
| They have a hate speech law, where just last month, someone posted a comment saying, the homosexuals, the Christians and the Jews won't be safe until we deport all Muslims. | ||
| That was his comment. | ||
| He was prosecuted. | ||
| We're posting that online. | ||
| That's not free speech. | ||
| You know, he certainly didn't say kill these people. | ||
| He said, like, we're being threatened by them, deport them. | ||
| And that could be a scared, reactionary old man. | ||
| I certainly think it's, you know, particularly extreme opinion, but to be prosecuted for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And do these guys consistently never see that the more they silence people, the stronger they make their enemies, the stronger they make the far right? | ||
| You know, so many of these European countries are terrified of World War II rhetoric, Nazi Germany, and things like that. | ||
| They don't really have free speech, right? | ||
| Holocaust denial is a crime. | ||
| And criticizing race in Sweden, criticizing a marginalized group, is a crime. | ||
| But they all do claim to have free speech. | ||
| I told them, as an American, there was a very well-respected journalist from one of their bigger publications, I said, as an American, we have almost absolute free speech, with some exceptions, like inciting violence or yelling fire in a movie theater, etc. | ||
| I'm terrified in a country that says, we will lock you up for an opinion, and they couldn't understand it. | ||
| They were like, but why would you even want to have that opinion? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| And I'm like, I don't have that opinion, but maybe one day you say something and you don't necessarily mean, it's not violent, it won't hurt anybody, but people are offended by it, they'll lock you up. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny, because I have a lot of viewers in Canada, and they had this Islamophobia motion passed, and people kept saying to me, Blowing it out of proportion, all your guests are blowing it out of proportion. | ||
| It's not a law, it's just a motion. | ||
| And it's like, do you guys not realize how the slippery slope thing works? | ||
| Come on, people! | ||
| What bums me out is that people don't understand, if you empower a government, especially a democratically elected government, to take away the rights of people, Eventually, someone will come into power and take yours. | ||
| Yeah, that's always, to me, the best argument. | ||
| If you don't like Trump, the argument shouldn't be, let's destroy the system. | ||
| The argument should be, stop giving the executive branch so much power. | ||
| How about we be governed the way that the laws and the Constitution says we should be governed? | ||
| Okay, here's a good one. | ||
| I'm sure you'll have some feelings on this. | ||
| At this point, should Antifa be declared a domestic terror group? | ||
| That's, it's complicated. | ||
| If you look at the definition of terror, using violence, intimidation or threats to push political ideology. | ||
| They told me that's what they believed in. | ||
| So, you know, I'm not a lawyer, right? | ||
| I can't make that distinction. | ||
| But what I can say is, are the statements of a few people I interviewed fitting the definition of terrorism? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Were they throwing explosives? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it's grains of sand in a heap, that old saying. | ||
| At what point does that few grains become a mound? | ||
| And then we say, this is terrorism. | ||
| Right, so it's almost as if something really, like we're watching sort of low-grade warfare where nobody wants to empower them by saying you're a terrorist group, and it's almost like until something really horrible happens... It's tough because I don't necessarily like the idea of the government determining one group is a terrorist group and then shutting them down, but at the same time they're literally throwing Low-level explodes. | ||
| An M-80 is not a firecracker. | ||
| That could take your hand off. | ||
| When an M-80 exploded about 10 feet in front of me, you feel that shockwave in your ears pound. | ||
| It's intense. | ||
| And they threw mortars that burst and send flares in every direction. | ||
| So at what point do you have to say it? | ||
| They're throwing explosives to push a political ideology. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I just bought gold. | ||
| What does that say? | ||
| kind of gets right to our wheelhouse. | ||
| Are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future of media and politics? | ||
| Will the truth win or will we tear ourselves apart? | ||
| I just bought gold. | ||
| What does that say? | ||
| Did you buy gold for the first time? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| What about this Bitcoin? | ||
| I'm on the Bitcoin now. | ||
| I don't trust Bitcoin. | ||
| It relies heavily on our current standard of technology, and it's possible people could advance it as our technology advances, but to put it simply, it's based on encryption, and we have some super quantum computing in development, some already exist, and that could... I don't trust Bitcoin. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| I do hold some. | ||
| So the question was, are you optimistic or pessimistic? | ||
| You said, I just bought gold. | ||
| Absolutely pessimistic. | ||
| The violence is escalating. | ||
| The rhetoric is escalating. | ||
| I have friends that I considered, you know, to be moderate, liberal, left-leaning, who are posting things online saying it's okay to punch Nazis. | ||
| And it's terrifying when anyone who is on the right is a Nazi. | ||
| You're basically saying, punch people who disagree with me. | ||
| And there was even a well-known YouTuber who posted a poem about stabbing Nazis. | ||
| And I'm like, we're getting crazy. | ||
| People on the rally had knives, people on Antifa had knives. | ||
| There was that event not too long ago where people actually got stabbed. | ||
| And it's mainstream think, by the way, because I was watching comedians who are supposed to make fun of the craziness, saying it was okay to punch Nazis. | ||
| You're supposed to beat them by making fun of them, not by violence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So yeah, I have hope, but like, this is tough. | |
| All right, let's jump into a couple of Super Chats. | ||
| What do you think has to happen within the U.S. | ||
| liberal community for its stance to shift back to classical liberalism, or at least to moderate its stance? | ||
| I'm gonna let you handle that one. | ||
| I don't know if it's possible. | ||
| So there's a phenomenon where one side is adamant about protecting those they deem weaker, right? | ||
| And so they're willing to take any community that is marginalized and bring it into their fold. | ||
| But not all cultures mix. | ||
| Some cultures are absolutely homophobic or anti-gay to the point where in some countries they throw them off buildings. | ||
| You bring people of that ideology into a group that wants to protect the LGBT community And what's going to happen is destabilization. | ||
| So where we've seen recently the trans community criticizing the lesbian community for not wanting to have relationships with trans women because of their male organs, it's this chaotic clashing where But, you know, it also extends into the fear of racism and social pressures. | ||
| I think one of the big problems with the American left is that they're terrified to call out those who are too extreme out of fear of becoming the Nazi. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whereas people on the right are mostly having conversations, and even when they... I'm going to break. | ||
| This is what I tell people. | ||
| When you go to a Trump event, they'll disagree, and at the end of it, go, USA! | ||
| USA! | ||
| When you go to a liberal event, if you're not black-clad, they're going to call you a snitch and informant. | ||
| If you break ranks, you're the enemy, even in a slight degree. | ||
| So nobody who's now in the identity politics left wants to challenge the narrative. | ||
| There was a famous feminist who tweeted something about Even though, of course, if you look at the wage gap myth, watch some videos by Christina Hoff Summer, it actually is a myth. | ||
| I can't believe I would say something so stupid, I'm so sorry. | ||
| And that makes the narrative of the left go more and more extreme because they won't stand up | ||
| to each other. | ||
| Even though of course, if you look at the wage gap myth, | ||
| watch some videos by Christina Hoff Summer, is it actually is a myth. | ||
| But even if she just says that as a feminist herself, they now paint her as a right wing extremist. | ||
| I did an event with Christina Hoff Summers and Peter Boghossian. | ||
| I mean, these are moderates, the three of us, moderates. | ||
| And Antifa put up some crazy post about us, how we're anti-gay. | ||
| I'm married to a guy, but that's not good enough for them. | ||
| All this stuff, and she hates women, and he hates whatever, and he was a white supremacist, I think. | ||
| You're a white supremacist. | ||
| It's hilarious in its lunacy, but it goes back to what we talked about before, about how much focus should we give them, because are we just empowering them? | ||
| There are successful media outlets that employ these people who then hire more people to push these narratives | ||
| in one instance. | ||
| And you know what, I'm gonna say it, I never like calling people out, | ||
| but the editor-in-chief of Fusion, their Twitter banner was down with whiteness, right? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, I believe it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it was some black fists and it said down with whiteness. | ||
| And you know what's crazy to me is I've always been, I considered myself a social justice activist | ||
| for so long. | ||
| Growing up I was a punk rock anarchist, you know, and when people started immediately just disparaging people who are white, or perceivably white, or passing as they call it, I said, oh come on guys, like, You know, I understand racism is a huge problem. | ||
| But we don't want to start using the same tactics that we're fighting, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| I was told to occupy Wall Street. | ||
| It's our turn now. | ||
| That's what someone said to me. | ||
| It's our turn. | ||
| And then, you know, in St. | ||
| Louis, they put up rooms for colored only. | ||
| And I'm like, that's not social justice. | ||
| That's a division. | ||
| Segregation, I'm not cool with that. | ||
| And I think you were telling me in our first interview, when you were in Milwaukee, people were saying, well, you're white, you're white, so get out of here or something. | ||
| And you were like, well, actually, I'm part Korean and whatever. | ||
| But it doesn't matter. | ||
| But it doesn't even matter. | ||
| I actually had a Korean woman tell me, well, you're not Korean enough. | ||
| And I'm like, when I was younger, someone threw a brick through, my family had a van, someone threw a brick through the window, and they vandalized my family's house, my house, and they put white supremacy pamphlets, because my mom is very obviously not white, my dad is, and we are a mixed race family in a white neighborhood. | ||
| And my mom told me that, don't worry, once we pass the white test, we'll be, you know, they'll leave us alone. | ||
| Once they realize that we're, you know, my dad's a firefighter and we're just normal people. | ||
| And so I grew up with things like that. | ||
| And then once I'm older, as soon as my opinion becomes more moderate, like, I am not going to throw all of one group into a stereotype. | ||
| I'm opposed to the preconceptions of someone based on their race. | ||
| They tell me I'm the enemy because I have to make those assumptions about white people. | ||
| Now, when that happens, I lose the credit as a mixed race person, and I'm immediately a white male from a trust fund family or something. | ||
| Like, all of a sudden I'm a rich white person. | ||
| I hear you, brother. | ||
| I know what you're talking about. | ||
| Okay, why aren't refugees going to other Muslim countries? | ||
| So I think this is one that's kind of interesting because the Gulf states have a ton of money. | ||
| We know Saudi Arabia has, don't they have something like a million tents that are air conditioned that they use for the hajj? | ||
| They're like empty or something. | ||
| Every year and they're empty. | ||
| So what do you think's going on there? | ||
| Well, A lot of these countries won't take many of them, but also, when you have Sweden offering housing and stipends, when you get benefits to go to these countries, and these countries are temperate climate, they're nice, and you're taken care of, what are you going to pick? | ||
| I interviewed a couple of refugee brothers, English-speaking atheists from Syria, and What they had said was they have friends who they don't understand why they chose to go to Europe instead of Lebanon or some other countries where they speak Arabic. | ||
| I think, you know, the one thing most people default to is as long as these European nations accept and offer benefits and housing, they're going to attract people over other countries. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's an oddly interesting argument to just close the borders for these European countries, see what happens at least. | ||
| But one thing that's important to say is that Jordan and Turkey are housing many refugees and Turkey is housing the most. | ||
| So it's not like it's only Europe doing this. | ||
| Speaking of Turkey, somebody asked what your thoughts are on the Turkish referendum. | ||
| Were you able to pay any attention to that? | ||
| A little bit, yeah. | ||
| I mean, Erdogan won. | ||
| I mean, bad news for a Democrat. | ||
| There's photos of people voting multiple times and laughing. | ||
| There's stories of teachers who went to vote who were immediately detained as members of the coup. | ||
| That country is... | ||
| I fear the worst for Turkey. | ||
| And it bums me out, because I really enjoy Turkey. | ||
| I've been there several times, reported from Istanbul several times. | ||
| There's a lot of good people there. | ||
| And the story of Ataturk, the founder of the republic that is Turkey, it's inspirational. | ||
| It's very similar to the founding fathers of America. | ||
| And now it's all gone. | ||
| They need their Ataturk now, and they got more Erdogan. | ||
| Not good, all right. | ||
| Do you think that the growing left-right partisanship is comparable to similar circumstances that led the past to war, like the Spanish Civil War followed the Weimar Republic? | ||
| Like, a lot of people ask me that. | ||
| Like, is this heading to civil war? | ||
| I don't really see it. | ||
| And again, it's why at least five times in the last hour, I've said this thing about, when we talk about this, are we inflating it? | ||
| Because I definitely am somewhat wary of that. | ||
| It's important to recognize that whatever happens with war in the future is going to be so dramatically different from our historical perception of war. | ||
| We could be in civil war right now and not even know it. | ||
| In thirty years, they might talk about the battle for Berkeley, which was the fight heard around the world that started the American Civil War. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| When we look at history, we're reading the abridged version, where this led to this and this and this, but there's months or years in between a lot of these moments. | ||
| So, are we headed to civil war? | ||
| One of the challenges, we don't have clear territorial division, but we're seeing a lot of factional fighting. | ||
| And as long as the media keeps acting like Antifa is the rational left, is like the balance between left and the right, they're going to prop up this idea. | ||
| They're pushing people who want to stay within party lines to adhere to an extremist ideology. | ||
| I posted on my Facebook that the free speech rally was not white supremacists, but there | ||
| certainly were white supremacists there. | ||
| And then I also posted that Antifa was throwing explosives. | ||
| And someone started arguing with me saying that I was painting all Antifa as people throwing | ||
| explosives to which I responded, they're a group in uniform. | ||
| They all show up wearing the same clothes. | ||
| They did this to protect each other, so that if someone does throw an explosive, they can't identify who that was. | ||
| The people at the free speech rally were wearing all different clothes. | ||
| Some were Trump supporters, some weren't. | ||
| Some were Christians. | ||
| It was a mixed group of people who were at this free speech rally. | ||
| Predominantly right-wing. | ||
| But yeah, I'm not going to paint people who are all wearing different clothes arguing with each other as white supremacists, but a single uniform body of people all wearing the same clothing and explosives being thrown from it. | ||
| Some of them had knives. | ||
| They hold the same similar ideology. | ||
| They're extremists. | ||
| And if we don't call them out, if we normalize that behavior, then people are going to think that's what is okay. | ||
| Right, it's like, sorry, your leash to allow them to be individuals as they're all dressed exactly the same, throwing the shit is probably a little shorter. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, I think something that you said there, where you mentioned before earlier about growing up and that now you, because you've shifted a little bit, say, center, would be thought of as this right-wing extremist, maybe partly that's what's happening with all these people in the media. | ||
| So even though they have a closer inkling to what the truth actually is, because I suspect some of the few people that I respect on that are left at CNN, like a guy like Jake Tapper who hasn't seen reporting on any of this stuff. | ||
| I suspect he probably knows that it's not a 50-50 thing, but that probably he doesn't want those tactics to be used against him, because it's not fun to be called racist and bigot and all the other things that they're going to throw at you. | ||
| Look at the issue of Charlie Hebdo and drawing Muhammad. | ||
| How many South Park, for instance, had a depiction of Muhammad in their show, and then after that happened, Comedy Central refused to air these things. | ||
| And they actually censored the speech at one of the end of the episodes, where they say, violence works. | ||
| That if you want to get your way, just become violent and threaten people, and society will capitulate to your whims. | ||
| Comedy Central even censored that speech. | ||
| That's how scared people are of these tactics. | ||
| And Tifa goes around throwing explosives, How many people do you think will not attend one of these events? | ||
| Because they were literally throwing low-level explosives into crowds. | ||
| In one instance, I saw an old woman collapse, falling back. | ||
| Because when the M-80 fell, and everyone started screaming, yelling, M-80! | ||
| She tried to move away as quickly as she could, fell back and started crawling on her feet. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Exploded right in front of her. | ||
| Nobody was injured by the explosives as far as I know. | ||
| There's escalation, and what is someone gonna do next? | ||
| Molotov cocktails? | ||
| Because they've been using the past. | ||
| Right, and that's that slippery slope. | ||
| Once you say it's okay to punch a Nazi, well, can you blow up the Nazis' house? | ||
| What if their kids are in their car? | ||
| Can you blow up the car? | ||
| And everyone's a Nazi. | ||
| Yeah, and what if you sit across from a Nazi? | ||
| And at the same time, you keep expanding that definition of Nazi. | ||
| But it's, you know, everyone has reason to blame for this a little bit, because there were people at the rally drawing knives. | ||
| There's a photo of this, you know, biker-looking guy holding his blade. | ||
| And so, don't be surprised then when Antifa shows up with knives. | ||
| They see a photo of a guy from the rally with a knife, they come with knives. | ||
| And vice versa. | ||
| You know, maybe now people are gonna say, they're bringing explosives. | ||
| What are we gonna do? | ||
| We gotta bring shields and sticks to protect ourselves. | ||
| Actually, Base Sick Man's a good example of that. | ||
| He came with gear because the Antifas had been violent, had been smashing property, attacking people. | ||
| So he said, I have to protect myself. | ||
| And then what does Antifa do? | ||
| They've got sticks! | ||
| So then they bring sticks. | ||
| Now it's knives, explosives. | ||
| That's why I'm pessimistic. | ||
| Yeah, a few people have asked something to this idea, that do you think that as your profile grows and you go to some of these places and more people know that you're a guy that shows up in hotspots, that that then sort of adds you to the element of the reporting, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like they know if they blow some shit up in front of you, more people are gonna see it. | ||
| Or if, you know, just something like that, where they, oh, that's Tim Pool, we know he's got a YouTube channel, we know people pay attention, et cetera, et cetera, that you get dragged in sort of. | ||
| I don't know about that, I mean, There was a lesson learned by many of these people, which they probably forgot. | ||
| They didn't like me during Occupy. | ||
| The moderate left, the average Democrat, Republicans, they're all very like, hey Tim, you tried to be fair, we respect that. | ||
| But the hard right, actually I'm going to debate for a second, because the crazy fringe right racists I was talking to, we had an argument. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| And they said, why don't we grab a drink and keep talking? | ||
| But, and this is like a literal racist who was saying some crazy stuff to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the hard left- Did you go for the drink? | ||
| At the end of the day, yeah, I went and I continued to debate them because- Did you get anywhere? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I'm glad to hear- I didn't think you were gonna say yes, but I'm glad to hear that because that's how you'll hopefully change somebody even if it didn't work in this instance. | ||
| But the hard left threatens me and so during Occupy Wall Street, they physically attacked me in the street. | ||
| Because they want to stop my work, I suppose. | ||
| They hate me. | ||
| And all that did was get all of the reporters to spin their microphones to me and say, what just happened? | ||
| And then MSNBC asked me to come on and speak about being attacked. | ||
| When I go to these events, I do have a fear because these people have called me out by name. | ||
| But I also know that My audience has my back, and if they want to try and silence me, just let me do my thing. | ||
| If you wanna try and silence me, you're only gonna make me louder. | ||
| And that's not my intention, but I will absolutely stand up for myself if the need arises. | ||
| I always respect the Obi-Wan Kenobi rule of if you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. | ||
| All right, Super Chat, do you believe getting rid of political labels is important? | ||
| I feel that getting rid of them is necessary to have real discussions about the issues. | ||
| I like, for example, liberal left, right, and so on. | ||
| You know, I talk about this all the time because I think you have to use these labels. | ||
| Otherwise, we could literally sit here for eight hours trying to parse every little word of what everyone thinks. | ||
| So you need them on some hand. | ||
| At the same time, the traditional things of talking about left and right and conservative and liberal and Democrat and Republican are becoming increasingly meaningless because Trump, I think, has just tossed everything up in the air and everything's kind of nutty right now. | ||
| Well, I don't like political labels, and the example I give is, there was someone I met who was slightly center-right, and they were pro-life. | ||
| They said, you know, I grew up Catholic, I'm pro-life, but I'm reasonable, I think I'll have a conversation with you. | ||
| And then a friend of mine from the city was atheist and center of left. | ||
| They both literally had the exact same view on abortion. | ||
| They didn't like it to be used in issues of accidental pregnancies, and they don't think that, but that it should be available for medical emergencies and issues of health and well-being for the families. | ||
| And I was like, but you're calling that pro-choice, you're calling that pro-life, but it's the same argument. | ||
| And they're fairly center people. | ||
| And so, you know, that's just an example of someone will say, I'm liberal, but you don't even know what that means. | ||
| Because then they could say like, oh, but I do agree on this issue. | ||
| And so by taking that political label, conservatives and liberals will then accuse each other of being the other. | ||
| And they'll argue when they if they just sat down. | ||
| Actually, let me give you an example. | ||
| When I was talking to one of the Antifa guys, I said, tell me what it is you want. | ||
| And he says, we want to fight fascism. | ||
| We want to stop fascist takeover. | ||
| And I said, you do realize that many conservatives are so scared of fascism, they are holding onto guns as a second amendment right to protect themselves from a fascist takeover. | ||
| And he goes, Oh, well, I mean, I guess they don't like the fascism they don't like. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| I'm like, conservatives are also anti-fascist. | ||
| Like, they're clutching their guns, like, take it out of my cold, dead hands, you know? | ||
| That's funny, because the actual conservative, the real conservative, again, not to get lost in the terms, the real conservative would want us to be governed by the Constitution, which would be the most, it's the hugest antidote there is. | ||
| Actually to fascism. | ||
| It's a democratic republic system. | ||
| We want to prevent this stuff just as much, you know, most people believe that, even the people. | ||
| But what I said was, if you just took the mask off, went in there and talked to them, you'd probably find that although you disagree on most things, you agree on a lot of things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then we could actually move forward. | ||
| But you make assumptions about the people in there, they make assumptions about you and then you fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's interesting because there has been a theme here that generally There is a little more tolerance of dissenting opinions on the right, which is why I've talked about how I'm able to build bridges with a lot of these guys on the right, even though they know I'm for gay marriage and I'm pro-choice and a whole bunch of other things. | ||
| Same for me. | ||
| And yet I find their tolerance of me, the diversity of thought related to me, is much bigger than what I'm finding on the left at the moment. | ||
| I think you're kind of similar. | ||
| Mike Cernovich has tweeted out several times, like, Tim Pool's a liberal, But he's fair. | ||
| He'll be honest with you. | ||
| And I respect that. | ||
| And I'm like, you know, I always consider myself, I actually stopped saying that I was liberal because of the Antifa, because of the identity politics, because it's gone off the deep end in my opinion. | ||
| I have a lot of friends who I think are good social justice activists. | ||
| I respect their right to do what they do. | ||
| I have no problem sitting down. | ||
| I'm a journalist. | ||
| I've sat down with drug dealing refugees and What do you think happened to respect? | ||
| Because what you just said there is very much the way I feel. | ||
| I'm not gonna yell at you, I'm not gonna insult you. | ||
| I'm gonna say, tell me why you believe what you believe and let's have a conversation about it. | ||
| I wanna learn. | ||
| What do you think happened to respect? | ||
| Because what you just said there is very much the way I feel | ||
| I really will try to sit down with almost anybody and just, what do you think? | ||
| We gotta live in this, You're going to double down on their opinion. | ||
| of us in this country, we gotta live in this country together. | ||
| Like, we gotta do this. | ||
| You're not going to change someone's mind by hitting them. | ||
| You're going to double down on their opinion. | ||
| If the right thinks the left is insane, and you show up with explosives, | ||
| you're just gonna convince them that they're right. | ||
| But there's the story of a man who befriended over 200 KKK members, convinced them to quit accidentally, | ||
| simply because they realized he was a good guy, and that maybe this extreme racism wasn't true. | ||
| So I always tell people... | ||
| Have a conversation. | ||
| You might not change their mind, but what will killing each other do? | ||
| It's just going to escalate the violence. | ||
| It's going to make life miserable for everybody. | ||
| It's just the best example of the words, too. | ||
| It's like, if someone's against gay marriage right now, of course I'm not for that. | ||
| I would like to change our idea, but I'm not gonna change it by screaming | ||
| that they're a homophobe. | ||
| I might change it by having a drink with them or having them over for dinner | ||
| and seeing that everyone's actually the same at its core. | ||
| Okay, here's a good one from Super Chat. | ||
| Will you be at the Ann Coulter event in Berkeley on the 27th? | ||
| She's going. | ||
| I mean, we know this now. | ||
| I mean, it's like we're just teeing these things up at this point. | ||
| Where are you going to go? | ||
| You know, I don't just want to chase around factional political fighting. | ||
| I want to cover things that I think are real stories that are important. | ||
| The reason I went to Berkeley was because this is the third event that we knew was going to escalate, and it was the escalation. | ||
| The story there to me was that we're seeing this factional politics increasing. | ||
| Richard Spencer's going to be in Auburn. | ||
| Ann Coulter's going to be in Berkeley. | ||
| So it's kind of like, am I just going to chase after the riots? | ||
| I might go. | ||
| I'll put it that way. | ||
| I'm in L.A. | ||
| right now. | ||
| It's not hard for me to get there. | ||
| I wasn't planning on staying in L.A. | ||
| for too long. | ||
| Actually, I'll say this. | ||
| The main reason I'm here is because I didn't want to go back to New York with the tensions in Korea, where they're at. | ||
| Otherwise, I'd be significantly further away. | ||
| So I'm going to hang out here for a few days, see what happens there. | ||
| I might fly there instead. | ||
| But if nothing happens and I stick around, I'll give it a 50-50 shot. | ||
| I'll go up for the Ann Coulter thing. | ||
| What would you say to the people that would say, well, Ann Coulter's just trying to exacerbate the situation right now? | ||
| By even going there right now, she's just trying to exacerbate it. | ||
| I don't agree with that premise. | ||
| I think she has every right, if people want her to speak there, then she has every right to do it. | ||
| I think, you know, I tend to err on the simple solution. | ||
| She wants to Prove her point. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's not necessarily about exacerbating, but it's about saying, like, these are the things I believe in, here's why I believe them, and I can prove it. | ||
| Will that lead to an escalation? | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| I had gone... Some people had told me not to go to the Berkeley event because of the death threats, and because of, like, long-standing threats from these people. | ||
| And I said, I'll walk to their side and film from their side too, and if they attack me, What am I supposed to do as a journalist? | ||
| Am I supposed to say I'm not allowed to do this anymore? | ||
| Are there threats? | ||
| Never gonna happen. | ||
| Threaten me all you want, but I'm gonna keep doing what I do. | ||
| And so, when I see what Ann Coulter is doing, she has every right to go and speak there. | ||
| She shouldn't have to fear escalation or violence because she wants to speak. | ||
| Yeah, perfect segue for this one. | ||
| In the UK, we had football hooliganism, same type of people as Antifa, young people who want the thrill of group confrontation solved by good policing. | ||
| So we talked about this a bit at the beginning, that the policing is becoming a problem now because either it's that they're not getting enough resources or they're getting a directive to allow a lot of this to slide. | ||
| At the same time, if they crack down really hard, that just feeds the beast perhaps. | ||
| But do you think that one hardcore crackdown maybe could stop a lot of this? | ||
| Like if Berkeley, the next one at Berkeley, if they just did the hardcore, it just doesn't solve it. | ||
| If the police, it's a challenge. | ||
| If the police come in in full force with gear, then the left is gonna start posting up videos of robo-cops, police brutality, and they're gonna say, oh, you know, this was peaceful. | ||
| But I will say this. | ||
| With the lobbing of explosives, at this point, what scares me, if the police come in, at the Ann Coulter thing and just start arresting these Antifa | ||
| people. | ||
| And any counter-protesters who might be armed as well, just shutting the violence down. | ||
| If the left at that point tries to claim it was a peaceful protest, that terrifies me. | ||
| We have precedents, just the past couple days where, or just the other day, where | ||
| explosives were thrown into a crowd. If you will defend that, that is a ridiculous escalation of | ||
| the violence. | ||
| And that scares me. | ||
| Like I said, I think most people would condemn the throwing of explosives. | ||
| So if Antifa now tries to have another protest and the police say, hell no, you threw explosives last time, If they defend that, that scares me. | ||
| Right, so this is where it shows how dangerous the media is, right? | ||
| Because when they give you the 50-50 thing that we're seeing all across the media right now, well, it was the Trump people versus the anti-Trump people, and they were equally as violent and they keep playing the one thing of the guy punching that woman, which I don't know all the specifics about that, but the danger is they've created a monster so that if the state ever cracks down, It's as if they're only cracking down on one side. | ||
| When in reality it was a mostly conservative but mix of people at our free speech rally versus the revolution. | ||
| And the revolution was throwing explosives. | ||
| Like that's not moderate, that's not majority, that's not half, that's extremes. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I'm glad we're getting some of this stuff out. | ||
| Any chance of Le Pen or the like in Europe winning elections anytime soon? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, one thing about Yurt Wilders, everyone, you know, you see a lot of the liberal outlets saying, like, he was crushed, he was defeated. | ||
| It's like, he gained 30 percent. | ||
| No, he went up. | ||
| I think a lot of Americans don't understand the parliamentary system. | ||
| They're not voting for him, they're voting for his party, and if his party dominates, then that shows. | ||
| So, you know, he saw a big gain. | ||
| It's not winner-take-all like we have with one president. | ||
| The Sweden Democrats in Sweden are considered the right-wing party. | ||
| In the United States, they'd be considered more like liberals or Democrats. | ||
| In Sweden, they're considered far-right because they're questioning issues of immigration, but they're gaining. | ||
| And a lot of people believe that they're going to start taking over. | ||
| But Sweden's politics are interesting because they don't have like a one or two party, they have seven parties. | ||
| And so all it takes is for the other majority to just roadblock them and agree to shut them out no matter what they try to do. | ||
| But I think it's going to increase. | ||
| Le Pen's polling is going up. | ||
| Most people I speak to think that she'll win the first round, there'll be a runoff, but she won't actually win in the end. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's been a lot of terror happening just in Stockholm recently, and that's always pushing people towards questioning immigration and these issues. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Where do you think Trump fits into all of this? | ||
| Just the fact that we've got this guy that obviously has some authoritarian leanings. | ||
| I don't, the hysteria that I generally see all the time, like I'm not subscribed to a lot of it. | ||
| But that we have this just group now that is just in 100% crazy mode all the time. | ||
| Yeah, these same people weren't criticizing Obama's deportation of immigrants. | ||
| They called him deporter-in-chief. | ||
| They didn't criticize, some of them did, but most of them, you don't see the mainstream criticism like you do of Trump. | ||
| Or the eight-year war that we had in Afghanistan. | ||
| Every single day of his presidency, they all went crazy when we dropped this big bomb, but we've been dropping bombs nonstop. | ||
| But you know what I do say? | ||
| I'm not going to condemn, I don't want to insult these people who are now protesting Trump. | ||
| What I want to say is, Thank you for finally waking up to the extreme powers being granted to the executive branch. | ||
| Thank you for trying to be a watchdog and now engage in the politics. | ||
| Just don't forget Obama did very similar things, and keep doing what you think is right. | ||
| So it's kind of a welcome to the fight. | ||
| I'm not going to insult someone who's now questioning the executive authority. | ||
| By all means, continue to do so, and thank God we're doing it now, because the executive branch has been gaining way too much power. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like, you've got Congress right now, so how about, if you're so right about all of these things, Republicans, how about write some laws and get them passed the way they're supposed to get passed, but I guess we're past the Rubicon on that. | ||
| Who are some people you trust in the media these days? | ||
| I get that one all the time. | ||
| I don't trust anyone. | ||
| Hence, you're buying all this gold. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, what I tell people is, for me, trust isn't black and white. | ||
| Everything I do is based on probability. | ||
| For the most part, I will trust this, right? | ||
| So, in my mind, I sort of have like a 60% trustworthiness, 30% trustworthiness. | ||
| This person may tell you the truth sometimes and mostly doesn't. | ||
| This person mostly tells you the truth but might lie. | ||
| So, for the most part, Everyone thinks they're right. | ||
| Everyone thinks they have the answers. | ||
| I don't know who to trust, and that's why I'm willing to sit down with people who are extremists on both sides, who are moderates, who float around, because I don't think I'll ever know. | ||
| I can only try and listen as much as possible. | ||
| For instance, I trust you. | ||
| I think you're generally an honest guy, and I understand most things you say and agree with a lot of it. | ||
| A lot of people don't like Lacey Green. | ||
| I trust Lacey Green. | ||
| We don't agree on a lot of politics. | ||
| I agree on some things, I don't. | ||
| I also trust Cassandra Fairbanks, but we don't agree on the same things. | ||
| So I know, as knowing them, that their perspective will be one side or the other, and that they may not always be correct, but they're well-intentioned. | ||
| So it's important What I tell people is to read every news source. | ||
| Read the feminist site, read the conservative site, because the worst case scenario is you'll at least understand why these people think the way they do, and you'll be better equipped for an argument in the future. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| You mentioned Hanlon's Razor earlier. | ||
| If these rioters are doing this out of ignorance, what's the most effective way of stopping ignorance? | ||
| Better education, better media, better law enforcement. | ||
| It's kind of been a through line through everything we're talking about here. | ||
| Is it education at the end? | ||
| It's integration. | ||
| It's integration. | ||
| It's, for the love of God, when Antifa shows up, actually, in my opinion, invite any, what I would like to see is a free speech rally that invites them to participate. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Because if you show up... But aren't they invited by default? | ||
| I mean, at a free speech rally, right? | ||
| If they were to not wear masks and be violent... Not as speakers. | ||
| So the speakers were all fairly conservative. | ||
| And so when you set up an event, that's actually a divided space. | ||
| You've literally drawn the line. | ||
| So what I think needs to happen is go hang out with some people who align with Antifa and Anticap. | ||
| You're not going to become best friends overnight. | ||
| But it's important for people on both sides to realize that these are all people and though in my opinion the Antifa group is It is Hanlon's razor in my opinion. | ||
| I think they are ignorant. | ||
| They think they know what they're doing They think they have to do these things it's but the reality is you take any one of these people Bring them to an academic space sit down with them have a conversation and start integrating showing them like look that person you thought was a Nazi that Trump supporter you actually agree in a lot of issues of race and Gender and things like that. | ||
| They're not You're not enemies, you know, you're actually more alike than other countries and Americans. | ||
| It's we just need to stop Creating the other in our mind assuming everything about everyone Clarifying, the difference being that Antifa is in uniform and defending each other, but you remedy that not by attacking them, stabbing, punching, but by welcoming them to come and join the conversation. | ||
| I will say this too, most of them won't do it. | ||
| Right, I'm not blind and stuff. | ||
| Right, that's the thing, you can throw it out there whether they take it or not. | ||
| But that's the solution, it is, and it might not be possible, but fighting isn't the solution. | ||
| Conversation and integration is. | ||
| All right, we've got so many more, but we're just gonna do one more. | ||
| Because you reached out to me last night, and I wasn't planning on doing this today, and I got a few things to do, although we could, we'll do this again, and we've obviously done five hours now. | ||
| Just final thoughts on just the general state of free speech right now. | ||
| Like, do you think it's in as a precarious place as certainly that I do, and I think many other people do? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's one thing, you know, the Founding Fathers never thought of. | ||
| They said the government shouldn't be allowed to do these things, but they didn't realize that people do it to themselves. | ||
| People are scared to say things out of fear of losing their jobs. | ||
| Sweden has it really bad. | ||
| But there are a lot of people in the U.S. | ||
| during the election who were scared to be pro-Trump. | ||
| In fact, there was a meme that was being shared that one of the top searches in California was, how do I hide that I'm conservative? | ||
| People are scared to come out and say that they hold certain political beliefs. | ||
| And what's scary to me is that For instance, Trump got the RNC to clap and cheer for the LGBT community. | ||
| That blew my mind. | ||
| Standing ovation when he mentioned it in his acceptance speech. | ||
| Trump has made several statements over the past where he's been very moderate on gay rights, but now they're saying anyone who agrees with Trump is racist, sexist, anti-gay. | ||
| People are scared to talk about it. | ||
| One thing that was fascinating to me is I met this very liberal guy up at the Shia LaBeouf thing in New York who said, Trump is our least racist president. | ||
| And this is like a super lefty, crazy haired, and I was like, whoa, whoa, the least racist. | ||
| And he goes, come on, man, we have presidents that own slaves. | ||
| Of course Trump is the least racist. | ||
| It's like, I still think he's a little racist because everybody's kind of a little racist and that, and we want to keep fighting racism. | ||
| And I was like, wow, that's, that comes off as kind of honest, but, People, they can't talk about that publicly. | ||
| Like, yeah, in a private conversation, he can say these things. | ||
| But is that same person gonna go on TV and say Trump is the least racist president? | ||
| He'll get eaten by wolves, you know what I mean? | ||
| So free speech is in a dangerous position because of social pressure, self-censorship. | ||
| I mean, look at the brands pulling off of YouTube. | ||
| Advertising dollars are drying up. | ||
| You had a conversation about Islam, and you lost ad revenue over it. | ||
| That's the real threat to free speech. | ||
| With someone born Muslim. | ||
| I wasn't bringing on a white supremacist to talk about Islam. | ||
| The issue isn't that the government will ever stop it, but that if there is no money available in the work you do, then the economy is censoring it. | ||
| And that's a huge problem. | ||
| If you can't eat doing what you do, you can't do it. | ||
| We'll rely on some people who are willing to be broke to say their ideas. | ||
| But for most people, they're going to say, I'm just going to toe the line. | ||
| I don't want to lose my job. | ||
| I don't want to lose my credibility. | ||
| Sweden has it really bad, and I fear that the U.S. | ||
| is heading in that direction. | ||
| But hopefully, you know, Trump did get elected, and one of the big reasons was political correctness. | ||
| So, you know, I'll just say it. | ||
| I'm not a Trump supporter, right? | ||
| I'm not a supporter of anybody. | ||
| I don't oppose anyone other than violent people. | ||
| But hopefully, Our society starts pushing back and starts defending the right to free speech, and I think we are seeing that. | ||
| So, in that area, I am a little bit hopeful, but the violence makes me pessimistic. | ||
| So you're stocking up on gold, yet a little hopeful on free speech. | ||
| A little bit of gold. | ||
| There's a little, oh, I'm glad we could bring this to a decent ending. | ||
| All right, well, clearly we could have done five hours. | ||
| We've sort of been talking about figuring out ways that we can collaborate, and I think This'll probably spark some of that. | ||
| So you are on the list of, the short list of people that I actually think are doing some good stuff. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I appreciate talking to you. | ||
| I agree with you, too. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| And for more on Tim, you can check him out on the YouTube at youtube.com slash Tim Casson. |
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