June 30, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| So, Monday was my 41st birthday and this helium-inflated stormtrooper showed up at my door and I couldn't | ||
| possibly pass up the opportunity to use him as both a prop and a metaphor for this week's | ||
| direct message. | ||
| One of the ideas which keeps popping up in the discussions we're having around here is that old political labels are becoming more and more meaningless by the day. | ||
| The terms progressive and liberal have virtually nothing to do with each other anymore, and if you're a classical liberal, you're certainly not a leftist. | ||
| Conservative and Republican don't have much to do with each other today, as Trump, a populist who doesn't focus on social issues like gay marriage and legalizing marijuana, is now the leader of the GOP. | ||
| For these reasons, as well as the real time crumbling of our mainstream media, the battle for freedom now is between the authoritarians and the libertarians. | ||
| That is, the battle over the soul of America, and the West in general, is now about people who want the government to have more control over your life, versus the people who want the government to have less control over your life. | ||
| I think that by now you probably know that I fall solidly in the camp of the people who want the government to have less control over how you live. | ||
| And that brings me to my friendly and trusty stormtrooper beside me. | ||
| In the original 1977 Star Wars, the Stormtroopers were the foot soldiers for the Galactic Republic, a massive evil military regime who wanted to control every star system in the galaxy. | ||
| This would qualify as authoritarian. | ||
| The Empire and the Stormtroopers were not keepers of the peace as the Emperor had promised, but authoritarian rulers who wanted to endlessly expand their power, hence their building of the Death Star to blow up any planet which didn't fall in line with their desires. | ||
| Blowing up a planet is a pretty good way to get people to do what you want. | ||
| Dare I talk about the prequels, but trust me, it works for this metaphor. | ||
| 2002's Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones, takes place about 20 years before the original Star Wars. | ||
| In this film, the Stormtroopers, at that time known as the Clone Troopers, were the good guys. | ||
| They allied with the Jedi in defense of the Democratic Republic. | ||
| Eventually, Chancellor Palpatine, who had consolidated power himself and secretly ordered the creation of the Clone Army, took control of the Stormtroopers and the Senate and used democracy against itself, at the same time going from Chancellor to Emperor. | ||
| In 2015's The Force Awakens, which takes place about 20 years after the original trilogy, the Stormtroopers are again the bad guys, this time in the form of the soldiers for the authoritarian First Order, which has risen from the ashes of the Galactic Republic. | ||
| One of the heroes of the story, Finn, is a stormtrooper gone rogue who suddenly realizes that he, as an individual, can chart his own destiny. | ||
| He puts his collectivist past as a stormtrooper behind him, and he becomes one of the heroes of the story. | ||
| The point of all of this is that it isn't this stormtrooper you should fear, it's the power which commands him. | ||
| Any ideology can be used as a force for good or for evil, and that's why we should be reigning in authoritarianism of any kind, even when it's your sort of authoritarianism in charge. | ||
| This whole metaphor took place in a galaxy far far away, but the lessons it presents are ones we can use right here on Earth. | ||
| Joining me to discuss authoritarianism vs libertarianism is author, professor and podcaster Thaddeus Russell. | ||
| our friends at Learn Liberty have sent him our way, and to loosely quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, | ||
| this is the episode you've been looking for. | ||
|
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(upbeat music) | |
| We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty today and joining me is an adjunct professor | ||
| at Williamette University and author of "A Renegade History of the United States," | ||
| Thaddeus Russell. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Thaddeus Russell, that is a name. | ||
| Sure is. | ||
| Of a man who I feel knows what he's saying. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like there's some gravitas to your name. | ||
| Do you feel that? | ||
| First of all, my mother gets all the credit. | ||
| You know, people sort of compliment me on my name all the time and I say, hey, I had nothing to do with it. | ||
| I wish I could take credit for it. | ||
| But do you see that as the person? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think it's unfortunate because, you know, then I have to be good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have to sort of say things that make sense and it's a lot of pressure for me. | ||
| Yeah, well. | ||
| Yeah, which you just put on me. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| I just put an extra dose of pressure. | ||
|
unidentified
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There you go. | |
| And now for an hour, you're gonna have to make perfect sense. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Because you know about this. | ||
| This is the internet podcast. | ||
| Perfect sense coming up. | ||
| Video, people are gonna judge every word that comes out of your mouth. | ||
| Yeah, I've noticed that. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm looking forward to this because we're gonna talk about postmodernism. | ||
| I think you have a slightly different take than some of my previous guests. | ||
| You have an interesting history, so let's just dive into it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You grew up in a Marxist household in Berkeley, California. | ||
| I've given a lot of good buzzwords right there in that first sentence. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| You could also have said the 60s and 70s, too. | ||
| That's when I was growing up. | ||
| Yeah, that's a lot. | ||
| I mean, right there, that's a lot. | ||
| Plus the name, Thaddeus Russell. | ||
| We've combined things here. | ||
| I'm kind of done. | ||
| I mean, we can just stop the interview now. | ||
| Yeah, no, my parents were members of a small Trotskyist sect. | ||
| It was called the International Socialists. | ||
| And what they did was they industrialized, which meant that they left their middle-class lives and went into heavy industry to organize the proletariat for revolution. | ||
| My mother became a clerical worker to organize the secretaries for revolution. | ||
| My stepfather, who had gone to Exeter Academy and the University of Chicago, he left his world to become a steel worker and a truck driver. | ||
| And the mission was to convince the workers to rise up and bring about a communist revolution. | ||
| So that was unsuccessful. | ||
| Do you know what caused them to do it? | ||
| Was it just generally what was happening around then with the war and everything else? | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to explain why people come to particular ideologies, but they chose Berkeley in the 60s, they moved there and fell in with this hardcore group. | ||
| And that was their lives. | ||
| And so that was my life when I was growing up. | ||
| And we had meetings in our house and the comrades were sitting downstairs and talking about stuff. | ||
| I had no idea what they were talking about. | ||
| I learned later. | ||
| But, you know, it was heavy Marxist theory and which union shop should we infiltrate and which factory should we organize. | ||
| And then there were visitors to our house. | ||
| You know, there were Black Panthers. | ||
| We lived about three blocks from the Black Panthers National Headquarters, which was actually in Berkeley, not in Oakland. | ||
| And they were around, and sort of hippies were around, and members of the IRA came and gave speeches and stuff like that. | ||
| And my mother, one of the interesting things is that my mother was the dominant figure in my family. | ||
| She was the heavy-duty intellectual, actually. | ||
| And so the idea of, you know, women being weak or victimized or unable to compete with men has always been just a weird thing for me, an alien idea, because she was always the dominant force and I always looked up to her and tried to model myself after her. | ||
| Yeah, so were you, once you became of age and started thinking about these ideas, did you immediately jive with these ideas? | ||
| Did you have pushback? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so I will say this. | ||
| My parents, as I recall, did not try to indoctrinate me directly. | ||
| But you can't help it, right? | ||
| I mean, if you're raised in a church family, you're going to think that that's the truth and correct and the way to be. | ||
| And that's what I said. | ||
| I mean, my mother said that, in fact, she said this in one of her speeches, that when I was about 10 years old, she said, I want to grow up to be in the IS. | ||
| That's what I want to be. | ||
| I want to be a socialist, Mom. | ||
| How do I do that? | ||
| And that was kind of my mission. | ||
| And I really mean that. | ||
| When I went to college, I didn't know what socialism even was. | ||
| And so that was my mission. | ||
| I said this. | ||
| I said, I'm going to learn what socialism is and then become a socialist. | ||
| And that's sort of what I did for a while, but that wore off. | ||
| Yeah, so you write a lot and you talk about the outsiders, really, the rebels. | ||
| I mean, the people, the drunks, the fringes of society, the people that were probably at a lot of these meetings. | ||
| Now you don't... | ||
| No, not the people. | ||
| No, that's no, that's a misconception about my work. | ||
| So it's okay. | ||
| No, please clean it up. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, so no the people well, okay Let me let me tell you how I got there first. | ||
| So I end up going to Antioch College in Ohio, which is this ultra ultra left college run by hippies and anarchists basically and and punk rockers and I think that's Evergreen State. | ||
| I was just going to say, we used to compete with Evergreen for being the most politically correct, the most left-wing college in the country, and we always thought, oh, they don't know what they're doing. | ||
| We are the true radical college. | ||
| Wow, that's hilarious. | ||
| I think we were the champions, and I have a lot of stories I could tell you about the insanity at Antioch College, which is kind of one of the reasons I started to think twice about this politics and this culture. | ||
| Well, can you give me one example? | ||
| Let's just dive into that for a second because that'll frame this interestingly. | ||
| Let me give you two. | ||
| One is just sort of tragic and disgusting and the other's more comical. | ||
| The tragic and disgusting one was there were two kids in Antioch in my third year | ||
| who had an anti-Christian art exhibit. | ||
| And so they had crosses on the wall and they had a fire in a barrel in the middle of the room. | ||
| And at one point they took one of the crosses down and threw it in the barrel, right? | ||
| Everyone there understood this was an anti-christian statement. | ||
| Oh no, this was racism. | ||
| This was the Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| Those kids got expelled. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because it was widely perceived to be an act of You know, racist violence. | ||
| And they had to leave the college. | ||
| And I was the editor of the newspaper at the time and I said, and this was kind of a turning point for me, I said, what are you talking about? | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| It really had this witch hunt feel on campus. | ||
| And I felt guilty and bad for having to come to their defense simply to explain that it had nothing to do with race at all. | ||
| And that there was this hysteria that really takes no prisoners. | ||
| I mean, you have to eliminate the evil once you identify it. | ||
| Yeah, why do you think that that ideology breeds that hysteria? | ||
| Because we're seeing this literally right now. | ||
| Yeah, there's something that goes on in college campuses. | ||
| Actually, my mother said this to me when that happened. | ||
| She said, well, you know what? | ||
| They need the devil. | ||
| They need to have a devil. | ||
| As soon as you step on campus, you start reading about the history of oppression. | ||
| And, you know, I think a lot of that's correct in many ways. | ||
| There's a lot of bad things that have happened in this country and elsewhere. | ||
| And then you look around, and you're an affluent, very privileged person in this world. | ||
| You're in the top 1% or more. | ||
| Every college student basically is that, especially at Antioch. | ||
| So there is no devil. | ||
| There is no Bull Connor. | ||
| There's no one like that around here, so you have to find one. | ||
| And so what we did was we kind of focused on administrators, the president, and his evil administrators. | ||
| We just assumed... They inherently have to be evil. | ||
| We assumed they were evil, and they were out to get us, and so we had to get them. | ||
| And so one day, one night, two kids broke into the president's office and took a shit on his desk. | ||
| And that was our statement. | ||
| That was telling him who was who. | ||
| It works at many levels. | ||
| And what was what. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Yeah, so I mean, those are just two of the most comical or worst things that happened at Antioch in that way. | ||
| It was also a very liberating place. | ||
| I mean, there was a lot of... the hippies were good in some ways. | ||
| I mean, there was a lot of nudity and smoking pot and lots of sexual freedom, which is gone now on college campuses. | ||
| And I love that stuff. | ||
| But I hated this puritanical left-wing culture. | ||
| And that's when I started to move against it. | ||
| And then I went to Columbia for graduate school. | ||
| And everybody there is a Marxist or a socialist or maybe a New Deal liberal, but everybody's on the left. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| And this is the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I wanted, I needed to be a socialist. | ||
| And so I started to study as hard as I could to be a socialist and be a socialist historian. | ||
| I became a labor historian, which is what you're supposed to do. | ||
| But I started noticing that all of these people didn't care what clothes they wore. | ||
| They had no idea what movies were playing. | ||
| They never watched television. | ||
| They were completely oblivious to the lives of real people. | ||
| And in particular, well actually I'd say they were actually hostile to the ways in which ordinary Americans chose to spend their leisure time. | ||
| So popular culture was something that was bad. | ||
| It was a false consciousness, in fact, right? | ||
| This is an idea from the Frankfurt School, from Adorno. | ||
| He said this. | ||
| He said, popular culture is simply the way the capitalist class maintains control and so we must do away with it. | ||
| I said, that's awful. | ||
| It's worse than awful. | ||
| It's totalitarian. | ||
| Yeah, there's many arguments for saying that a lot of pop culture is nonsense and drivel and I mock it constantly. | ||
| But also people need an escape. | ||
| It's also part of human nature. | ||
| These are the things that rise up that have some resonance with people. | ||
| Yeah, I want to say it's better than an escape. | ||
| So, you know, a lot of my work is about Puritanism and its long history, and people aren't really aware of how it carries through to today. | ||
| So the heart of Puritanism is the Puritan work ethic, and a lot of people get confused about this. | ||
| They think it's a working hard to get a nice house or a big television or a nice car. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's the idea that work in itself, no matter what you get for it, is virtuous. | ||
| So you should work all the time, no matter what you get for it. | ||
| So, popular culture in this country, since it started in the early 19th century, has always been not just an escape from that, it's been, in a way, a repudiation of that. | ||
| Because the Puritans and their descendants, the Victorians in the 19th century, said, all these things are terrible. | ||
| At that time it was dime novels, which were the first novels, you know? | ||
| It was going to the Nickelodeons, it was gambling, it was going to the horse races, sports, all that stuff they said, we can't do that. | ||
| That's evil. | ||
| That's Satan's work. | ||
| We must avoid that. | ||
| We must work all the time and raise our families, and that's it. | ||
| So popular culture for me has essentially been a repudiation of the Puritan work ethic. | ||
| It's always been this counter force against that in our culture, and there's this constant fight between the two. | ||
| So you'll see, like in politics, politicians, you won't find a president or a senator until Donald Trump, actually, who hasn't criticized popular culture in some way. | ||
| Right, because they are, they have to be the models of the sort of puritanical, repressive, good American. | ||
| God, there's a lot there. | ||
| I know, sorry. | ||
| All right, no, no, no, that's great. | ||
| So is there, when you're discussing this, it sounds like there's a religious connotation there, and when people hear the word puritanical, they think of a religious connection. | ||
| But in and of itself, there isn't really a religious connection, right? | ||
| There's the ideas of a religious authority or something like that, but it's not religious per se. | ||
| It's not necessarily religious, and so another argument I make, and I think this might resonate with you, is that modern-day progressivism and left politics generally is secular religion. | ||
| It's really secular Christianity. | ||
| In particular, I think you see a lot of puritanism in left-wing politics, and that's been true for a long, long time. | ||
| There's actually a couple of very good books showing that left-wing intellectuals for the last hundred years have been uniformly hostile to populism. | ||
| of popular culture, that until very recently, these sort of hipster communists in Brooklyn | ||
| who talk about pop culture, until them-- | ||
| Who all wear the same glasses and have the same facial hair. | ||
| They pretend, they do, and I've had arguments with them, they pretend that Lenin loved the movies. | ||
| No, I mean, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, all of them, you name it, and all the intellectuals | ||
| in the universities who are on the left, like Adorno, have all hated pop culture | ||
| and seen it as false consciousness. | ||
| Because, and I said this once to a professor at Columbia, a very prestigious feminist gender studies professor once, I said, why do you hate the fact that so many women just like to go shopping or like to go to the movies? | ||
| And she said, because they think they have better things to do with their time. | ||
| I mean, right, so that's not just... What a profoundly judgmental... So it's elitist, it's judgmental, it's at least authoritarian. | ||
| I think it might be totalitarian, and this is my critique of the Frankfurt School, not postmodernism. | ||
| Different things, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, and I do want to get to that. | ||
| Very different things. | ||
| To me, it's totalitarian. | ||
| Because their idea is that your ideas are wrong, false, that's their term, they use that, and they're leading you to do things that are counter to your own interests. | ||
| So we know what your own interests are, and we know how you should best arrive at them to gain them. | ||
| So we're going to tell you what music to listen to. | ||
| What movies to go see? | ||
| Probably no movies, but what you should do with your life, your time, right? | ||
| It's actually totalitarian, which is why that crew, the people who followed the Frankfurt School in the 50s and 60s, the left-wing movements that they became very attracted to during that time were Maoism. | ||
| With third world communism. | ||
| Because that's what Maoism looked like. | ||
| It was this idea that we must rid ourselves of our bad ideas before the revolution can happen. | ||
| It's fundamentally totalitarian. | ||
| It's about the total person. | ||
| All right, so let's back up to a couple things. | ||
| I think we're gonna be bouncing around a lot here. | ||
| So I love this concept of what you said, that Trump was the first one to reject this, because during the election, I think a lot of people noticed, and I think what people partly didn't like about Hillary was that she's on stage with Katy Perry, then Madonna's doing a thing the day before. | ||
| Just this absolute connection between pop culture and politics that started feeling gross. | ||
| It started feeling, Like the powers that be between entertainment and politics were so in bed together. | ||
| They all hated Trump and I think that then boosted his support. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And do you think that was a calculated move by him or was it just he had been pinned into a corner because nobody, none of those people would back him except a few of the deplorable rejects like Ted Nugent and Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't have the same critique of that that you do. | ||
| I have no problem with what you said, but I just, I take a different line on it. | ||
| I mean, to me, Katy Perry and Madonna being front people for Hillary is a contradiction, because Hillary represents second wave feminism, which was, read Betty Friedan if you don't agree with me. | ||
| I mean, if you don't believe me. | ||
| was a rejection of the objectification of women in all forms, right? | ||
| So that any showing of skin, any sexualization of women was bad and needed to be left behind. | ||
| Friedan said in her book, The Feminine Mystique, that women should become leaders of corporations, leaders of government, and that's it. | ||
| And she has several chapters in that book that are rejections of sex in particular. | ||
| And also she attacks gay men For being eternal boys who are obsessed with sex, and for seducing housewives into being obsessed with sex. | ||
| This was Friedan's whole thing. | ||
| She thought that women were themselves too interested in sex, and what they should be interested in was work. | ||
| Puritanism. | ||
| Here you are, right? | ||
| And so Hillary Clinton is the apotheosis of that, isn't she? | ||
| Because she wears the business suits. | ||
| She is ultra-rational. | ||
| She is Ultra disciplined, she is. | ||
| Her husband gets sex elsewhere. | ||
| He does the bad stuff, right. | ||
| So she is the perfect second wave feminist. | ||
| So, Katy Perry showing her boobs on stage, and Madonna having done the same thing before, that's a rejection. | ||
| That's a contradiction with second wave feminism. | ||
| So, someone's not understanding something here. | ||
| I think Hillary just used them, but probably isn't really a big fan of what they're doing. | ||
| So, you know, there's something, there's a contradiction that needs to be resolved. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think, though, that that contradiction, like, I think people see that, even if they don't understand the full history of it or the full philosophical underpinnings, I think people kind of see that, and I think that possibly did drive more people to Trump. | ||
| Do you think that makes sense? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because it was a rejection of all of it. | ||
| It was just a rejection of this monstrosity. | ||
| I think that a lot of people, again, I don't know, and I hate the way that people sort of presume to know what Trump voters thought. | ||
| You better know everything, otherwise what the hell are we doing? | ||
| My name's Thaddeus, I better know. | ||
| But I do think it's reasonable to assume that a lot of them were rejecting or reacting to this repressive puritanism in Clinton and politics generally. | ||
| Which is not just cultural, it's not just about sex, it's that you're not allowed to say all kinds of things if you're in American politics, right? | ||
| It's this very restricted discourse that's allowed in American politics. | ||
| I'm sure that was a lot of what went on. | ||
| In fact, I did hear a lot of people say that. | ||
| Trump says what he thinks. | ||
| Just that was very attractive to a lot of people, and that was attractive to me. | ||
| I didn't like most of what he said, but I did like that he was breaking down the walls, right? | ||
| And Bernie, to some extent, was doing that too, you know? | ||
| And so I thought that was very good, even though I didn't like either one of them in terms of their content, but I did like that they were simply challenging the walls. | ||
| Do you think that right there is sort of what the next evolution of politics is gonna be? | ||
| Because I've been saying for a while now, I feel like the chessboard has just been thrown up. | ||
| We've got fertile ground now. | ||
| We don't know what's gonna grow of it. | ||
| I think there's, you know, the traditional labels of left, right are becoming meaningless. | ||
| What really is a Republican in the age of Trump, which is a sort of a different thing than conservatism, all of that. | ||
| Do you think that the next wave of politics is really gonna be about the realignment Of all of this stuff? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I do, I know you've been talking about this a lot on your show, you know, this split between authoritarianism and whatever you want to call it, libertarianism, small L, broadly conceived, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what I hope to see. | ||
| Do we need a better word for that? | ||
| Because I think, because I do believe that's what it is, that it's authoritarianism versus libertarianism. | ||
| But I think when you say libertarianism, people think of it as some sort of offshoot, strange political party. | ||
| Is there a better phrase? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so for instance, I have many differences with Libertarians, so people often lump me in with them, but ask a Libertarian. | ||
| I mean, ask like a hardcore Libertarian about Thaddeus Russell, they'll tell you, oh, he's not a Libertarian. | ||
| I have many differences with them, although in some things I very much agree. | ||
| Hostility to or opposition to the state and state power. | ||
| I'm completely with them on that. | ||
| I think markets are very responsive to consumers' needs, and I think they advance humanity in many, many ways. | ||
| I don't think they're perfect. | ||
| I think capitalism is perfect, and that's one of their problems. | ||
| But anyway, I do think that general idea, that basic idea that we should be free from control by others, those in authority, in particular those with state power, which is the monopoly on violence, right? | ||
| Is a good thing so I I love that about them and I love that about this sort of new formation I see happening and you're a part of that and some of your guests are a part of that versus Democrats and Republicans who do want to control us right liberals and conservatives who do want to control us in various ways I Would like to see a new realignment around that I would like to see us talk about politics in those terms because right and left I think you're right no longer make make much sense unless you're very specific about what you mean by them Right, so we've talked a little bit more about the left so far, and you know my feelings. | ||
| I'm trying, as a liberal, I'm trying to clean up what the left is, and at this point I don't think that being a liberal and being on the left are even compatible, unfortunately. | ||
| But let's talk about the right a little bit. | ||
| What is right authoritarianism right now? | ||
| Right-wing authoritarianism is sort of what we know. | ||
| I mean, it's using the state to control people's personal lives. | ||
| So, you know, they don't want women to be able to choose abortions. | ||
| They don't want us to—actually, they're very concerned about popular culture, so they want to control what we watch and listen to. | ||
| You know, they don't like a lot of Hollywood. | ||
| They don't like a lot of what happens in the music industry. | ||
| They've held marches and protests and called for laws to censor those things. | ||
| And they also want to control what happens in the rest of the world in various ways. | ||
| They want to send out the United States Army to control how people think and behave. | ||
| Now the thing is that lately, and I think again this is where you've been going a lot | ||
| with your show, is that there's been a convergence between the conservatives, the republicans, | ||
| and the liberals, the democrats, on many of these questions. | ||
| So for instance, hip hop, here we go, popular culture. | ||
| If you look at the reaction to hip hop over the last 20 years, the negative reactions, | ||
| the calls to censor it, it was tipper gore. | ||
| It was a lot of feminists and it was Christian conservatives joining together. | ||
| Al Sharpton was another one who held marches against hip-hop, you know, calling for music companies to shut down these artists and censor the lyrics. | ||
| So there's a lot of convergence around this authoritarianism. | ||
| Yeah, so where does Trump fit into that? | ||
| Because he doesn't care about video game violence or words that are in rap songs or even abortion, I don't think he particularly cares about, certainly not about gay marriage. | ||
| So those things that are thought of as right authoritarianism, all these people that are marching with hashtag resist, are they sort of missing the boat on who they should be attacking on this? | ||
| It would have been a great thing if he had had more than two or three people in the world who agreed with him. | ||
| We're in Washington DC, right? | ||
| So unfortunately he brought just his tiny little crew to Washington and had to fill all these posts, you know, all these jobs. | ||
| And the only people available, unfortunately, were Christian conservatives and generals, right? | ||
| And so what we have is, and Mike Pence, right? | ||
| So Mike Pence comes from the Christian conservative wing and They've gotten their hold on him. | ||
| Sessions, I think, is another one, right? | ||
| Who actually thinks that marijuana is dangerous to people. | ||
| I mean, it's phenomenal. | ||
| The guy is an absolute Neanderthal on this stuff. | ||
| I do think that he's not going to be successful, because I think that war has been won by us, you know? | ||
| But it's unfortunate that Trump, I think he feels beholden to them. | ||
| He can't hold any power without the Christian conservative base, and so he's not being Really forceful in his championing of popular culture, which he comes right out of. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I mean, look at who he is. | ||
| He's the zenith of it. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| His wife is a model and, you know, all the rest of it. | ||
| I mean, that's so. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So Trump. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons I think that he makes people crazy. | ||
| In fact, I actually think that's the main reason he makes both sides, liberals and conservatives, absolutely lose their stuff, which is that he is that he breaks those rules, cultural rules. | ||
| So if you look at if you look at Puritanism, right? | ||
| What I was talking about. | ||
| The work ethic. | ||
| What does Donald Trump do? | ||
|
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Hmm. | |
| He got a bunch of money from his dad and he kind of lives large on his private jets. | ||
| Everything is in, you know, everything is covered in gold. | ||
| And who does that other than Donald Trump? | ||
| Rappers. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You think about this, right? | ||
| He does a lot of the stuff that, you know, the bad black people have done. | ||
| They celebrate their bodies and they don't care about, you know, conventional rules and norms and bourgeois morality and all that stuff. | ||
| And he's not shy about talking about sex. | ||
| That's also something you can't do. | ||
| That's an absolute taboo. | ||
| He breaks all those cultural rules. | ||
| I actually think that's why they go crazy about Donald Trump in a bad way. | ||
| Because basically they don't know how to fight it because they're constrained by sort of other rules, right? | ||
| It's so fundamental to who they are and what their world is. | ||
| When we walk around in America, generally speaking, we don't talk about sex. | ||
| We just don't. | ||
| It's this silence that we impose on ourselves. | ||
| We all are proud of when we work hard even if we don't make a nickel for it, right? | ||
| It is so central to who we are. | ||
| We've internalized it. | ||
| It's not like people walk around saying, oh, I'm a Puritan and here's what the Puritans think. | ||
| It's just it's completely, deeply embedded inside of us since the Puritans got here. | ||
| And that's what Trump just seems to not, seems to be oblivious to sort of that fundamental American culture. | ||
| And I would say it's really a middle class culture. | ||
| So working class people of all colors have generally speaking, and immigrants too, have kind of avoided that stuff. | ||
| They haven't internalized it, of course, because they're sort of outside of the realm of power and they're outside of citizenship, right? | ||
| And so for whatever reason, I don't know why, Trump is much more like them, even though he's always been a rich kid. | ||
| He sort of adopted that kind of working class indifference to bourgeois morality. | ||
| And people can't stand that. | ||
| What does that tell you about politics sort of between the ideas and just the cult of personality? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, as someone that you obviously care about ideas, you have a command of the ideas, you were born out of certain ideas that you later challenged and have sort of incorporated into what you do now, but basically everything you've said is just, this is just cult of personality of what he's done. | ||
| There's a fundamental, very depressing problem that I'm sort of just coming to grips with, or coming to terms with now in my own life, which is that, and I've sort of known this all along, but it's really hitting me hard, is that even with the internet, even though I think people are better informed now than ever before because of that, The vast, vast, vast majority of Americans don't know anything about politics. | ||
| You've obviously been spending time on Twitter. | ||
| This is a problem no matter what your politics are as a public political person or a public intellectual. | ||
| People don't even like that word and all it means is you're a lover of ideas, that you're curious about big ideas and you talk about ideas. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| People don't even like it when you use that. | ||
| You smug son of a... | ||
| I know. | ||
| Smug is the word I've been called recently, more than once. | ||
| It's a problem, I mean, for what we do, right? | ||
| So that's why we, those of us in this little world, talk to each other most of the time, right? | ||
| Because most Americans have never heard of Syria. | ||
| Much less know anything about it. | ||
| Most Americans, I mean, look at the polls. | ||
| It's just most Americans, I think, don't know who the Vice President is. | ||
| It's something like that. | ||
| I mean, they can't identify Washington, D.C. | ||
| on a map. | ||
| Huge portions of the American public don't know anything. | ||
| Is that just a function of our success, that we are perhaps the most successful nation in the history of the world? | ||
| We have done tremendous amounts of good. | ||
| We've done plenty of bad at the same time. | ||
| We've brought in more people from every walk of life. | ||
| All of these things. | ||
| We've created this system that basically still is pretty great and what you get out of that after the sausage is you get sort of a dumbed down thing because people have video games and have Yeah, you don't need to care about stuff. | ||
| You don't need to think. | ||
| I think those are good things though. | ||
| I mean, I think sports-- | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree. | ||
| I think it's pretty great. | ||
| Now, it doesn't mean there aren't problems and I wish more people cared about ideas and all that, | ||
| but that it's just the function of success is some of this. | ||
| Yeah, you don't need to care about stuff. | ||
| You don't need to think. | ||
| You don't need to read Foucault. | ||
| You can spot all you want about what he thinks, but you don't need to read him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because no one does, so no one ever checks you on it, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, it's like I often say to people like you and me, it's like, are we sure we want to be doing this? | ||
| Wouldn't we have a better time and a better life if we were just following sports instead? | ||
| I mean, I love sports. | ||
| It's funny, I had Jason Whitlock from Fox Sports 1 on a couple weeks ago, and he was so clearly passionate and knows his thoughts and all that stuff about politics and the wider world. | ||
| And then when he left, I was like, man, that guy gets to talk about sports all day. | ||
| I was like, that would be pretty great if I was an NBA analyst. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| But we do love this, that's the... I don't know, I mean, aren't we conflicted about it? | ||
| Well, can I speak for myself? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Well, you do, but you're also tortured by it. | ||
| Yeah, it's exhausting when articles and publications call me an alt-right extremist. | ||
| And then I have to go, well, now do I want to spend my day fighting this or just letting it be? | ||
| But it's fighting, that's what it is. | ||
| And so half the time I love the fight and half the time I hate it. | ||
| I don't know what else to say. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what else I could do. | ||
| I mean, I would love to be a boxing coach instead, but I don't think I can. | ||
| I'd like to be in the NBA. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| So you know, Jews used to dominate basketball. | ||
| I know. | ||
| In this country. | ||
| Oh, you do know this. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| There were a lot of Jews in the early days of the NBA. | ||
| Dominated. | ||
| It's too late for me. | ||
| Dominated. | ||
| 40 with a bad knee. | ||
| So you could bring that back, you know. | ||
| Now that I think there are no Jews in the NBA, you could be the first. | ||
| There's not one Jew, that's pretty sad. | ||
| I've heard that Jordan Farmar is half Jewish. | ||
| Yeah, is he still in the league though? | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| They got him out. | ||
| They found out about his half. | ||
| I think they actually sent him to Israel, but all right, total sidebar. | ||
| But wait, I wanna focus a little more on that right authoritarian thing, because it isn't the part of the authoritarian stuff that I focus on a lot, so I do wanna spend a little more time there. | ||
| Part of it doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| It seems to me that on something like gay marriage, if the right that supposedly believes in states' rights | ||
| and in the individual and in local limited government and all of those things, | ||
| they had such an easy opportunity to do the right thing with gay marriage. | ||
| Now, of course it got screwed up because of the Christian conservatives, | ||
| but even right now with marijuana, as you're talking about with Jeff Sessions, | ||
| it's like, you guys are the ones that are supposed to care about limited government | ||
| and not having the government tell people what they can do in their own home. | ||
| Why are they unable to take a principled position here? | ||
| Well, I don't know about being, okay. | ||
| Well, I think for me- Did I lead too much in that? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I think that conservative or Republican authoritarianism is different in a very important way. | ||
| And it's the reason that I, like you, focus much more on left authoritarianism, which is that they are dumber. | ||
| No, really. | ||
| They are less effective at getting authoritarian politics out there and distributed and bought into. | ||
| Sessions, this is what I was saying about Sessions, right? | ||
| Good luck, buddy. | ||
| Like, convincing America to roll back legalization of pot. | ||
| It ain't gonna happen, right? | ||
| You're certainly not gonna convince anyone of this stuff. | ||
| I mean, no one believes, other than Jeff Sessions, really, that pot is harmful to you in the ways he's talking about. | ||
| But then what does that say that even President Obama was still having the feds shut down local things like here in California? | ||
| That is my point. | ||
| That is exactly what I'm saying here. | ||
| So that Sessions won't be able to do it, Obama could. | ||
| Because everybody loved Obama. | ||
| Because Obama played by all the rules. | ||
| Because he was the perfect American man. | ||
| And he was black. | ||
| And so he kind of fixed our bad history for us too. | ||
| He made us feel better. | ||
| He was our salvation. | ||
| He was perfect. | ||
| He was almost a Jesus figure. | ||
| And I mean that, people really did treat him that way, and I don't think that's an exaggeration if you look at it, right? | ||
| And so he could send in the feds to shut down marijuana dispensaries, and no one batted an eye, certainly on the left. | ||
| But why did he? | ||
| Oh, why did he? | ||
| Yeah, I see what you're saying on why he can get away with it, but why do you think he did if most likely he doesn't really care about I don't know. | ||
| I would say that he, like people in the progressive left, and I include liberals in this, are interested primarily in social control. | ||
| And that's not saying that they're evil. | ||
| That's just who they are. | ||
| They like a well-ordered society. | ||
| So I don't know, but I would suspect, and look at Obama, he's like the paragon of discipline, right? | ||
| He is actually the perfect Puritan, at least as far as we know, right? | ||
| I would say that's part of it, that he didn't like the fact that people were violating federal law. | ||
| And, I think getting high, I think he now sees as disruptive, right? | ||
| It's not a good thing. | ||
| So look at his sermons, here you go, sermons or lectures or speeches, whatever you want to call them. | ||
| Interesting choice of words. | ||
| Against black culture, which people sort of don't pay attention to. | ||
| But he gave many, every time the guy got in front of a black audience, he would start lecturing them about watching too much ESPN and about how they needed to pull up their pants and how much, how they needed to work harder and raise their children right and stop eating Popeye's chicken. | ||
| Google it. | ||
| I mean, he went and Michelle did the same thing. | ||
| This really stern admonitions of black culture. | ||
| So I think that's all of the piece. | ||
| I think that's probably plays into why he did go after the dispensaries. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God, there's a lot there. | ||
| So where we started before we went on this 20-minute roundabout was I was mentioning the outcasts, sort of the drunks and all those people, and then I said it was sort of like some of the people that were in your house growing up, and you were making an instinction that those are not the same thing. | ||
| So let's go back to that. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| I had it there. | ||
| I knew we were going to get there. | ||
| That was very good. | ||
| So the communists in my house growing up were puritanical. | ||
| Because as I said earlier, communists and socialists have always been puritanical. | ||
| Again, lots of literature has been written on this. | ||
| This is not just me talking. | ||
| Lenin and Trotsky were opposed to homosexuality. | ||
| Not because homosexuality was sort of bad in itself, but because it was decadent. | ||
| So decadence was the problem for communists throughout the 20th century. | ||
| They thought, like Adorno did later, that it was this thing that was leading the working class, the decadence, popular culture, consumerism, was leading the working class astray. | ||
| What the working class should be doing instead was organizing themselves for revolution. | ||
| Now here's what they understood. | ||
| This is why it's all logical. | ||
| They understood that when you control or manage a whole society, which is what they wanted everyone to do, that requires tremendous discipline. | ||
| You can't be going to the movies if you're going to be managing the economy, right? | ||
| And so that's what they said. | ||
| This was their argument. | ||
| We need to instill this perfect proletarian discipline, was the phrase, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. | ||
| And so my parents' comrades came out of that tradition. | ||
| They were Trotskyists, you know, they came out of that and they understood that. | ||
| They may have watched some television, but they thought at best it was just an escape. | ||
| And what we really need to be doing is studying GDP figures so that we can manage the economy. | ||
| Everyone should be doing that. | ||
| Everyone should be an engineer and everyone should be ready to have meetings all day long and all night long to organize our society. | ||
| So it's so interesting because I don't, as you're saying that, I was thinking that recently I've been saying this thing about how comedy, I think, is dying right now too. | ||
| That there aren't comics willing to cross the line. | ||
| We've got Bill Maher apologizing for a word even though no one in their right mind thinks he's racist. | ||
| We've seen so many leftist progressive comedians just making the same Trump jokes over again and not really pushing the limits of what comedy is. | ||
| With what you're saying, it really does make sense why they almost can't be funny. | ||
| This is what I've been saying, that these progressives who are shutting down pop culture in these ways are true to their heritage. | ||
| This is what progressives, I mean THE progressives, the original ones of the early 20th century, did. | ||
| They shut down the Nickelodeons. | ||
| They did. | ||
| In every city in the country, progressives launched these campaigns. | ||
| Tell people what Nickelodeons are. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Because a lot of people, my younger audience, is going to think you mean with the green goo, but that's not what you mean. | ||
| Yeah, the Nickelodeon network is named after the cinemas, which started in the Lower East Side of New York, but grew and spread all over the country, which were five-cent cinemas. | ||
| You could go and put a nickel in and you could watch a movie. | ||
| Yeah, although I'm sure they were probably going to go after the green goo at some point, too, because there's got to be some racial connotation to that. | ||
| Yeah, so the progressives in all the big cities shut down those Nickelodeons because the working class was watching burlesque, you know, or, you know, just or things that weren't about work and, you know, discipline and war. | ||
| And so, yeah, they're being true to their heritage. | ||
| Yeah, we should have culture that is completely austere, right, and not fun or funny in those ways. | ||
| That's why the left is so unfunny, right? | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| I mean, they're so earnest. | ||
| They're so earnest that they can't make a joke. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| They've been birthed Pepe and Keck and Keckistan and all. | ||
| They birthed it because it's these people online that have just had it with the political correctness. | ||
| So now they're sending out frogs with swastikas just to get a reaction out of people. | ||
| And people then think it's hate speech, which of course has been I had Gavin McInnes on my show, and it became very clear to me about five minutes in that this is what's happening. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| Much of what he says is either racist or pretty damn close. | ||
| And the content of what he's saying, I have a lot of trouble with. | ||
| I don't know how serious he is about it, but it's clearly right-wing in pretty bad ways, according to my politics. | ||
| But he's really, really funny. | ||
| He has the freedom to do that. | ||
| Comedy requires freedom. | ||
| Jim Goad is another one. | ||
| He just approached me. | ||
| He wants to be on my podcast. | ||
| And I started looking at his writing. | ||
| Much of what he says is probably racist, probably sexist, probably homophobic. | ||
| But he's hilarious. | ||
| He's very, very funny. | ||
| So what do you do? | ||
| I want to ask you that. | ||
| What do you do with that? | ||
| You personally, what do you do with that when you're sitting across from someone like that? | ||
| Right, I don't know. | ||
| I laugh and I'm troubled. | ||
| And I feel like if they are not, however, I feel like if they, like with Gavin McInnes, he has no real power, right? | ||
| I mean, no one's going to listen to him and write some policy based on this. | ||
| You know, you could say he contributes to the Trump phenomenon, but what's the Trump phenomenon? | ||
| I mean, there is no Trump phenomenon anymore. | ||
| The generals have taken over, basically, you know. | ||
| Yeah, once they attach themselves to any movement that might seize state power, oh, then give me an AK-47. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But these guys are so marginalized. | ||
| People talk about being marginalized. | ||
| The marginalized are those guys and what they represent. | ||
| It's so interesting you say that, because that's the other reason that I focus on the left, is not just because I come from it, but also because I see that's where all the power is seated, the conversation is seated there, Hollywood is seated there, all those things. | ||
| So when they get the three white supremacists to show up at a meeting somewhere, and then of course the media blows it out of proportion as if there's Nazis rampaging through the streets, it's like you just need that, you need that belief. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair belief? | ||
| Oh yeah, no, I mean, so they control most of the media, it's just true, okay? | ||
| Liberals, liberals mostly, not really socialists, but liberals control the media for the most part, other than Fox News and Fox. | ||
| Well, by the way, if you've ever been in the Fox News green room, you'll know that there's a lot of liberals who even work there, right? | ||
| Yeah, oh, the people behind the scenes, there's tons, I knew gay people that work there, and all sorts of New York City Upper West Side. | ||
| Oh yeah, exactly. | ||
| And they control academia. | ||
| And they control what's now being called the deep state, whatever, if that's fair. | ||
| Yeah, that's a whole other topic. | ||
| Whatever, but in terms of the civil servants who work in Washington, D.C. | ||
| and work in all the state capitals, we know this, is overwhelmingly liberal. | ||
| So yeah, this is why I get upset, because they control the world that I operate in. | ||
| They determine my fate in many ways. | ||
| So I know that just because of the things that we talk about here every week, when you say the word liberal, that a certain amount of my audience is going to go, wait a minute, does he mean classical liberal or does he mean Progressive or leftist or something. | ||
| It's obvious to me you're making that distinction, but the word liberal has now been so muddied that in some ways it's not even worth. | ||
| The progressives who shut down the Nickelodeons in the turn of the 20th century, they're the ones who changed the meaning of the word. | ||
| They seized it sort of after World War I and said, oh no, we're liberals. | ||
| And people are like, what are you talking about? | ||
| You're not liberals. | ||
| You want the state to control much of the economy and much of our lives. | ||
| But they started to use that word, and it stuck. | ||
| And so once the New Deal happens in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt becomes another Jesus figure, and he calls himself liberal, and people call his movement liberal, then that was it. | ||
| That was the moment, the turning point. | ||
| No, this is all, of course, a repudiation of classical liberalism, which is about the individual, you know, having some autonomy, or at least freedom from the state and its power. | ||
| Do you think that people like us can win that word back? | ||
| That's what I've been thinking about a lot lately. | ||
| I like making this argument for liberalism versus the left. | ||
| I just don't think it's a liberal movement anymore. | ||
| And I know that I've brought a lot of people to it and have many allies that are doing similar work, you included. | ||
| But do you think it's possible? | ||
| The word liberal is now so tainted that in the broader sense, maybe we can't build something around that word. | ||
| Not to say the ideas can't be used in another way. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm not sure I want to. | ||
| So I'm not a classical liberal and I don't love classical liberalism. | ||
| I like some of it, but the Puritan notion of the repressed individual who never talks about sex and only has sex to procreate and who works all the time, that's actually at the center of classical liberalism. | ||
| So if you read John Locke and you read the Founding Fathers, this is what they say, you know, we must regulate ourselves so that the state doesn't have to. | ||
| So it's a cultural puritanism. | ||
| It's good that they don't want the state regulating us in those ways. | ||
| So I like that. | ||
| I like the Bill of Rights. | ||
| But they say for that to happen, for that to be possible, we must constantly police ourselves. | ||
| So the cop becomes internal. | ||
| The policeman is inside of us. | ||
| So I don't love that. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting, because I've never thought of it in that, I know exactly what you're talking about, but to me that was more of just a sign of the times then versus now, because aren't we all policing ourselves in our own way? | ||
| I mean, every day you get up and you don't do everything, every whim that you want to do and every crazy urge that you want to do. | ||
| So we're all sort of doing that just by living, right? | ||
| Oh yeah, sure. | ||
| It's not, I mean, it wasn't a sign of the times. | ||
| They made this argument. | ||
| I mean, Locke and the Founding Fathers, the whole first chapter of my book, Renegade History, is on this. | ||
| If you think about it, it's consistent, right? | ||
| They wanted the people, or at least some of the people, many of the people, to control the country. | ||
| Take it away from the king and run it themselves. | ||
| And they understood this thing that the Leninists understood a century later, which is that, oh, to do that, Jesus, we've got to, like, learn a bunch of stuff and we've got to stop, you know, going to the cockfights and stop smoking cigars. | ||
| No, really. | ||
| And stop drinking, most of all. | ||
| And because we've got work to do. | ||
| We've got to run this country. | ||
| Democracy, I say, is puritanical for that reason. | ||
| So it's interesting because, as you know, so you work with Learn Liberty. | ||
| They're a classical liberal organization. | ||
| They sent you to me. | ||
| I just want to make a, no, but I want to make a point of saying that's why it's a beautiful thing that we're doing with them because you just said, I am not a classical liberal. | ||
| Where do you, if you had to give yourself a label, I know you don't want to get hung up on that kind of stuff, but I sense a lot of classical liberal stuff from you. | ||
| I sense some libertarian stuff from you. | ||
| I sense some utility of the state from you. | ||
| What the hell is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Let's make up a new word. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I have sort of, culturally, I guess I'm anarchistic, I suppose. | ||
| I am anti-authoritarian. | ||
| I'm anti-authority. | ||
| It doesn't mean I want to demolish authority and remove authority. | ||
| In fact, I like that there are some people in this world who want to take charge because I don't want to do that work. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I don't want to do that work. | ||
| It's weird, right, that there are some people who just want to manage everything and take control and take care of everything. | ||
| I don't want to determine who picks up your garbage on Monday morning. | ||
| I mean, that's fine. | ||
| I'm glad you want to do that. | ||
| I'd rather play video games or whatever it is, right? | ||
| And so, I don't know what that is. | ||
| That's why I like a lot of libertarianism, you know, obviously, because they want the state out of our lives. | ||
| But a lot of libertarians have this classical idea of the self-regulating individual there, right at the middle of it. | ||
| And so I don't like that at all, because they're kind of not fun either. | ||
| Actually, a lot of libertarians remind me of the socialists that I grew up with. | ||
| They're very stodgy and very kind of uptight and controlled and not interested in the real world and the pleasures in the real world. | ||
| All the pleasure they get is from reading books, which I understand, but there's more to life than that. | ||
| Yeah, you know this past week was, or about a week ago, was VidCon, which is where all these YouTubers get together. | ||
| I didn't go, but a lot of the people that are sort of in my YouTube circles, most of them are younger than me, were there, and it seemed like what I could gather was they were the fun group. | ||
| That there's these people on the left that are screaming about third-wave feminism and all this stuff, and then they're at a YouTube conference, there's not a lot of many people on the traditional right, but that this new group, whatever this thing is of these sort of half-liberal, libertarian mix, whatever, that they're the fun group and that's what's attracting people. | ||
| I think that was probably a lot of what was in the middle of Gamergate, which was that there's these kids playing video games who like looking at women with big boobs and enjoying it, right? | ||
| And that was about it, I think, for most of them, I would imagine, right? | ||
| They like shooting people, right? | ||
| Virtually. | ||
| You know, and watching the heads explode, which you're not allowed to do. | ||
| By the way, that's another form of repression that the Puritans and the Victorians instituted. | ||
| We can't fight each other in the streets. | ||
| That's anarchic and disorderly. | ||
| We have to let the state do all the killing for us, right? | ||
| We get the monopoly on violence. | ||
| The state does. | ||
| So you can't do that anymore. | ||
| So, like, boxing was shunned for a long time. | ||
| All these things, you know. | ||
| And so I think video games represent sort of a return of the repressed. | ||
| To use Freud's term? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know, in that way, because these kids are doing stuff you're not allowed to do through these video games, which is kill and have sex, or at least some kind of sex. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Be sexual in that way. | ||
| And it's fun. | ||
| Now, we know that this didn't cause them to go out and shoot people. | ||
| We know that it didn't cause them to go out and rape people. | ||
| We know this from many, many, many studies, right? | ||
| Yes, every study, basically. | ||
| Yeah, every study. | ||
| Okay, so we just know that. | ||
| And so, They were having fun doing the stuff that you're not allowed to do or even express. | ||
| You're not even allowed to express those desires in this culture, right? | ||
| And then all of a sudden you have these people coming in, swooping in and telling them that not only what they're doing, just their thoughts, their feelings are bad, but that it's going to cause another Sandy Hook and another mass rape somewhere and that it's the cause of the subjugation of women. | ||
| It doesn't make sense to these kids, and I imagine, and it's like we were just having fun in our mom's basement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By the way, we have zero institutional power in this country. | ||
| Right, nothing. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And you're telling us suddenly we are the most powerful people in the world. | ||
| Now, by the way, I'm speaking for them now. | ||
| Here's what's so amazing to me. | ||
| Why is anyone so concerned about what those people think? | ||
| Here's what's so amazing to me. It's like, why are feminists or women or any, why is anyone so concerned about what | ||
| those people think? | ||
| Like that's what is becomes important in a lot of feminist discourse is what we think, what men think. | ||
| Well that all that does is sort of reinscribe the patriarchy, right? | ||
| What we think, what we do is what's important. | ||
| What men do and think is what's important. | ||
| Well, how about just say, I'm going to do what I want to do. | ||
| And many feminists, by the way, have done this. | ||
| There's a different strain of feminism that I love, which has been called sex-positive feminism or independent feminism. | ||
| So that's sort of more the Christina Hoff Sommers. | ||
| I know she doesn't focus that much on sex, but more just like, let them do their thing. | ||
| Maybe, yeah. | ||
| So I had a guest on my show, her name's Anna Aerosmith. | ||
| She was a feminist, and she hated pornography. | ||
| She thought it degraded women. | ||
| And then she was walking down the street in Soho in London, which is the red light district basically in London, thinking and watching all these shops full of these videos with sex all over it, and she was turned on by it. | ||
| And she thought, oh, wait a minute, I'm turned on by this. | ||
| But I don't like that, so you know what I'm gonna do? | ||
| I'm gonna make my own porn. | ||
| And so she started making her own porn, she became the biggest female pornographer in the world, and did it on her own terms, and it's all hardcore, there's nothing, she doesn't hold anything back, she just makes it nicer looking, and the men are better looking, etc. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| To me, that's feminism. | ||
| Do it on your own. | ||
| Make your own world, right? | ||
| Instead of worrying constantly about what I want and what I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How unhealthy do you think just having to talk about politics all the time is? | ||
| I don't mean what we're doing right here, so I don't mean for the people that have these conversations about ideas and that, but I mean for the average person that all day long now, because of social media, is harping about every little decision | ||
| that happens in the government. | ||
| It strikes me as it's becoming, it's starting to really rot people's minds or something. | ||
| Like I would argue that a good government is one that's small enough | ||
| that you wouldn't have to talk about it all the time. | ||
| Now there's probably good counter arguments to that, but the idea that people are all day worried about this, | ||
| seems like a real problem. | ||
| Well, so when you say people, you know, I mean, how many people are we talking about? | ||
| Again, I think it's hard to gauge. | ||
| I think it's a lot of people talking to each other, right? | ||
| I think it's a pretty small world that we inhabit or that we observe, right? | ||
| I think most, well, what is it, 25% of Americans are on Twitter. | ||
| Okay, so that's a quarter. | ||
| That's a pretty big chunk. | ||
| But of those, how many just read Katy Perry's feed, right? | ||
| I mean, I think that those who do... Which can be bizarrely political, though, because of doing stuff with Hillary, so... | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But let's say, you know, what's called political Twitter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know, but how many people are there, right? | ||
| And how many people there are just, you know, just checking on the Democratic Party's latest, you know, announcements, right? | ||
| I think it's a pretty small world. | ||
| I'm not too worried about the population in general, but I do think that the world that you and I have chosen to live in It's pretty uncomfortable, and I'd say since the election in particular, it's nearly intolerable. | ||
| So I used to be a Twitter addict, and then since the election, it's actually been really hard. | ||
| It's not been fun to go on Twitter. | ||
| It really almost never is fun. | ||
| It almost always makes me sad or angry, and so I watch it less, you know, and I don't know. | ||
| I think that may be the next phase we're going to go through, that Twitter will become something else, or there will be alternatives to it, and you know, it's just people talking. | ||
| The thing is to just keep going and not, I know it's hard, but to not let the eggs with the five followers get to you. | ||
| They get to me, but we just have to keep going if we want to do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about the amount of time that we're spending on this? | ||
| I think that's really what I meant there. | ||
| Not just the griping, but the amount of time people are worried about these things. | ||
| Like, the broader people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, the thing that I don't like is the policing that goes on. | ||
| It's a constant policing, right? | ||
| You said this, and you shouldn't say that, you shouldn't think this, you shouldn't feel this, you need to check yourself, you need to watch yourself. | ||
| It's all, it's a totalitarian language, which again, by the way, comes out of the Frankfurt School. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Which, you know, their argument was that language is this tool of the oppressor against the oppressed, and so we need to recapture the language and make it our own to bring about revolution. | ||
| That was the Frankfurt School. | ||
| It's a totalitarian impulse. | ||
| It's totalitarian politics. | ||
| It's no fun to be around. | ||
| And I think that's the thing. | ||
| People are just repudiating it sort of tacitly, in that they're playing video games instead. | ||
| They're watching television instead. | ||
| They're not engaging in this discourse. | ||
| You and I are masochists, because we do it. | ||
| Most people are not masochists in that way. | ||
| So that's, to me, the cause for hope. | ||
| Yeah, it's so funny because I enjoy 90% of this. | ||
| There is that 10% of just, you know, when people are maliciously misquoting me or writing things that are blatantly not true. | ||
| The rest of the interaction I can basically deal with and I do love the battle of ideas. | ||
| But believe me, I hear you. | ||
| There's like an unspoken thing that we can do here that I can't quite quantify in words. | ||
| So I'm curious, so all this being said, You have an interesting mixed match of politics and culture and all that stuff. | ||
| Is there anyone in politics right now that you like, that you go, well, this guy kind of gets it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Meaning like electoral politics? | ||
| Yeah, just anyone right now. | ||
| Or who in the public space in general? | ||
| Is there anyone? | ||
| In electoral politics, there's no one. | ||
| I mean, I thought Trump was interesting in these ways. | ||
| He was at least raising these questions for the first time. | ||
| I mean, I can't stand most of what he's for in terms of policy, but he was raising these questions for the first time, so I got to talk about them. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| Thank you for the opportunity. | ||
| Now leave office, or just please don't do anything when you're in office. | ||
| This is the best thing. | ||
| No, in electoral politics, there's no one because they are part of the machine, or at least they want to be part of the machine. | ||
| So being part of the machine means making yourself a cog. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Uninteresting. | ||
| Uninteresting to me. | ||
| There are very few cultural radicals left. | ||
| There are a few sort of sex radicals. | ||
| There's like three. | ||
| You know, I find them interesting. | ||
| You know, people who say, yeah, we should talk about sex. | ||
| We should be able to express our desires openly. | ||
| It's better. | ||
| Sex is a good thing. | ||
| Sex is not a bad... | ||
| They almost don't exist. | ||
| The 60s had that. | ||
| The New Left and the counterculture had some people there who were quite interesting in that way, but they're gone and it's very sad. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| there's this writer, I forget what he writes for even, but I don't know if you saw this thing | ||
| where he took a screen capture of his screen and one of his tabs had hentai porn on it, | ||
| which I guess it's like octopus porners, I don't know, some cartoon porn, but he's a lefty, | ||
| so all these people on this right, anything goes over here, they were all attacking him | ||
| and I was like, do you guys not see the irony in what you're doing here? | ||
| It wasn't illegal what he was doing, it was some odd thing, you know? | ||
| But I thought you guys are the free being, you know, alt-righties. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the left, I would imagine, would attack him too. | ||
| I mean, they have in the past, right? | ||
| Because that's the objectification of women, so we can't have that. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's not fun. | ||
| So, in terms of... | ||
| Yeah, no, I guess it's sort of my mission to kind of bring back that kind of, and it is left-wing. | ||
| Here's part of my politics, too. | ||
| It's like that sort of left cultural radicalism back into political discourse, which just doesn't exist, really. | ||
| So when you say left cultural radicalism, you actually do mean freedom in that context. | ||
| It doesn't sound like something that's of the modern left now, but that's what you're talking about. | ||
| You're talking about real great art. | ||
| You're talking about great comedy, all of those things, right? | ||
| I'm talking about Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. | ||
| You talked about stand-up comics. | ||
| Those are my heroes. | ||
| Those are my original heroes. | ||
| Richard Pryor is my original hero because he did that. | ||
| He said what you're not supposed to say. | ||
| He said what you're not supposed to say. | ||
| That's what great comedy is. | ||
| That's what makes us laugh. | ||
| And that's what makes them so brilliant. | ||
| And yeah, I don't know if that's lost, but it's certainly being challenged. | ||
| Oh, it's just being squeezed. | ||
| Lenny Bruce went to prison for that. | ||
| And so do we want to return to that? | ||
| Do we want to put comedians in jail for saying things you're not supposed to say? | ||
| Not doing things you're not supposed to do, saying things you're not supposed to think, giving voice to the taboo, giving voice to the forbidden. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| Shouldn't we have that? | ||
| Imagine what would be happening if George Carlin, who would be 80 years old right now, was still trying to go to college campuses. | ||
| They'd be screaming about this old white man who's saying all of these things. | ||
| This is a massive problem. | ||
| That's why, by the way, I was so... | ||
| Dispirited I guess by Bill Maher's apology because everyone knows he's not racist So I'm not saying that I'm gonna sit here and want to use that word if it bothers people of course Speech has consequences. | ||
| I understand that but the apology struck me as man, of course A comedian who's been the hero of the left has to now bow to them. | ||
| This strikes me as a major problem. | ||
| Okay, you ready to get into more trouble, Dave? | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Okay, so nigger is arguably the most important word in American history. | ||
| If we don't use that word, we're not serious about understanding American history. | ||
| We're not serious about understanding this culture. | ||
| You can be an anti-racist or a racist or anything, but if you don't talk about that word and use that word the way it's been used in history, To hurt people, not as an epithet, but to simply refer to it, right? | ||
| We can't do that. | ||
| We're not grown-ups here. | ||
| We're not being serious about ideas, about history, about our culture, about America. | ||
| We can't understand it. | ||
| And that's really what it is. | ||
| It's avoiding these ideas rather than hitting them head-on. | ||
| People talk about slavery as if they know anything. | ||
| They don't know anything about slavery. | ||
| They just know that it was wrong and there was whippings all day long and it was nothing but rape and torture. | ||
| Having never read a thing about the history of slavery, it's the same thing, right? | ||
| It's when you moralize, right, about ideas, that is anti-intellectual. | ||
| That is saying, oh, this thing is outside the realm of discourse. | ||
| This is outside the realm of inquiry. | ||
| It's anti-intellectual and it's lazy. | ||
| And, I would say, it leads to things that are worse. | ||
| It leads to things like Donald Trump. | ||
| Because you are repressing, again, these ideas, and there are people who just won't be repressed, and they're going to come back, and they're going to say, yeah, you're playing identity politics, you're saying there's blackness and whiteness and you're black and I'm white, well, okay, fine, now I'm going to say I'm about whiteness and being white. | ||
| So that's the problem there. | ||
| I mean, it's a very bad thing to avoid. | ||
| We have to use these words. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting because I've heard people make that argument. | ||
| I saw my friend Michael Shermer make that argument about that you're just creating an identity politics of white people. | ||
| And I saw him get into a fight with some leftist professor on Twitter. | ||
| And by the way, I offered her an opportunity to come here and defend her ideas. | ||
| She declined. | ||
| But I so obviously see that. | ||
| But it also leads to all sorts of other cultural rot Because by taking the word out of Huck Finn, well now you, well, that was a book that's, it's not only stood the test of time, but now you're altering the original meaning. | ||
| Not to mention that Huck Finn was anti-racist. | ||
| The book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which, as Bill Maher, has been anti-racist. | ||
| But the point needs to be made that if it were racist, we still have to use the word, right? | ||
| Not as an epithet, again, not the way the racists used the word, but we have to be able to talk about the racism. | ||
| We're not, here's the terrible irony, is that By not being allowed to use that word, we are not allowed to talk about racism. | ||
| We're not allowed to study it, think about it, take it seriously, right? | ||
| It's like in Germany, you're not allowed to basically talk about Nazism unless you just sort of moralize it really quickly. | ||
| Wouldn't you rather, as a Jew or an anti-Nazi, wouldn't you rather study it really hard, really closely, if you don't want to return to that? | ||
| Yeah, well it's why, I mean, as a free speech guy, it's why I'm completely against the laws that, you know, criminalize Holocaust denial, because they're not gonna stop denying it, they're just gonna go into their secret little places, and I'd rather have all this effectively over. | ||
| There are more real Nazis in Germany than in the United States, where we are allowed to talk about it. | ||
| But okay, so you said the word. | ||
| Now I know a certain amount of people are gonna be angry at you because I have not said the word while sitting here with you right this second. | ||
| You know that there's a certain cost there, you know what I mean? | ||
| And you've just sort of shifted past that. | ||
| You've made your sort of philosophical point and now it's just... | ||
| Yeah, and so I would just say, listen to what I say after the word, because I very clearly put forward why we should use that word, and I'm pretty sure what I said was anti-racist. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Anti-racist, that anti-racism requires using the word nigger. | ||
| And that's why all this has been flipped. | ||
| So then at Evergreen State, to bring us back to 40 minutes ago, at Evergreen State, you have a professor, Brett Weinstein, Who was being anti-racist, and now he is smeared a racist. | ||
| So I guess that's what it is. | ||
| When you don't deal with the truth honestly, you end up having to destroy anyone who even gets close to it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Evergreen is not a good look, I would say. | ||
| I don't know if you want to go into this too much, but there's a lot that's not said about what causes this craziness on campuses. | ||
| Which is that, you know, there's a monopoly that no one talks about. | ||
| No one's even aware of this. | ||
| In fact, I wasn't even aware of it until recently. | ||
| The Department of Education and the federal government authorizes accreditation agencies Accreditation agencies accredit colleges and universities, and they have all these rules. | ||
| You can't just become a college. | ||
| You have to have all these things in place for them to accredit you. | ||
| Without accreditation, the world doesn't take you seriously. | ||
| Employers don't take you seriously. | ||
| The credentialing is crucial to this. | ||
| It's the federal government at the head of this whole thing, of this monopoly that they have, right? | ||
| Then on top of that, there's another monopoly within it, which is tenure, the tenure system, right? | ||
| So after seven years, if you're lucky and you're good and you follow the rules and you say the right things, you get tenure and you're there forever. | ||
| Now, who do you think you're going to hire once you have tenure? | ||
| Someone who is contrary to your ideas or someone who might agree with you? | ||
| Someone who makes you look good or someone who challenges you? | ||
| Hence, we have this uniformity of opinion in academia, which is supported, defended, bolstered by this federal government, state-enforced monopoly. | ||
| No one knows this. | ||
| That's what's going on here. | ||
| Third thing, last thing, you add to this, this system of affirmative action, which brings people onto campus who, according to the rules of affirmative action, have less training in academic work than other kids. | ||
| So when they get there, of course it's going to be more difficult for them to do the academic work. | ||
| Also, it has been stated the purpose of diversity and affirmative action is to have these people represent their race. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so imagine how crazy that would make you feel in a classroom when you're like one black kid or one whatever kid or two black kids out of 30 and everybody knows why you're there. | ||
| And you're supposed to represent your race and people are wondering, assuming that you don't have the credentials that they do. | ||
| That would make me crazy, too. | ||
| And so almost everything that's been said in the race discourse on campuses over the last three years has been, to me, fraudulent or hysterical, and much of it has been totalitarian, by the way. | ||
| But I think there is something at the bottom of it that's legitimate. | ||
| There's a legitimate grievance that African-American students have on colleges that's not addressed. | ||
| The tools they have to talk about this are only Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Malcolm X and, you know, Bull Connor and oppression and slavery. | ||
| So that's the way they talk about it. | ||
| And that's unfortunate, and that's the fault of their professors. | ||
| We need to give them language to be able to talk about what's really going on, which is not good. | ||
| It's not fun for them. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I absolutely get that it could feel oppressive. | ||
| Really, that word is the word I would use if I were them. | ||
| But it's not the oppression they're talking about. | ||
| There is no physical threat to them. | ||
| There never has been. | ||
| That's so interesting because I referenced my interview with Jason Whitlock earlier, but he said something to that effect, that basically the oppression is different now and you have to then change tactics. | ||
| You can't be doing Fighting the way that, say, a Jesse Jackson or a Al Sharpton is, using the language of the old thing when there's a whole different system in play right now, where you could get more natural allies. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm only talking about academia, okay? | ||
| I'm not talking about being a 19-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri. | ||
| That's a different ballgame entirely. | ||
| I'm talking about academia. | ||
| I know that world very well. | ||
| Those are the rules of the world, and that's what happens to these black kids. | ||
| They're plucked out of these neighborhoods, put in these classrooms, and said, oh, go ahead, represent your race. | ||
| We're gonna pay you to do that. | ||
| Well, that's going to make you crazy. | ||
| It's what I call racial liberalism. | ||
| It's this idea of the representative race and the idea that we will give them the chance to prove themselves that they can be just like us. | ||
| So there's an assimilationist impulse in there, too, or an assimilationist expectation. | ||
| We're going to show the world that these black people can be just like us, which, by the way, is kind of white supremacist in a way, right? | ||
| Because they're saying, well, our world, of course, is the best one. | ||
| Harvard, of course, is the best place to be. | ||
| That's incredibly elitist and superior and probably white supremacist because Harvard, of course, is historically a very white institution. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So just let people do what they want to do. | ||
| We don't have to expect them to go to Harvard. | ||
| All right, well, I suspect we're going to do this again, but I want to ask you one final thing, and I think it's sort of been a through line to what you're talking about. | ||
| I sense sort of like an alternate, there's sort of a world weariness to you, and then also like a total sense of opportunity. | ||
| Do you think these things are in 50-50 with you? | ||
| Because I have a lot of that, too. | ||
| I worry about the state of the world, what is going to happen to the Western world and society and all these trends that I talk about that I think are so dangerous. | ||
| And yet, I could never do this if I didn't have optimism and care about the ideas. | ||
| So I sense that constantly in battle. | ||
| Where are your percentages? | ||
| Where do you get all that to get out of bed and do what you do? | ||
| People are wealthier than ever before. | ||
| There is less poverty in the world than ever before. | ||
| And so I'm very optimistic about that going forward. | ||
| I constantly worry about war. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I mean, you know, World War II was not that long ago. | ||
| Vietnam wasn't that long ago. | ||
| Millions of people died in that war. | ||
| That could happen literally at any minute, you know, thinking about the Middle East and these new coalitions that are forming right now. | ||
| We have the Sunni side with the Saudis and the U.S. | ||
| and Israel against the Shia side with Iran and Syria and Russia. | ||
| And if Turkey makes its decision to go with the Shia, which it very well might because of the Kurds, then look what we have there. | ||
| We have two huge military alliances Potentially fighting each other, that's terrifying to me. | ||
| So, I'm always worried about war, I always will be, so long as there are militaries, and there probably will be. | ||
| But, so I'm split, I don't know what to say. | ||
| You know what, I'm okay with ending a show on I Don't Know What To Say. | ||
| That's the difference between this show and most other shows. | ||
| As long as you're okay ending that way. | ||
| Very okay. | ||
| All right, very good. | ||
| Well, for more on Thaddeus, check him out on the Twitter, although he's not on the Twitter that much, but he'll jump on for ya. | ||
| It's at Thaddeus Russell, and thanks for watching. |
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