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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
All right, we obviously have to talk about gun control this week. | ||
Over the course of my many Rubin Report interviews, I've sat across from an array of people who are pro-gun rights, anti-gun altogether, or somewhere in between. | ||
While the events surrounding the gun conversation are always horrific, with this week's tragic events in Vegas being perhaps the worst of all of them. | ||
I believe that the conversation around guns, when done right, can offer powerful insight into how people think about society at large. | ||
Gun ownership and the right to bear arms brings up issues about the American Constitution, states' rights, personal responsibility, mental health, radicalization, both religious and otherwise, and much more. | ||
Unfortunately, as is so often the case these days, we're seemingly caught between two groups of people, the people who want to ban guns completely and the people who don't want to have any sort of conversation about sensible gun laws. | ||
While I absolutely support the Second Amendment, I at the same time understand and acknowledge that the United States has what seems to be a unique problem related to mass gun violence. | ||
Lost in the midst of all the awful events of Las Vegas this week are other senseless shootings across the country, like the 5 people killed and 30 others wounded by gunfire in Chicago this past weekend. | ||
The weekend before that, 3 were killed and 36 were wounded in Chicago, and the weekend before that, it was 11 dead and 29 wounded in the very same city. | ||
We've included a link down below which tracks the gun related violence across Chicago occurring every single weekend, and it's disturbing to say the least. | ||
I bring up Chicago not to deflect from the events in Las Vegas, but to show how this murderous violence is happening in one of our biggest cities literally every single day, and happening so often at this point that the mainstream media has all but given up on reporting on it. | ||
The reasons behind how and why people murder others also makes it hard to find one law around guns that works in every situation. | ||
There, no doubt, is a difference between a murder that occurs during a robbery, versus gang violence, versus terrorism, versus suicides, versus a random shooter with no known political or religious motive. | ||
And at the same time, there are times when someone with a gun saves innocent lives during a shootout, or when someone defends their property and their family by having a gun in the home. | ||
So again, while I support the Second Amendment, I also recognize that we undoubtedly have a gun related violence problem on our hands. | ||
Just look at the numbers. | ||
I can also acknowledge that guns in and of themselves aren't the only problem here. | ||
Without question, much of the carnage caused by guns is due to people with mental health issues gaining access to guns. | ||
The truth is that if I or most of the gun owners in America had access to the most deadly weapons on earth, We wouldn't be randomly using those weapons against innocent people. | ||
Not only are mental health issues an aspect to the people who are committing mass shootings, but also there is a problem with any ideology which drives people to commit these heinous acts, be it a religious ideology, a political ideology, or any other system of principles or beliefs which could drive someone to kill. | ||
A weapon in and of itself can't kill anyone, it takes a human being and a corrupt thought process to pull the trigger and kill innocent people. | ||
Also, as I'm recording this, it's still unclear exactly what weapons were used in Vegas, but authorities report to finding about 20 other firearms in the shooter's hotel room, and it's possible that this man was using a military style fully automatic rifle to commit this heinous act. | ||
For all the defense I've offered of the Second Amendment, I cannot see how access to such weapons, which have the ability to mow down civilians at an incredible rate and which are designed for the battlefield, should be in the hands of regular citizens. | ||
As we post this video, the story about the Vegas gunman is largely incomplete. | ||
At the moment, we don't seem to know his motives, so it's hard to say if this was an act of terrorism under the most specific definition of the term, which includes having a political motivation to kill. | ||
Nevada State's definition is a little more broad, not including the need for a political motivation, which in this case would in fact classify this killer as a terrorist. | ||
Regardless of how we want to define this specific act of horrific violence, or how the gun discussion relates to terrorism, or the legitimate right of every citizen to have the ability to defend themselves, we must get better about talking about gun control between the shootings in order to prevent more shootings and not just talk about it when these acts occur. | ||
Passing more laws in the heat of emotion is rarely the right thing to do, even if they are well intentioned, while doing nothing and hoping that these events will simply end is just as misguided as hoping that terrorism will completely stop if we just ignore it. | ||
While we wait to find out more about the Vegas shooter himself, and at the same time mourn the victims of this evil act, we should also continue to talk to people on both sides of the gun debate to try to come to some sensible place of agreement. | ||
I'm gonna do my best to do just that. | ||
And if you guys know of some interesting voices in this debate that you'd like to hear on the Rubin Report, | ||
let us know in the comment section right down below. | ||
We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week. | ||
And joining me is a columnist, a media personality and the author of "Dear Reader," | ||
the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il, Michael Malice, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
Hello. | ||
Kim Jong-il, and yet when you see that online, sometimes it looks like Kim Jong-to. | ||
That's true. | ||
Because of the I-L. | ||
That must be very confusing to people. | ||
Uh, only if they're like, you know, IQ of 100 or lower, I guess. | ||
I said to you right before we started, I was doing a little research, and then people see Kim Jong Un, the current one, then you got Un, you got Il, people think it's a two. | ||
You could see why there'd be some language confusion there, I think. | ||
Well, it's also funny when people think Kim is his first name, because that's the family name, and in Asia, they have the last name first, and some people refer to him as, like, Lil' Kim. | ||
It's like, that's not it. | ||
Yeah, you could Google Lil' Kim, and a whole There's a ton I want to talk to you about and I'm looking forward to talking about North Korea because I think it's actually one of the countries and from a part of the world that we haven't spent a lot of time. | ||
We talk more about You know, obviously domestic stuff and some Middle East stuff, but we haven't spent that much time in that part of the world. | ||
But first I just want to find out a little more about you. | ||
You have an interesting biography. | ||
You just told me a couple pieces of trivia about yourself that I think are quite interesting. | ||
So for people who have no idea who Michael Malice is, who are you? | ||
Well, that's a broad kind of question. | ||
Who am I? | ||
I'm the boy you love to hate. | ||
Like you said, I'm an author. | ||
I'm on TV, running my big fat mouth frequently. | ||
I host a show on compoundmedia.com. | ||
You're in the Fox family. | ||
I see you on a lot of the Fox business shows. | ||
You know, when I started this North Korea work, it was driving me crazy that there's so many people on TV and in other forms of media who are running their mouths about this country, which is extremely complicated, and they have no idea what they're talking about. | ||
And, you know, quoting Atlas Shrugged, I said, I'm going to put a stop to this once and for all. | ||
And I kind of did. | ||
The conversation has started shifting from, you know, we just need to bomb them into oblivion, to this is a nation of, what is it, 25 million slaves, and our hearts should go out to them, because they are absolute victims of this horrible regime. | ||
You know, I was on an NPR affiliate, it's very funny, and she was referred to Kim Jong-il as a campy figure, and I said, well, that's a very unfortunate choice of words, and she was rendered pretty much suicidal, because again, they have concentration camps, you can see them on Google Earth, so whenever you see the press making North Korea out to be a carnival, this is exactly what I'm against. | ||
Yeah, and that's actually one of the things that I really want to dive into in a little bit, because I find it to be one of those things where anything happens, you know, there's a missile test that now seems to be happening every week or whatever else, The amount of people, and again, you can't pay too much attention to what's happening on Twitter, but just the amount of misinformation, confusion, joking about extremely serious things when people have no idea what the consequences are, all that. | ||
There's just a whole series of- Yeah, I was on a radio show this week, and the hosts were just cracking jokes about North Korea, and I wasn't having it, and he's like, oh, you gotta let me have my jokes. | ||
I go, it's like North Korean missiles, you gotta make sure that they land. | ||
So, the book is humorous, because I'm like, if you can make people laugh about this situation, you can get them to understand the darkness, because otherwise it's too intense. | ||
You know, there's this amazing book called Nothing to Envy, and you read it and you want to jump out of a window, because we're so powerless to help these people. | ||
But at the same time, I think it's important to understand both North Korea specifically, and generally how totalitarian governments work, and what that means in practice. | ||
You know, I was born in the Soviet Union, so this is something that hits very close to home for me. | ||
Yeah, so, alright, before we dive fully into that, you mentioned right before we started, and you just referenced Ayn Rand, you mentioned that you have her, did you say it's her first print, first copy of the Fountainhead? | ||
I have Ayn Rand's copy of the first edition of the Fountainhead, yes. | ||
That seems like it doesn't even exist. | ||
You somehow have it. | ||
I also have the dress she was buried in. | ||
No, I'm kidding. | ||
No, but I do have that book. | ||
I mean, I'm a book collector. | ||
I've got every book she's ever written and I stopped after a while because now with self-publishing people can write books about her and they're not worth reading, but to a point I had every book written by and about her. | ||
I mean, she was a huge influence influence on me, but at the same time, | ||
I don't often like talking about it because for a certain percentage of the population, | ||
higher than 10%, less than 50%, saying you like Ayn Rand takes the mental space | ||
of saying you're a Scientologist. | ||
Most people just check out, they think it's a cult, and there's something to that. | ||
So I mean, I'm very kind of wary of getting into the whole Ayn Rand stuff. | ||
Yeah, it's so interesting to me because I've been doing some work with the Ayn Rand people, | ||
and mostly we're just promoting free speech on college campuses, and I found them to be | ||
some of the most open, decent, protecting the things that I care about, | ||
Sure. - Free speech and all of those things. | ||
And yet I know for sure, and there are people I've had on this show that'll say, oh, Ayn Rand this or that, just completely in a dismissive way, and maybe they've got some branding work to do. | ||
One of the things that drives me crazy, and this is maybe my Soviet upbringing, is do not eat your own. | ||
So the kinds of people who go after Rand or Rothbard or any of these other great titans of liberty who had many, many flaws and who did many messed up things, if your agenda is to take down the people who broke down those doors for you, you are, in my view, garbage as a human being. | ||
And it's really reprehensible for me to see. | ||
I mean, the villain is the state, the villain are the people who want to dominate and control free people's lives, and you should always keep that in mind, as opposed to some kind of social posturing. | ||
You know, I really like the way you phrase that, because we see so much bickering, inner bickering with people these days, and all the personal attacks, and all the labels, and all that stuff. | ||
And it's like, you guys all don't have your eyes on the prize here. | ||
What we should be fighting for is freedom. | ||
What we should be fighting for is to expand liberty, all the things that you just mentioned. | ||
And instead we're just like at each other's throats all day with people that have virtually no control over anybody. | ||
And we should be at the throats of people who are sending those to war for no reason, who are sending people to prison for no reason, who are trying to censor free speech for no reason. | ||
They're the villains. | ||
So if you don't like how someone talks or thinks, you judge people by their actions, not by their thoughts. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
All right, well, let's talk about some ideas, then. | ||
So, okay, North Korea. | ||
Yeah, the Juche idea. | ||
What in the world possessed you to go to North Korea? | ||
You even say, I went to North Korea, to people, they think, this guy, something's not right here. | ||
Well, there's a few reasons. | ||
One is, when I got established enough as a writer, I had some money in my pocket, and I thought, I'm gonna travel more, right? | ||
This is something I never allowed myself to do when I was kinda struggling, and North Korea was first on my list. | ||
First of all, you have party cred, because you can always tell people you've never been. | ||
It's the new Milan. | ||
Yeah, yeah, that's very impressive. | ||
They're like, oh, we went to Sonoma this summer while I was in North Korea. | ||
I saw grimness at its most real. | ||
But also, you know, you get older, people want to see what their family went through. | ||
And for me, the only time capsule of Soviet Russia is, you know, North Korea. | ||
It's the closest. | ||
so and i also wanted to see what it's like it's the only country of internet | ||
access you know access the outside world my friend had gone and it's it was it was until recently | ||
legal to go so and i wanted to do a book about it because it's it's | ||
such a fascinating uh... country and i thought to myself look | ||
we have a pretty good here if i move the needle in america it's not gonna matter | ||
but if i move the needle in north korea even a little bit this could be saving | ||
you know millions of lives and yet the pompous thing to do but i'd rather shoot | ||
for the moon and this then you know kind of like have some kind of | ||
marginal tax cut here although i would like to believe that you can move the | ||
needle here and it would still have | ||
Sure, absolutely. | ||
Otherwise, why would any of us do what we do, right? | ||
Fair, that's fair. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Let's just pause for a second. | ||
So tell me a little bit more about Soviet Russia, because I don't want to gloss over that. | ||
So you were born there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
When did you and your family leave? | ||
We came here when I was two. | ||
But you know, you grow up in a Soviet household. | ||
It's funny, as you get older, talking to Americans, realizing, oh, this is not how everyone is raised. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
And how much programming I have in my head as a result of how I grew up. | ||
And it's just fascinating. | ||
We all think of our families as the norm, and then you go to college and you grow up and you're like, oh no, this is just my family that's messed up. | ||
And for me, it's not just my family, it's this whole culture. | ||
Yeah, well, everyone's family is messed up just to different degrees and about different things. | ||
What's it like growing up? | ||
So, okay, you came here too, so you obviously don't remember what it was like to be in the Soviet Union, but with parents that lived through that and then come here as immigrants, what was that experience like? | ||
English is my second language, and the first thing they did was send me to private school, because they knew that public schools would be the death of me, which I'm very, very grateful for. | ||
But there's just so many little idiosyncrasies, like, you know, Russia is a no-trust society. | ||
So you kind of have this paranoia built into your head, which, frankly, when you're dealing in entertainment or media, it's useful to have. | ||
You're prepared for that person to kind of screw you over, but also the fact that most people in life are generally incompetent. | ||
So if you have these backup plans for when someone messes up intentionally or not, it kind of behooves you well in business. | ||
At the same time, it's hard for making personal relationships because you're paranoid and assuming everyone's out to get you. | ||
A no-trust society is an interesting phrase, and I sense we're sort of veering to that right now in America. | ||
That there is just a basic sense that, first off, yeah, you barely trust the people that you're getting information from, but it's not even that. | ||
We're also having trouble agreeing on facts, which I think is a much more dangerous thing. | ||
Oh, in fact, I think that's a very healthy thing. | ||
Because I think what we need to do is self-segregate. | ||
We already start to self-segregate by ideology. | ||
We've been having these same arguments since the French Revolution. | ||
I don't want to argue anymore. | ||
I want you to go your way. | ||
We'll go our way. | ||
And everyone will be the better for it. | ||
Interesting. | ||
So you don't think, if we disagree politically on certain things, you kind of want to let each faction just go its own way, as opposed to try to get something together? | ||
Oh yeah, the best thing about Trump for me is that he's increasingly making political discourse impossible. | ||
Because when you have political discourse, that can only mean oppression. | ||
Because that can only mean when both parties get together, it's going to be at the expense of freedom. | ||
So when you see, for example, it's unfolding as we're taping this right now, so when we air this, we'll see which way it has gone. | ||
When you see Trump working with the Democrats then on something like DACA, you view that as sort of a, this can't be good in the end? | ||
Correct, it can't be good, but I don't know that it's gonna play out exactly like it seems, because Trump has been very good at pulling the rug out from people and humiliating him, and he's been a great wrecking ball in terms of bringing disapproval and distaste toward the political process. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So as someone that grew up with parents from the former Soviet Union and went through all this stuff and understands this trust issue, I sense you're basically a Trump guy, right? | ||
No, I'm an anarchist. | ||
I mean, I think these people should all be in jail, but I think it's great that he is- You're giving me a lot here. | ||
I'm going to have to have a chart right under this thing I could fill. | ||
No, here's an example of how the Soviet upbringing really helped me. | ||
This thing with that guy from Google, James... James Damore. | ||
James Damore, yeah. | ||
When people were shocked how it played out, I'm like, it was mind-boggling to me that people were naive enough to be surprised there'd be any other consequence. | ||
When you have that mindset, you know the essential Soviet thought is, if someone has power over you, arbitrary power, you should assume that they're going to exploit it. | ||
Completely unfairly and arbitrarily, and always be aware of who has—for example, I have a landlord, and there's a problem with my sink, and my friends are like, why don't you tell him, you know, and say—you know, make a fuss about it. | ||
I go, what he's just going to do is fix the sink, let's say it costs $200, and just raise my rent by $200. | ||
They're like, well, he can't do that. | ||
I'm like, he can. | ||
When people have power over you, they will use that power. | ||
And I think it's very naive for many Americans to think that, you know, politicians are in any way beholden to you or care about you in any way, whereas for them, you're just a resource to exploit. | ||
Interesting. | ||
So on the D'Amour front, so if it played out exactly as you expected, do you think that there's a net good or bad by what happened? | ||
In other words, so I had him on the show, he was on Joe Rogan's show, he got a lot of press, and I think when he gets some of those ideas out there, I think that's actually a net good for society. | ||
But you think the process is just obvious. | ||
What's gonna happen? | ||
This guy went against the narrative, and of course this is what's gonna happen. | ||
The net good—and Trump has done this very well—is getting the veneer of civility to be exposed from the evangelical left and showing that, yeah, they will be nice if they need to, but they have no problem being very nasty if they want to. | ||
And the more that is exposed, the more the sneering, the literal violence, the calls for—I mean, these people would be glad to have gulags if they had their way. | ||
So the more that is exposed in this veneer of respectability that people in suits in Washington have, that is, to me, is the best good that came out of this. | ||
I think that's the first time anyone's said the evangelical left. | ||
We usually go regressive left, I've heard control left, alt left, all that other stuff. | ||
But it's interesting because it does have a, as some of my guests have said, Peter Boghossian, that this sort of postmodernist leftist stuff, that there's a secular religion Well, I always say that progressivism is Christianity without the mythology. | ||
So, they don't believe in a Christ figure, but they definitely have means of redemption, they definitely think systemic racism is conceptually identical to original sin. | ||
You know, I'm writing a book on the New Right, this is all laid out in there, but these are religious people who hate heretics. | ||
And they hate them with the fury of a thousand suns. | ||
And once you realize that, that's their MO. | ||
And I don't mean everyone on the left. | ||
There are plenty of people on the left who are like, we need some welfare, people shouldn't be discriminated against, so on and so forth. | ||
I'm all for that. | ||
I mean people who are like, you can't have your ideas anywhere on earth or even in the future or in outer space in like sci-fi or video games. | ||
That is an evangelical approach. | ||
Yeah, and as we talk about this right now, it's to the backdrop of Ben Shapiro gave his big speech, and look, it basically went off okay. | ||
Yeah, there was some violence. | ||
I guess there were a couple arrests, but the craziness that had to happen beforehand to even get it to happen. | ||
I heard that Berkeley had to put $600,000 worth of security in just to make this thing happen, and that does sort of prove your point. | ||
All Ben did was talk about ideas. | ||
I watched it. | ||
He did not say one bigoted, or racist thing, you may not like his ideas, | ||
you may not like his policies, but of course these are ideas that should be heard. | ||
But I disagree with you because their definition of racist | ||
is that which is not progressive. | ||
So-- | ||
No, so they view it as racist for sure, but in the scheme of reality, | ||
what I would call objective reality, nothing he said was racist. | ||
The thing is, if you are allowing racism to dictate the terms of discourse, | ||
you've already allowing them to establish the rules And this is something Trump has done very effectively, because for years, for decades, racist was this huge term that used to completely destroy people. | ||
That didn't work with him. | ||
So now they've ratcheted it up to white nationalist, white supremacist, Nazi. | ||
All of Trump's children marry Jewish people. | ||
And yet he's told with a strange face that he's a literal Klansman and literally Hitler. | ||
And he married an immigrant. | ||
And he married an immigrant, yeah, who's beautiful. | ||
So the more that they have to say things that are ridiculous on their face, the healthier it is for our country. | ||
Yeah, all right, so taking this back, because I can see you've got a consistent line of thinking here. | ||
Well, thank you. | ||
Taking this back, from what I can see so far, but give me a chance here. | ||
Okay. | ||
Taking this back to your family and coming from the Soviet Union, How much of this was always built in? | ||
Like, did they have their wake up to power? | ||
Like, when you guys got here, were they immediately like, oh, we understand what living under that was like? | ||
Or did they suddenly, then they were in freedom, the freedoms of the West, and then started realizing what it was like over there? | ||
Oh no, it's the same thing, just sliced differently. | ||
I was on a BBC radio show, this was 10 years ago, and I just repeated something that my father said about the police, which I won't do here, and the host kind of... | ||
He audibly gasped and said, this is a family show. | ||
So the perception of authority when you're coming from that background as opposed to America is very, very different. | ||
And it was kind of shocking to me to see, I just did recently, just did grand jury duty, and to see how easily people fall into like the Milgram experiment, this idea that authority can be bestowed and we should be subservient to someone else for any reason whatsoever, is something that's very alien to my upbringing and my thinking. | ||
How did they let you on a grand jury? | ||
Did they ask you anything? | ||
I explicitly said, I'm an anarchist and I will not vote to indict under any circumstances. | ||
And they said, too bad you're on the grand jury. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
I worked that grand jury like nobody's business. | ||
It was beautiful. | ||
I can't talk about it legally, but let's just say that if you have, one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of democracy, if you have one smart person and a group of people who don't have much principles at all, it's very easy for that one person to lead the herd. | ||
Yeah, off the record, maybe later, you'll have to tell me some of that stuff. | ||
But that's an incredible indictment of our criminal justice system. | ||
If you can literally walk into the grand jury and say, guys, I'm an anarchist, I don't believe in any of this, this is all nonsense, and they're going, yeah, get going. | ||
Yeah, and I made those assistant DAs look very, very upset. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Why would they want you? | ||
Why would they have agreed? | ||
They need to have bodies. | ||
They just need bodies. | ||
They need to fill those 20 whatever slots. | ||
Yeah. | ||
How far does your anarchism go? | ||
To the core. | ||
What do you mean? | ||
I mean, really, like, you would deconstruct the government altogether? | ||
Well, I would say there's nothing to deconstruct. | ||
This is the endless debate, I think, between libertarians and the people that are further to the right. | ||
Like, what's the point? | ||
Are we talking, okay, no more driver's licenses, and then are we talking about, you know, private courts and everything else? | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, absolutely. | |
So, it's not a function of deconstructing government per se, so much as atheists don't want to kill God, right? | ||
If you said an atheist wants to kill God, that doesn't make any sense. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
So it's more the idea that the idea of government is itself illegitimate. | ||
Every criticism that Bernie Sanders and all these other people have of corporations are true. | ||
But the biggest corporation is the government, which has government schools, which teaches you that it's a good thing that this corporation can steal, what, 40% of your income, and you should be grateful for it, and it can provide you crappy quality products and make you feel unsafe, and then the only answer is more things that'll make you feel unsafe. | ||
That concept, I don't understand how people don't get, because this idea that what I hear Bernie and the rest of these guys complain about is the government. | ||
They complain about, obviously, private companies and all that, and big corporations, but then there's always this, the government's corrupt, everything's corrupt, we're all corrupt and evil, blah, blah, blah, give us more money, make us bigger. | ||
Well, it's also that this filthy, moth-eaten hippie Bernie Sanders, to watch him defending the CIA, which is like the bête noire of the hippie movement, was mind-boggling, but also shows the tribal mindset that anyone who is on our side is good, and anyone who is against us in the moment is bad. | ||
You remember during the Obama years, we had this whole honeymoon with Putin. | ||
You know, Russians are our friend now. | ||
Cold War is an embarrassment of the past. | ||
Mitt Romney, you're so stupid, and the 1980s called, and now Putin is literally Hitler. | ||
I have not heard one reason in the press why Putin is supposed to be hated, other than his interests are not aligned with ours, which applies to every country on Earth. | ||
Right. | ||
So do you think that Russia was involved in the election in any way? | ||
Or, you know, every day there's another story about this. | ||
They generally get hit down after about two weeks. | ||
I don't know and I don't really care because, I mean, everyone tried to stop Trump. | ||
I mean, didn't he have, like, literally no newspaper endorsements? | ||
You had organizations that didn't endorse anyone in 150 years. | ||
I think that Trump daily supported him. | ||
unidentified
|
What do you make of that? | |
I think it was the Trump Weekly or whatever it was. | ||
But I mean, you remember-- | ||
The Daily Trump. | ||
You remember how quickly it went from Russia, Russia, Russia to Charlottesville, Charlottesville, Charlottesville. | ||
So it's only a matter of what weapon will we have to defeat our opposition. | ||
Yeah, what do you make of that? | ||
Just that sort of endless parade of, we focus on this for three days. | ||
We're all outraged about that. | ||
Then we literally forget about it and we move on to some other outrage, | ||
usually sparked by someone we've never heard of in a place we don't care. | ||
and then now we're gonna just endlessly focus on that. | ||
That's one of the reasons I like the left better than conservatives and consider conservatism the vilest of all political philosophies, because they think you can sit down with these people and have some kind of meeting of the minds, and then you're going to come out with some kind of agreement in the middle. | ||
Whereas, as you said, every three days the story's changed. | ||
These people are not playing some kind of fair game. | ||
They're engaged in war. | ||
And, you know, if you're on the right, you shouldn't be for unilateral disarmament. | ||
This was a motif of the far left. | ||
So that's interesting. | ||
So you like them more because you respect a certain authenticity about it. | ||
Even if you don't like the ideas, you like that there's a sort of realness to the game or something. | ||
And they appreciate culture, which conservatives often do not, and do not understand where culture comes from. | ||
I mean, I live in Brooklyn, and I live in Brooklyn for a reason. | ||
So I think the left exploits Many very good ideas and principles that people have to a very unhealthy degree. | ||
Yeah. | ||
What do you mean you live in Brooklyn for a reason? | ||
Meaning that it is cultured, I think. | ||
It's culturally left! | ||
I mean, it's very left-wing, and though I don't agree necessarily with people politically, culturally this whole idea of, you know, having diversity of idea, diversity of expression, and all these other things is just absolutely wonderful. | ||
Now, it's not for everyone, and if you don't like it, that's perfectly fine. | ||
I'm not going to judge you for it like most of my colleagues will. | ||
But at the same time, you have to appreciate, the left has its power for a reason. | ||
It's not just getting ability out of nowhere, it's taking it from something. | ||
So it's focusing on the cultural stuff, so the Hollywood stuff, the movies. | ||
Right. | ||
All of that stuff. | ||
It's interesting, you said, I think you said, conservatives have no culture. | ||
Right. | ||
But, I mean, I think that was a little bit of a hyperbole, right? | ||
No. | ||
Not none? | ||
I don't think conservatives are capable of creating culture whatsoever. | ||
Really? | ||
Yes. | ||
unidentified
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Interesting. | |
I'll even tell you a story. | ||
Can you see my shoes? | ||
I can. | ||
I'm guessing they were not made by a conservative. | ||
Well, that's my point. | ||
I was in the green room and a prominent conservative, who I won't name, looked at them and he's like, | ||
"What are you wearing?" | ||
And it's not like I had like octopus wrapped around my feet. | ||
It's just newsprint print. | ||
And he's seen newsprint, he's seen shoes. | ||
Maybe it's a little weird, but he couldn't wrap his head around it. | ||
So much of conservatism is based on this aversion of, if this is new and I haven't seen it before, I don't like it. | ||
Which is why so much of conservatives like crappy TV, like I Don't Know How I Met Your Mother, because they take innovative ideas, corporations do, digest them, and excrete them in ways that these people can find palatable. | ||
And to me, that's just the nadir of culture. | ||
That's interesting, you know, you probably saw a little bit about, you know, Tim Allen's show that's been on these last couple years. | ||
I haven't. | ||
Last Man Standing. | ||
Okay. | ||
Was a sort of, you know, standard sitcom, you know, not too far from what Home Improvement was, his main show. | ||
But he played a conservative in it, and all the jokes were conservative jokes. | ||
So they were mocking the atheist son, and they would make global warming jokes and stuff. | ||
and I watched it a couple of times, and I was like, this isn't the funniest thing | ||
I've ever seen. | ||
Generally, these sitcoms are pretty old, and it feels like you're watching something | ||
from another time. | ||
But that being said, I was like, oh, they're at least doing something reverse | ||
of what you're being pushed at all the time. | ||
And I was like, there's something at least good there. | ||
And of course, then it was canceled, and perhaps because it was-- | ||
But any comedian will tell you, he wants laughs and not applause. | ||
So much of leftist comedy is based on, and again, this is leftism at its worst, is based on, I think you're funny because I agree with you. | ||
That's not how humor works. | ||
Humor works if I think you're funny because you made a connection that I haven't. | ||
Yeah, that's got to be much worse, right? | ||
I mean, we've talked about that a bunch on the show, the leftist comics these days. | ||
Well, 90% of any artistry in any field is always going to be garbage. | ||
I mean, 90% of podcasts are terrible, 90% of comedians are terrible, 90% of books are terrible. | ||
In fact, when I started becoming an author, I read this amazing book by Dennis Johnson called Jesus' Son. | ||
I didn't realize he was a poet, and it made me distraught. | ||
I'm never going to be able to write this well. | ||
Yeah, I'm like I don't have to write as well as him I could write as well as me and when I tell people how to get into writing I go look at how many crappy books are out there That could be you you could be that mediocre author and when you put in those terms people find it aspirational I'm in the middle of writing my first book. | ||
Oh, that's a wonderfully That's a very powerful statement right there. | ||
I mean, every day I look at it and I'm like, man, this is crap, and then three hours later I like it and then I chew it again. | ||
Don't edit as you write. | ||
Is that how you're making that mistake? | ||
I've started controlling myself because I have enough friends, many whose books are right here, that have said to me, don't edit as you write. | ||
It's against my nature, you know, but I'm trying. | ||
Writing is not a natural process, even for people who are communicators like us. | ||
It's a very tough, rigorous process that's kind of like nails on a chalkboard, at least for me. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
All right, I do want to go deep on North Korea, but let's just do a little bit more here first because I wasn't intending on going this route, but I'm with you. | ||
Okay, so you start writing and then you start appearing on these TV shows saying what you think, all of this stuff. | ||
It seems like we don't have a lot of people these days who will say what they think with some actual knowledge behind it. | ||
Everyone's saying something. | ||
But to actually have an understanding of what you're talking about. | ||
Do you find that when you're doing a lot of these cable shows? | ||
Because I'll watch some of these things sometimes and I'm like, man, these people don't know what they're talking about. | ||
In their defense, they have to effectively have opinions on everything under the sun. | ||
Like, I didn't know who Tom Brady was, but that night we were going to talk about him and I had to have an opinion on him, right? | ||
You didn't know who Tom Brady was? | ||
No, I did not. | ||
Hey, Gavin didn't even... You like comic books more than football. | ||
Gavin McInnes didn't even know that the Patriots were out of Boston, so I had one up on him. | ||
So, I think that's tough. | ||
I think a lot of people's role—and there's nothing wrong with that—is to be a talking point machine and then to represent their side, because the person at home is like a good Republican, wants to see their good Republican view portrayed on screen. | ||
I think that people are smarter—it's not that they're dumb, but it's very hard to be quick and articulate and informed about anything, so it's a very small pool to draw from, I think. | ||
And a lot of people have told me, and I never thought about it until after I did it, that what I do is their worst nightmare because they're not able to kind of answer questions on the spot. | ||
And I guess for people like us, it's just something that either comes natural or something we learned. | ||
Yeah, it's funny because anytime I do one of these things or when I do a public speaking event or something, I always feel that less preparation. | ||
Of course, I want to know what I'm talking about. | ||
I want to know the topic that I'm giving a speech about or something like that. | ||
But beyond that, less preparation and being able to hear someone when they do it. | ||
I love Q&As because it's like, You thought of something and now I will respond naturally and not in a canned way and yet we watch people on TV all day that it's like we could be watching the same thing that they said three years ago on some other channel. | ||
And as the audience you enjoy the spontaneity. | ||
My favorite thing is when I'm on one of these shows and someone who sees me as humorous therefore thinks I'm a silly clown and they come for me and I just eviscerate them and the person at home knows this wasn't planned, this is off the top of the head and that's my favorite kind of moment. | ||
All right, now we are going to talk about North Korea. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Because you wrote a book, you went there, people don't even believe you can go there. | ||
So let's just start with that. | ||
How does one even go to North Korea? | ||
It used to be legal until very recently. | ||
I saw my friend, he had gone, he was on Facebook, he met a guy in Burning Man who ran the tour company. | ||
Of course. | ||
That's really all you need to say. | ||
Well, I knew a guy at Burning Man. | ||
So they were desperate because they don't produce anything of value, so they're desperate for currency. | ||
So this is one of their mechanisms for doing it. | ||
And there's one flight in and out out of China, or you could take the train out of China, which, you know, as a New Yorker, I take the train enough already. | ||
I was fine with that. | ||
Right. | ||
And you're there for a week, and I mean, I hate all these people who go on a trip and then it changed their life forever and their Facebook is whatever, but I mean, the thing that drives me, that gets to me, is knowing that every single person I met there is still there. | ||
Like every kid I wave to, every old lady on the street, they're all still prisoners of the regime. | ||
Yeah, all right, so let's pause for a second. | ||
So you take a flight to, you flew from New York to China? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And then a flight? | ||
To Pyongyang, yeah. | ||
It's in the last terminal. | ||
It's one flight a day, you know, all the way tucked away in the Beijing airport. | ||
And even though it's illegal to go now, at that, when you went, how many years ago was this? | ||
unidentified
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2012. | |
Okay, so not that long ago, five years ago. | ||
Who was going there? | ||
Like, when you were on the plane, like, what type of people were even going? | ||
It was very international, my tour group. | ||
There were a bunch of Canadians, there was a guy from Belgium, I believe, a girl from Holland. | ||
Yeah, and when you get there, what are the security measures? | ||
like a couple of people from Ireland. | ||
I think this is the kind of people who are like, there's nothing else like this on earth | ||
and let's see it for what it is as opposed to what you're hearing in the press. | ||
Yeah, and when you get there, what are the security measures? | ||
Because obviously they don't take too kindly to outsiders, especially people that may wanna talk about what's going on. | ||
Well, quite the opposite. | ||
When you're there, you're a guest of the government. | ||
So you are treated extremely well. | ||
It was safer there than here because no one can do anything to you because human life means nothing. | ||
And you're there as a resource for the state. | ||
So you are treated very well. | ||
But when you land, at least for me, your whole brain is screaming at you like you don't belong here. | ||
You know, it's this very kind of feeling that's almost impossible to describe. | ||
Yeah, so tell me about your time there. | ||
I mean, I could go, I wrote an article at ForReason.com, ForReason about it, you could look it up, but it's, you know, my whole principle there was to try to break down my guide. | ||
I do a lot of ghostwriting, and when I do that I interview the people, kind of get inside their head, get past the press releases, and I'm like, I'm going to use those techniques in my guide to get her to kind of Let me know what she knows. | ||
And there was this funny moment how they're very quick. | ||
I mean, this is what people don't get. | ||
The North Koreans have a sense of humor. | ||
They're humans in jail. | ||
And they have something there called Cholima, which is a pegasus, which is the symbol of speed. | ||
And I asked my guide, I go, if I could send you anything from the outside world, what do you want me to send you? | ||
And she goes, a Porsche. | ||
And I go, lady, I'm not sending you a Porsche. | ||
I'm not sending you Cholima either. | ||
And she goes, we have the original one here. | ||
What do I need you to send it to me for? | ||
So very, very quick, very, very funny. | ||
And she said she wanted perfume. | ||
And I go, what kind of perfume? | ||
And she was struggling for the words. | ||
And imagine, it's hard for us to describe perfume. | ||
Scent is not something that lends itself to language. | ||
And the word she was looking for is feminine. | ||
And this is someone who's a millionaire. | ||
Interesting. | ||
And she can't buy perfume because they don't have it in the whole country. | ||
And I smuggled the perfume in for her. | ||
But it's, when I was telling her, she had the same haircut my mom had in like 1981. | ||
My mom has jet black straight hair. | ||
And I said, you know, talking to you makes me realize a lot of what my mom went through back in Russia. | ||
And she just stares at me. | ||
She goes, oh, then your mother must have hated Russia. | ||
And it was this very chilling moment. | ||
And yet this is a woman who obviously has a pretty decent job. | ||
Very. | ||
And rich. | ||
Was she a millionaire because of the job? | ||
The poor guy job? | ||
So North Korea has something called Sanban, which is a hierarchy based on your loyalty to the regime. | ||
So to even step foot in Pyongyang, your family has to have a good background, right? | ||
So to be talking to foreigners, you have to be off the charts in terms of your family background. | ||
And one of the people, you know, stayed behind on the tour. | ||
He did solo for a few days, and she told him all she wants to do is travel the world. | ||
And you know, your job is to show tourists around, and you see college kids, you know, and you get to see Like on my tour, America, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, and you know you're never going to be able to go. | ||
Ever. | ||
No matter how much money you have, no matter how much power you have. | ||
In fact, anyone who's a diplomat or something like that who leaves North Korea for any reason, their family has to stay behind as hostages to make sure you don't defect. | ||
Yeah, I mean, that's what a crazy proposition. | ||
It's not crazy, it's brilliant. | ||
I mean, the level of control, as I lay out in my book, this was methodical, that this family got this complete country under their total control. | ||
It was step by step, closing the doors, putting up barriers, hermetically sealing them off from the outside world. | ||
I guess I say crazy in that it's like the crazy level of authoritarianism. | ||
You say brilliant as in not because you like it per se, but because the mechanism that they use to create this power is pretty brilliant. | ||
Oh yeah, and it's so pervasive and it's so much worse than people think, like, oh they just have these crazy ideas about the leaders. | ||
It's much worse than that. | ||
It's so much worse than people realize. | ||
Yeah, so I want to get to some of that, obviously, but for your tour guide, because this is sort of fascinating to me. | ||
So this is a millionaire. | ||
What does that even mean in North Korea if you can't get perfume? | ||
What does that mean to be a millionaire? | ||
What that means, and this is to me the beginning of the end of the North Korean regime, it means you can bribe your way out of trouble. | ||
One of the first things I saw when I landed at the airport, I was looking at the parking lot in the back, and one of the guards stopped some rich lady, and by rich in North Korea she's dressed in 80s clothes, right? | ||
And she's on her cell, and he's basically like, papers please, and she rolled her eyes at him, didn't even look at him, showed him whatever he needed to, and he waved her off. | ||
And as the regime has stopped being able to provide for its citizenry, the corruption has spread throughout the country, which is a great step to bringing down a country which is based on glorifying the government, right? | ||
So now when you're wealthy, you can just pay whoever you want to get whatever you want, and that is a good step towards getting people in North Korea to realize this is all a house of cards. | ||
Yeah, what a fascinating way to look at things. | ||
It's like now the corruption and bribery is the good part because this means that the power is starting to erode. | ||
They can't control it. | ||
And the best argument towards the earnestness of their propaganda, that the Kim family are divine, | ||
essentially, is this cynicism. | ||
And just like here, realizing what we're being presented to as the overwhelming truth is actually a barely, | ||
poorly constructed lie. | ||
Yeah, so to that point, give me some of the, so Kim Jong-il. | ||
Yes. | ||
Who was the leader when you were there. | ||
No, he died in 2011. | ||
Oh, okay, so he had died, what, about two years before you were there, basically. | ||
What do we need to know about him versus the current leader, Kim Jong-un? | ||
Well, when Kim Jong-il took over in—so Kim Jong-il was born in World War II and died in 2011. | ||
So in my book, as he tells the story of his life, he's actually telling the whole history of North Korea. | ||
Because like Forrest Gump, he's everywhere where something important happens. | ||
When he took over for his father, the founder of North Korea, great leader Kim Il-sung, his campaign slogan—people think it's a joke, it's not—was, do not expect any change from me. | ||
So, their whole principle is this Mount Paektu bloodline, which goes from father to son to grandson now, is a continuous process that's going to bring forth the revolution through the generations. | ||
So, Kim Jong-un, people make fun of his haircut, his haircut's that of his grandfather from the 40s, because he's harkening back to that era and showing this kind of sense of continuity through the golden era of when North Korea was actually competitive with the South. | ||
So what else do we know, just personality-wise? | ||
Because I think there's such a cult of personality around him. | ||
People say, well, him and Trump, it's like the match made in hell, because they're both erratic, they're both boisterous, and they love headlines, and all of this. | ||
I haven't seen anything he's done that's erratic at all. | ||
For example, by North Korean law, only someone who's a descendant of Kim Il-sung can be the leader, right? | ||
So Kim Jong-un is the youngest of three brothers. | ||
When he killed his eldest brother, Kim Jong-nam, who was passed over, that was an insurance policy. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, can you just tell that story a little bit, because this was just a couple years ago, right? | |
No, this was a couple months ago, in the airport. | ||
Didn't he kill, but there was another brother? | ||
No, he killed his uncle. | ||
He killed his uncle, sorry. | ||
So he had originally killed his uncle. | ||
But his uncle wasn't up for the leadership position. | ||
Right. | ||
but what what happened when kim jong-il took over ninety four and when kim jong-un | ||
took over in twenty eleven what they did is have purges and killed or you know made | ||
them exported them or sent them to the countryside | ||
people who were loyal to their father when people ask well why doesn't someone | ||
just put a bullet in him the people at the top are there not because of their skills | ||
but because of their loyalty to the man personally so it's like the idea | ||
of like john podesta telling hillary clinton | ||
you know you should probably resign it will never happen under any circumstances | ||
and especially because if you do try that you will your family will have | ||
consequences even crazier than that because basically all of their power resides in that man correct systems | ||
So that's an interesting and important distinction. | ||
Right, and the point I always make when people are like, oh, he's this crazy person, if you look at Gaddafi, if you look at Saddam Hussein, if you look at Romania, Ceausescu, who's very inspired by North Korea by his own admission, when these leaders go down, they're usually shot, and with good reason. | ||
So even if he wanted to kind of step away from the gun, I mean, that gun's gonna be turned on him immediately. | ||
Yeah, what's it like for the average person that's living there? | ||
So now let's get away from the millionaire who's the tour guide. | ||
Billionaire, he's a tour guide, yes. | ||
So right, so he's a billionaire, of course, now we have a millionaire tour guide who can't get perfume, and yet is... | ||
expressing to you in effect, this kind of sucks, but here we are. | ||
What about for the average person that you came across? | ||
Well, I mean, they keep you away from the average people. | ||
So there's a lot of extreme, I mean, during the '90s when the famine hit, | ||
they chose to allow people to starve rather than give them food from the outside world. | ||
So if you go in like the countryside, I mean, there's this very famous picture of North Korea | ||
at night compared to South Korea, and it's just this black void | ||
with a little bit of electricity in Pyongyang. | ||
So they don't have electricity. | ||
They're trying to make subsistence living as farmers, and they have to go to school and be taught their propaganda. | ||
So they're admitted now. | ||
Their propaganda has changed. | ||
It used to be that the whole world envies us. | ||
And now they're saying, OK, we're a poor country that's up and coming and that's preserving Koreanness. | ||
So it's just being a poor farmer is what it's like. | ||
Although they kept you away from the average person, how much of outside world ideas can actually seep through? | ||
So I suspect someone like the tour guide, it's pretty obvious, you were able to get some ideas across. | ||
She had some sense of the outside world. | ||
She had her Gangnam Style. | ||
She didn't get half the lyrics, but that's the level. | ||
Because when you're in Pyongyang, it's like being a New Yorker. | ||
You think of yourself as this international cosmopolitan. | ||
So everyone in Pyongyang has these big heels. | ||
They like to pride themselves on being cultured and civilized. | ||
But increasingly, thanks to cell phones, thanks to people being refugees and memory sticks, people are getting an understanding of the outside world in North Korea, which is also very healthy. | ||
They used to be taught that South Korea, you know, they have to wear gas masks in the pollution and that the women are raped by American soldiers in order to give them AIDS and things like this. | ||
And now you just look across the Tumen River into China, in these towns, and you're like, they have electricity at night, why don't we? | ||
And it's as simple as that. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So I sense that your prescription for all this would be that it will crumble under its own weight, not only because of everything that you've just described, but also technology will eventually, it can't, they can't stop it with borders. | ||
Yeah, they can shut the internet, but there's just a zillion other ways now. | ||
There's this great quote from either Steinbeck or Faulkner, I always forget, and he says, how did you go bankrupt? | ||
And the answer was two ways, gradually and then suddenly. | ||
So this is exactly how the Soviet Union came down, because during the 80s you had all these women in Russia watching Dallas and Dynasty and saying, why on this show does the maid have a fur coat and I'm wiping my ass with the literal newspaper? | ||
And it's as simple as that. | ||
You can tell people Kim Jong-un is the greatest thing since sliced bread or sliced kimchi, | ||
whatever you wanna call it. | ||
At the end of the day, you want your kid to have food. | ||
And if this other alternative is, I'm gonna have food for my children, | ||
it's as simple as that. | ||
Yeah, so does some of this explain what's going on with all of these missile tests lately, | ||
that this is creating some sort of crisis which allows him to double down on power? | ||
unidentified
|
It's not a crisis, this is... Well, an appearance of a crisis. | |
No, from their... Look, so Kim Jong-il, the leading philosophy of North Korea is the Juche idea, which is invented by Kim Il-sung. | ||
Kim Jong-il changed that to the "sun gun" idea, which means "military first." | ||
And what he meant is the military is the basis of our country, which preserves all the other | ||
freedoms that we have. | ||
And he said, "In order to fight the American eagle and the Chinese dragon and the Russian | ||
bear, I have to turn North Korea into a hedgehog." | ||
And what he meant by this is an animal with missiles in every direction. | ||
And Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son, wanted to demilitarize. | ||
And Kim Jong Il said, no, no, no, it's these missiles that are going to keep us safe. | ||
So look at it from his perspective. | ||
He's a country the size of Pennsylvania. | ||
He has gotten the entire UN against him. | ||
He's making a fool of America on a daily basis and laughing about it in the photos. | ||
And he's saying, look, we're tiny and look how strong I've made us. | ||
And these U.S. | ||
imperialists, as they call us, who tried to kill us during the Korean War and are biding their time to come back and kill us all, I'm the one keeping us safe. | ||
So it's not even a crisis so much as—it's more of a—our reaction is much more of a crisis, because we're all hysterical. | ||
And he's like, ha-ha-ha, what are you going to do about it? | ||
Right, that's interesting. | ||
So our reaction is a crisis because basically you're saying everything that he's doing is very logical within the system that he's doing things. | ||
It all makes sense. | ||
So that's not a crisis. | ||
How we deal with it without understanding a lot of the things you're talking about is the actual crisis. | ||
So when these tests go off, You think this is just more showboating, sort of, to double down on that, right? | ||
Well, it's both. | ||
It's also commercial. | ||
So North Korea has always complained about how is it the United States is the biggest arms deal in the world, and we don't have the right to sell our arms. | ||
So by doing this, they can show every little dictator, look how good our weaponry is, and it's gonna be available for sale, and look what it can do to America. | ||
And it'll, you know, it'll be the best kind of home security system you're ever gonna have. | ||
Yeah, it's kind of funny because obviously you're talking about so many things that are really wrong in terms of human rights. | ||
Pure evil. | ||
What freedom is and the things that you really care about. | ||
And yet also I can sense there's a certain level of admiration or something. | ||
Respect. | ||
Yeah, I guess respect for just somebody that created a system that has some value in a bizarre way. | ||
They are very bright people, and they're very evil people. | ||
So I always talk about this, I compare it to, like your comic book, the Batman villain, the Joker, because people see the clown, but that clown has a lot of bodies behind them, and that clown has pulled off a lot of stunts in his day. | ||
So the idea that he's this silly idiot, it's like, this silly idiot, they've been around for 70 years. | ||
If they're suicidal, they're doing a really bad job of it, and they've outlasted everyone except for Cuba. | ||
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. | ||
That's one of the things that I've come around on Trump, the idea of Trump, at least, when all these people all day long, he's such an idiot. | ||
He's making these decisions every two seconds. | ||
He doesn't know what's going on. | ||
And it's like, if that's actually true and he became president like that, then we're all just the worst suckers ever. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Like, then what does that say about the rest of us, actually? | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
So you have to, I think, if someone has risen to that level of power, it doesn't mean you like them. | ||
It doesn't mean you, Respect them as people or anything else, but you have to acknowledge, like, there's a little something going on there. | ||
And I talk about this very heavily in my book, because when you go there, they brag about their strategy. | ||
So, you know, Kim Jong-il is very boastful of his techniques, and they've been very effective, because when he took over in 1994, they mentioned Krauthammer by name in their literature, like, they all think it's not gonna last another six months, and now it's 2017 and they're still there. | ||
So, despite all the predictions, despite all the claims that these people are stupid and crazy and incompetent, Kim Jong-un's hold on power is pretty strong, and this is not an accident. | ||
This is at the cost of humanity, and at the cost of human life, and the cost of anything that you and I hold decent and moral. | ||
So I know that everybody always wants America to do everything. | ||
It's like, they always want America to do everything, and then every time we do anything, then they hate us for it. | ||
So we're sort of in our own karmic insanity. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That, to that regard. | ||
But what about the other countries there? | ||
China most particularly. | ||
Right. | ||
What do they make of what's happening there? | ||
They're seeing tests go off. | ||
I mean, I know that one of these rockets just went over Japan. | ||
Sure. | ||
From what I understand, like, what are all those countries thinking about what's really happening? | ||
China doesn't want an American ally on their border. | ||
China doesn't want 25 million North Koreans who have never—who don't speak Chinese or who haven't been on a computer swarming the border and setting up camp in Manchuria. | ||
So they're in a tough spot. | ||
But China has turned their back on North Korea a couple of times, when in North Korea they built this gigantic gold statue of Kim Il-sung in the town square. | ||
The Chinese said, look, we're communists. | ||
That's not what we're about. | ||
So they changed it to bronze. | ||
Is that right? | ||
That's correct, yeah. | ||
You have to go to that. | ||
If you go to my website, you can see a photo of me next to statues. | ||
I called it leadership. | ||
In the 80s, North Korea for a very long time fought having North and South both in the UN because that would make permanent the idea that these are two countries divided. | ||
The North regards Korea as one country. | ||
And China in the 80s turned their back on that, and both countries are allowed in. | ||
So, these were two moments that China has turned their back on North Korea. | ||
But at the same time, if you—North Korea, just recently, Kim Jong-un pointed out, this latest hydrogen bomb was made using homegrown ingredients. | ||
That's their way of saying, you can sanction us, you can make exports illegal, we can still build them, and there's nothing you can do about it. | ||
He just had a storage of, what was it, 1 million gallons or something of oil, pointing out, even if you seal stuff from the outside world, these tests are going to continue. | ||
I think we can continue, even if China turns their back on us. | ||
Yeah, so was this hydrogen bomb test a true game changer in your mind because of that? | ||
I think the game's been played the same way for decades, which is we are going to do whatever it takes to maintain our hold on power, and we're gonna revel in the fact that we're going to, in their words, slap America across the face. | ||
Yeah, and then at the same time, in a weird way, they can do whatever they want, because as you just said, China doesn't want them collapsing and then having to deal with either a migrant crisis or an immigrant crisis or... | ||
What other, any other military crisis that's gonna come after that? | ||
And they're all taught as soon as things go bad, you gotta hit Seoul as hard and fast as possible. | ||
Now the imagery, if you can think of that in nukes, the imagery of a city like Seoul, a city of skyscrapers getting hit by missiles, is apocalyptic. | ||
Yeah. | ||
If you were a South Korean, what would you think of this whole situation? | ||
They don't really, they're fine with it. | ||
They've been living with this for a very long time and this is not freaking them out. | ||
So I don't, I was at a, I ran into some South Korean tourists and they didn't really even know who Kim Jong Il was. | ||
So this is how little they care about the North. | ||
And it's actually very sad when a lot of North Korean refugees make their way to the South. | ||
They're treated very, very poorly due to their accents and so on. | ||
And in fact, they're short. | ||
If I, I don't know what I would make of the situation, probably, I'd feel even more kinship. | ||
I feel a lot of kinship toward the North Korean people because, again, it's some parallel to what my family went through. | ||
I think I'd feel that even more if I was living in the South, especially if I was meeting these refugees and interacting with them. | ||
It's just heartbreaking. | ||
All right, so to sort of wrap up the military side of this thing, so when we hear all this back and forth these days and we hear about the hydrogen bomb and everything else, I think we're playing chicken and both cars are going at each other at the speed that they can and it's going to be a question of who blinks first and what it's going to take to blink. | ||
I don't believe in voting, no. | ||
building up these weaponry, that's not just posturing. | ||
Yeah, all right, so then as someone that I think basically, | ||
did you vote for Trump? | ||
I don't believe in voting, no. | ||
Okay, so, but as someone that I think basically likes Trump, you've explained why you-- | ||
I also liked Hillary because she destroyed healthcare for a generation, I mean, if you look at Nixon | ||
and how much he brought leftist ideas into power, an incompetent foe is very, very useful. | ||
You couldn't have had Obama without Bush, right? | ||
So everything she's touched, she's such a walking calamity, she almost lost the primary to someone who wasn't even in her party. | ||
So she would have done great things for the right if she had been president. | ||
And you certainly couldn't have had Trump without Clinton, so it does kind of make sense. | ||
That being said, as someone that basically likes what's happened to the system because of Trump, Do you think Trump has the capacity, either mental or otherwise, to deal with this game of chicken? | ||
Or is there someone else that you would have preferred? | ||
I don't think anyone has a good answer to this issue, including me. | ||
But I'm very heartened by hearing Rex Tillerson and Mattis and all these other people saying, and Bannon recently said it, you know, he goes, we all know that military conflict with North Korea would be absolutely catastrophic. | ||
You see some conservatives saying, Kim Jong-un insulted us, so therefore we should bomb this country into oblivion. | ||
You're going to take the moral high ground and kill 25 million slaves because someone assaulted you? | ||
No. | ||
Go to hell. | ||
So, there's a very strong understanding in the White House that military conflict would be the worst possible course. | ||
Yeah, which I would never want, but I always think it's interesting how anytime someone says something about the military, I mean, the average person, I think, doesn't understand what deterrence is anymore, or just doesn't understand what some posturing is, or what public statements are. | ||
So they make it seem like anyone who ever says anything about the military, or we might do this, or all options are on the table, or whatever, that they're automatically the warmongers. | ||
And in effect, it's almost completely reverse, actually. | ||
We saw this just recently. | ||
So North Korea said, we're bombing Guam in August. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And Trump went on TV and said they're going to face fire and fury like the world has never seen. | ||
And Chuck Schumer, who doesn't know anything about this issue, and I don't blame him, was like, this is this, you know, reckless rhetoric isn't helping. | ||
Well, I'm still here. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
So obviously, when you're speaking to someone on their level, they're going to have an ability to communicate with you. | ||
And it worked. | ||
How do we explain that concept to people? | ||
Because it's one of the things that drives me crazy more than anything else when you see this, because if we were just saying all the time, We're never gonna do anything, you can do whatever you want, and blah, blah, blah, even though I'm not an interventionist by nature and all those things. | ||
But it just doesn't really encompass anything that's even how humans react to each other. | ||
I think most people, let's say 90%, are completely incapable of empathy, by which I mean understanding things from other perspectives. | ||
My whole book was about North Korea's perspective. | ||
I think they think, this is how I act in my normal life, therefore this is how you should act on a world scale. | ||
It's as simple as that. | ||
Yeah, and we've got to get those two things to match up a little bit more. | ||
Or we've got to stop relying on the masses to make our choices. | ||
Which is also a sort of scary proposition in a way, don't you think? | ||
No, it's the opposite of scary. | ||
What do you mean? | ||
Well, that you want some input from your populace. | ||
No! | ||
So at the end of this anarchist view, you'd prefer that just some elite It's like this, my rights are not up for discussion, let alone a vote. | ||
So as soon as we all sit down to discuss it, I've already lost. | ||
You are entitled to your religion, you're entitled to your life, you're entitled to raise your kids as much as you want. | ||
I don't know you, I don't wanna know you, and I don't care what you think about anything, and I'm not interested in persuading you, I'm interested in stopping you from implementing your ideas on my life and my person. | ||
Right, but what is that, in real world sense, what does that mean for, if we were to just apply all of that to America in 2017, what does that mean? | ||
It means freedom. | ||
No, no, no, no. | ||
I get it on the intellectual side. | ||
Truly, I understand what you're saying. | ||
But in terms of how we would change the government right now. | ||
It's happening now. | ||
Making political discourse impossible. | ||
Making it impossible for any bills to pass ever. | ||
Oh, because you'd argue then that basically the government becomes sort of just irrelevant altogether. | ||
And a stalemate, yeah. | ||
Yeah, and you'd wanna live in this sort of endless stalemate because basically it would allow us all to just turn back and rely on ourselves? | ||
Once you see government is not a mechanism for effecting social change, the system starts to break down and you're gonna see healthier consequences, is my opinion. | ||
Yeah, can you give me an example of where that, oh, I guess what you're saying is that's what happened sort of in Russia. | ||
Oh yeah, that's one of them. | ||
From when it was the time when you were there, and when your parents were there, to now, even though there's obviously a lot of problems in Russia. | ||
There's this blog called Slate Star Codex, and he pointed out that our best mechanism nowadays of self-segregation is not by race, it's not by culture, it's by ideology. | ||
And the more that happens, which is a function of social media, | ||
where you can only talk to people that you agree with if politics are important to you, | ||
I think the better that is, because this freedom association | ||
is essential American freedom. | ||
And it's one that the left, and many times the right, does not regard as essential. | ||
And the more that happens, I think the happier everyone's gonna be. | ||
It's so interesting, 'cause it's sort of countered to the way I try to do this show, | ||
and I like hearing about ideas from everyone on both sides, and I'm trying to build some bridges, | ||
and even in my own life, I've built bridges with people that I've had on this show. | ||
But I do understand the premise of what you're saying here. | ||
Obviously, the bulk of my existence leans to the other side on this, in terms of finding some of that agreement. | ||
I have no problem with finding agreement. | ||
I have a problem with ideas being imposed on me. | ||
And I think that is all politics is, is oppression. | ||
So this is what anarchy is? | ||
This is what anarchy is. | ||
You're looking at it right now. | ||
Face of anarchy. | ||
You mentioned that some of the people get out of North Korea, just to quickly go back to that, | ||
'cause I don't wanna lose that. | ||
Who actually gets out? | ||
How do they actually do it? | ||
Well, one of the great things, and this just shows the evil and the brilliance | ||
of the regime, when they were unable to feed the border guards, if you bribe the border guard, | ||
they'll let you go. | ||
Now, what the regime has smart enough to do is they allow the border guard to keep the bribe as long as they turn you in. | ||
But this was a very big mechanism, people crossing—the Tumen River is very shallow between North Korea and China, so people in these border towns would go into China all the time. | ||
They were smugglers whose job it is to kind of get people—because you are officially a South Korean citizen if you're North Korean, so as long as you set foot in a South Korean embassy, you're home free. | ||
Wait, can you repeat that? | ||
I just want to get that clear. | ||
You are officially a South Korean citizen? | ||
If you're a North Korean, right. | ||
They're both recognized Korea as one country. | ||
So if you step foot in a South Korean embassy or in the South Korean airport, you're safe. | ||
Interesting. | ||
Tell me about the demilitarized zone, because I think people have this idea of this bizarre corridor of nothingness. | ||
What's actually going on there? | ||
Well, there's a very funny story in the Gerald Ford administration, because people are like, North Korea's never done anything like this. | ||
There was a tree in the demilitarized zone, which is between the two Koreas, and the Americans took an axe and they wanted to prune it. | ||
And the North Koreans took that axe and chopped up the American soldiers. | ||
That axe is now on display in North Korea. | ||
I've seen it with my own eyes, bloody. | ||
And the Americans came back with Operation Paul Bunyan, and they had a huge force, and | ||
they pruned that tree, and they left the stump just as a finger to the North Koreans. | ||
So there's been a lot of—all these conservatives on the air who are like, "They've never seen | ||
anything like this." | ||
You have. | ||
They've captured USS Pueblo in 1968. | ||
It's still there. | ||
They killed one of the crewmen. | ||
But when you're at the DMZ, I mean, you've got the North Korean guards staring at each | ||
other. | ||
You have the South Korean guards. | ||
It's kind of—it's funny coming in from the North Korean side, you know, and seeing it. | ||
But it's the most militarized border on earth. | ||
It's like full of landmines. | ||
But the North Koreans would plow right through it if they wanted to invade Seoul in seconds. | ||
How big is it, actually? | ||
I mean, what— What is it? | ||
It's just a strip. | ||
There's like a strip. | ||
There's like, I think, five buildings, two of which are north, two are south, and one neutral. | ||
It was kind of closed down for repairs when I was there. | ||
And the north, there's this big, hulking, brutalist building that you get to look out of the balcony and look into the south from. | ||
And everyone has all these cameras pointed at each other. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I feel I should ask you for a few predictions on some of this stuff. | ||
On North Korea? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think we're seeing the beginning and the end. | ||
And I think Kim Jong-un, even just given his age, is nowhere near as smart as his dad. | ||
I think he's freaking out. | ||
I think Otto Warmbier was a very big mistake on their part. | ||
And I think Trump cares enough about human rights and is reckless enough, in a sense, to be like, alright, I'm going to see the end of this regime before the end of my presidency. | ||
At least that's what he says. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Alright, now a little prediction on America. | ||
Because we've got some of this stuff happening too. | ||
Some of our internal chaos happening right now. | ||
I think there's going to be more chaos. | ||
I think it's the healthiest thing possible. | ||
I think the right has now understood the rules and is exploiting them to their advantage. | ||
For example, when this Kathy Griffin thing hit, I talked to a lot of my buddies on the right and I'm like, how are you offended by this when you put up all these awful memes and they go, we're not, this is a scalp. | ||
And they got her. | ||
A week later, they got Reza Aslan fired from CNN. | ||
So, rather than having this old conservative model of Buckley, who is the great villain, standing at Thornton Hill, history yelling, stop, it's like, we actually want to stop. | ||
We actually are going to do something about it and force people to kind of have casualties on their side. | ||
And I think Bannon's strategy, which he kind of let slip, is The more we make this a cultural fight, the more they're going to lose because the more they're going to get into hysteria. | ||
Now, here's an example of that. | ||
For decades, you know, as I said earlier, calling someone a racist is an effective mechanism. | ||
Because most people are scared that they're racist in the sense that if you meet someone from another country, you don't want to offend them accidentally. | ||
It's a problem. | ||
No one is scared that they're a closet Nazi. | ||
No one is scared that they're a closet white supremacist. | ||
So if you're telling the layman, you know, you're a Nazi, it's like, my dad fought? | ||
My grandfather fought? | ||
Like, what are you talking about? | ||
Even though the rhetoric has escalated, the effectiveness has decreased. | ||
And in my view, this is a sign of them freaking out that they've lost control of the megaphone. | ||
Yeah, and I have hit this point a couple times on the show, that the desperation is why we're seeing the violence, because they've lost the ideas. | ||
Again, to reference the Ben Shapiro at Berkeley thing, there were signs up about, we don't want white supremacists on campus. | ||
Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, he gets more online. | ||
I think they've measured it. | ||
He's gotten more online hate from the alt-right or whatever that thing is, than anybody. | ||
And it's like, he goes to show up there to give you some basic conservative views, and we're saying, we don't want white supremacists here. | ||
Like, it's just basically the chart has been completely obliterated at this point. | ||
Oh yeah, and because they're not able to enforce their edicts any longer, now they have to do it on a ground level. | ||
So rather than taking out entire classes of people like back in the day, now they have to go people one-on-one. | ||
So for the violence part, I mean, I suspect you don't want just violence to be erupting all over the place, but do you almost see that as a necessary piece of this now? | ||
Or an inevitable piece, I guess, is a better question. | ||
The three villains are the media, the government, and the universities, right? | ||
So the media and the government have been discredited. | ||
The university is still very much a bourgeois aspiration for Americans. | ||
Like, my kid's the first one to go to college. | ||
You know, this is such a big deal. | ||
You need a degree to make something of yourself. | ||
I've never taken a writing course. | ||
I didn't want to waste time educating professors. | ||
Now, I don't care where you are on the political spectrum— That was quick. | ||
Thank you. | ||
I don't know where you are on the political spectrum. | ||
I don't care if you're a human or an animal. | ||
If you see fire, you're against it. | ||
We saw this in Ferguson, and it gave the Republicans their biggest landslide ever, and we're seeing it now. | ||
If you look at a university and you're seeing schools being burnt down, if you're seeing your daughter go to school as a pretty young 17-year-old and coming out looking like a swamp walrus, As a parent, you are going to be against this, and this is a very important next step towards breaking the last piece of progressivism, because the goal of the university is to turn young children into the shock troops of the progressive militia. | ||
Man, I think we could do another couple hours here. | ||
You're gonna have to, how often do you get out to LA as a Brooklyn guy? | ||
When my next book and then your right hits, we can talk about this stuff. | ||
When's that one dropping? | ||
April. | ||
April, and then in between then we'll see on Fox Business. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
Where else will they accept these crazy ideas? | ||
Compoundmedia.com. | ||
It's my show, once a week. | ||
So Compound Media, that's through Gavin. | ||
That's Anthony Cumia, Gavin just left, yeah. | ||
Gavin just left, oh right, so a few people left, I guess. | ||
Just Gavin. | ||
Was it just Gavin? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so Cumia's doing that, and he's been through the machine himself. | ||
Oh yeah, to a crazy degree. | ||
I mean, they cost him his job. | ||
That's a whole other topic that we will hit on next time, and we'll get you back in here in April to discuss the book. |