May 24, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the man that I have dubbed the Willy Wonka of politics. | ||
| It even says so on the back of his book right here. | ||
| Michael Malice, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to be back again, Dave. | ||
| We have a lot to do, my friend. | ||
| Now, most of it, obviously, is going to have to deal with your choice of wardrobe and general persona and being. | ||
| You've really done it this time. | ||
| If I had a nickel, this is actually the same thing that Johnny Depp wore. | ||
| But it's a W for him. | ||
| Now it's an M. And now it's an M for Michael, although if you flipped it upside down it would be a W. Yeah. | ||
| For Willy. | ||
| For Willy Wonka, yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's actually the one, I didn't see that one. | ||
| It's not, that's the better one. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| It is, it is the better one. | ||
| You're gonna tell me the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp is better than Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder. | ||
|
unidentified
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Correct. | |
| And I'm not trying to be a contrarian, not trying to be talkative, it's much better. | ||
| I haven't seen it, but there's no way it's better. | ||
| Well, it's pretty good. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| How could it possibly be better? | ||
| You're telling me he was better than Gene Wilder. | ||
| That's what you're telling me. | ||
| Don't you think I'm in a position to make this call? | ||
| I suppose at some level, because of the great honor that I've bestowed upon you by calling you the Willy Wonka of politics, but I just don't think anything could possibly be better than Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. | ||
| Watch it and tweet out the answer. | ||
| This is a really disturbing start to this thing. | ||
| Okay, so let's do this. | ||
| So first off, I'm going to do this interview completely in a different way than I've ever done before, which is that you may notice I have no notes here. | ||
| Now, my policy is that when it's a good interview, I don't have to look down once. | ||
| But I thought, you're so bananas. | ||
| Your political theories are so... | ||
| Out there, I thought, I'm just gonna sit down and completely see what happens. | ||
| I am literally not going to write down one thing beforehand. | ||
| So the reason that I call you the Willy Wonka of politics is not just because of your high fashion style, but you actually do strike me as a unique political thinker, which is pretty freaking rare these days. | ||
| Well, that's a huge compliment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's all I have for you. | ||
| Okay, good shot. | ||
| No, all right, so, but you really do, and even the way you tweet, the way you use trolling, you know, your out there political thoughts, all of those things, I mean, the way you present yourself, it's all like just this really bizarre package. | ||
| So for people that didn't see our first interview, just give me Michael Malice 101. | ||
| Let's just get the history out of the way, and then we'll go into the new right and the topics of the day. | ||
| The glib answer is he's the boy you hate to love. | ||
| The longer answer is my background is with North Korea, was my last book with Dear Reader. | ||
| The new right happened as a consequence of so many of my friends who were in, who were | ||
| trolls, who were anarchists, fell down these rabbit holes of what was called at the time | ||
| neo-reaction and later became like the alt-right and dark enlightenment. | ||
| So I watched this scene build up from the ground floor and then to have it culminate | ||
| to some extent in the Trump presidency and contemporary cultural wars, I had a bird's | ||
| eye view. | ||
| So I knew someone was going to have to write a book about the subculture and I also knew | ||
| that any reporter is not going to be able to understand this scene because at the very | ||
| least they're going to be an outsider. | ||
| Secondary, they're going to have their own, you know, prejudices. | ||
| So since my job had been to make North Korea, you know, before I started my North Korea work, the idea was they're crazy. | ||
| And crazy means I don't understand you. | ||
| It can mean I don't understand you. | ||
| It can mean that you're random. | ||
| And now everyone understands North Korea is not crazy. | ||
| They have a very coherent, logical approach to their evil dictatorship. | ||
| And the same thing with this scene. | ||
| Everyone would like to dismiss it, lump everybody in. | ||
| They're all nuts. | ||
| They're all Nazis. | ||
| And it would be really convenient if you could paint everyone with the same brush. | ||
| They'd be a lot less efficacious. | ||
| It'll be a lot easier to dismiss. | ||
| But that's not the way it is. | ||
| And people understand that any subculture, even for the Republicans, they think, oh, the left's the same. | ||
| The Hillary Clinton hate the Bernie people. | ||
| They really hate them. | ||
| So there's a lot of different groups in what I call the new right. | ||
| And often though they're united in what they regard as their opposition to progressivism, | ||
| between them they do not have much agreement. | ||
| Okay, so with that as the backdrop to all of this, and this also explains why when BuzzFeed and HuffPo | ||
| and Vox and the rest of them are writing about you guys, whatever that collective thing is, | ||
| they always get it all sort of wrong because as you said, they're not part of it, | ||
| So they just look at the, oh, they must be racist part. | ||
| Well, they also have an agenda. | ||
| So, racist means that which is against progressivism. | ||
| And I have a list in the books of things that have been called racist, which includes moving into minority neighborhoods and moving out of minority neighborhoods, noticing races and not noticing races, milk, certain types of dinosaurs, I mean, picnics. | ||
| Wait, what type of dinosaur is racist? | ||
| In Jurassic Park, one of the dinosaurs was called racist. | ||
| I'm not sure exactly why I didn't follow reading through the article. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| And possibly, what's his name? | ||
| Fred Flintstone's pet. | ||
| Oh, Dino. | ||
| Yeah, he's a bit of a white supremacist, just between you and me. | ||
| It's unfortunate. | ||
| So, I thought someone has to write this book. | ||
| And also, it's a dark space. | ||
| So I wanted to have people be able to explore it in an interesting way and in a non-threatening way. | ||
| Okay, so for people that know nothing about this, the couple groups that you just mentioned there, Dark Enlightenment, the troll community, all of this stuff, can you just kind of break down all of it? | ||
| How did this start? | ||
| How did you even start caring about it? | ||
| Were you part of it? | ||
| What the hell's going on? | ||
| Because even for me, and I have some basic understanding of this stuff, I'm actually not totally clear on all the sort of markers and where everybody is online and all that. | ||
| So it starts, I ground it in 1992, when Pat Buchanan, who is regarded as a paleo-conservative, teamed up with Murray Rothbart, who was regarded as a paleo-libertarian. | ||
| So between those two men, You basically have everything that is happening today within this scene, meaning nationalism, trolling, flirting with racism, you know, contempt for authority, skepticism toward the establishment. | ||
| The two of them had many disagreements. | ||
| And at one point, you know, Pat Buchanan turned on Murray Rothbard, and later he asked Murray Rothbard's executor for forgiveness, literally getting on his knees and asking for forgiveness. | ||
| I broke that news in the book. | ||
| And that has come down to contemporary terms where the internet, what social media allows, and this is both a positive and a negative, is back in the day if you were that one person in your town with these weird fringe views, you're the freak. | ||
| But now that one person with their weird fringe views in that town can talk to the other person with their weird fringe views in the other town, or in Denmark, or in Asia. | ||
| Or can put on a purple jacket and show up at the Rubin Report. | ||
| It's all very bizarre. | ||
| No, they can't pull it off. | ||
| You have to earn this jacket. | ||
| So, but now they have a community and discussion and they can develop an ideology. | ||
| So, what I saw happening as a result of hanging out with the trolls is people falling into this group called, what was called at the time, Neo-Reaction or the Dark Enlightenment. | ||
| And it was things like, we need to return to monarchy. | ||
| America is this decadent Weimar Republic that's on the verge of destruction. | ||
| But where was this happening at first? | ||
|
unidentified
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On the internet. | |
| No, I know, but like where? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Forums, chat rooms? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah, exactly. | |
| Forums, all these blogs. | ||
| It's very HP Lovecraft, things you're not supposed to know. | ||
| Especially, it was blogs, not really Twitter at the time, and Facebook groups. | ||
| Those were the big ones back then. | ||
| So this would have been about like 2013, 2012. | ||
| Okay, so now some of this stuff starts bubbling up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you start seeing these communities that sort of don't really align, but have some weird touch points. | ||
| What do you make of those touch points? | ||
| Well, what I knew from my, you know, I'm a big pop culture person, obviously, and I knew how culture develops, which is it starts at the fringe with the weirdos. | ||
| And then the edgy people, the cool people, like, hey, have you heard about this thing? | ||
| Then it becomes more mainstream and then, like, kind of the nerds get it. | ||
| Then the corporations appropriate it and kind of tone it down, right? | ||
| So all the intellectual momentum I saw on the right was a result of this stuff. | ||
| These are the people talking ideas, both nefariously and positively. | ||
| These are the ones asking the big questions and basically the radical questions. | ||
| And one of the big differences between conservatives and the new right is this. | ||
| Conservatives take what is given, and this isn't a slight against conservatives, and regard it as, all right, basically what we have, how do we fix it? | ||
| The new right often has a more radical approach, meaning just because something exists doesn't mean it can't be destroyed completely and started from scratch. | ||
| So these are two different approaches, and we see it regarding the press. | ||
| I got into an argument with Sean Davis, who writes for The Federalist, and his whole point is that, you know, the media, they're all dumb. | ||
| And my point is, no, no, these people are very, very bright. | ||
| And if they're all making the same mistake in the same exact way, that is not a function of stupidity. | ||
| Stupid people aren't all going to agree. | ||
| This is a function of something more nefarious. | ||
| So it's not a bug. | ||
| It's a feature. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Because they do have a certain specific agenda and everyone has a certain specific agenda. | ||
| So this is a big separation between conserves and you're right. | ||
| Is this part of society salvageable or is it inherently impure and beyond redemption? | ||
| So, when Trump was being elected, I had Eric Weinstein sitting in that seat, and what I said to him was, what most people seem to want is a panther in a china shop. | ||
| We know something's wrong with the system, but we don't want to blow up the system. | ||
| We want a panther to walk in there and knock something off with its tail, and bang one thing off with its head, and then close the door behind it, and a couple things will have broken, but we'll be okay. | ||
| But there's no such metaphor as a panther in a china shop. | ||
| It's a bull in a china shop that you just can't get it. | ||
| I sense that a lot of what you're talking about is these people want the bull in the china shop. | ||
| No, these people want a bomb in a china shop. | ||
| They want the china shop to be destroyed. | ||
| And the phrase china shop is pretty Apps here, because it's talking about, you know, foreign influence in America. | ||
| China's not their big villain specifically, but basically the idea, like, this store needs to be torn down. | ||
| We're not breaking some dishes. | ||
| We're way past the point of breaking some dishes. | ||
| But they want to blow up the whole store, too. | ||
| It's not just about breaking the China that's in the store. | ||
| They actually want the entire structure to change. | ||
| And salted the earth, yeah, to make sure nothing can be built there again. | ||
| So where do you fall on that? | ||
| Because I sense there is this weird thing on both the left and the right. | ||
| The left seems to really want to destroy the whole thing too, in a weird way. | ||
| But then you're talking about people on the new right that want to destroy the whole thing. | ||
| They want to destroy it for different reasons. | ||
| What do you think the left wants to destroy? | ||
| The left wants to destroy capitalism and they want to destroy the basic way our democracy has functioned and things like that. | ||
| I don't know that they want to destroy capitalism so much as they think of it as something they can milk and harness. | ||
| Even Bernie has some vaguely positive things to say about capitalism. | ||
|
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And I don't know that they would ever admit... Well, I think it's a slow slope to get there. | |
| You don't just come out day one and say you want to destroy capitalism. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| But undermining it over election after election. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| But what I'm saying is the new right is saying, yes, we want to destroy this. | ||
| Chapter four of this book is called The Case Against Democracy. | ||
| So in this scene, there is a huge question of how is it that democracy is inherently good, let alone inherently legitimate? | ||
| So lay out a case. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So you know people say that communism works in theory, not in practice, right? | ||
| Well, that doesn't mean anything because everything works in theory. | ||
| That's what theory means. | ||
| It practices how you figure out something actually works. | ||
| Democracy is one of the few things that doesn't even work in theory, and here's why. | ||
| They talk about voter turnout being a good thing. | ||
| Well, at what point does it become legitimate? | ||
| If 70% of people vote, They can speak for the 30% who don't vote. | ||
| What if it's 40% vote and 60% don't? | ||
| At what point is it that you can say this group of the population can dominate this other group who haven't voted? | ||
| That's one example. | ||
| But in even more technical terms, the purest, I use an example from this book called The Machiavellians, the purest exemplar of democracy is the town hall. | ||
| You have a bunch of people, everyone's there to kind of speak their mind, put their point of view across. | ||
| Even in a town hall, you're going to have to have limits on time, You're going to have an agenda, what issues we're going to discuss. | ||
| So even in the most democratic moment, you're going to have an elite setting the rules and boundaries. | ||
| So one of the ideas behind The New Right is this old school theory of 100 years ago called the circulation of the elites, meaning Hillary Clinton will always have more in common with George W. Bush than she will have with a janitor, and you can't get rid of an elite so much as replace it with another elite. | ||
| So this is a little bit of the way Game of Thrones ended, sort of. | ||
| I'm not that much of a... Oh, you're not a Game of Thrones fan? | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| There's a funny moment at the end where they're trying to figure out how to rule in the future, and one of the guys says, well, what about democracy? | ||
| Let the people vote. | ||
| And there's a moment where you're like, oh, are they going to end with democracy? | ||
| And then everyone laughs. | ||
| Well, there was another New Right moment early on, because didn't some person hold up like a piece of paper that says, you promised, and they basically ripped and laughed, right? | ||
| So this idea that the Constitution is somehow going to start working and save us is another thing that they're very skeptical of. | ||
| So what are you politically, if you had to give yourself a label? | ||
| Sure, I'm an anarchist without adjectives. | ||
| An anarchist without adjectives? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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Explain the adjective part of it to me. | |
| There's different schools of anarchism. | ||
| There's anarcho-capitalism, there's anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism. | ||
| I like it all. | ||
| My point, essentially, is that government is not legitimate, it cannot be made legitimate, and you have to start with that recognition. | ||
| Now, some people think, OK, if you take away government, everyone's going to be equal, you're going to have wage equality. | ||
| Some people think, OK, it's going to be hyper-capitalistic. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm a lot more comfortable defending anarchy than I am defending capitalism or communism or syndicalism. | ||
| So I think most people hear anarchist and they just think, well, I mean, I say this all the time, it's just, you want to end up in Mad Max. | ||
| You just want sort of warring factions constantly trying to take each other out and that there is no sort of social cohesion. | ||
| There's no way to build big projects and things like that because we don't have something that's sort of bringing us all together, that the government is kind of sucky. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people think this, it's kind of sucky, but it's the best we got. | ||
| The best criticisms of anarchism are actually descriptions of the status quo. | ||
| Meaning, what you're describing is the status quo. | ||
| You have governments who are trying to take each other out. | ||
| China has, you know, hacked our systems. | ||
| Russia, you know, is interfering in our elections. | ||
| So, right now, nations have a state of anarchy with regard to each other to some extent. | ||
| What anarchism would do would provide more security because you wouldn't have to have a government monopoly. | ||
| The idea that you need the government to kind of build a big project is really not necessarily true. | ||
| And if anything, the government is probably the biggest hindrance towards people working together because they have to run things through some bureaucrat who has no accountability. | ||
| Okay, but wait, I wanna back up before we go too down that road. | ||
| So just break down a couple of these other groups that were sort of in this trolling community, and can you just explain, like, for someone of a certain age that really doesn't even under, that's not on Twitter, and they're not on 4chan, or wherever else is going on, or Discord, like, what is actually going on with the trolls? | ||
| Like, what is the goal of the trolls? | ||
| The older people actually know trolling quite well, because the example I use in the book, the first troll was Andy Kaufman. | ||
| So Andy Kaufman, he was the great troll of all time, he was on Taxi as Latke, which is not what he's proudest of, and he would do things like, he had this character called Tony Clifton, who's basically this old lounge singer in a pink salmon blazer, and he'd come out and sing terribly and just berate the audience, and one most trolling moment is, he was performing I think in Atlantic City, And he says, oh, you know, my wife died a few years ago, and when I look at my daughter's eyes, I see my wife. | ||
| Come on out here, honey. | ||
| And she sits on his lap, and they sing, and her voice cracks, and he slaps her across the face, and he goes, what the hell are you doing? | ||
| And the audience is booing, and he goes, oh, don't boo, you're just making her cry more. | ||
| Well, not only wasn't his daughter, it wasn't even a child, it was an actress. | ||
| So trolling, correctly, is forcing a party, exploiting a party's weaknesses in order to turn them into an unwitting performer. | ||
| So other examples of this, there was a little kid, this little autistic kid, was on The Late Show in the UK or Ireland, and they asked him, hey, what do you want to do? | ||
| Huey, Huey, what do you want to do when you grow up? | ||
| And he goes, I want to fly planes into buildings. | ||
| And the guy goes, what? | ||
| He goes, I want to fly planes to skyscrapers. | ||
| And he's like, OK, if you can't do that, what would you want to do? | ||
| I'll move to Iraq and be a terrorist. | ||
| Now, it's this little 10-year-old boy, and the host now doesn't know what to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But on the spot, that is trolling. | ||
| Now, trolling is often used on the internet to be like being a jerk. | ||
| That's not, to me, a definition of trolling. | ||
| There's plenty of words for that. | ||
| And just going up to someone and saying, you know, you're this or you're that, that's not clever. | ||
| Trolling is an art. | ||
| Okay, so how is it that Trump understood this, do you think? | ||
| Because this is where people say, well, he's just an idiot, he just says whatever he wants, there's no filter, da-da-da-da-da. | ||
| And it's like, if that really is the truth, If that really is the truth, then everyone else must be hyper-idiots. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I just can't accept that as the truth. | ||
| Let me give a great example of Trump trolling. | ||
| Again, trolling meaning you're forcing someone to become a performer by exploiting their weaknesses. | ||
| Which it seems like now all the media has become, and all of his enemies have become. | ||
| He can get them to take any position on anything. | ||
| Here's the perfect example. | ||
| For one year, he's yelling at Elizabeth Warren, take a DNA test, take a DNA test, take a DNA test. | ||
| She takes it in secret, doesn't even test for Native American blood. | ||
| It says she's at most 100,000 24th. | ||
| She releases it, and she goes, ha, Mr. President, I took the test. | ||
| And you know what he goes? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So now she's made a fool of, he is not at all engaging with her, and she's left, you can even hear the Curb Your Enthusiasm music playing as she talks. | ||
| And this woman has become a broken woman as a consequence of him clowning her so thoroughly. | ||
| What is it about him that you think made him understand this? | ||
| How did this guy understand this psychological trick or There's two scenarios, right? | ||
| Scott Adams, who I know you've had on, describes the lucky Hitler phenomenon, right? | ||
| That somehow it's just he always manages to say that what he needs to, to upset people. | ||
| The other scenario is like there's some kind of Rain Man thing going on, that he just sees people's weaknesses, he knows exactly what to say, and despite themselves, they lose their minds. | ||
| Another example of this was, I think it was Pixelated Boat, there's a Twitter account, and they made this fake screenshot from Michael Wolff's book, Fire and Fury, about how Trump Watches TV all the time, and the staff at the White House made something called the Gorilla Channel, and he talks to the gorillas on TV, and he says, oh, that gorilla's good. | ||
| And it was clearly a joke. | ||
| It was meant to be a joke. | ||
| People repeated this, like, oh my gosh, Trump is so dumb, he talks to television. | ||
| Like, wait a minute, you could think he's as dumb as you want. | ||
| You're telling me this man who's 70, who's had a TV show, doesn't understand that you can't talk to gorillas on a screen? | ||
| But that is the level that he's driven them to. | ||
| So it's hilarious to watch. | ||
| And it's beautiful from the anarchist's perspective because he's delegitimizing the political process and the presidency. | ||
| So the reverence that people have for the presidency has deadly consequences because it allows them to get away with things like war. | ||
| And if you think the guy in the Oval Office is a clown, and that clown is getting ready to send your kids overseas to possibly die or possibly kill people, you're going to be a lot more skeptical. | ||
| God, there's a lot there. | ||
| It's a whole book worth. | ||
| Yeah, if only someone would write a book about this sort of thing. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| So you think in an odd way his behavior is delegitimizing Right. | ||
| say the office of the presidency, or more broadly government in general, | ||
| and you ultimately view that as a good thing because you don't think that really has legitimate power | ||
| to begin with. | ||
| Right, one of the big views of the Murray Rothbard School | ||
| is that the two political parties are literally rival gangs. | ||
| And just like a gangster has the nice rings and the suits, they wear their suits, they go to the Senate, | ||
| but these are at base murderers who are plotting fighting with each other, | ||
| but it's infighting. | ||
| So anytime the mask is dropped and you realize these people are stealing your money, they're trying to control your lives, they're causing massive, you know, harm around the world often, that's a good thing. | ||
| What's the racial element that comes out of all of this? | ||
| Because for as much as I get a lot of this and I like a lot of the trolling, the good natured stuff that's really getting the people that I don't like to flip their lids, I love all that stuff. | ||
| And then there's this other piece of it that strikes me as, it's hard to tell, are they just intentionally inflammatory? | ||
| Do they really believe this? | ||
| What kind of power do these people have? | ||
| Are they coordinating all of that? | ||
| Yeah, so Jared Taylor is the head race realist, right? | ||
| These are the people who view racism as the most important issue, the alt-right. | ||
| And I interviewed him for the book, I went to his house, and even he was confused. | ||
| And there was this great moment, he's got this very weird accent, he goes, Are you telling me these people really believe this Hitler stuff? | ||
| Like, he couldn't wrap his head around it. | ||
| And I go, yeah. | ||
| And he goes, the idea in this day and age that Hitlerism would be a model for America is simply fantastic. | ||
| And I go, you mean crazy, right? | ||
| He goes, oh, yes. | ||
| Thank you for the clarification. | ||
| So even in that group, though, there are the racists, but he is pro-Jew. | ||
| Then you have the people who are full-blooded. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| So there are the racists, meaning there are just people who just Full-blown racism. | ||
| They just actually are racist. | ||
| They want people based on the color of their skin to have different laws or not be in this country. | ||
|
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Correct. | |
| And they say, if you don't see that as the most important issue, you're blind. | ||
| So I had to engage with that writing this book. | ||
| Then there are the ones who are, everything's about the Jews. | ||
| The Jews, the Jews. | ||
| I was in Charlottesville. | ||
| I saw everything happening. | ||
| I couldn't go to all the events because my contact was told, don't bring the Jew to the party. | ||
| I was not wearing the blazer. | ||
| But so there is this whole subculture and they disagree with themselves and it was important for me to engage with them and express what their point of view is and show how they're wrong because what happens is when you drive people to the margin it's like telling and especially when you deal with young males it's like when you tell kids if you smoke The principal, your parents, and everyone's going to get upset. | ||
| And then you can't get a palm off fast enough. | ||
| So that's the same thing here. | ||
| It's like if you talk to these people and say certain things, people you hate are going to get upset. | ||
| It's like, sign me up. | ||
| So the point I make in this book is you take one red pill, not the whole bottle. | ||
| Because once they realize that the corporate press is often dishonest and has an agenda, they fall down this rabbit hole. | ||
| And unless someone grabs them by the collar and it's like, yeah, you don't have to go all the way. | ||
| We can stop right here. | ||
| They're often lost. | ||
| So this is, you would argue then, the reason why censoring these people and suspending people on Twitter and booting people off Facebook and the rest of it is actually the worst possible thing that you could do. | ||
| I don't know if it's... You're just feeding it. | ||
| I don't know if it's the worst, but if they're gonna say there is an elite agenda designed to drive us underground and keep the truth from coming out, now they have evidence. | ||
| Look! | ||
| We're being blocked. | ||
| They don't want to hear the truth. | ||
| And the fact that David Duke, for example, is still on Twitter is very curious to me. | ||
| And again, with the internet and technology... So wait, what do you think that's about, then? | ||
| Well, I think David Duke is a very useful foil for the left. | ||
| Because when he endorses people like Keith Ellison or Ilhan Omar, it's crickets, right? | ||
| But when he says something positive about somebody else, like, oh my God, David Duke... About Trump! | ||
| About Trump, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't think he likes Trump too much, because all of Trump's kids, except for one, married Jews, so he's not that fond of the president. | ||
| Everything's about Israel, David Duke. | ||
| And I trolled him once on Twitter, so that was a fun moment. | ||
| You took out the Duke? | ||
| I don't know if I, no I didn't, he's still there. | ||
| And that's the problem. | ||
| Why is David Duke there while people like Laura Loomer aren't? | ||
| I mean, that is a very odd situation. | ||
| And you would say that really is just because of the power dynamic? | ||
| Within Twitter or within something bigger than that? | ||
| I can't speak to why. | ||
| I'm not inside Jack Dorsey's mind. | ||
| I do think there's something here that's not adding up. | ||
| And I think the more transparency, the better. | ||
| And I think Jack, on some level, would agree with that. | ||
| What's your position on what to do with the tech companies at this point, related to all of this and the censorship and everything? | ||
| I think the solution is going to be just like back in the day we had OkCupid and now you have Tinder and all these other sites and they separate out. | ||
| There's no reason everyone has to be in one site. | ||
| If Twitter wants to say we're a site for progressive ideas, they have that right and that's perfectly fine, they're going to lose a huge market share because when you drive out fringe ideas where they're evil fringe, you're also going to be driving out the good fringe idea and that's where innovation happens. | ||
| So if you're gonna have this bourgeois, middle-of-the-road, I-don't-want-weirdness, you're going to lose the interesting people also. | ||
| So this is a very big double-edged sword. | ||
| So then why hasn't this problem been fixed? | ||
| There's enough people frustrated with it all over the political map. | ||
| Good old classical liberals are just as frustrated as perhaps more nefarious characters, and nobody has solved this problem. | ||
| But your frustration might be a feature, because they say, look, we're obviously doing things right. | ||
| We've got Dave Rubin upset. | ||
| So if we live in a culture that's heavily dominated by the progressive ideology, so for them, if they are getting certain people upset, they can say, hey, we're doing our job right. | ||
| The euphemism they currently use is the quality of the conversation. | ||
| I mean, this is the most Orwellian thing ever. | ||
| You're going to be judging quality, which is a very different thing from free speech, which is messy and ugly and often reprehensible. | ||
| How do you think that the new right, then, is supposed to... I know you don't like boundaries, and you don't like gatekeeping and any of those things, but how do you think it's... I like gatekeeping. | ||
| You do like gatekeeping? | ||
| I like gates. | ||
| I'm not an inclusionist person. | ||
| I'm very much for freedom of association. | ||
| If I don't want to talk to someone, I block people liberally. | ||
| But all right, but in a wider group outside of just what's happening in your mind and your interactions with people, how do you think that this new sort of group of people that are all over the map politically, how do they keep the fringe people, the truly bad people out of the way? | ||
| This seems to be the biggest issue that nobody's solving. | ||
| I don't think you can, because technology has made it. | ||
| It used to be you had three networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, and between the three of them you get the news. | ||
| Then Drudge came along, as I talk about in the book, and the networks were like, he's not legitimate, he's not legitimate, he's not legitimate. | ||
| He breaks one of the biggest stories of all time, Monica Lewinsky. | ||
| They didn't know what to do. | ||
| He's not legitimate, he's not legitimate. | ||
| He broke news. | ||
| Who are you to say he's not legitimate? | ||
| This orthodox idea of legitimacy has no inherent meaning other than tribalism, right? | ||
| So once you have technology, and thanks to Twitter, Facebook, whatever, everyone has their own mic, and there are more and more mics being built every day, I don't see how you're going to be able to put that genie back in the bottle. | ||
| So you just have to let it be then? | ||
| You'd say there's just no option, it just is. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And you have to engage with bad ideas if you want to defuse them because you're not, thanks to technology, you're not going to be able to censor anyone. | ||
| Let me give you another example. | ||
| I have this in the book. | ||
| Let's suppose it's like 1990, right? | ||
| And you're having an argument censoring books. | ||
| And one guy's like, we need to censor books like Mein Kampf. | ||
| It has bad consequences. | ||
| Someone else is like, no, you need to hear a free speech. | ||
| I come from 2019, teleport back in time, and I say, look, someday you're going to be able to copy a book infinitely at no cost. | ||
| You press one button, you send it anywhere on earth at the speed of light for free. | ||
| I would sound like a lunatic, but that is the status quo. | ||
| Oh, and also you need a magic word in order to read it, a password. | ||
| Okay, crazy person. | ||
| That's the status quo. | ||
| And technology is only going to increase more and more and more to empower the individual at the expense of big conglomerates. | ||
| It becomes cheaper and cheaper to make your voice heard. | ||
| Back in the day, you'd have to be like, if you don't like it, make your own network. | ||
| Well, you did. | ||
| Except we're still using their pipes, I'm still dependent, at least for the moment, on their technology. | ||
| There's a great book called The Goal, and the point of this book is, what's the goal? | ||
| What's the goal of a business? | ||
| And he says, to make money. | ||
| So how you do this is, you look at the pipeline from conception to production, and you look at what's slowing up your profits. | ||
| So maybe you don't have enough shipping boxes, maybe you're not producing enough bottles, maybe you have too much inventory, so you've got to have more marketing. | ||
| Maybe YouTube's not sending your videos out to your subscribers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So you look at what the issue is, the bottleneck, you fix that. | ||
| Once that's fixed, there's going to be another worse thing, and you fix that. | ||
| So Twitter, in many ways, is a rearguard movement right now, because people are realizing it's PayPal, and it's the banks, and it's the fact that there's domain registrars. | ||
| Those are the next three that people are going to build alternatives to, because banks are shutting down accounts right now. | ||
| And that's what's being underreported. | ||
| So Twitter is kind of a little bit of a distraction, because you'll always be able to make some rival to Twitter. | ||
| Banking and PayPal, that's something people have to look at now. | ||
| And do you think the right people are looking at it? | ||
| People in your world? | ||
| Are people looking at it? | ||
| I don't think this is an ideological thing. | ||
| I think it's just some entrepreneur who sees a market opportunity and be like, PayPal is being arbitrary, and I can compete with them on some level. | ||
| All it takes is that one guy. | ||
| And then the battle is won, and then there's gonna be another battle. | ||
| It's an asymptotic situation. | ||
| So what are some of the policies of the new, if the new right becomes, takes over the conservative movement, or takes over. | ||
| Oh, they wanna destroy the conservatives, the enemy. | ||
| Right, so whatever that is, whether they burn the thing down, or whether they infiltrate it, or whatever. | ||
| The people that care about these ideas broadly that you're talking about, what does it actually look like politically? | ||
| What are the things that they would be fighting for politically? | ||
| So this is what's hilarious, is you have a group who's united only by their opposition | ||
| to progressivism. | ||
| What do you want to do? | ||
| They have no, even close to unanimity. | ||
| Some want a military junta, like just martial law. | ||
| Some like me. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| No thank you. | ||
| All right, good. | ||
| Some want complete liberty, meaning anarchy. | ||
| Some want a restriction of the right to vote. | ||
| Some want to accelerate. | ||
| They want more leftism because they think if you accelerate and amplify, the system | ||
| is going to collapse because of the inherent contradictions in leftism. | ||
| So you have no consensus whatsoever about what the next steps. | ||
| And same thing with, for example, they think, people think, oh, everyone in this group likes | ||
| Trump. | ||
| Some of them loathe Trump completely and unabashedly. | ||
| Ann Coulter, who I talk about in this book, she's come out very hard against him and I think she called him a moron or something like that. | ||
| What do you make of her related to Trump? | ||
| It was like she was huge pro-Trump, but then he's not, you know, he's not building the wall fast enough for her or a couple of the other things. | ||
| It's like... So Coulter used to be... There's also some real politic involved. | ||
| Yeah, Coulter used to be a real troll, right? | ||
| She knew how to say the exact right things to upset people. | ||
| Now she's gotten much more serious and ideological in her later books. | ||
| It's interesting to see her relationship with Trump. | ||
| I mean, she said at one point she thought America was like 90% No chance, now it's maybe 40% because of Trump's election. | ||
| She's very- Wait, 90% no chance, what? | ||
| That America's done, we're done. | ||
| She thought, it was like, we're over, 90% chance. | ||
| Then she was like, okay, maybe it's 40% that we're done, because Trump got elected. | ||
| Oh, I got you, I got you. | ||
| I can't really speak for her, but she is a very kind of interesting character, and I discuss her ideas at length, because her book, Adios America, was probably the most influential book of the 2016 election cycle. | ||
| That's the book where Trump got the idea of they're sending the rapists. | ||
| Who do you find you can debate with on the other side of this? | ||
| So I get you can be around people on the right that you disagree on a lot of these different things and you don't come out of the racist camp and all that stuff. | ||
| Do you find that there are some good actors on the left that you can engage with? | ||
| Oh, a lot. | ||
| People like Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracy, Jimmy Dore. | ||
| I actually don't debate, because I'm not interested in persuasion. | ||
| I'm just there to have fun. | ||
| And I think debating is often a waste of time. | ||
| It's always a waste of time. | ||
| I mean, the cost benefits. | ||
| So I don't really, I've had a few people on my show who are, you know, pretty far left. | ||
| Nomiki Konst was on. | ||
| I also like debating with conservatives, because I really disagree with them. | ||
| And since I'm coming at them from this angle. | ||
| What's your line on that? | ||
| Conservatism is... Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. | ||
| So one of the things I discuss in this book is National Review, my favorite paleontology magazine. | ||
| In the late 90s, they had this editorial comparing the fight for gay rights to a theoretical fight for necrophilia and saying, what's the difference between fighting for two men to have sex with each other as opposed to having sex with a corpse? | ||
| And it was just a very disturbing article. | ||
| But now, the conservative case for gay marriage. | ||
| So what principles are there that would have you say that then and have you say this now? | ||
| So it's disturbing then and the hypocrisy is disturbing to this day as well. | ||
| So you care more about the hypocrisy of it, you don't care about gay marriage. | ||
| Well, I mean, I care about both. | ||
| I mean, if you're going to have a principle, I would have more respect for someone to be like, gay marriage is wrong because of the Bible, blah, blah, blah, and stick to that, as opposed to, I'm anti-gay then because I'm a phony, and now I'm anti-gay now because I'm a phony. | ||
| You're bringing nothing to the table. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, you specifically. | ||
| You don't care. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I wouldn't even care. | ||
| I'm glad that you're married. | ||
| Well, that's what I meant. | ||
| I mean, you don't care. | ||
| I mean, care in a negative sense. | ||
| Oh, of course, no, no, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Please, marry whatever you want. | ||
| Marry a corpse. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| So you do have limits. | ||
| Only if they're good looking. | ||
| Only if they're good looking, then you can marry a corpse. | ||
| How crazy do you think things are going to get as we roll into 2020? | ||
| As crazy as possible, hopefully. | ||
| And here's something that I've called that once I say it, no one can really kind of deny it. | ||
| Historically, the president or the nominee hasn't really engaged with the other party's primary process. | ||
| For the first time in history, a sitting president is going to be live-tweeting the debates and the primary of the other team. | ||
| And not only that, it's not like he's going to comment like, oh, I disagree with his economic plan. | ||
| He's lobbing nukes in his Trumpian style, and none of these 23 candidates are going to know what to do. | ||
| And none of their advisors, who are getting paid a lot of money, social media experts, are going to know what to do. | ||
| There's no blueprint. | ||
| And the question becomes, is it a badge of honor that Trump is clowning me? | ||
| Does that make me the strong candidate? | ||
| Do I ignore him? | ||
| Am I above the fray, like historically people used to do? | ||
| Like, oh, my opponent, you know, that kind of stuff. | ||
| So this is going to be absolutely hilarious. | ||
| And you want that hilarity. | ||
| The more chaos, the better politically. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want people to be able to get together and impose their will. | ||
| So what if you were one of the 23? | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| As someone that knows how to play the trolling game, that knows how to, you know, throw the bombs back, let's say, what would you do? | ||
| If Trump, so you're on stage, Trump's, you know, doing his Twitter thing, you get off stage, you see what's going on, what would you do? | ||
| Or what would you tell, if you were an advisor to one of these people, what would you do? | ||
| I know you don't want to give away all your tips right now. | ||
| I've resigned, I would never advise any people. | ||
| But in all seriousness, what I would do is, if you look at when he was a Comedy Central roast, And they asked him beforehand, they said, what jokes can you make and can't you make? | ||
| The only thing he wasn't comfortable being joked about was that he's not as rich as he wanted, as he claims he is. | ||
| So since that's his line, I would hit him with that line as much as possible. | ||
| But at the same time, it's hard to troll someone who is that, you know, Hiroshima in a china shop. | ||
| I mean, he's... But I don't know, Justin Amash got him pretty good, I think, over the weekend with coming out in favor of impeachment. | ||
| I think that really ruffled his feathers. | ||
| You know what it is? | ||
| This is what I would hit him with. | ||
| I would say, you bragged during the campaign that you would hire the best and smartest people. | ||
| How come all these people are resigning? | ||
| And hit him with that, his big core competency. | ||
| Alleged core competency. | ||
| How competent do you think he is or isn't? | ||
| Actually, forgetting the tactic, the trolling tactic on Twitter aside. | ||
| Confident as being president? | ||
| Confident as being president. | ||
| It's hard to tell because there's, I have that theory that probably isn't that crazy, that when you become president they sit you down, they're like, all right, this is what you can do and this is what you can't do. | ||
| The fact that Obama was droning everyone all the time, it seems like it's out of his, you know, peacenik background, or it could be that, you know, he was a closet, you know, hawk the whole time. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| I don't think any of us really know what it's like to be president. | ||
| The fact that he hasn't gotten a lot of his big promises through is kind of a big deal. | ||
| The fact that he has taken on unprecedented opposition and his head is still being held high, his approval ratings are still relatively high, I mean, that's a bit of an accomplishment. | ||
| So since you wrote a book on North Korea, and there's been a little, I think last time I had you on, maybe they were in the beginnings of some of those discussions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where are we at with North Korea right now? | |
| So North Korea has this secret weapon, which causes everyone on earth to have amnesia. | ||
| And what happens is North Korea goes through these cycles as night follows day, which is they'll be warmongers. | ||
| We're going to nuke America. | ||
| We're going to kill everyone, blah, blah. | ||
| And then six months later, we want peace. | ||
| Please work with us. | ||
| Please work with us. | ||
| And they've just gone back to the war cycle. | ||
| And everyone's like, oh, my God, we've never heard this before. | ||
| North Korea had sentenced President Trump to death. | ||
| They were threatening to New Guam and Alaska, and even previously that they were threatening to New | ||
| Austin. | ||
| So this is how they, this is their song. | ||
| Austin wouldn't be terrible. | ||
| Oh, come on, no. | ||
| [LAUGHTER] | ||
| So this is where they are right now. | ||
| I am very hopeful. | ||
| The thing I'm very happy with with President Trump is that North Korea is now on the front pages, | ||
| because we need to engage with this most evil country. | ||
| And I was on Fox & Friends first, a while ago, and they said, what is your big concern with the summit? | ||
| And I said, the continuing enslavement of the North Korean people. | ||
| So that whenever you're looking at this issue, always ask, in my view, what does this mean for these 20 million hostages who are being kept enslaved by this evil government that starved its population on purpose during the 90s and killed one to two million people? | ||
| That is not funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do you think that Trump is sort of the perfect person for this? | ||
| That as North Korea vacillates back and forth with all this rhetoric, that Trump can actually match them at that, and that might be the thing that kind of allows a detente? | ||
| I don't know about perfect, but you have to have hope for these people. | ||
| Especially, I mean, not to sound whatever, once you've been there and you've seen people there, everyone I met in North Korea is still there. | ||
| Like, every single person I saw on the street, every kid, every grandma, and it messes with their head, because this is, what, 2012? | ||
| Think how much your life has changed since 2012, think how much mine has, and none of theirs has. | ||
| I still see my guide, you know, pictures of her on Instagram, and she's still trapped, and she's like a millionaire there, but she's still trapped in that prison with those gilded bars, so it's very disturbing. | ||
| How does an anarchist care about foreign policy? | ||
| Well, because since the government's the enemy, this is the most evil government on earth. | ||
| It's a pretty easy syllogism. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| You don't really think about that, though. | ||
| I mean, generally, when people think of a more libertarian view of the world, it's like, no, just let everybody do whatever the hell they want. | ||
| Well, I'm not going to let the government do whatever the hell they want to these people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing. | ||
| Even though it's not your government? | ||
| These are human beings. | ||
| And, you know, being born in the Soviet Union, being Jewish, these were two chances my family could have been sent to concentration camp. | ||
| So the fact that we have concentration camps right now, that you can see them on Google Earth, you know, in high school we always talk about how the Holocaust happened, how the Holocaust happened. | ||
| Something similar happened in the 90s in North Korea against its own population. | ||
| This is something that maybe other people don't care, but for me, it's kind of like there but for the grace of God go I. And when I met the guy that I had, she had the same haircut my mom had in like 1982, which is a cutting edge for North Korea. | ||
| But it's just looking at like a sliding doors thing and it's like, holy crap, I could have been born here. | ||
| And instead of sitting here in my Willy Wonka costume, you know, who knows what would have happened to me. | ||
| What do you think is going to happen to the traditional conservatives? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Is it absolutely over because they can't withstand what's coming on both sides at this point? | ||
| I don't see how they come back, because they didn't bring that much to the table to begin with, as opposed to socking to the left. | ||
| And now Trump is socking to the left more than anyone else has. | ||
| Ben Domenech, not that long from The Federalist, and I'm very curious to hear his take on this book and this thesis. | ||
| Because he's someone that is more of a traditional conservative. | ||
| He's a hardcore pure conservative, mutual respect, I like him a lot. | ||
| But I don't see how they regain this party, especially because one of the big issues with conservatism and maybe republicanism is young people. | ||
| Young people are going to be drawn to humor and edginess and memes, and they're not going to be drawn to kind of like, hey, remember Reagan? | ||
| You know, Reagan's great. | ||
| He ended the Cold War. | ||
| But this is not going to be a selling point for your movement. | ||
| And also, I think young people are also drawn to aggression and kind of flipping over tables. | ||
| And that's what the new right does offer them. | ||
| Are there political leaders outside of however much Trump is involved in this? | ||
| Are there some other people that you like? | ||
| I know that's the weird thing. | ||
| It's like you don't want a political leader, per se, because you don't want... Who'll be personally, who I like? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or that you think can sort of grab some of these pieces and do something good, in your estimation. | ||
| I'm sure there are. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard I like. | ||
| Anyone who brings more of the anti-war message. | ||
| It's funny, you wrote a book called The New Right and you're picking a candidate who's running as a Democrat. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Anti-war Democrat, but it's interesting. | ||
| I would love it if there was a complete Consensus in Washington that war is a last resort and an absolute nightmare. | ||
| That is my goal. | ||
| So, just like we agree that slavery is a non-starter, sure, I'll get the argument that maybe we have to go to war, but the fact that we can be so glib about it and be like, oh yeah, we're just gonna... Here's another example. | ||
| Do you think that we've crossed a little bit of a threshold when it comes to war? | ||
| I mean, I feel like the mistakes of Iraq and nobody knows why the hell we're in Afghanistan still. | ||
| Trump is not beating war drums. | ||
| You know, there's stuff about, there's always this over-the-top rhetoric related to Iran, but I don't sense this is a guy that wants to just, I think he's actually very against all of these nations. | ||
| The bloodlust of the establishment, which I include the corporate press, cannot be overstated. | ||
| When 2016 trumps the nominee, we heard it every single day. | ||
| He's crazy. | ||
| He's going to give us to World War III. | ||
| He's going to get pissed off at a tweet from China and press the nuclear button. | ||
| Remember, we heard this all the time. | ||
| Carly Fiorina got asked this in the second debate, the first question, do you trust President Trump with his finger on the nuclear button? | ||
| And now, China has hacked our systems, Russia has tried to interfere with our elections, and the press is constantly saying, do something about it, do something about Venezuela. | ||
| So the fact that he's not getting us into World War III is now being used as a slight against him by the same people who regarded that as a problem when he was a nominee. | ||
| It's horrific. | ||
| And this has been a long time coming. | ||
| We talk about yellow journalism in high school, remember? | ||
| The Spanish-American War. | ||
| And then they pretend it went away. | ||
| It didn't go away. | ||
| The same press, if it bleeds, it leads. | ||
| They can't wait to get us into another engagement. | ||
| It's disgraceful. | ||
| What has to happen with the press then? | ||
| And I mean this in terms of cable news, mainstream news, network news, I mean this Vox HuffPo, BuzzFeed, all of it. | ||
| The battle is won when the average corporate journalist is regarded with the exact same way as the average tobacco executive. | ||
| They have a job, they're promoting their product, their product is cancerous and deadly, they're often bright people, they're often good people, but be aware of what it is that they're selling you. | ||
| So how do we find some people to trust in the mix of all this, in this big mess? | ||
| Trust? | ||
| Trust but verify? | ||
| I mean, I'll use the Reagan... I mean, trust is... I'm not interested in trusting people. | ||
| I'm interested in trusting ideas and creating mechanisms that people can't enforce their will, so trust won't be necessary. | ||
| Like, I don't need to trust, like eBay, right? | ||
| I don't need to trust that other guy is going to be... | ||
| God, there's a lot here, Malice. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| there are different systems, I can get my money refunded, so on and so forth. | ||
| So there's no reason for me to have a political leader to trust because systemically, | ||
| he's going to betray me at some point or another. | ||
| God, there's a lot here, Malice. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Take me somewhere else altogether. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Where else do you wanna go in this conversation right now? | ||
| I mean, I've got a million things rattling here, but where else do you want to go? | ||
| You're a humorist. | ||
| Doesn't it bother you? | ||
| One of the things I defend in this book is dark humor. | ||
| Let's tie it back to North Korea. | ||
| I knew a refugee, and so when people say, that's not funny, Right? | ||
| It's this puritanism. | ||
| H.L. | ||
| Mencken said puritanism is the idea that someone somewhere is happy, right? | ||
| I knew this refugee, North Korean refugee, and he went to high school here, and he's talking to his friends, and they go, hey, remember when we were kids we had Pokemon? | ||
| And he goes, yeah, except instead of Pokemon, I watched my dad starve to death. | ||
| Now, are you going to tell him that's not appropriate? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Do you know what it's like? | ||
| His coping mechanism. | ||
| Yeah, do you know what it's like to watch someone hungry, starve to death, and it's your own dad? | ||
| We can never wrap our heads around this. | ||
| So for you to tell him that kind of joke is not appropriate, how dare you? | ||
| Bonnie McFarlane, a great comedian, was roasting Jim Norton, and she said, Now, that's very dark, but are you telling me she doesn't love her daughter? | ||
| Are you telling me she's not a tell-a-joke? | ||
| So, the metaphor I use when people say a certain subject is not appropriate for humor, I say it's like flour. | ||
| F-L-O-U-R. | ||
| It's flour or food. | ||
| Well, no one eats flour, but everyone eats it when it's processed and baked, right? | ||
| So same thing with jokes. | ||
| The darker the subject, the harder it is to make it palatable. | ||
| And I have examples of, you know, they made me cut one joke, but I have examples of all sorts of, you know, subjects that are supposed to be off-limits. | ||
| And maybe you personally don't find it funny. | ||
| If someone's been assaulted and they're like, you know, these kind of jokes set me off, that's fair. | ||
| But the idea that no one should find that funny is not fair. | ||
| Well, it's also stealing something that's very human, is that we use humor. | ||
| Comedy is tragedy plus time. | ||
| We use humor to be able to look back on the past. | ||
| I mean, if Mel Brooks couldn't have made fun of Hitler, couldn't have made fun of the Holocaust, that was actually healing, I'm sure for him personally, but for millions of other people. | ||
| But the establishment, which gets by on legitimacy and quality conversation, it cannot abide that court jester laughing at them. | ||
| Do you think that's why they took out the AOC parody account on Twitter? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Because it was really freaking good. | ||
| They took out a lot of parody accounts. | ||
| Strange, all those Trump parody accounts are still up. | ||
| And Saturday Night Live, which is their right, and they're great. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| You should be making fun of the president. | ||
| But you're not saying Saturday Night Live is great, are you? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's pretty crappy. | ||
| I haven't watched it in a long time. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, I haven't watched it in 15 years, but every time I see a 10-second clip, it's like... Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's basically as good as the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka movie. | ||
| So... That's a callback, my friend. | ||
| Yeah, I understood it was a callback. | ||
| It's just the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard in my entire life. | ||
| Someone who I love your outside-the-box thinking and yet... | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
| The point is, humor, it's a Jewish thing. | ||
| It's this Jewish thing of laughing to keep from crying. | ||
| And it's a very WASP-y thing. | ||
| It's like, ugh, you don't make the kind of jokes at the dinner table. | ||
| And just because something isn't for someone doesn't mean it's not for no one. | ||
| And one of the elements of the evangelical left is the idea of universalism. | ||
| Everything has to be inclusive. | ||
| Everything has to be for everyone. | ||
| And my answer is no. | ||
| Not everything has to be for everyone, and that's okay. | ||
| Not everyone is welcome in my house. | ||
| Not everyone's gonna enjoy this book. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If you don't think I'm interesting or funny or smart, I wish you nothing but goodwill. | ||
| This is a big world. | ||
| Go live your best life. | ||
| Do you think that it doesn't make sense, or does it deeply, that they're obsessed with our differences? | ||
| They're obsessed with our skin color differences and our sexuality and our gender differences. | ||
| I mean, that is the entire thrust of everything that they're giving us. | ||
| And yet, they're also the ones that want us to be exactly the same. | ||
| Is that a feature or a bug, actually? | ||
| I don't know if it's a feature or a bug. It certainly works for them to some extent because what | ||
| you know kind of evangelical progressivism gives people is a sense of certainty and it also gives | ||
| them a sense of being saved, right? So once I recognize the pervasiveness of racism, I've kind | ||
| of been initiated into the mysteries of this faith and therefore since I'm inherently good now, I'm in | ||
| a position to condemn heretics and sinners and if necessary wipe them off the face of the earth. | ||
| So they want us to be the same in terms of being saved but they don't want us to be necessarily | ||
|
unidentified
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saved in terms of a literalist. I don't know that I've ever heard you talk about this specifically | |
| but how much of what do you think is going on with the evangelical left as you just described | ||
| them is just a disconnect from faith? | ||
| Oh, I think it's a degeneration of the social gospel. | ||
| So conservatives, when I talk to them, they're like, oh, they admit that the left controls culture and media and Hollywood and things like that. | ||
| And you say, how did this happen? | ||
| And they're like, we have to have our own version. | ||
| I go, how did this happen? | ||
| They're like, oh, it used to be. | ||
| I'm like, when? | ||
| When it was the 1930s when literal communists were running Hollywood, when Woodrow Wilson is playing birth of a nation at the White House, FDR has so many Democrats that they have to sit on the Republican side of the seats in Congress. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| So you're saying it's not that they lost control, they never had control? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It's always been and there's a reason because leftism lends itself to innovation and creativity because one of the aspects of leftism is liking what's new, liking what's innovative. | ||
| This is a psychological thing and there's nothing wrong with being conservative saying I don't like new stuff, I like things the same. | ||
| That's fine for you but that's going to be a huge disadvantage when you're trying to attract people who are artistically minded because they're going to be drawn to those who are maybe not overly openly minded. | ||
| Right, because it sounds good. | ||
| I'm for progress. | ||
| Everyone's for progress, but it depends what you're progressing to. | ||
|
unidentified
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Correct. | |
| This is the rub. | ||
| So, how conservatives, how the left controls culture and built it is one of the big themes of this book. | ||
| And it's, I think, filling in a big hole on the right, because conservatives really don't know. | ||
| And here's another example of conservatives. | ||
| You remember, I'm sure, back in the 90s. | ||
| John Stewart, you know, or the 2000, excuse me, was running the show. | ||
| And the answer was, let's have a conservative daily show. | ||
| That's not creativity. | ||
| That's just mirroring what someone else has built. | ||
| As opposed to people like, I would say, like Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes. | ||
| Rush Limbaugh invented, basically, talk radio, made it what it was. | ||
| Roger Ailes was told, we want you to compete with CNN. | ||
| He goes, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm going to destroy CNN. | ||
| And CNN was all news. | ||
| And he made it this news entertainment opinion thing. | ||
| And then CNN followed suit. | ||
| So those are two examples of the right actually creating something kind of sui generis. | ||
| You think we ever get to something that feels a little more stable again than where we're at right now? | ||
| I think stability politically means oppression. | ||
| And I think the stability of like, let's suppose the 50s, and this is one thing I'm hopeful with social media, there were entire schools of thought that were made invisible. | ||
| Because they were threatening to the social order. | ||
| And now they have to pick people up one by one instead of entire schools of thought. | ||
| And that is progress in a good way. | ||
| What if you were picked off? | ||
| I'm too charming. | ||
| No, I mean, I can be glib. | ||
| It would suck. | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| I mean, because I think that's what a lot of people are thinking. | ||
| It's like, you know, we've seen enough of the names that we've mentioned throughout this get picked off and get suspended and get banned. | ||
| It's not that there are best buddies or anything, | ||
| but everyone's sort of in the same sort of circles at some level. | ||
| Again, coming from that Soviet background, I know that idea of like, it could be you tomorrow. | ||
| It's not, it's always at random, 'cause that way you keep everyone scared. | ||
| Can you dive into that a little bit more? | ||
| Sure, so one of the techniques that the Soviets did is, it wouldn't be like the worst people | ||
| who would get picked off. | ||
| Like Beria said, find me the man, I'll find you the crime. | ||
| So Stalin, and I do not think we're in a Stalinist society, I'm just using this as a metaphor, a very loose metaphor, I just really want that to be clear, because we've got a ways to go before that. | ||
| But the principle to keep a population kind of submissive is, it's not always the loudmouth. | ||
| You pick the housewife, or you pick this grandma, and then everyone knows you could be next. | ||
| So you only got to take out like three people, and that 100 are going to basically fall in line. | ||
| And because Twitter's rules are ambiguous, and it's seemingly at random, and they don't even give warning. | ||
| They could have sat down that AOC account and said, these three tweets are offensive, Delete them. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Even though he did nothing wrong by the rules that they supposedly put out there. | ||
| I mean, he labeled it a parody account. | ||
| That's the main thing. | ||
| And many people have more than one account. | ||
| And also, if you want to have this kind of public square, you know, political conversation, once someone is a certain level of stature, who are, you know, kind of an influencer, it might be that Jack has to talk to them personally, or there has to be three checks before they're banned, or you could have warnings. | ||
| A lot of systems for keeping people who are part of this thriving conversation in place, but that's not what they want and that's their right, but this is something that people should recognize. | ||
| So you would say that the tech companies basically want to keep us all in semi-darkness all the time because that's the easiest way to... | ||
| I don't know if it's easy, but it seems to be effective for them in terms of, because then you have self-censorship, right? | ||
| Because, you know, I had this tweet, I don't remember what it was, and I was scared to put it up because I'm like, any moment that I have sore on can fall on me and I'm booted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm sure you know this feeling very well, especially with your YouTube stuff. | ||
| Yeah, no, I know it extremely well, and it's like, if I'm even remotely close to where the cliff is, man, things have shifted in a seriously dangerous way. | ||
| I mean, look, there will be a certain amount of people that don't want me talking to you. | ||
| There are a certain amount of people that didn't want me talking to Cernovich, et cetera, et cetera, and I have to figure out who I think it's okay to talk to. | ||
| And I talk about that in the book. | ||
| How is it okay for Barbara Walters to sit down with, like, Gaddafi? | ||
| You're telling me that Diane Sawyer didn't endorse all the views of Charles Manson? | ||
| Because that seems to be what they say about if I sit down with someone I must endorse all their views. | ||
| It's amazing when they're like, oh, he follows this person on Twitter. | ||
| It's like, everyone follows the president. | ||
| I mean, does that mean you endorse it? | ||
| Like, when CNN plays his video, his speech, does that mean they're endorsing it? | ||
| So it's a very weird situation. | ||
| But again, because they're legitimate, you're unorthodox, you're not legitimate, you don't have the same rights, in a sense, that they do. | ||
| Yeah, well, we talked about it right before we started, but you saw the way Media Matters went after me, because I was going to have Mayor Pete on. | ||
| They went after him, though. | ||
| Yeah, well, so that's the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not you! | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Can you take that away? | ||
| I mean, you know exactly how it works. | ||
| When Donald Trump Jr. | ||
| took a tweet of mine and put it on Instagram, and for days I was fending people off, basically it was like, well, they can't get a Trump, so they're going to get at me. | ||
| So you don't give a crap about media matters, I'm sure, but they can sure get to Pete because they'll have his ear. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| I mean, think how sad and depressing that is. | ||
| Forget Mayor Pete coming in here and doing the show. | ||
| It's actually irrelevant. | ||
| I would like to have talked to the guy, but that strikes me as irrelevant. | ||
| It's more that either he or his handlers are willing to bow to the mob. | ||
| His people basically agree to do an interview, and then because media matters, HuffPo and Vox. | ||
| Which the latter two are supposed to be places of journalism. | ||
| They are leveraging or trying to influence a political candidate. | ||
| The only reason a mayor of an Indiana town is in the running for the presidency is because of HuffPo Media Matters and Vox. | ||
| The idea that this is a platform for even Senate beggars belief. | ||
| So of course he's going to kowtow to the people who put him in the position he is. | ||
| This guy's no natural constituency. | ||
| He's like 37 years old. | ||
| We got a big battle ahead of us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the important thing is to have fun and enjoy life because we're still free and we're still blessed in this country. | ||
| And this is one of the things I do disagree with, with many pox. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| These people think America is ruined. | ||
| We're destroyed. | ||
| There's no hope. | ||
| And it makes me very, very sad because you go online and you find more creative people doing awesome things than you can count. | ||
| Yeah, and we definitely focus, seemingly we focus on the negative more, but that is one of the things that when I see you on Twitter, I'm like, you are actually having fun with this. | ||
| And there is a need, this endless politicization, did I say that right? | ||
| Yes, you did. | ||
| Of everything, it's making people crazy and depressed. | ||
| One of the things I really hate about the left, and a certain kind of the left, is the idea that the personal is the political. | ||
| And to me, if I disagree with someone politically, that this would have any ramification on our friendship is so profoundly disturbing. | ||
| I can't even begin. | ||
| Like, if, God forbid, some of my family dies and I have to look at my phone and be like, well, I can't call this person because they're a Bernie person. | ||
| What kind of human being am I? | ||
| What a twisted place. | ||
| What a twisted place. | ||
| And even people who are like regular Christians don't think in these terms. | ||
| Like, I have good friends. | ||
| I'm staying with a couple. | ||
| They're solid Christians. | ||
| If something happened to my family, one of theirs, I mean, "You're Jewish?" | ||
| This would never even enter their heads, not even in a million years. | ||
| But it's like, "Oh, you're a Trump voter, "you're a Hillary voter, I can't, you know, | ||
| "whatever with you." | ||
| This is very, very tribal and disturbing to me. | ||
| Have you figured out any ways to deprogram some of these people? | ||
| Yes, humor. | ||
| I think once you encourage people to see the absurdity of their position, | ||
| and also tell them you can let go. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't have to be so ideological all the time. | |
| Life is wonderful. | ||
| Enjoy your life and you shouldn't be depressed. | ||
| Let's suppose Mike Pence. | ||
| If you're gay and Mike Pence is president, that might suck for you. | ||
| But come on, go to WeHo, go to Hamburger Mary's, have fun! | ||
| I mean, this is not really a reflection of your life because there will always be a president that you hate. | ||
| So focus as much as you can, and this isn't a shocking message, on living your life to the fullest. | ||
| That's it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't need to ask you anything else. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I think let's get people, regardless of where the politics fall on any of this, it's like let's get people to realize it's still pretty good and don't get too caught up in all the lunacy. | ||
| And just when I'm trolling, someone just retweet it and sit back and laugh. | ||
| Don't spoil my trolls. | ||
| Where do you get this jacket? | ||
| I mean, Oompa Loompa made it. |
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