Oct. 17, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I changed my party affiliation because I just don't feel like it's, I just couldn't live with my conscience to be a Democrat anymore after working on the new book. | ||
| I just felt like it's just, I have questions about even, I mean, I'm sticking with California. | ||
| I'm going to fight to save California like you, but, um, I feel like I'm living in like apartheid South Africa or something. | ||
| I just feel like I'm living in a place that's not moral. | ||
| And, and I feel really bad and angry about that. | ||
| And so. | ||
| Yeah, we don't wanna move, but this state is pretty terrible. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the president of Environmental Progress and author of the new book, San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities. | ||
| Michael Schellenberger, welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| Good to see you again. | ||
| So last time that I saw you was about three years ago, and I think it's fair to say we both considered ourselves liberals or Democrats or something like that. | ||
| That's why I wanted to have you on, because I thought, oh, here's someone sort of on my team who's frustrated with some of the stuff that I'm frustrated with. | ||
| Flash forward three years, where are you at in your little political journey before we fully get into the book and everything else? | ||
| As usual, still having trouble with labels. | ||
| I mean, I wrote an essay called why I am not a progressive. | ||
| So I'm definitely not a progressive. | ||
| I can't accept that label anymore. | ||
| I changed my party affiliation in April from Democrat to no party preference, which is what we call independence in California. | ||
| I, you know, I wrote, I have two books out, one last year, one this year, Apocalypse Never, and San Francisco, where, you know, I wrote them in part because I just wanted to sort of articulate what I believe, you know, based on reading the evidence and what my views are, because I think labels are so inadequate. | ||
| I think some people, some progressives will call me, you know, a conservative or a right-wing lunatic, of course. | ||
| You know, I, some, a lot of people I think call me a moderate. | ||
| The Huffington Post quoted me as a moderate. | ||
| Um, you know, as usual, as you won't be surprised to hear, I mean, there's some views I have that I think would be better categorized as liberal than conservative and some views that would be better categorized as conservative. | ||
| And I think there's some things that are just not easy to categorize. | ||
| You know, I should note for the record that I actually still am registered as a Democrat in Cali, but it's a calculated move because I wanted to be able to vote in the primaries so that I could vote, believe it or not, for Biden in the primaries so that I could stop Bernie. | ||
| So that tells you how, that sort of tells you how politics has become so crazy and the system is so nuts that you stay in a party to vote against the guy you're trying to stop the most, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, and obviously the state level now we have a, you know, an open primary so that you can vote for, um, you know, you can have two Republicans or two Democrats or two independents in the runoff. | ||
| So, but yeah, I just honestly, I, I, I changed my party affiliation because I just don't feel like it's, I just couldn't live with my conscience to be a Democrat anymore. | ||
| After working on the new book, I just felt like it's just, I have questions about even, I mean, I'm sticking with California. | ||
| I'm going to fight to save California like you, but, um, I feel like I'm living in like apartheid South Africa or something. | ||
| I just feel like I'm living in a place that's not moral, and I feel really bad and angry about that. | ||
| And so, yeah, we don't want to move, but this state is pretty terrible on a lot of levels. | ||
| Yeah, let's sit with that for a little bit, because as you know, I fought really, really hard for this recall. | ||
| I basically was campaigning with Larry Elder. | ||
| The results of this thing were a disaster. | ||
| Now Newsom has codified mail-in ballots basically forever. | ||
| We have one party rule, nothing's working, which is so much of what your new book's about. | ||
| Do you have any hope here? | ||
| I am really troubled. | ||
| I'm just having trouble Seeing the hope. | ||
| If I could see some hope, I'd be like, yeah, I could still stay and fight. | ||
| But I just don't see that glimmer. | ||
| I don't see that star in the distance anymore. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's dark right now, right? | ||
| But I think the darkness also means that we just can't see things. | ||
| And so we should be humble too about our own inability to view what might be out there. | ||
| You know, I will say, I think that the election heavily, if you believe the polling, I think it did heavily turn on the COVID response. | ||
| And I think most people in California, and I don't know, you and I might not agree on this, but you know, I think most California supported the status quo view of COVID. | ||
| I wrote, I tweeted something that I think now is overly pessimistic about how people voted for the status quo. | ||
| I don't necessarily think that's true. | ||
| You know, we have polling data that also shows high levels, 75, 70, you know, 80% support for basically, I think the things, the common sense things that I think you and I will agree that we need to do about the open air drug scenes, what we euphemistically call homeless encampments. | ||
| So I do think there is public support for a lot of the stuff that we need to change. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, we have a, you know, I think we have a leadership challenge. | ||
| I surprised myself and I did feel like I needed to endorse somebody. | ||
| I ended up endorsing Kevin Faulconer in the recall. | ||
| In general, I don't believe in recalls because I do think you should give the guy the four years. | ||
| But in this case, I thought the situation on the streets was so extreme that it merited the recall. | ||
| So I did endorse the recall and I endorsed Kevin Faulconer and Yeah, and then I defended, you may have seen, I defended Larry Elder against the unconscionable attacks by, you know, the racist Antifa woman, or I don't know if she's Antifa, so don't sue me, but the racist woman in a gorilla mask, throwing an egg at him, and just the unconscionable media coverage by the LA Times in particular, but really all the state media, | ||
| You know, clearly, you know, inappropriate. | ||
| I mean, I sort of flabbergasted still by how terrible and biased the media coverage was. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, with the book and certainly in a movement that we're building, we have a coalition of groups, including parents of kids killed by fentanyl, including parents whose kids are addicted to fentanyl and living on the streets and who want to get their kids off the street, including recovering addicts. | ||
| We are advocating for a pretty sweeping set of reforms. | ||
| But yeah, it was discouraging. | ||
| So when you talk to your liberal lefty friends, or just like the average California type person, one of the things that I'm still amazed, now I do sense a lot of people waking up and I think that the election and the way they treated Lowry was a red pill for a lot of people, but still, obviously the results were basically 70-30, so obviously out of the voters, they're down with Newsom and whatever that means. | ||
| When you talk to some of the lefties still, do they think things are going well here? | ||
| That always seems to be the confusing part for me. | ||
| Who thinks things are going well? | ||
| No, I mean, my most progressive friends are the guys I play soccer with and they don't think it's okay. | ||
| They think it's a big problem. | ||
| Part of the reason I wrote San Francisco is because when I would raise the problems with them, including the fact that the vast majority of people living on the streets are addicted to hard drugs or suffering mental illness, They would say to me, it sounds like you just want to arrest everybody. | ||
| And so I wrote San Francisco in part to say, here's what I want to do. | ||
| You know, here's what I think the plan is. | ||
| And it's we don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration. | ||
| There is a role for police. | ||
| There is a role for laws and law enforcement. | ||
| But that's not the end of the story. | ||
| And we don't want to go back to one flew over the cuckoo's nest. | ||
| But it's unacceptable to have these, you know, 100,000, 120,000 people living on the streets using hard drugs, a threat to themselves and others. | ||
| Totally unacceptable. | ||
| So, no, I think that there's actually high levels of dissatisfaction. | ||
| I think we are looking for leadership, whether that's coming from the civil society level or from the political level. | ||
| Somebody's got to step up and challenge Newsom, who obviously is up for re-election next year. | ||
| So it's kind of funny. | ||
| You wrote San Francisco, obviously about San Francisco. | ||
| You happen to be in Venice right now, just visiting. | ||
| I'm in LA at the moment. | ||
| So we're only about a half hour away from each other. | ||
| And we wanted to do it in person, but my schedule is a little nuts today. | ||
| But what's going on in Venice? | ||
| Because it seems like Venice has been completely destroyed. | ||
| Yeah, so, you know, what we call homeless encampments is really a euphemism for what European researchers call open drug scenes. | ||
| So, you know, the San Francisco really describes the whole history of how did we get here. | ||
| But basically, we're in the midst of two overlapping drug epidemics, as you know. | ||
| One, the more famous one, is around opioids. | ||
| It started with the overprescription of Opioids in the early to the early late 90s early 2000s. | ||
| We then curtailed doctor prescriptions in the you know around 2010 a lot of people switch to heroin now a lot of people are using fentanyl and dying 93,000 people died last year Dave from illicit drugs. | ||
| It's scandalous. | ||
| It's a moral failing That's almost five times more people that die from homicides in the United States about three times more than die from car accidents and Up from 17,000 in the year 2000. | ||
| So this is a moral crisis. | ||
| It's disproportionately impacting California. | ||
| Homelessness increased in California 31% over the last 10 years, while declining 18% in the rest of the United States. | ||
| So what we're seeing in Venice Beach, in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, in Skid Row in Los Angeles, but also in the Blade neighborhood of Seattle, in Portland, where I just visited, I was just in Portland, but also in Vancouver. | ||
| And now we're seeing very similar situations in Philadelphia, the Kensington neighborhood. | ||
| So these are all best referred to as open drug scenes. | ||
| That's, I think, the right way to think about them. | ||
| That's the academic word. | ||
| But, you know, there's only one way to deal with them, which is that you have to require people to use shelter. | ||
| You can't let people camp in public. | ||
| I know that sounds like a radical idea, but that's not OK. | ||
| There is some role for providing people with housing, but they should earn it by making progress on their personal plan towards recovery from addiction or taking control of their psychiatric illnesses. | ||
| But we need a shelter first policy. | ||
| We need a treatment first policy. | ||
| The housing first policy we have has completely failed. | ||
| It's basically unethical because it doesn't actually try to deal with the root of the problem, which is addiction. | ||
| Everything that we do in California is a band-aid solution. | ||
| So the solution in Venice Beach was just to try to put people in some hotel rooms temporarily, but everybody just ends right back out on Venice Beach or in Tenderloin or Skid Row because we're not willing to deal with the fundamental problem, which is an addiction crisis. | ||
| Right, so that's actually one of the themes of the book, that the progressive and all the cities you just mentioned are all progressive cities, that they sort of say the right thing. | ||
| Oh, we'll put them in hotels, they will be off the street. | ||
| It sort of sounds right, but then you realize that now they're just doing drugs in hotels and no one suddenly gets a job or gets their life in order. | ||
| Is that sort of the biggest theme to Maybe even a little bit of your own political evolution, that progressives are constantly saying what sounds right and easy. | ||
| Oh, we're not gonna police. | ||
| We're not gonna worry about drugs. | ||
| We're not gonna do anything about homelessness. | ||
| It all sounds like, oh, we're trying to be nice to people, but the end result is pretty much everything in your book. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this was one of the big questions, which is sort of, you know, why do people who claim to care so much about people of color, the poor, the mentally ill, the people addicted to hard drugs? | ||
| Why is it that that the progressives have allowed the situation to worsen so terribly in California? | ||
| I debunk all the reasons given. | ||
| People say we don't spend enough money. | ||
| We spend more money than anybody. | ||
| And I documented more money on mental health than any other state. | ||
| Worst outcomes. | ||
| People say it's because we don't have enough permanent supportive housing. | ||
| San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing per capita than any other city and has the worst outcomes. | ||
| You know, what's going on here is that this all boils down to victim ideology, where there's this idea that we can categorize some people as victims, that nothing should be asked of victims. | ||
| Everything should be given, including, you know, the right to camp in public, to use drugs in public, defecate in public, engage in even violent behaviors with no consequences. | ||
| It's specific to the West Coast. | ||
| It's specific to progressive cities. | ||
| But it is spreading around the country. And so yeah, I mean there's been various | ||
| I mean one of the funniest things I interviewed progressives I interviewed a lot of progressives for this book by the | ||
| way So they're all in here and I I have my own, you know | ||
| I worked for Maxine waters to advocate for needle exchange in the early in the late 90s. I worked for George Soros's | ||
| think-tanks in the late 90s So I, and I still support- You have a progressive pedigree. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they all talked to me, you know, everybody talked to me and you know, a lot of them, it was like, they would say things to me like, well, this really started with Reagan, you know? | ||
| And I was like, really? | ||
| Like how so? | ||
| You know, they would say Reagan let everybody out of the mental institutions. | ||
| As governor, in truth, it was actually Kennedy who got deinstitutionalization started. | ||
| Reagan didn't do what he needed to do, but it's hard to blame it on him. | ||
| People claim that Reagan cut the budget for housing. | ||
| Really, the budget for housing at the federal level stayed the same when he was president. | ||
| It declined to very small amounts. | ||
| Mostly the changes had nothing to do with him. | ||
| Progressives have been in charge, as you know, in California for a really long time, so this is not a problem that they can put on anybody else's back. This is really something they have | ||
| to own. And in fact, you know, Gavin Newsom, who used to identify or position himself anyway as | ||
| a moderate Democrat, was the person who advocated the housing first policies in 2005. By the way, | ||
| it was George W. Bush who instant who is who made that official federal policy. So it's really | ||
| been a bipartisan policy to some extent. | ||
| But the idea that you should just give people housing with no requirements on behavior change | ||
| has been a progressive, you know, been at the top of the progressive agenda for 20 years. | ||
| Did you talk to any of the progressives, say in San Francisco, here in LA, who, you know, like Chesa Bodine or George Gascon, these DAs who have decided not to prosecute basic crimes. | ||
| Or even in New York, they're doing things like this. | ||
| If you jump the turnstile, they won't arrest you. | ||
| So you're incentivizing people to break the law. | ||
| But you know, if you steal, I think it's under $899 worth of stuff, At a store, they basically won't prosecute you. | ||
| So you could get a PlayStation 5 and you get five games, but you take that sixth game and now you're in trouble. | ||
| Did you like, now I get it, I get it. | ||
| They feel like they're helping somebody who might need to steal a carton of milk or something like that. | ||
| Not even that that would make it right. | ||
| But do you ever get a better explanation on stuff that we all see the videos and we're like, geez, we know this is not right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, what you're describing is a selective view of victims. | ||
| So, progressives are really concerned with victims of the system, and they're giving a pass to victims of other individuals, so to speak. | ||
| So, to give an example of it, progressives are very concerned with people who they feel are being victimized by police, than people who are being victimized by other individuals. | ||
| So African-Americans are killed at a rate 30 times higher by other civilians than they are | ||
| by the police, and yet there's a huge movement around police killings, which is advocating some | ||
| reforms that I think are very positive and we But there's basically no movement whatsoever for reducing homicides among African-Americans more broadly. | ||
| What about drug addicts on the street who are often stabbed with machetes by drug dealers if they don't pay what they owe them? | ||
| That's how it gets enforced. | ||
| Um, there's just kind of a shrugging of the shoulders by progressives at those crimes and the drug dealers, according to Chesa Bodine, most of whom are from Honduras, not all, but a lot of the, and that's just particular San Francisco, but the Hondurans control the drug trade in San Francisco and Chesa Bodine has said that their victims, the drug dealers are victims of human trafficking. | ||
| That's not true by the way, but because they're people of color and they're immigrants, they get put in the category of victims. | ||
| So what I'm interested, what I was interested in was why the selected, the selective categorization of victims. | ||
| What you come up with is that progressives are strictly concerned with victims of the | ||
| system and not concerned with people that are victimized by others. | ||
| One thing that was interesting to me, I'm working on a column called The Reason They | ||
| Defend Crime is Because They're Against Capitalism, which is that when you find people defending | ||
| the shoplifting, the complete looting of Walgreens and drugstores in California because you can | ||
| steal as you mentioned $950 worth of items without any consequence. | ||
| The people who will defend that are socialists who say, well, Walgreens rips off its workers. | ||
| So what you find in the book in San Francisco, I document a long history going back, of course, to the 60s of antagonism. | ||
| To the police, but to the criminal justice system more broadly. | ||
| And this goes back really to the 19th century radical anarchists and socialists who viewed crime as sort of justified because it was, um, you know, getting at, you know, fighting back against the man. | ||
| Um, and so, so that, that's where that selective victimization comes from. | ||
| I felt the need to write San Francisco because I think when my soccer, my progressive soccer buddies read it. | ||
| and you kind of lay out where is this ideology coming from? | ||
| And you realize that, yeah, it's really that stupid. | ||
| Like, it's like, you know, you get to the bottom of it and you're like, wow, that dumb. | ||
| Or you're like, I thought it maybe would be more sophisticated, but it's just that stupid at bottom. | ||
| There's no there there. | ||
| Yeah, once you make it explicit, I think it's harder for people to defend it. | ||
| Does it sort of impress you almost? | ||
| I mean, I ask almost all my guests at this point. | ||
| It's caused so much destruction, this radical ideology, and destroyed so many institutions, literally destroyed cities. | ||
| It's destroying colleges. | ||
| It's destroying basically the fabric of American society. | ||
| Do you somehow admire it in some weird, perverse way? | ||
| I mean, even in the last couple of days, we're holding this interview for a few days, but in the last couple of days, you know, Kyrsten Sinema got chased into that bathroom at Arizona State University. | ||
| And I saw an incredible amount of progressives and progressive news organizations defending her. | ||
| Oh yeah, you can get up in their face, which by the way is exactly what Maxine Waters has been on the record saying, get in their face. | ||
| That you almost admire their absolute relentless pursuit of destruction. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's a cunning to it. | ||
| There's a cleverness to the manipulation of language in particular. | ||
| I mean, just take a simple word like homelessness. | ||
| I traced the genealogy of this word back. | ||
| It's a propaganda word. | ||
| It's always been a propaganda word designed To mix together two totally different groups of people. | ||
| One is the proverbial mother escaping an abusive husband with her two kids, who doesn't have anywhere to go that night. | ||
| Mixing her together with people suffering from schizophrenia, who are on the streets, often addicted to hard drugs, or people that are just addicted to hard drugs. | ||
| Mixing those populations together deliberately, confusing two groups of people who require completely different things. | ||
| And by the way, we do a pretty good job taking care of the mom. | ||
| escaping the abuse of husband. She needs something different than someone with schizophrenia, | ||
| and that person with schizophrenia needs something different than someone who's just addicted to | ||
| heroin. But the word homelessness suggests that the only response should be a charitable response, | ||
| when sometimes you do need to involve law enforcement to either make sure the laws are | ||
| enforced and also to compel treatment, because it's not compassionate to let people die from | ||
| drug overdose on the street. | ||
| If someone wants to kill themselves in the privacy of their own home, fine. | ||
| But we don't allow people to kill themselves on the street. | ||
| That's not something that's consistent with Civilized society. | ||
| So yeah, I sort of I can admire the cunning the manipulation, but there's just something really sociopathic about all of it I mean, there's a there's a view I heard a lot of people say things like our unhoused population and it just gave me the creeps dude Like it was just like they're not your population Like they're not they're not objects for you to control These are often people that you're contributing in their victimization out of some hatred of the system. | ||
| So yeah, it's scary, dude I remember when I was a lefty and they would always say fam, like we're fam. | ||
| And I hated it because it was like, you're not my family. | ||
| Like we may be friends or a group and we all kind of have common cause in some of this stuff. | ||
| But like, you also hate family. | ||
| Like they hate the family structure, but we're fam because we have some like ideological cohesion or something like that. | ||
| There's a lot of that forced, they call it forced teaming. | ||
| You know, that sort of sense of conforming. | ||
| It's also a lot of menace. | ||
| There, if you don't conform, you'll be ostracized and stigmatized and all the rest. | ||
| So as you talk about this stuff and as you write this stuff and go through whatever your own political evolution is, you're having a similar experience to what happened with me, which is I sense you're finding that people on the right generally aren't that bad. | ||
| You've done some stuff with PragerU, scary Dennis Prager, and I think you've had conversations with Ben Shapiro and a couple other people. | ||
| How's that been for you? | ||
| And have there been red lines with those guys that you've said something that was so outlandish, so crazily left, that they didn't want to talk to you anymore or didn't want to air something or wanted to censor something or silence you, etc? | ||
| No, I mean, that's that is shocking, right? | ||
| Which is that, you know, if you go on a conservative TV show, your progressive friends, it's just it's so upsetting to them that like the friendship is threatened. | ||
| Whereas if you go on a liberal show, like nobody on the right seems to care, you know? | ||
| And so it's clearly, you know, I mean, this is my second book. | ||
| I'm writing a trilogy and the books, you know, Apocalypse Never Came Out last year, San Francisco's coming out next Tuesday. | ||
| I've got a third book in the works, and these are books really about how these threats to civilization and the institutions that support civilization are coming from people in the grip of a religious fervor. | ||
| This is a fanaticism, and what's at stake So you go on a show with somebody you don't like, why would that threaten a friendship? | ||
| Why would that be such a threat to somebody? | ||
| It's because they have so much of their identities riding on their political identity, so much of themselves riding on their political identity, so that people's politics have become their new gods, new religions. | ||
| It's interesting, because when new religions form, they are more fanatical and more apocalyptic. | ||
| then they become over time. They start more extreme. So what's scary is that this is a new | ||
| religion that's asserting its control over the society. We have to push back against it. We have | ||
| to expose how harmful it is. Part of the reason I wanted to write San Francisco was it's not just | ||
| the universities. | ||
| There's real victims of these policies. | ||
| 93,000 deaths last year. | ||
| I'm not going to say all of them are due to these policies, but we went from 17,000 20 years ago to 93,000 last year. | ||
| That's a lot of dead bodies. | ||
| What's a non-progressive city that's kind of doing this stuff right? | ||
| Like I've bounced around the country, I'm sure you have. | ||
| I went to Salt Lake City. | ||
| It was pretty freaking clean. | ||
| Everybody was decent. | ||
| I didn't see homeless people. | ||
| I didn't see people doing drugs on the street. | ||
| I was in New York City last week. | ||
| I have to say it was more open than I thought it was gonna be, which was nice, but there were cops on basically every single corner. | ||
| Almost every corner was barricaded. | ||
| And there were a ton, I mean, around Midtown, a ton of people on drugs and people just laying in the streets. | ||
| Yeah, New York has gotten worse for sure. | ||
| Though, really, when you say which cities have done it better than progressive West Coast cities, the answer is all of them, basically. | ||
| You know, New York shelters 99, or at least it did until the pandemic. | ||
| It sheltered 99% of all of its homeless. | ||
| You know, we shelter about a third in California. | ||
| And it's very simple. | ||
| If you, you have to build enough shelters. | ||
| The progressive homeless advocates, Put it in in quotes have denied funding for the shelters. | ||
| They've taken money away from building sufficient shelter space and put it into this really expensive, you know, $700,000 a million dollar apartment unit housing, which is grossly insufficient. | ||
| Miami has done a pretty good job in terms of dealing with this population. | ||
| New York did better. | ||
| I really look at Amsterdam in the book as my model because it's such a progressive city. | ||
| It's such a liberal city. | ||
| It's hard to be against it. | ||
| You know, their sex work is basically legal. | ||
| You can smoke marijuana and go to the Van Gogh exhibit. | ||
| You know, it's a very progressive city, but yet there aren't big homeless encampments. | ||
| And when you talk to them about how they dealt with it, it was always social workers and police working together. | ||
| So it's not like there's any mystery in terms of how you solve the problem. | ||
| It's more like, why won't we do it? | ||
| And I think that's where I get to, it's really about victim ideology. | ||
| Right, so how do we get the lefties out of this a little bit? | ||
| You're talking about sort of the religious fervor, sort of, you know, that the ideas are sort of antithetical to what is actually working. | ||
| Have you figured out a way to make any headway with them? | ||
| They generally, at least from where I'm at, seem to double down when things don't work. | ||
| Oh, it didn't work, not because of what we did, but because of those guys, sort of like your Reagan answer from before. | ||
| Have you figured out any tricks in this little period that you've been doing this? | ||
| Well, I don't know if it's a trick, but I do think you have to we have to have a proper solution to the addiction and psychiatric crisis, which is really what is driving what we call homelessness. | ||
| And this is not to do with crime, which is a separate issue we could we could talk about, at least not with homicide. | ||
| But so we've come up in the book. | ||
| I propose something called Cal Psych. | ||
| Which would be basically taking over from the counties which can't deal with this problem because, you know, street addicts are incredibly transient population. | ||
| They move from city to city often to escape law enforcement or just because things go bad. | ||
| We need a single agency to deal with this. | ||
| It needs to be a psychiatric and mental health response, an addiction response. | ||
| It also would allow us to have drug treatment facilities in places like Fresno. | ||
| If you're, if you're addicted and breaking the law in Venice Beach and you get arrested and offered to either go to jail or prison or to go get drug treatment, then you don't, there's no reason to be in Venice Beach where real estate values are really high and expensive. | ||
| It's hard to build something and go to Fresno and do it. | ||
| So when my progressive friends say, what do you want to do? | ||
| I say, I want to do this thing called Cal Psych. | ||
| You know, if anybody should have a problem with it, it should be conservatives. | ||
| It should be libertarians. | ||
| I spent the last, the very last few chapters of San Francisco interviewing the leading conservative thinkers on this proposal, and they all support it. | ||
| So Chris Rufo, who's famous for critical race theory. | ||
| Before that, he was a really important researcher on homelessness and drugs. | ||
| He is on board with this. | ||
| I interview a top scholar at Manhattan Institute, which is an important center-right think tank. | ||
| They're on board with this. | ||
| You know, Republicans have sort of privately acknowledged that the state needed to take | ||
| over psychiatric and addiction care, but it hasn't been something that has been at the | ||
| center of their agenda. | ||
| So my hope is that some center-right candidate. | ||
| And by the way, it could be a Democrat, Independent or Republican, doesn't have to be Republican. | ||
| We'll pick up Cal Psyche and run with it. | ||
| We made some headway with Kevin Faulconer in the recall. | ||
| He certainly, I think over time, started to understand why you need to have a single state provide this service. | ||
| But I do think that would be game changing because I think that starts to look a lot closer to, you know, psychiatry for all, universal psychiatry, which is something that progressives should embrace. | ||
| And then the only thing that comes along with it is that, you know, if you're going to have psychiatry for all, you can't just go and do your hard drugs in public. | ||
| There need to be some consequences as well. | ||
| That's when we put that together with polling, we find 70 to 80 percent support. | ||
| In fact, we found stronger support among Democrats than Republicans because so many Republicans felt like. | ||
| That was already being a little bit too soft. | ||
| And that people should just go to jail. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Was there any polling on how things changed over the last two years, not only because of lockdown, but also because of the riots? | ||
| And the riots were getting pretty damn close to my last house. | ||
| I no longer live there. | ||
| I'm not sure how much longer I'll live in this house. | ||
| That changed. | ||
| We know that California had its first net loss of population in the history of the state last year. | ||
| Yeah, I haven't seen any change. | ||
| I would be surprised if the basic attitudes change, because I think the basic attitudes on this issue towards people with mental illness, people with drug addictions, are formed from kind of pretty core liberal or conservative values, depending on how you think about things like human nature and society. | ||
| You know, these issues of are you a victim of society or a victim of individuals tends to just be kind of a core, almost unconscious part of people's thinking. | ||
| But what I will say, I think has changed is that it is now viewed as a threat to public order and public health. | ||
| And that it's not just, you know, you see the encampments everywhere now. | ||
| And so I think that's had a big impact in terms of increasing what pollsters call the salience of the issue. | ||
| When you ask, well, what's the most important issue facing California? | ||
| What they say is COVID. | ||
| And then that's number one. | ||
| And number two, they say homelessness. | ||
| And COVID is going to, you know, it's going to go away or it's going to be dealt with. | ||
| I would say, you know, if I were advising someone to challenge Gavin Newsom, I would say you probably just want to agree with him on the COVID response. | ||
| That might be hard for conservatives, but I would just agree with him on the COVID response and just challenge him on the homelessness issue. | ||
| Because honestly, you could implement much of what he has promised to do and hasn't done. | ||
| You could promise to do that. | ||
| And I think people would be on board with that because he's given good rhetoric to a lot of these things, but hasn't had the kind of software or courage to be able to stand up against the ACLU and the radical left within the Democratic Party. | ||
| Somebody that I think embraced a treatment-first, shelter-first approach, along with Cal Psych, I think could make a lot of headway, particularly if they just kind of conceded the issue of COVID, which I just think most Californians agree with the status quo on. | ||
| Yeah, man, I mean, I hope you would be right on that. | ||
| I just think it's so weird to me how many people here seemingly are brainwashed, even on the COVID stuff, and I'm not sure we were in full agreement, which obviously wouldn't matter to me, you know, that so many people voted for the guy who was locking everybody down while he was... | ||
| eating in the most expensive restaurant in the state. | ||
| I mean, and the first thing that he did after getting reelected or after the recall failed, | ||
| the first thing he did was basically get LA to institute new measures. | ||
| Like I just, I can't imagine what it's like being in the brain of those people. | ||
| But maybe that's just me. | ||
| Yeah, and I think, you know, I mean, you probably can in the sense that, | ||
| you know, California's changed a lot over the last 20 years. | ||
| You know, people are much wealthier. | ||
| All of us that own, you know, 65 percent of voters are homeowners. | ||
| If you own a home, you are like you saw your wealth increase so dramatically over the last 10, 20 years. | ||
| And you know, people are pretty neurotic, man. | ||
| I mean, you know, you live in LA, I live in Berkeley, like people would look, people give me bad looks if I was not wearing a mask on a nature trail, like 10 feet away from them. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of neuroticism that I think is stronger among, so it's a much more progressive electorate than it was 10 or 20 years ago. | ||
| It's a much more neurotic electorate. | ||
| But I think that that is not necessarily a, I mean, I think that's been, I think that's been annoying for conservatives and even for maybe moderates like myself on COVID issues, because I do think kids should have gone back to school, you know, right away. | ||
| But I do think that that neuroticism and the concern around public health and the concern around public order does favor change when it comes to dealing with the open drug scenes that we call homeless encampments. | ||
| You mentioned sort of the religious fervor behind this earlier and as you're talking about the neuroticism now, it seems to me that if you have this sort of secular idea on steroids, this, you know, government's going to do everything on steroids, it leads to this sort of crazy neuroticism because government can't solve all of your problems and you're constantly looking to it as you would God or whatever it is that you believe in. | ||
| I'm wondering if that tracks with where you're at sort of politically too, because I've seen a bunch of my liberal friends that are on a similar trajectory as me that now are either believers that weren't believers or are at least questioning or something along those lines. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| You know, and I think that like, you know, I want to distinguish between the progressive activists who have the victim ideology and control policy to some extent, a large extent at the at the state level in terms of Housing First, ACLU, those folks. | ||
| I want to distinguish from them and, you know, say my hairdresser who voted for Bernie Sanders, who also is upset about the homeless situation, the open drug scenes. | ||
| She's more in that 70 to 80 percent that I think would favor a more balanced response of both carrots and sticks in terms of a shelter first treatment first approach rather than a housing first approach. | ||
| So I think the challenge again, I think it's a there is a leadership problem. | ||
| I mean, you need to have somebody who can articulate that vision and explain it to people. | ||
| Because, you know, when you get people in a conversation like a focus group rather than in like an instance, you know, if you're using type two thinking, slow thinking rather than fast thinking, I think people are more attentive to the need for a balance that it's you shouldn't just build it. | ||
| We still have a very deep reciprocity You know, motivation, which is that if you give somebody something, you should expect something in return. | ||
| Progressives are violating that in this idea of you just giving street addicts anything they want and not asking for public order and public behavior in return. | ||
| So that seems to me that's the soft underbelly of the progressive agenda in California. | ||
| Honestly, I think it's the soft underbelly of Democrats nationwide. | ||
| I think Republicans should be doing a lot more with it, which is that You know, here this big package, this big budget package is going to give, what, a couple more years of college education, some child care credits, but what's it doing about, like, the most important cause of death, accidental cause of death? | ||
| I mean, here the FDA finally issued a one-pill-can-kill advisory, but I mean, like, we're seeing, you know, kids who experiment thinking they're taking a half a Percocet, buying it from a dealer on Snapchat, or dying in their bedrooms, being found by their parents. | ||
| I mean, this is Michael K. Williams, the great actor from The Wire, who died from fentanyl poisoning. | ||
| Prince, Tom Petty. | ||
| I mean, you know, fentanyl changes everything in terms of, this is not just an addiction problem. | ||
| We're now dealing with active poisoning, and Democrats are just not to be found anywhere in dealing with this. | ||
| So I do think there is room for maneuver. | ||
| I do think it's a dark moment right now, but there's so much chaos in the system. | ||
| I think in the last four years we've seen that, that Something is going to change that the system can't maintain its instability for for many more years I think Republicans are moving in a lot of the issues that you and I I think Probably had concerns with Republicans over 10 or 20 years or just not issues anymore You know, I see the progress that's you know, like one of the characters in my book is | ||
| Is Harvey Milk the gay rights leader? | ||
| I asked my publisher, I was like, am I conservative readers going to have a problem with Harvey Milk? | ||
| And he was like, no, I mean, it's like that issue is gone. | ||
| So a lot of the social issues seem to be taking moving into the background and we see new issues coming to the forefront that I do think open up possibilities for some challenge to progressive orthodoxy. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, as you were mentioning that, I may have told you this story three years ago, but when I interviewed David Horowitz the first time, and David Horowitz was sort of the original why I left the left guy, he told a story about how, you know, he was a Marxist his whole life, a leftist, his parents were communists. | ||
| And then in 1984, he liked Reagan during the reelection. | ||
| So he says, you know, basically I'm leaving the left. | ||
| And then he told me this story about how in New York, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, That all of the public health officials, who basically, they were lefties, it was run by mostly Democrats, that they all knew that it was emanating from the gay bathhouses. | ||
| Like, they just knew. | ||
| People were doing drugs there, they were having unprotected sex, and they knew it was all coming from there, and they knew that all of these people, young people, were dying every day. | ||
| Hundreds and thousands were dying. | ||
| And that the conservatives, who had really no power, the Republicans in New York City, came in and said, well, okay, we gotta close the bathhouses. | ||
| That's how we have to do something here. | ||
| And it was the Democrats who said no, because they didn't want to infringe on those people's lifestyle to be thought, and they called them homophobes, basically. | ||
| Anyway, I'm just reminded of that, because it's so consistent with everything that you're saying here. | ||
| Yeah, because the victimization or the spread of HIV-AIDS was occurring at the individual level rather than something being imposed by the system. | ||
| And so, yeah, I think that you have to remember, progressives start from the point of view that the system is evil, you know, and it's basically a Rousseauian idea that the individual is innocent and good and that the society is what's corrupting. | ||
| And conservatives, just to really dumb it down to kind of big crayon level, and conservatives are more like humans are fallen and and society is what keeps us on a straight and narrow. | ||
| And I think that's still very much alive here. | ||
| It's why we allow people to be killed by drug dealers, killed by civilians, but we are, | ||
| just everything changes when people are perceived as being victimized by the state. | ||
| Like literally if you if you bring up black on black crime, they'll tell you you're a racist I mean, that's your point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, here's the interesting thing and I find I'm interested in hearing your view of it too. | ||
| I mean to declare all black people victims of That's totally racist. | ||
| And the idea that all white people are privileged is also racist. | ||
| And when you really kind of listen to it for a minute, you go, so let me get this straight. | ||
| You're saying that all white people are privileged and all black people are victims and that you think that's not racist. | ||
| That's the most racist thing. | ||
| Victimology is actually bigger than that. | ||
| Of course, it encompasses that kind of racism, but it also suggests that a whole set of other people are basically, that people are powerless. | ||
| You know, that people that you put in the category of victims are powerless and therefore, And one of the consequences, of course, is that we shouldn't do anything to prevent them from being victimized, because doing so would only exacerbate the victimization. | ||
| One of the, sorry, go ahead. | ||
| No, no, you know my feelings on this, but I'll tell you this. | ||
| Look, I have Larry Elder coming to my house for dinner tonight. | ||
| Larry Elder, born in South Central, dad was a janitor, does not view himself as a victim and is not a victim. | ||
| And I have one of my best friends from childhood whose son right now, who's white, which doesn't matter other than for the purposes of this story, his son is hooked on Fentanyl right now. | ||
| And it's like he grew up privileged, and that is that at a job. | ||
| So it's like none of this makes any sense. | ||
| I'll tell you something. | ||
| I've been obsessed with one of the fathers of cognitive behavioral therapy named Viktor Frankl, who's famous because he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. | ||
| He's one of the original humanistic psychologists of the 1960s. | ||
| His whole book, Man's Search for Meaning, is about how he survived the concentration camps under the Nazis, And he did so by changing his mentality and getting a goal. | ||
| And his goal was, you know, survive the concentration camps, find my wife and parents and write a book about the experience. | ||
| So his whole thing was mentality, mentality, mentality. | ||
| Forget about how bad the situation is. | ||
| Mentality is everything. | ||
| And he was loved by progressives in the 60s. | ||
| Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, sold like 10 million copies. | ||
| During the pandemic, when I was in some dark moments, I'd watch these five-minute YouTube videos of Viktor Frankl talking, and suddenly I felt enthusiastic about life. | ||
| And yet, if you take Viktor Frankl's core message, of empowerment, which I think is the Larry Elder message that you were describing as well, which is that you can change your life, you can take control and responsibility of your life. | ||
| But somehow progressives said that's fine for self-help, but in politics, it's blaming the victim. | ||
| To suggest that people have control over their lives, to suggest that people have responsibility and agency and empowerment was viewed as blaming the victim. | ||
| And boy, what a disservice. | ||
| And what a destructive view, this idea that you should categorize people as victims and suggest they're powerless. | ||
| Well, that's why I always say it's anti-human, actually, because the one thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to logic and reason and dream and pursue and have passion for something and build. | ||
| That was a lot of things that I combined into one thing, but like, that's the thing. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| And they're saying, no, it's not yours. | ||
| It's ours to somehow give to you. | ||
| And that seems to me, in terms of fighting back against the radical left and the dehumanization that you're describing and the disempowerment, that seems to me to be the soft underbelly as well. | ||
| We, I think, have a natural instinct to not want to perceive ourselves as victims. | ||
| In fact, in the book I describe, a fair amount of homeless guys will confess that they were just playing the victim. | ||
| They don't actually perceive them. | ||
| Homeless guys don't actually perceive themselves as victims. | ||
| And I think in part because it's like that's a terrible way to live. | ||
| It's a it's a depressive way to live and it's hard to sustain it. | ||
| They might pretend that for a bit. | ||
| But I think that really you're on to something really powerful here which is and I think that you know all of your work honestly Dave has been really creative and productive when you're talking about this question of psychological health. | ||
| that the extension of psychological health in one's own life, in politics, should be one of empowerment. | ||
| I don't think that means that, you know, I think when it comes to things like health care, that we still may need a universal psychiatric program, but it has to be paired with this idea that people are capable of taking responsibility for their lives. | ||
| Even people, frankly, with disabilities and addictions and in all sorts of terrible circumstances, all the more reason That they should be empowered to take power and responsibility for their lives. | ||
| And of course, that's the irony, because as I've become, say, more libertarian in general, and people say, well, you don't care about these people or something like that. | ||
| Now, first off, it's not an honest statement because it's like, they're usually doing nothing for them either. | ||
| They're just screaming about it. | ||
| They're pretending, or they want the state to do it, but they're pretending. | ||
| But I think even bigger than that is sort of like, well, if any of the stuff worked, If you gave me policies that worked, some of the things you're describing here, then it's like, oh, we should fund those things properly. | ||
| But if you consistently show me things that don't work and keep people trapped in this cycle of poverty and everything else, well then, yeah, I don't need my money going to it. | ||
| And it's not even about money. | ||
| I just don't need, that's not how society should operate. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And if I had any, if I had any, if any advice comes out of San Francisco for libertarians and for the right, it's just that we should lead with what we want to do, which is, I think that's why I sort of say, I want the modified, I want to modify Dutch. | ||
| I just want to do what the Dutch do. | ||
| I mean, and why do I want to do what the Dutch do? | ||
| It's not out of some ideological predisposition. | ||
| It's because it works so darn well. | ||
| You know, there's nobody on this. | ||
| There's hardly anybody on the street. | ||
| Very few people on the street. | ||
| Marijuana is basically decriminalized, you know, but they've also got the most humane treatment of the mentally ill, the most humane treatment of addicts. | ||
| It's exactly what you said, but it's got to balance. | ||
| We've got to restore some balance here. | ||
| And I think that's the kind of thing that my progressive soccer buddies and my hairdresser and the folks that voted for Bernie, I think that's what the vast majority of them want. | ||
| They just want to see some balance restored, that if we're going to give something, we should get something in return. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting on the sort of be careful what you ask for thing. | ||
| Like, I'm completely for legalizing medical and, well, medical certainly, and recreational marijuana and some psychedelics and things like that. | ||
| But I will tell you, when I was in New York last week, a lot of the street corners that used to smell like urine, they smell like weed. | ||
| I'm actually not sure if that's good. | ||
| You know, it just is what it is, I suppose. | ||
| No, I actually appreciate you saying that. | ||
| I have some real concerns about what we might call the IDW's excitement about psychedelics. | ||
| It's showing up on my Instagram page that I can take psychedelics and there's no downside to them. | ||
| I've become much more sensitive to that. | ||
| I've always been an advocate of decriminalizing marijuana. | ||
| My view is that we have amazing drugs available to us more than ever in history and they're very powerful and We have to have a more complex view of drugs. | ||
| Drugs are different from one another. | ||
| Nobody overdoses from marijuana, but a little bit of fentanyl can kill you. | ||
| Okay, so these are two drugs, but you can abuse marijuana and marijuana can have really harmful impacts. | ||
| And so this is again where you just have to have a system of care. | ||
| You know, I think if you're, you know, we know that ecstasy MDMA works well with victims of extreme trauma who are having a hard time overcoming their PTSD. | ||
| There's some evidence that some of the other psychedelics have some benefit as antidepressants. | ||
| They need to be done under supervised circumstances. | ||
| I mean, this is Wild West out here. | ||
| You know, and again, I think this has been a traditional sensitive issue, both for, you know, right libertarians, but also for left libertarians like ACLU. | ||
| But I kind of go, I don't know what the problem is of having psychiatry involved in helping to guide people's, you know, use of those drugs, because maybe they'll have some benefit for people, or maybe they won't. | ||
| Maybe they would be better off taking an SSRI. | ||
| You know, maybe medical marijuana is better for some people than an SSRI, but you do need some kind of professional Care involved in that, or I think you just end up with 120,000 people on the streets addicted to hard drugs. | ||
| The best line, since you mentioned the IDW, the best line that I heard on psychedelics was when I was on tour with Jordan, people would often ask in the Q&A, what do you think about psychedelics? | ||
| What do you think about magic mushrooms? | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And his answer was always the same, be wary of unearned wisdom. | ||
| And I always thought that was like, you kind of said it all pretty succinctly. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think we underemphasize things that are probably more boring, but at least for me personally and my own mental health have been much more important, like exercise. | ||
| Like, you know, it's like, it's so boring and my, everyone gets sick of me talking about it. | ||
| I'm kind of like. | ||
| If I don't exercise like a hard exercise every other day, then I'm just not right mentally. | ||
| And I think there's just a lot of people where I'm like, I see people looking for a kind of medicine or something to take rather than doing other things that are much better for self-care. | ||
| That's actually where I wanted to end this with you. | ||
| That as you've been on this journey, I wonder just your life in general, whether it's your relationships Physical body, mental, spiritual. | ||
| I can say my life is significantly better on all fronts. | ||
| You know, like confronting the ideologies that I had to break through and let go of some things and traverse that new territory and find out that people I thought were scary aren't that scary and some of the things that I believe weren't. | ||
| And then that translated into actually taking better care of myself, physically, mentally, spiritually, everything else. | ||
| I sense you're kinda in a similar spot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am. | |
| Thank you for asking, and I really appreciate how you've shared your own personal journey with your videos over the years. | ||
| I found it really inspiring and brave, because I know it's not easy to do, to share some of these things. | ||
| It's certainly not easy for me. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, just like you said, I basically couldn't finish Apocalypse Never until I came back to my faith, until I stopped being embarrassed about my faith and believing actually that it was okay for my psychological health to have faith, in fact, that it was quite important to it. | ||
| I also stopped drinking three years ago, almost exactly, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. | ||
| For my life, and it was um you know I I think about how to talk about it And I really I didn't in the end I decided not to write about that in San Francisco Which is nice that you asked about it because I felt like I didn't want to compare my Situation to something that people on the street because that's a really different situation But it did make my life better And it was what I needed to do because I wasn't able to get control of my drinking in a moderate way So and for sure you know all the things that you hear really matter Family, faith, sobriety, and then I would just add exercise, have been really important for me in dealing with tough times. | ||
| Crazy right-wing stuff, huh? | ||
| Mike, it was good seeing you. | ||
| We will do this in person next time, I promise, and good luck with the book. | ||
| We're gonna link to it down below, and I'll talk to you soon. | ||
| It's great to see you again. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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