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| So I guess it's been about a year maybe a little over a year since Trump was elected into office and I wanted to share some thoughts about it because I know that there's more than a few people out there in the world who were somewhat skeptical if not downright terrified of the Trump administration but the data is in now and I think it's worth having a conversation and I invite your feedback in the comments below to have a look at what was expected versus what has played out now In the lead-up to Trump's election, | |
| there were people who said it was going to go one way, and there were people who said it was going to go another way. | |
| Now, the people who said it was going to be a complete disaster, I mean, I think now that the empirical data is in... | |
| They were wrong. They were really wrong. | |
| People who said the stock market was going to crater, well it's reached all-time highs. | |
| People who said that it was going to be a disaster for the economy as a whole, well you have many, many large corporations who are sharing The benefits of lower corporate tax rates with their employees in the form of raising the minimum wages that they're paying their employees in terms of giving them significant bonuses. | |
| $1,000 is a lot of money, significant bonuses for them to spend as they see fit. | |
| And of course, the people who've told you maybe your whole life that, you know, the evil Mr. | |
| Burns capitalists are just out there to shaft the worker and get all the gold they can eat in their diamond-studded bathtubs and so on. | |
| Well, those people who told you that, well, when taxes were lowered for corporations, corporations shared hundreds of millions of dollars with their employees, raised wages, extended benefits, and so on. | |
| And that is important information to have. | |
| It's the kind of stuff, like, I mean... | |
| Everybody has this process, at least I hope you have this process. | |
| If you're not just a Xerox photocopying compliance bot of cognitive dissonance removal by seeking out affirmative echo chambers, you recognize that when you've been told a theory and empirical data contradicts that theory, that it's really time to look at the theory again, right? | |
| Because you've been told one thing and Something else has played out. | |
| You were told, of course, that Donald Trump was a racist who hated, blah, blah, blah. | |
| But, of course, he's garnered significant support from the black community, from the Hispanic community. | |
| The majority of Hispanics, for instance, want to close the borders and reduce immigration because it's driving down their wages. | |
| You see more Blacks employed then has been the case in recent times and wages going up for certain sectors. | |
| So, good stuff. | |
| We see huge numbers of corporations offering and planning and executing on the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars into the American economy, into building The factories that Barack Obama said, like, what magic wand can Trump waive? | |
| Those jobs aren't coming back. | |
| The manufacturing jobs, 50,000 a month, have been stealing after the third world. | |
| Well, the magic wand is freedom. | |
| The magic wand is the free market. | |
| The magic wand is letting people keep their own money rather than forcing them to spend it on what politicians and bureaucrats see fit. | |
| And so, this has been different, I think, from what a lot of people told you it was going to be. | |
| And his willingness to work with people, his willingness to compromise where necessary. | |
| The reduction of regulations is a big deal. | |
| Regulations piled up enormously. | |
| Like a third of Americans need government permission just to go to work in the morning. | |
| That's really, really heavy bureaucracy and red tape. | |
| And those, they've not been reduced to below where they were at Obama's levels. | |
| It's still a lot of clawback that's needed, but the Federal Registry and other regulatory, I mean, they're just pages and pages of tree-killing regulations that strangle opportunity, opportunity, and work for this kind of stuff. | |
| I would say that it's important to look at what you were told and to look at what has actually happened and compare the two, because it's really important, right? | |
| I mean, empiricism trumps theory. | |
| This is the basis of science, right? | |
| And of engineering and all of the disciplines that work with physical objects and properties and laws, physical laws. | |
| If you have a theory, that's one thing, and it's really good to have a theory, a hypothesis, or a conjecture, but then you have to submit it to the test of empirical evidence, if you're a reasonable person and you're not an ideologue, and I assume that if you're watching this, you're not, and you want to get to the truth and want to get to the facts. | |
| So, a lot of what you were told has turned out to be false. | |
| And people are upset, of course, about the question of the wall and the question of immigration and so on. | |
| But these are conversations that need to happen. | |
| America is one of the truly unique and remarkable and dangerous in many ways countries. | |
| For its commitment to open-ended immigration, virtually unlimited immigration over the years. | |
| And there are questions that need to be asked about that. | |
| There aren't any other countries or many other countries in the world which have that kind of access to immigration. | |
| Mexico is certainly not one of them. | |
| Israel is not another. | |
| Saudi Arabia is not another. | |
| I mean, it's very, very rare for these kinds of open-ended immigration situations to occur. | |
| And there are challenges. | |
| There are challenges of language. | |
| There are challenges of culture. | |
| There are challenges of assimilation. | |
| And this experiment, it's reasonable to say, should we just continue on crossing our fingers when the data is coming in to show that assimilation to the values of America, to free speech, to relatively free markets, to freedom of expression and freedom of association, That there are challenges in other cultures coming in and it's not magic soil. | |
| You don't just touch down at JFK and immediately imbibe all of the painfully acquired and developed values of America or other Western countries for that matter. | |
| So these are reasonable questions and you know to shout them down and to scream them down is not rational and it certainly doesn't accord to the evidence. | |
| And there are people who wish to see restrictions on immigration at the moment, controls over immigration. | |
| Even if it's just a basic matter of infrastructure, the infrastructure in America and in Western countries as a whole was built for a certain number of people. | |
| And if tens of millions of more people come in than were expected, then you have a huge strain on the infrastructure. | |
| And if the native population is having babies, you have Some time, you've got your birth rates and you've got some time to plan for the infrastructure, but if tens of millions of people pour in who are adults and themselves have birth rates higher than the local population, you just have a problem with infrastructure as a whole. | |
| And these are reasonable questions to ask and to shout them down and scream them down is very destructive. | |
| And it's not going to make these questions go away. | |
| It's just going to produce more extremism because shouting down legitimate concerns based upon data It's an extremist position. | |
| To scream at people and to yell at them and call them horrible names because they have questions about the nature of their country and the sustainability of its infrastructure. | |
| That's a very extremist position. | |
| And it will only produce an extremist response, which we don't want. | |
| We want to try and gather together under the sunlit climes of reason and evidence and have these discussions as intelligent people. | |
| I mean, that's civilization, right? | |
| I mean, not just screaming at people. | |
| A lot has been different from what was talked about. | |
| Trump is quite popular around the world. | |
| You were told, of course, that he was a dangerous lunatic that shouldn't be anywhere near military power, but he's been far more restrained in many ways than Obama. | |
| I mean, Obama, over the course of his presidency, dropped 100,000 bombs On the Middle East, largely on innocent Muslims, and this was horrible stuff. | |
| And this has been diminished. | |
| Also, of course, ISIS, the great threat that Obama was unable to deal with for those many years after helping to arm them, Well, ISIS has been largely eliminated as a toxic, radical threat in the Middle East. | |
| And that, again, is something to talk about, something to discuss. | |
| For all those who said it was impossible, for all those who said it couldn't be done, well, it kind of has been done in many ways. | |
| And that's important information to have. | |
| And look, I know, I know, trust me, oh man, I know. | |
| I know it can be tough to change your mind based upon new information. | |
| It's one of the reasons why people don't seek out new information is it challenges what you've been told. | |
| And since we don't have, most of us don't have any direct experience of Trump, we kind of have to go with What he said, of course, to some degree, but even what he said, if you don't watch all the speeches or read the books, what he says is selectively edited and shown to you. | |
| So you kind of have to go on hearsay. | |
| This is what Trump meant. This is what Trump said. | |
| Here's a particular quote out of context. | |
| Here's a particular, you know, gesture out of context. | |
| And people, you know, people who give you information The media and so on. | |
| Even me, you know, feel free to verify everything that I'm saying. | |
| Please do. But people who give you information, They choose what to give you and they may have an agenda that does not exactly accord either with the truth or what's beneficial to you or your nation, for that matter. | |
| So, I mean, just thinking back, for a lot of people waking up to the dangerous nature of the mainstream media, there was the George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin. | |
| It was one of my most popular videos. | |
| I did an analysis of this. Really, really quite shocking that, you know, you were basically told that this little boy was shot in cold blood after being stalked by this white person, and it turned out to be a half-Hispanic person acting in self-defense, as all of the forensics have shown. | |
| Mike Brown. Mike Brown, of course, was, you know, hands up, don't shoot. | |
| He was supposed to have been gunned down execution style by a racist white Policeman, and this is not the case. | |
| He attacked the cop, tried to take his gun, the gun discharged, he ran away, he turned around, he charged the cop and he was shot in The cop is acting in self-defense. | |
| And again, the autopsy and the forensics are very clear on this, as did the courts with the eyewitness. | |
| Now, of course, the way it was spun by the media was to provoke tensions, to provoke riots, to provoke animosity between blacks and whites, which is, unfortunately, a very productive wedge strategy, particularly in election years, which is when these kinds of race-baiting incidents are portrayed to help the left gain power, the Democrats gain power. And this is kind of what I want to get to. | |
| Which is, you know, it's possible. | |
| I sort of put it out there as a hypothesis. | |
| It's possible that you're kind of being lied to and manipulated for the sake of the political gains of some, let's just say, not extraordinarily nice people. | |
| And that's important to know. | |
| I don't know about you, I get kind of angry when I really feel like I've been lied to and manipulated, when I've been given false information, when I've been given misinformation, you know, that all, was it a Mark Twain line? | |
| If you don't read the paper, you're uninformed. | |
| If you read the paper, you're misinformed. | |
| I don't like being manipulated. | |
| I don't like being used. I don't like for my sympathies to be controlled and subverted for other people's political ends. | |
| So the sympathies for a man, whether he's black or white or anything else, a man being gunned down execution style, In cold blood for a young boy, whether he's black or white, a young boy being stalked by some crazy white guy and shot. | |
| I mean, this is terrible stuff. | |
| I mean, any reasonably sane, moral human being would feel intense pity, sadness, and anger if the situations portrayed by the mainstream media had in fact occurred. | |
| And it's the same thing, you know, the question of DACA and the DREAMers and so on. | |
| Well, these are complicated questions. | |
| Does a country have control over its borders? | |
| Does it have a rule of law? | |
| The laws need to be changed through the appropriate channels. | |
| If the laws regarding illegal immigration are to be changed, they should be changed through the proper channels. | |
| They should be changed through Congress changing the law. | |
| They should not be subverted by an executive order. | |
| That is a form Of tyranny, which America and of course a lot of the West was founded in order to precisely avoid. | |
| So these are important conversations to have. | |
| I don't like being controlled and manipulated. | |
| I don't like my natural sympathies for the underdog, for children, for people who are victims of police brutality. | |
| I don't like my sympathies being used to control where my allegiances lie. | |
| I do not like being manipulated. | |
| I do not like Having a puppet master who is feeding me misinformation in order to control political outcomes. | |
| It is a terribly disgraceful, horrible use of sophistry, which of course philosophy has been opposed to for thousands of years since sophistry first fed hemlock to Socrates 2500 years ago. | |
| I don't like being manipulated. | |
| I don't like being controlled. | |
| And it seems to me that that's a lot of what is going on. | |
| And so when you were Fed a lot of information about Trump that has turned out to be false. | |
| Like, a lot of it could have been shown to be false beforehand, and I did a video called The Untruth about Donald Trump, a couple of videos like that, just analyzing what the media was saying about him and comparing it to the actual facts. | |
| But if you didn't get the information beforehand, No matter what echo chamber you may be ideologically stuck to at the moment, you do have to, I think, accept to be reasonable. | |
| You do have to accept and understand that the data is not playing out the way that you were told right there on. | |
| He's not Hitler. He's like, he's a reasonable guy. | |
| The economy is doing better. | |
| Regulations are down. Companies are investing. | |
| Wages are going up. | |
| Unemployment It's down to an extraordinarily low rate. | |
| Historically, there are lots of problems still to be solved, but it's not playing out the way that you were told. | |
| So then the question becomes, why were you told all of this? | |
| Why were you told all of this information about how terrible he was going to be, how horrible things were going to be, how the economy was going to collapse, how he was going to provoke a war? | |
| Why were you told that? | |
| Now, I have my ideas, of course, but that's not really the important thing. | |
| The important thing is that you ask the question, why were you told all of this? | |
| Why were you given a very selective and biased amount of information regarding Donald Trump, regarding what his plan was and his goals were? | |
| Why were you told that? | |
| Now, once you start to ask that question, you enter into a rabbit hole, for sure, for sure. | |
| I mean, I find that quite exciting and illuminating, alarming at times, for sure. | |
| With the one caveat, I suppose, being that a rabbit hole leads downward from the clear blue sky and the sunlight into the bowels of the earth. |