4136 Leftist Outrage, Inc. | Derek Hunter and Stefan Molyneux
Summary: "Progressives love to attack conservatives as anti-science, wallowing in fake news, and culturally backwards. But who are the real denialists here? There are three institutions in American life run by gatekeepers who have stopped letting in anyone who questions their liberal script: academia, journalism, and pop culture. They use their cult-like groupthink consensus as 'proof' that science, reporting, and entertainment will always back up the Democrats. They give their most political members awards, and then say the awards make their liberal beliefs true. Worse, they are using that consensus to pull the country even further to the left, by bullying and silencing dissent from even those they've allowed in. ... Tired of being forced to believe or else, Derek Hunter exposes the manufactured truths and unwritten commandments of the Establishment."Derek Hunter is a contributing editor at The Daily Caller and host of “The Daily Daily Caller" podcast. He is a regular columnist at TownHall.com and the author of “Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.”Order Outrage Inc: http://www.fdrurl.com/outrage-incWebsite: http://www.derekahunter.comTwitter: twitter.com/derekahunterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. Here with a man, a writer, a thinker that you really ought to get to know.
His name is Derek Hunter. He's a contributing editor at The Daily Caller and host of, I believe it's Daily, the Daily Daily Caller podcast.
He's a regular columnist at townhall.com and the author Of the book, which we're going to talk about today, most enjoyable, it's called, and I really feel this should be all caps, OUTRAGE, Inc., How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.
The website is DerekAHunter.com and Twitter.com slash DerekAHunter.
Thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
And yes, the podcast is daily.
We weren't just stuttering.
So the book. Let's talk a little bit about the thesis.
I just wanted to give you props for, you know, some challenging arguments, some really new information that I wasn't aware of.
And it's witty as hell.
To the point where I'm like, I'm not reading another sentence because professional jealousy is consuming like Pac-Man.
So it's a very funny book, very witty, very incisive.
But what was the trend that kind of got you to sit down and hammer this one out?
Well, I was an avid consumer of news in college.
I went to college in the late 90s, graduated in 2000, and I used to watch MSNBC even.
You could learn things from there.
I would watch Hardball twice a day, believe it or not, and it wasn't out of self-loathing like it would be now if you watched it once a day.
You had people on there, actual knowledgeable newsmakers, talking about the events at the time.
Somewhere in there, between there and now, it became the same 12 people having a conversation every single day about things they know nothing about And it's a conversation you would move away from if it were happening to you, you know, next to you at a restaurant.
You would ask to be moved.
And I thought, what the hell is going on here?
They're not even talking about the issues anymore.
They're talking about anger.
They're talking about emotion. They're talking about spin.
And I came to the realization that most of what the left is offering now, because their policies have been rejected, the American people have taken a look at free this and universal that and said, that's not really workable.
That's not what we want. Their campaign strategy, their political strategy is based on making people emotional, making people angry and or afraid.
And what happens when you're angry or afraid is you act irrationally.
I bet most of the things you've apologized for, Stefan, in your life have been out of something that you've done in a fit of rage, a fit of emotion at a moment.
When you're thinking logically, you tend not to say something you regret.
I need a keyboard that the harder I type, the more electrified it gets.
So if I'm typing really hard, it just zaps me and throws me back across the room until I shock myself into coherence again.
If you could just hit it hard enough, it automatically bolts it or goes to caps lock or something like that.
But that's where the left lives.
They try to keep people scared to death that they're going to end the entire earth with climate change.
That this country is horribly racist and out to get you.
The system is rigged and you can't get ahead.
Don't bother trying.
There's no policy proposals there other than we'll protect you from Hitler Jr.
in the White House. And again, if you actually believe that Hitler lives in the White House now, you almost have a moral obligation to act.
And this is going to lead to a very dark place eventually.
We've been seeing that in the last few weeks.
You can't keep an angry mob in an emotional state indefinitely at a set level.
You have to keep upping it because they naturally will calm down.
People will calm down. And so the right tends to have a dimmer switch.
We go from zero to ten depending on if we're at a good five moment, we're doing okay.
The left has a toggle switch.
It's on or it's off.
And the top seems to be now at about 15.
It's incredibly dangerous, all the outrage.
You look at it as a rational human being and think, my God, how do these people live?
But the left looks at it and says, great, this is working because this will inspire them to go to the polls.
And right now they're playing a bit of a chicken game, whether or not it will blow up into violence before November or whether or not people will vote first.
I didn't know that when I was writing the book.
I couldn't have predicted. I should have been able to because they are predictable like the tides.
I that's what I saw as a trend of emotional manipulation through ways both big and small and that's what I document in the book.
Well, predictable like the tides, except of course, Derek, the tides have two directions.
These guys only seem to have one direction.
Now, this is something that's interesting and I think you've really hit something powerful in the book because when you just pour this dehumanizing hatred out into the world and these endless volcanic waves of rage and hostility and hatred where everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi and there are fascists everywhere and you've got to punch them and so on.
The purpose, of course, is to create, and this is what the left has always done, is to create a shock troop cadre of uninformed people who are like the ground troops for your political agenda, you know, in the way that the KKK was originally the sort of...
Terrorist arm of the Democrat Party to keep blacks from voting.
Now we've got Antifa and other groups out there who are really getting ginned up and who have this self-righteous rage and have uncorked the satanic love of violence in pursuit of a political agenda.
And of course, my hope, as I think yours, is that people look at this, understand where this has gone historically, and try to pull back from it.
That's what is scary.
Look, if you and I sit here and you talk to these rage mongers, this angry mob, this mutant army that they have that is ready to take to the streets at a moment's notice, it's amazing that they're always at the ready.
They seem to be hibernating and kept in pods and buses just outside of every major town for whenever some perceived outrage or taking to the streets moment occurs.
If you and I were to say, hey, look, we're not trying to destroy the country and put out a rational argument for conservatism.
They wouldn't take it.
It would just get them angrier.
To calm this mob to quell the mob, it has to come from within the mob or the leadership of the mob.
If you saw last week when Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer sort of admonished Maxine Waters for her calls to basically hunt down and harass anybody who works for the president and or supports him or voted for him or who stayed at a Trump hotel once.
They said you shouldn't do that.
Nancy Pelosi was about as insincere as you could get.
She tweeted a statement.
I don't know how you get any less sincere except for telling your dog.
But Chuck Schumer went to the floor of the Senate and he used the term that it was un-American.
I thought that was quite good.
But then if you read Nancy's statement further or listen to Chuck Schumer's statement further...
They then said, but this was all caused by Donald Trump.
It's really his fault. Which is akin to saying if you didn't want to get your ass grabbed, you probably shouldn't have worn such a short skirt.
It is qualified.
They're trying to play both sides against the middle to keep the mob just below boiling point where something horrible happens.
And the media is on board.
I remember it was a weird time two months ago.
Remember that crazy time?
Hairstyles were different. Clothing styles were different.
And calling your political opponents Nazis was socially unacceptable and would get you thrown out of polite society.
Now it is coming out of the mouths of paid contributors and anchors on MSNBC and CNN with regularity and there is no word whatsoever from the bosses over there.
It is amazing because they're seeing that they're losing.
The economy is doing quite well.
Everybody pretty much who wants a job has a job.
Now you're getting to the point where you can pick your job.
Rather than just take any job that you can find.
So what else are they going to campaign on?
They have nothing else except for the fact that they need to motivate their base.
They need to use fear and anger to get their base out there.
One of the things that drives me nuts, Stefan, is this race argument.
And you read the book.
I just want to briefly tell the audience this story.
Because if you listen to the left, if you read the New York Times, you would think, my God, this country is overrun with Klansmen.
This country is horribly racist, fundamentally racist and founded on racism.
In 1920, there were 106 million people in the country and 4 million of them were Klan's members.
That's about three and a half percent.
Horrible. In 2016, there are 330 million people in the country and the Southern Poverty Law Center of all places estimates that there are about 6,500 members of the Klan.
Now, there are other racist groups, obviously, but the Klan is still the big one.
And the granddaddy of them all.
So we've gone from about 3.5% of the population to a rounding error of the population.
And the WNBA in 2016 celebrated the season because they had record attendance.
They averaged 7,644 people.
That means on any given WNBA game, the least popular professional sport in the world, There were more than 1,100 more people at a game than were in the Klan in the entire country.
If that isn't progress, nothing is progress.
But we're not allowed to point that out.
We just have to sit there like bobbleheads on a dashboard going down a bumpy road going, yeah, this country is totally racist.
We're all Klansmen. There's Klans everywhere.
We must do something. No, we've made incredible progress.
Of course, in a nation of 330 million people, there are always going to be some idiot racists out there.
But to pretend that it is epidemic and somehow all of them have joined the police force and are out there shooting young black men is a manipulation worthy of Goebbels.
It is frightening that anybody would try to make it.
What's more frightening is that some people would believe it and that shows the depths of the talons of the left in the psyche of so many people that they've been taught That the Democratic Party is from the place from which all light and good comes from and they would never lie to you.
No, they lie to you plenty.
They manipulate you perfectly.
They play you like a fiddle.
And that's what I'm trying to expose in the book.
Yeah, no, and it's having a relationship with the mainstream media is like dating some crazy woman who just misinterprets everything you say to the worst possible effect.
You know, she says, do I look good in this bathing suit?
You say, yeah, you look great in that bathing suit.
And she says, what, that bathing suit?
Are you saying I don't look good in other bathing suits you pick?
Like you just can't win.
And so when you say, well, I think that we should have equality under the law.
That's a racist dog whistle.
I think that we should have a blind admissions test to university.
That's a sexist and racist dog whistle.
I believe in objective facts.
Objective facts is white supremacy.
And it's like, well, if you're just going to make up whatever meaning you want from whatever I say, how on earth can we have a conversation?
And this shutdown of conversation.
There used to be some pretty robust and useful stuff coming out of the left, like some of the anti-war stuff was great.
The free speech stuff before they gained control of the universities was great.
The criticisms of imperialism was great and so on.
But there just doesn't seem to be much capacity for conversation at all these days.
But of course, if you're a Nazi, there's no negotiation possible when you get that kind of categorization.
That's really kind of funny because they led the charge in free speech on college campuses in the 60s and they won.
We joined them and they won.
Free speech was – and suddenly they realized that Well, no, no.
We didn't mean free speech for everybody.
We just wanted speech that we like.
And everything you just said right there, if it happened on a college campus, you would be chased off of it by a pitchfork-wielding mob for not giving the sufficient number of trigger warnings before you said it.
And that you microaggressed at least three times, Stefan.
And I find that to be a hate crime.
And I'm going to have to report you to your local government.
I mean, that is the mentality on college campuses.
What's really funny about what's happening on college campuses is Even the leftists in the administration and in the faculty aren't left enough for the angry mob.
We've got college professors being run off of campus for saying crazy ideas like maybe we should have a discussion about race with people of all races.
Anybody willing to have it instead of, as happened at Evergreen State University, instead of get white people off the campus for the day so people of color can have a conversation amongst themselves.
A very liberal professor said that's not very good.
We should have a conversation. I'm not going to segregate.
We should have an open conversation.
I'll moderate it. I'm on your team.
No. If you are their 0.1% enemy, you are their enemy.
You could be 99.9% with a line over it percent on board, but it's that 0.1% that they focus on.
They have... This is going to be perhaps controversial, but I think it's a joke and it illustrates the point perfectly.
I haven't seen this level of purity tests since Nuremberg.
That's what they demand from themselves, from their own so-called leaders, is if you aren't completely with me.
You are completely against me.
It doesn't matter how much you're with me.
I used to think that that just lived in the libertarian side with conservatives, but no, they've kind of gone to the left.
Now the left has absolutely lost their damn minds.
And I think this has a lot to do with the fact that, I mean, up to half of American households are either solely or significantly dependent on the US government for income, for, you know, whether it's directly in forms of welfare payments or somewhat indirectly, like, you know, food stamps or SNAP or Section 8 housing or whatever it is.
A lot of people dependent on the state.
And one of the things I sort of noticed over the course of my life, Derek, is that hysteria tends to be associated with dependence.
You know, if you can go out and make your own way in the world, if you've, I don't know, it seems also to be related if you've ever had a manual labor job and had to interact with bare naked reality rather than manipulate people.
But if you're pretty confident that you can be dropped in the woods in a bearskin thong and you'll make your way, then you can kind of accept freedom.
But I think if you feel that you can't make it without the state, then anybody who says, maybe we should grow the free market, that's going to result in some shrinkage of the state and so on, people seem to freak out because I don't think that they trust their resourcefulness and how well they'll do in a more free market environment.
Well, that's part of the conditioning that you get from elementary school through now, is you're told the system is rigged against you, whether it's because of the color of your skin, the economics of your parents, and the situation of your birth, whatever it is.
If you believe that the system is rigged against you, or you've been told it enough by people who are supposed to educate you, and then you go out into the real world, and you apply for a couple of jobs, and you don't get them, or you get them but you don't get a promotion, or whatever.
Everybody's had setbacks. I've been fired.
I've had I've had over 65 jobs.
I've done everything from...
I just wanted to point out that all the books behind you, just for those who can't see, that's just your resume.
There's nothing there other than your resume by month.
That's only part of it.
That's right. But you can't go out and get discouraged.
It's a normal person. You're like, okay, I didn't get that job.
Maybe I need to interview better.
You do some self-reflection. What did I have?
What can I do to make myself more marketable to then go back and take another bite at the apple?
But if you buy into the system is rigged mentality, after a couple of failures, you just kind of go, well, why the hell should I bother trying?
I've lost. The system is rigged.
You can't get ahead. And what I find really ironic about the system is rigged argument is it's made by people like Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren.
People who come from relatively modest means, who are now fabulously wealthy and had their hands on the levers of power.
And you think, if the system is rigged, how did you beat it?
If the system truly is rigged, how did you beat it?
Their own life story undercuts their argument, but they're never asked about that.
Obviously, they think that they're special, especially Elizabeth Warren, because she had to overcome two setbacks, being a woman and a minority, being a member of the Chickasaw tribe or whatever tribe she happens to claim membership in this week.
But you can see how that becomes discouraging.
And then you do fall into government dependence.
And the social safety net can easily become a hammock.
People can get used to a lot.
If you just made $1,000 a month, you could find a way to live for $1,000 a month.
And you know what? I've been there as a grad student, you know, right?
You get used to it.
You may not like it.
You may not have a blast. But you'll have a laugh with your friends as long as you have...
You know, enough money to have a couple of drinks with your friends on the weekends and maybe go see a movie every once in a while.
But realistically, this mentality leads to something more pernicious.
There used to be a time when I was growing up, when you'd see somebody drive past in a really nice car, you see a really big house, and your parents would turn to you and say, you know, you can have that too if you work hard enough, if you do this, you know, all the things that people use to teach their kids.
Now somebody drives by in a nice car and the dad says, grab a rock and let's throw it at that guy.
That guy doesn't deserve that car.
Or he has the car because he stole everything from you and your ancestors and your land and your history.
And then it's like, well, now you can't get there.
All you can do is crap on the good rather than pursuing it.
I mean, assuming that it's not Al Gore you're throwing rocks at, who does not seem to have come by his fortune in the wildest areas of the free market.
Who knew that helping the poor would make you so rich?
The Clinton Family Foundation. If I'd have known there was that much money in helping the poor, I might have changed my vocation.
But no, it's bizarre.
We've become a country where resentment, I think reality TV has a lot to do with that.
The culture has definitely changed where you don't aspire to be something, you resent somebody who is that now.
And there are just bad consequences to that because you do get a nation of people who stop trying.
Why would you try? If you can't get ahead, if you really believe the system is rigged against you, there's no way to get around the system.
So you just stop and it saps, the liberalism saps people of their humanity.
And I find that part probably the most disgusting and disturbing.
Well, and there's this lie.
Look, two lies.
They're sort of two sides of the same coin, which is this fantasy that somehow life should be fair and that people should care.
Like, the reality is you care about your book.
How many other people wake up in the morning and say, okay, well, I've got my own list of things to do, but my very first important mission is to make sure that Derek Hunter sells as many copies of his book as humanly possible.
Hopefully a lot of people.
Well, no, but I mean, you know, you wrote a book and then you've got to make people interested in it.
Nobody cares that I run a philosophy podcast.
I've got to go and make people interested in it.
So this idea that there should be this abstract fairness in the world, you know, well, some people are prettier, some people are taller, some people have nicer voices.
I mean, this is just the way nature does.
It's scattershot and there's this bell curve.
And so the idea that life should be fair and all deviations from that fairness is somehow horrifying and horrible is just going to make you eternally annoyed and pissed off at basic reality and biology.
And the idea that someone else should care about your little pet project.
No, you've got to make them care by providing them value.
Your mom should care if you have a rash when you're three, but adults shouldn't care about your projects unless there's some value in it for them.
But they've bastardized the definition of the word fair.
Fair is everybody gets up and they aren't clubbed to death like a baby seal as they try to go about their business.
Fair is you make what you will of your life on a daily, hourly, minute basis.
They want the finish line.
They don't want the starting line to be fair.
They want the finish line to be fair.
And that's where you end up with all the problems because then you end up with jealousy because Some people are better looking.
Some people are smarter. Some people are faster.
Some people are taller. And there's no way for government to make you better.
All they can do is make other people worse.
Government doesn't rise.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
Well, a sinking tide sinks them all too.
And government, if you see in Venezuela, everybody's equal.
Everything is fair. Everybody's in hell except for the leadership.
North Korea, the same thing.
The double standards.
The nation is starving and Kim Jong Un is fat.
That's not by accident.
He's not eating a high carb diet.
He is eating well.
The people in the rural areas are eating dirt.
Kim Jong Un is eating well.
The same with the Soviet Union.
Khrushchev. All the leaders of the old Soviet Union were fat.
Meanwhile, their population was standing in bread lines waiting to get bread so that they could have enough energy to stand in the bread line again tomorrow to get more bread.
Liberalism is inherently unfair when you really think about it.
Al Gore lives in a house that could be a shopping mall, but he wants you to live with a hand fan in the middle of summer while he jets around on a private jet.
Leonardo DiCaprio produces documentary after documentary about climate change.
Meanwhile, every weekend he's stocking his party yacht with Victoria's Secret models.
Again, nothing against Victoria's Secret models or party yachts.
As I write in the book, the world would be a better place with more of both.
But that's not the world we live in.
It's completely fair that he gets a party yacht full of Victoria's Secret models because he's earned that.
He's not buying them. They want to be with him.
But the idea that somehow life has to be fair.
Life is ultimately fair because it is what you make of it.
But we've taken that away because one of the cases I make in the book is that we're out of problems.
Real problems.
It used to be 200 years ago, you woke up in the morning, you hope you didn't cut your finger that would lead to an infection that you would die.
You'd hope some stranger wouldn't come along and kill you.
You just wanted to gather enough food.
So you could live and do it all again the next day.
Backbreaking labor. I hope that puddle doesn't give me polio.
Exactly! Now we've gotten rid of most of that and our reptilian brain somehow can't adapt, at least some of us can't adapt to the fact that we have it pretty damn good.
It's not perfect, it's never going to be perfect, but we've had it better right now than anybody has ever had it ever in all of human history.
And there are some people who just can't accept that and will still just complain.
There's mileage, political mileage to be gained out of that, and there's a lot of money to be gained out of talking about how unfair it is, which really is unfair, if you think about it.
Well, it is the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
One leads to freedom because you don't have to do that much.
Like if you've got a running race somewhere in a field, well, you get a starting block, you get an ending block, and you get a go!
And everybody just runs like crazy.
You don't have to do much.
You have it set up, and then you have the rules, and go, and everybody runs like crazy.
That's your equality of opportunity.
But if you have equality of outcome, then everyone has to cross the finish line at the same time.
Then you're into micromanaging everyone's step.
You've got to have this weight.
Well, you've got to move ahead 10 feet.
Oh, well, that's adjusted everyone's behavior, so now we've got to adjust it again.
And there is, I got the sense when reading the book...
That there's never enoughness of the left.
It's never enough. There's never an end point where they say, okay, well, we've now achieved what we want to achieve.
It's always escalation, escalation, escalation.
It was Eric Holder, I think, who said a couple of years ago that affirmative action has only just begun.
It's barely scratched the surface.
And it's like, dude, it's been 50 years.
It was never supposed to be a quarter system.
Then it became a quarter system.
And now you're saying after 50 years of massive government power, we've barely begun?
Wait, where's the end point here?
Well, you can't have an end point.
There is no end point. We saw that just this month or last month with the chance, end family separation.
President Trump signed the executive order.
We've ended family separation.
End family detention.
There's always a new finish line for them to move the bar to.
We need income inequality.
We need to raise taxes. Okay, you've raised taxes on the rich.
Once the Democrats raised taxes on the rich, they didn't say, all right, everything's great now.
They said, no, we need to raise taxes on the rich again.
They've spent 60 years trying to get universal health care.
60 plus years.
They've been doing it slowly, incrementally.
And this is the difference between the left and the right, Stefan.
This is what drives me nuts.
The right will try to do something.
It won't work. And they go, ah, well, we tried.
Good old college tribe.
We gave it a shot. Moving on.
The left finds a way to get there incrementally.
They said, oh, the Great Society will deal with the elderly and the poor.
We'll help the elderly and the poor.
And then there's this middle section in the middle.
And they've been trying to lower the age for Medicare.
And raise the qualifications for Medicaid and income to try and choke down the middle so they eventually meet and have everybody.
Obamacare was a great leap forward, if you'll forgive the analogy, for the left in their goals.
But it still wasn't socialized medicine.
Michael Moore this past weekend on Bill Marsha was complaining that we've only gotten half measures at best and we didn't get universal Medicare.
Obamacare was supposed to be enough.
They're never satisfied.
They're relentless. They're like the Terminator.
They can't be reasoned with, and they will not stop.
And the right all too often goes, yeah, well, we tried.
The Democrats, if they wanted a wall on the southern border and the parties were reversed, the Democrats would shut down government until they got their funding for the wall.
They would be throwing a fit.
They would be casting votes every 20 minutes down on the House and Senate floor until something changed, until they got their way.
The right doesn't work that way because we're a bunch of individuals.
We believe in rugged individualism.
We're individualists. The left is a collective hive mind.
And that's how they're able to get the day after Trump was inaugurated, the Women's March.
Trump hadn't done anything.
Suddenly it was a need to take to the streets.
Two weeks later, the March for Science.
Trump, again, hadn't done anything.
The New York Times headline on the March for Science was, scientists feel under siege.
Now, the president had barely unpacked his socks at the time.
How were they under siege?
He hadn't even pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords yet.
Well, but Derek, you know that when any group claims to be under siege, what they really mean is that they might be exposed to the rigors and consequences of the free market.
That's what it means to be – they might actually have to produce something that is of value to some kind of end consumer rather than the endless trough Filling government grant that they always going for.
It's like, oh no, I'm under siege.
It's going to be horrible. It's going to be terrible because there may be consequences to what I do with my day.
I'm sieged every month when I have to pay rent.
It's horrible and I need relief.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about PolitiFact.
And when you first started writing about it, I'm like, well, this seems like a bit of an odd topic to spend so much time on.
But it really did sort of make sense as we went forward or as the book went forward.
And in particular, one of the great lies of the last half century, which was you get to keep your plan, you get to keep your doctor at a time when well north of 80% of Americans were very satisfied with their health care.
And I was just talking to a friend of mine.
He says, like, he gave me the sum that he has to spend Every month for his family for healthcare with a very high deductible.
I'm like, wow. So they really just want to break it so that they can get universal healthcare.
But this PolitiFact and the way that they work, I'm always suspicious of anyone who gets a Pulitzer.
It's like, so you got your medal for leftism.
What's going to happen now? That was sort of one of the death knells of journalism is once PolitiFact came along and then went a Pulitzer pretty quickly, everybody said, oh, we have to do our own fact check because there's Pulitzers in it.
Politifact, it was kind of funny because they fact-checked three times the, if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.
Three different occasions, including once during the 2008 campaign when it was just a vague idea.
Each one of those times, they declared it varying degrees of true.
Even before there was legislation, they just knew in their heart of hearts, deep down, that their spidey sense was tingling and everything was going to be okay with this.
It wasn't until 2013 that it became the lie of the year after, again, being declared three times to be true.
But after 2012, Barack Obama was never going to be on a ballot again.
People were never going to have a chance to weigh in against him.
And so then they could do an accurate fact check.
They didn't even really do a very effective mea culpa.
They just kind of said, yeah, well, what are you going to do?
But that is the way that the left works.
They point themselves the arbiter of what is and is not true.
It's very pernicious. It's bigger than just PolitiFact, but PolitiFact is the most blaring example in there because they were unequivocal about their support for this statement being true, even though we found out after the fact the Obama administration internally knew that it wasn't going to be true.
There were people saying it's impossible if the government sets the standards for what is an acceptable healthcare plan.
There's going to be plans out there that won't meet that bar.
So just logically, it doesn't make any sense.
They didn't care. They put the blinders on.
They put their fingers in their ears.
They were going la, la, la past the graveyard.
And they declared it true.
Another example of fact-checking, and this one's just kind of funny and sad and pathetic about NBC News.
During the third debate, they fact-checked live fact-checks.
Six things during the debate, none of which had anything to do with Hillary Clinton.
They didn't fact-check her at all.
They fact-checked Donald Trump six times.
Every time they declared him to be a liar, including the time where he said that Hillary Clinton had acid-washed her server, her email server.
Now, she used the program BleachBit, which I can understand if you're not a tech person, maybe you just hear acid-washed and it makes sense.
But because Hillary Clinton didn't physically dip her server in a vat of hydrochloric acid, that was determined not only to not be true, but it was a lie because he used the term Acid washed.
That is the level of pettiness.
But people don't remember the details.
They'll remember that NBC News declared Donald Trump to have lied during the debate.
And they know that's what sticks.
That's why headlines are so important.
You know this as a student of the web.
Most people don't click on the stories.
And if they do, they don't read past a paragraph or two.
That's why the lead and the headline, which sometimes contradicts what the body of the story is or buries the actual news in the story, are so important.
And especially in the age of Twitter, where you just, it sort of whips past your timeline.
You can mislead and misrepresent and manipulate a lot of people by your choice of ten words.
In bold, above the fold in your headline, no matter what is conveyed in the story.
It's all just part—it comes down to I despise the media.
Mostly because I love the media so much.
I love information. I love watching news.
It's just harder and harder to find actual news.
There's no such thing.
This is one thing that sort of surprises people that I've been talking since the book came out.
There's no such job as Republican strategist or Democratic strategist.
That is a made-for-TV term.
I've looked because the job seems pretty cushy.
I'd like to have that job.
There is no such job.
It's people who have other jobs that are just like, I don't want to have, I'm a lobbyist, but don't put lobbyist up there.
Okay, we'll just call you a Republican or a Democratic strategist.
They are not experts on the things they talk about on cable television.
They are available and able to string together a coherent sentence.
They're told sometimes a day ahead of time, sometimes a week ahead of time, they're booked to be on, which is, you think of that, how can they know what's going to be in the news cycle?
And the trick is it doesn't matter what's in the news cycle.
You're going to debate somebody opposite of you, whether they really are or not.
You're going to read a couple of associated press stories about it.
And you're gonna have five minutes you have to fill.
Nobody's gonna drill down on any details.
Nobody's gonna call you out on anything you get wrong.
Don't worry about it. Just be entertaining.
That's entertaining, but it's not news.
Have you ever wondered why the same 12 people on CNN are up there every night, no matter what the story of the day is?
Do you think that they spend all day in a hermetically sealed Tupperware container, drilling down on the details of North Korea's economy?
No. They're just good on TV. They're on the payroll and they have a job to do.
They play it on TV. They all ridicule Donald Trump for being a former reality TV star.
News has become reality TV. It's sad because we need news.
We need information. We need journalism to be informed.
You need a jeweler's loop and a helmet with a light on it to find it anymore.
Now, I was really thinking when you wrote about, in particular, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the great astrophysicist, and Bill Nye, the engineer turned children's TV entertainment guru, both of whom are very charming and articulate and presentable men.
And I was thinking, I don't know if you've ever had this thought, Derek, but I was thinking, okay, well...
Because to be of utility to leftists is a very dangerous thing for your soul, because boy, oh boy, are they going to dangle some sweet goodies in front of you.
Like, it's like, oh, wait, can we use you to prop up this particular narrative?
Can we use you to expand our pair in this particular way?
Here we go. Here's your kibble.
You get We're good to go.
Give you a little bit of haircut and trim your beard.
Give you a nice TV show.
You can make, you know, half mil a year.
You know, what do you think? You know, just all you got to do is serve the narrative a little bit.
We're going to win anyway. Why not grab the gravy?
I could be bought. I'll admit I could be bought.
We're going to make up a price and put it down.
Six pack. 20 million bucks and I'm yours for a long time.
This is sort of the media created celebrities.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a brilliant guy.
He's much smarter than I am.
There's no doubt about it. But he is an astrophysicist.
Why is he on television pontificating about transgender bathrooms or on climate change?
Climate and deep space are exact opposites.
He's studied one.
He knows nothing about the other.
Again, my plumber It will certainly be able to fix a leak in a pipe.
He's the guy. I'm not going to call a roofer to fix the leak in my pipe.
But if I need foot surgery, I'm not going to go, well, you know what?
The plumber really did a hell of a job at unclogging the bathtub.
I've got a leak in my foot. Get some duct tape.
He's got to know what's going on there, too, because he was able to drain the bathtub.
Expertise used to matter.
It doesn't anymore. Now it's whether or not you serve the narrative and whether or not you present well on television.
Bill Nye is a failed stand-up comic who was cast in a kid's show.
His background is in engineering.
If you want to build a bridge, you might want to consider giving Bill Nye a call.
But because he's on board, he's down with the cause, he was the grand marshal of the March for Science.
You can't Get a grand marshal for the March for Science who's an actual scientist.
There's nobody available.
Maybe they're not going to be flashy.
Maybe they wouldn't have had a kid's show.
But a cardboard cutout of Mr.
Wizard, at least he had an actual science background, would have been better.
But it's that celebrity.
It's the power of TV. And it goes back to what I was talking about with the people who know nothing about what they're talking about, talking about it.
When you put somebody on TV, Stefan, especially on a news show, The audience automatically assumes they're an expert.
They know what they're talking about because you think, well, this is a news organization.
Surely they've vetted the people.
It wouldn't be so crazy.
They would never do that.
Then you think, well, what does Donnie Deutsch know about anything besides advertising?
Yet he is a staple every morning or nearly every morning on Morning Joe.
The answer is, of course, he knows nothing, but he says the right things.
He's on the team. And the same goes for DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye when the hurricane hit Houston last year.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson went on about how this is climate change, it's clearly climate change, and we're all going to die unless we cede our liberty to the federal government.
He didn't ask and wasn't asked and didn't weigh in on why there had been a 14-year lull of hurricanes hitting the United States After Katrina and why we were promised at the time that we're going to have more and stronger hurricanes.
And this was just the beginning. Al Gore was convincing us that if you live on the coast, you're going to have to learn to drive a gondola because that's the wave of the future.
I was in New York last week.
I didn't need a gondola to get around.
But they never are called on their bad predictions.
Just a quick example of the Al Gore thing.
And the 90s and 2000s, he was out there, we've got 10 years before everything goes, or it's too late to do anything.
Well, that 10-year window has come and gone.
None of the doom and gloom that they predicted would happen has happened.
This would cause a normal human being to go, hey, wait a second, maybe we were wrong, maybe we should reassess here.
If you were the leader of a doomsday cult and you said the world is coming to an end Sunday, Monday morning, you're probably going to have an awkward conversation with your followers about what happened.
The left, instead, they said, well, we can't keep making 10-year predictions because 10 years comes and goes pretty quickly.
Now they're making 100-year predictions.
Oh, yeah, the lightning. Lightning strikes.
They're going to double in 82 years.
Okay, first of all, who cares?
Secondly, how do you know?
The point is you can't prove it, but more importantly, you can't disprove it.
So now all the people won't be able to say in 10 years, I call BS. They'll be dead and they will forget that you've made this prediction of doom and gloom while still trying to tell you that it is a moral imperative that you give government your power because you're killing the planet otherwise and deer may get struck by lightning in the middle of the woods in a hundred years.
Well, I mean, in my past iteration before doing this, I was a software entrepreneur and wrote a lot of code for predictions of the environmental area.
So I know a little bit about this.
And I'll tell you this, just by the by.
Anyone who claims to be able to predict the weather a year in the future, just a year, forget 82 years.
Anyone who claims to be able to predict the weather a year into the future, who's not stinking rich, is just lying to you.
Why? Because all you do is you invest in futures.
Because if it's going to be more rainy or more cold or more warm, certain crops are going to do better, certain crops are going to do worse.
So you call up your broker and you say, I want a short soybeans or I want a long whatever, right?
And so if you're saying that you can predict the weather at least a year out, Just go become filthy rich with futures and investments and then take all of that money and invest it in green energy.
You don't even need to run to the government.
You'll make far more money than any government crime could ever give you.
But they don't seem to want to do that.
I don't know why. Don't they care about the planet?
What's funny though is if you take those models that they say in 100 years we're all going to be dead because of this, that and the other thing, there'll be the end of snow.
You take them back 50 years and you punch in those numbers, you should be able to then accurately, if you're going to tell me what's going to happen in 100 years, you should be able to tell me what happened the last 100 years with your computer model.
They can't do that.
They have no real idea.
The idea of climate science is so new, they're barely getting their sea legs.
But somehow, if you drive an SUV, you're akin to a Bond villain, and you must be destroyed.
And they're convinced of it.
And of course, in the 50s, when Betty Friedan was writing about the coming ice age, and the 70s, when the Time Magazine and Newsweek were writing about the coming ice age, then in the 90s, when it was, we're all gonna burn up in global warming, and then it just became the catch-all climate change.
It's weird that no matter which end of the spectrum the problem was on, the solution was always the same.
We need higher taxes. We need more regulation.
We need more government and you to have less liberty.
And it just happens to dovetail nicely with the left's agenda no matter what the problem is.
That should be somebody's first sign that maybe something isn't kosher here.
Oh, it's weird, too, because, of course, when I was growing up, of course, the whole idea was zero population growth.
Stop having babies because it's bad for the environment.
Oh, sorry, you don't have enough babies.
We have to import pretty much half the third world to make up for it.
Also, the left was like, well, it's really bad that the poor don't have enough money.
The poor don't have enough resources.
And now that the poor are getting wealthier, it's like too much pollution.
We can't have that anymore.
And that's weird, too, because I think I sort of just do a tiny little pivot here because...
This prediction around Donald Trump winning, you know, 98%, 97%.
One guy was like in the 70s and everyone like 70% of everybody went nuts on the guy.
That is an astounding thing because if that doesn't show you how bad they are predicting how partisan they are and how most news is simply leftist wish fulfillment, boy, how do you maintain your credibility?
I mean, what is their audience?
I mean, if somebody tells you it's a sure thing and they get it disastrously wrong to the point where Trump wins in a landslide, how do you take anything they say seriously after that?
Unless they have some huge post-mortem mea culpa, let's figure out where our prejudices come from and work like crazy to sandblast them out of our newsroom, which they haven't done, gone the opposite direction.
How do they have any credibility at all?
I feel like the mainstream media used to have credibility, but just like after you die, your fingernails or your hair keeps growing, they've still got a bit of legitimate credibility.
Credibility or illegitimate credibility left over from when there used to be real news because who believes anything of this stuff anymore?
Well, in a way, they're the assigners of credibility.
So they have that advantage.
They decide what is credible, what is believable.
But you're right. There was no big deal.
The Huffington Post sort of did a little bit of a postmortem on their analysis because they had it at 99%.
They'd spiked the football on the five-yard line for Hillary Clinton and already popped all the champagne, which made it unreturnable, which made them very angry.
But other than that, there really wasn't a deep dive into it because it's the Pauline Kael syndrome.
Even though it's a bogus quote, Pauline Kael was a critic in New York who allegedly said after Nixon's reaction, I don't know how Nixon won.
I don't know anybody who voted for him.
Well, if you live in a bubble, of course, life outside the bubble is Doesn't make sense to you.
If you live in Manhattan, D.C. or L.A. and that is your world and only occasionally visit the middle of the country as sort of like a trip to the zoo to talk to people outside of that world, you don't understand that world.
The rest of the country is just that unpleasant place where your private jet dumps its chemical toilet.
And that is it as you fly out to L.A. They go into middle America like Tom Cruise going down on those ropes.
You know, it's like, I didn't touch anything, did I? Okay, let's get me out.
Get me out. And they go back home and they take a Silkwood shower and delouse themselves and then go and regale themselves, their friends, for the next four years about how they visited a diner in Iowa and therefore they're a hero.
And they usually get, I mean, there's no profession except for maybe Hollywood that awards itself more than journalism.
So everybody gets a Lucite block with their name laser etched in it and they're heroes.
They dine out on that and that is, there's nobody to call them out on it.
If you're never called out on your BS, you're never going to know when you're BSing.
You're just going to BS more.
That's human nature.
The more you can get away with, you'll get away with more.
Journalists police themselves.
Even when a group like Newsbusters or any other conservative news site calls out Jim Acosta for making a clown of himself.
He takes comfort in the fact that he hears from supporters on Twitter and he gets Uh, Facebook notes and he's on CNN regularly and they sometimes bring him on for the reaction to his pontificating to his holier than thou attitude, which again, isn't his job.
It should embarrass him 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
He probably would have gotten at least a stern warning from his bosses that you can't do that.
That is not the job of a journalist, but journalism is, it's not necessarily dead.
But it's certainly on life support and need of a transfusion.
And I just don't see that happening because the people who went into journalism after Watergate are now in charge.
And Watergate was probably the worst thing to happen to journalism because it made Woodward and Bernstein celebrities.
Journalists became celebrities and they got rich.
They were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the movie.
Robert Redford, good-looking guy.
Woodward played Woodward.
He's a good-looking guy. But Dustin Hoffman is Carl Bernstein.
Carl Bernstein is a bridge troll.
Being played by Dustin Hoffman is a step up.
And they made millions of dollars.
They're still dining out on it.
They were honored at last year's White House Correspondents' Dinner over it.
That meant a lot of people who said, I want to go into journalism to make a difference, which is not the reason to go into journalism.
Yeah, I mean, but even the Nixon thing, to me, had a bit of a stink of fake news.
They wanted to get Nixon. The left wanted to get Nixon ever since he worked with McCarthy to out the communists in the State Department.
So they were gunning for the guy.
And of course, they let JFK get away with worse and LBJ get away with worse.
So even that was like, wow, fake news, pretty profitable.
Ka-ching! That's true, but the people who went into journalism after that to make a difference are now in charge.
Now they've got millennials coming up who have been told that the system is rigged, so they want to fight the system that is rigged.
And the people in charge wanted to make a difference, so they're not really in a position to say, you can't say that as a journalist, or this isn't news, maybe you should keep your opinions out of it.
And soon, those millennials and the Gen Xers who are the ones who want to No, no, but it's better for us.
It's better for us. Because, you know, if you think sort of truth-telling is somehow ensconced in the mainstream media, the mainstream media, with very, very few exceptions, yeah, I'm looking at you, Candace Owens, but the mainstream media will only give you a microphone if they're absolutely sure what you're going to say.
There's no room for randomness.
There's no room for originality, for spontaneity.
Or if you do accidentally spew up something spontaneous and original, it's like they'll cut your feed.
You'll never be allowed back again.
They police themselves very, very seriously, which is great because it means that more people are going to turn to people like you and I for more of an unbiased perspective on things.
As the old saying goes, never interrupt your enemy when they're in the process of making a mistake.
I understand that, but there is a point of diminishing returns.
There are more uninformed people in the country than there are informed people, and that will sort of always be, because people are busy.
They're not paying attention to the news.
People who listen to your show are educated and informed, but they're seeking it out.
Most people don't seek out news.
They seek out sports scores.
They seek out movie times.
They seek out porn, if you just look at the numbers.
That's just the way it is.
So, and they casually digest news.
They find a newspaper in the bathroom and they read it.
They read Time Magazine in the waiting room at the dentist or whatever.
Somebody posts something on their news feed.
And that's sort of the problem that we're up against is we have the facts, we have the devotion.
Luckily, we have the passion.
But the other side has the numbers.
Dispassionate, that's where they're trying to get the emotion involved in it.
But they have the numbers just because they, for the network's Their numbers are way down for the three nightly newscasts, but they're still by far the most watched news programs in the country.
So while NBC Nightly News may have lost 25% of their ratings in the last 10 years, that still dwarfs anything else out there.
I suppose maybe in the long horizon, you're right.
But we don't necessarily have until the long horizon when we're staring at $22 trillion in debt and an ever-growing federal government.
We need to kick that ball a little bit faster down the road.
Let's talk about The fake hate crimes.
That troubles me enormously.
And again, I really want to remind people, although some of the topics we're talking about can be a little bit grim.
Derek does a fantastic job of Spoonful of Sugar with the witticisms and the great writing.
But I wonder if people are getting close to empathy burnout, which is a very dangerous situation in society.
There are ills and injustices which need to be addressed.
But the number of times to the point now where like I hear about some new, there's been a hate crime against Group X. You know, I'm like, okay.
Even to plus odds that it was committed by someone within that group in order to gain attention.
And I worry to some degree about empathy burnout and the resulting coldness and lack of willingness to address social issues that can result from all of these horrible, horrible frauds.
Well, like I said earlier, there is racism in this country, but everything being called racist means that what the actual racism that exists It falls on a lot of deaf ears.
I, for one, sort of just tune it out a bit.
I disagreed with Barack Obama when I was called a racist, even though I disagreed on health policy or I disagreed on trade or I disagreed on it.
And you were a racist. Well, I disagreed with Joe Clinton.
I wasn't a redneckist, but somehow I'm a racist when I did it with Barack Obama.
Some might call you an anti-rapist.
Maybe. But that is the mentality.
Once you overuse a term, you take away its power.
That's why, look, I do the podcast for The Daily Caller.
I could swear all I want on that.
There's no FCC regulations about it.
But if I just every other word dropped an F-bomb, it would mean nothing when I said it.
But if I were to say it, which I don't, but if I were to say it, it would cause your ears to perk up because suddenly, oh, he must really care about this or this must be an important point or what have you.
Racism, the accusation, should be used like that.
It should only be used when it's serious because racism is a serious problem.
It's a disgusting problem.
But when you use it every day for a policy disagreement, The real victims of racism are sort of – when was the last real victim of racism that got widespread reporting in the news?
There's a lot of claims of it.
Michael Brown was put up as a victim of racism and then the forensic evidence of the party of science dismisses shows that he was attacking Officer Darren Wilson.
You lose all its power.
You cede all the power on an important issue when you just say, throw it around casually.
It's the same with cursing. It's the same with everything.
And the problem is that these social justice warriors in colleges, and when I go into the book with the fake hate crimes, is they're told their whole lives, this country is racist.
And look out, and it's everywhere.
There's a Nazi in every pot.
And so they go out into society, and they say, well, I must fight this then, and we will take it on.
And fighting Nazis is great, and it is.
But they go out there and they can't find these injustices that they've been told happen everywhere on a daily basis.
So they find themselves stuck and they go, well, you know what?
I'm just going to take the spray paint and I'm going to write something nasty on the wall of this church or I'm going to vandalize this car or what have you.
Because I know it's out there.
I'm drawing attention to the issue because we all know it's out there.
I just hadn't found it. And it's more important to draw attention to the issue.
That's where you get these fake hate crimes.
And there was a huge, huge spike in fake hate crimes after the election of Donald Trump.
Nobody wants to talk about it.
Remember the Jewish community centers that were getting bomb threats called into them?
That turned out to be a liberal black guy, former journalist, and a kid in Israel calling them in.
As soon as we found out who it was, remember, the White House must weigh in on this.
Donald Trump, the atmosphere around Donald Trump that he's created, is causing this backlash, this anti-Semitism.
Then they found out who it was, and now, have you heard anything about how those cases have been adjudicated?
No, you haven't, because they're not news anymore.
It's like the guy who started all these fires in California, these brush fires and forest fires in California, turned out to be an illegal immigrant, so the entire problem has vanished.
Thanks. Exactly. It's weird how that works.
Again, if you decide the unit of measure, you're always going to be the tallest, the smartest, the best looking, first, whatever.
And that's the game the left plays.
They decide what is news, what matters, and then immediately pretend it doesn't when something comes out that proves that...
What they've been saying wasn't true.
So this issue which you touch on in the book, the free speech zones, the puppy videos and hug chambers and so on, you know, I was kind of told that diversity was a strength and we're just going to get more robust debates with better perspectives and get closer to the truth with all of this stuff.
But boy, people seem to be a little fragile these days.
They seem to be a little bit like, wait, you have reason and evidence?
You know, that sort of typical internet meme.
Where do you think that's going to go?
Because if you can't handle opposing opinions, I don't really know how a democracy can remotely function.
Maybe that's the point. I don't know.
Well, there are majors in a lot of cases of gender studies, 1940s bisexual polar bear studies as a major.
I mean, you can major in just about anything.
They weren't exactly making themselves employable to begin with.
Add to that the piercings where you stretch your earlobes out to the size of a Frisbee and the neck tattoos.
Or more piercings.
Looks like you fell down a flight of stairs holding a tackle box.
Right. If it takes you 20 minutes to get through TSA checkpoint and a metal detector, you're not making yourself employable.
It leads no place good.
It leads to an entitlement.
They've been told that they're entitled to things.
And then they're giving them skills that really make them as unmarketable as humanly possible.
So you end up with more foot soldiers in the drone army.
They are on their couches, ready to get that text from their organizer to take to the streets.
Most of these victim majors are really only qualified to teach more victimhood majors.
That's it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, a self-filling toilet, if you will.
So I don't know where it ends.
It ends in crushing debt.
It ends in promises of free college and people You know, if you rack up $200,000 in debt with a degree in dance philosophy and you can't get a job in dance philosophy if it doesn't occur to you until four years after school that you can't get a job in dance philosophy, the idea of free college and student loan forgiveness becomes a lot more appealing.
And the left is really just, they're the candy man.
They're giving out, they're offering all sorts of freebies.
We'll give you free college and we'll forgive your student loans.
Look, I still owe student loans.
I'd be tempted by somebody going to wipe that debt off of me, except I know that that doesn't work and that doesn't lead any place good.
And I majored in political science, which is equally just as worthless as a movement class, so I shouldn't really.
And my original major was theater, so you can see how wrong-headed I've been my whole life.
I like the transition from theater to political science, because as we all know, politics is show-based for ugly people.
Well, exactly. And I thought, hey, wait a second, are you calling me ugly?
No, I found that I couldn't stand the fake people in theaters, so I went into politics where there are fake people.
So yeah, don't follow me, kids.
Wait, now you're in the publishing industry.
Oh, useless burn for no reason whatsoever.
All right. No, it's true.
Somebody who's been through it, I can tell.
But no, it leads no place good.
It leads to an angry, ignorant mob.
That is the design of the left.
In this multicultural crap, our differences don't make us stronger.
Our similarities make us stronger, but we're not allowed to talk about our similarities.
Now, if a college serves Chinese food in the cafeteria, that is a microaggression against Asian students, and everybody must take to the student center until the head chef resigns.
That leads no place good, Stefan.
I actually hear this. It's a pretty common observation, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on it, just to wrap things up.
So, your father, congratulations.
I hear your daughter's a little past a year, so great.
I hope you're enjoying all of that.
But, you know, as somebody with, you're wearing more than one hat, you're a father and so on.
It's a lot of work.
It's, you know, it's 24-7.
You wake up, feel like my days are like I wake up, I get shot out of a can and I try and grab some productivity along the way and I hit my bed, you know, 17, 18 hours later.
And for the people who have this much time and energy on their hands, you know, part of me wants to say...
Get married, have some kids, get a hobby, get a job.
You'll quickly find how little outrage there is when you're out there in the world being productive.
But boy, people with a lot of time on their hands.
There's an old saying from, well, my youth in church, which was, idle hands are the devil's plaything.
In other words, if you're bored, if you're – we're all a restless species.
That's why we got out of the caves.
If you're bored, and I think this goes back to where we started, you will end up making up problems because we are problem-solving species.
And I just wonder if they just don't get a little bit more busy living that they'll have less of an urge to just spend their entire lives controlling and bullying.
Well, the idle hands of the devils playthings is idle minds of the liberals playthings.
That's the thing. Look, if you want to complain about the injustice of your economic situation and you brag to your friends about how well you did on a video game over the weekend, maybe there's a correlation between those two things.
Just throwing that out there as an idea.
It's a matter of drive.
And this is the equality we talked about.
You have the equality of opportunity.
Whether or not you avail yourself of it is entirely up to you.
You can spend all day sitting around resenting what other people have or trying to work towards it.
Start a business. Sell stuff on eBay.
Go to garage sales and find things to sell on eBay for a profit.
Whatever you choose to do.
You can start a show on your phone.
There you go. Yeah. I mean you can make a movie on your phone for God's sakes.
So it's really up to you.
It is sad that so many people, it's the sense of entitlement.
You have an entire generation with a bedroom wall plastered with participation ribbons.
So they're used to being rewarded for showing up.
That might work in school.
But once you graduate and you get a job, somebody's willing to write you a check, they're going to expect you to do more than to show up and then lecture them About how you're being culturally insensitive by using the wrong type of plastic wear or whatever.
You're not going to find success that way.
We're conditioning kids for anger and failure and resentment.
Not all of them.
Good parenting can certainly counteract that.
My daughter's only one, so I haven't had a chance to make her counteract that or screw her up yet.
I still have plenty of time for both of those things.
But everybody else out there, if you...
If your kid is thinking about majoring in one of the social sciences, for example, talk to them.
Don't pay for it.
Whatever it is, make sure that they're offering a marketable skill and then do what I did because you don't have 65 jobs in your lifetime because you have an incredible drive, Stefan.
As a kid, I did not have an incredible drive and I didn't go to college right out of high school because I didn't have the money and so I worked a lot of jobs and I would live at home with my parents.
My parents would eventually get to the point where they said, you have 30 days to find a job or you're out of the house.
That was a motivator. Now granted, it wasn't a motivator until the fourth week and then I actually – because I wasn't looking for jobs where you need a job.
They can't be serious.
No, no, no. I'm their offspring.
They would – my dad would kick open my bedroom door with a squirt gun at 8 o'clock in the morning and start spraying me with water to get me up to go look for a job.
I would just go to a friend's house and fall asleep on their couch.
I was looking for jobs where you fill out an application.
You didn't need a resume. I knew I could find one of those pretty easily, so why do it in week one when you can have two or three weeks of laying around?
You've got to get that part of me out of you and out of everybody.
If you want to combat the left, it's get educated and get motivated.
Nobody's going to be motivated for you.
You have to motivate yourself.
If you can't get motivated for yourself, I can't help you.
Nobody can help you.
They've got their claws too deep into you to be helped.
Right. Well, that's a great and stirring note to end on.
So everybody make sure that you go get your water guns of motivation.
Just wanted to remind people, contributing editor at The Daily Caller, the name is Derek Hunter and host of the Daily Daily Caller podcast.
You can check him out at townhall.com.
The book we'll link to below, well worth your time, Outrage Inc., How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.
The link will be right below. The website is Derek A. Hunter.
