Dec. 16, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:07
The Tragedy of Rob Reiner... Twitter/X Space
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Tuesday, December the 16th, 2025, and we're here to talk about Rob Reiner.
Happy to get your thoughts about it as well.
It is a horrifying, horrible situation.
As a philosopher and particularly as a moral philosopher, I am wedded to examining causation.
I don't believe, and this is sometimes to my detriment, but I don't believe that there are many accidents in life.
I don't believe that there are many coincidences in life.
And so looking at causality is the best thing that we can get out of these kinds of tragedies.
So let's just start with some bare bones facts in case people are listening to this later.
What happened?
Rob Reiner, of course, an acclaimed director and actor and producer, and his wife, Michelle Singer-Reiner, were found dead in their Brentwood home on Los Angeles, December 14th, two days ago, 2025, from apparent stab wounds.
The story is that they had their throats slashed.
And the prime suspect, of course, who's under arrest and being held on a $4 million bail is their son, Nick Reiner.
The Los Angeles Police Department has launched a homicide investigation into the deaths.
So reports indicate the couple's throats were slit during a heated argument with a family member.
Now, the first place that I go to, and I did a whole show about this, whole conversation about this, a true crime thing, was on the Menendez brothers.
The Menendez brothers killed their parents and said that their parents had sexually abused them, in particular their father, for many years.
Now, there's no evidence with this with Rob Reiner.
However, I will say this is all just speculation, right?
Nobody knows for sure.
They're all just speculation.
But I will say this, that in my conversations with, in particular, Dr. Gabo Mattei, who said that every single drug addict he came across when working in Vancouver had been severely abused and often sexually abused as a child.
No proof, right, obviously.
But something causes a child of 14 or 15 to get horrendously addicted to heroin.
And then he had, I think, about 17 rehab stints over the course of his teenage life, the son, Nick.
And in doing some research, I did come across a roast.
I think it was from the year 2000, where Al Franken was making, I hate to say jokes because they're not jokes.
I don't understand the humor at all, at all.
But was talking about how in his commentary, not a direct accusation, of course.
I guess it would be classified in the realm of humor, though not a humor that I understand at all, that Al Franken was talking about Rob Reiner's father, Carl Reiner, inviting friends over to have sexual, to sexually abuse his son.
And again, I know this is a roast.
I don't understand the humor.
I don't understand the humor.
It's not funny.
It's horrendous.
So this is not proof of anything.
I'm just saying it's disturbing as hell.
So why is Nick Reiner under suspicion?
So details are limited.
The LAPD has not released specifics about evidence or charges beyond confirming he's been booked for murder and is being held on this $4 million bail.
Multiple reports indicate the following factors may have contributed.
A recent argument, family friends reported that Nick and Rob Reiner had a heated argument on Saturday evening, December 13th, 2025, at a party hosted by Conan O'Brien.
Witnesses noted Nick acting strangely during the event.
There were no signs of forced entry at the home, suggesting the perpetrator was likely someone known to the family.
And this, I said, as soon as I heard the news, Rob Reiner is worth like half a billion dollars or something like that, and very famous, very wealthy, and very controversial, at least on the right, much more accepted on the left.
But I said they would have crazy security.
It had to be an inside job, right?
Because you just wonder into Rob Reiner's house, right?
Family involvement.
Police sources mentioned interviewing a family member in connection with the deaths, and the bodies were discovered by one of the couple's children, reportedly their daughter, Romy.
So, with regards to background of family tensions, Nick has a well-documented history of drug addiction, having cycled through rehab multiple times as a teenager and experiencing homelessness.
He co-wrote the 2015 film Being Charlie with his father, which was semi-autobiographical and explored these struggles.
Sort of reminds me of Beautiful Boy with Timothy Chalamet.
While he was reported to clean since around 2015, the family had endured significant strain from his issues in the past.
Now, as far as the clean parts or the clean thing going, there had apparently, at least there are some reports, that he had relapsed recently, and this was a source of continuing ongoing tension.
No motive has been publicly stated.
The investigation is ongoing, but the cause of death to be confirmed by the coroner's office.
So, details have emerged from family sources, cited in media reports about the conflict at Conan's party.
The heated argument reportedly centered on concerns over Nick's ongoing mental health struggles and alleged substance abuse issues, with Rob and Michelle Reiner expressing frustration that they had tried everything to help in recent months.
The exchange was described as very loud, audible to many attendees, and involved Michelle as well, escalating to the point where Rob and Michelle left the party early.
It's not particularly clear if Nick did too.
This incident occurred just hours before Rob and Michelle were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home the next day, with Nick arrested as the suspect.
So, for those of you who don't know, because I guess Rob Reiner has been a little bit out of the public eye since this absolutely astounding run of movies that he had in the 80s and 90s, Rob Reiner, born March 6th, 1947, in the Bronx, New York, was the son of a very legendary comedian, Carl Reiner, and began his career in entertainment as an actor.
He gained widespread fame in the 70s for his role as Michael Meathead Steyveck on the hit sitcom All in the Family, earning two Emmy Awards for his performance.
I never watched All in the Family, but I've been watching some clips since.
It's horrible.
It's horrible stuff.
It's anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-lower class, very elitist, and just absolutely wretched.
It's really far more propaganda than comedy.
But of course, a lot of people who do propaganda are very good at being funny because when you laugh, your defenses are lowered and you're more likely to believe false, appalling, and terrible things.
All right, that's just my particular opinion.
In the 80s, Rob Reiner transitioned to directing, debuting at the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, which became a cult classic.
Oh, gosh, my friends were mad about that movie, quoting it all the time.
It was like their Monty Python.
And I actually, of strange coincidence, a couple of days before Rob Reiner was murdered, I watched Spinal Tap again.
And again, I just saw this, you know, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American, just contempt a lot.
I mean, even in All in the Family, there's a conversation between the Kyle Reiner character and the Carol O'Connor character about how terrible the American national anthem is and all that kind of stuff, right?
So he did this Spinal Tap, the film Stand By Me with River Phoenix, and gosh, who else was in that?
Just about just about everyone.
Will Wheaton was in it, Keufer Sutherland, and so on.
It's an adaptation of a Stephen King story.
The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men.
And this was, of course, an incredible run of movies.
He later did the American President 1995, Ghosts of Mississippi, 1996, and documentaries like God and Country 2024, which has the usual liberal obsession with the terror that is engendered by any kind of Christian nationalism for sort of obvious reasons.
He was a prominent political activist.
He co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, advocates for same-sex marriages, frequently commenting on social issues.
He was a vocal liberal activist, leveraged his fame to champion progressive causes throughout his life.
And he was a prolific Democrat fundraiser.
He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates and causes, actively campaigned for Howard Dean in his 2004 presidential bid, Hillary Clinton in 2008, this including Rob Reiner hosting events and endorsements, and Kamala Harris in 2024 with a high-profile fundraiser at his home.
Also, Reiner was a fierce, if not downright deranged, half-psychotic, and fanatical critic of Donald Trump and used social media public platforms to denounce him.
There's reports that he met with some pretty dark-eyed people to promote the Russia collusion conspiracy hoax, which was kind of like an overthrow.
And he earned tributes from leaders like Barack Obama, Gavin Newsom, for his lifelong commitment and so on, right?
You know, one of the big watershed tests was COVID, right?
You find out people's real feelings, thoughts, and nature over the course of something like COVID, and in particular, the question of vaccination.
You know, it's always deeply, deeply disturbing and wretched when people call other people Nazis and then are big fans of semi-compelled medical treatments with very little informed consent.
Because that's, I mean, the whole Nuremberg Code was developed out of the Nazi and also the Japanese atrocities, forced medical treatments.
And so when people say, oh, everyone else is a Nazi, and they then themselves advocate for forced medical treatments, or at least highly compelled medical treatments, that is really, really terrible.
So Rob Reiner referred to those opposing vaccines, including unvaccinated individuals, as part of an ignorant majority, minority that was tyrannizing the majority.
In a September 2021 tweet, he stated, whether it's vaccines, voting rights, climate change, or investigating a deadly insurrection, was sick and tired of being tyrannized by an ignorant minority.
Enough, let majority rule.
Yeah.
So I think by majority rule, he means force people to take the vaccine, because that would be it, right?
And this was, of course, quite common on the left, particularly among media figures.
Did Rob Reiner compare Trump and his supporters to Hitler, Nazism, or fascism?
Yep.
Rob Reiner compared or accused Donald Trump of being like Adolf Hitler on at least three documented occasions in public interviews and statements, often framing Trump as a demagogue or his influence as akin to Nazi Germany.
It's tough because the criticisms are so frequent.
It's a recurring theme.
Here are some known instances.
July 27, 2016, MSNBC's Morning Joe.
Reiner likened Trump to Hitler, along with cult leaders like David Koresh and Jim Jones as a demagogue people blindly follow, stating, quote, that's the power of a demagogue.
That's what they do.
They spread words.
Listen, we follow all kinds of crazy people in the world.
We follow, you know, Hitler, David Koresh, Jim Jones.
People follow all kinds of people if they're loud and they scream and they say these crazy things.
December 7th, 2023, interview on Norman Lear's legacy.
Reiner described Trump as embodying the fascism that Lear fought against, tying it to authoritarianism with Nazi undertones.
September 18th, 2025, podcast appearance, Reiner compared the direction of America under Trump to Nazi Germany, referencing his mentor, Norman Lear's WW2, bombing missions over Nazi territories and expressing fears of similar authoritarianism.
Reiner also made related comments, such as a 2010 remark about the Tea Party, that's the tax enough already party movement, which Trump later championed, selling fear and anger like Hitler, and frequently called Trump a fascist in other contexts.
And it was all pretty wretched.
All pretty wretched.
Now, I did comment that Charlie Kirk did not call people fascists and racist and so on.
And somebody produced a tweet, probably seems true, where Charlie Kirk referred to Joe Biden as a fascist.
Now, it's part of the challenges of the English language.
I said he didn't call people as a multiple people.
He didn't refer to an entire movement as a fascist.
I don't believe that he ever said that everybody who follows Biden or is a Democrat is a fascist or anything like that.
So when I said people, I was referring to the sort of collectivist stuff that Rob Reiner was saying about all of these kinds of people.
So I'm just looking up something that Rob Reiner wrote about the MAGA movement as a whole.
He referred to MAGA scum and all of the evils that the MAGA people were involved with.
And in general, it was more than half the population as a whole, because Trump won the popular vote, right?
Even against the massive headwind of all of this.
But Rob Reiner referred to all of this sort of stuff.
Let me just get the quote here.
Here we go.
So what did he say?
Rob Reiner wrote: After speaking with many government sources who indicate direct connection between Donald Trump and Putin, investigation must happen before Donald Trump is installed.
Right?
Russia hacks our election to help Donald Trump.
FBI violates Hatch Act and colludes with Trump.
He's an illegitimate president.
Anyway, this sort of goes on and on and on that he accused Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to steal the election.
Episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, November 2021, Reiner stated regarding the unvaccinated, I don't want you walking around if you haven't been vaccinated.
I don't want you walking around if you haven't been vaccinated.
In another post around the same time, he referred to a pro-Trump website or platform as vile, racist, and evil, stating it did not take long for MAGA scum to come and spread their lies.
He described Trumpism and MAGA as fascist, warning that electing Trump would lead to the end of American democracy with supporters enabling authoritarianism.
He framed MAGA as a cult-like movement and oblivious to the dangers of their choice.
MAGA supporters are scum.
MAGA scum.
Well, that's not good.
That's not good.
That is dehumanizing language.
And that is the kind of language.
Look, I'm not obviously accusing him of directly incentivizing violence or directly calling for violence or anything like that.
Although I did not find instances where he had condemned left-with wing violence, he did condemn ISIS violence from time to time, but not, I don't find any places where he had condemned the violence on the left, in particular, Antifa and other sort of groups.
So I don't want to sort of get too much into the weeds here, which is sort of a self-defining statement, but it's all come to a bit of a head regarding Trump's tweet.
This is causing people to lose their minds about this.
So this is what Trump wrote yesterday, 9.51 a.m., December 15th.
He wrote, a very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood.
Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away together with his wife, Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS.
He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.
And with the golden age of America upon us, perhaps like never before, may Rob and Michelle rest in peace.
This is, I just speak personally, just speak personally.
And I see people want to chat.
We'll get to it in a second.
This is hard for me to understand why people are so bothered.
Rob Reiner spent over a decade raging against Trump, comparing him to Hitler, calling him a fascist and his supporters a scum, and may have worked to try and get him investigated and so on.
Now, I don't, again, I'm happy to be schooled on this.
I really am.
I'm happy to be corrected.
I'm happy to get all the pushback in the known universe.
Really am.
Because if I'm wrong about this, well, I don't want to be wrong about things.
I don't want to be wrong about things as a whole.
But I have trouble understanding why, when he said, look, it's very sad, rest in peace and so on.
Did if it was Nick, right?
If it does turn out to be Nick, and I mean, that seems likely.
I mean, you know, innocent until proven guilty.
But if it does turn out to be Nick, I strongly doubt that it was Rob Reiner's bottomless hatred towards Trump and MAGA, which is, you know, MAGA is significantly Christian.
So I assume that there's some anti-Christian bias in there.
I think Rob Reiner was an atheist.
I'm not sure.
Certainly very secular.
But I don't think that if it was Nick, that this was the result of Rob Reiner's endless hatred of Trump.
It does seem like an odd thing to do in your sunset years to spend all of this time raging and hating about politics and so on.
But I don't agree with Trump's characterization that Rob Reiner's contempt for Trump caused this.
I mean, who knows?
I doubt it.
I don't believe in that.
But here's what I don't understand is that when somebody is really that political and that aggressive to the point where he's saying that people who are unvaccinated should not be out of their homes, that's insanely evil, by the by.
Like, that's insanely evil, that position.
That people who choose not to get vaccinated when, I mean, it was the one, two, three punch with COVID, right?
One, they only tested it for a couple of months.
So they can't say safe and effective.
They even said safe for pregnancy.
They can't say that.
It's not even the length of a pregnancy.
Safe and effective, only tested for a couple of months, number one.
Number two, they hit the fucking data.
They would not release the testing data.
They wanted, what, 75 years until a judge ruled otherwise.
And number three, they demanded immunity from liability.
If something is safe, then you should not need immunity from liability.
If you demand immunity from liability, you cannot also claim that it is safe.
So I understand why some people took the vaccine.
I understand why some people chose not to take the vaccine.
But the idea, and this was shared by Howard Stern and a lot of other people, that people who chose not to take this experimental medical intervention, that they should not be allowed to walk around in society, is deranged and completely corrupt and immoral.
Hysterical.
Rob Breiner wrote, September 2nd, 2020, Donald Trump has essentially shot and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans on Fifth Avenue, continues to do it every day, and he's right, his cult doesn't care.
But the rest of the U.S. do in 42 days, we will arrest the killer.
Rob Reiner wrote, been trying to figure out why Trump has never said anything negative about Vladimir Putin.
After watching the Stormy Daniels interview, I think I've got a handle on it.
It involves Putin, Trump's ass, and a rolled-up magazine.
September 16th, 2020, the president of the United States is a premeditated murderer, and the media that covers his disinformation is an accomplice.
September 15th, there's no other way to put it, says Rob.
The president of the United States is committing premeditated murder.
And of course, the day after Rush Limbaugh, the famous conservative, the most famous conservative radio show host, the day after Rush Limbaugh died, Rob Breiner attacked the late conservative radio host as a purveyor of disinformation, saying that Americans must protect democracy from others like him.
He called Rush Limbaugh a liar, warning that other conservative media personalities are trying to deny climate change.
So when you call someone a premeditated murderer and say he's an illegitimate president, accuse him of colluding with a foreign adversary, which I'm no lawyer, would seem to be would fall into the category of treason, which has the death penalty if convicted in some instances.
I don't know why everyone's freaking out about Trump's tweet.
And again, I'm very, very happy to be schooled on this.
I mean, I'm raised Christian.
I'm raised a Christian.
And in Christianity, the way that I was raised, maybe it was a little bit more male back in the day.
I know it was.
I went to a boarding school where I got most of my religious education.
I was in the choir and I went to Sunday school and we went to church two or three times a week, got a lot of education on Christianity.
And what I was taught was that we should celebrate the end of wickedness.
Now, I don't think we should celebrate this.
It's an awful, tragic, horrible situation.
But the idea that it's complete anathema within Christianity to refrain from mourning someone who wished your utter destruction, I don't understand it.
I don't, okay, because I mean, I understand the Jesus thing, like on the cross, right?
Saying, forgive them, Father, they know not what they do, right?
I get that.
But in Proverbs, this is what I read.
Proverbs 10, sorry, Proverbs 11, 10 to 21.
This is the new International Version.
When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.
When the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.
Through the blessing of the upright, a city is exalted.
By the mouth of the wicked, it is destroyed.
Let's do that again.
It's important.
When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.
When the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.
Through the blessing of the upright, a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked, it is destroyed.
Now, was Rob Reiner a wicked man?
People are complicated.
People are complicated.
But his level of vitriol was destructive.
His level of hatred for more than half of the country was scarcely a stabilizing factor.
And he did further polarize and exaggerate and make more aggressive and hysterical the differences in oppositions in American politics.
If you keep calling a man a fascist, a Hitler, a racist, a murderer, it has an effect.
It has an effect in the world.
I think that was wicked.
I do not think shouts of joy are the appropriate response at all, because it is a deep and horrifying tragedy, what happened to the Reiner family.
But the idea that the dead should experience no criticism is something that is put in place by wicked people.
Of course, wicked people want to be excluded from moral judgment in the same way that bank robbers don't like video cameras.
Don't speak ill of the dead.
No.
So when something like this happens, we have the opportunity to talk about a lot of very deep and important issues.
And if we say, wait till later, then the moment passes and the focus and concentration of those issues vanishes.
It is a way of saying we will never talk about these issues.
We will never talk about these issues.
Was Nick Reiner abused as a child?
Most people self-medicate child abuse, like if they're drug addicts, they're taking the drugs to self-medicate child abuse.
This is not proof.
There's not proof.
Be clear.
I'm not saying that it is proven.
We may know, we may never know.
But there's a correlation.
There's a correlation.
But if your child is moving in circles where he has access to heroin at the age of 14 or 15, and he has the money to pay for that, let's say that Nick and Nick Cave of the Bad Seas, right?
Let's just say Nick Reiner, I don't believe it, but let's just say for the sake of argument, Nick Reiner was just born, and no matter how good the parenting, he just had a predilection towards addiction.
I don't believe that people are born that way.
I think people are born with various susceptibilities.
I never particularly enjoyed alcohol, but obviously alcoholics do enjoy alcohol.
Some people don't particularly like sugar.
I have a weakness for sugar, so I have to watch what I eat and watch what I buy.
So let's say that Nick was born with a genetic predisposition towards addictive behavior.
Okay, I mean, there seems to be some validity to that.
Okay, that doesn't mean he becomes an addict.
And he went into rehab at the age of 15.
Do you know how bad things have to get to put a child into rehab?
And who knows for how many years it had gone on beforehand?
I don't know that that's ever been established.
But when I say, and I did tweet this, and I say, look, if your kid becomes a raging heroin addict as a child, that's on you as a parent.
And it is.
It is.
Ah, yes, but people have predilections and predispositions.
Yes, I get it.
I get it.
But that's why you have to be really involved as a parent.
How unattended, unparented does your child have to be to run wild with a druggy crowd while barely past puberty?
And there's another strange thing that I wanted to mention.
And again, happy to be corrected, happy to be schooled.
This is all tentative.
This is all theoretical.
Nothing is proven.
But Rob Reiner was a huge Joe Biden fan.
Joe Biden, to a large degree, not only left the border open, but facilitated people crossing the border.
Do you know that incidence of hard drugs crossing the border under Biden went up three to 500%?
And yet, Rob Reiner was a vocal, hostile, aggressive opponent of a secure border.
He's not an open borders guy, as far as I could tell, but he was very opposed to Trump's border wall.
Now, of course, not all poison, well, not all heroin, not all fentanyl comes in from outside America, but a lot of it does.
And if your child was suffering under the horrors of illegal drugs as a child, wouldn't you want to seal up as quickly and as efficiently as humanly possible the porous border of the guy you supported that was facilitating to some degree those drugs coming into the country?
Now, a lot of drugs come in, of course, through, like they're hidden in cars and so on.
They come in through ports of entry, but not all.
So it's not like the border would have stopped it completely, but it would have helped.
So it's, I'm just, you know, help me, help me out, brothers and sisters, please help me out.
How is it possible for a guy whose kid is rapidly addicted to some of the worst substances known to man, God, or devil, who then opposes border security, thus facilitating the same drugs coming in and hitting others?
The other thing I don't know, and again, if you know anything or can help me out, I'd really appreciate it.
The other thing I don't know is the people who supplied his son with drugs, were they prosecuted?
Because that seems important as well.
I'm going to just look this up.
Because if there were people who supplied children with drugs, you should go after them really hard.
Oh.
I asked about Nick Reiner.
I got Nick.
Okay, let me just try.
This is Rob Reiner's son.
Okay, sorry, let me just.
But were they prosecuted?
Stop disconnecting, Rock.
Don't be frightened of the questions.
Okay.
All right, let me just, I'm asking.
Sorry, I thought it would get this answer.
See if we can get this answer in.
But I didn't hear about it.
Okay, no, there is no evidence or report that any individuals who supplied drugs to Nick Reiner, Rob Reiner's son, were ever prosecuted.
Now, that's quite something to me.
That's quite astonishing to me.
So as of 2018 appearance on the Dopey podcast, Nick Reiner openly admitted he was not fully sober at that time.
He disclosed using marijuana and Adderall regularly and revealed a major relapse on heroin and other hard drugs in 2017, which led to a cocaine heart attack during a family intervention.
December 2025 from Family Friends and Sources describes Nick's ongoing issues as a persistent problem with concerns about his mental health and drug use escalating in the weeks leading up to the tragic events.
Articles note that his life continued to involve sobriety efforts, sobriety efforts, and relapse.
And his friends describe drugs as his always core issue.
No public updates indicate long-term sobriety after the 2017 to 2018 disclosures.
So if your kid ends up on heroin at the age of, again, it goes into rehab at 15, 13, 14, whatever, right?
It had to escalate.
Who's giving your kids, who's giving your kid drugs?
And as a powerful, wealthy, talented, concerned father, wouldn't you want to smash whoever was supplying your kids, your kid, with drugs?
Wouldn't you want to find out who it was and use every conceivable resource to bring that person to justice, everyone associated with that person to justice, to use all of your hundreds of millions of dollars and connections to ensure that anyone who touched anyone who supplied your kid with drugs goes away for a long, fucking long time?
Maybe this happened.
Maybe it was all kept under wraps.
There's no public evidence of it.
And I don't quite follow that.
I don't understand if that didn't happen, which it doesn't seem to have happened.
I don't understand why that wouldn't have happened.
Why somebody with Rob Reiner's power, influence, wealth, and fame wouldn't work every fiber of his muscles to destroy everyone who was supplying these hellish drugs to children as a whole and his child in particular.
Now, if this didn't happen, I don't understand why.
I mean, the only thing that would make sense to me, and again, this is not proof of anything, it's just speculation.
But if Rob Reiner did not and his wife did not, move heaven and earth to discover who had supplied his child with drugs and to make sure they faced the appropriate justice legally would be if the trail led to people he knew, people in his circle in his life.
People don't just wake up and become heroin addicts.
Most people who are addicts are not taking drugs to feel good.
They're taking drugs drugs to stop feeling terrible.
And it's also a strange thing that people keep using 10-year-old pictures of Nick Reiner rather than the more haggard and terrifying pictures of him later on.
So the fundamental question and i'll turn it over to you guys after this, but the fundamental question to me is and again happy to be corrected on this what is wrong with hating back doesn't mean you wish people dead.
But what is wrong with hating back if someone hates you and hates your movement and calls you a Hitler adjacent and your, your followers, a scum racists?
It's all highly volatile and dangerous language in.
I'm a free speech absolutist right, but it's dangerous language.
It's not shouting fire in a crowded theater, which never really happens anyway, but it is.
It is escalating language if you can convince unstable, Unstable populations that they're going to get killed.
If so-and-so continues to breathe, then they will view assassination as self-defense.
So it's dangerous.
So, why is it so wrong if somebody hates you and is working for your destruction?
Why is it wrong to hate them back?
I mean, help me understand this.
This high road just leads off a cliff.
And the most successful strategy, I will say this until my dying breath because it has worked very well for me.
And it is mathematically proven.
The very best strategy in life, you've heard me say it before, you'll probably hear me say it again.
The very best strategy in life is treat people the best you can when you first meet them.
After that, treat them as they treat you.
Why would you mourn the death of someone who has worked for 10 years for your destruction?
I'm not saying dance, I'm not saying celebrate.
And Donald Trump did not celebrate.
He said it's very sad.
Rest in peace.
But please, please, please help me understand.
Help me understand why it is so unacceptable to hate back.
Because to not hate back seems to be weak-coded.
So, if you are a slave, let's go back to the origins of Christianity.
If you are a slave, then you cannot hate your master back and do anything about it.
Your master beats you, you have to, you can't do anything about it.
So, hating back would be a useless emotion and could actually be very dangerous.
Because if you beat, if you're beaten by your master and then your master catches a flash of hostility or anger or rage in your eyes, he's probably going to beat you more, might even kill you.
So, hating back if you're a slave is sadly a sensible strategy.
If you have a really violent parent whose thumb and fist you're going to be laboring under for the next 15 plus years, then yes, hating back is very dangerous, could be suicidal.
If you have a prison guard and you're unjustly imprisoned, sort of you have a prison guard, you're in some gulag, and the prison guard doesn't have to bring you any food.
Can you show hatred to the prison guard?
No, because you're helpless.
Saying to people don't hate back puts them in the mindset of being slaves.
And it's funny, you know, because the people on the well, not funny, but the people on the right are constantly saying, Oh, all of this virtue signaling from the left, it's so gross.
But the virtue signaling from the right is even more gross because they criticize everyone else.
Oh, it's so much better than these petty leftists, you know.
I'm only going to say lovely and wonderful things about Rob Reiner because we're so much better.
No, it's not better.
I mean, that's somebody who already feels like a slave who can only pat themselves on the back for failing to express an emotion that they could never act on and might get them beaten up or killed in the sort of slave mindset, right?
Because, you know, we have evolved, our brains have evolved to be either masters or slaves, depending on our values we accept.
I mean, your brain doesn't know if you're going to be born a king or a pauper, a master or a slave, a prince or a serf.
Your brain doesn't know that ahead of time.
So you've got to be able to adapt either way.
And if you are a slave, as most people were throughout human history, if you are a slave, then you're going to adopt passivity and forgiveness and don't get angry.
And we'll get our reward later in heaven.
Don't resist.
Don't get angry.
Because that's the only way you can survive.
And of course, I sympathize with that mindset.
I would do the same thing.
Were I, I mean, we're all a little bit slaves, but were I more of a slave, an outright slave, I would adopt that mindset too.
But if you don't have to and you adopt that mindset anyway, you're putting yourself in chains.
And it's gross.
I'm not saying celebrate, but everyone who's out there, God, it's ferocious.
It's insistent.
It's like some estrogen tsunami designed to wash away all testicular residuals in the population.
No!
Trump said something mean about the guy who spent a decade trying to destroy him or said something not super mournful.
God, this tone policing, this weakness, this virtue says, it will be so much better.
It's vile.
Again, I'm happy to be schooled.
I'm happy to be corrected.
I do not understand it.
All right.
So we have people who want to talk about this topic, I hope.
Back out of what's on your mind.
Don't forget to unmute.
Hello.
Going once, going twice.
Can you hear me?
Kind of faint.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
So let me just premise it saying I totally agree and I like the strong stance you've taken on this.
Rob Reiner is not a good guy, and it's okay to be happy that his stuff, all his spouting and nonsense is over.
I mean, it is tragic how it happened.
We can admit to that.
But I think what you were discussing, is it weak and is it slavery to not mourn?
And I think this comes down to like, you know, the progressive left has developed its own religion and the right is sort of fractured and sort of all over the place.
So if you look at the progressive left and you can say like, yes, this is actually an evil in what Ralph Reiner was doing by like, you know, insisting on Russia Gate and various other nonsensical stipulations like open borders, we can sit here and say, yes, that's actually evil and he is not a good guy.
And we rejoice when he's gone.
But the left-sorry, I wouldn't say rejoice, but the idea that we have to put on a sad face when someone like this dies, I don't understand that.
I'm not saying we wish for his death or we celebrate his death, but you know, I mean, Trump wasn't wishing for or celebrating.
He said it was very sad.
But sorry, go ahead.
Yes.
Yeah, you're right.
Sorry.
I'm probably more radical on this issue.
But yeah, a neutral position at worst is like seems more than fine to me.
I mean, if some guy, and take an extreme example, sorry to interrupt.
If some guy is rushing at your wife and children with a machete and then he has a heart attack, do you mourn his passing?
Absolutely not.
No, I hope it hurts.
Anyway, go on.
So, yeah, so the issue is sort of a couple of things, right?
So like Charlie Kirk died.
The right was all up in arms about Charlie Kirk was murdered.
Yeah, sorry.
Yes, of course.
Charlie Kirk was murdered and the left sits there celebrating.
And in the same way you're describing like Rob Reiner's language as like, you know, not dangerous, but upping the temperature, they have a religious conviction to certain things like transgenderism and things like that and racial equity.
And, you know, Charlie Kirk was knocking down the moral pillars of theirs.
So in their eyes, he was exactly as dangerous as we might consider Rob Reiner.
Well, sorry, but Charlie Kirk was no race realist.
Charlie Kirk said that there's absolutely no difference other than the color of the skin.
So he was in no way racist that I can see.
So even by sort of the left standard or anything like that.
So it depends on how far left you go because some of them are like, you know, he says, oh, I might look at an airplane pilot and question their credentials if you're just giving them the job because of their race, which is heretical in the hyper-egalitarianism, blank slate cult, right?
Okay, got it.
Religion.
Or what did you say?
Belief.
So when you see these leftists like cheering his death and stuff, he was a heretic to them, effectively.
It's good that he died.
So now, I mean, now we have the right.
Sorry, to be fair, Rob Reiner did, was quite honorable with regards to Charlie Kirk's death in interviews.
He said it was a great tragedy and so on.
But just to be sort of fair to him, but sorry, go ahead.
That is good that he did that.
But he also cheered Ruff Swimbaugh's death the day after that guy passed.
Well, he attacked him pretty scathingly.
I don't think he necessarily quite cheered it, but it was definitely quite hostile.
But the left certainly doesn't police.
The left doesn't say, oh, if you were celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder, I don't want to have anything to do with you.
And they don't cross-examine each other and do that guilt by association, hop, skip, and a jump.
Do you disavow?
They don't do that stuff for sure.
They'll say, if pressed, they'll say, yeah, some people had some really bad reactions, blah, blah, blah.
But they don't self-police in the way, like when I see people on the right online, they're self-policing ferociously on this issue.
How dare you?
It's so terrible.
What Donald Trump had said, blah, blah, blah.
Like this policing, the left does not do that.
If pushed, they might say, yeah, there were some negative responses to Charlie Kirk.
I don't agree with that.
But the left wasn't out there saying, you know, if people were celebrating the Charlie Kirk thing, they weren't saying, that's despicable, that's vile.
I'm going to disassociate from you.
They weren't doing that from what I could see.
Right.
And I think this comes back to your idea of like, there is a weakness on the right right now where it's like, it's not universally accepted truth.
If you ever see that like difference of opinion chart, the left is all like in one tight-knit bubble.
So they're not going to release shit that's outside that bubble.
And whereas the right, you have people like barely on the fence who didn't vote Democrat or stayed home this last election just because the invasion was so obvious and like was causing them some sort of cognitive dissonance.
But a lot of them haven't like this whole concept of woke has gone away.
It hasn't.
It's metathized and it's got to be beaten back.
And, you know.
It's just less obvious because it has more control in a sense.
And I think a lot of this, and again, not to dump on the three-month widow, but the Erica Kirk thing where she forgave the murderer, but as somebody pointed out, won't forgive the conspiracy theorists, that has unfortunately set the tone to the point where, well, I mean, if Erica Kirk can forgive the guy who murdered her husband, then surely Donald Trump can forgive Rob Reiner.
And that is not because these are the same people who say, well, we want illegals to port it.
It's like, well, there's no forgiveness there, right?
So they want laws enforced.
They want criminals locked up.
They want crazy people put in institutions and so on.
And then they say, well, we're all about the forgiveness.
And they say, it's so frustrating.
It's so frustrating when these liberal judges keep letting out these repeat criminals to the point where they go out and kill and murder more.
It's like, you mean when the liberal judges forgive the murderers or forgive the killers or forgive the thieves or whatever, right?
And they say, well, it's really, really great that the guy in charge in El Salvador has cut the murder rate like 90% by just putting people in jail and keeping them there.
Oh, so by not forgiving them.
So this is what I do not understand on the right is they want to forgive murderers and deport illegals.
Okay, if forgiveness is a virtue and a value, then forgive everyone.
Whereas the left say, we want to forgive.
The right say, well, we want to forgive murderers, but Donald Trump's tweet is absolutely appalling and beyond forgiveness.
It's like, what?
And on the left, they say, well, we want to forgive murderers and we're fine with political violence against.
So forgiveness and non-forgiveness is like a weird thing.
This is why I keep talking about the issue of forgiveness because it's weird, squirrely, and self-contradictory on both the left and the right.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
So I agree.
I mean, the left is, you're preaching to the choir with all this stuff.
But I mean, the right is so fractured in its opinions.
Like you have the Christians on the right that are like, hey, actually, we're trying to model this like moral system.
So we have to hold ourselves like, you know, better than them by saying, like, look, see, we didn't like this guy, but we're not going to cheer when he died.
Like, you know, no, no, nobody's saying cheer.
That's, that's a false dichotomy.
Okay.
I mean, some of them are saying some people cheered, you know?
Okay.
Yeah, maybe some people cheered, but tone policing, those who were saying he was not a good guy.
And he also, you know, if you're, you know, this is a brutal thing to say, but I'll say it anyway, right?
If you are murdered by the child you raised, you're not a random victim.
Yeah.
It's not like, you know, you're just walking down the street in a nice neighborhood, someone jumps out of the bushes and kills you, right?
Right.
So it's not a random act of violence if your own son, God, I can't even imagine like the rage you'd have to have to slice your own parents' throats is staggering.
Yeah.
And whether that's just the drugs or something else, again, the Menendez thing, who knows?
We'll probably never know, but that's not a random thing.
See, people say, well, it's a tragedy.
It's like, I don't know.
I mean, lots of people smoke and don't get cancer, but a lot of people smoke and do get cancer.
If somebody smokes and gets cancer, is it a tragedy?
I don't know.
It's sad, but it's not a tragedy.
A tragedy to me is when you're not at all the author of your own disaster.
Right.
I just not a tragedy if you have a hand in it.
If somebody's overweight and doesn't exercise.
But I would say Charlie Kirk's death was a tragedy, and they said he has it coming.
Right.
So they say, yeah.
So they say it's not a tragedy because he had it coming.
He was going to get shot.
They were hoping for it.
They were saying it openly.
Right.
So if somebody's tone policing that's happening.
Yeah.
Did I disconnect?
Oh, man.
No, I'm with you, but I think I couldn't be heard for a moment.
But go ahead.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Can you hear me?
Hello?
Hello?
Yes.
Hello.
Okay.
I think we have, I think he's lost his audio for me.
So we'll get to others in just a second.
But to me, it comes down to if you are obese and don't exercise and eat terribly, and your doctor says, hey, you know, you keep doing this.
It's going to go badly for you.
And then you get diabetes.
Is that a tragedy?
I don't think that it is a tragedy.
Let me just check my audio here.
Can you hear?
Because this guy couldn't hear, and I just want to make sure that nothing happened with my connection.
Testing one, two, three.
Yeah, I don't think it's a tragedy if you brought it on yourself.
Now, of course, I'm not saying that Rob Bryner and his wife brought it on themselves in the same way that somebody who gets diabetes has, but it is not an outside inflicted tragedy.
And one of the indicators of that seems to be that they did not take the advice.
So let me just get this.
I know get to the other colour in a sec of the addiction counselors because I've certainly read some of that kind of stuff.
Want to be obviously pretty fair about this.
Okay.
Rob Bryner followed the advice of addiction counselors during his son Nick's early struggles, but later publicly expressed deep regret for doing so.
When Nick would tell us that it wasn't working for him, we wouldn't listen.
We were desperate.
And because the people had diplomas on the wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.
He regretted, quote, valuing the advice of counselors over the voice of his son, end quote, noting that traditional recovery programs, quote, work for some people, but can't work for everybody.
So, all right.
So, I'll just wanted to be clear on that.
Okay.
Justin, just in time.
What's on your mind?
About this topic, Silvouple.
Justin, you need to unmute?
Yes.
I just want to say that, I mean, to me, it's tragic in the sense that, sorry, that's my son in the background.
Hey, Micah, no problem, but the sounds of happy children is such a dark topic.
The tragedy is the sense of, you know, Nick.
Being born into an environment that he was maladapted for uh, and and the parents that were unwilling to make sure he adapted appropriately in that environment um, is the way I see that uh, as being a tragedy.
And it's tragic, you know, for relatives you know that may have suffered uh as a result of that as well.
So the tragedy is more on Nick's side, right?
No no no, i'm saying that it's a tragedy.
He was, you know, born into the environment that.
Sorry, who's he?
He was Nick okay sorry yeah, it's the tragedy.
He was born into that environment and he wasn't, you know equipped, either himself, you know, or with parents that were willing to uh, guard him against those things.
Yeah, that I agree with that.
That is the tragedy, that is the tragedy.
But the tragedy then would be on Nick's youthful side.
Now, i've never been any particular kind of an addict, so I don't really quite understand this.
But uh, I know my, I don't want to speak for Mike Sonovich, but there's a certain perspective that he's talked about that you just need to stay away from addicts because they will take you down.
They're sort of emotional terrorists.
They manipulate and lie and all kinds of things like that.
So yeah, I mean it's it's, it's a, it's a horribly sad situation and of course, I have sympathy for Nick as a child and I don't, I don't know the degree to which people who are long-term addicts sorry, it's a little tough to concentrate, uh.
So yeah, I don't know the degree to which people who are long-term addicts just have their brains completely rewired.
Can they ever be normal again.
I've certainly met long-term addicts over the course of my life and I don't think that they ever quite get back to normal.
So, who knows?
All right Alan, thank you for your patience.
If you have uh thoughts about this, i'd love to hear them.
Going once, going twice, can you hear?
All right, looks like not so much.
Jaden, if you uh would like to uh share your thoughts on this, I would love to hear them too.
Yes sir, go ahead.
Hi yes, i'm not sure if you saw my response to your post, but are you willing to concede that Charlie Kirk did in fact refer to Joe Biden as a fascist?
Uh assuming, let me just double check this, and I I i'm sure you're telling the truth about this and let me just uh double check that because yeah, I mean, if he did, I would.
It's not.
Would I be willing to concede it?
Yeah, I mean, if he did, he did, right?
Yeah, so did Charlie refer to Joe Biden as a fascist?
Fascist, right?
Don't don't.
I think he did.
I think he did.
And so I'm just checking this out.
Okay.
I just think, you know, it's always in the right mind to concede when one is wrong.
And you did post something that was factually incorrect.
So I thought I'd relate that.
Okay, so hang on, hang on, hang on.
So this was in, hang on.
So this was in the context of Rob Reiner calling MAGA people scum, which is more than half the country, right?
When did he say this?
Oh, well, I did this earlier in the show.
You can look this up and I did do a direct quote.
Well, I mean, I gave you a direct reference as to where you can find Charlie Kirk's tweet, and I'm asking you where I can find that.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure where you said where I can find it.
August 30th, 2022 on Charlie Kirk's page.
Joey.
Okay.
If you want to play it that way, we can do that.
Okay.
Hang on, hang on.
When did Rob Reiner refer to MAGA as scum?
Boom, boom.
Boom, boom.
Brock Bryner referred to MAGA supporters as MAGA scum in a post on Blue Sky on November 20th, 2024.
Gotcha.
How does that relate to the?
I'm sorry.
I think you cut off there.
Can you repeat?
All right.
Well, I think we may have lost.
Jayden, sadly, I think you muted yourself.
Can you hear me?
Oh, I think you're back.
Yes, go ahead.
Right.
The original claim was about Kirk never saying anyone was a racist or fascist, right?
No, that's not what I said.
That is what you said, verbatim.
No, that's not what I said.
I never said that.
No, I did not say that.
Read my tweet.
Pull your tweet.
Yeah, if you're going to misquote me, I'm going to ask you to read the tweet.
It's a direct quote, is it not?
Go ahead.
Read the tweet.
Let me pull it up.
I mean, while he's pulling it up, I can tell you what I tweeted, more or less.
I said more verbatim.
Yeah, go ahead.
Is it more or less or verbatim?
No, go ahead, read the tweet.
Is it more or less or verbatim?
I'm not sure what you're asking me.
You said what I more or less said.
No, no, read the tweet.
You said I never, I said, you said that I said that Kirk had never called anyone a fascist.
That's not what I said.
That's not what I said, what you said.
You said he didn't refer to people as racist or fascist.
Right.
So is people plural or singular?
Hang on, hang on.
People would be plural.
Okay.
Okay.
So he referred to President Biden as a fascist.
Is that President Bible as president?
Okay, so no, hang on, hang on.
So you see, if you talk over me, we can't have a conversation.
That's just basic civility, right?
Sure.
Okay.
So in the context where I was quoting or whether the debate was about Rob Reiner calling more than half of America scum, and I used the plural with Charlie Kirk, that Charlie Kirk was not calling people, not an individual, but people, right?
Referring in the context of a conversation about Rob Reiner calling more than half of America scum, that he did not refer to people in the collective as fascists.
Now, if Charlie Kirk had said all Democrats are fascists, that would be a complete repudiation of my post.
But I was talking in the context of calling lots of people, in this case, the majority of the country.
This is why I used people.
You didn't specify that.
Oh, no, but it was in the context of the debate that I was happening.
It was about calling masses of people, which is why I used the plural.
And that's why I did not say Charlie Kirk.
Okay.
Okay, if you over talk me, we can't have a conversation.
Got you.
You understand that?
No problem, man.
No, it is a problem for you because you keep doing it.
Okay, go ahead.
Thank you.
Jeez, basic civility, man.
So if I had said Charlie Kirk never referred to anyone as a fascist, I would be completely wrong.
In the context of calling more than half the population MAGA scum, saying Charlie Kirk did not refer to people in the plural as fascists and racists, that would still be correct.
The fact that he referred to President Biden as a fascist is not referring to large numbers of people in Rob Bryner's case, more than half the country.
You're shifting the goalpost because you've been caught in it.
Your post does not say masses of people, does not say half a country, which mega does not compromise half the country anyways.
But you say Charlie Kirk didn't spout hate and call people fascist and racist.
He's called more than one people, more than one person fascists, Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden.
Those would be people, since we're arguing plurality, two people, instances of which he's called them fascists.
Quote, Joe Biden is a fascist, August 30th, 2022.
Right?
So he called two people, is that right?
Two political leaders, fascists.
He referred to bro.
Okay.
I can't do it.
I mean, I do not know how to have conversations with people who can't follow simple instructions.
Like when I'm starting to ask a question and someone overtalks me.
Now, listen, I'm perfectly aware and I, you know, I'm perfectly, this is a complexity of both the conversation and the English language.
So when I'm in a conversation with someone about Rob Breiner calling a lot of people, you know, whether it's all MAGA or, you know, some MAGA or whatever, but when he's calling supporters of Donald Trump collective negative names, and I say, well, Charlie Kirk didn't do that.
And then people say, ah, yes, but Charlie Kirk did call one person a fascist.
It's like, I get.
So it's a gray area.
I'm not going to say I'm completely wrong, which I have no problem doing.
I have no problem saying that I'm completely wrong.
And if I had said Charlie Kirk never referred to anyone as a fascist, that is a, I mean, the difference is the law of reasoning by induction or deduction.
So deductive reasoning, and you can find more about this in artoftheargument.com, but deductive reasoning is any exception disproves the rule.
Right?
So that's 100% accuracy.
So if I had made an absolute statement that Charlie Kirk never referred to anyone as a fascist, that's an absolute statement.
And then if somebody says Charlie Kirk referred to Joe Biden as a fascist, I would say, totally right.
I'm wrong.
I have to withdraw that.
But this is an inductive one, where in a conversation where I'm talking about calling masses and masses like 150 million people, you know, fascists or scum or whatever.
And I say Charlie Kirk didn't refer to people in that way.
He didn't call people that.
And Swiper says, well, there's one individual.
Okay.
Like, I understand.
I understand it's a bit of a gray area, but no, I'm not going to say that.
I mean, yeah, I could have said in the context of, but I assume that intelligent people understand the context in which I am talking, which is about massive collectivist judgments.
And I say, well, Charlie Kirk didn't do that.
Didn't make massive collectivist judgments.
So again, I'm not quite sure what the objection is.
It is very much nitpicky.
All right.
Let's try Justin one more time.
Justin, have you had any more luck with your microphone?
Go on.
Yes.
Oh.
Oh, okay.
Sorry, did you want to come back or?
Yeah, yeah, I did.
I did.
I also wanted to speak on the Trump's tweet about the Rob's and the fact that I think he could have done a little better in the sense of taking it beyond himself.
Now, he did a little bit by talking about how Rob was not good for America.
However, I think he could have pointed out how Rob had called the Republican Party the white grievance party, as if whites voicing their grievances isn't a legitimate cause to be concerned with.
And that's how I measure whether I have sympathy for someone who died or not, as, you know, whether or not they, whether or not they have compassion or love for the people that I care and love for.
And that's my, that's my biggest issue with Trump's plea is that it was, you know, more, I don't know if you say selfish than thinking about the impact his voice has against other people beyond himself.
Well, but as you point out, he did later say, yeah, that he was, it was bad for the country.
And he's also saying that his hatred of Trump would have interfered with the golden age of America and so on that he was bringing up and so on.
All right.
Luke, if there's anything that you wanted to mention, don't forget to unmute.
Going once, going twice.
Yes.
Excellent.
Yeah, I'm the guy that scheduled a call with you, but you had to cancel.
I want to talk about religious freedom and anti-Semitism.
Yeah, that's not our topic today.
Yeah, that's not our topic today, just so you know.
And so we're just trying to talk about this issue with Rob Reiner.
So I think it's not a matter of, it's funny because there's this word like deserve.
He didn't deserve to die like that.
And I have trouble with the concept deserve because I don't know what people mean by that.
I mean, let's take a crazy example, right?
A real extreme example.
And this is not particularly related, but just to sort of tell you where the issue I have comes from.
Let's take a big issue like somebody shoots himself.
So somebody shoots himself.
He didn't deserve to die like that.
Now, does that mean he didn't deserve to be depressed?
Or if he puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, he didn't deserve to have his head blown off.
Like, I don't know what, I mean, if he chose, and we can think, of course, with great sympathy and tragedy to people who commit suicide, but if somebody says he didn't deserve to die like that when he made the choice to kill himself, I don't know what that means.
If somebody is a chain smoker and his family begs him to stop and he doesn't stop and then he gets sick, what does it mean to say he didn't deserve to get sick?
Let's say he dies of getting sick.
He's got COPD or emphysema, lung cancer or something, and he dies from it.
What does it mean to say he didn't deserve that?
I mean, he chose that.
It's like Russian roulette.
If somebody doesn't get help for a gambling addiction or is just a compulsive gambler and loses all his money, does it make any sense to say he didn't deserve to lose his money?
If a woman has unprotected sex and gets pregnant, she didn't deserve to get pregnant if she doesn't want to be pregnant.
I have trouble with that.
Let's say that a guy is horrible.
You know, he cheats on his wife.
He beats his children.
He drinks.
He's just a terrible guy.
And everyone suffers who's in his vicinity.
And then later on in his life, he's alone.
People say, well, he didn't deserve to end up alone.
And I don't know what that means.
Nobody wants that.
Nobody wants someone to end up alone.
Nobody wants anyone to be murdered.
My God, that's appalling.
But I don't know what deserve means.
So let's take something a little less immediate, like the Menendez brothers, right?
So if what the Menendez brothers allege is true, was true, we don't know for sure, but if it was true, there's evidence, but no proof.
If it was true that there was horrendous sexual abuse of the children and that they were terrified that their father was going to kill them because they were going to reveal his secrets, like whatever it is, right?
If you prey upon your children, if it was the case that this praying happened, if you did prey upon your children to that degree and then they kill you, did you deserve that?
I don't know.
I don't know what that means.
Actions have consequences.
Blowback is a real thing.
You know, if I go up and punch some guy in the face and he turns out to be some, you know, real martial artist and hummels me to a pulp, did I deserve that?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, don't go punching people in the face.
So I don't know.
And again, people can, I'm going to close the show off in a sec, but people can certainly tell me these kinds of things for sure.
And explain it to me.
You can always email me support at freedomain.com.
But I don't know what people mean by deserve.
If somebody eats badly, doesn't exercise, is obese, do they deserve to get diabetes?
I don't know what deserve means in this context, right?
If I jump off a wall that's way too high for me and I twist my ankle, do I deserve to have my ankle twisted?
I don't know what that means.
And I don't, it seems to be a term of great sophistry.
If horrible abuse happens in a household, obviously nobody wants people to get murdered, clearly, except maybe the murderer.
But if horrible abuse has happened in a household, and let's just take the example of the guy who alienates his kids, he beats them, he yells at them, insults them, and so on.
Does he deserve to end up alone?
I don't know what deserve means in this context.
If you abuse people, you probably will end up alone.
I hate to say serves him right because nobody wants that situation to begin with.
Nobody wants people to get diabetes, but if you take really poor care of your health, then your risk of getting diabetes goes up.
So if you make a whole series of bad decisions and bad things happen to you, do you deserve...
Again, I don't know what that means.
And again, I'm happy to have it explained, but it doesn't make any sense in the context of free will and choices.
Actions have consequences.
And if a guy is really horrible to his family and ends up isolated in his old age, well, there's that old demotivational poster that sometimes the sole purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
So if we say, if we try to intervene and say, well, bad things should never happen to bad people, then all we do is reward the bad and punish the good, right?
If women who have sex outside of marriage, it's unprotected, they get pregnant, then we should remove all negative consequences.
Well, that's not, that's not good for society in the long run.
Individuals do have to suffer for society to progress.
And the more we try and take away suffering from individuals and the more we try to deny that suffering or say it's somehow undeserved, whatever that means, well, parent your kids, be close to them, understand them.
You know, I'm sure that Rob Reiner's last thoughts had nothing to do with his success as a filmmaker.
I'm sure that the torment of his later years did not add up to the happiness he had in producing movies.
What matters is your relationships.
What matters is your connection.
What matters is love.
What matters is your closeness with your children.
What matters is the connection of friends and family.
That's what matters.
Professional success, be damned, because this is almost an example of massive ambition, taking a father away from his son and leaving his son vulnerable to predation.
It's not worth it.
I say this to people on my show all the time.
It's not worth it.
Well, we're going to, my wife wants to work and I want to work and we're going to put our kids in daycare.
And it's like, it's not worth it, man.
It's not worth it.
You're going to make a couple of bucks now.
You're going to pay for it later when your children are far more influenced by their peers than their parents.
Far more influenced by TikTok than the morals of their elders.
Don't do it.
Do not trade money, fame, and power for closeness and connection with your children and your family.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
It's not worth it.
It's the opposite of worth it.
This is a particularly gruesome example of what can happen if you put work and ambition above connection and family.
I mean, Nick Reiner repeatedly said he felt very distant from his father.
And he didn't understand his father's competence until they were making a movie together, which was 2016 was the movie came out.
Do not be lured away by the shiny baubles of money, fame, success, the glittering empty eyeballs of strangers who come and go.
Focus on virtue.
Focus on your connection.
Focus on love.
Focus on closeness.
That sustains you into old age.
That sustains you into old age.
Glittering prizes, money in the bank, and misery in the heart is a very, very bad deal.
Freedomman.com slash tonight.
If you would like to help out the show, I really do appreciate your time today.
I hope you have a lovely afternoon.
Go talk to people you care about.
Open your heart.
Open your mind.
Be close to them.
Please, I'm begging you.
I'm begging you.
I've seen what happens the other way, even in my own life.
It's not pretty.
So open up.
Be close to the people you care about.
Tell them how much you care about them.
If you have issues with them, speak openly about them and resolve them as best you can.
That is the best life you can have.
You'd rather be in love, living in a shoebox, than be in misery in a mansion.