Sept. 8, 2020 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:14:44
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unidentified
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you you | |
| you the other day at a Trump rally clashes broke out between | ||
| Black Lives Matter leftists and some Trump supporters | ||
| Now, it looks like from photos there are some Proud Boys who are there. | ||
| But the news, the story, and the viral trend all say that Proud Boys attacked these Black Lives Matter leftists. | ||
| There's a viral tweet saying that these two men who, like, chase after a guy and knock him down are, in fact, Proud Boys. | ||
| But apparently, they're not. | ||
| And I noticed this right away. | ||
| I didn't think it was that big of a deal because this viral tweet was claiming it was Proud Boys. | ||
| But it is still apparently Trump supporters or some conservatives, they end up getting arrested. | ||
| And I think there's something really important we should talk about because already the media is latching onto this. | ||
| It is the Proud Boys. | ||
| The Proud Boys did this. | ||
| And it's because there happened to have been a couple Proud Boys at the event. | ||
| This is what I've been talking about. | ||
| If the right goes out, and everybody knows this, Well, I should say most conservatives know this. | ||
| The media is going to immediately claim the right of the bad guys, they're the aggressors. | ||
| Already we saw it with Joe Biden. | ||
| You get months and months of leftists, riots, and destruction, firebombs, molotovs, and then you get one rally where Trump supporters drive through Portland. | ||
| Not only that, but a Trump supporter actually gets killed by one of these leftists and Joe Biden says, Trump's got to tell his militias to stay out of here. | ||
| And that's what I said was gonna happen, but you don't need me to say it because I think most of you know this. | ||
| But I think this is just another story in... I hate to say it because it becomes so routine with the excessive clashes and the fights between the left and the right. | ||
| And admittedly, I don't think the right goes out there all that often. | ||
| But we got a bunch of other stories to talk about beyond this. | ||
| We've got schools are calling police because they're watching these webcams of kids, and apparently there's like a toy gun or something, so the cops have to come for a wellness check. | ||
| And we got... You know what? | ||
| I hate to say it this way. | ||
| I find this to be hilarious, but not... Look, Disney thanked the Xinjiang security forces that are apparently helping run concentration camps because they helped make Mulan, and it's sparking this big boycott. | ||
| And this, to me, is like... You know, there's Get What Go Broke, and now there's something well beyond it, like Get Authoritarian Communist Pro-China Go Broke, and now there's a boycott because apparently everybody wants to boycott this. | ||
| But we've got a really great guest. | ||
| To help us sort through these news stories, we've got Rabe Suave. | ||
| How's it going, man? | ||
| You want to introduce yourself? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Nice to be with you. | ||
| My name is Rabe Suave. | ||
| I'm a senior editor at Reason Magazine and the author of this book, Panic Attack, Young Radicals in the Age of Trump. | ||
| Already promoting the book right off the get-go. | ||
| I mean, it's here. | ||
| Well, so actually, no, I wanted him to bring it up because you're basically talking about this college leftist activism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the other reason I think it's great to have you here, a lot of people might not know this, but it was you and I, I guess for the most part, had the most prominent takedowns of the Covington fake news right when it happened. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I'm sure most of you who are listening are familiar with what happened with the Covington kids. | ||
| Some dude was, you know, Nick Sandman was standing on the stairs, minding his own business, basically, while the other kids were dancing. | ||
| And then this Native American guy walks up to him, banging a drum. | ||
| The media ran the story completely backwards, claiming the kid went up to him. | ||
| And then I ended up seeing the videos and being like, whoa, that's BS. | ||
| You ended up seeing basically the same thing and calling it out immediately. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, I noticed you right away. | ||
| I was like, oh, this guy gets it. | ||
| This guy's calling out the fake news. | ||
| But real quick, how did you immediately break that? | ||
| Because I know how I did. | ||
| I just Googled the videos and I looked, right? | ||
| Yeah, I was sitting down to write something about this. | ||
| I saw that everybody was weighing in on this. | ||
| It was all over my Twitter feed. | ||
| And when I started to write about it, I'm like, well, I should make sure I know what the whole story is. | ||
| And at that time, the longer clip was emerging that was showing the black Hebrew Israelites. | ||
| That there was some argument really started by Nathan Phillips' entourage as the Native American people were trying to argue with the boys. | ||
| So I'm like, okay, well, I'll watch this whole thing. | ||
| And then when you watch that whole thing, it's a much, much different picture than just like a very brief video of them having this confrontation. | ||
| There's just so much more context to it. | ||
| And the context makes it very clear that Nick Sandman was not engaged in racially motivated harassment of this man. | ||
| So I think the other interesting thing, too, that we'll definitely dive into is it's not young radicals in the age of Trump anymore. | ||
| They've graduated. | ||
| They're working at the companies. | ||
| They've brought all of that stuff from colleges out into the real world. | ||
| And now they're sort of wreaking havoc. | ||
| Well, now we live on campus. | ||
| Campus is everywhere. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, defunding the police is a step towards that, for sure. | ||
| I mean, would you agree? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Um, I would take the Biden line that we should reallocate probably some funding. | ||
| Um, I certainly think for sure, but like the conflict we're seeing in the streets needs to be handled by the police. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I think, I think I don't want the police to not arrest people engaged in violence and looting. | ||
| Well that's what, I mean the more, like they ran a story in an op-ed in the New York Times, yes we mean abolish the police. | ||
| I think that's an offshoot of these college campus kids who, we saw Evergreen where they all had, you see that photo where they're like at the baseball bats and they're like flexing? | ||
| That's what it feels like. | ||
| It was on the campus, they were walking around swinging bats at people, now they're in the streets doing it, and it's just getting worse and worse. | ||
| Yes, but abolish the police is disingenuous in that way, because they don't actually want to abolish the police, they want to become the police. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They are the police. | ||
| And their jurisdiction extends to what you think and what you say, not just crimes you would commit, but your views are something they should be able to adjudicate in a criminal-type setting. | ||
| Are you worried this is going to expand? | ||
| I mean, you're basically outlining authoritarian thought policing. | ||
| It has expanded. | ||
| It's moved, just like you were saying, off the college campus. | ||
| I mean, this summer, we have seen so much in, I think, in elite media environments, on social media to some degree. | ||
| Those are the environments where the kind of woke campus student activists, whatever you want to call them, Have, have moved first into those environments, places that are disproportionately likely to hire young woke people. | ||
| And there it only takes, and I always say this, it's not like they're a majority. | ||
| They're not even a majority of young people. | ||
| It's a, it's a small number of people. | ||
| They just wield a tremendous amount of power and influence despite only being a couple of people because no one, it's a compliance culture. | ||
| No one wants to tell them no, no one wants to get themselves in trouble or canceled or whatever it is. | ||
| So they just, it's easier to give them whatever they want. | ||
| So then does that mean Trump's gonna win? | ||
| I don't know if that means Trump's going to win. | ||
| Certainly some people, probably a lot of people, end up supporting him because of that. | ||
| That pushes them, because it's like, how do you even fight this? | ||
| And they go to Trump. | ||
| And Trump, to some extent, made himself the avatar of resistance to political correctness. | ||
| Again, the terminology for it is confusing. | ||
| One thing I think is interesting, with Trump announcing he's going to ban critical race theory in the federal government, and then he targeted schools that were teaching the 1619 Project. | ||
| You had, for instance, Brian Stelter say it's bad that Trump is doing this. | ||
| You had the New York Times, I think it was, saying that Trump is now, you know, overtly the candidate for white America, not realizing at all what it is they're talking about. | ||
| And if regular people really do hate this stuff, and Trump's making that bet, then the media is making the wrong bet. | ||
| Well, and there are even, there are like mainstream normie liberals who have criticized the 1619 Project and have criticized critical race theory as taught by like Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi. | ||
| And about racists, by the way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Those people have actually, it's funny, like they've drawn a lot of criticism right now from everyone except the far left, the far progressive left. | ||
| So I'm not sure, like, Trump is getting rid of this kind of teaching that, like, almost no one thinks has any scientific validity to it. | ||
| It's a racket. | ||
| It's a racket for the people who teach it. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I think it's expanding rapidly. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| There's like, you know, Robin DiAngelo, she makes tons of money off preaching how all white people are racist. | ||
| And I'm sure you've seen that video of the morbidly obese woman saying, white people are inhuman, they're demons, now PayPal me and give me money. | ||
| Right, it's written on the chalkboard behind her. | ||
| Yeah, that's like the famous picture of exactly what critical race theory is. | ||
| But I have friends that have wholly adopted this, and I know some influential celebrities who have like, as far as I can tell, lost their minds. | ||
| Yeah, but again, it's a way of life. | ||
| It's more cultural and less ideological, I think. | ||
| It's fitting in. | ||
| It's what you do to fit in. | ||
| I think that's true of the college activist set to a degree. | ||
| Obviously, there are some true diehard people out there, but I think they get into it because it's what their friends get them into. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, well, they're surrounded by it. | ||
| Yeah, man, it's really sad. | ||
| I had a friend, a pretty good friend, and they befriended one of these, you know, grifter, cringey, weirdo, you know, uneditarian lefties. | ||
| And now all of a sudden, everything they espouse, it's like, that was who they were surrounded by. | ||
| But it's shockingly bad to the point where... | ||
| You can talk to extremists, you know, a lot of them. | ||
| And religious extremists. | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| Some of these fundamental faiths won't hear you at all. | ||
| But there are some really hateful, nasty people and racists that you could actually have a conversation with. | ||
| And you might not agree with them, and you might actually hate them. | ||
| But on the left, man, I can't even... It's like they shut down. | ||
| Well, and you should try to have a conversation with them. | ||
| You should try to have a conversation with anybody who's an extremist. | ||
| You should try to talk them out of their extremist views. | ||
| Or more so, just let them know about the kinds of other things there are, the other options there are available. | ||
| It's hard to convince anyone of anything in a straight-up, especially if it's a confrontational kind of thing. | ||
| But a lot of people who are drawn, I think, to extremist ideas uh... get in it | ||
| into it for other reasons and they can be demotivated to event they fall out of | ||
| eventually and then you got a stop them from getting to the next extremist maybe after | ||
| this election when they you know the democrats are like okay we don't need | ||
| them anymore right a little disappear | ||
| i'm not convinced well writing | ||
| it is spreading but i think i think some of the classes on the streets | ||
| we we're seeing i mean again there's so much of else going on it | ||
| If the weather isn't as nice, if it gets cold again, people stay inside. | ||
| We were talking about this earlier, but when Obama became president, so much of the protesting just stopped. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| Even though he didn't end up addressing a lot of what they were mad about. | ||
| But it only took a couple years for Occupy Wall Street to take over and see hundreds of thousands marching through the street in all these different cities. | ||
| Well, it'll never be stopped for forever, but I think there might be a little bit of a cooling off period. | ||
| Well, we'll talk about this. | ||
| Let's jump to the first story. | ||
| This is from Fox News, and this is really interesting. | ||
| Two arrested after Trump supporters, Proud Boys, clash with far-left demonstrators at Oregon State Capitol. | ||
| One man in a bulletproof vest beat a counter-protester with what appeared to be a baseball bat. | ||
| Because even in one video, one of these guys at the Trump rally Runs up behind some lefty dude and just like the guy's not fighting him and he just cracks him over the back of the head now Fortunately, this guy is wearing a helmet. | ||
| So maybe the Trump supporter knew he was gonna whack him with the helmet. | ||
| He'd be okay I don't care don't hit people, you know over the back of the head for any reason and don't chase after him But this is this is actually it's going immediately viral. | ||
| It's like a trend on Twitter now everyone's talking about the proud boys and And this is what's crazy. | ||
| It's interesting how Fox News has framed this because they say Proud Boys clash with Far Left. | ||
| I don't know if that's true based on what I've seen. | ||
| Because while it does appear that there are Proud Boys there, you have these viral tweets. | ||
| This one from Sergio Olmo saying, Proud Boys bull rush BLM. | ||
| But there's no evidence. | ||
| I don't know who these guys are. | ||
| Why should I assume that these are just Proud Boys? | ||
| Now in fact, as I'm told, they're not. | ||
| So this is what I'm actually being told. | ||
| The Proud Boys are disavowing, saying these guys aren't ours. | ||
| There were Proud Boys who were there, apparently holding flags. | ||
| You can see Proud Boys, and they're wearing, you know, the golden black. | ||
| But I'll tell you this. | ||
| There's an interesting conversation to be had about... We were kind of talking about this a little bit before the show. | ||
| What makes someone Antifa and what makes someone a Proud Boy? | ||
| But first, I'll read you the quick context so you know what happened and then we'll kind of break this down. | ||
| Fox News reports at least two people were arrested Monday after Trump supporters traveling from the Portland suburbs clashed with far-left counter-protesters outside the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, which is actually like on fire right now for those that haven't seen it. | ||
| So seriously, I hope everyone out there is going to be safe. | ||
| Ty Parker, 53, of Durango, Colorado, was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor assault and first-degree intimidation. | ||
| Trenton Wolfskill, 37, of Eugene, Oregon, was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor assault. | ||
| The Oregonian Oregon Live reported, citing an Oregon State Police spokesperson, both have since been released. | ||
| These are just, you know, misdemeanor assault. | ||
| They're not the most important things in the world. | ||
| But of course, We're seeing many people on the left try and use this. | ||
| Videos posted on social media showed several dozen people wearing military fatigues, pro-Trump t-shirts, and bearing clothing and flags labeled with the names of the far-right group Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys gathered on the steps of the Oregon State Capitol building in Salem, Oregon. | ||
| Several in the group later rushed towards a slightly smaller group of counter-protesters. | ||
| And this is where you see the videos. | ||
| Now admittedly, this is definitely being hyped up, but in this video, the dude in white, this guy right here, he basically just runs up to the dude and pushes him over. | ||
| It's assault. | ||
| It straight up is. | ||
| And I think the cops have like zero tolerance for any of this right now, especially Escalation, regardless of where it comes from. | ||
| And then apparently some other guy comes and shoves him as well. | ||
| It is, you know, admittedly not the worst thing I've seen in terms of street clashing. | ||
| Antifa has been coming out with, you know, clubs and molotovs and stuff like that. | ||
| But the bigger issue, I guess, that I'm trying to bring up with this story is... Well, they claim that they're Proud Boys. | ||
| And not Fox News. | ||
| Fox News is kind of dancing on the line. | ||
| But a lot of other outlets are saying the Proud Boys did this because you can clearly see that they're there and they have paintball guns. | ||
| So the first thing I kind of want to talk about is... | ||
| What makes someone, you know, are these, all of these guys now Proud Boys, all of them Patriot Prayer, or is that unfair? | ||
| But at the same time, because you mentioned this just a moment ago, if it was Antifa, we'd all be saying it was all Antifa, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So yeah, what do you think? | ||
| Right, so that's why I think it's a little, you gotta be careful not to, I totally see what you're saying with it right there, maybe those people specifically weren't Proud Boys, they are there doing like a kind of Proud Boys thing, The Proud Boys are, I guess, a more rigorously defined organization or club than Antifa, which is really more of a loose association of people who practice the same tactics. | ||
| So then it's like, are you Antifa? | ||
| If you're dressed like Antifa, you're there. | ||
| Actually, Black Lives Matter is interesting, too, because it's a slogan you can agree with without being part of the organization. | ||
| And then the organization is so big, it's not a formal, you don't sign up for it or something. | ||
| so it's sometimes the media character talks about these things in | ||
| characterizes people wrongly or who should be in what group but i don't know it seems a little bit like splitting hairs | ||
| in this case with the proud boys using using its president of ways to this | ||
| i mean you should always strive for greater rigorousness of just like you | ||
| know that little they were i'm aga supporting conservative activist people | ||
| at at a place where there were proud boys is the better way to say it | ||
| If you have a headline that doesn't contextualize that perfectly, I guess you should improve it, but it doesn't seem like the worst failing from the media I've ever seen. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, definitely not. | ||
| Well, particularly with Fox News mentioning that Proud Boys clash, and then a man in a ballproof vest did this. | ||
| But there are some left-wing outlets saying Proud Boys attack Black Lives Matter leftists and stuff. | ||
| So the general idea, I guess, from this, we're supposed to get a Proud Boy rally at the end of the month, September 26th, in Portland. | ||
| Have you heard about this at all? | ||
| I think I've heard it mentioned, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a bit concerned that this is gonna, you know, dramatically escalate. | ||
| Seems like a horrible idea. | ||
| Well, there you go, that's one way to put it. | ||
| No, I think it's a bad idea, yeah. | ||
| These people, these people on both, like, the Antifa people and the Proud Boy type people, maybe not exactly the Proud Boys people, aligned with them. | ||
| Um, I mean, it's like the blood in the crypts. | ||
| They want to fight each other. | ||
| They want to battle each other. | ||
| Um, and it's just like what they get excited about. | ||
| And I'm not sure how much it represents anything else to some degree. | ||
| Like there is some level of people in every society who just want to, they want to beat people up. | ||
| They want to, they want to create violence. | ||
| And like, this is their space for these people to do that. | ||
| I think that's less true among the Proud Boys, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's more true among the Proud Boys than the average person. | ||
| They remind me of the Cowboys or the people who would have joined organized crime or something. | ||
| Or a militia in the 17th century to protect some local... I'm sure a lot of them join militias now. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| But what I'm saying is it's actually not strange that it's usually young men between the ages of 15 and 30 who create all the violence in society. | ||
| Right. | ||
| in every society. | ||
| Sometimes they're the ones who fight wars. | ||
| They're the ones who burn towns in the medieval time. | ||
| They're the ones who in the Wild West where there's less law | ||
| and order were doing things like that. | ||
| Why though? | ||
|
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Why? | |
| That's what appeals to you. | ||
| I mean there are actually differences between men and women. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the actual sad fact. | ||
| It's usually men who are called to this level of violence. | ||
| Well so let me clarify what I was saying. | ||
| I think that there is a higher likelihood among the Proud Boys | ||
| of a desire for violence than the average person. | ||
| But I think there is an extremely higher likelihood among Antifa | ||
| for a desire for violence among Proud Boys or the average person. | ||
| Meaning, the way I see the Proud Boys, when they go out and do these rallies, it's more of like climbing on top of the mountain and pounding their chest and being like, MY MOUNTAIN! | ||
| Don't you dare come up my mountain? | ||
| There's a little bit on both sides of like sticking their finger in your face and saying I'm not touching you. I'm | ||
| not touching you What are you doing? And then a fight breaks out right? Okay, | ||
| I guess technically you weren't touching me But come on, we know what you were trying | ||
| So the way the way I see it with especially with going to Portland is that a lot of these guys don't live in Portland | ||
| Some of them actually do like the guy who got murdered apparently lived just like a few blocks away and he may | ||
| have been going Home, that's crazy. So, you know, here's a guy who lives in | ||
| Portland. He's walking around and they they Targeted him dude went goes in the parking garage high like | ||
| weights grips grips is gone He knew he knew he was doing and it's things like that I mean I've been to a bunch of these rallies and what I end up seeing with the proud boys is they want to I Feel like it's them asserting. | ||
| They're like almost dominance, but not necessarily dominance like I mean as much as I can be critical of the Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| going to these places, the general idea behind what they do is we have a right to march wherever | ||
| we want and we're going to come to your city and do it and you shouldn't attack us. | ||
| But the reality is if Antifa doesn't show up, you know what they do? | ||
| They wander around with American flags, then they go to a bar and get drunk and go home. | ||
| But Antifa goes around smashing up windows and fighting with cops. | ||
| So that's why I say, look, I'll absolutely be critical of these guys especially. | ||
| Chase people down and attack them? | ||
| Nah, you get arrested for that. | ||
| We don't want escalation. | ||
| And you shouldn't be attacking people anyway. | ||
| And they got a slap on the wrist charge as it is misdemeanor assault. | ||
| Proud Boys going to Portland? | ||
| After... Now we have... The one guy gets shot. | ||
| Then we have this other guy in Vancouver, Washington, get hit by a car. | ||
| You had Kenosha. | ||
| I think it's... Yeah, it's a horrible idea. | ||
| Well, often the best way to de-escalate something is to just not participate in it at all. | ||
| I have to think the Antifa-type people are more likely to get bored with this and go home if there aren't any Proud Boys out there. | ||
| I mean, obviously there's the scuffles we see, but that's not every time. | ||
| Sometimes just nothing happens because there isn't really anything going on. | ||
| I want more of that. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But we've had three months of the far left going out and, you know, across the country, mostly in Portland, not stopping. | ||
| It's getting worse. | ||
| Yeah, Portland is a special case, right? | ||
| Because there's a long history of this kind of thing there. | ||
| Berkeley is another place that's been like that. | ||
| Yeah, the West Coast. | ||
| What's going on, man? | ||
| It's a West Coast thing. | ||
| It's a West Coast thing. | ||
| You know, I wonder, like, what made that... I wonder if it could be traced back to the Wild West. | ||
| Who was willing to go there? | ||
| Who was willing to survive there? | ||
| And what they were willing to do. | ||
| And then you end up with generations and generations of these individuals These Wild West stories and you get people who are just looking for a fight. | ||
| I don't know if maybe there's like less pressure to work or something or be in like a professional setting all the time and so you have people who have hobbies like this. | ||
| Like violence? | ||
| I don't know, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know man, I think the main reason Proud Boys specifically will go to Portland is to, they view it, and I could be wrong, I can't speak for them because I don't really talk to those people or anything like that. | ||
| But I think they view it as asserting their First Amendment rights. | ||
| Their right to be on the ground, in a city, free of harm, to express themselves. | ||
| Well, you could easily say that about the other side people, too. | ||
| Yeah, but Antifa smashes things up. | ||
| I mean, they show up in Portland, and in Seattle, they cemented the police station shut and tried burning it down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a little different. | ||
| You know, some of these people, sure. | ||
| So, actually, here's an interesting, bigger question, for sure, as it pertains to this. | ||
| I guess the way I view it with the Proud Boys and how the media is framing it, or actually this one individual saying they're all Proud Boys. | ||
| The Proud Boys, you have to like, join. | ||
| Where they like, you know how you join the Proud Boys? | ||
| That is the difference, right? | ||
| Don't you have to sing that song or something? | ||
| They have to name five breakfast cereals. | ||
| You have to name five breakfast cereals while they're punching you. | ||
|
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Yes! | |
| And that's... No, no, no. | ||
| So the first thing you have to do to join is not that. | ||
| It's actually, you just have to say some quote about, like, supporting Western civilization or something. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And their degrees. | ||
| Apparently the whole thing was supposed to be a joke from Gavin McInnes. | ||
| Like, it was meant to be silly. | ||
| And so, you have to name five breakfast cereals while they're punching you, and then you gotta get a tattoo. | ||
| Why can't they just, like, throw toga parties or something? | ||
| Like, that's what it sounds like, a fraternity. | ||
| Like, do you have to go out and participate in social mayhem? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, I mean, do you think they have a right to... Of course they have a right. | ||
| But even people also have a right to be part of Antifa loosely and go out and... Now, they don't have a right to smash windows and burn things and throw cement and all that, but, I mean, then it starts to get tricky. | ||
| Are you culpable for what the people who do do that if you're vaguely associated with them? | ||
| And that would be true of Patriot... Patriot Prayer. | ||
| Well, Patriot Prayer as well, I mean, because they're up in Portland. | ||
| And I know the leader of that group, I think, does speak often about let's not practice violence, or has in the past, I don't know. | ||
| Uh, Proud Boys, or? | ||
| Uh, Patriot Prayer, I think. | ||
| I think the Proud Boys are actually better than Patriot Prayer in terms of... Yeah, because I'm... I don't know. | ||
| I don't know enough about either group, to be completely honest. | ||
| But I'm pretty sure, like, there's like a video out of, I think it might be Portland, where the Patriot Prayer guys are, like, fighting people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're more willing to just, you know, Well, I have certainly seen videos of people who are affiliated with both groups causing violence. | ||
| I have seen that happen both times. | ||
| Not to say that everyone there does that or that they're responsible for the other people, but again, I think you could say that to some degree for the people on the left as well. | ||
| I think there's a challenge here. | ||
| So here's the view from many people I hear on the right. | ||
| So I've absolutely criticized the right when they go to Portland and they do this, or I shouldn't say the right, I should say certain groups. | ||
| Specific individuals. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| When they're like, hey, we're gonna go and we're gonna protest in the city, I'm like, you realize that will lead to conflict because Antibes is gonna show up. | ||
| The response is, why should I not get to entertain my rights because these people show up and attack us? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, there would be no violence if they didn't come. | ||
| So I've seen a bunch of, you know, pro-Trump rallies, where they're minding their business, waving little American flags, Antifa shows up and starts attacking them. | ||
| And that tends to be overwhelmingly the case. | ||
| That's why this one's so particularly egregious, and I think it's so dumb that anyone would engage in this. | ||
| You know the media's gonna immediately, you know, prop it up and be like, there it is. | ||
| And I guess, you know, to an extent, rightly so. | ||
| If you're gonna go out and be violent, well then you're gonna get, you know, you're gonna get arrested and the media's gonna talk about it. | ||
| So I guess here's my last question for you on this. | ||
| Is it fair? | ||
| Outside of strategy, you know, and what someone should or shouldn't do, like, is it equality, fair, or freedom if one group can't go out and march because they'll be attacked by another group? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Everyone should have that right. | ||
| They do have that right. | ||
| They should be able to exercise that right. | ||
| And we should hold people accountable on an individual basis for any violence or property destruction they cause. | ||
| Ultimately, I mean, I'm a believer in individual responsibility, individual moral agency. | ||
| So what group you're a part of, we shouldn't be looking at. | ||
| I think on both sides, looking at it from a group perspective is harmful. | ||
| The police should arrest where they have cause to do so, individual purveyors of violence and hold them accountable. | ||
| So how do you feel about hate crime laws and terror laws? | ||
| I tend to be very skeptical of both. | ||
| I tend to think that people get put on lists for bad reasons. | ||
| I've actually written tons in opposition to the hate crime laws. | ||
| The hate crime laws present a due process issue for one thing because there's a federal hate crime statute. | ||
| So to clarify, often people don't know what the hate crime law is. | ||
| So it is not like a legal to express hateful views or to hold hateful views. | ||
| It is, what it is, is if you commit a, so there has to be an underlying crime. | ||
| So if you attack someone, you beat someone up, but then if you evince some kind of hatred of a protected | ||
| class, race, gender, sex, all the others, you can then be charged additionally, but so there has to | ||
| be an underlying crime. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| But the problem is there's a federal hate crime law and also then state by state laws. | ||
| So they get to crack. | ||
| So you end up you have to plead guilty because it's just the government has two opportunities to convict you of this and the additional penalty is so stiff. | ||
| you're all and this is just kind of true of the criminal justice system in general is that people | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| always have they have to plead guilty because there's even if you just committed like one crime | ||
| that'll be well obstruction and planning and there's so many other elements of it that it's | ||
| just staggering that you end up kind of being actually deprived in a sense of your right to | ||
| a trial by jury because you can't risk the trial because the the it's called the trial tax right | ||
| so that's an issue with it And then also it still does get in a little bit of like policing your motivation. | ||
| Like, is it really? | ||
| Should it be treated differently if you beat someone up because you didn't like them for their certain race? | ||
| Or if you just beat them up because you're a jerk? | ||
| Or what if you don't like their shoes? | ||
| Or what if you don't like their music? | ||
| So let's say someone's playing, you know, I don't know, country music. | ||
| Is it gonna be a hate crime if you attack them? | ||
| Like, ah, these people and their damn music, and you attack them. | ||
| Are they gonna assert it's a hate crime? | ||
| What if it was hip-hop or something? | ||
| Right, then it might be. | ||
| Then it might be, and that to me makes no sense. | ||
| That's why I'm like, if it's a crime, it's a crime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree with that. | |
| And also, it can be, now, in the system, the judge might want to, or a jury might factor in, in your sentence, even without hate crime laws. | ||
| They could still say, well, we're more sympathetic to this person. | ||
| They made a bad call because of why the crime happened. | ||
| So I'm not saying that can't be ever considered by a judge or a jury. | ||
| But what the hate crime law is saying on the front end, This is changing how much the prosecutor is going after you for, and that's the part of it that I think is problematic. | ||
| So is the pendulum swinging too far left on that then? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| You know, like we pass civil rights law, we say that in public accommodation and in... Right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I think it is. | ||
| And then now, but yeah, so it's like now we're punishing you on top. | ||
| And also, and before, you know, I get jumped on by like progressive people, the new protected class is going to be cops, is going to be police officers. | ||
| So don't think, so you'll have hate crime charges for like assaulting a police officer. | ||
| But they do have that. | ||
| Like assaulting a person and assaulting an officer are two different things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You get harsher penalties for attacking a cop. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they're also, but they're going to add it to the hate crime statute too. | ||
| Are they actually going to do this? | ||
| That's been proposed in several jurisdictions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So you want to, can you elaborate what's going on with it? | ||
| Yeah, we're just adding what counts as a protective class. | ||
| That's what you're adding to the list. | ||
| And the list is different in different places. | ||
| But then that's kind of creating a second tier justice system in some sense. | ||
| If you're only going to be charged this much for attacking someone of this ethnicity or sex or profession or status. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That seems bad to me. | ||
| There's a lot of crazy laws like this. | ||
| I was at the gun shop recently. | ||
| And they were telling me not to buy hollow point bullets because they said it's an extra crime if you're considered to have committed a crime. | ||
| And I was like, well, I'm not going to commit a crime, so it doesn't matter. | ||
| And they're like, actually, if they decide to charge you and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. | ||
| So if I buy this bullet for my gun for home defense. | ||
| And I guess the idea is it's less likely to penetrate through walls or something because it like splatters or whatever, I don't know what the right word is. | ||
| And I'm like, so wait, if I'm at my house, so we're in New Jersey. | ||
| New Jersey is not a castle doctrine state. | ||
| It's like, I guess it's called like a semi, meaning you have to retreat from your home. | ||
| Only if you're trapped can you defend yourself. | ||
| So if I'm in my house, someone breaks in and they're screaming, you know, where's Tim Poole? | ||
| I'm gonna kill him. | ||
| And then they're like, I hear him like pump a shotgun or something. | ||
| Let's say I defend myself with a hollow point. | ||
| A prosecutor could be like, well, you could have fled, I think, so I'm gonna charge you the crime. | ||
| Oh, but what's that? | ||
| The bullet was special, therefore, you get another crime. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's crazy to me. | ||
| This is over-criminalization. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| I mean, this is something libertarians rant about all the time. | ||
| It's just too many laws on the books. | ||
| It's just too easy for the prosecutors to get you with something. | ||
| Something. | ||
| Everything's a crime, huh? | ||
| Even if it's not the thing they're initially going after. | ||
| They'll find some procedural crime. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| So what do we do about it? | ||
| We gotta get rid of those laws, man. | ||
| Do we even get rid of laws, though? | ||
| Or do we just keep stacking them up? | ||
| It never happens, but it'd be nice if it did. | ||
| It'd be nice to, I mean, mandatory minimums are something that can be gotten rid of. | ||
| I think Congress has made some progress on that front. | ||
| Just that they have, again, that's bad because it takes away the, what you're supposed to have is some, the judge or the jury should have some flexibility to take lenience, to leniently treat you. | ||
| Or I guess even to really throw the book at you if you're really unrepentant or you're really bad or you're a repeat offender or something. | ||
| But the mandatory minimums, the laws are saying, no, we have to treat you like this. | ||
| Even if it's like only technically your third offense because you're like a grandmother and there was drugs being dealt in your house or something. | ||
| That kind of people, Trump has pardoned a few of those cases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It's interesting. | ||
| Do you know why they did the mandatory minimums? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if you know. | ||
| This was the tough on crime approach coming out of the 90s when crime was a very bad problem in the 80s, early 90s, and they just decided this is the right approach. | ||
| Throw the book at people. | ||
| Discourage people from committing crimes because you can't dare to commit a crime because look how bad the punishments are going to be. | ||
| I think there's, you know, this is a nebulous public policy question. | ||
| I don't know that it really actually worked to scare people out of committing crimes that way. | ||
| I think there's probably other reasons crime went down. | ||
| And I don't think that prison sentences scares anybody. | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think they think about that. | ||
| Because I think a lot of the, there's a lot of organizations, and maybe this is just a trope that I've heard of, but they figured out how to function through the prison system as normal. | ||
| Well, and also there might have been some idea that we have to keep people in prison who are violent and dangerous and commit crimes, which is true. | ||
| Certainly people who are a risk to society have to stay in prison if they are a risk, but As I was saying earlier, you can age out of the population at which you're a risk of committing a violent crime. | ||
| I mean, there are people who've been locked in there for decades who, if you release them, there's no way they're going to cause any problems anymore. | ||
| They're going to go to sleep in the sun with a blanket on their lap. | ||
| Sadly, yes. | ||
| We have so many people in prisons. | ||
| Is there a general libertarian approach to how we deal with the prison problem? | ||
| Uh, we would like to release non-violent offenders, those people who are there for drug crimes particularly. | ||
| Hey, I love that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| There's a lot of those. | ||
| Um, and then also violent offenders who, you know, if they show, if there's evidence that they've reformed, I mean, the purpose of jail should be to lock people away because they are a present threat to society. | ||
| Some people have reformed. | ||
| They can probably let go, too. | ||
| Or they're older now, and they're not a threat anymore. | ||
| What if we, like, had an island? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we just put people on the island? | ||
| That sounds like Survivor or Lost or something. | ||
| I read a story about, like, I think somewhere in, like, some Scandinavian country, the worst offenders are just put on an island, and it's like... Sure. | ||
| Let's get creative. | ||
| Do your thing. | ||
| Like, live, learn to survive, and cooperate and function. | ||
| You know, because whatever's happening now isn't working. | ||
| Maybe that this story was I'm pretty sure I was reading a story about like the most extreme offenders they have like housing on an island and you have to like chop your wood and just live a like kind of exile life. | ||
| Maybe you can wear an ankle bracelet or something we can try to track you. | ||
| I know you always hear about the horrific stories where it goes wrong where they let someone out and then they kill someone like it's terrible and then we go how could we ever let someone out of prison it's awful. | ||
| And yeah, we need to be cognizant of that, but defaulting toward just keeping people in prison forever... Yeah, I know, it's ridiculous. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| Yeah, I definitely think our prison system is broken in many different ways. | ||
| And that's different even than the policing. | ||
| Like, we over... To some degree, maybe under police and over in prison, in a way. | ||
| Where you don't have... The police don't have the resources or the trust in the communities that you'd want them to have, and they're almost like two different problems, and we almost do it maybe wrong on both ways. | ||
| Do you think we should defund the police? | ||
| I think I've said no already. | ||
| I think you asked me that. | ||
| Did I? | ||
| No. | ||
| Uh, I think I said, there are some, uh, so right now there's like tons of cops in public schools. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very needlessly. | ||
| Some maybe occasionally schools need a cop, but right now I think like half of all high schools have a police officer in them. | ||
| If you went back to 1970, there would not be a single police officer in any school in America. | ||
| Just didn't happen. | ||
| Now they're there and all the disciplinary problems between students default to them. | ||
| So you have cops called on, you know, kids roughhousing now. | ||
| It's going to be an assault charge. | ||
| It's going to be on their record. | ||
| It really, it's terrible for kids. | ||
| I feel so bad for them. | ||
| But didn't they have guns? | ||
| Like, I don't know about the 70s, but I hear these stories about how, like, way back when, people would bring their gun with them to school. | ||
| Yeah, you had rifle clubs, you had smoking clubs, that kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, it was a better time. | ||
| Now, there's a freakout about guns in schools that is, like, vastly disproportionate to the danger of guns in schools. | ||
| I mean, we freak out about school shootings to a degree that is insane. | ||
| When did they ban guns from schools? | ||
| I don't know when precisely they banned guns from schools. | ||
| They started putting, because of the cops, so there were federal grants to schools to hire more cops, and then there was more zero-tolerance programs that if you have a gun in school, yeah, you're gonna be expelled immediately, or anything that looks like a gun, or even like a piece of Play-Doh you shaped into a gun in some way. | ||
| Did you hear the story about that kid who was eating a Pop-Tart? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I've written about that kid 19 times. | ||
| So, for the people who don't know, some kid was eating a Pop-Tart, and he bit it into the shape of a gun, Yeah. | ||
| And I guess he was holding it like a gun or something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, a kid got suspended for, like, wearing the magic Lord of the Rings ring and saying, I make you disappear. | ||
| Like, schools are so paranoid about violence. | ||
| Dude, if you— And now it's Zoom class. | ||
| I wrote about this this week. | ||
| Well, we actually have it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's pull this up. | ||
| This was insane. | ||
| Talk about creepy, dude. | ||
| It's from yesterday. | ||
| Yeah, and so this happened a couple times. | ||
| This was a kid who's playing briefly with a Nerf gun. | ||
| Clearly a Nerf gun. | ||
| It says Zombie Hunter on it. | ||
| During virtual class. | ||
| Zombie and the school the teacher notices it and the school decides to call the police | ||
| The police show up to this kid's house to make sure you know, he's safe and well | ||
| This is the kind of the merging of child services and law enforcement and education that unfortunately zoom learning | ||
| distance learning really permits And he would they suspended him for five days. He's never | ||
| going back to that school. Anyway, his parents said this is ridiculous | ||
| Good. I know. Yeah, they said charter school or private school for us. Yes. Yes | ||
| This is so this is a concern I have about distance learning at one of many is that it invites the state | ||
| into right into your Right into your house. | ||
| I mean, Massachusetts Department of Families, their child services equivalent, gave out some guidance to teachers saying, you know, make sure while you can see on the screen, you know, does the child look like they're unhappy or emotionally unwell, which is probably every child in America right now, because it's a terrible time. | ||
| Yeah, no friends. | ||
| But if they look like they're malnourished or they skip breakfast, you might want to alert us, child services, and we'll do a check. | ||
| Which is not good, because again, inviting the police to come into the house, people get upset, people act irrationally, people get arrested for things, and it's just this strain on the least able parents, the parents who have the most kind of stress in their lives, the working class family. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| What do you think this is going to do to these kids when they're older? | ||
| I mean, I think they're going to be nuts. | ||
| It's tough to predict. | ||
| This is a harmful year for kids, certainly. | ||
| For their emotional development, their intellectual development. | ||
| Did Michael Malice, he said that they were prisons for kids? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't recall that. | |
| Was that Michael? | ||
| That's something he believes, I think. | ||
| I don't need to speak for him. | ||
| I've chatted with him before. | ||
| He was calling schools prisons for kids. | ||
| Yeah, basically saying that it's, you know, the teachers are bullies. | ||
| They're forced to go there. | ||
| They're locked in. | ||
| They hate being there. | ||
| Everyone's unhappy. | ||
| Yeah, I think schools are trash, and they're only getting worse. | ||
| Right, so that's the important point. | ||
| They've gotten more prison-like, certainly, over the last 30 years, in terms of what you... And it can ruin your life to get in trouble for something these days. | ||
| I mean, it can ruin your life to find out, you know, you tweeted, you know, when you were 14, something like homophobic or racist. | ||
| Or even a joke. | ||
| I feel so bad for kids these days. | ||
| I mean, so I finished my adolescence immediately prior to the era where there are now smartphones everywhere and everything everyone says is being recorded, and there's video of you at all, which is good! | ||
| I feel terrible for these kids. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Every mistake they've made is out there. | ||
| The purpose, to me, of school is partly to socialize young people and get them... So when they make mistakes, they're forgiven, and then it's forgotten. | ||
| Nothing's forgotten now. | ||
| I think... So I'm very, very pro-homeschooling, and I've heard a lot of people say, what about socializing the kids? | ||
| I completely disagree with this. | ||
| I don't think kids should be learning from other kids. | ||
| I think kids should be learning from working people in normal society. | ||
| So that's my experience when I was growing up. | ||
| My family had a business, and I did interact with other kids my age, but I also would work on the weekends at my family business strictly interacting with adults on normal adult-like things. | ||
| So the way I view it is, what's going to actually teach a kid to function in the real world? | ||
| Being around a bunch of kids who are talking about dumb things they don't understand. | ||
| Or hearing adults talk about normal adult things. | ||
| Business management and politics and, you know, just general life stuff. | ||
| Oh, I gotta pay the mortgage. | ||
| What's a mortgage? | ||
| Well, the mortgage is like this. | ||
| You go to school and what do you do? | ||
| They open up the book, they teach you the same thing over and over again every year. | ||
| Like, that's the craziest thing about public schools to me is how often they just regurgitate the exact same lessons over and over again. | ||
| And then, when you're actually interacting with people, it's people who don't know how the world works, and you're spending, what, you know, 18, 19 years, or maybe even up until you're 24? | ||
| Well, yeah, no, no, 18, 19 years, you know, because you're 5 when you start kindergarten, and you've not interacted with adults, other than being berated, talked down to, and treated not like an equal. | ||
| So you get a lot of people who are just... Actually, this is an interesting point. | ||
| I think one of the reasons why we're seeing right now our politicians, Trump is, what, 74, and Biden 77, and Bernie is, what, 78. | ||
| They're all really old. | ||
| Very old. | ||
| And I think it's because of the way our school systems are functioning and creating people who only know how to look up to the older generation to be told what to do. | ||
| I think it's a product of what our schools are doing. | ||
| So, anyway, the point is, the reason I bring that up, when you take a look at these stories, like, a kid's playing with a Nerf gun, and now they're in his home. | ||
| And now these policies that were kind of oppressive to kids are now coming into their own private spaces. | ||
| It's gonna get a whole lot worse. | ||
| I mean, you think the SJW college crisis is bad now, and these people are out in public? | ||
| Amplify that tenfold. | ||
| Well, I think it has to teach, it encourages young people to view themselves as victims. | ||
| That's how you get ahead, is to say you're victimized by something. | ||
| Or also to crave a kind of safety that is ridiculous. | ||
| or and also to think that the purpose of the authority figures in the society is to provide you comfort and safety and protection from I mean in the schools we're talking about imaginary threats like school is a very safe place for kids yeah kids are safer in school than they are outside of school in virtually every place in America it's just not but we we act like they're Like they're war zones with all the policies we put in place to keep kids safe and like perfectly coddled all the time. | ||
| And I have to think that's an unhealthy educational environment. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Did you hear about what happened in Chicago with that kid put in the padded room? | ||
| No, what happened? | ||
| Some kid was acting out and the Chicago school has a locked padded room where the kids who are acting up just get put inside, they close it. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| Yeah, it's like solitary confinement for kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So apparently the kid was like freaking out and then he like cracked his pants and he was covered in feces and then started crying saying he was sorry and begging for help and they just left him there. | ||
| Solitary confinement is really terrible. | ||
| It's torture. | ||
| I feel it's awful for hardened criminal adults who deserve to be in prison. | ||
| It's still awful for them. | ||
| I can't imagine doing that to kids. | ||
| Could you imagine, like, you've seen the movie Cast Away, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Inflicting the Wilson on a kid? | ||
| Like the desperation for some kind of human interaction? | ||
| It's worse for kids, though. | ||
| I mean, if you're an adult, At least you've actually had time to grow up and kind of harden yourself to some degree. | ||
| These kids are scared, fragile, don't know what they're supposed to be doing. | ||
| And they're being treated like adults in the wrong way. | ||
| It's like, you do something wrong, you're an adult. | ||
| If you're inquisitive, we're gonna treat you like a moron. | ||
| So, I hate school, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I don't know what your thoughts are on homeschool, though. | ||
| Look, I'm in favor of families making whatever the right schooling decision is for their individual kid. | ||
| Because it is different for every kid. | ||
| Some kids will thrive in a traditional educational environment. | ||
| Some kids will thrive in something else. | ||
| I think your family should be able to decide what that is. | ||
| The money that is being spent by the government to educate your kid, maybe you should have some control on how that's spent instead of it just automatically going to the school. | ||
| That's very libertarian of you. | ||
| Yeah, so what do you think about school choice, or like the voucher program specifically? | ||
| Yeah, so that's basically the implementation of that philosophy, which is that the dollar should follow the student rather than just going to the school. | ||
| I mean, some of these school districts spend an obscene amount of money per kid. | ||
| We're talking ten, ten or twenty or thirty thousand dollars per kid. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| to have terrible educational outcomes. | ||
| Like, you'd think with that much money per kid, you could achieve something, and they don't, and they fail. | ||
| Because this isn't even, like, this is a moderate, this isn't even saying we shouldn't, like, fund education. | ||
| We're just saying, like, maybe the government, sure you can fund education, but maybe the government is not the best at actually doing the educating. | ||
| So maybe they haven't quite figured that out yet, and we should, like, leave that to the professionals. | ||
| So what you're saying is abolish the government. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| No, but I certainly hear stories like this, and it definitely makes me much more of a small government type person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because waste exists in so many different elements of governmental function, I guess. | ||
| Well, when you just get the money regardless, you don't have an incentive to be efficient about it. | ||
| If you're never going to go bankrupt if you spend it badly, if the funding lever's never going to get shut off if you don't have the right outcomes or achievements, You're going to have less incentive to spend it wisely or to achieve anything at all. | ||
| And that's the problem with, yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what we see basically in every government crisis. | ||
| They end up, you know, we have all these states now that are, you know, they're locked down, their economy is destroyed, their tax base is gone. | ||
| So what do they do? | ||
| They go to the federal government and say, give us money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Trump said, no. | ||
| And then Trump was like, actually, I'm gonna take your money away. | ||
| And now they're freaking out. | ||
| But it's a really interesting Problem, I think. | ||
| Well, I'll keep it at school just for another minute or two because I wanted to make the point about... You write about, in your book, the college campus stuff. | ||
| But I kind of feel like you're late to the party. | ||
| Like, we all were. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, these kids certainly got these ideas from somewhere. | ||
| And I think, it's interesting, it traces back to this desire to... | ||
| Actually end racism, actually end sexism and homophobia and things like that. | ||
| But the way I've always viewed it is we had, you know, the previous generation decided, hey, wait a minute, you know, these things are bad. | ||
| We should get rid of them. | ||
| And then we had the Civil Rights Act, for instance. | ||
| And then we've actually had some, you know, other civil rights gains for like gay marriage and stuff like that. | ||
| But what happens when the generation before us solves those problems, but demands their kids solve the problems that have already been solved? | ||
| It's almost like they've been set on a mission of social justice that they don't actually have to solve anymore, you know what I mean? | ||
| So, I guess it's a combination of things. | ||
| I think back to when I was a kid in school, and they would tell us these things, like, you know, love who you love, and be who you are, and racism is bad, and they would tell us these things. | ||
| But it was really hammered into us, but these things are often already illegal. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess it just ultimately feels like they've simultaneously created an ideological drive on accident. | ||
| Well, indoctrinating kids to support an authoritarian system, where they just do what they're told to do. | ||
| Notably, you go to school, you have your teacher. | ||
| You go all the way to college, and you always have someone telling you exactly what you have to do. | ||
| So what happens when they get out? | ||
| A couple things. | ||
| For one, many of them are massively in debt. | ||
| They have no idea how to solve that debt. | ||
| So they look to the old people and say, what do I do? | ||
| Well, the old people at their universities are lefties, and some of them are communists. | ||
| Probably a lot of them, actually. | ||
| And they say, communism is the solution. | ||
| They're also, you know, social justice indoctrinated. | ||
| So, it's like, everything we're seeing right now probably could have been easily predicted, right? | ||
| Although it entertained me how many of the kind of activist students we're talking about hold their hard left professors in utter contempt because their communist professors, the old school left, the ACLU left, they like free speech. | ||
| Right, but I'm talking about the former era. | ||
| Those people liked free speech and they liked an exchange of ideas. | ||
| And also they were, it was more class, their leftism was class-based, not race and gender. | ||
| And I like that stuff. | ||
| Yes, so the students now, I mean those, it's those professors, I mean I defend, you know, conservative speakers when they're chased off campus, conservative professors, but also lots of leftist professors who are terrified of their students. | ||
| Professors who are of the left have said, I am terrified of my students, even though probably on policy they mostly agree. | ||
| they are terrified they will use the wrong word the wrong language to describe particularly relating | ||
| to race or gender even though the sentiment is perfectly in accordance with | ||
| progressivism and there will be there will be a complaint | ||
| followed by an investigation into this uh... professor | ||
| and uh... and it's caused by the woke students So, Bucko just jumped on the table. | ||
| Yeah, we've got a cat. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know if we could acknowledge the cat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we can acknowledge the cat. | |
| No, no, he's not there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's here. | |
| Don't say anything. | ||
| Did you see that professor who said the Chinese words? | ||
| Who got suspended? | ||
| I wrote about that! | ||
| Yeah, you can click on my name, it'll come up. | ||
| Oh man, yeah. | ||
| It's like the one before. | ||
| We gotta talk about this, because this is so good. | ||
| Oh, here it is. | ||
| A Chinese word that sounds like a racial slur. | ||
| I don't think we can even say the word because the YouTube filter will pick it up and it'll translate it as the racial slur. | ||
| But just to be clear, this guy was not saying a slur. | ||
| He was saying a word in a different language that is just a filler word in China, like saying er or um. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| In Chinese. | ||
| Okay, so wait, wait. | ||
| So here's the context for those that missed this story. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| So Robbie wrote the story, it's USC suspended a communications professor for saying a Chinese word that sounds like a racial slur. | ||
| Greg Patton was describing the Chinese filler word, it's spelled N-E-G-A, but I really am worried because YouTube uses an automatic speech-to-text filter, and then when they hear, they're like, oh, oh, oh! | ||
| banned. So it's N-E-G-A. And you know, some people say it's pronounced ney and then ga. | ||
| And you can understand why, you know, people would pretend to be angry about that. | ||
| This guy is a communications professor. Like, he's talking about how to give a speech and how | ||
| you would use different filler words and depending on different languages. So this was a perfectly | ||
| appropriate discussion to have. This is virtual learning. | ||
| Some student was offended. He was reported. He was temporarily suspended. I have actually, I | ||
| don't often receive a lot of emails on a subject that I write about. Email just doesn't seem to | ||
| be the way people. | ||
| I don't communicate as much these days. | ||
| Sometimes I do, if the article goes really big. | ||
| Twitter DM. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This article, I have received a number of emails from people who were his students. | ||
| Some of them who said, I am a minority student, said, this teacher was wonderful, he was great, not a racist bone in his body, and they are outraged by his treatment. | ||
| By USC, this is a major university. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I'm sorry, Robbie. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| He was a white supremacist. | ||
| Now I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| He was white! | ||
| Well, that explains everything. | ||
| That's whiteness. | ||
| Take us away! | ||
| I'm technically the only non-white person, so both of you, you know... I'm a female. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| Robby, you can PayPal me. | ||
| My PayPal is... I'm kidding. | ||
| This is really amazing because it's actually racist to attack him for saying something in Chinese. | ||
| No, but it is. | ||
| So the general context is we say things like, you know, and like. | ||
| You know, like when we're talking about dogs, you know, that's what we do. | ||
| And I've been saying you know too much for the past week or so. | ||
| I'm a like abuser, I think. | ||
| Like abuser? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's what they do. | ||
| There's a comedian who has this really funny bit about it where he said that he's in China. | ||
| And there's like a little kid who walks into a chicken shop. | ||
| And there's also like a Nigerian woman. | ||
| And he makes a joke where he says it's like the one black person in China or something. | ||
| And this little kid starts looking at the menu and he says, you know, that word. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ne-ga. | ||
| Over and over and over again. | ||
| And the woman looks at him and she looks at the guy and he's like, she's looking at me like I'm supposed to beat this kid up or something. | ||
| But the joke being that I mean, I'm sure it's not the only instance where if you're speaking a different language, you'll hear something that could be offensive in a different language. | ||
| I mean, this is the origins of, didn't President Kennedy's the, I am a jelly donut. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Was it Ich bin ein Berliner? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Um, I'm a jelly donut. | ||
| It's probably better for, uh, for our society, for broad racial tolerance and getting along. | ||
| If we can all laugh at things like this and move on. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That doesn't seem like a crazy idea, right? | ||
| Look, this is funny. | ||
| We can laugh and that's it. | ||
| This is why I'm, uh, look, I think if you look at the things I'm talking about often, it's probably very similar to what you're talking about. | ||
| And I consider myself to be a social liberal, kind of like where Democrats were 10 years ago. | ||
| You're a libertarian, but we talk about a lot of the exact same things. | ||
| And so do Trump supporters. | ||
| And because of that, we all get lumped in as like right wing. | ||
| But isn't it better to call out the psychotic behavior and to do something about it? | ||
| Or maybe that really is like whatever the new right is. | ||
| Includes libertarians, former liberals, Trump supporters, conservatives, Republicans. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I guess some Democrats who just haven't realized it yet. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| I mean, I know plenty of, right, the people, the kinds of people I was describing, people who would describe themselves on the left who are really fed up with this kind of thing. | ||
| I mean, there there's tons of those sorts of people. | ||
| The dirtbag left. | ||
| The dirtbag left to some extent. | ||
| Even I would say more mainstream left people. | ||
| There's the Glenn Greenwald type people. | ||
| So they see the harm this has caused, I think, to retreat on principles of free speech from a leftist perspective. | ||
| I guess they don't view it as big a threat as I do, though. | ||
| Well, we might disagree then. | ||
| I think it is possible to over-dramatize the threat as well, and some people do that. | ||
| I think this is one of the worst things. | ||
| It's completely illiberal. | ||
| They're shutting down jokes, and what it's doing is it's almost some kind of cultural Balkanization. | ||
| where you can't wear clothes this is the craziest thing to me | ||
| if a white person is wearing clothes that's arguably from some culture that's | ||
| not white it's a bad thing and they get attacked for it yeah that is bad | ||
| and to the extent where like we had that girl going to the prom who had | ||
| the uh... the chinese dress Oh, that was just the worst thing ever. | ||
| And then you see that guy who was in China who went around asking people? | ||
| And the Chinese people were like, oh, that's very great. | ||
| Like, it's very beautiful. | ||
| Like, they didn't care. | ||
| Well, that's what's so annoying about some of this leftist identity politics stuff is often it's actually privileged, wealthy, white, liberal people who are purporting to speak for some oppressed minority, even though the supposedly oppressed minority group would never be offended by that thing, or some of them would. | ||
| Most people would not be. | ||
| I mean, this is true of the Latinx thing that white progressives want you to use, but you couldn't find two Latino-Latina people who actually prefer that. | ||
| The Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank, a few years ago, they surveyed minority groups on how, if you were offended by certain things that were supposed to be microaggressions. | ||
| You know, asking where you're from and a couple other things and on nearly all of them a majority of the | ||
| people who were supposed to be offended by this thing said they weren't | ||
| offended by it. | ||
| So then why are we teaching or training people to be aware of this even on campus? | ||
| There's no scientific basis to it. | ||
| Well there's two main points. | ||
| Someone tweeted this, what's the end goal of critical race theory? | ||
| And someone responded, to leverage white guilt for money. | ||
| And that's what we see a lot of with these people like, you know, Robert D'Angelo. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And what's funny is like, she's an avowed racist. | ||
| I have to bring this up every time because she's like a New York Times bestseller. | ||
| Her book is like the top of Amazon. | ||
| Why is the left taking their cues from people who are like, just telling us they're racists? | ||
| Well, but New York Times did a long takedown of her, so did The Atlantic, so did... A lot of people are saying, man, do not actually take your non-racism cues from her. | ||
| For sure, for sure, but they still are. | ||
| Like these viral videos where there's... Well, guilty... Again, just like exactly what you said, guilty feeling white people are ordering her book en masse because it's easy to do that and say, okay, I did it. | ||
| Now I'm good. | ||
| I'm one of the good ones. | ||
| But I think my concern about this is, for one, it's rapidly expanding. | ||
| We're all on college campus now. | ||
| Why should I make the assumption that, oh, it's just people, you know, saying virtue signal and I'm done? | ||
| If every month that goes by, it expands and it reaches new heights. | ||
| Because some of these books, like the book from that, what's his name? | ||
| Ibrahim X. Kendi? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ibrahim X. Kendi, yeah. | |
| Yeah, where he overtly says we need discrimination, racial discrimination. | ||
| His big idea is to create a department of non-racism or anti-racism or something that... But you would require, and he admits this, he wants a constitutional amendment to create it, to void the First Amendment, and so this would be a bureaucratic federal department that would sanction people for expressing racist views. | ||
| Okay, okay, look, this guy's... That's as bad as you can... That's as bad as an idea you could ever have. | ||
| You know his book is number one in human rights on Amazon? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's had a like it's on the USA Today list which tracks literally just hard sales. Yeah, he's like number 13 or | ||
| something So that now it's bad, and he's and he said I think three | ||
| books so | ||
| Look, we're all off the campus right now To me, this feels like a serious existential threat for liberalism. | ||
| And I don't mean liberalism in the colloquial American sense. | ||
| I mean classical liberalism, part of the foundation of this country. | ||
| Individuality, consent of the governed, all of these things. | ||
| He's literally attacking the First Amendment. | ||
| It's not just about this one guy. | ||
| It's about... | ||
| Going back to 2014, where we all laughed because there were silly vloggers who were complaining about, you know, inclusivity in games or whatever, and now it's straight up to the point where 10% of the CDC staff wrote a letter demanding that they declare racism a national health crisis. | ||
| If it's expanding this quickly, what, in 10 years? | ||
| Then we're literally going to be living under some, like, leftist critical raceocracy, where, you know, white people, oh, we can't hire you because you're white and you're privileged and you have to give up your property or something like that. | ||
| Or we get to the point where, heaven, like, these people have no idea how to address mixed race individuals because they don't know where the privilege falls. | ||
| So they just make it up. | ||
| Do you agree with me or don't you agree with me? | ||
| Because if you agree with me, I'm just going to say you have privilege, and if you don't agree with me, then I'll give you whatever you want. | ||
| Well, and the First Amendment will not be abolished via a constitutional amendment because that's not going to happen, but the way around it is to tweak harassment law continuously in a way that just... Speaking to the hate speech stuff, that I'm a protected group, so you can't... | ||
| Like this happened on the campus with this is not a safe educational environment for me that violates title 9 etc There's the same kind of laws that have to do with the workplace That is the is the next front of kind of leftist changing how we all live is making so well if you say something That offends me even if it's like a boss giving like totally reasonable feedback to an employee Yeah. | ||
| That's exactly what I'm talking about. | ||
| unsafe. Right. | ||
| But it's worth I think you mentioned it that is where | ||
| compliance culture. | ||
| Yeah. So the New York Times claimed that Tom Cotton's op ed | ||
| you know sending the troops for the riots was making the | ||
| office unsafe for black. | ||
| That's exactly what I'm talking about exploitation of existing | ||
| law. | ||
| Yeah. Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So you're right, I don't... I'm not worried about... That's my fear. | ||
| So you're getting... So I... We began this by saying you're over-dramatizing it, but that is my exact fear. | ||
| Yes, that is dangerous. | ||
| But it's gonna happen. | ||
| Yes, it's already happening. | ||
| So I think about the Supreme Court's recent ruling on workplace equality pertaining to same-sex relationships and transgender, and their argument that while sex does include these things, therefore the previous, you know, laws do protect these characteristics. | ||
| And they used, interestingly, what they did was, and look, I'm all for workplace equality, stuff like that, | ||
| but I think it's interesting that the Supreme Court said, because you can't discriminate someone | ||
| based on their relationship, unless you're targeting them based on sex, | ||
| it is a protected category to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, et cetera. | ||
| You remember when they did that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was a very technical argument. | ||
| Right, the reason I bring this up specifically, though, they're changing the definitions of words. | ||
| And when the definition of the word changes, then the amendment changes afterwards. | ||
| So if you can't change a constitutional amendment, you can change the meaning of words. | ||
| What is white supremacy? | ||
| So now they've made it so that white supremacy is quite literally Time. | ||
| Hard work. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| These things have existed for decades. | ||
| These ideas that have been seeded and are expanding and are now becoming mainstream. | ||
| And how dangerous and raw... So you're referring to... That's exactly... The left was saying that hard work and individuality and, like, having a stable family and all those things are elements of white culture. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is something an ardent racist, an actual white supremacist, an alt-right person would say that. | ||
| That this is what differentiates white culture and that's why it's better. | ||
| So how harmful, and I think that view is totally wrong, but the left was promoting that view, in agreement with that view. | ||
| It was on the website of the National African American Museum. | ||
| From the Smithsonian. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that's, yeah, that is bad. | ||
| So you're gonna say to me that you can overhype the problem we're facing here. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think, to me, this is a serious existential threat. | ||
| And I think the easiest example is, I know it's a bit cliche for my audience because I bring it up relatively often, but There's a reason why I do. | ||
| I grew up hearing stories about life before Loving v. Virginia and the Civil Rights Act, and it sounds scary for my family. | ||
| And California Democrats just voted to repeal Prop 209, so it's going to referendum, quite literally repealing their civil rights law at the state level for public employment and schools and stuff. | ||
| So the left is actually, this is interesting. | ||
| You're familiar with the term reactionary in the proper context. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| So the left likes to point out, you know, right-wing reactionaries. | ||
| It's a reference to the French Revolution, those who reacted to the revolution and opposed it. | ||
| So reactionary typically means you want to keep the status quo and prevent the revolution. | ||
| But what the left is doing is actually turning the clock backwards on freedom of speech and civil rights. | ||
| They're quite literally a reactionary movement that everything you just said about ardent racists and white supremacists. | ||
| The Democrats of today are trying to go back to what the Democrats of the 1950s believed in a weird and slightly different kind of way. | ||
| Like, they genuinely believe that white culture inherently endorses or produces hard work and saving for the future, and they're guilty about it or something. | ||
| I guess to be fair though, there still are, to some degree, there are still some racist beliefs in society that are prevalent among white people. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| White conservatives. | ||
| And also, I always have to bring this up because it is, I talk a lot about it, you do as well, leftist, cancel culture, free speech issues on campuses. | ||
| There are also tons and tons and tons of cases of conservatives flipping out about professor, leftist professor says something like, America is bad, or like, I don't support support the flag or something. | ||
| And what happens every time, all the, not everyone, I don't do this, maybe you don't do this, | ||
| when we're not conservatives, but the freak out among a certain kind of turning point USA crowd | ||
| who in every other context has canceled culture's bad, like oh, we need to fire, we need to hold | ||
| this person accountable, like it's so lame, it's so pathetic, and so many conservatives do this. | ||
| I'm reminded of when. And I hate it. | ||
| I'm reminded of when Trump said, jail time for burning the flag. | ||
| Right, an issue that has been litigated by, But it could not be clearer. | ||
| The Supreme Court has said, you can burn the flag. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's an open and shut First Amendment case and it really does, it's annoying that, it's annoying and wrong that President Trump would say otherwise and that the conservative people would freak out about that. | ||
| So I think, look, I wouldn't burn the flag. | ||
| I'm not a fan of people burning the flag. | ||
| But I am a fan of the freedom it represents, burning the flag. | ||
| And so that's a part of living in a free society, where an individual, as long as it's your property, that's a big thing. | ||
| because I remember I was at some event where they were trying to light a flag on fire and | ||
| then some right-wing guy took it back because it was actually stolen from him and people | ||
| were like, it's a free speech, it's a free speech and then they were like, you stole | ||
| the flag from someone, it's not your property. | ||
| Right, that's not. | ||
| If you want to have your own property to burn, you do it, but they were trying to, you know, | ||
| make some kind of. | ||
| It's important as a free speech point because this is a country that protects free speech | ||
| on paper, vis-a-vis the First Amendment, to a greater degree than any country on earth. | ||
| in a very serious way. | ||
| You have hate crime laws that are much more serious, that actually do criminalize outright speech in other jurisdictions, in other countries. | ||
| You can't... libel laws are in some other country, in Australia, in the UK. | ||
| Journalists can't do their jobs. | ||
| They can't say true things about people because they're going to be sued for it. | ||
| This is a country that protects free speech to a really enviable degree, and it's rare, and it's uncommon, and it's not historically... Like, free speech is new. | ||
| I mean, even in America, for World War I, people who were protesting World War I or handing out leaflets, they got thrown in jail, and the Supreme Court said that was fine. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Now they've backed off that, and we have currently the most wildly pro-free speech Supreme Court that has ever existed. | ||
| We have the most pro-free speech authority of, like, legal authority that has ever existed on Earth, and that's a very good thing. | ||
| You know we used to have an office of censorship? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And their slogan was, silence accelerates victory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That was World War II. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what a lot of these, a lot of people don't realize is that our current understanding of free speech is really new. | ||
| Like, this is a country that has a First Amendment. | ||
| This is what's really amazing about the First Amendment, is that it meant almost nothing a long time ago. | ||
| It actually took the rulings of the Supreme Court, better understandings of freedom and liberty, to bring us to this point. | ||
| This is what's really funny. | ||
| When they criticize free speech warriors, the left, they're like, ooh, the free speech warriors, the far-right reactionary, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Like, when you talk about the inception of this country, the Bill of Rights came, what, like it was like a decade or so after the country was formed? | ||
| And even then, they weren't really properly enforced in that sense. | ||
| No, the Alien Sedition Acts were terrible on free speech grounds. | ||
| Well, so I'm not super familiar, but to the point I was going for is we had obscenity laws. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We had moral authoritarianism. | ||
| It was a very religious culture. | ||
| And we move forward through the years. | ||
| We eventually come across people like Frederick Douglass and anti-slavery stuff, where they really challenged the idea of what it means to be free and what our Constitution really means. | ||
| And even then we still did not have outright free speech the way we know it today. | ||
| That's what I remember, like looking at like the Viet, you know, I think it was the 70s, or was it, when were they doing the big free speech stuff on Berkeley? | ||
| It was the 60s, 1963. | ||
|
unidentified
|
60s. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So my understanding, I was reading about this. | ||
| I read, I talk about it a lot in the book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do you know, do you know when the Supreme Court like officially gave us our most current iteration of free speech? | ||
| Well, the most recent decisions that establish a very broad understanding of free speech are really the, it's the Westboro Baptist case, in my view, because there the Supreme Court said you can go, it's on public property on the road, you can shout the most vile things you can possibly imagine in the most sympathetic context for the victim you're shouting them at, people who've been killed in military service, and you can shout awful things and that is protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| If that speech is protected by the First Amendment, Everything that is offensive to the social justice world is obviously protected, if that's protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that was the early 21st century. | |
| Is that the free speech the Founders envisioned? | ||
| No, probably it's not. | ||
| There was probably some of them. | ||
| I mean, there was the Quaker ethos, the Voltaire Enlightenment ethos, that I may disagree or even hate what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend it. | ||
| There's always been free speech. | ||
| You're right to say it. | ||
| You're right to say it, not the content. | ||
| There have always been free speech dissidents in society, even in like intense kind of medieval Europe, like Geneva, like kind of John Calvin obscenity types. | ||
| There were some people saying, no, we should have free speech. | ||
| But for most of human history, for most people, it was... | ||
| I mean, it wasn't even just if you offend the religious authorities of the king. | ||
| If you badmouth your neighbors, they would come kill you. | ||
| I mean, there was a... in Iceland, right, there's a court to adjudicate disputes between rival clans | ||
| that are insulting other people. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the basis of it. | ||
| It was kind of anarchist and cool. | ||
| We won't get into it. | ||
| Anarchist and cool, you say? | ||
| But you would fight. | ||
| You would fight duel. | ||
| You would challenge people to duels. | ||
| Even up through the early part of the 1800s in America, you would challenge people to duels if their speech offended you. | ||
| So there was no understanding of free speech. | ||
| It was a small number of people who really held to that. | ||
| And we managed to make that the law of the land for our country somehow, and it's great. | ||
| So what you're saying is we could resolve a lot of our problems if we brought back dueling. | ||
| I don't think I said that. | ||
| I'm kidding, I'm kidding. | ||
| Can we have like Smash Brothers tournaments or something instead? | ||
| Well, I guess the issue with dueling was that you quite literally silenced the person forever, and they would never then speak ill of you again. | ||
| In Steven Pinker's book about the decline of violence, he argues that dueling stopped basically because the younger generation thought it was really dumb, and they were like, why are you killing people over this? | ||
| So it like became uncool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| You know, you mentioned that we have a very, very free speech country. | ||
| And, you know, we're talking a bit about how maybe it's not what the Founding Fathers envisioned, but there are a lot of problems that come with it. | ||
| Fake news. | ||
| I mean, and that's one of the first things we talked about in this livestream. | ||
| The Covington stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, we do have libel laws, but the Covington kids, notably Nick Sandman, who's suing these news outlets, he's won technically, I think. | ||
| Because it's a settlement. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They weren't court victories, but I think it's fair to say that that is, in a sense, a victory, because often the goal is to force a settlement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, they sued for, what, $250 million? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they're not gonna get that. | ||
| Nowhere close. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I don't- They got something. | ||
| They got something, and I'm sure it was pretty good. | ||
| I don't- I think the people who are pointing out that it was a nuisance payout, so basically that means it's cheaper for, you know, CNN or the Washington Post. | ||
| I think that's who paid out, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's cheaper for them to just pay them to go away than to deal with the court case, but I'd imagine they got a little bit more than that, because I think they risked going to discovery. | ||
| You know, the judge had ruled that some of them were good, and that meant that if it moved forward, then likely Nick Salmon's lawyer would sue and get access to their communications. | ||
| Right, the judge changed his mind in the, I can't remember, it was, whichever case was first, and I can't remember if it was CNN or Washington Post. | ||
| I think it was Washington Post. | ||
| I don't remember, but he had a ruling basically saying that... I mean, it's a complicated case, because you have to establish... Because really, the libelous party, to some degree, is the Native American man, who said, you know, who said, I was being a predator and prey, but you don't go after him, he doesn't have any money. | ||
| He doesn't have two niggles to rub together. | ||
| So, CNN and Washington, the mainstream outlets that first reported on it, they're relying on, which is essentially a false witness, someone who gave them false information. | ||
| So to what degree are they responsible? | ||
| What degree are they liable for reporting on that? | ||
| For reporting what someone told them they saw. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So that was a little bit of my, just even though they jumped the gun on this story, and then you get to, well, why are you even writing this story? | ||
| This isn't a... There's no confirmation. | ||
| And this isn't a public person. | ||
| It isn't a matter of public importance. | ||
| It's not, and that matters, that Nick Sandman is not a public person because the standard is different whether you're a public person or private person. | ||
| So it raised a lot of interesting questions. | ||
| So they decided, and then also the things being described, are they actually, are they just opinion characterizations? | ||
| Like is he smirking or smiling? | ||
| That's not going to be a factual assertion. | ||
| So the factual, the only thing I think the judge decided was maybe a factual assertion was, was he blocking the path? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think they may have actually got more than people realize. | ||
| And I mean, you know, when I say a little... I don't know. | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| No, maybe. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| to be able to amount, I would think, depend, you know, the jurisdiction might be sympathetic to him | ||
| anyway, that was a factual assertion that they got wrong. I think they may have actually got | ||
| more than people realize. And I mean, you know, when I say a little, you don't think so? No, | ||
| maybe, I have no idea. You know why? Discovery probably would have cost those companies so | ||
| much money. | ||
| I mean, I wonder. | ||
| I don't know about reason, but you guys have like a Slack or something where you communicate with other employees? | ||
| And do you say things that you would hope and pray would never become public? | ||
| Dear God, yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now imagine what Washington Post and CNN are saying. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're probably thinking, how much will we lose if it turns out that our employees were laughing and mocking the kid and saying, who cares, he's a Nazi? | ||
| Well, we know what they said publicly on Twitter. | ||
| They're people affiliated with CNN, at least. | ||
| And that's them being careful though. | ||
| So, I want to punch this kid. | ||
| Imagine if they were, imagine what, like one person posted a picture of a wood chipper | ||
| with blood coming out and they were like, you know, a guy who worked for Disney I guess. | ||
| I don't know, be careful. | ||
| Fact check me on that one. | ||
| You always had to say Jake Tapper was the first, like the first blue checkmark person | ||
| to retweet my article when I came out with this. | ||
| I, the mainstream media did a bad job with this story but swiftly corrected themselves. | ||
| There are still outlets that are more like ideological, like there was an article for Slate, there was an article for Deadspin, that still to this day maintain that Nick Sandman was a racist who got in this guy's face. | ||
| And so I... A lot of criticism, and I'm plenty critical of the mainstream media all the time, but this one's... It's like, okay, I see where they got it wrong, but... | ||
| There are actually greater media sins in this that just don't get talked about as much. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That persist to this day. | ||
| I'm going to say something that should be considered a compliment, I guess, but I consider Jake Tapper our media D student. | ||
| He's not as bad. | ||
| He's not nearly as bad. | ||
| A D is bad, but he gets a passing grade. | ||
| I like Tapper. | ||
| I think he's a good reporter. | ||
| I give him a D. Maybe a D+. | ||
| That's harsh. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| Well, it's not as bad as a lot of the people, you know, the grades I'd give. | ||
| But, you know, he's said and done things in the past that are particularly, like, ill-informed and bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's had his moments. | |
| I think he tweets commentary from a variety of sources, which is very valuable if you're in the mainstream. | ||
| You're not just listening to people in your own echo chamber. | ||
| He has tweeted a lot of my articles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| That's why I give him a passing grade. | ||
| I guess it's because I have a lot of disdain for a lot of these media companies. | ||
| So, anyway, just to wrap up that previous point about internal slacks, I've worked for some of these companies, and for those unfamiliar, Slack is like Discord, I guess, for corporations. | ||
| It's a communication server. | ||
| I love how that's how you describe it to your audience. | ||
| I would have said it's like GChat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think anybody... What is GChat? | |
| So, uh, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| People know what Discord is. | ||
| Everybody uses Discord to some degree, or a lot of people do. | ||
| It's a popular thing. | ||
| Like, you know, on Reddit, people mention their Discords. | ||
| So Slack is relatively similar. | ||
| But I've worked for some of these companies, man. | ||
| I tell you, if these private logs ever got published... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| Spicy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| You get the servers. | ||
| And even if they've erased them, man, you can recover all that stuff. | ||
| You can recover it. | ||
| should delete their... | ||
| Yeah, you can't. | ||
| You can't get rid of them. | ||
| Oh, I guess they stay and like, well, if it was a subpoena, you could get, you'd have | ||
| to subpoena Slack. | ||
| I guess you could. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You get the servers. | ||
| I'm talking through it right now. | ||
| Yeah, I got it. | ||
| And even if they've erased them, man, you can recover all that stuff. | ||
| You can recover it. | ||
| It just depends on how far you're willing to go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but so here's why I think Nick Salmon may have gotten more than people realize. | ||
| If the judge is saying, these are good, we're going to move forward, the next step is discovery. | ||
| And they're going to say, we want to know what you were saying behind the scenes about Nick Sandman because they want to prove intent, malice, actual malice. | ||
| Meaning, did these people, these news organizations know what they were producing was false? | ||
| I don't think they did. | ||
| I think they got taken in by a believable and credible-seeming witness who was there and told them something that was totally wrong. | ||
| As a journalist, as someone who writes articles, that's a tough position to end up in. | ||
| It wasn't an anonymous source. | ||
| They just said, this guy said this. | ||
| Yeah, but a lot of people wrote stories without even contacting Phillips, the Native American guy. | ||
| They just said, in a viral video, a young man is seen blocking the path and smirking. | ||
| But Phillips gave an interview to a couple outlets, and then they, so then they're, I mean, I do, you quote, you block quote something from a different article. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| So a lot of these outlets didn't make, some of the outlets that wrote about this didn't reference Phillips' statements. | ||
| They launched off of them to make the actual factual assertion. | ||
| So this is the problem of free speech, particularly with our very rigorous defamation protections, anti-SLAPP laws. | ||
| That's a, what is it, strategic lawsuit against public participation? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| A lot of states have this, and it's like, you sue for defamation and they say, your public figures? | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| Don't care. | ||
| You're out. | ||
| Gets dismissed really, really quickly. | ||
| And that creates the fake news problem, which results in chaos. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is a tough line, because, like I said, I don't want to draw the defamation standard a lot tighter, because then you can chill important discussions, the ability to hold powerful people accountable. | ||
| I mean, Harvey Weinstein, that story could not be written in another country. | ||
| It just couldn't. | ||
| No one would print it. | ||
| Even here, there was some effort to shut it down, to threaten those kinds of things, yeah. | ||
| So it now the difference is so how do we I do but I believe in privacy very strongly. | ||
| So the question now is in the social media age. | ||
| How do we protect to the extent we even can privacy for non-public people? | ||
| I don't actually I don't care if people if people there has to be a high threshold of just allowing you to say wrong crazy stuff about famous people. | ||
| For people like Sandman, who's just a regular person, how do you protect those kinds of people's right to have privacy or not be written about or characterized in this way without expanding libel? | ||
| Is there some other way you can do it? | ||
| That's the kind of thing I think about a lot these days. | ||
| Or could there be a... | ||
| Or like, you know, like Gawker publishing, like, actually humiliating video, or like sex videos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they did that not even to Hulk Hogan, but just a random woman who was assaulted while she was drunk in a sports stadium. | ||
| They did it to a guy who was an executive, I think, at Conde Nast. | ||
| Oh yeah, that was, they outed him. | ||
|
unidentified
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They outed him. | |
| Yeah, when he, or whatever, when, yeah, he was something outside of marriage. | ||
| He was being blackmailed. | ||
| That was terrible. | ||
| And they participated in this blackmail, that was horrible. | ||
| They did so many horrible, horrible, horrible things, and actually they did ultimately, they, I mean, they very much deserved what they got. | ||
| This is tough. | ||
| You know, our free speech protections that we describe is a really good argument. | ||
| Who would write about Weinstein? | ||
| That guy's got so much money, he's going to bury you in legal fees. | ||
| And because of our laws, people were able to write this stuff. | ||
| But at the same time, what about not-wealthy public figures whose lives and businesses are destroyed? | ||
| So I think about how this pertains to Section 230 and these big tech companies. | ||
| Notably, remember that, you know, it was the, uh, I'll just call it the poopy men in media list, because I'm going to try to avoid swearing, but you know what I'm talking about. | ||
| For those that aren't familiar, there was a list that was put together where people just put random accusations on it of, like, men who, you know, were engaged in assault or impropriety, and it resulted in some people having their lives completely destroyed. | ||
| There was one dude who was innocent, falsely accused, and he wrote this article, and it was really weird, and he said the reason why his story is fake is because he had a very strange sexuality or something that didn't make sense based on what they'd accused him of, and it was just someone who was vindictive and hated him. | ||
| He lost his job. | ||
| Nobody would hire him because they knew he was on the list. | ||
| And then now he works at like a theater as like a theater manager or something ridiculous. | ||
| But that woman is being sued. | ||
| The woman who made the list and then I think other people added to it, she's being sued and it's a very interesting case. | ||
| It is, it is. | ||
| Yeah, it's been going on for a while though. | ||
| The Section 237 is very interesting on this front. | ||
| Well, so here's the challenge. | ||
| What happens if someone tweets, you know, wasn't it like a Google Doc that went and tweeted or something? | ||
| The list? | ||
| It was a Google Doc. | ||
| But it was not made to be made public. | ||
| It was a private Google Doc, and then somebody else made it public. | ||
| So that might matter too. | ||
| I actually don't think that matters. | ||
| In defamation, private defamation is the same. | ||
| So if you and I are having a conversation about John Smith, and you're like, oh yeah, John Smith, he's a guy, I might work with him. | ||
| And I'm like, no, no, no, that guy's a Nazi. | ||
| And then you're like, whoa. | ||
| Well, right, it has to have caused material harm, so presumably it doesn't if it's just a private conversation. | ||
| This is the challenge, because when you get these, you know, far-off individuals who engage in these smear tactics against, say, someone like Andy Ngo, where they just, they know they're lying. | ||
| and they completely falsely frame or push things out of context, it is very different to an | ||
| individual in the real world saying something. Technology has created a completely different | ||
| atmosphere where you can literally destroy someone and then argue, | ||
| I'm but a snowflake in the avalanche. | ||
| I only said my opinion. | ||
| So how do you stop this? | ||
| If Twitter knows something is overtly wrong or false, it's a serious challenge. | ||
| I'm for free speech. | ||
| We're having this conversation right now. | ||
| Twitter is the more aggressively biased social media platform to my mind. | ||
| I think Facebook is worse now. | ||
| I don't think that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't think so? | |
| I think Mark Zuckerberg has, I mean the things he, his stated commitment to free speech is much stronger than Jack Dorsey's. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| The things he said at the committee meetings. | ||
| Facebook has been stronger on saying we're really not going to try to fact check ads, their ads, sorry. | ||
| I think Facebook to a greater degree has said I mean, they're still gonna, they still do some policing of, of, of, uh, there are plenty of policing of misinformation to some degree, but I think in a less heavy-handed or biased way. | ||
| I mean, Facebook is so good. | ||
| This is why I get upset with conservatives who want to get rid of Section 230. | ||
| Facebook has been, um, such a powerful platform for conservative speech. | ||
| Oh, definitely. | ||
| Breitbart, uh, uh, Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, their views on Facebook dwarf mainstream media. | ||
| So if you were going to tinker with Facebook's liability for what appears on its platform, I mean, so the media wants, like, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren support getting rid of Section 230 because they're smart people on some level, and they realize that conservatives can succeed in an alternate media environment, whereas, like, the New York Times isn't even going to ever print a Republican senator's opinion again. | ||
| So, yeah, let's go back to that world. | ||
| Why do people like Josh Hawley want that? | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Well, I think that is a mistake, but I think we need 230 reform. | ||
| If I was to... yeah. | ||
| It could be tweaked in a way to, I think, probably protect privacy of non-public people, especially maybe their videos or something. | ||
| I might be on board with that, but I'm just so worried that any attempt to change it will just result in it being done away with. | ||
| The problem is, on Twitter, for example, they will ban conservatives for saying Learn to Code. | ||
| Like, that's clearly not within the scope of 230. | ||
| Well, it's not, no, they can do whatever they want. | ||
| The good faith provision of 230 says objectionable content. | ||
| Are you going to argue in court that banning someone for saying hashtag Learn to Code, would a reasonable person believe that is objectionable? | ||
| Or that lewd and lascivious, violent or graphic? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| 230 just says they can do, right, good faith moderation. | ||
| Of objectionable content. | ||
| So a conversation that we've had on the show quite a bit is, you know, one thing Trump's tried to do is define what good faith is, what objectionable is, because Twitter is certainly not engaged in good faith. | ||
| I think if you presented the evidence to a reasonable jury, they'd say that's definitely not good faith. | ||
| Well, the issue with the suspensions, though, is they're all complaint-driven. | ||
| he treated ok do that that at somebody who didn't know was trans and he got | ||
| suspended for it that's not good faith well | ||
| the issue with the suspensions though is they're all complaint-driven | ||
| so it ends up looking biased and the the maybe the impact is by a lawyer but it's | ||
| because there's more lefty people complaining absolutely say people are | ||
| they why is this up when this is or why is this taken out when this is up and | ||
| And you can do that ad infinitive. | ||
| On YouTube, you can do that with a true, and there's so much content. | ||
| And the answer is always, someone complained about that. | ||
| Someone didn't complain about that. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| It's because the left is organized. | ||
| And because they'll say, hey everybody, go flag this tweet and get it taken down. | ||
| But I'm saying, I don't know how the social media platform can solve that problem. | ||
| I don't know how they could, or if they should be held accountable. | ||
| That's just, that's gonna be the nature, with so much content, Not enough. | ||
| You can't police it on the front end. | ||
| And if you require people to approve it before it appears, that's the end of the whole game. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| You have content being... There's a lot of problems with Facebook, and Facebook, I think, absolutely crossed the line with... I think Facebook's in direct violation of 230 by appointing fact-checkers. | ||
| Right off the bat. | ||
| No, no, no, not that. | ||
| I like that, but this is, I like that you're talking about that council. | ||
| I think that council, which includes some, like some, there's a free speech scholar of | ||
| Cato, there's some people who seem to have considered. | ||
| No, no, no, not that. | ||
| I'm talking about how there is a special editorial group on Facebook where you go through the | ||
| pointer, it was a pointer institute, you get certified and then your organization can determine | ||
| whether things are true or false. | ||
| Those are the fact-checkers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But they also have, they gave, didn't they give the Daily Caller fact-checker status as well? | ||
| Yeah, but it doesn't mean anything. | ||
| It doesn't matter if there's a conservative or two, it matters that they have a special class of people who can flag my content as false. | ||
| So I had a post I made about Bill Clinton and the woman who, you know, ID'd him on the island in the court documents that went out. | ||
| My tweet was 100% factually true, and a fact-checking organization put a block over it saying it was false information. | ||
| Well, that's a statement of fact, that my post is false, when it was in fact true, and they knew it was true because the dude told me on the phone he knew it was true. | ||
| So now we're talking about actual malice. | ||
| When you link to the guy's... So it says false information. | ||
| Here's why. | ||
| When you click it, it sends you to his website where he makes money. | ||
| I'm assuming. | ||
| Off of ads. | ||
| So by putting fake fact checks on my content, he can make people click his link to his website and get cash out of it even though he knows what I posted was true. | ||
| That's a special class of people. | ||
| That is not a regular person. | ||
| That would be like the New York Times hiring a fact checker to go in and change posts and link to other content. | ||
| That's completely editorial. | ||
| And that's Facebook. | ||
| So, listen. | ||
| That seems like a bad idea, or something they should not do, but it seems like the solution is to complain about it until they stop doing it, or call attention to it, or... Facebook told me right off the bat, I emailed their politics person, they said, we will not intervene in any way. | ||
| They said, they have the right to do so. | ||
| And so, my question now is, this is a really interesting... But it's their company, right? | ||
| I mean, they can do what they want, at the end of the day. | ||
| Not if they're stealing the commons. | ||
| I completely disagree with that. | ||
| It's a private company. | ||
| They own it. | ||
| So if a private company puts up fences around Town Square and puts armed guards around it... It's not Town Square. | ||
| It's their property. | ||
| It's their Town Square. | ||
| They may act like it's the Town Square, but it's... I mean, at the end of the day, it's theirs. | ||
| The best way to... You can complain about their rules, but it's a free product they give you. | ||
| See, I think this is where we have a strong disagreement. | ||
| If they've taken over the commons due to technological advancement, then we have a duty to regulate that to protect the public. | ||
| There's no way it's a monopoly. | ||
| It's a free product. | ||
| I don't believe it has staying. | ||
| If it makes enough people mad, enough people are dissatisfied with it, a rival could easily come around. | ||
| Twitter is to some degree, these other companies are to some degree a rival. | ||
| They've tried, and you know what's happened? | ||
| Well, I remember Myspace being a big thing. | ||
| It's gone now. | ||
| And what happens... Parler could come along. | ||
| And what happens when... And you know what they did to Mines? | ||
| M-I-N-D-S dot com. | ||
| There was a block on it. | ||
| Facebook wouldn't let you link to the website. | ||
| You'd get a warning saying, nope, you can't go there. | ||
| If you're going there from Facebook. | ||
| Facebook made it so that if you ever tried... I think they've removed it since then, but Google and Facebook for a while blocked the URL to Mines dot com. | ||
| Google is a more compelling monopoly case to my mind than Facebook. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| Well, it's not so much an argument about monopoly, because what service does Facebook provide is a bigger question. | ||
| Connecting you to loved ones. | ||
| If that's the case, then they do have a monopoly. | ||
| And if they're restricting what you can say, and they've taken over the communication lines between you and your parents because you don't call them anymore because you just talk to them on Facebook Messenger, then they're starting to take away from the public space. | ||
| Well, that's like saying Giant has a monopoly on groceries because I'm too lazy to walk two more blocks to Trader Joe's. | ||
| Or Trader Joe's got shut down because Facebook moved in, dropped the prices to a ridiculous degree because they can afford to. | ||
| Giant's not required to advertise for Trader Joe's in the Giant. | ||
| So here's the issue. | ||
| It's their building. | ||
| So Facebook could ban you and your ideology outright. | ||
| Your ideas, everything would cease to exist in a generation. | ||
| Where are people getting their news from? | ||
| and where's the thought from other people. | ||
| Now you're too. | ||
| This is where we do it. You are too online. | ||
| You're only it's only that like there's so many other places | ||
| conversations are happening. | ||
| Also I wouldn't I wouldn't be happy that I would complain vociferously. | ||
| Where are people getting their news from where people getting | ||
| their news from not just Facebook. | ||
| The younger generation, it's almost exclusively social media, and it's predominantly Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. | ||
| So, YouTube is a video hub. | ||
| Facebook is specifically an interactivity between you and people you've chosen to form a network with, and Twitter is mostly people following high-profile individuals. | ||
| So, these are not... It's hard to quantify what each space does, but Facebook definitely has seized a large portion of the commons. | ||
| And on these platforms, alternate ideas are thriving like they never have before and like they never would under the mainstream media paradigm. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But we have to make sure we maintain that. | ||
| Otherwise, we create a more disturbed... There's big challenges in both directions. | ||
| If we absolutely limited 230, so just to clarify for people who aren't familiar, this is the liability protection for these companies, then you would end up with like porn sweeping across Facebook because porn is legal content. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so that's why they have the good faith moderation provision. | ||
| But the issue I'm bringing up... Or just like harassment on a level that no one wants to... It would just be so unpleasant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Which they would have to do if you applied the First Amendment in the same way. | ||
| I've encountered a proposal. | ||
| Will Chamberlain wants... I don't know if you know who that is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| He's going to be here tomorrow. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, you should yell at him about this. | ||
| We've had this debate. | ||
| That's what he wants. | ||
| He thinks the same First Amendment, it should be, it should be nationalized in the sense that the First Amendment should apply to it. | ||
| Well, they can't police any, they can't police anything. | ||
| They can. | ||
| Westboro Baptist Church rules apply. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| That would be a very bad idea. | ||
| They absolutely can, though, so long as they're so... Well, not under Will Chamberlain's rules. | ||
| No, they can. | ||
| So, for instance, the way Mines does it is that there's effectively two layers. | ||
| Everyone is allowed to post, but if you cross a certain line, then you get a not-safe-for-work filter that has to be turned on. | ||
| But people can just choose to be like, I want to follow who I want to follow regardless. | ||
| You break the rules, you go in filter mode. | ||
| That's an easy way to keep people on the platform while allowing people to stay in their walled garden or whatever. | ||
| The problem with Facebook that I bring up specifically as it pertains to 230, Is that Facebook is allowing companies to make money off of defaming me. | ||
| And that's Facebook saying we've elected this special class of people. | ||
| We've chosen them specifically to make statements on behalf of Facebook that regular people can't. | ||
| That this is false information or not. | ||
| Statements of fact that are not based on public user bases. | ||
| I can't go into Facebook and put a tag on your post saying it's fake. | ||
| Facebook appointed people to do that. | ||
| That is a Facebook editorial assignment. | ||
| That is not protected under 230. | ||
| That might not be protected under 230 currently. | ||
| In which case, they're in violation of their liability protections, and anybody should be able to challenge them in that regard. | ||
| And Twitter, the same thing. | ||
| Well, it's just like in there, they couldn't put out a... 230 wouldn't protect them from putting out a press release that libeled you. | ||
| So the situation you're describing might be close enough to that. | ||
| But that doesn't require 230 reform, because that's fine. | ||
| No, no, no, right. | ||
| I'm just saying Facebook's already in violation. | ||
| Maybe they are. | ||
| And I guess there's probably a longer legal conversation about whether they are or they aren't, but the way I see it is, if the New York Times is curating content, or actually a better example is like BuzzFeed's community posts they used to have. | ||
| They choose what to post. | ||
| So if someone writes something and the New York Times says, you know, we have a freelance writer who's been appointed to post an article, the New York Times is responsible for what they say when they publish that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If Facebook is saying we have this select group of 12 people, 12 organizations, who can publish tags on posts, it's not like an article or anything, but they literally called me a liar and it wasn't true. | ||
| And it just drives traffic from people who want to see my content. | ||
| It wasn't actually me who posted, it was a screenshot of one of my tweets from a different Facebook page. | ||
| People can make money off this. | ||
| Facebook has empowered people to make money by defaming other people. | ||
| Facebook has created that class. | ||
| They're not regular users. | ||
| If you turned on talk radio or cable news, people make money off of saying untrue things about people all the time. | ||
| It is a major way for people to make money, just in general. | ||
| They can be sued, depending on what line they cross, in terms of what they say. | ||
| I guess I'd be more for expanding the protections for saying things, even if things that are wrong, in that direction, rather than holding Facebook to the same standard. | ||
| It's most cases it's best handled by calling it out rather than the to my mind the libel the lawsuit should be for areas of unique harm to people who are not public people perhaps involving publication of like private or embarrassing stuff. | ||
| There's where you find sympathy from me for like, how can we, do we need to tweak the system to more protect people from sites like Gawker, from what they did. | ||
| That's what I, and I don't have the answer, but that's the area where I'm more, I'm more, there's some kind of, I mean, they're like, publication of private facts is a, can be an element of, I think, element of defamation. | ||
| How do you feel about antitrust investigations into these big tech companies? | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| So in general, I'm skeptical that... I mean, I've watched all the hearings. | ||
| I'm skeptical that you can really apply antitrust. | ||
| If you changed antitrust, then they might fall under it. | ||
| But for antitrust, there has to be a harm from a consumer standpoint. | ||
| It can't just be that they have all this influence and power and everybody just uses their service. | ||
| It also has to have a material downside from the customer. | ||
| Well, like banning mines, for instance. | ||
| Yeah, so you really can't show that. | ||
| Maybe it's bad for minds, but it's not bad for the consumer because it's not like I have to pay for more expensive bananas because Facebook has cornered the market on bananas or something. | ||
| So it's not going to work under the existing antitrust. | ||
| Now, so I think that's true for Facebook. | ||
| Apple is, no one even really seems to be asserting that it's a monopoly. | ||
| It makes a product that just goes with other products. | ||
| Google has done, you know, so I approach these things with an open mind. | ||
| I'm generally a free market guy. | ||
| Google sounds like they did some shady stuff that got brought up that I didn't know about. | ||
| The thing with, what, with Yelp, was it? | ||
| Do you know what I'm talking about? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't. | |
| There's some dispute there. | ||
| I think it was with Yelp that they treated them badly. | ||
| I don't remember exactly enough, so I don't want to say. | ||
| There was some other stuff. | ||
| And I know the putting conservative sites on a list and then they suddenly disappear from the Google search results, which they did. | ||
| sometimes consumers get this wrong because your Google results are | ||
| different depending on what you've searched but it and they fixed it | ||
| quickly but it was still weird that they it must have like some it was accidental | ||
| but there's some switch they could flip wire people on a so I guess like I'm not | ||
| you know I'm not totally denying the there are any of these problems but I | ||
| don't really think anyway I don't think breaking up these companies would would | ||
| improve matters yeah I don't disagree I I mostly agree that it won't improve things, especially when you consider that some of these platforms, you know, YouTube, for instance, can't exist outside of Google itself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because it's subsidized by a lot of these other things. | ||
| But here's an example. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Two of my channels, Timcast News and Timcast, are blacklisted from Google. | ||
| They will not appear. | ||
| In fact, if you search for the title, you'll get Facebook videos instead. | ||
| But this channel will. | ||
| And I don't exactly know why that is. | ||
| It could be that this channel is relatively new from this year and there was a point where YouTube created a list and they straight up eliminated a lot of these channels from their search. | ||
| Interestingly, a lot of the people who got eliminated tend to be individuals promoting alternative platforms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it could also be that's just what the algorithm thinks people want when they search these things. | ||
| It's not necessarily nefarious. | ||
| Well, no, my channel literally doesn't come up on any page at all. | ||
| It's just outright banned. | ||
| So if you search for TimCast on Google, you'll get this channel, which is new, and my other channels just don't exist. | ||
| You'd think that if you could actually limit the Google search to site, you do site colon YouTube dot com, so that all search only goes to YouTube, it won't come up. | ||
| It's literally blacklisted. | ||
| Interestingly, like I mentioned, many of the people who are on this blacklist, because there's a lot of personalities, independent commentators, they're all people who either have supported say like Minds or BitChute or other social media platforms. | ||
| And all of a sudden we find ourselves on a list where you can't Google search us anymore. | ||
| I'm currently writing a book about the regulation of speech on social media, and I'm trying to get a hold of Google, so I will ask them if I ever do. | ||
| I've asked them, too, and they just, like, don't have any answers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're like, huh, that's strange, we'll look into it, and they know what's up. | ||
| Nothing ever happens. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird, because I certainly don't think they hate me. | ||
| Like, I'm rather successful on the platform. | ||
| Big companies do make mistakes. | ||
| doing really, really well, and it does come up, I don't know what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Maybe it was a rogue employee, you know? | ||
| Oops, it was a mistake, and they put your name on a list or something, I have no idea. | ||
| Big companies do make mistakes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| My concern, and I think there's a really interesting contrast between you as a libertarian and | ||
| me as more of a liberal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that is what the contrast is here. | ||
| I'm all like, regulate the company. | ||
| They're interfering with public, and you're like, no, free market. | ||
| I think it's great, though, because it's really funny how, I think we actually agree on so much stuff, especially pertaining to the radical left and the insanity, and they've somehow created this big tent of liberals, libertarians, conservatives, moderates, whatever, opposed to them, for the most part. | ||
| We all get along, hang out, we're like, yes, we disagree on so much we don't talk about anymore, you know what I mean? | ||
| But I am also always happy to call out bad behavior by these companies. | ||
| When I see people get banned for stupid reasons, you can come to me, I will share your story, I will look into it. | ||
| I think that's the method for holding them accountable. | ||
| I'm worried actually about harming conservative speech if you actually harm the platform. | ||
| I completely agree with that. | ||
| If you got rid of 230, independent creators would be totally screwed. | ||
| Actually, a friend of mine, Casey Maddox, tweeted it because Donald Trump said something about getting rid of 230 or something today. | ||
| He tweeted it. | ||
| He did again. | ||
| And Casey Maddox tweeted it. | ||
| So here's what it would look like. | ||
| Thank you, Donald Trump, for submitting this tweet. | ||
| We will subject it to review and it will appear on our platform within four days. | ||
| Yeah, it'll be way, way worse. | ||
| I just think I'm in favor of reform, particularly to clarify what the terms of good faith moderation really mean. | ||
| That might be fine. | ||
| Yeah, because banning someone for saying, learn to code, the bigger issue at hand for me is that if Facebook really wanted to, they could guarantee victory to any candidate. | ||
| Yeah, but I think that would just be so bad for their, like, I think they wouldn't do that. | ||
| Well, they banned some of the highest profile Trump supporters a year ago. | ||
| But would, and would that even give, like, then they would, they could just, they could go full MSNBC or full Fox and be so in the tank for one category. | ||
| YouTube is? | ||
| With that, right, but that already exists. | ||
| Well, actually, actually. | ||
| But the thing is, that phenomenon already exists, because there's already rabidly partisan information outlets spewing selective or biased or even outright disinformation, and it's the world, it's just the world, it's always been the world we live in. | ||
| I mean, there were, think of, Like, the newspaper where you would get all your information used to be called, like, the Republican or the Democrat. | ||
| I mean, like, partisan insanity or Yellow Journal. | ||
| I mean, remember the main, if you're going to go far enough. | ||
| There's a long history of this kind of thing. | ||
| I don't think the problem is different because it involves different methods of delivery of information. | ||
| I'm not sure it's actually notably different in the kind of thing. | ||
| I think YouTube is the best, and I explain this a lot, that if you go to YouTube, you can actually get a progressive, liberal, moderate, conservative, you know, individual. | ||
| You can actually hear what a lot of them have to say, and there's actually even some relatively far-right individuals who have survived on the platform for quite some time, although they're the first to get the axe. | ||
| If you only watch, like, you know, some of these cable news channels, You're in a, you know, a specific partisan building. | ||
| You go on YouTube, you might get a mixed bag of things. | ||
| The bigger issue I see is that YouTube is not so much of the problem in my opinion, but they are definitely going mainstream. | ||
| Like, I think most people will get recommended Fox News videos after they leave this stream. | ||
| And it's interesting, too, because they've done similar things to, like, Jimmy Dore, who's a lefty. | ||
| But they recommend Fox News on his channel like crazy. | ||
| So there was actually a researcher who mapped all this and found that YouTube does everything in their power to actually push people towards mainstream media. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| Well, I'm actually just working on that part of my book right now, looking at the... Because there was a concern among progressive people that YouTube is radicalizing people by giving them increasingly fringe, alt-right content. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| Right, it's the opposite. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that they're trying to send them more normie stuff. | ||
| But there's a benefit to that. | ||
| Actually, substantially more left-wing as well. | ||
| It's two to one. | ||
| So there's actually a chart that maps this, and you have to be careful because it is 2 to 1 that you are more likely to be recommended left-wing content, but it's because many mainstream celebrities and comedians are making anti-Trump jokes. | ||
| So the perspective you will get from them will be anti-Trump, which aligns with the left, but it is not left-partisan content. | ||
| So in reality, it's actually... | ||
| If you get rid of the late-night comedy hosts who all that generic trash, you know, current-year comedy, ugh, it's awful, then you get a decent lean towards YouTube promoting left-wing content relative to right-wing content, but it is decently balanced, but the rabbit hole, that's the point, it leans left, but the reality is there's not a very big rabbit hole on YouTube at all. | ||
| This is, it's just, you know where the rabbit hole really is? | ||
| It's Facebook. | ||
| Because Facebook allows you to directly share the content. | ||
| So what happens is, you go on Facebook, and this is the bigger problem I see with these big tech companies, it's the algorithmic feeds. | ||
| Where you essentially have accidental worldviews being built. | ||
| So, someone will make a video, you know, police brutality. | ||
| And they'll post it on Facebook. | ||
| Someone will see it. | ||
| They get angry. | ||
| Anger is the most likely to trigger a share. | ||
| It's the emotion that triggers sharing the most. | ||
| So they share it. | ||
| Then Facebook says they like these words. | ||
| And it keeps feedback looping similar content into them. | ||
| And they keep sharing it. | ||
| And so you get this mass spread of insane police brutality. | ||
| Where it actually happened where one of the top websites in the world at one point literally only wrote about police brutality. | ||
| It was like a website dedicated to police brutality and it cracked the top 500 websites in the world because Facebook was just pumping out like crazy And that's a bigger rabbit hole. | ||
| If you only ever see police brutality, then you're gonna assume all the cops are like evil demons hunting people down and killing them, when in reality it was, we have what, 300 million, 370 million interactions with cops, and a percentage of them go bad, and you'll be able to inundate someone's feeds endlessly with this kind of content, and Facebook was doing that. | ||
| I think they changed it a little bit, but what's worrying to me is when you see the actual rabbit hole on YouTube. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever seen this. | ||
| Maybe I'll show you after. | ||
| It's a video of Hitler, and he's doing Tai Chi with the Incredible Hulk, while some people from India are singing a nursery rhyme into what sounds like, you know, some trashy dollar store headphones that they could only muster up as a microphone somehow. | ||
| It's nightmarishly creepy. | ||
| But what happened was, parents were putting babies in their cribs or beds and giving them a tablet, and then pressing play on nursery rhymes. | ||
| And the algorithm was just grabbing keywords. | ||
| So within an hour or two, it was nightmarish, weird... It's actually really great art, if you were to ask me. | ||
| Like, if it was made for an art installation, I'd be like, ah, incredible! | ||
| Hitler dancing in a bikini with a woman's body with the Incredible Hulk while someone sings nursery rhymes. | ||
| I wonder what it means. | ||
| But when you show it to babies, and it's the only thing they see, it's going to start twisting their brains. | ||
| All right, fine, you got me. | ||
| Babies should not watch videos of Hitler dancing in a bikini. | ||
| Twist my arm. | ||
| I'm not saying all of this to be pro-regulation. | ||
| I'm just saying that the company had to make changes because that was actually happening. | ||
| But here's the main point I've mentioned. | ||
| The problem with Facebook is, If I showed you a video of the Incredible Hulk, the Joker, and Hitler dancing together, you'd be like, that's insane. | ||
| Why is that nursery rhyme video being shown to kids? | ||
| You know it's crazy. | ||
| The baby doesn't. | ||
| What if we did the exact same algorithmic manipulation, but instead of the Incredible Hulk, Hitler, and the Joker, I said Donald Trump, racism, and neo-Nazis. | ||
| And the only thing you ever saw was a nightmarish amalgamation of things that just didn't really exist. | ||
| So we've actually seen this in news outlets. | ||
| There was one we talked about in the show where it was like they were dragging Melania Trump and they stuffed every possible keyword into the article because they were hoping that those keywords would get it shared more on like Google or something. | ||
| That's the danger I see with big tech companies, having algorithms that choose certain words and weighs them and then it results in people getting these specific narratives. | ||
| I think one of the reasons we see the rise of the radical left in this way is because Facebook's algorithm favors content that has more keywords in it. | ||
| So why is it that police brutality did so well? | ||
| Anger triggered emotions. | ||
| But they started mixing in the words racism and police brutality and it got even more shares because now it had double the keywords. | ||
| Same thing was true for adding sexism and now you'll see articles from Vice saying like Trans women of color fighting against police brutality is the epitome of Black Lives Matter in Trump's America Yeah, yeah, and it's like we just jammed everything in there But then people read that and they adopt this ideology that seemingly has no goal and makes no sense Well, that's actually a good thing to hear, because we can fix that problem. | ||
| You can change what, just like it used to be, Upworthy-style headlines is what drove clickbait stuff, and then there were tweaks to algorithms, and now all that went away because of the crash of that kind of content. | ||
| Well, that's my rant on algorithms, but how about we read some Super Chats? | ||
| Because, you know, we went a little over because I started ranting about algorithms. | ||
| Zach Kessel says, if Facebook is so great, why was Anomaly banned from livestreaming for over a month, or the Hodge twins being told their page was going to be shut down? | ||
| Well, I don't think Facebook's all that great. | ||
| So actually, my buddy Adam on this show said that he decided he was going to vote for Trump, and he explained why, and he wasn't like this hardcore liberal or anything, but he was looking at what Trump was doing and actually liked it. | ||
| We post the clips, you know, on YouTube and stuff, but the Hodge twins, and I think maybe Terrence K. Williams, black conservatives, they posted the clip from the show on their Facebook page and it got 4 million views. | ||
| And then one day it was gone. | ||
| It was gone from everywhere. | ||
| People at Facebook just erased it. | ||
| It broke no rules. | ||
| It was not objectionable. | ||
| It was just the dude sitting in the chair where you are expressing his opinion about voting for Trump. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| It was gone. | ||
| Bad. | ||
| People should speak up. | ||
| Stop them from doing that. | ||
| Criticize them when they do. | ||
| I do all the time. | ||
| But they don't change it. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| They undo some bad decisions they made. | ||
| Ford Fisher is someone I like who got banned from Facebook this weekend. | ||
| He had no idea why. | ||
| They said it was an accident. | ||
| We're sorry. | ||
| They restored his page. | ||
| I don't know what else you want him to do. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| That's why I've leaned towards some kind of clarification on Section 230, like reform in terms of what people are allowed to post and how it's moderated. | ||
| But why is it that it tends to be one political faction fighting an uphill battle to make sure they get heard, while the left does face censorship, but it's disproportionate? | ||
| You know, it's typically like anti-war lefties who are getting the censorship, whereas the orthodox pro-establishment leftists can literally organize violence on Twitter. | ||
| Like, this is the crazy thing. | ||
| I sat down in front of Jack Dorsey and said, hey look, here's an example of them organizing violence. | ||
| And they were like, oh! | ||
| About that. | ||
| And to this day, all of these accounts, they still do it. | ||
| Well, that's why I say Jack Dorsey is the most, or Twitter is the most obvious bias. | ||
| Yes, that's a good point. | ||
| I do think, Jack, yes, I think Twitter, in a more deliberate way, does have political bias and is actually a little bit more obvious and deliberate about that, that they're just going to fact-check Trump just to, they're gonna poke right in the face until they get the whole social media paradigm regulated out of existence. | ||
| I don't know why they want to do that, but maybe it's because they know conservatives are thriving. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean that actually that could be it could be I mean if you want to get really conspiratorial with it a trick to get more concerns you already have a lot of them on board with abolishing 230 which then screws over Facebook and YouTube's ability to promote alternative conservative content you go back to the media gatekeepers and and that wouldn't be a good thing. | ||
| The New York Times wrote this. | ||
| Ben Shapiro gets, like, I think around double what NBC, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, and The Washington Post get combined. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And I wish everyone who—go ahead, complain about censorship on these platforms, but please keep that in mind. | ||
| So I'll point this out, so right now, my channels get around 50% of the viewership of CNN. | ||
| And that's pretty significant. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah, it's 100 million views in the past month. | ||
| All combined, it's like 110. | ||
| So I'm doing really, really well, but I am, you know, people jokingly refer to me as like a milquetoast fence-sitter, liberal, blah, kind of boring, doesn't even swear. | ||
| So that means that there are other channels that might just be conservative that will never get to that point, and what's happening is that YouTube is picking the winners and losers, which is going to shape our culture for, you know, which is going to shape our culture in general. | ||
| I mean, there has to be some, right, to some degree, but not, they don't curate, again, to the degree that the Washington Post, the New York Times, or even cable news does at all. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| All right, let's see here. | ||
| We got Sam Beasley says, prediction, the red mirage occurs. | ||
| Trump wins on election night, but votes pour in for Biden afterwards. | ||
| Democrats celebrate, then voter turnout passes 100% nationwide, and their ace in the hole turns into a bullet in the foot. | ||
| I actually think that's a possibility, but not necessarily in that sense, just because it would be election night chaos. | ||
| Both sides would accuse each other of cheating if that were to happen, so I don't think it's outside the realm of possibilities. | ||
| Also, do you want to mention your social before we read some more Super Chats? | ||
| Oh yeah, you can follow me on Twitter, just my name, at Robbie Suave, R-O-B-B-Y, S-O-A-V-E. | ||
| And you want to mention your book real quick? | ||
| Yes, Panic Attack, young radicals in the age of Trump, about the increasing illiberalism on college campuses, the kind of activist culture that has now spread from the campus to everywhere else. | ||
| So when did you write this? | ||
| Uh, so this came out last year, uh, in June. | ||
| So I wrote it during the first couple Trump years, essentially. | ||
| So it's basically like, if you want to understand why all of these weirdos are in government and, you know, read this book. | ||
| All right, cool. | ||
| Let's read some more Super Chats. | ||
| Daniel Ashley says body cams on more than 30% of all Proud Boys participants will be their best defense. | ||
| I mean, they should all wear body cams. | ||
| And my advice would be, you know, just be defensive. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, if they're gonna go out to Portland, don't swing at somebody. | ||
| Just keep blocking. | ||
| And I know people don't want to hear it, but I'm talking about tactics and optics. | ||
| And if you have a group of guys who are waving American flags, just covering their faces and getting hit over and over again, not even trying to fight back, the press is going to have nothing to go off of, except that Antifa was beating people who were just trying to protect themselves. | ||
| But I don't think that's going to happen. | ||
| I think you're going to get some people swinging fists and bringing clubs and paintball guns. | ||
| And those guys who are bringing out paintball guns, man, that's the stupidest thing. | ||
| Frosty says, I'll be legitimately shocked if we don't see BLM and Antifa voter intimidation outside in-person voting centers. | ||
| Should make for some great content at the very least. | ||
| I think we're gonna see Trump supporters doing the same thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's gonna be everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't remember. | |
| that plays out. Well, but they, and you've got to be careful with voter intimidation. I actually | ||
| think it's fine and probably, there's rules to prevent you from even like wearing a t-shirt | ||
| to the polling place that I think actually that should be protected under the First Amendment. | ||
| Don't you remember when Bill Clinton like showed up to a polling place in 2016 and was like | ||
| campaigning? I don't remember that. Yeah, didn't he do that? | ||
| I don't remember. Something like that. | ||
| I don't know. I looked that up. Let me Google it. Yeah. | ||
| So you think people should be allowed to wear whatever? | ||
| I think sometimes that is labeled voter intimidation. | ||
| I'm like, right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, but I think we're going to see left wing and right wing groups and they're going to be outside and they're going to be invariably somewhere. | ||
| It's a big country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Andrew Knapp says, just drove from Charlotte to West Palm Beach, Florida for a driving trip. | ||
| I saw exactly one Biden bumper sticker slash placard on the whole trip, but gave up counting Trump 2020 flags. | ||
| Yeah, man, that's crazy. | ||
| Voltage says, Hey Tim, been watching you for the past couple months. | ||
| First time super chat. | ||
| Really love watching every day. | ||
| Tony Hawk 2020. | ||
| Spin the UFO. | ||
| All right, here, this is going to be your job. | ||
| This is a air duster. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Just blow on the side of that UFO and you'll get it to spin. | ||
| With what? | ||
| Just hold it down and it'll start. | ||
| And that's how you make the UFO spin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We usually practice this before we start. | |
| Yeah, we gotta teach people how to do the UFO spin. | ||
| And there you go. | ||
| We've made it spin. | ||
| See, I actually got that thing to clean my keyboard, but then I posted an Instagram video where I'm like, look, it's spinning. | ||
| Don't bring this on Zoom class. | ||
| Child services will show up. | ||
| It looks like a gun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh gosh, there goes the stream. | |
| Stephen McIntyre says, What if the disaffected liberals coming to the new right start to organize more protests and boycott tactics that the far left uses, then pressuring corporations to stop the woke nonsense? | ||
| Love your show and what you do. | ||
| I mean, I think people need to organize. | ||
| Would you agree with that in that sense? | ||
| Instead of regulating these businesses, you just organize Certainly, protest boycotts are a preferable thing to do than regulation. | ||
| I think the left is so boycott-obsessed that probably just culturally, I invariably go, ugh, a boycott. | ||
| Probably unjustifiably. | ||
| Probably there are times where it would work or be good. | ||
| Like Mulan. | ||
| Right, we didn't actually talk about this, but I... So I'm hesitant to endorse boycotts, but I think probably it's pretty justified for people to just say, I'm not going to see Mulan after the terrible... Yeah, we didn't make it. | ||
| Yeah, what Disney... Disney's crediting of the proper... Disney, they thanked them, right? | ||
| So Disney thanked the people who basically run the concentration camps? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Very bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bad luck. | |
| Good work, Disney! | ||
| Disney who doesn't want to do business in Georgia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what I said. | |
| The hypocrisy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my gosh. | |
| The hypocrisy on the sort of woke capital is, to me, actually more irritating than the actual woke is. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| All right, let's see. | ||
| Redneck Logic says, Antifa isn't smart enough to be an organization, that's why. | ||
| Don't underestimate your enemies, man. | ||
| Jacob says, who invited Jason Bourne onto the Timcast? | ||
| Great job regardless. | ||
| We did. | ||
| Are you Jason Bourne? | ||
| Not quite Jason Bourne. | ||
| I've never gotten that one before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's funny. | |
| Matt Damon, I like it. | ||
| Vsidious said, did you see the new Madden game? | ||
| Decided to add Colin Kaepernick. | ||
| It already had a .2 user score on Metacritic. | ||
| The lowest of all time. | ||
| Looks like go broke then try to go woke. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| You've heard get woke, go broke? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think a lot of it is often get broke, go woke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These companies are failing and they're desperate and so they throw a Hail Mary. | ||
| We'll try the wokeness and maybe, you know, people will buy our garbage product. | ||
| And it comes across as insincere, it's not heartfelt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And people can tell it's cynical and they don't... But then it becomes tribal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And like... Right, right, right, right, right. | ||
| All the conservatives are like, we're gonna burn Gillette! | ||
| And they throw all the Gillette in the flaming dumpster. | ||
| And then the left is like, well, we're gonna go buy Gillette! | ||
| And then Gillette's like, we're getting press! | ||
| This is great! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it! | |
| It's great. | ||
| Let's see, Exile of Society says, if a program that mimicked the pitch of anti-racism critical race theory but called counter-racism went into these agencies, corporations, and institutes and changed the mindset and undo what's been done by critical race theory, would it work? | ||
| Maybe, I don't know. | ||
| I think regular people understand why this is all bad, you know what I mean? | ||
| And a lot of these people are sitting, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I think a lot of people sit in these, like, diversity trainings and just kind of blindly absorb it, but a lot of people probably listen to it and they're like, this is nuts. | ||
| Oh, I think most people know, yeah, this is... | ||
| Oh, they think it's unnecessary. | ||
| Just like a fire drill or something. | ||
| It's just something you have to do. | ||
| Or like an OSHA, like, watch out for sharp corners in this office. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's required and people know it's kind of silly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Harassment training. | ||
| That must be really the approach that most people, I swear, who sit through it go, I really didn't need this, but I know it's just legally mandated. | ||
| Sunny Days says, my opinion. | ||
| You are minimizing the level of threat our constitution is experiencing. | ||
| I'm a Portland resident. | ||
| Our city has reached demoralization. | ||
| We are within the destabilization phase. | ||
| When do you think normal working people stand up and defend their way of life? | ||
| That's a scary, scary thought. | ||
| See, this is another thing we disagree on. | ||
| We talked about a bit earlier, before the show, that I'm more bullish on civil war and you're more bearish. | ||
| So, you know, I see what, you know, like, Sunny Days is seeing that people in Portland, | ||
| I mean, I can only assume that because I don't live there, but after months of rioting and violence, | ||
| people just feel like nothing's going to be done about anything. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrible. | ||
| I actually think there's a greater likelihood that Trump wins in a massive landslide | ||
| than we see any kind of like civil war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, if people really are this angry with stuff, they're gonna go vote. | ||
| But then there's the issue of mail-in voting and the potential that, you know, Trump isn't actually doing that well. | ||
| But do you really think if people are—and I am also angry about this stuff. | ||
| I hate what I'm seeing in the streets of many cities. | ||
| I live in D.C. | ||
| It's been not, like, the Right, exactly. | ||
| It's been pretty bad in a lot of places. | ||
| And then certain journalists are like, oh, everything's fine. | ||
| Look, this park hasn't burned down. | ||
| You could go to Syria. | ||
| You could go to Afghanistan. | ||
| This village is fine. | ||
| This village is fine. | ||
| He doesn't tell you that. | ||
| It's the stupidest thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just real quick, during the Syrian civil war, the Syrian tourism agency was still advertising, | ||
|
unidentified
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come to Damascus and party, there's sarin gas over there, but don't worry about it. | |
| That's it, I don't know that if you want to vote against the rioting and the protest and | ||
| what you're seeing, is that... | ||
| Deputized Oregon State. | ||
| The Feds have deputized Oregon State Police so that the FBI is now prosecuting the rioters. | ||
| It's like not it doesn't latch onto the political that closely enough because Trump actually hasn't done anything | ||
| about it It's a current watch. He's done something deputized or he's | ||
| treated law and order another time The feds have deputized Oregon State Police so that the FBI | ||
| is now prosecuting the writers I don't think that's the smartest thing I've ever heard. | ||
| Maybe that's a very good idea In reference to the riots. | ||
| I don't think there's enough perception that Trump literally cares enough. | ||
| He cares enough to tweet about it, but to do anything about it. | ||
| That I agree with. | ||
| And also, it's hard, to some extent, it would not be hard to tar a very far-left Democrat, many of the people he ran against, but Biden himself has been historically moderate or even conservative in some ways on policing issues. | ||
| So to me, that's why I think a different political candidate on both sides Could easily turn this the way like Nixon did into a very vote for me for law and order. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think that quite fits the Trump-Biden dynamic. | ||
| I think you're right in terms of perception. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think in terms of practicality though, Joe Biden has been entertaining far left policy ideas, but not nearly as far left as the far left wants. | ||
| So when he says something like a moratorium on deportations, that is a huge departure from where the Obama administration was. | ||
| They called the guy the deporter-in-chief. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So for Joe Biden to come out and say he's negotiated a pact with Bernie, where they are going to push for, you know, a compromise on many of these things, Joe Biden's definitely negotiating with more far left. | ||
| Probably on the economic stuff. | ||
| I don't know so much about the policing stuff. | ||
| Like, I don't think, like, again, Biden has historically wanted to throw more money at the police. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The crime bill. | ||
| And his vice president is actually a prosecutor! | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think the deputizing of Oregon State Police was brilliant. | ||
| Because now the feds don't have to go in. | ||
| political wins but the political wins actually moved a little bit against the | ||
| hard left i think | ||
| i think uh... | ||
| the deputizing of oregon state police was | ||
| because now the feds have to go in yeah the oregon state police were complaining that arrest | ||
| these people and then the d a would release them | ||
| so now the deputized when they rest is riders the federal attorney say nope | ||
| And they've been going door-to-door to these Antifa people, and now the Antifa people are actually panicking, like the FBI is coming and they're gonna arrest you, and they're giving you the same charges. | ||
| So, I feel like Trump's figured out a way to solve that problem. | ||
| It's kind of, you know, the past night, there was not a whole lot of unrest happening in Portland, and actually, since the deputization, it's slowly been chilling out, and I think it's because they're locking these people up. | ||
| And I think that was Trump. | ||
| That might be specific to Portland, though. | ||
| It absolutely is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But also think about, Trump offered federal assistance to all of these jurisdictions, and he didn't violate the Constitution to force his way in. | ||
| So in my opinion, when you look at Joe Biden negotiating and saying, we're going to do these things, you look at the Democrats actually favoring the protests and some of the rioters, like the AG in Oregon specifically sued on their behalf. | ||
| Why would I assume Joe Biden's coming in and he's going to actually do anything related to law enforcement? | ||
| I think he's going to say, what do you want so that you vote for me for a second term? | ||
| Or more importantly, Kamala, because I don't know if Joe Biden will make it to a second term. | ||
| Trump, on the other hand, is going to be like, put me in and we'll send in the feds. | ||
| And we'll, you know, I don't I don't think he'll do the insurrection act. | ||
| That would be bold. | ||
| But I also I think I think it's a fair point that was brought up. | ||
| You brought it up earlier. | ||
| I think, you know, if Joe Biden won, many people might actually stop. | ||
| But my issue now is why would Antifa stop if Joe Biden won? | ||
| They've actually, you could argue that because he's compromising with them, you know, give them what they want and they'll actually stop burning things down. | ||
| But that to me is scarier. | ||
| Yeah, I mean some number of them will never stop because that's just what they do. | ||
| They're professional kook activists, fringe people. | ||
| Just like a certain number of the Proud Boys will still do things. | ||
| But some of the violence, a good portion of the violence we've seen is opportunistic crime being committed that just happens when law and order breaks down. | ||
| So with things get a little bit more normal, those people just don't do those things anymore because you can't get away with it and it doesn't occur to them. | ||
| That needs to sink in. | ||
| And I think that's just going to happen at some point. | ||
| Part of this summer is people's emotional and mental and psychological outrage over what we've all been put through in terms of the lockdown. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Even some of this crazy cancel culture stuff we've been talking about, like what's happened in the New York Times. | ||
| This is people who are forced to work in a virtual office. | ||
| Their frustrations that you would bury between coworkers is spilling out into the open because you're not interacting with people in a normal human way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we under-discuss how much of the craziness we've seen this summer is because right now human beings are being put through something that is horrible and unnatural and against every instinct they have to socialize and have fun and to some degree get along with people. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| And it's really bad and we don't talk about that effect enough. | ||
| I mean, I definitely talked about it. | ||
| I think the mainstream media didn't so much, that early on, you have this pent-up rage from a lockdown, unemployment, panic, fear, and just anger at the system. | ||
| Give them a reason, and they will go out and burn stuff down. | ||
| That's probably why we had the mass looting across the country for that week. | ||
| Everything kind of chilled out and now it's more of a, you know, pockets of far leftists popping up and, you know, I mean, when you look at, it's hard to say, when you look at places like Pittsburgh, which is not a historical protest place, but you have that big march where they went and harassed some restaurant owners. | ||
| They did this in D.C. | ||
| Yeah, right, yeah. | ||
| Then you had the Black Lives Matter people getting into a shootout with people in rural Pennsylvania. | ||
| Did you hear about that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| So I see all of these things. | ||
| But crime just increases too, like air conditioning decreases crime. | ||
| When people are not frustrated and angry, they do less violent stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| That's why winter is always really boring. | ||
| Nobody wants to go out in the snow. | ||
| Summer always gets crazy. | ||
| So we're seeing that effect to a degree. | ||
| Interestingly, with the election happening over winter, there may be weird dry periods of just like You know, what I would compare as two dogs on the other side of a fence screaming, which is basically people on the internet saying, ooh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And next year when it warms up, though, I think it's going to be, I think it'll just be, it'll be nuts. | ||
| I don't know what we're going to see, man. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| But I think the potential for violence is worse than it's ever been. | ||
| Especially, look, we've seen a Trump supporter killed. | ||
| Another guy tried, they say he tried to kill him. | ||
| I tried to be careful. | ||
| He ran him over. | ||
| He rammed into him with a truck and the guy went flying in the air, hit his head with, got serious injuries. | ||
| Then you had the Kenosha stuff, which I think was self-defense. | ||
| A lot of people are arguing that. | ||
| The left doesn't see it that way. | ||
| I think the potential for violence is just... I don't know, man. | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| All right, let's see. | ||
| We got Neon Lights. | ||
| He says, Hey Tim, I've been sticking to your channels for news in 2016, and I've so far found you to be one of the most reliable not to twist things out of proportion. | ||
| Thanks for being amazing for the past four years for me. | ||
| Welcome to the Trump train, friend. | ||
| It's an interesting comment, especially considering I'm more bullish on civil war and you're more bearish. | ||
| So, you know, this individual seems to trust me. | ||
| I wonder which one of us is going to be right. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Yeah, we'll see how it plays out. | ||
| My political predictions have been very good this year. | ||
| Not my pandemic predictions. | ||
| I thought people would not live with this lockdown madness and would rebel against it. | ||
| That was wrong. | ||
| But I said from the start, I said it will be Biden. | ||
| I said Biden or maybe Bernie. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm sorry, for the primary. | ||
| I also think he'll win the general. | ||
| Biden will? | ||
| Yeah, since the pandemic. | ||
| If you had asked me in January, I would have said Trump was going to be re-elected. | ||
| I still don't know, man. | ||
| I'm just reading the polls. | ||
| The polls are not inaccurate. | ||
| Pundits' interpretations of the polls are inaccurate. | ||
| So that's a fair point to an extent. | ||
| Politico actually wrote an article saying no pollster has figured out how to actually track non-college educated whites who voted for Trump. | ||
| So they're missing from the polls. | ||
| But what a lot of people don't understand about the polls being wrong is that most of them were within the margin of error. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that the predictions about what was going to happen were completely wrong. | ||
| Well, and then you see like it says, OK, Trump right now, Nate Silver will say Biden has a 70 percent chance of winning. | ||
| Well, that means if you had the election 10 times, three times Trump would win. | ||
| People look at that like, oh, that means Biden's going to win. | ||
| It's impossible for Trump. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then they're like, how could you have lied to me when when Trump wins? | ||
| But that's you're not thinking about how statistics work. | ||
| I don't think Biden's going to handle a debate. | ||
| He's going to do terribly in the debates. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| We saw him debate already. | ||
| But this matters. | ||
| Biden's performance in the debates was easily the worst of any of the candidates up there, and he still won the Democratic primary nomination handily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the heck? | |
| That's so creepy, dude. | ||
| Oh, he's gonna come. | ||
| Bucko's gonna jump on the table. | ||
| Oh, the cat's coming. | ||
| Yeah, because he knows we're over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's true. | |
| He's gonna start yelling at us. | ||
| Our kitty clock. | ||
| We got a couple. | ||
| We'll read a couple more Super Chats. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Yep, there he's screaming. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| There's a cat on the table. | ||
| The BLM was Russian propaganda, page 22 Mueller report, and it was that successful that the | ||
| American cultural Marxists took over. | ||
| Read the Quillette article, The Challenge of Marxism. | ||
| It's informative but scary. | ||
| We have a serious fight before us to maintain freedom, the American way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very cool. | |
| Mark G says, Tim, the prison island has been tried many times. | ||
| Look what it spawned, an authoritarian country called Australia. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| Dave Maggiacomo. | ||
| I'm an ex-Democrat based on your great journalism. | ||
| Keep up the great work, Tim. | ||
| The silent majority is becoming more prevalent. | ||
| However, do you believe that the uninformed majority and negative partisanship could become a factor in the election? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, negative partisanship. | ||
| That's what the Democrats are banking on entirely right now. | ||
| They don't care about Biden. | ||
| They want people to go and vote against Trump. 100%. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Funny or Die? | ||
| says the right did raise red flags decades ago about public schools and | ||
| colleges. They were mocked for it. It's time to acknowledge that they were right. | ||
| You know what's really funny? I'll mention this too. There was a... have you ever seen | ||
| Prop 8 the musical? I don't think so. From 2009. It was from Funny or Die and it's a | ||
| bunch of leftist celebrities singing like in favor of gay marriage and | ||
| And one of the things that the fake right-wing group says is that you have to oppose, you know, gay marriage, otherwise they'll teach kids about sodomy in school. | ||
| And then the left-wing group says, but that's a lie! | ||
| And they say, so what? | ||
| It works, so we don't care. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| That's actually funny, because if you Google search that, they literally did. | ||
| And like, with only a few years, they were teaching kids about... In sex education, about sodomy. | ||
| Like, they were. | ||
| I don't know why it was like... Anyway, the point is, the mockery of the right was quite literally... Yes, that literally happened. | ||
| Zach Kessel says, if Facebook is so great... Oh, I read that one already, alright. | ||
| Alright, let's just jump down and then I think we'll do a couple more. | ||
| Jimmy Sommer says, hey Tim, have you seen the first episode of Watchmen HBO? | ||
| The cops have to hide their identities and they're all wearing masks. | ||
| It's eerily similar to what's starting to happen in the U.S. | ||
| now. | ||
| It was a great show. | ||
| Did you like the show? | ||
| I thought it was so, so good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, I can't recommend it enough. | ||
| I didn't watch it. | ||
| It was really, really good. | ||
| It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with Watchmen. | ||
| No, it's subtle. | ||
| It takes its time to really reveal the connection to the original comics. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| I recommend it. | ||
| I tried watching the first episode and I was like, I don't know. | ||
| The guy who plays Ozymandias is so good. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| He's the voice of Scar from the original. | ||
| Yeah, he's a cool dude. | ||
| He's a cool dude. | ||
| It just didn't seem like when I watched the first episode and I was just like, I don't know what this is. | ||
| The first episode is not watchable at all. | ||
| You gotta get three in and then it's clear. | ||
| It's rough. | ||
| They cancelled it though, didn't they? | ||
| They didn't want to work on it anymore. | ||
| Well, they just finished the season and decided not to have another one. | ||
| It really stands on its own. | ||
| Gareth Green says, Robby doesn't understand how bad social media is. | ||
| But Pool Sunbay doesn't understand the power of the free market. | ||
| If they ban all dissenters, they will create unstoppable demand for competition. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And if you haven't already, smash that like button to help support the channel, but we're getting- we'll do one more Super Chat. | ||
| I don't know about Trump winning. | ||
| I'm worried. | ||
| I just really doubt that many people are waking up. | ||
| It's all happening late. | ||
| The media is so monolithic and reps always get complacent. | ||
| Look at articles on lack of campaign funds. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| Apparently now they're saying that Trump is going broke. | ||
| I don't know if that's true though. | ||
| It doesn't matter, though. | ||
| Hillary Clinton wildly outspent Trump, and it didn't matter. | ||
| I don't think the spending matters all that much. | ||
| I've become very skeptical of, like, you can spend your way to some political outcome. | ||
| And people tend to freak out over, ooh, campaigns have too much money or too much money in politics. | ||
| Maybe it's a problem. | ||
| It seems impossible to prevent. | ||
| It seems like the more you try to prevent it, the more you just, like, entrench the class of politicos who better understand how to circumvent these rules. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Um, and also, you should just let people donate, because it doesn't necessarily always work. | ||
| I'll tell you this, man. | ||
| I'm getting that sweet, sweet Biden and Trump bucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The more they spend on these campaign ads, it's ridiculous. | ||
| This is gonna be probably one of the biggest spending seasons, I guess. | ||
| And so, all, like, YouTubers are probably, like, freaking out, because CPMs are starting. | ||
| Oh, because you sell ads? | ||
| Yeah, well, YouTube just does it automatically, basically. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| So it's like, all of a sudden you're making more money, you're like, wow, I have no idea why, and then people are like, oh, it's because there's a Biden ad on your video. | ||
| I'm like, ah, it must have been expensive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, we're a little bit over, so we're going to wrap it up there. | ||
| Do you want to just mention your Twitter account real quick? | ||
| Yep, you can follow me at RobbySoave, and read my work at Reason.com, which is Reason Magazine. | ||
| And, of course, you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Parler at TimCast. | ||
| And check out my other channels, youtube.com slash TimCastNews and slash TimCast. | ||
| And, of course, you can follow at Sour Patch Lids, the producer. | ||
| That's Sour Patch L-Y-D-S. | ||
| We do the show Monday through Friday live at 8 p.m. | ||
| There's a cat sitting on the table in front of me right now because he's mad because we've been spending too much time talking. | ||
| But yeah, subscribe, hit the like button, hit the notification bell, and we will see you all tomorrow where Will Chamberlain is going to be joining us. | ||
| And he's got very different opinions. | ||
| You're going to get the exact opposite perspective. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Pro-Trump, you know, social media is a civil right. | ||
| But thanks for hanging out. |
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