Oct. 27, 2020 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
04:05:22
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unidentified
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you you | |
| so as we are getting ready to go live where we're initially planning on | ||
| starting by talking about the riots that erupted in Philadelphia last night | ||
| because I covered this earlier And as you know, I still live there. | ||
| We've been setting up the new studio in the new space, but I was literally just back in the Philly area, in the Philly burbs, the other day. | ||
| And so chaos, riots, looting, it erupted. | ||
| There was a pickup truck rammed into, was driving at a high rate of speed, went through a row of cops. | ||
| A bunch of the cops jumped out of the way, but one got run over, broke her leg, got taken to the hospital. | ||
| So it's pretty serious stuff. | ||
| But as we were doing this, we got breaking news that the Trump campaign website got hacked. | ||
| And I was like, that's breaking right now. | ||
| We probably should talk about it. | ||
| And then it turns out like nothing really happened. | ||
| It was just like, so we'll briefly talk about it, I suppose, because I thought it was very, very significant. | ||
| But there's a ton of people already in the chat because we are joined today by libertarian, socialist, anti-fascist, Vosh? | ||
| Yeah, just about Vosh. | ||
| Hey, how you doing? | ||
|
unidentified
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Vosh. | |
| Vosh, yeah, there we go. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And look, we had Enrique Tarri of the Proud Boys. | ||
| I said we'll get somebody from the left in. | ||
| It's very difficult to get a lot of people on the left, so I appreciate you coming in and hanging out. | ||
| We've been hanging out and talking. | ||
| I think we're probably gonna have some arguments about the riots, about a ton of stuff. | ||
| But I just want to say, to anybody who thinks that we're going to have like a Bloodsports-style debate, you're not correct. | ||
| We don't do this. | ||
| And so I'm just going to tell you right now, fair warning, you're mostly all going to be dissatisfied. | ||
| I didn't bring on Enrique Tarrio to literally just attack him and get into a big debate with him. | ||
| I ask him some questions, I challenge him on some of his ideas, and mostly just try to understand him. | ||
| We're going to do the same thing with Vosh. | ||
| Vosh, right? | ||
| I'm pronouncing it right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, excellent. | ||
| And I think we're going to have a good insight into just a lot of the things we don't normally get to hear from from, I guess, leftists. | ||
| Is that appropriate? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Real Blood Sports is the upcoming me versus Enrique Tarrio conversation. | ||
| Obviously, that one will be, you know. | ||
| I mean, I'd be down if you wanted to have a debate. | ||
| Because I don't debate people. | ||
| I'll have a discussion. | ||
| We can talk about stuff. | ||
| Enrique actually mentioned, I think, debating with you. | ||
| Real? | ||
| When he was here, was it Vaush that he wanted to debate? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Probably Hassan's the... I know we look so similar, but... Yeah, well, I'm terrified of flying, so we'll pace him out one at a time, but I'm not principally opposed. | ||
| Try and have your mic, like, right in your mouth and... Gotcha, right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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There we go. | |
| There we go. | ||
| Nailing it. | ||
| Getting better. | ||
| So, so, just, like, because the story just broke, I don't want to, I don't want to just ignore it, but apparently it's like a big nothing burger. | ||
| But I do want to show this real quick. | ||
| Before we do, Welcome to the show, everybody. | ||
| This is the Tim Castellaw Podcast. | ||
| Of course, Ian. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yo! | |
| You know, we got Ian here. | ||
| What it is! | ||
| Lydia is producing, as most of you are aware, and I am Tim Poole. | ||
| And as you all know, Vosh is our guest. | ||
| It's Vosh V. So, Vosh V. We're gonna argue about a lot of stuff, probably, and we'll talk about news. | ||
| But hit the like button, subscribe, notification bell. | ||
| We do the show Monday through Friday, live at 8 p.m. | ||
| And just so everybody knows, we're totally down to have literally anybody come into the studio and have a debate. | ||
| I know there are some people who are like, Tim, why won't you have the far right on? | ||
| I'm like, Who said we wouldn't? | ||
| No one said we wouldn't. | ||
| I interviewed a Soviet general in Ukraine during the You're My Dance stuff. | ||
| I interviewed a Brazilian gang leader. | ||
| There are some limits. | ||
| I'm not going to bring some lunatic serial killer into my house. | ||
| What about good content though? | ||
| It would be great. | ||
| He's strapped to the chair screaming, I'll kill you! | ||
| And I was like, that's interesting. | ||
| Why do you want to kill me? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Before I came on, they were actually, there was a possum outside they were going to bring into my play. | ||
| So I'm not special. | ||
|
unidentified
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It really is. | |
| And that also would be good content. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Great stuff. | ||
| I like the way you think. | ||
| Well, let's, let's, let's, let's first do this. | ||
| Uh, you know, this is a breaking story. | ||
| Uh, Trump's campaign website is seized by hackers who claim to have evidence that proves his criminal involvement with foreign actors to manipulate the 2020 election. | ||
| Of course, as of right now, his website is back to normal, we checked. | ||
| And so I saw this and I was like, whoa, this is like, you know, something's gonna come, let's launch with this, and then it's just a big nothing burger, these things happen. | ||
| But the gist of the story is, his campaign website was seized by Hackers Tuesday. | ||
| A message reading, this site was seized appeared briefly on the homepage of DonaldJTrump.com before the website was taken offline completely just after 7.20pm. | ||
| The message continued that the world has had enough of fake news spreaded daily by the president. | ||
| It is time to allow the world to know the truth. | ||
| The hackers behind the stunt claimed to have compromised multiple of the president's devices. | ||
| Seems like grammatical errors aren't unique to the hackers. | ||
| Daily Mail, come on, get a copy of it. | ||
| That gave them full access to Trump and his relatives, along with access to confidential information. | ||
| Strictly classified information is exposed, proving that the Trump government is involved in the origins of the coronavirus, the Post read. | ||
| We have evidence that completely discredits Mr. Trump as president, proving his criminal involvement in cooperation with foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections. | ||
| The U.S. | ||
| citizens have no choice. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a nothing burger. | ||
| I almost feel kind of dumb that we even decided to bring it up because I was like, it was like breaking news and I'm like, oh wow, we got, we got what's going on. | ||
| I think you've got it though. | ||
| Same typos in the actual Daily Mail writing. | ||
| Maybe they did it. | ||
| Daily Mail needs to hire some copy editors. | ||
| They have grammatical errors all the time. | ||
| The inside scoop. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That makes perfect sense. | ||
| We've busted. | ||
| Nah, you know. | ||
| They're making the news. | ||
| I gotta be honest. | ||
| Daily Mail needs to hire some copy editors. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| So like, you know, they have grammatical errors all the time. | ||
| That's so wild. | ||
| Of all the outlets, you know, there's that. | ||
| But we, so look, that's the gist of it. | ||
| So, Tim, was it true what they were saying, that they were trying to blame Trump for the COVID crisis? | ||
| What's going on there? | ||
| What, the hackers? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I heard. | ||
| I heard that they were trying to blame Trump for this, and they were like, this is a big deal. | ||
| I mentioned earlier, is the U.S. | ||
| government and the Chinese government, are all these governments working together to create a bioweapon in a Chinese lab that then got out? | ||
| That's like a movie script, dude. | ||
| No, I'm 100% behind it. | ||
| Yes, I like it. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
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Taff. | |
| The bad grammar kind of leaves, like, involved in the origins? | ||
| I mean, I think Trump flubbed the COVID response, sure, but involved in creating coronavirus? | ||
| I don't know, like, that'd be a pretty sensational claim, right? | ||
| It's pretty ridiculous. | ||
| Maybe they saw Borat, they were inspired, you know, creative flourish, but I don't know, maybe... Could explain why the grammar was wrong. | ||
| They made it, put it in China so they could blame China. | ||
| I've heard that it wasn't just a Chinese company working out of that lab. | ||
| Where did you hear this? | ||
| I read it on the internet. | ||
| I read that some company that Fauci was involved with was working at the lab in Wuhan. | ||
| I don't have the documents in front of me. | ||
| I give up. | ||
| I met Fauci. | ||
| He admitted to it, though. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, snap. | ||
| So let's dive in. | ||
| You just said you think Trump flubbed the response. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
| I think, I mean, one of the problems is we don't actually have a metric for knowing what success looks like. | ||
| Every pandemic response is unique, you know? | ||
| Would Hillary Clinton have done better or worse? | ||
| The fact of the matter is, America is its own country. | ||
| No other country is a perfect comparison. | ||
| We also have a very decentralized government. | ||
| States are given a lot of autonomy when it comes to responses. | ||
| Which can be a downside when it comes to stuff like this. | ||
| I think there were a lot of things that he did wrong, from a sort of habitual tendency to downplay the severity of the virus. | ||
| We know, of course, that he was informed of its severity but didn't want people to panic, which seems like it was an effort to keep stock investors from sort of, you know, hard-selling, which may or may not have worked. | ||
| We know, of course, there was a crash later anyway. | ||
| But the thing that bothers me the most about the whole response is that I don't actually think there's a metric that Republicans would, like a line, where they would say, that's too many deaths. | ||
| Because right now it's at 225,000-ish. | ||
| And I feel like, and Trump's saying, well, you know, they said it was going to be 2 million, which was the estimate if nothing was done. | ||
| So what if it had hit a million? | ||
| Would they say, well, that's half of what was expected? | ||
| If it hit 2 million, would Trump have said, well, that's exactly what they said was going to happen? | ||
| To be fair, you could say the same thing about the Democrats. | ||
| Or, you know, if it's right versus left, the Democrats would not have accepted any number at all. | ||
| Oh, I mean, if they were in power, I'd be perfectly willing to criticize for them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But right now, I mean, we this is I mean, Trump has had his hands have covered this whole thing. | ||
| It's true, but it feels like then the real issue is do you like Trump or not? | ||
| I mean, look, 225,000 is really, really bad. | ||
| It's horrifying, right? | ||
| And even Trump has said that. | ||
| We don't know what it could have been or would have been. | ||
| There's no metric for success, which you pointed out. | ||
| So it's either do you trust him or do you like him or do you not? | ||
| Well, there are things that he did that I'm reasonably sure like a Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And by the way, please, everyone, I don't like Hillary Clinton. | ||
| We can write that on my tombstone. | ||
| What about Joe Biden? | ||
| I'll admit, I do like him more than Hillary Clinton. | ||
| I think he is marginally more likable than Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Hillary Clinton is the bottom of the barrel, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right. | |
| So we're only nowhere to go but up. | ||
| So with Trump, when it comes to stuff like, for example, downplaying the severity of the virus, I feel like Democrats would have done that to an extent. | ||
| But when it comes to stuff like habitually like ignoring masks or like sort of arguing with Fauci back and forth to the point where Fauci now needs a security detail to go in his runs because there are a lot of far-right groups who think that he's trying to lock down the whole country with him sort of | ||
| promoting the anti-lockdown protests, saying they were taking back their respective states, which | ||
| has led to additional threats of violence. | ||
| I feel like stuff like that refers to a particular kind of far-right populism that the Democrats | ||
| don't have the ability to tap into, you know? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I don't think the Democrats really have the same base of fanatical support in the way | ||
| that the Trump supporters do. | ||
| They have, now there are like K-Hive lunatics, and those people exist and they're real, but | ||
| I feel like their antagonism is more directed at sort of chauvinism or anti-progressivism | ||
| or just against any candidate their preferred candidate doesn't like. | ||
| But this like hardcore, ultra-nationalist rejection of a national response to COVID, that I think is a particular to the Trump fandom. | ||
| What groups? | ||
| Like what right-wing groups are engaging in this kind of violence and going after people? | ||
| Well, the violence is fairly... I mean, violence, like political violence, is always going to be a fairly small percentage of the actual harm done here. | ||
| No political group could ever do harm to rival the 225,000 dead, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But we tend to wipe that stuff under the rug. | ||
| This is one of the criticisms that I have as a libertarian socialist, like, with the general system that we live in, you know? | ||
| We'll say, like, news media will focus a terrorist attack seven dead. | ||
| That's horrible, of course. | ||
| But, at the same time, you know, Pharmaceutical companies are pushing doctors to give unneeded opiates to people, and in the same period of time, 13,000 people might die. | ||
| But that's a statistic. | ||
| That's not a news story. | ||
| That just keeps happening. | ||
| So what I'm worried about isn't the actual political violence. | ||
| It's about the attitudes we've taken that have allowed COVID to continue to this point. | ||
| Just today, Trump said, as one of his campaign achievements prior to the election, conquering COVID-19. | ||
| On Saturday, highest recorded number of cases in the history of the country in a single day. | ||
| Horrifying. | ||
| And Mike Pence has said, I think he said during the debate, he tweeted it and deleted the tweet, that Trump locked everything down, which is not the case. | ||
| There's a lot of complicated stuff here, because we're going now from COVID, we're getting into political violence. | ||
| So I think the simple point I can make, which I did, I guess, is when it comes to the COVID response, there's nothing to base it off of. | ||
| For me, I'm kind of like, OK, well, early on, Trump took action, very early on, like it was in January, to form the task force to suspend most, to restrict most travel. | ||
| There were some cases in which people could travel from China eventually to Europe. | ||
| And Anthony Fauci in March said no one could have done it better. | ||
| So that was the early response. | ||
| Dr. Fauci said, don't wear masks. | ||
| We had, who was the Surgeon General guy? | ||
| Don't wear masks. | ||
| They both did. | ||
| They tweeted about it. | ||
| Fauci is now saying it was a mistake for him to say not to wear masks. | ||
| There's a video that the Republicans put out where you've got Kamala Harris and Joe Biden criticizing things Trump has said, and then they show that was Fauci was the one advising, like Fauci was the one saying it publicly. | ||
| So, in this capacity, I've been covering this since it started, and I remember Anthony Fauci saying, Trump is doing the best, I don't think anyone could do anything better. | ||
| Now we're several months on, we're getting close to election, and all of a sudden everyone's saying Trump has | ||
| done a miserable job. | ||
| To be fair, it's not all of a sudden. | ||
| I mean, there have been points where Fauci's—and I disagree, by the way. | ||
| I think initially Fauci's arguing you don't need to use masks was— | ||
| I mean, the logic he used there was that he was trying to disincentivize the purchase of PPE that otherwise needed to | ||
| go to medical professionals. | ||
| I remember. | ||
| And I think it's irresponsible to put that out saying masks aren't effective or we don't know masks are effective | ||
| I think a more responsible way would have been to sort of implore Americans to be responsible with their consumerism | ||
| You know the weird you the weirdest thing about it is though early on conservatives are the ones like I'm gonna | ||
| go buy masks I was getting messaged by people like it don't listen to | ||
| Fauci go buy your mask Trarians yeah, but it's but it's both like you had you had | ||
| Democrats saying don't wear masks and the conservatives saying wear masks | ||
| Then it flipped at some point and now it's the Democrats or I should say the left or whatever it is | ||
| I don't think it was that unanimous I think that for the most part people were on board with | ||
| wearing masks and there was a brief period where we were very | ||
| Concerned about making sure there was enough materials available for the for the you know for the hospitals and | ||
| for the nurses and what-have-you But even early on, and Fauci's in a difficult position here, because I have a strong feeling that if Fauci was too critical of the president, he would be replaced for somebody less so. | ||
| Like Dr. Atlas? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So if Fauci praises the president, there's kind of like that, okay, how much of this is like the kid getting patted on the shoulder by the teacher, and how much of this is like a real political assessment, you know? | ||
| I don't know, I just think it's a degree of skepticism that we have to apply. | ||
| With regards to the early response though, with Trump though, we know that he defunded the CDC, he eliminated Obama's pandemic response team, he pulled the 44 researchers out of Wuhan who were supposed to investigate the origins of that virus, and while he did stop travel from China quickly, he did basically nothing for the next month before stopping it from Europe, by which point I think we now know it was pretty much too late. | ||
| What should he have done? | ||
| I think that he says this now, like, Biden called me xenophobic for locking down China. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| Biden called him xenophobic, comma, but also... But he was responding to Trump's tweet. | ||
| Sure, but that's because Trump is pretty xenophobic when it comes to China. | ||
| You can lock down China without it being like this weird nationalist condemnation of China, you know? | ||
| You can just say like, oh, they're going through their own stuff right now. | ||
| Well, what could he have done? | ||
| I think obviously a lockdown from Europe faster would have been preferable. | ||
| I think, regardless of what Fauci said, you know, once it was known that masks were available for everyone, that the PPE line was secure, he should have been very on board with promoting their use. | ||
| Instead of like, Tacitly supporting the anti-lockdown, anti-masker protests with his tweets. | ||
| And most importantly, I think he should have laid out a national plan to help states, to guide states, to give them money necessary. | ||
| He did. | ||
| To help them. | ||
| Well, he kind of held it over some of their heads. | ||
| It was like... Well, there was the three-phase plan that he launched earlier in the year of, like, what to do and how to do it. | ||
| And then he did this press conference where it was like, phase one, phase two, phase three. | ||
| Here's what you need. | ||
| I'm the president, I can't control the states, now it's up to the governors. | ||
| Sure, but he can though. | ||
| Like, you can do a national mandate, you can order national distribution of resources, and it feels like, and if we get down to the dates it gets particular here, but there were times when it felt like he was like blackmailing states with support, like, oh yeah, I'll give you this, I'll give you this, your hospital's need, I'll give you these resources, you know, but you're doing so terribly lately. | ||
| Just recently he said, I think this is one of the debates, you'll have to forgive me if I don't remember the exact source, he said that He didn't care so much about aid for some of the stimulus deals because they would have gone to high-crime Democrat cities. | ||
| And what this suggests to me is the partisanship of a president who is going to give preferential treatment to bases of support that he knows will vote for him doesn't really care so much about other groups. | ||
| I respect your point. | ||
| I think it's complicated. | ||
| In terms of Trump's ability to accurately and charismatically convey an idea, I would say he lacks that substantially. | ||
| But one of the issues with giving money to a lot of these states, whether he's legally allowed to do it, there's going to be a lawsuit. | ||
| You've got these jurisdictions, because we'll now move into sort of the political violence stuff, and we can get into what's going on in Philadelphia. | ||
| You've got these jurisdictions that are cutting people loose over and over and over again, and the riots keep going. | ||
| So why should I, as somebody who is, you know, I pay taxes in a state not having these problems, why should I have those federal tax dollars go to a state that's just dumping it into a sinkhole? | ||
| So now what we have is we have states that have a budget crisis, notably New York is a really good example. | ||
| Cuomo said, I believe it was last year, God help us if the rich leave. | ||
| Then you get Ocasio-Cortez leading a protest in the financial district, which triggers, I guess it was a catalyst for Amazon saying we don't want to bring our 20,000 to 40,000 jobs here, which is $30 billion over a decade. | ||
| So now you've got New York City in a budget crisis and then they go to Trump and say bail us out. | ||
| And then Trump says, no. | ||
| And particularly because you've defunded a billion dollars from your police. | ||
| You had widespread rioting and looting that wasn't taken care of. | ||
| You've used taxpayer dollars to put a political message in the street. | ||
| Why should federal tax dollars go towards what New York is doing when they're acting extremely irresponsibly? | ||
| I think there are a lot of issues being conflated here. | ||
| First of all, if we just look broadly at like a state level, we know it's generally red states who underperform when it comes to the investment they need from the federal government as opposed to what they pay in taxes. | ||
| In large part because red states tend to have a smaller portion of their population in big cities, which tend to be more efficient economically. | ||
| But then like you say, so New York's in a tiff, as it is, undeniably. | ||
| And like Ocasio-Cortez and the marches and the protests, the BLM protests have caused an amount of damage which is infinitesimal compared to like Say, for example, the amount of money that the New York | ||
| City Police Department spends every year on settlements from police brutality or other | ||
| mis- about a billion, a quarter billion a year, which exceeds the damage done by any of the | ||
| protests. | ||
| And that's an every year thing, not an exorbitant, you know, like once in a half century civil | ||
| rights protest thing. | ||
| When we're talking about the reason why New York is struggling right now, it's undeniably | ||
| because of the impact of COVID. | ||
| And I mean, that's hurting everyone. | ||
| New York is a massive city, which means that its supply lines and its industries are going to be more on the razor's edge when it comes to their ability to support the population. | ||
| Like, a farm in a bad economy can hold itself for a while, but 8 million people in a dense urban network. | ||
| Needs a lot of support and I just when it comes to like how why should I help these people? | ||
| I mean, I understand the frustration I guess I mean I grew up in California Hold on not not so much. | ||
| Why should I help these people? | ||
| I totally understand people of New York need help for sure It's more of if I give money to the city to the government Are they going to light it on fire? | ||
| Is it actually going to go to help the people or are they just burning money? | ||
| Well, I mean, I haven't looked at their budget registry for the past... I imagine that most of it goes to people, but I mean, when it comes to... You said defunding the police. | ||
| I mean, that would mean there's less money going towards very high, you know, powerful institutions in that city. | ||
| So I feel like, if anything, that would aid in the responsible allocation of those funds. | ||
| What we're talking about right now, ultimately, is how much do you trust city governments to support their people and my answer unequivocally would be I absolutely do not but I don't think the solution to that is denying them funds. | ||
| I think that's the solution to that is a grassroots organization or network or uprising that tries to make our government more accountable to its own people. | ||
| Yeah, like a blockchain or some sort of database that shows where the money went. | ||
| I, I, it's the transparency in our cities, like absolute 100%. Everyone should believe in that. | ||
| I'm, I, I don't think these cities have done a good job at all. | ||
| I think we are seeing a lot of problems with gross mismanagement, and even before COVID and before the riots, New York was in trouble. | ||
| That's why I brought up Cuomo saying, you know, God help us if the rich leave. | ||
| Doesn't that suck, though? | ||
| Like they're doing a terrible job? | ||
| Well, I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| Again, this could be my libertarian leaning here. | ||
| I just don't like the fact that cities, in order to function properly, have to suck up to big corporations in the way they currently do. | ||
| Now, I understand, of course, business is a part of how cities operate. | ||
| That's how life is. | ||
| But it feels very often that politicians are more interested in levying the money that they get to suck up to these corporations than they are using it for people. | ||
| Stadiums being a big, big, big part of that, you know? | ||
| I don't like Amazon, man. | ||
| I agree with you for the most part. | ||
| Politicians sucking up to corporations is a problem. | ||
| It's a lot of what we're seeing now and we've seen over the past several decades, which has led to the erosion of the manufacturing base in this country, but I digress. | ||
| Where does the money come from? | ||
| You know, the government doesn't... it runs the post office, I guess. | ||
| What other, like, actual services does the government have in terms of giving a service, like, and making money? | ||
| It's the post office, I guess? | ||
| Apart from taxes. | ||
| So, the government doesn't generate revenue in the sense that, like, a business... the government taxes the existing market. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think only the post office actually creates an exchange medium for the government where people can exchange currency or whatever. | ||
| Maybe I'm forgetting something obvious. | ||
| Tolls? | ||
| You're talking about the federal government? | ||
| What I'm saying is like, if Amazon comes into New York, they're bringing currency in that people then trade with Amazon, and then the government takes pieces of that. | ||
| And then it says, we're going to allocate, we're going to take this much, and then we're going to allocate it to fixing certain things. | ||
| And I got no problem with that. | ||
| But that's why they need Amazon. | ||
| Or they need these companies. | ||
| But ultimately, it is the people who vote politicians in, not corporations. | ||
| Because we don't treat other interest groups the same way. | ||
| For example, here's another thing essential to the functioning of a society. | ||
| Teachers. | ||
| Teachers, we literally need them. | ||
| Absolutely we do. | ||
| And yet, teachers unions, while powerful in slim areas, teachers are constantly getting their budgets cut, schools are constantly getting defunded. | ||
| Despite this essential element of a functioning society being something that we need to function in a modern tech-based economy, they get like no relative power. | ||
| Corporations get everything when it comes to the delegation of interest from politicians, you know? | ||
| I think you're right, but I think we need... One of the problems with government is that, what do you do when it goes bad? | ||
| When the government programs are no longer working properly? | ||
| When the teachers are no longer teaching? | ||
| When the schools are broken? | ||
| Do we just keep putting money into it? | ||
| Keep spending tax and tax and tax? | ||
| Or do we finally cut it off and say, we gotta shut it down, turn it off, turn it back on again. | ||
| Because whatever we're doing isn't working. | ||
| Sure, but denying New York City money during a pandemic isn't going to functionally change the way its government operates. | ||
| It's only going to hurt people. | ||
| I think that, and also just from a functional perspective, it also bolsters democratic political will. | ||
| If you're not interested in seeing that happen, seeing the president, like, hold his hands up and let cities, like, wilt because of some presumption of, you know, poor city management. | ||
| It's certainly not just New York, you know. | ||
| In fact, when it comes to actual, like, percentage of wealth that goes back to its citizenry in a meaningful way, I think New York is fairly in line with a lot of other large cities, including some Republican-run ones. | ||
| We don't have those discussions about those cities. | ||
| How are they comparable to Republicans? | ||
| With regards to these cities, like, in terms of the proportion of the money that goes into the city and how it's used, how it's distributed, New York isn't like some magic sinkhole. | ||
| It's a very large city, but there are other cities that are in comparable spots. | ||
| I think the big challenge, I guess, is Trump is looking at it from the perspective of—and I can only assume, I don't know—why is a citizen of Wyoming going to pay for what New York is doing? | ||
| Do you know what happened with Cuomo and the nursing homes? | ||
| Yeah, but we've been paying for Wyoming for like a century, though. | ||
| Yeah, but there's like, it's way, way, way less. | ||
| Because there's less people in Wyoming, I mean... Right, right, right. | ||
| So the issue is, Andrew Cuomo puts sick people in nursing homes. | ||
| People die. | ||
| I'm not gonna defend that. | ||
| No, no, right, but like, the problems were caused by them. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Sure, but... And, they're like... | ||
| I'll be honest Wyoming right you could say the same thing like well | ||
| Why is Wyoming as a state so poor like why is does it have to take so much federal money compared to what earns in? | ||
| Taxes well, what are those governor's doing? What are those city mayor is doing? | ||
| We just never have those conversations every time it comes to talk about like the responsibility of city government | ||
| We always focus it on Well on Democratic run strongholds, which is in part | ||
| because cities tend to be more Democratic for a number of really complicated sociological reasons | ||
| But also because I don't think we want to acknowledge the fact that this poor city management thing isn't a Democrat | ||
| problem There's a functional rot in the way this country treats its citizens, and that operates everything from county all up to the national level. | ||
| And I wish when we had that conversation it was less Less partisan, less about getting owns for one or the other. | ||
| Because I can tell you, if Biden wins, and I hope he does, I hope to spend the next four years ruthlessly criticizing him and everyone who supports him on these same fundamental points. | ||
| Because they do matter to me. | ||
| And I agree, New York City is in a lot of ways a I want to ask you about Biden, but I feel like we kind of glossed over before. | ||
| You mentioned Fauci and threats of violence from the right and things like that. | ||
| So correct me if I'm wrong, the general idea you're saying is that Trump and the right have like fervent supporters of them that are ultra-nationalists and willing to be violent? | ||
| Yeah, I would say more so than the left, at least if we look at like FBI data and crime statistics and such. | ||
| So this past year, how many pro-Trump things have happened where pro-Trump groups have gone out and committed mass acts of violence or targeted people or killed people or anything like that? | ||
| I can't tell you if I remember the number. | ||
| I will say, though, it's not... I mean, the most thing that immediately comes to mind would probably be the Michigan governor kidnapping. | ||
| But those guys weren't right-wing. | ||
| Well, they were. | ||
| I mean, that one guy was... They said he was an anarchist, but he was posting memes about killing commies on Facebook, so he definitely wasn't left-wing. | ||
| Some of them were... I think this is one of the things where it gets really complicated. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But these guys are clearly just anti-government. | ||
| I mean... Sure, I will, but I mean... And then they went after a Democratic governor who was being very heavily targeted by the right, and they seemed to reflect... Doesn't mean they're right-wing. | ||
| Well, they were reflecting a lot of the rhetoric that was being used, and some of the people up there, I'm pretty sure they were MAGA hats. | ||
| I would need to look back They were at Black Lives Matter protests, actually, two of the guys. | ||
| So I'm not going to pretend those guys were left-wing. | ||
| They were just crazy anarchists. | ||
| As an anarchist, I thoroughly disavow. | ||
| They were ANCAPs. | ||
| They were a very different group. | ||
| I don't even know if they were ANCAPs, though. | ||
| They were marching with Black Lives Matter. | ||
| They clearly have some of their social values aligning with leftist groups. | ||
| Ideologically idiosyncratic, perhaps? | ||
| But I'm not going to call them leftists. | ||
| I think it's absurd. | ||
| The media says these are right-wing militias or whatever, and it's like, it's a bunch of crazy guys. | ||
| Like, look, you'll see a Trump rally. | ||
| The people in Trump rallies aren't going around attacking people. | ||
| Well, that's a little bit simplistic though, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, again, political violence, terrorist attacks, these always represent a very small fraction of actual deaths in a country at any given point in time. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Like, but since we started talking right now, probably you could chalk up 50, 100 people who've died in this country to some sort of pharmaceutical or military or something like that. | ||
| Opioids, man. | ||
| But I'll be waiting a while until I get to see the next news story about like a terrorist attack. | ||
| I just, when I'm concerned about far-right violence, I'm less concerned with like the individual terror attacks and more concerned with the fact that their actions seem to reflect a disposition prominent in the Republican Party. | ||
| Whereas with Antifa, for example, nobody in the Democratic Party is going to defend Antifa. | ||
| I'll defend Antifa, but they won't. | ||
| Has any Democrat disavowed Antifa? | ||
| Didn't Biden say he would arrest the anarchists and looters? | ||
| He has never said Antifa or Black Lives Matter extremists. | ||
| Well, what is a Black Lives Matter extremist? | ||
| The people in Portland who are wearing Black Lives Matter sweaters and waving flags and throwing explosives at cops. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| Well, I mean, I think he said anarchists and looters. | ||
| I'm pretty sure there's been firm disavowal of people who have committed violence against the Commons. | ||
| He's disavowed. | ||
| So he said, violence is wrong and, you know, these people should be arrested. | ||
| And then when asked, like, will you condemn, what about Antifa? | ||
| He doesn't say it. | ||
| Then he yells at the Proud Boys. | ||
| I think I would have to. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I remember him going over that. | ||
| Antifa doesn't have a base of support amongst the Democratic Party. | ||
| It tends to be very far-left people who hate the Democratic Party. | ||
| What about Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and their cohorts? | ||
| They're SOCDEMs. | ||
| I mean, they're left-leaning compared to America, but if you put them in Europe, they'd be considered center-left politicians. | ||
| I love them, don't get me wrong. | ||
| I mean, when you start talking about Europe and the US, left and right becomes rather | ||
| meaningless. | ||
| Because then are we talking about revolution versus status quo? | ||
| Are we talking about economic policy? | ||
| Are we talking about cultural policy? | ||
| I think it's fair to say that if you look at Ilhan Omar or AOC, they're probably not | ||
| on the revolutionary side of the argument, just judging by the career path they've chosen. | ||
| But the Antifa people are almost to a man going to be very far left, very anti-establishment | ||
| types who are probably as disgusted by the Democrats as they are the Republicans. | ||
| So, a lot of people like to bring up Antifa all the time, and like a lot of the stuff we saw in Portland, I've actually said repeatedly, stop calling them Antifa. | ||
| They're wearing Black Lives Matter sweaters. | ||
| They're flying flags that say Black Lives Matter. | ||
| They have plastic shields that say Black Lives Matter on it. | ||
| The way I explain it to people is, if you go to a large group of people and say, how many of you want to protest in the name of Antifa, or anti-fascism, whatever, you'll get a decent people saying yes. | ||
| If you go to the average person, a group of people, and say, how many of you want to go protest for Black Lives Matter, more of them will say yes. | ||
| So I definitely think you have people who were previously flying the Antifa flag, now flying Black Lives Matter. | ||
| But you have way more people joining in the ranks of that violence in the name of Black Lives Matter, which is funded through ActBlue, which is the Democrats' fundraising platform, has been routinely supported by almost every, I would say every national Democratic politician. | ||
| My problem is that this is the exact same logic that people use to condemn the civil rights protesters of the 1960s. | ||
| Anytime you have a lot of civil unrest, there are going to be groups at different levels of radicalization that get involved. | ||
| Most of the civil rights protesters, ye back in day 50, 60 years ago, Probably boomers, you know, just like middle class, fairly progressive black or non-black people who just wanted to see their rights achieved. | ||
| And amongst those people, there have always been socialists and anarchists and much more left-leaning people. | ||
| And sometimes those groups, or sometimes even the regular moderate folk, will clash with the police. | ||
| And the problem is that when we focus on this violence, especially with a movement as large as Black Lives Matter, which if judging by the number of people who participate in these rallies goes, the largest civil rights protest in all of American history. | ||
| When we start saying, like, well, these few people threw rocks at cops here and there. | ||
| We're talking about fractions of millions of people. | ||
| So I'd like to say Black Lives Matter as a movement is, with Biden, reformist and generally quite nonviolent as protests go. | ||
| And then amongst them, are there more radical people? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But I'll even defend, to an extent, radical action when it comes to protesting against injustice like this. | ||
| So, do you know how many people last year, how many unarmed black men were shot and killed by police? | ||
| I think, I mean, it was like, unarmed black men? | ||
| Unarmed black men shot and killed by police. | ||
| Somewhere between 20 and 40, I don't remember exactly. | ||
| 13. | ||
| 13. | ||
| I want to be clear, it's unarmed black men shot and killed. | ||
| There are instances, you know, like George Floyd was not shot and killed. | ||
| But it seems like if you have an estimated 375 million interactions with police, if we're having double digits of unjust killings, it's not so much a widespread problem, but just areas where we need to hold people accountable. | ||
| And I definitely think police are often not held accountable for sure. | ||
| Which does that warrant millions of people, you know, protesting? | ||
| Does that warrant, like, changing banners at every single park? | ||
| Every major corporation adopting these slogans? | ||
| Does it warrant street paintings with taxpayer dollars and then using police to protect it? | ||
| Does it warrant those who would commit violent in their name for 140 plus days? | ||
| And will any of the Democrats call them out? | ||
| Well, the corporations and the politicians doing all of that is just... I'm trying not to use the term virtue signaling. | ||
| They're doing it because it makes them mad. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| But I'm not going to defend corporations who are throwing up like the black iApp icon for 30 days. | ||
| Of course, but they're only doing that to appeal to a popular narrative, but I'm not going to defend their virtue. | ||
| Their CEOs could be racist, they could be not. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| They'll do whatever makes them money. | ||
| When it comes to the protest itself, you have to recognize that the police killings of unarmed black men are very much the tip of an iceberg, even a glacier here. | ||
| Where that is the most easily and objectively verifiable injustice. | ||
| Like, George Floyd, I think a lot of people recognize. | ||
| Not great. | ||
| Breonna Taylor, likewise. | ||
| But underneath all of that, those... Do you mean when you say not great, like, those stories were not clear-cut acts of... Like, what do you mean by that? | ||
| No, I mean that they're very easy things to protest against. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| You think that the George Floyd thing was like, people should see that and go like, eh? | ||
| You know? | ||
| I think when the George Floyd thing happened, I covered it. | ||
| Shocked that we had a video of this cop kneeling in the sky for eight minutes. | ||
| And I think it was like, was it 43 seconds or whatever? | ||
| That shouldn't have happened. | ||
| But more information comes out later. | ||
| So I recognize that protest. | ||
| I do. | ||
| But I don't think any info came out that made that any less horrible. | ||
| That he had fentanyl in his system, a lethal dose of fentanyl, and that when the body camera footage got released, he's actually kicking his way out of the car saying, please hold me on the ground, hold me on the ground. | ||
| So, I have to push back against this. | ||
| He would not have died if that knee had not been on his neck. | ||
| It is. | ||
| The degree to which fentanyl was in his system is something of a matter of contention. | ||
| There are people who say there was a lethal amount. | ||
| There are people who say that it was, while a substantial amount, something that was decreasing or indicative of a previous dose and that his death was directly caused from constriction of his airflow. | ||
| Well, I am not a doctor. | ||
| I do think the undisputed sort of decision here is that it was because he was kneeled upon. | ||
| Did you watch the body camera footage? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that changed anything. | ||
| Where he's saying, hold me on the ground, hold me on the ground, hold me on the ground, three times. | ||
| Not by his neck, with a knee. | ||
| Did you see the manual that was released by the police defense showing them training the police to do that? | ||
| Uh, then I think that's a terrible manual. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I, and, so what I see with Breonna Taylor and with the George Floyd incident is not massive systemic injustice, but, well actually I'll take that back. | ||
| I think it's a broken system that needs to be amended. | ||
| But that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Not individual acts of, of malice. | ||
| These are the tips of the iceberg with these two, you know. | ||
| But if you actually look at the history of black people in this country, and this is what people are fundamentally angry about, because people don't go out and protest because one thing happened. | ||
| Nobody does that. | ||
| It's always the accumulation of a large number of unfortunate events. | ||
| And when you look at black people in this country, if you take a look at average household income, or average like schooling quality in your neighborhood, or the continued presence of redlining, which hasn't changed in 70 years, and all these things building up, and it's actually the product of like this incredibly complicated network of interconnected systems that a lot of which aren't even being managed by racist people. | ||
| A lot of it is just the system is stacked in a way Here's the issue. | ||
|
unidentified
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I agree. | |
| Completely. | ||
| I did a documentary on blockbusting, redlining, Pruitt-Igoe, St. | ||
| and black people sure were disadvantaged a while ago and that patterns continued | ||
| and that's the underlying sentiment and that's i think what people really want | ||
| to address here here's here's the issue i agree completed a documentary on blockbusting redlining pruitt i | ||
| go saint louis all that stuff | ||
| and the issue is race racialized policies and that's not the answer | ||
| That's not what's going to solve the problem. | ||
| It's become a class issue because we've removed the racial component legally, but now we have issues of, okay, you changed the law. | ||
| We made redlining and blockbusting illegal, though it definitely still happens. | ||
| We've changed those laws. | ||
| Now how do we address the actual inequality? | ||
| It's a class-based issue. | ||
| So what ends up happening now is you get the likes... This is what really bothers me about You create Black Lives Matter, I think it was created from Trayvon Martin, and then people counter with All Lives Matter, which instead of being a unifying thing, becomes an adversarial thing. | ||
| Then you get All Black Lives Matter, and then you get Blue Lives Matter, I think Blue Lives Matter probably came second, and instead of people saying like, Let's work together to solve all these problems as friends. | ||
| We get, my issue is the issue, and you're wrong, and how dare you? | ||
| And everyone just points the finger at each other saying, how dare you? | ||
| The issue is that All Lives Matter types don't really have an issue. | ||
| They're just counter-protesting Black Lives Matter. | ||
| If the All Lives Matter thing was a legitimate effort to try to de-racialize a broader class issue, I think that it would have turned out very differently. | ||
| We have to be clear, that's not what it was being used for. | ||
| It was being used to say, like, oh, you say black lives matter. | ||
| Well, you're implicitly suggesting mine doesn't, so all lives matter. | ||
| So it's a counteraction. | ||
| This is the point I'm making. | ||
| If you have an area, say, like Ferguson, where it's predominantly black, but there are white people who live there, you're cutting out people based on race, and it makes people angry. | ||
| What policy are you referring to here? | ||
| I'm just talking about the slogan. | ||
| So, for me, growing up on the South Side, it was a very mixed race area. | ||
| You had white people, black people, but there was a segregating line, 47th Street. | ||
| I watched the cops brutalize everybody. | ||
| I watched the cops plant drugs on whoever. | ||
| I watched white people die of heroin overdoses. | ||
| Well, I shouldn't say watch, but I've had friends who died of heroin. | ||
| And so you then start, you know, you start talking about Black Lives Matter because of brutality, and then you're going to get a bunch of poor people. | ||
| And of course, there are more poor white people in the United States than poor black people. | ||
| I'm not saying proportionally, I'm just saying the hard number. | ||
| More white folk, yeah. | ||
| Well, so, right, exactly. | ||
| So what ends up happening then is you create a movement that tells someone, we are not focused on your problems. | ||
| We're focused on their problems. | ||
| And they say, but what about, what about me? | ||
| Everyone's going to say, what about me? | ||
| And I think that's a simple solution to addressing all of the problems. | ||
| This is my thing though. | ||
| The all lives matter thing was not made up by poor white people who are trying to get, to get that solidarity. | ||
| It was made up mostly by Republican counter protest. | ||
| I just, I, the, the all lives matter thing was never made in a, in a good faith effort to try to broaden the net. | ||
| I think you're in a bubble, man. | ||
| I really don't think so. | ||
| I was in Cincinnati. | ||
| But I can tell you, even if that wasn't the case, though, even if that wasn't the case, even if I were to accept your premise, back in the civil rights protests, the original ones, you know, there was a slogan that was used pretty frequently amongst the black folk marching. | ||
| It was, am I not a man? | ||
| You know, am I not a person? | ||
| And to me, when we're saying like, well, black lives matter, you're leaving out the white people who are poor. | ||
| This sounds to me like if a woman of that era was to walk up to a man with that sandwich board over his chest and say, well, I'm not a man. | ||
| What about me? | ||
| I recognize that the language can seem exclusionary, but if you pull back, you recognize the Black Lives Matter movement is not exclusionary. | ||
| Even if the language may suggest some sort of exclusionary focus on black people, the people marching out there and the policies proposed by | ||
| BLM advocates are generally very very progressive when it comes to class-based | ||
| issues and class-based solutions | ||
| and they also protest white folk getting killed by the police or black folk getting | ||
| killed by black police. | ||
| Your analogy, I don't believe fits what we're talking about right now. | ||
| If you had black people in the civil rights era saying segregation is wrong, we need equality under the law, and we're also talking about getting rid of miscegenation laws, those were actual laws in place. | ||
| What we're talking about right now is, are people facing injustice at the hands of police? | ||
| and are people facing disadvantages in life based on class and wealth issues? | ||
| The answer is yes, it affects everybody. | ||
| So why would you choose to exclude somebody? | ||
| If we go back in time, we're talking about civil rights and a woman went up to, | ||
| you know, a civil rights activist who was black and said, well, what about me? | ||
| It's like, I'm actually fighting for something that has nothing to do with you. | ||
| Whereas today, you do have white people, Latinos, Asians, and everybody who have faced injustice in the hands of cops. | ||
| I met a black woman. | ||
| If a black woman went up and said like, oh, I'm not a man. | ||
| But, like, with the exclusionary thing, I just, I guess from what I've seen from BLM advocates that protest the movement, and even the organization, which is far to the left of what the general BLM actual marcher believes, I just, I guess I just don't see these exclusionary tendencies. | ||
| Even if we were to believe there was an exclusionary element here, outside of the mere language of the movement, There are racialized elements of this disparity that can't be solved just with class solutions. | ||
| It's like if a hundred years ago you put all the black folk in Section A and all the white folk in Section B, and then a hundred years later you're like, oh, I'm really sorry about that. | ||
| So anyway, people in Section A make half as much as people in Section B. I'm sorry, that's the law. | ||
| No race mentioned. | ||
| What neighborhood are you born in? | ||
| And the breadlining and the distribution of wealth has reflected a distinct racialized oppression in this country that I think we can solve with race-neutral policies, but we must acknowledge that it exists. | ||
| But Black Lives Matter isn't advocating for race-neutral policies, they're advocating for racial policies, racialization. | ||
| For instance, in Seattle, they're doing POC and non-POC separate events. | ||
| At the University of Michigan, we saw the non-POC and the POC, like literal neo-segregation popping up in response to this movement. | ||
| I want to be specific about those two. | ||
| notable thing and shocking thing to me was California's proposition I believe | ||
| it's prop 16 repeal prop 209 which would strike the civil rights language from | ||
| their Constitution. I want to be specific about those two so the POC non POC | ||
| separate thing this is I don't really think that this is like an official BLM | ||
| thing that's being pushed for. | ||
| I think that's woke crap as well, by the way. | ||
| I don't think that... You can make an argument for it, provide a safe space, whatever. | ||
| I don't think it does what it's supposed to. | ||
| But the organizers of Black Lives Matter say these things. | ||
| Sure, yeah, but when we're talking about, like, what BLM wants, I don't mean, like, these little events or soirees which may have, like, these weird elements that are kind of, like, misappropriated woke culture. | ||
| What I mean is, like, broadly, how are we fixing this multi-trillion dollar economic gap that we have? | ||
| And when it comes to the California thing, I'm mixed on this. | ||
| The reason they're doing that is because the language of their law prevents them from implementing affirmative action the same way other states in this country do. | ||
| It's just, optically, it looks terrible. | ||
| Like, wow, you know, a California gone so woke that they're getting rid of civil rights, and it looks terrible, and I recognize that. | ||
| I don't know if I support it. | ||
| If it was an affirmative action amendment, as they claim it was, then they would have amended it to add language protecting affirmative action instead of stripping all civil rights from the Constitution. | ||
| Well, I mean, they still are, they have to adhere, of course, to national law regarding | ||
| protected licenses. | ||
| That would require federal intervention. | ||
| So California is paving the way for internally, so for instance, California legalized medicinal | ||
| marijuana when it was federally illegal and then complained when the DEA would go in and | ||
| If California strips away the civil rights language, thanks to unanimous support from Democrats and federal Democrats, then they're going to start implementing racist and racial segregation policies statewide. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| and then specific programs saying no to this race and no to that race. | ||
| I mean if you're talking about affirmative action we can start with that institutional racism outright. | ||
| Do you think that affirmative action is an inherently wrong thing? | ||
| I think it's an institutional racism. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, do you think it's wrong? | ||
| Personally, for me, yes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that's because I come from a mixed-race family. | ||
| So I've already experienced being a second-class citizen from groups aligned with, whatever you want to call it, intersectionality or whatever. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| I believe it flies in the face of everything my grandparents fought for in terms of civil rights. | ||
| They were a mixed-race couple. | ||
| It was illegal. | ||
| They faced prison time over this. | ||
| and they had to flee several states because of it. | ||
| My mom was born before civil rights and Loving v. Virginia as an illegal person, like wasn't | ||
| allowed to exist in this country because of miscegenation laws. | ||
| They're bringing these things back. | ||
| I don't think they're bringing back miscegenation laws. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| They're bringing back, I'm talking about, they're stripping away the civil rights law. | ||
| They're bringing back segregation. | ||
| I really, given the reasons and the multilateral support that this proposition have received, the idea to me that they're removing a specific California set of policies to then become the most racist state in the nation Even though they're equally beholden? | ||
| Because let's be clear, once California removes these laws, they're going to be at the same point a lot of other states in this country are. | ||
| Other states in this country also rely on a set of federal protections when it comes to discrimination in workplaces and what have you. | ||
| California is going to be in equal standing with them. | ||
| I think we're being really uncharitable when we assume that they're doing this as part of a step one to bring back racism in this country. | ||
| Well, it is. | ||
| I mean, well, it depends on whether or not you think affirmative action is something which is already done in a bunch of other states. | ||
| Yeah, it is racist. | ||
| Sure, but if that's the case, then let's not pretend that California is, like, backsliding past the civil rights movement. | ||
| Let's just acknowledge that they're, I guess, awkwardly moving towards the implementation of policies that a bunch of other states already have. | ||
| I think I'm 50 50 on affirmative action. | ||
| I think that's like, conceptually, it disgusts me, you know, but on the other hand, like, if you think about it in certain neighborhoods of like, Los Angeles, for example, where I grew up, if you get like, a college admission, or college, yeah, like, application, sorry, from a black person, a white person, you don't know anything about these two people apart from what they send you. | ||
| Statistically, the black person has had to work harder because their neighborhoods on average are way worse. | ||
| Same with worse schooling. | ||
| This is actually a really good point. | ||
| It's really funny when we hear... What was this? | ||
| There was something about they wanted to do blind hiring because they felt like names were... I saw a post on this on Facebook, actually. | ||
| People were advocating. | ||
| It was leftists saying, we should get rid of your names and your address and let people choose based on what their merit is and blah blah blah. | ||
| Well, they didn't say merit, but that was the general idea. | ||
| You put an application. | ||
| Their concern is that white culture, or mainstream American culture, favors anglicized names. | ||
| Therefore, people have a disadvantage. | ||
| They actually found, there was a study that found the opposite. | ||
| And it's actually exactly what you said. | ||
| If you take a person, statistically on average, a white person's more likely to have family wealth, more likely to grow up in a wealthier suburb, less likely to have encounters with police for a variety of reasons. | ||
| And then they're going to have a resume that says, I went to this school, I went to this school, I went to this college. | ||
| Whereas people in the black community, Latino community, are going to have less... On average, yeah, because they've had to put up with more historical... And so you end up with a racial disparity. | ||
| But I don't see how, that being said... | ||
| I don't see how the solution is affirmative action or racializing. | ||
| I completely agree. | ||
| And that's why affirmative action is at best a stopgap. | ||
| And you could argue maybe it makes the world slightly more fair. | ||
| I think it makes it worse. | ||
| Well, you could argue in a consequential sense because personally when I think who deserves to get this spot in a college, who deserves to get that job, I think of how hard they've worked, what effort has been put in, what is the, in a consequential sense, what is the income to outcome there. | ||
| And affirmative action, in some cases, helps. | ||
| In some cases, it actually quite hurts people when it comes to that, especially with the treatment of, say, for example, Asian immigrants in Los Angeles, UCLA. | ||
| The negative affirmative action points they get, because a lot of those students are sent over here from wealthy families in China, and you get this really complicated situation. | ||
| And ultimately, we can avoid all of this, all of this, and I'd love to avoid all of this, if we just put more effort into addressing the underlying racial disparities in this country. | ||
| But nobody wants to do that. | ||
| Which would be? | ||
| Real anti-redlining policies. | ||
| And reparations, not on race, it gets messy, but on class. | ||
| Because if you were poor 100 years ago and white, you had it better than if you were poor 100 years ago and black, for sure. | ||
| But there are still issues you can fix across the board, and that way you don't get a lot of really Messy racial politics that might otherwise it felt like what do you do like you test people's blood, you know, exactly Yeah, that gets really really messy, but nobody wants to do this. | ||
| I mean Republicans Democrats neither of them want to do this How do you feel about oh, sorry interrupt man? | ||
| How do you about universal basic income? | ||
| Yeah, I think so as a socialist my one contention is my concern would be that universal basic income would Assist in perpetually commodifying the standards of life. | ||
| I don't want people to have the money, necessarily, to afford medical care or food. | ||
| I want those things to just be available to people, with that wealth maybe being divested to, or diverted to, like, luxury goods, that sort of stuff. | ||
| But I think that, like, right now in this country, this is me, like, picking which two beautiful, delectable fruits I want to eat from a tree. | ||
| If we could get UBI in this country done properly, like a good UBI, absolutely. | ||
| And that would go a long way, too, to fixing the situation poor folk are in. | ||
| So we got two routes to go. | ||
| I definitely want to talk about UBI, socialism, etc. | ||
| But I want to make sure, because we were originally talking about Antifa and right-wing violence. | ||
| So going back to what we were talking about before, with Antifa on the far left, we have people engaged in violence consistently. | ||
| I mean, I mean, if we look at the death count... But what is death? | ||
| I mean, death doesn't change the fact that someone gets bashed over the head with a brick. | ||
| Sure, but I think that generally speaking, if we're looking to quantify the amount of violence done by any given number of groups, the fact that we've had historic racial protests in this country, with Antifa involvement at some of these protests, and I think we have one death, and it was that 100% Antifa guy who was in Portland. | ||
| Well, you had the security guard who shot the guy in the face. | ||
| That guy wasn't Antifa. | ||
| No, no, no, he was just the Bernie bro, but he was there as an unofficial security guard. | ||
| Sure, but he wasn't operating in the capacity of like a revolutionary protest, or he was there, and I don't know the circumstance of the death, but he wasn't like Black Bloc. | ||
| You have that, and... | ||
| The fact that there's only been so and so much death from these groups, I think, when we're looking at, over the past 10 years, hundreds of deaths from the far-right groups, indicates something. | ||
| Whether that indicates the far-right group uses more lethal methods, you know, guns opposed to bricks, I'd be willing to bet that, and Tifa don't carry guns for the most part. | ||
| Except for that one guy. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, every once in a while, you know. | ||
| But when you see a far-right militia group, these people are not carrying flags and bricks. | ||
| These people carry firearms. | ||
| But I think that, ultimately, discussions on stochastic violence are distractions from greater systemic violence that I think that we all need to pay a greater level of attention to. | ||
| I think if you got the left and the right in a room and talked about the opioid crisis in pharmaceutical companies, they're gonna agree. | ||
| Yeah, I genuinely agree with that. | ||
| The problem for me is, man, these guys in Michigan, I don't care what you want to call them. | ||
| Lock them up! | ||
| They're plotting a kidnapping, whatever it is, they're staking out some governor's house. | ||
| The courts had already won in Michigan. | ||
| The legislation ruled, they stripped her powers from her, the courts ruled unconstitutional, and then the AG said, I will not enforce any of her laws, and these guys were plotting for what reason? | ||
| The system we built, it worked. | ||
| And so these guys were nuts. | ||
| They got caught. | ||
| The FBI staked them out, locked them up. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| But when we look at Portland, when we look at Seattle, when we look at what happened in Chicago, in the Pacific Northwest, we get, what is it, 140 nights now? | ||
| That's a bit unfair because it's simmered down quite a bit, but we had a sustained period of about 90 or so days where it was just riot every single night, explosives being thrown. | ||
| And when these people would get arrested for doing things that were, like, serious, You know, like, you had cops who had, like, burns, cuts, lesions. | ||
| There were a lot of protesters who did, too. | ||
| Well, for sure, but I mean, if you're... So, I'll get to that. | ||
| You have these people getting arrested, and then the DA, Mike Schmidt, says, you're free to go. | ||
| So it was so bad, the state police said, what's the point of being here if they're getting released as soon as we arrest them? | ||
| And they left. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Well, Trump came in and deputized them, then later deputized the police, and now the feds are dealing with it. | ||
| So, death is the worst possible outcome. | ||
| And we have Michael Reinoehl, who killed that Trump supporter, and that is extremely horrifying. | ||
| And we didn't get mass national press coverage about it. | ||
| Which instance is this? | ||
| Michael Reinold, the guy in Portland who said, we got him right here, and then he fired two shots. | ||
| We don't know if it's horrifying, because he never lived to see trial. | ||
| He was murked by Trump news. | ||
| It was definitely horrifying, and it was definitely horrifying that he got killed. | ||
| Death is horrifying, but I mean, we didn't even get to see a trial there. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And that's something that the right doesn't really experience, by the way, too. | ||
| Like Fort Hood, for example, you treat these people with kid gloves. | ||
| But that guy, That guy outside the house, apparently, according to a bunch of eyewitness testimony and the conflicting narratives of the police who were there, he didn't draw a gun. | ||
| They just saw him. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you this. | ||
| There's conflicting witness statements. | ||
| But only with minor variations, the vast majority affirm that the cop's story isn't true. | ||
| That he did not draw a gun. | ||
| I read that there was a witness who said they saw him drawing. | ||
| But I'll tell you what, it doesn't matter. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Cause uh, even if we have witnesses saying he did and he didn't, Trump said twice. | ||
| Oh, he was at a rally. | ||
| He goes, they knew who he was. | ||
| It took him 15 minutes. | ||
| They didn't want to arrest him. | ||
| And then the other time he said it was retribution. | ||
| And that's, that's meh. | ||
| That's messed up. | ||
| I'm trying to avoid swearing. | ||
| I saw you tweet that, by the way. | ||
| The president claiming that we should just get retribution and go kill people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| We want that guy on trial so we can hear everything about him and make sure we know who he is, we know what he's doing, we know why he's doing it. | ||
| To me it shows, to an extent, fear as well. | ||
| If you are confident in your case, legally speaking, you want them to stand trial because a trial is a years-long prolonged shaming Of them and everything they represent. | ||
| Whereas them being murdered, martyrized, the only reason you wouldn't want that is if you were concerned that a trial would bring out information or would be inconvenient to you in some way. | ||
| That's why, look, I think I'm not a big fan of trusting the government, but we got a couple statements and it just seems like inconclusive. | ||
| I'm not inherently going to distrust the cops who are there. | ||
| I'm not inherently going to trust them either. | ||
| Inconclusive is the best you can ever get when it comes to conflicting witness testimonies. | ||
| So, to my point, just because sometimes one group of extremists kills people doesn't mean we ignore the other group of extremists. | ||
| Oh, I'm not arguing that. | ||
| Though I will defend a lot of the protest violence that's been taking place. | ||
| I know, and this is contended among a lot of conservative circles, but I think an economist recently estimated that the damage done to the black community in this country could be monetarily represented by a figure of like 14 trillion. | ||
| And that's one estimate, of course. | ||
| But it's just political. | ||
| I mean, how do you actually estimate this stuff? | ||
| Well, of course, you know, there are different methods and methodologies. | ||
| I'm not an economist. | ||
| I can't fact check him. | ||
| I know there are lower estimates as well. | ||
| But we know this, you know. | ||
| In the United States of America, for the longest time, the western reaches of this country, they didn't have roads, and they didn't have electricity, and they didn't have phone lines. | ||
| And through an enormous expenditure of federal wealth, we put effort into bringing that infrastructure westward. | ||
| Because the investment brings about more educated people, encourages the development of more land, which allows for more people to live there, which means more money. | ||
| And we're facing now the same issue, albeit in a much more sophisticated way, with a lot of poor communities in this country, a lot of which are black or Latino, where we now know these communities are black holes of wealth. | ||
| People will make fun of this. | ||
| Like, why give money to the schools? | ||
| It's a black hole. | ||
| We could invest. | ||
| We could prevent that from being a problem. | ||
| But there are more poor white people than poor black people. | ||
| Sure, and we should invest, absolutely. | ||
| But there are specific elements of black poverty To be fair, I think you already said reparations on class, not race anyway. | ||
| So, yeah, I get it. | ||
| There are some elements that are heavily racialized. | ||
| There are studies, for example, about the criminal justice system that are non-sensationalized, like just flat out the likelihood of given charges or what your sentence will be, even if every other factor is accounted for, just race is left. | ||
| And then you have things like implicit bias. | ||
| But those things are cultural shifts. | ||
| I don't think we can fix that with law. | ||
| I certainly don't want there to be like a federal mandate, all judges must give black | ||
| men 10 percent lower sentences to compensate for the racism we assume they have. | ||
| But when it comes to non-cultural issues like that, the deficit we see in these black communities, | ||
| this is something worth protesting. | ||
| And I think for a lot of people, people who grew up there, this is something worth fighting | ||
| for. | ||
| I don't think it's good to drive a car through cops. | ||
| I don't think it's good to hurt police officers. | ||
| But I recognize that riots and violence at protests just seem to be an inevitable product of great civil strife. | ||
| And to me, the solution to this would be to say, what can we do to alleviate that strife? | ||
| Arrest people as needed along the way. | ||
| But giving them what they want just justifies their tactics. | ||
| Well, what do they want? | ||
| Honestly, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, Black Lives Matter on their website, they want to disrupt the nuclear family. | ||
| They did remove it. | ||
| Healthy food, man. | ||
| It's a class war being subsidized by the sugar industry and the drug industry. | ||
| Dude, we're talking specifically about what the protesters are asking for. | ||
| They want healthy lives. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| Dude, chill. | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What have they asked for specifically? | ||
| The movement or the specific organization? | ||
| Because they tend to operate kind of at arm's length. | ||
| There's no cohesive ask. | ||
| Well, that's always the way- I mean, you were at Occupy Wall Street, you know there's- But there were a few general asks Occupy Wall Street had. | ||
| And it was a lot of leftist stuff, like healthcare, transit, schools. | ||
| But that was a big problem with Occupy, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, we have- I mean, there are fairly specific requests. | ||
| We do have, of course, police reform, which I think is best represented in its most moderate form. | ||
| by Joe Biden's policies. | ||
| I think what's it called? | ||
| I'm actually blanking right now. | ||
| It's like eight main policies that have been scientifically proven to improve police. | ||
| Well, there's a name for it. | ||
| Yeah, there's like, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, whatever the case is, that's great. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But then you have other things like reinvestment back in the community. | ||
| That's what defund the police is mostly about terrible slogan optics wise, mind you, but Here's where I disagree. | ||
| I think if people aren't motivated to serve their own communities, I don't think any amount of money is going to change that. | ||
| And I think it actually could make a bigger problem. | ||
| and education or people forget about this, waste management, you know. These parts of these cities | ||
| are absolutely filthy. It means nobody wants to go outside, travel to businesses, or work outside, | ||
| which means that it's rough. Here's where I disagree. I think if people aren't motivated | ||
| to serve their own communities, I don't think any amount of money is going to change that. | ||
| And I think it actually could make a bigger problem. So we had, are you familiar with Scott | ||
| Pressler? You'll have to bonk me on the head. | ||
| He's this Trump supporting guy who goes around cleaning up. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| He cleans up. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| He went to LA. | ||
| He went to Baltimore. | ||
| Literally cleaning? | ||
| Literally cleaning. | ||
| He brings a bunch of Trump supporters come out and they'll just start cleaning things up. | ||
| He actually got smeared in the media for this. | ||
| They said his real motivations were to help Trump or whatever. | ||
| Okay, you know like carry on cleaning up. | ||
| Do you think there's an element of that that could be true under certain conditions? | ||
| Like what if just hypothetically? | ||
| I'm just curious before you go on like what if it had been like he'd go to black communities. | ||
| That's what he's doing, right? | ||
| And he'd clean up. | ||
| He'd be like, see how easy it is, you know? | ||
| And he'd clean up and he'd get like the picture, you know, and and to me and to me it would it would feel almost like a more patronizing, you know, like when the white evangelicals go to Africa to help build one house over three months or something like that. | ||
| I actually think... I'm just asking. | ||
| I don't know the circumstance. | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| I don't think so, but I think you absolutely could make that argument, and you could make the exact same argument for the fact that Black Lives Matter is overwhelmingly white. | ||
| To have a bunch of white people claiming they're representing the minorities. | ||
| There's one viral video where it's like two white Antifa women are spray-painting, and two black women are yelling at them to stop, and they're like, no, we're doing this for you. | ||
| I don't defend that. | ||
| But the white participation at these rallies, I think, is a good thing. | ||
| I think it supports my argument that, broadly speaking, this is a fight for a sort of plurality of social justice rather than a hyper-specific race war. | ||
| But it's not popular. | ||
| So the general movement has, right now, according to Civics in the polling, 48% approval. | ||
| Then you've got 39% opposition and then 11% like unaffiliated. | ||
| That's the civics numbers. | ||
| That's better than the Civil Rights Movement was at the time. | ||
| So Black Lives Matter as a general movement, when you don't get into the specifics, you don't talk about the protests, regular people just say, oh, I like that idea. | ||
| But 48%, so it's not a majority. | ||
| It was after George Floyd, but they lost ridiculous amount of support after the riots heated up. But | ||
| to be fair, and again, I just, as a person who's very critical of the narratives media | ||
| tries to push to us, how much of this is because the movement functionally changed and how much of | ||
| it is because of the hyper-targeted media coverage of all the violence to the exclusion of, again, | ||
| for every person who dies at a BLM protest, a hundred black people die of COVID, a hundred black people | ||
| die of malnutrition or of gang violence or of other issues that can be fixed through the | ||
| systemic solutions that Black Lives Matter people tend to support. I, I... | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I think the media is garbage in this country. | ||
| And I think it's an issue of human behaviors and the incentives of the media machine as it exists. | ||
| That's capitalism, baby. | ||
| I got a socialism pill you can have on. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I was talking to some Trump supporters a couple years ago, and I said, I'm for a mixed economy. | ||
| I want regulation on these companies. | ||
| And it was three guys, they were Trump supporters, they were like, we think that's wrong. | ||
| And I said, I do not believe in coercive force, physical force, and manipulative force to make people do things. | ||
| And they asked me what I meant by manipulative force, and I was like, tricking people. | ||
| Fraud. | ||
| And they were like, no, no, no, no. | ||
| If you convince someone to exchange something for whatever, that's their choice, and I was like, I'm talking about the media lying to everybody all the time, and they're allowed to do it. | ||
| So the problem is, I believe in free speech. | ||
| They're allowed to do it. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| I just don't think it's ethical, the way our media machines function like this, and I don't think there's a way to solve for that problem, because you can't put someone in charge of what's acceptable speech. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You end up with media machines designed to make people go crazy. | ||
| And I gotta be fair, I think there's criticism you can point towards me for that, absolutely, because I have my personal biases and the things I don't like. | ||
| And I think if you look at... This is why I'm actually okay with YouTubers. | ||
| Like, whether you're left, right, or whatever. | ||
| Like, you for instance. | ||
| You're a socialist YouTuber. | ||
| We clearly have disagreements. | ||
| But you're one dude. | ||
| By all means, make all the videos you want saying, you know, Trump is awful and, you know, all the Republicans. | ||
| And I'll talk about what I don't like, and I don't like, you know, intersectionality and Democrats, the current iteration of the Democrats, for sure. | ||
| I want to talk to you about that intersectionality thing, by the way. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| When we get to that, of course. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think YouTube creates a space where individuals will be like, here's my world as I see it, here are the things I have problems with. | ||
| The thing about these companies is that they editorially choose to hyper-target and ignore things. | ||
| So, to go back to your point, They'll never talk about the opioid crisis. | ||
| I mean, they will, like, a little bit. | ||
| But they're not gonna be like, today, another X amount of people. | ||
| It's just whenever it's convenient and shocking and politically advantageous for, like, an election cycle, for instance. | ||
| So, to basically say, yes, the media is trash, I think when it comes to what we saw with the riots, they kept calling it peaceful and they kept making excuses for everything. | ||
| Well, some did. | ||
| There's that very highly publicized clip of the guy saying, despite some fires, mostly peaceful. | ||
| So that, I will say, absolutely hilarious. | ||
| Not great. | ||
| I don't know if that's representative of the general coverage. | ||
| I do think, for example, that a lot of it was necessary to push back on the narrative that cities were burning. | ||
| I hear this phrase all the time. | ||
| Portland burning, Seattle burning, nothing's burning. | ||
| One or two buildings in a block sporadically once in a week. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| No semantics. | ||
| Of course, but when you use the term... You know, hyperbole. | ||
| But there is a reason why that hyperbole is employed, and it's not just a rhetorical flourish. | ||
| It's to give the person the impression that these cities are actually collapsing, which is of course not true. | ||
| I've been to Portland. | ||
| But have you seen all these small towns that had those problems that are struggling to recover because the rot? | ||
| Like, when you have a small town, Michael Tracy traveled to these places, journalist, he went around to a bunch of small towns that people didn't care about or know about because they're not going to get national coverage. | ||
| And they had widespread lootings and were putting things on their doors like, we support Black Lives Matter, please don't hurt us. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's terrible. | ||
| But their recovery is, like, it's not going to happen. | ||
| Because they're a small town, that money doesn't exist. | ||
| Right, but I mean, there is nothing I would propose that wouldn't try to solve that. | ||
| I mean the death of small-town America has been one of the greatest like demographic crises that we've done. | ||
| We don't even care about small-town America anymore in anything other than a folksy aphorism we can use to drum up voters. | ||
| When it comes to actual investment, we don't do anything about these communities. | ||
| And the way our businesses consolidate makes it easier and easier for everyone to just live in big cities. | ||
| I live in a big city. | ||
| I like living in a big city. | ||
| I would like it if people could choose between that or more rural life. | ||
| Without knowing they will have fewer opportunities in the latter, or at least severely hampered opportunities. | ||
| But with regards to that, like the, we support BLM, please don't, you know, loot us. | ||
| Looting's illegal. | ||
| I'm not defending looting, or I don't think most BLM people are defending looting. | ||
| You just said, you know, there's a book called In Defense of Looting, and I think it was the new, was it the New Republic? | ||
| Did Biden write it? | ||
| It was written by a trans activist, Black Lives Matter, and this is coming from an article that may have been... I don't think it's the New Republic. | ||
| All stems from where I started getting more upset with this level of activism, because I've been covering civil unrest. | ||
| But that's not broadly representative, you know? | ||
| You said it yourself, those two black women trying to keep the two white people from spray painting. | ||
| When I see videos of these protests, one of the first things they teach you, if you protest consistently, and I used to protest more, before I decided I hated going outside and that I didn't | ||
| like being, you know, sunburned, was that you want to minimize | ||
| negative engagement with the community that you're in. Looting, arson, tagging, these things, the definition of negatively | ||
| affecting the community. But they defend it. Well, who... | ||
| Because people keep saying they defended a book or a columnist. | ||
| Activists. | ||
| Sure, some activists. | ||
| Media calling it peaceful over and over again. | ||
| Most of the protests were peaceful, though, like a vast majority of them. | ||
| But what does that mean, most? | ||
| That's the joke we make, mostly peaceful. | ||
| Ninety-seven percent? | ||
| Ninety-three? | ||
| Ninety-three. | ||
| And that's a tricky statistic, too, because at seven percent of all the BLM rallies, there was violence. | ||
| Who started that violence? | ||
| You're based in Cophield, I know. | ||
| You know cops will regularly initiate violence against protesters, either by putting one of their own amongst their rank, throwing a rock, and then using it as justification, or by just starting themselves. | ||
| We have plenty of video and data-based evidence to defend that. | ||
| But that's not enough to indict the officers in specific places. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But I'm just saying, only 7% of these protests had violence, but we don't know how much of that was actually protester-initiated violence. | ||
| And even of those that were, how much was like one or two guys? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| Most of these protests were peaceful. | ||
| The data on that is very clear. | ||
| But that's fine. | ||
| We're arguing over margins. | ||
| So if that's the case, why is it so difficult for anyone to come out and be like, screw those guys. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I see that all the time amongst the left. | ||
| Usually you have these hyper woke 18 year olds who have never been to a protest in their life who will say, Yeah, you're showing the system! | ||
| No. | ||
| And there was more of that at the very beginning with Minneapolis because people were very angry right after George Floyd. | ||
| You know, that leads people to make perhaps dumb decisions. | ||
| But in terms of the broader movement, and I guess we don't have data because we're talking about people's perceptions, I don't think people are all out here defending, rioting, looting. | ||
| What they are saying is hyperfixating on those things is a distraction from the real issues the protests are about. | ||
| So, I've had many discussions with people, and I'm sure people in the audience who are watching can absolutely understand this. | ||
| How many conversations have you had where someone says, it's righteous anger, or you don't understand their anger? | ||
| I recently had a conversation with someone where I was talking about, they said something like, if you are against Antifa, that means you are pro-fa, which means you're pro-fascist. | ||
| And my response was, if I don't like, say, Islamophobes, does that make me pro-Islam? | ||
| And they were like, yes. | ||
| I'm like, no it doesn't. | ||
| It means I don't like it when you go and beat random people. | ||
| So if you've got people wearing masks going around, look, I can't go out. | ||
| There's a viral video of, there's like a black dude, and this InfoWars reporter is like, come with me to this line of Trump people coming to a Trump rally. | ||
| And he was like, oh, okay, I guess, you know, I was kind of worried. | ||
| And everyone there is like, he says, I don't, I don't like Trump. | ||
| I'm not a big fan. | ||
| They're like, hey man, that's cool. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| Shook his hand, gave him hugs. | ||
| Some ladies were like, oh, that's fine. | ||
| We just love that you're here talking to us. | ||
| Gave him a kiss on the cheek. | ||
| And this guy's like, man, I get more of those. | ||
| I'm going to come hang out here. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| And then she goes, now let's go over to the protest side. | ||
| And they start screaming vile, disgusting insults. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the guy's face just drops like- A random black guy? | |
| It was so I don't know the exact context of who this guy was, but he was talking to a reporter from InfoWars. | ||
| Well, they might have been screaming at the- They're screaming at the InfoWars lady. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, that's totally fine. | ||
| Yeah, there's nothing wrong with being black. | ||
| There is something wrong with being an InfoWars reporter. | ||
| So I'm fine with the respective levels. | ||
| The point I'm bringing out is this vile hatred exists, like, overwhelmingly. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Shouting at people you don't like is fine. | ||
| No, but I'm just giving that as an example to talk about if I were to go out right now to a Trump rally, there's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna, if I said, I don't like Trump, that's fine. | ||
| In fact, I called Trump a very disparaging term on Twitter laughing about it, and I've done it like 10 times in the past two weeks. | ||
| And people are just like, I disagree with you, Tim, but I respect that you're giving us your thoughts on this one and you're treating the news seriously. | ||
| If I... I went out in 20... I think it was 2017 or 2018. | ||
| I think it was 2017. | ||
| It was in Berkeley. | ||
| Antifa was posting pictures of my mom, like, and me, and threatening me, and I went to a skate park, minding my own business, and I had guys come to me and start threatening me for no reason! | ||
| So, I can't defend all these individual... Obviously, I think going after people's family members is unconscionable, regardless of the people you're targeting, you know? | ||
| I mean, these are very spread out. | ||
| The broad argument that I'm making is I genuinely do believe that the sentiment behind Black Lives Matter is about the things they're protesting for, and not the defense of the most violent, extreme, hyperbolized actions that take place in a movement that tens of millions have participated in. | ||
| Two billion dollars in damages. | ||
| I mean, and that was just the insurance cap. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So beyond that, it's way more. | ||
| But what do you want to do about it? | ||
| Condemn it, call it out and say stop. | ||
| But people, but I guess I mean, I'm in some pretty far left circles. | ||
| I think that when I what I remember is this after George Floyd and after the Minneapolis riots, there were a lot of people who were very gung ho about the rioting. | ||
| And just a couple of weeks later, I remember there was a livestream segment from a far right, I don't know if it was a YouTuber, Twitch streamer, I think he was a neo-Nazi, the chat on screen had a lot of wacky stuff in it, and he was there at a BLM protest, and he was saying, hey, hey you guys, can you flip that truck? | ||
| And he was trying to get other people to flip, and the people who were there, who were BLM protesters, all turned on him, they were like, No. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| And they started trying to chase him out. | ||
| The guy ran away and chat was like, oh, gotta run. | ||
| And when I saw that clip, that made its way around the Twitter, the YouTubes, and people were celebrating it because the goal of protests should always be to affect positive change. | ||
| And you aren't going to affect positive change with the looting, the burning, the rioting. | ||
| Those things do happen, but an over-fixation can be detrimental to the actual message being made by the vast majority. | ||
| There's a video of some guy with a hammer and he's smashing up the sidewalk and pulling bricks. | ||
| Have you seen this? | ||
| They run up, they grab the guy, and they throw him to the cops. | ||
| And then the cops grab two guys, and one of the guys was actually helping, and then they cut the good guy out, and they arrest the guy who was vandalizing the street. | ||
| So I definitely praise that. | ||
| By all means, peaceful protest is the foundation of this country. | ||
| We have the First Amendment right to do so, and it's amazing when we do. | ||
| Violent protest is the foundation of this country. | ||
| Technically, but when we told the Crown, the American colonists, stop oppressing us, stop sleeping in our homes, stop murdering our people, And they didn't live here, they were from, you know, like, you had people who were born and raised in the colonies, and what did they say? | ||
| They said, we're severing ties from you. | ||
| So what did the Crown do? | ||
| They sent the regulars to the states, and then we said, F off. | ||
| So it's a bit different than a bunch of people showing up, you know, an extreme minority of a community that is at odds with what the community wants, burning it down, getting defended by the press, and then just only getting like, well, let's not focus on the extremists. | ||
| I think that's a really sensationalized narrative, because we are focusing on the extremes here. | ||
| So we have to remember, we're focusing on a very slim minority, probably exclusively, you know, stuff that's going on in New York, Portland. | ||
| There are cities, of course, that have greater levels of agitation just based on the demographic. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| But there are actions like that that take place otherwise, but when we talk about persistent media coverage, you know, Say Portland, for example, you know? | ||
| I would be willing to bet that, for the most part, the people in the city of Portland are largely behind what goes on there, for the most part. | ||
| But even if they are not, I still just... I guess I just don't understand why this is as much of a talking point as it should be. | ||
| Like, if we want to fix this... I think you should check out... We don't have it, but Michael Tracy drove to small towns that never made the press. | ||
| I talked with Michael Tracy. | ||
| I was very critical of him for his work in that bit. | ||
| He went to all these small towns and showed that the riots reached places that didn't make the news. | ||
| Let me tell you, I have family members who live 60 miles outside of Chicago, and for some reason, Black Lives Matter activists showed up to these towns of a couple thousand people, demanded that the mayors allow them to march, and when they did, they started trashing the place. | ||
| This is directly from a family member of mine saying, I don't understand why this is happening. | ||
| We're a small, sleepy suburb, 60 miles outside of the city, And then here's the issue. | ||
| In Minneapolis, you keep hearing things like they have insurance. | ||
| And we've heard that from prominent activists in Black Lives Matter. | ||
| They have insurance. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| So in Minneapolis, for example, there were several stories covered by the Star Tribune that insurance only covers up to $25,000 for hauling away debris, which the cost of hauling away totally demolished buildings was five times that, which meant they just said goodbye and they walked away. | ||
| The business never to come back. | ||
| Well, you won't find me defending insurance companies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, for sure, but the issue is... But what do you want to do about it? | |
| So, what I'm looking for specifically is the prosecutors in Chicago, New York, Fort Worth, Seattle, and Portland to actually start prosecuting these people. | ||
| I have heard many accusations. | ||
| I have not seen many claims to indicate, or I have not seen much evidence to indicate that there are legitimately people just being let out. | ||
| What often happens is that police will gather up big batches of people that are even associated with an area surrounding a crime that took place, and then because there isn't enough evidence to find out which one of them actually did it, the whole group of them gets let go. | ||
| There's a video- But that's due process, right? | ||
| There's a video of a guy fighting with cops and grabbing his baton. | ||
| It's something Andy No posted, I know a lot of people on the left don't like him. | ||
| It's a guy fighting with the cops, he grabs their baton, a bunch of cops grab him, throw him to the ground, he got cut loose. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know any of the circumstances. | ||
| But again, why are we arguing about individual statistics when we're talking about a civilization-wide problem in a country with a population of a third of a billion? | ||
| I'm okay with Black Lives Matter, rioters, or Antifa, or whatever, have done damage. | ||
| This is bad. | ||
| This is bad. | ||
| I'm totally okay with that. | ||
| But when people say this, they don't stop there. | ||
| They then go on to say, and this is why I don't support Black Lives Matter. | ||
| And that's the association I can't abide. | ||
| Because if you do care about fixing these problems, you should care about addressing the underlying sociological disparities that have created them. | ||
| This wasn't created by far-left DAs who are letting them get off easy. | ||
| This was all created by class and race-based issues, and it's going to boil up again in 5 or 10 or 15 years if we don't do something about it. | ||
| It's an inevitable product of historic inequality. | ||
| And if you want to condemn those people, I have no issue with that. | ||
| It's not just about that. | ||
| What do we do to stop it when we have district attorneys and county attorneys being elected | ||
|
unidentified
|
When? | |
| That will let these people go but now we have actual stories where people who would defend their property are | ||
| the ones getting charged Right. We're seeing this when? | ||
| The mccloskeys they brandish illegally on their own private property legally in missouri. I am so I am | ||
| Not familiar with missouri specific law Are you telling me that brandishing firearms at people without provocation is okay as long as you're on your property? | ||
| According to the Attorney General of Missouri, yes. | ||
| So it's not for me. | ||
| Look, you can say the Attorney General is wrong and biased and all that stuff, but they're being charged with felonies. | ||
| Now they're being charged with evidence tampering because they claimed And it was reported that the government, the prosecutor, actually took the gun and dismantled it and reassembled it and then accused them of tampering. | ||
| I can't speak to the specificity of these claims. | ||
| I don't know if this borders on conspiracy, but I'd have to look more into it. | ||
| If they're innocent, the courts will find in their favor. | ||
| They are very wealthy. | ||
| I have no doubt they're going to get a good lawyer. | ||
| Well, they're good lawyers, I guess, themselves. | ||
| Oh, right, true. | ||
| I shouldn't say they're good lawyers. | ||
| I should say they're wealthy lawyers. | ||
| Well, yeah, they can't represent themselves, of course. | ||
| So I guess the issue is we have widespread writing, it's consistent, and it's sustained. | ||
| Not as sustained as the systemic biases they're fighting against, though. | ||
| But what systemic biases? | ||
| I mean, all the stuff regarding class and race that has led to these conditions boiling up here. | ||
| I guess it really just is a matter of like, what do you think the solution to this is? | ||
| Class. | ||
| Class-based. | ||
| Right, but is it like arresting a given number of people and replacing some left-leaning DAs? | ||
| Or is it like a, we fix this, like from the ground up, you know? | ||
| I think the first thing that needs to happen is acknowledgement and condemnation, which is what we're not getting from the media. | ||
| I think we have. | ||
| But they're just saying peaceful protests over and over again with the flames behind them. | ||
| But you're doing it now. | ||
| You're like, well, there was one. | ||
| For the most part, the protests are peaceful. | ||
| So calling them peaceful protests is an accurate and factually verifiable description. | ||
| I went through this today. | ||
| They were calling what happened in Philadelphia demonstrations. | ||
| Every outlet I read was like, demonstrations took place and a pickup truck rammed a cop, knocking her to the ground and breaking her leg. | ||
| I think you've got to acknowledge CNN's crap. | ||
| But wait, weren't they demonstrations? | ||
| MSNBC's junk. | ||
| When people are going around smashing windows and stealing things from all these stores, That's not a demonstration. | ||
| They were calling that a demonstration. | ||
| The media doesn't say rioters. | ||
| They don't ever call it a riot. | ||
| I mean, conservative outlets will. | ||
| I know for a fact that's not true. I've seen even liberal or neutral outlets that have referred to these as riots. | ||
| Sometimes, perhaps. | ||
| I'll say this. I don't think either of us have an example, but I'm willing to concede, yes, absolutely. | ||
| But I'm just being hyperbolic in that for the most part, they overwhelmingly say demonstration. | ||
| And every time I read one of these stories, I'm like, dude throwing a brick at the head of a cop is not a demonstrator | ||
| or a protester. | ||
| Here's where I have to turn this on you, okay? | ||
| So I assume you and I have similar goals when it comes to race-based justice. | ||
| You don't like redlining. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| I'm glad we don't have to argue on that. | ||
| But you seem very concerned about the inaccuracies in the way that the left-leaning media has covered this. | ||
| And I've seen this on your channel, too. | ||
| Many videos pertaining to that general trend. | ||
| I see none of it with regards to how the right miscovers these. | ||
| How many views does the right get? | ||
| Views? | ||
| Like, how big is right-wing media versus left-wing media? | ||
| The right wing, at least on YouTube, the right wing media is absolutely larger. | ||
| Have you looked at the actual data on that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you, if you, I mean, it depends on, um, it depends on what your metric is | ||
| for left leaning. | ||
| There are some like, uh, like neutral leaning, like I don't consider CNN to be left by any | ||
| metric for example. | ||
| They're anti-Trump and he, and Cuomo, uh, Cuomo specifically said since when do protests | ||
| have to be peaceful? | ||
| I think that, well, that's a true statement. | ||
| There are many non-peaceful. | ||
| So I mean, that's definitely left. | ||
| No, there have been plenty of non-peaceful protests. | ||
| some of them led by right-leaning people in the history of this country. | ||
| Protest does not inherently mean peaceful. | ||
| The point I'm making there is that he's clearly on the side of the unrest. | ||
| I don't think being anti-Trump makes you left-leaning. | ||
| I think that just makes you a fan of human decency and life on this planet. | ||
| In terms of how the media covers what's going on, CNN's on clearly one side. | ||
| I think that CNN is, at best, neutral. | ||
| They are absolutely not on my side. | ||
| But when it comes to this, again, you have an enormous media platform. | ||
| We have people like the President of the United States. | ||
| Saying that black lives matter people they aren't American. | ||
| They hate America. They want to destroy it This is up to the presidency of the United States right-leaning | ||
| media You think the left-leaning media has been inaccurate in | ||
| their coverage of these issues. The right-leaning media is Insane when it comes to talking about Bush | ||
| But who and what? | ||
| So I really wanted to ask you, one of the things that you mentioned was that you did not like Michael Tracy's coverage of these small cities. | ||
| And I kind of wanted to loop back a little bit because we are still talking about riots, and we're going to go to super chats, maybe eventually. | ||
| And I wanted to ask, what was your issue with Michael Tracy's coverage? | ||
| And why did you think that he was unfair in his representation of talking about these small towns? | ||
| I think we have a really bad issue, especially with commentary on YouTube, of people who will try to amass a series of descriptive positions and then use them to imply a prescriptive one without actually ever making that argument. | ||
| So for example, if your argument is that Black Lives Matter That's so interesting. | ||
| to damage in some small communities or that Black Lives Matter has increased the propensity | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| of COVID-19 spread, which seems to not be true. | ||
| Those are descriptive claims that you can make, but you're not making the prescriptive | ||
| claim, which is that BLM is bad. | ||
| The problem that I had with Michael Tracy is it seems like he wanted to do everything | ||
| possible to supply the right wing with arguments that would support their idea that BLM is | ||
| bad without actually making the case himself, just making sort of hodgepodge descriptive | ||
| claims to support it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why would he do that? | ||
| The right is on the outs. | ||
| Breitbart is flagged, deranked, banned. | ||
| Their live stream of a congressional press conference was removed immediately from YouTube. | ||
| I would consider you far right, and you have 110 million views. | ||
| Far right? | ||
| Oh yeah, the actual... I like talking to you, don't get me wrong. | ||
| The actual stuff that you do on your channel, though, is hyper-partisan, like almost conspiracy bait. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Like there was the clip you did where you said that if Joe Biden wins, they're going to rewrite all the definitions in your dictionary. | ||
| People are going to come to your house with fireworks and guns. | ||
| It's all going to be over. | ||
| Those things have already happened. | ||
| First of all, bad things have happened to people on the left and the right. | ||
| Second of all, this has nothing to do with Biden winning. | ||
| This all happened under Trump, under protest that Trump has exacerbated with his poor response. | ||
| And third of all, don't you think it's a little bit disingenuous of you to imply that just because something has happened at some point in this country, that means that it's the product of an upcoming presidential election? | ||
| Like, at some point over the past four years, you know, there's probably been like a sewer explosion in somebody's toilet in an apartment. | ||
| But if I said, if Trump wins again, there will be toilets exploding in your home, I feel like it would be a disingenuous presentation. | ||
| Do you think Joe Biden would reinstate critical race theory trainings at the government level? | ||
| I think that your opposition... Before Trump banned it, I guess. | ||
| I think your opposition to it is one of the most anti-free speech positions that you have. | ||
| Possibly the most, yeah. | ||
| So, you're getting off on this one. | ||
| We gotta go back to the initial claim you made and where I'm going with this. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| When I said that if Biden wins, and I don't know the exact quote that you're referring to, they're changing the definitions, which they've already been doing. | ||
| Definitions have changed dramatically to the point where Wikipedia makes no sense anymore. | ||
| Wait, it makes perfect sense, and definitions change all the time. | ||
| If you go to Wikipedia right now, and I brought this up before, and look up the word woman, it has nothing to do with the word trans woman, and they both disagree with each other on reality. | ||
| It's a Wikipedia article. | ||
| What does that have to do with Biden? | ||
| That happened under Trump or Obama. | ||
| What does that have to do with Biden? | ||
| The point is, you have Donald Trump, who just recently banned critical race theory, and any company that does critical race theory trainings is banned from contracting with the government, and it's actually reversing this. | ||
| Well, that's fantastic. | ||
| Critical race theory is neo-segregationist. | ||
| Wait, can you describe to me what critical race theory is? | ||
| So in layman's terms, I don't have the academic definition pulled up for you, but specifically like privilege plus power, whiteness, minorities, traits of whiteness would be specifically like hard work, scheduling. | ||
| I'll tell you this, the tenets of critical race theory, though I've definitely done segments on the overt academic definition of it, I don't have it pulled up. | ||
| But when they put out a list that says whiteness, they say things like, down with whiteness. | ||
| Traits of whiteness include schedules, hard work, planning for the future, 2.5 kids, and all of those things. | ||
| You're just listing the one Smithsonian Museum pamphlet that was passed out and largely criticized. | ||
| Critical race theory. | ||
| Criticized by who? | ||
| It was it was in the Smithsonian for decades. | ||
| That specific pamphlet, no, it was not. | ||
| This pamphlet you're referring to right now, I know because I covered on my stream and made fun of it as well. | ||
| No, it was made specifically probably some new in student or somebody who was in their 20s made it got taken away almost immediately afterwards following bad reception to pretend that this is indicative of an entire academic theories. | ||
| Very silly. | ||
| I learned critical race theory in sociology. | ||
| That was my major. | ||
| It's very, very simple. | ||
| Critical race theory is just the racialized element of critical theory. | ||
| That is to say, you analyze racial relations based on distinctive power relationships between different groups. | ||
| So how about instead, I guess, the application of? | ||
| That's probably the best way to put it. | ||
| There is something terrifyingly despotic about banning the teaching of a certain idea because it leads people to conclusions that are unfavorable to the President of the United States of America. | ||
| But I think you're now ascribing an assumption on the intent. | ||
| What I'm saying is... Why is it good that it's banned then? | ||
| Well, so the first assumption you made was you know exactly why Trump did it and made him look bad. | ||
| I think, actually, Trump doesn't know anything about it. | ||
| No, Trump specifically said that it promoted anti-American values, which is the same tinpot dictator excuse that every authoritarian is ever given for their excuse to... And so the context here is that Christopher Ruffo appeared on, I think, Tucker Carlson and said that, and then Trump just parroted it and didn't actually know what he was talking about. | ||
| So when it came to the debate, he had no idea what he was talking about. | ||
| He's the president. | ||
| I'm going to hold him accountable for his language. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Yeah, Trump didn't know what he was talking about, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, but he said that. | ||
| So we have now the emergence of an ideology that is targeting specific races. | ||
| It's not an ideology. | ||
| It's just a mode of academic analysis. | ||
| Critical race theory is just, I guess, a broad term. | ||
| This is the challenge I always get whenever I have conversations about this. | ||
| It's broad because it's been made broad so you have something to criticize. | ||
| So whatever happens is when I say something like, hey, I think these things are bad, I get semantic arguments about, well, then define it. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| You have to prove what the specific academic... What I'm telling you is, when they say things like, I worked for Fusion, for example, and the editor-in-chief changes Twitter by a down with whiteness, like overtly racist. | ||
| They use it to justify racial segregation, neo-segregation. | ||
| I have seen protests... | ||
| By claiming that racism is only privilege plus power? | ||
| That's an academic argument, though. | ||
| I've only heard that from non-academics. | ||
| Right, so what I'm saying is you have a colloquial understanding of what's happening versus you demanding I make a specific definition and then attack it, which is not a fair argument. | ||
| The colloquial understanding you have is as much an ideological mishmash as the anti-SJW compilations of 2015. | ||
| That's not an argument. | ||
| argument. What are you talking about? The argument that I'm making is that the | ||
| president of the United States is trying to engage in a modern form of book | ||
| burning and that is what this is by the way taking certain forms of knowledge | ||
| and removing them from the public discourse certainly with regards to | ||
| federal funding he is doing this and the reason he is doing this as for his | ||
| public comments are because they lead people to become un-American. | ||
| The trainings are a violation of Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. | ||
| You can't tell people that there are certain races that are inherently good or bad, but that's what the trainings were doing. | ||
| That's what the trainings were doing. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| What federal trainings were saying that certain races are good or bad? | ||
| Let's pull up Christopher Rufo. He's got a huge list of it. | ||
| This is what happened. | ||
| Christopher Rufo went on Tucker Carlson, gave a list of all these things that were happening, Trump saw it, reacted, didn't know what he was talking about. | ||
| But do we have information outside of Christopher Rufo's testimony? | ||
| We have the articles and the documents and everything, all the research he's done. | ||
| So, look, this is just one individual I'm citing right now. | ||
| This is like, white people are bad, black people are good? | ||
| No, we have down with whiteness, we have Racism can only be—only white people can be racist. | ||
| Racism is privilege plus power. | ||
| We have these components that make up some mishmash of intersectionality, leftist identitarianism, critical race theory, which form a nightmarish ideology. | ||
| And it's very, very simple, actually, when Trump bans this. | ||
| It's a violation of Title—I believe Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to do trainings where you say, white people this, white people that. | ||
| And why did it—wait. | ||
| So Trump is actually just enforcing existing law when he says you can't do this? | ||
| Those policies aren't against the law. | ||
| The critical race theory is nothing more than a tool that helps us understand the reason why things are the way they are in this country when it comes to people's racial divides. | ||
| The application of this tool is completely ideologically neutral. | ||
| You can arrive at right-leaning conclusions through it. | ||
| The only reason this is being discussed now is because it is being used as an academic scapegoat for the ideology that has led to Black Lives Matter. | ||
| I think, I think the issue is, you haven't, you haven't read any of this. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So I have, we have Christopher Ruffo. | ||
| The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that quote, virtually all white people contribute to racism and demanding that white staff members struggle to own their racism and accept their, this is Christopher Ruffo's cited research on, where did this happen? | ||
| So this is the Treasury Department. | ||
| We also have the National Credit Union Administration, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI all cited, and these are overt violations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. | ||
| So all of those departments said that exact thing? | ||
| So, National Credit Union Administration says they held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was founded on racism and built on the backs of people who are enslaved. | ||
| How is that false? | ||
| Founded on racism? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, that's an ideological position. | ||
| I don't think we should have that in government. | ||
| Wait, all government training involves ideological positions. | ||
| Even the understanding that our Constitution is the founding document of the land is an ideological disposition, a bias that we adhere to. | ||
| So, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| We founded a constitution that said all are created equal. | ||
| We had black slaves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course it's kind of... We murdered a bunch of natives. | |
| To be fair, we'll say the National Credit Administration. | ||
| That one's more of an opinion than I think actually is based on history. | ||
| I could agree with. | ||
| We definitely built this country off of Racism. | ||
| off of slaves and racism definitely racism for sure it was only we only got | ||
| the nineteen sixty civil rights act in sixty four sandy a national laboratories which produces our nuclear | ||
| arsenal held a three-day reeducation camp for white males teaching them | ||
| how to deconstruct their white male culture and forcing them to write letters | ||
| of apology to women and people of color whistleblowers from inside the | ||
| labs tell me that critical race theory is now endangering our national | ||
| security how's that endangering our national consensus | ||
| Regardless of whether that opinion is correct, holding camps for white males is a violation of the civil rights act. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What does this have to do with critical race theory, though? | ||
| So, what I'm saying is, when I say things like critical race theory, I'm referring to one particular component that's used in these trainings that are being banned. | ||
| The point I'm making is, there's a general understanding of what's happening in this country, and every time I bring this up to someone on the left, they use a semantic or academic argument to confuse the situation. | ||
| Because he's banning it, even so far as to go to universities and funding for them. | ||
| This is a tremendous violation of our First Amendment rights. | ||
| You have to understand that when it comes to, listen, I'm not defending white male training, whatever, okay? | ||
| Crap. | ||
| We're talking about you would need to meet the highest conceivable threshold of harm done to this country for me to even begin to believe it's acceptable for a president to unilaterally decide that a given type of academic analysis is no longer something that they will be permitting. | ||
| This is, like, it is insane to me that a person who considers themselves anti-authoritarian could ever even begin to to condone this. | ||
| If there are problems with those individual things, and I have no doubt, by the way, corporations have been doing cringe, cringey, terrible diversity training for decades now, So hold on. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| with men and sexual harassment. They've done it with like tolerance and everything like that. | ||
| They've done it with LGBTQ people. They're doing it with this. That's always been going on. But | ||
| there are ways to address that that don't involve this. And even if there weren't, this is way worse. | ||
| So hold on. I agree. I think the issue is that Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. | ||
| And I think he saw a Fox News segment and then was just like, oh, we got to ban all this. | ||
| When asked about it, he couldn't actually tell people. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Well, terrifying. | ||
| I wouldn't say terrifying. | ||
| This guy is the nuclear arm codes. | ||
| He's going to do unilateral executive action which restrict the First Amendment rights of federal institutions because he heard it from the like. | ||
| This is I can't. | ||
| Well, so look, I think the degree to which we find Trump's lack of knowledge on this and his overbearing action. | ||
| That's where we're disagreeing, I guess. | ||
| My issue is... This is a First Amendment violation. | ||
| I mean, it's just... You consider yourself to be... No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Hold on, hold on. | ||
| The government should ban violations of the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| And that was the issue at play. | ||
| Did Trump, you know, blanket banning critical race theory? | ||
| I guess it depends on what the actual executive order is, and to what extent critical race theory is banned, but insofar as it pertains to the training specified by Christopher Rufo, then brought up by Trump, that should be banned. | ||
| This is how it's always done, though. | ||
| And by the way, I know everyone loves the bring up Godwin's Law, this is how it was done in Nazi Germany, too. | ||
| When book burning started to take place, they didn't just say, let's burn everything progressive. | ||
| They would say, this specific ideology is But you're not arguing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| So in either case, there's a quote that I'm wonderfully fond of, and it's, if one considers himself a defender of human freedom, he must regrettably spend his time defending scoundrels, because it is against scoundrels which authoritarianism is first aimed, and if it is to be stopped, it must be stopped at its beginning. | ||
| When it even came to Nazi Germany, I understand this is a hyperbolic argument, I'm just using it because it's a clear-cut example. | ||
| When it came to the types of literature they decided to burn, they didn't just say, oh, everything progressive, anti-racist, everything Jewish, let's burn that. | ||
| They would say, oh, well this, this is child abuse, but it was everything research about gay people. | ||
| And if you use very specific problems to defend the dissolution of information on a broader topic, you're participating in authoritarian apology. | ||
| So yes, but I think you're talking about something else. | ||
| So, we can break this down. | ||
| First, if Trump went so far as to ban universities teaching critical race theory, then that's a serious, serious problem. | ||
| I've seen people complain, there was like a, I can't remember what it was, I think it was West Point, did a class on like queer theory, and people complained about it, and I'm like, why are you complaining about a class on something? | ||
| If people want to go and learn about it, they should learn about it and they go to university for it. | ||
| The actions being taken that I have issue with, that I can only specifically cite, was Trump saying these specific trainings violate the law. | ||
| Now, I think it's fair to say Trump didn't know what he was talking about. | ||
| That's easy. | ||
| He couldn't even answer on the debate stage, and a lot of people complained about that. | ||
| But if they violated the law, he wouldn't need to create any new laws to get rid of them. | ||
| He didn't. | ||
| It was an executive order. | ||
| Well, an executive order is a function of the law, no? | ||
| So it's the president saying, do this. | ||
| It sounds like critical race theory. | ||
| It's enforceable. | ||
| They took critical race theory and used it as an excuse to create ridiculously racist functions. | ||
| And then they're just, so instead of Trump saying, hey, get rid of those functions, don't do that again, he's getting rid of the theory that was used. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| That's what it sounds like. | ||
| So that part of the argument is well beyond what we're actually talking about. | ||
| That's why I'm saying if Trump went so far and that we'd have to pull up, I would agree with you. | ||
| Trump should not ban knowledge or theory. | ||
| But if Trump is saying the government is engaging in trainings that teach this thing to employees, and those things are violations of Title VII, we can't legally do those things. | ||
| Is the idea that white people are inherently racist a critical race theory idea? | ||
| I think that most critical race theorists would argue that everybody carries with them racial biases, whether you're black or white. | ||
| I think any academic who would say that only white people carry with them internalized biases is absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| Well, we used to talk about, we have comfort biases. | ||
| So whatever you're comfortable with is what you're, if you're not familiar, like familiarity biases. | ||
| So if a white person was born in a black neighborhood, they'd be familiar with the black people and not the white people. | ||
| White people, by the way, who are born in inner city, kind of like black areas, tend to develop the same cultural affectations as black people when it comes to relationships with the police or other institutions like that. | ||
| It's not about white people bad, black people good, or anything like that. | ||
| Even though some of these sessions, I've seen them, some of them seem horribly cringey and ham-fisted attempts by managers to try to fit some sort of nouveau standard of, | ||
| you know, woke training. | ||
| The fundamental idea here, at least for most critical race theorists I imagine, is just | ||
| simply we have to recognize these biases are inside of us, not just race, any type of inclination. | ||
| The thing about race is... | ||
| What you're saying about everyone has some kind of racist inclination... | ||
| I completely agree with. | ||
| I think people... So I learned this when I did fundraising for non-profits. | ||
| Anyone who's capable of teaching you sales or fundraising will tell you, absolutely, people trust and like those who are just like them. | ||
| And do so. So hold on. So that means when you approach someone wearing a suit, you try to act like someone wearing | ||
| a suit. | ||
| And that means there's a racial component to that, that if people see something familiar, you look like they do, they're | ||
| more likely to be favorable. | ||
| However, for what it's worth, I'm not going to pretend like Wikipedia is a fantastic source. | ||
| I'm just not capable of pulling up the actual article which goes back to 1999 from Harris, 1993, Ladson-Billing's Critical Race Theory, which views white skin that some Americans possess as akin to owning a piece of property. | ||
| In that, it grants privileges to the owner that a renter, in this case a person of color, would not be afforded. | ||
| Cheryl L. Harris and Gloria Ladson Billings describe this notion of whiteness as property, whereby whiteness is the ultimate property that whites alone can possess. | ||
| Valuable just like property, the property functions of whiteness, rights to disposition, rights to use and enjoyment, reputation and status property, and the absolute right to exclude, make the American dream more likely and attainable for whites as citizens. | ||
| Yes, that would violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act if you told people that in a government setting. | ||
| I genuinely don't believe it would. | ||
| That's just a flourish, purple prose way of saying that white privilege exists. | ||
| And while they may have phrased it there in a very alliterative way, I think everything there is perfectly defensible. | ||
| If someone made a stereotypical statement about black people in a government setting, would that violate their civil rights? | ||
| It's not a stereotypical statement in a way that infers racism. | ||
| It's just a discussion of privilege. | ||
| That's your opinion. | ||
| Wait, do you think it's a violation of the law in a sort of diversity training class to say that white privilege exists? | ||
| Yeah, well, in this context, it would be yes. | ||
| I genuinely don't think that is the case. | ||
| I mean, there is a big difference between treating people differently based off their race and recognizing that society treats people differently based off their race. | ||
| You can't discriminate on the basis of race. | ||
| But you're not by telling them. | ||
| But the thing is, races are different genetically. | ||
| So going into a training and telling people that one race is inherently privileged over another Would be racist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But race... I don't... I just... I just have to... Listen, listen, listen. | |
| Yeah, go for it. | ||
| Your argument about white privilege, the problem I have with it is, first of all, I recognize the concept of a majority privilege. | ||
| In the United States, there is a dominant, a much larger portion of white people than any other race, thus creating a familiarity bias that we mentioned. | ||
| This is something... I'm not trying to say that everything I'm saying is what Brett Weinstein believes, but Brett Weinstein has talked about things like this. | ||
| If you go to China, for instance, there's no white privilege. | ||
| There's none. | ||
| You're an outsider. | ||
| In fact, you know, when I go to a country like Korea, they're extremely ethno-nationalist, and they think they're better than everyone else in the world. | ||
| You could treat it better if there was a white person than a black person, though. | ||
| You ever go to Japan? | ||
| But that's just racism. | ||
| Yes, I have. | ||
| Well, that's privilege. | ||
| And so people having racist views is for sure you can call it a privilege, but you can't | ||
| under the law discriminate against one race. | ||
| That's not discrimination. | ||
| The problem I have with this ideology is that what's the difference between saying that and say Jewish privilege? | ||
| Well, the difference would be that the Jewish privilege thing is incorrect, I imagine. | ||
| Have you done research on it? | ||
| Yeah, I certainly have. | ||
| I argue with a lot of neo-Nazis on my channel. | ||
| Vox.com. | ||
| Vox.com wrote this, actually arguing you're wrong, and it was a professor who made the same argument, and it was the weirdest thing I ever read. | ||
| And when I quoted it, a bunch of leftists tried ascribing that quote to me. | ||
| The problem I have with it is I've heard the exact same thing about white privilege to Asian privilege. | ||
| And I've been told that Asians are the true bearers of privilege. | ||
| Then you get books like In Defense of Looting that straight up say that Jews and their opinion, and Asians, again, their opinion, represent capital. | ||
| I can't believe you would say that of your own opinion, Tim. | ||
| What? | ||
| But you know I have to do that. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| Listen, first of all, it's not just a majority bias. | ||
| A country which, by the way, has a very pernicious history of white supremacy and white privilege is Bolivia, a country recently that had a socialist victory in an election. | ||
| Two-thirds of that country is indigenous. | ||
| The one-third that is white has historically held a great deal of power because of course they are the descendants from the conquistadors who came over there and just just made a mess of things and they've held power for for centuries since. | ||
| So I just I need to listen. | ||
| If we are to defer to legal arguments, I am not a lawyer. | ||
| I am of the utmost confidence that saying that there is white privilege in this country does not violate any discrimination practices with regards to federal training or employment. | ||
| I think it is a very true and very real thing that people should know. | ||
| Not because white people should feel ashamed. | ||
| I have never once, for a moment in my life, Apologize to anyone for being white or for a man or being a dashing six foot two. | ||
| I think it's just a piece of information that is helpful to contextualize other pieces of information. | ||
| So I disagree on racializing it, but I will say this. | ||
| If we agree on that point, Then it sounds like what Trump did isn't terrifying, in fact, would just be a matter for the courts. | ||
| So, if Trump wants to say, this is illegal because I believe it is and you believe it isn't, then the real issue is not despotism, the real issue is, okay, you file your lawsuit, it'll go to the courts, we'll interpret, determine whether or not it is a violation of Title VII. | ||
| No, I can't accept that. | ||
| Because, first of all, if it's already illegal, then they should be able to file court cases just based on the evidence they already have. | ||
| They wouldn't need an executive order to give them the additional justification. | ||
| Additionally, when he talks about critical race theory, when Trump, when the Republicans, whatever, They aren't talking about this very narrow set of cringey diversity training practices. | ||
| They're talking about a broad ideology that is infesting and de-Americanizing people to make them hate whiteness, to hate this country, to hate their race, whatever. | ||
| And these things, frankly, we should call them what they are, blatant authoritarian | ||
| fear mongering. | ||
| And when we kowtow to it by saying, okay, well, we'll let the courts deal with it. | ||
| Okay, well, in some cases, maybe the worst iteration of these diversity training things | ||
| could conceivably be a violation of that law. | ||
| We are abetting authoritarianism. | ||
| And that is something I can't allow. | ||
| I would rather a country where these policies continue, and some are terrible, and we slowly | ||
| change them via process of existing law, than one where the president of the United States | ||
| of America, apparently operating on poor information, unilaterally decides to just shut it all down. | ||
| That is a very dangerous precedent. | ||
| But this is within the confines of our existing government, what the President has the authority to do, and there are means of rectifying it if it is a violation of the law. | ||
| Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean it's not authoritarian. | ||
| Yeah, it's some bad authority with the Patriot Act and stuff. | ||
| Just because he has the authority doesn't mean it's right. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It means that we have a system that, for one, is imperfect, but it's good in the sense that if Trump does something, he gets sued all the time and he's lost several times. | ||
| And in my opinion, I do not like the idea that there would be a government program, a government training program, telling people that whiteness is inherently this, that, or I wonder what's white. | ||
| Like, are you white? | ||
| You're Asian. | ||
| So are you white? | ||
| I'm not even white. | ||
| My skin's not white. | ||
| I'm like pink. | ||
| I'm voting Biden. | ||
| I'm going to be black in a couple of days. | ||
| There is no black human. | ||
| No white human. | ||
| Let's get that out of the way. | ||
| There's shades. | ||
| No human has that color. | ||
| Those are shades. | ||
| We use them improperly, those words. | ||
| But people will have biases based on what other people look like. | ||
| And so the problem I have is your ideology inherently turns me into a second-class citizen. | ||
| Wait, how? | ||
| Because I have been to these places where they tell me I'm not welcome in either space. | ||
| I've been told that I both simultaneously have white privilege and don't. | ||
| And as long as I agree with them, they're willing to grant me certain access. | ||
| I would never abet that. | ||
| I know you wouldn't, but this is what's happening in practice. | ||
| I have personally met many white nationalist authoritarians, but I can't say just by way of you existing, voting for Trump, aligning with them in that respect, that your ideas are exactly their ideas. | ||
| No, they hate me. | ||
| They insult me and they use racist terms for what I am. | ||
| Well, it really depends on how- And so that's why I hate identitarianism, be it from them or the left. | ||
| But I'm not engaging- But I'll tell you this, the white nationalists aren't putting policies in place. | ||
| Neither are we. | ||
| Trump removed that policy. | ||
| No, first of all, we're not talking about policy. | ||
| We're talking about the individual practices of individual government departments that maybe are worthy of criticism. | ||
| Again, I haven't gone to these, and I have very perfect reasons to distrust sometimes right-leaning media's portrayal of these events. | ||
| But even saying everything there, cringey as it seems, these are not, this is not identitarianism. | ||
| These are, at worst, poor ways of describing the concept of white privilege, which I think is a perfectly defensible concept. | ||
| You can believe in white privilege, you can believe in Asian privilege, that bears no, absolutely nothing, on your character as an individual, and anybody who would use these concepts as a hammer To dismiss you? | ||
| Or to say your ideas aren't worthwhile? | ||
| To me, I think that's disgusting. | ||
| And in fact, you know what? | ||
| I'll be bipartisan on this, okay? | ||
| Because I get this sometimes on the left. | ||
| There are people who will say, you can't have that opinion. | ||
| You're white. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You're a man, you know? | ||
| By way of your privilege, and I acknowledge I have privilege, your ideas on this aren't worthwhile. | ||
| And I say to that, as I always have, idiotic! | ||
| Ideas are valuable, people are valuable, by their own merits and none else. | ||
| When we talk about concepts like privilege, we're talking about lofty statistical biases. | ||
| Some black people will literally live their entire lives without really meaningfully getting racially discriminated against, and some white people will get frequently uh, uh, um, messed up because they're white. It's all about | ||
| averages and statistics. And anybody who uses that as an individual condemnation, I have | ||
| to tell you, this is not anything that I support. And I don't think it's representative of | ||
| critical race theory. | ||
| The problem is, when you try to address the problem from racial standpoints, you create | ||
| the circumstances in which the individual will be oppressed. | ||
| How? | ||
| So if you create a platform, a training program that says, and I know you said it wasn't, | ||
| you didn't like it. When you take, you know, 8,900 white males or whatever, and you know | ||
| you, I think that was actually a different circumstance, but when you bring white males | ||
| to a special training camp to tell them to address their privilege, | ||
| Those people are having their rights violated based on, if you want to call it a distorted or corrupted view of whatever the theory actually is, then it's being used to oppress individuals. | ||
| It's like corporations, you know, like corporations. | ||
| Let me give you an example. | ||
| I worked for Fusion. | ||
| They had a presidential forum. | ||
| They told me I looked too white to participate. | ||
| What should I do? | ||
| Uh, well, I, um... In what capacity were you there? | ||
| So I worked for this company as a senior correspondent and they were doing a presidential forum where they were going to be asking questions of presidential candidates. | ||
| And I went to the president and I said, I'm just wondering why I wasn't notified as a senior correspondent and somebody who's supposed to be hosting things for you. | ||
| And they said, they brought in someone else who was black. | ||
| And he said, well, he's like, you're too white. | ||
| And I was like, I'm second generation mixed race. | ||
| I was like, I've dealt with violence and racism. | ||
| And he was like, yeah, but come on, man. | ||
| He's like, look, man, these people are extremely racist, you know, so you can't, you can't do it. | ||
| I think we're... Wait, I just want to say, I mean, you know, I'm not going to come in favor of that, but that has nothing to do with critical race theory. | ||
| That is corporate PR 101. | ||
| They do the same thing with their commercials. | ||
| They'll be like, eh, you're a little bit too ethnic. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But I have to say, that has, again, nothing to do with critical race theory. | ||
| Often the people who are making these decisions are people who are, let me tell you, quite in need of understanding critical race theory. | ||
| If according to long-standing critical race theorists, whiteness as a skin color is something you can hold that grants you access and reputation and privilege, and it is a component of critical race theory. | ||
| It's because we're blending class. | ||
| Being applied by people who, I think to be fair, we can say people who are dumb. | ||
| But if people are taking these ideologies and saying whiteness is a special thing that applies to your skin color and negates who you are, in the fact that an individual will then be oppressed or denied rights, it's a violation of civil rights law. | ||
| The way it comes off to me, I mean, I can't speak to these individually, again, regardless of how bad they are. | ||
| I will say, though, they, I mean, you've heard of the book White Fragility, I assume? | ||
| This is a big popular, leftists hate this book. | ||
| We hate this book. | ||
| Because the person who wrote it is, if I may, A cynical corporate sellout whose primary interest is, as a diversity trainer, encouraging other corporations to get more diversity training. | ||
| Diversity training doesn't work. | ||
| It doesn't actually work that well. | ||
| Maybe you get some marginal benefits, but in terms of the money invested, it turns out that if a person has racial biases, sitting them in a one-week seminar is not going to do anything about it. | ||
| Who knew? | ||
| So, with that being said, when I hear about these government industries, I don't think these are being done by far-left critical race theorists. | ||
| I think these are people who are functionally working off the same set of misguided principles that have been dictating corporate policy for decades now, in an attempt to overstate how hip and cool and totally not bigoted they are. | ||
| But with regards to the executive order, if one ideology begets another, and if you want to believe critical race theory leads to stuff like that... We agree on that point. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| Then I'm glad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm glad about that. | |
| So here's my question. | ||
| Well, I don't want to interrupt you. | ||
| Finish your thought just so people can hear it. | ||
| I'm assuming I know what you're going to say. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If critical race theory leads to that, and again, I contest because I feel like corporations have been doing basically that for ages, but then we must acknowledge then, of course, that there are elements of Trump's language, like the way he presents himself, the stuff that he says, that do lead to the creation of far-right militias and violence in the same way that any political sort of extreme group will form from any type of speech. | ||
| But to then executively ban conservatism in an attempt to target the extremism? | ||
| I think we would recognize then, okay, maybe we should have painted with a finer brush here. | ||
| I guess the question then is, did Trump outright ban the ideology across the board, even at universities, or did he ban the specific trainings? | ||
| Well, he banned the trainings. | ||
| Now, you're gonna have to correct me if I'm wrong. | ||
| Did he not say that federal funding would be taken away from universities that participated in that training? | ||
| Or am I... I don't know about that one. | ||
| Okay, I could be misremembering that. | ||
| I'll just put it this way. | ||
| The training programs I read to you about taking white males on some trip to have them reflect on their racism, whatever. | ||
| Mud wrestle. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You would say that's bad? | ||
| I can't imagine that being effective. | ||
| But can you denounce that with me, but also acknowledge that critical race theory is like a tool for understanding racism? | ||
| Based on what I can read about critical race theory, I'd say absolutely not. | ||
| Well, check it out. | ||
| Race theory is talking about class and race combined because we come from a country where our ancestors were white, if you want to call us white, which I still don't think we are. | ||
| And they were wealthy. | ||
| And so that wealth has been passed down through generations to people with the similar skin tone. | ||
| And the black people, when they're not black, they had slaves with no money, so that lack of wealth has been passed down. | ||
| Now there's a class diversion, and there's an inherent bias in our society because of the class diversion. | ||
| And so if the issue is, we want to help people who are poor, we now have a problem with the likes of these programs. | ||
| In that, you now have a whole mix of people who are both poor, and wealthy who are of all different races, | ||
| and there's a disproportion of people of one race who might be wealthier or impoverished. | ||
| If you enact racial policy, you leave people poor and you don't actually solve the problem of poverty. | ||
| So is our goal to just say we wanna help one race ignoring all the others or do we wanna end poverty? | ||
| In which case, these programs should be ended and our policy should be based on class and not race | ||
| so long as we've gotten rid of racism in our laws. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, there are racial disparities that'll need to be addressed as well. | ||
| If you have black folk on average in a certain place and white folks on average in a better place, lifting people out of poverty won't fix the respective divide between black and white people. | ||
| It'll just level the pot in general. | ||
| But that's better than nothing. | ||
| I mean, we're not even getting that in this country, so honestly, at this point, I mean, I'll take that. | ||
| But I just, I need to say, because I think I found a comparison, maybe perhaps a more effective one, with regards to this. | ||
| You're aware, of course, that back in the 1980s, even the 90s, the promotion of homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle, saying it's okay to be gay, this was called child abuse in many, many circles. | ||
| This was in fact a mainstream Republican position for a very long time, and we all know the propaganda that they used. | ||
| If there was an executive action that was taken to ban federal governments that told the people there that it was okay to be gay or that you shouldn't discriminate. | ||
| That's not a good analogy to use. | ||
| Because the accusation that it abetted child abuse, I would be equally skeptical of that tendency. | ||
| We have to be, when it comes to banning certain types of ideas in federal government, we have to be very careful. | ||
| How would you feel if, in the 80s, there were government training saying that being gay was wrong, And they told people who were gay to go on retreats to address their gayness. | ||
| You would want that banned, wouldn't you? | ||
| Yeah, but there wasn't, uh, what broader idea would I be banning along with it? | ||
| I would be fine with that specifically being banned. | ||
| So here's what I'm saying. | ||
| I think the real issue at heart is, did Trump ban the idea or did he ban the trainings? | ||
| Well, it's really hard to tell because Trump, anytime he signs an executive order, it's really vague. | ||
| I think we can, but I don't think we need to keep arguing. | ||
| I think we can say we agree the trainings shouldn't happen and we agree that people should be allowed to learn. | ||
| Assuming they're as bad as what's indicated here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, that's fine. | ||
| I don't think they're effective anyway, you know? | ||
| I think, I mean, you'll find most critical race theories don't agree with that. | ||
| Critical race theory, along with critical theory, are derivatives of the Frankfurt School and a generally Marxist perspective on social events. | ||
| That is to say, a sort of agitative, discursive process of different classes interacting with one another. | ||
| Leftists don't like corporate diversity training. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| Look, when you've got, I don't know who Cheryl L. Harris is or Gloria Lansing Billings. | ||
| I'm sure they're wonderful people. | ||
| The 1993 research, Whiteness as Property, and you see how that extends into a whole facet of racialized thinking. | ||
| Affirmative action, for instance, is a component of all of this. | ||
| It's not of critical race theory. | ||
| I mean, according to this it is. | ||
| Well, affirmative action was implemented off of reasons that had nothing to do with critical race theory. | ||
| Critical race theory is just about the respective antagonisms. | ||
| In fact, I think most critical race theorists, or at least most orthodox ones, you know, like leftist ones, would actually be quite critical of the idea that you could emancipate black people by giving them Something that's interesting is how races are actually genetically different. | ||
| only further cementing them in a system that has caused them to fall to the place they're | ||
| in today. | ||
| I imagine that would be... | ||
| Well, that's a critique of capitalism. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| I mean, it all gets lumped together, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, something that's interesting is how races are actually genetically different. | ||
| Like, like, after, you know, and it's, that's a challenging conversation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it can be, seem offensive. | ||
| But I mean, the genetic, the reason you look different is because your genetics are different. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, modern biology is very interesting. | ||
| Again, I said I argue with a lot of Nazis. | ||
| Nowadays, biologists don't even use race. | ||
| They use clines as an idea, which have intersecting lines of parallel DNA similarities that can vary based on race, ethnicity, geography. | ||
| The interesting stuff is when you look at how all these intersect, there's more genetic diversity in the continent of Africa than there is between the average black and white person. | ||
| Meaning that if you took one African, not like Black American, but African, and found another random African, and then DNA tested whatever, the difference between them would be greater than if you took a random African and a random European. | ||
| Oh, so it's not the color of their skin necessarily, even though they're different races within the Africans. | ||
| It's just interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| So the issue is, people use race as a colloquial term for saying, like, The color of your skin and the certain features that exist within your, you know, typically your face or your body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they'll use that to describe like, you know, Asian eyes or whatever, or, you know, black people's noses or whatever, whether they're racial stereotypes, which I think to an extent, yes, because just because the color of your skin is one way doesn't imply. | ||
| But I bring that up to point out that some people don't get, I guess this might, you might agree with this, I don't know, that white privilege doesn't necessarily mean white skin. | ||
| Yeah, there are ways that you can evoke white privilege while actually being quite non-white. | ||
| What I mean is like somebody who's perhaps albino, but visually distinct. | ||
| Oh yeah, of course, because even people who, like black people or albino, there's a skin condition some black people have that leads to them having patches of white skin. | ||
| Michael Jackson claimed that he had it, but he obviously didn't because it was... Was it vitiligo? | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| Sometimes you can go for the whole face, but obviously there are other indications from people who | ||
| I guess prioritize different races over others that they should treat them differently or something like that. | ||
| Anyway, I just think what I think we all need to agree upon fundamentally, and I'm sure that we | ||
| all do here at least in concept, maybe not in actual practice or implementation, is that the | ||
| idea that people have a different sort in life based on the color of their skin or whatever else, | ||
| It's not based. | ||
| And I think there are a lot of deep seated problems in this country. | ||
| And I guess my frustration here stems largely from the fact that I wish I could say, like with great confidence that, you know, vote blue and this'll get fixed. | ||
| But while I do believe that Biden would be better for race relations than Trump, as do many Americans. | ||
| We know that's not true. | ||
| A lot of these cities with these deeply held racial disparities are Democrat-run cities. | ||
| I don't think Republicans would necessarily do better, but it does indicate that the system we have right now is not really fixing this problem. | ||
| It's made us debt slaves, man, to the banking system that wants interest. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| These cities that have the problems of police brutality, the places where these individuals have lost their lives that sparked these protests, Well, it's the same problem with COVID in America, right? | ||
| No two cities are alike, no one country is alike. | ||
| would do any better. I think we have San Diego, which is a Democrat, Republican mayor and didn't see, I guess, high | ||
| credits, not on the high coast. They're all stone man. | ||
| Well, it's the same problem with COVID in America, right? | ||
| No two cities are alike. No one country is alike. The best | ||
| argument I've heard is that a lot of the cities that have high | ||
| degrees of racial disparity are also run by Democrats, because | ||
| multi racial multi ethnic city is more likely to vote in Democrats just based on demographic trends. San Diego | ||
| has a lot of white and Hispanic people doesn't have as many black people so it might contribute to the trend. I don't | ||
| really know. So this this was a post I think it was Washington | ||
| Post, they mapped out the highest crime cities because I think Trump said they're all run by Democrats, and they | ||
| found that | ||
| I think in the by sheer numbers, that's true, but obviously New York has more people, they have more crime. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But per capita, I think there were no Republican cities. | ||
| There were two non-affiliated cities and the rest were Democrat. | ||
| And that would exclude San Diego, which I think is like the eighth biggest city and doesn't have a high rate of crime. | ||
| But I think it's fair to say that doesn't necessarily mean that the problem is individual Democrats. | ||
| I think it shows a problem might be single party control, no political competition. | ||
| So in California, for instance, they've had an ongoing problem with homelessness in Los Angeles, San Francisco. | ||
| And what happens is because I actually worked for a homeless shelter in the L.A. | ||
| area. | ||
| You keep getting Democrats who campaign on this, but they have no competition. | ||
| So when they win, they just laugh and do nothing. | ||
| Then you get wealthy people in the actual LA proper saying, not in my backyard. | ||
| So then nothing gets done about it. | ||
| And unless, I don't know how do you change that, because what happens in these cities, people just go in and say, Democrat, all across the board, and then nothing changes, because nothing has to change. | ||
| We need, absolutely, we need ranked choice voting in this country. | ||
| We live in a shockingly undemocratic country. | ||
| Nobody feels represented by either party. | ||
| Well, we're not supposed to be overtly democratic. | ||
| No, no, of course we have the Republicans, but we need at least, I mean, even the Founding Fathers said that a two-party system, or even parties in general, would lead to the downfall of this country, because, and there are a lot of problems with them, but if we're going to keep parties, man, ranked choice voting would allow third parties to actually exist and flourish. | ||
| Right now, they never can. | ||
| They can't do it. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| The spoiler effect will always lead towards two parties being the two dominant ones. | ||
| So let's do this and jump into Joe Biden and Donald Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey! | |
| My man. | ||
| We're going long tonight. | ||
| Yeah, super long. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wait, what time is it? | ||
| It's 10. | ||
|
unidentified
|
10. | |
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've been talking for two hours. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| OK, I'll take a sip. | ||
| You've got to stay hydrated, people. | ||
| I don't like any of the political establishment. | ||
| I think there's very few people on either side that I like and think are good people. | ||
| And there's slightly more Republicans than Democrats. | ||
| But I think it's because the majority of both parties are people who, like I said, didn't have to do anything. | ||
| gerrymandering, heavy guaranteed districts, you end up with Republican areas that are | ||
| always going to be Republican. | ||
| So, the Republicans are going to say, they don't have to do anything. | ||
| They'll be like, hey, vote for me. | ||
| Or don't. | ||
| Ha ha, who cares? | ||
| The Democrats said the same thing. | ||
| Nancy Pelosi held up a glass of water and she said, in my district or AOC's, you put | ||
| a D on this glass of water, it's going to get elected. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| That's a serious problem. | ||
| I disavow Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| Yeah, as you should. | ||
| I like the idea of rank choice voting. | ||
| Because to me, it would get rid of... Well, actually, I'm not entirely convinced it would get rid of Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| Term limits would. | ||
| How do you feel about term limits? | ||
| I haven't seen any evidence that they lead to a more democratic government. | ||
| I'm 50-50. | ||
| I could go either way. | ||
| Though, I have to say, I really do think the only reason that Nancy Pelosi is still in there right now is because of fear. | ||
| Democrats are terrified of Trump. | ||
| I think they have good reason to be. | ||
| But you have somebody, Shahid Buttar, who's running against Nancy Pelosi to try and unseat her in her district. | ||
| A Republican? | ||
| No, a Democrat. | ||
| A progressive, though, in line with Bernie AOC. | ||
| Yeah, no, it did. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| And I think that, like, fundamentally, the Democratic Party is ready to move on to a different set of ideas, a more true fulfillment, maybe, of what it could mean for its citizens and the party by the citizenry. | ||
| The actual elected officials, though, They have every trick in the book that they can pull out to maintain themselves in power for as long as is humanly possible. | ||
| And this is my argument for why Trump needs to win. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Joe Biden is a 47-year establishment crony who wants control of the executive branch to seal the doors and never allow any challenge ever again. | ||
| They are upset that they lost in 2016. | ||
| They weren't supposed to. | ||
| They did everything to crush Bernie Sanders. | ||
| And Donald Trump is the insurgent who upended the Republican Party and they hated his guts too. | ||
| Now they're beholden to him. | ||
| Here's my opinion, and I ask for yours afterward. | ||
| If Joe Biden gets in, he's locking the doors. | ||
| They're gonna shore up the fences. | ||
| They're gonna install their bureaucrats. | ||
| They're gonna make sure that you guys don't get a foot in the door ever. | ||
| You got too close with Bernie Sanders. | ||
| Trump, see, here's the thing. | ||
| Bernie Sanders, left-wing populist. | ||
| Donald Trump, right-wing populist. | ||
| The elites did not like either of them. | ||
| The establishment Republicans hate Trump, and that's exemplified by the Lincoln Project and the cronies who are now just espousing whatever the Democrats want them to say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If Joe Biden wins, they get back in the ivory tower, they bolt the doors shut, and they | ||
| laugh at both populist wings. | ||
| Trump was a bull brought to the gates, who stormed in, trashed everything, and the Democrats | ||
| are freaking out but still in there. | ||
| Bernie Sanders was very polite. | ||
| Hello, hello, let me in, please, I'll agree with you, I'll stop saying the millionaires. | ||
| If Joe Biden wins, I believe there will never be another populist, be it left, right, or | ||
| I think if Trump wins, Joe Biden was the best they could muster. | ||
| They are done. | ||
| If Joe Biden gets in and Kamala Harris then ends up being that person in charge, there will never be a Bernie Sanders. | ||
| There will never be a leftist populist. | ||
| But if Trump gets in and the establishment withers and dies over the next four years because Trump's going nuts, he's going to fire everybody. | ||
| He's stripping all these government protections from these employees. | ||
| He's going to fire that of the CIA. | ||
| To put his own cronies in, yeah. | ||
| I don't, but is he going to be able to do that? | ||
| If he fires them, somebody has to go there. | ||
| But that's still an argument beyond what he is doing. | ||
| So maybe that's an issue. | ||
| But if Donald Trump gets rid of the bureaucrats and he strips the establishment of its power, then I believe in 2024, you're going to see something new and wild, whatever it is. | ||
| I don't think it's going to be Trump 12 years. | ||
| I think Joe Biden is the best they could muster up to try and save the crony establishment. | ||
| And the Republicans like Rick Wilson and the other Lincoln Project people, Joined forces with them, showing us who they really are. | ||
| Joe Biden is getting more money from Wall Street than Trump is. | ||
| He gets more money from the wealthy than Trump does. | ||
| He is the establishment billionaire candidate who is being protected by big tech and billionaires who are censoring stories that might hurt him. | ||
| Let Biden go! | ||
| Okay, so we've got a lot to unpack here. | ||
| First of all, I fail to see in any meaningful way how Trump is anti-establishment. | ||
| How has Trump done that? | ||
| an enormous amount of power in the federal government. | ||
| He seems as if not more comfortable with executive orders than Obama ever did. | ||
| He's up drone strikes. | ||
| And what's more, he has fundamentally eroded the institutions which are meant to challenge | ||
| the government, the media. | ||
| Is the media bad? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But the media still serves a very useful role in this country as ineffectuously as they | ||
| do. | ||
| How has Trump done that? | ||
| The media has constantly called the, I'm sorry, Trump has constantly called the media the | ||
| enemy of the people. | ||
| He's threatened to remove press badges from people who are mean to him at press conferences. | ||
| And Obama did it to Fox News. | ||
| It's the degree to which this took place is not even comparable. | ||
| These are two different worlds. | ||
| And calling the press the enemy of the people is like fascism 101. | ||
| I don't care about right-leaning people getting their populists in office. | ||
| Right-leaning populism has a name. | ||
| It's fascism. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| No, it unquestionably is. | ||
| I don't want these people in office. | ||
| Can you define fascism? | ||
| Yeah, fascism is an ultra-nationalist, far-right form of government which relies on the assembly of the common will, the unification of a national narrative against enemies from both within and from without. | ||
| It usually has to focus on things like michismo or perhaps on the belief in a type of ethnic or racial supremacy. | ||
| So how would you define right-wing libertarians? | ||
| I don't think there is such a thing as a right-wing libertarian. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| Because I have never met one. | ||
| I keep talking to people who say they are, and then they stop being libertarian the moment it comes to literally any issue other than taxes and weed. | ||
| There was a dude who took his clothes off on the stage of the libertarian debate to argue about freedom, and they had a debate over whether or not you should be allowed to sell heroin to kids. | ||
| Yeah, well, they are some amazing people. | ||
| I will not deny it. | ||
| But they aren't populist, libertarian. | ||
| But I have to say, because we have so much to unpack here. | ||
| With regards to Trump, okay. | ||
| Is Joe Biden a candidate that I feel proud of voting for? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I'm not even going to waste time defending that. | ||
| When it comes to the means for populism to interfere with the government after Joe Biden wins, I am optimistic. | ||
| Bernie Sanders has extracted an enormous number of concessions from Joe Biden, and what's more, there are increasing signs That the popularity of the squad and other more populist, left-leaning, progressive, sometimes even socialist candidates, they are starting to wean in on the Democratic Party. | ||
| The constant conflict between Pelosi and AOC, and the fact that at certain points Pelosi has had to defer public opinion to AOC in those respects, is an indication that within that party there is a real chance at these dinosaurs. | ||
| I think the average age of the Democratic politician is like 71 or something. | ||
| These dinosaurs being ousted. | ||
| Now mind you, I am a socialist. | ||
| I don't think AOC is radical enough, but I recognize that progressive change in a given direction is preferable, especially when we recognize what we're gambling with here. | ||
| Even if I were to believe that Donald Trump was some sort of anti-establishment bull, and I don't, consolidated heavy amounts of federal power, defunded institutions. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well, the constant use of executive action, the fact that he has normalized attacks on institutions which attack him. | ||
| Like, for example, his attempt to try and get the FBI director fired during the Russiagate investigation, or the constant attacks on the press and the media, or the fact that he seems to be contemptuous of the very idea of losing an election itself. | ||
| He's consolidating federal power but trying to also fire the heads of these organizations. | ||
| I'm sorry, I should be more specific. | ||
| Executive power. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But hasn't he been heavily constrained in every direction? | ||
| He's been sued a million times. | ||
| Yeah, because he keeps breaking the law. | ||
| He breaks the law constantly. | ||
| Well... No, he does, yeah. | ||
| He has engaged in scandal after scandal after scandal over the course of his presidency. | ||
| Just be specific. | ||
| With what? | ||
| Name a scandal, name a law that's broken. | ||
| Because we hear it a lot. | ||
| I can tell you that does Trump use his authority and push really hard and then get challenged in the courts and lose sometimes and win sometimes? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Sure, so we can talk about the administration. | ||
| First of all, the Russiagate investigation led to literally dozens of credible indictments and arrests with regards to their misappropriation of funds or with their collaboration with foreign governments. | ||
| We have the Ukraine scandal, of course, with regards to him bartering aid with their willingness to help him. | ||
| That seems true now, though. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| That Joe Biden was using his son as an intermediary. | ||
| You still can't withhold aid on the condition that they release that information. | ||
| Well, so it's an argument about whether or not Trump had a right to withhold aid. | ||
| That's illegal. | ||
| Joe Biden did it. | ||
| He did it. | ||
| He literally did it. | ||
| We have him on camera. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Joe Biden said, you won't get the money unless you do what I want. | |
| So they're both criminals? | ||
| Wait, I have never at any point in my life defended Joe Biden. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| But if we can make that argument, we could say then Joe Biden's doing the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, the difference is that Joe Biden wasn't the President of the United States of America when he did it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you want, you're free to investigate. | ||
| You're free to investigate. | ||
| Why won't they? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Why is the media in this big tag? | ||
| What do you mean the media? | ||
| Wait, this vague conspiracism. | ||
| You guys are the media, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have both now written that there was a big effort to not cover the Biden scandal. | ||
| I would need to look into the specifics of it. | ||
| One of the things that I don't like when we talk about the badness of these characteristics is when we start playing defense for them on the assumption that the media is going after them or not going after them. | ||
| Left-leaning media will go after left-leaning aims. | ||
| Right-leaning media will go after right-leaning aims. | ||
| There is no such thing as journalistic integrity or objectivity. | ||
| There are only people in power and money. | ||
| Well, the establishment media I don't know what the establishment media is. | ||
| Fox News is the most viewed news station in the country. | ||
| Tucker Carlson is the largest pundit. | ||
| Do you know how many views Chris Cuomo and Rachel Maddow got combined? | ||
| Like 8 million? | ||
| And do you know what Tucker Carlson got? | ||
| In his average was 5. | ||
| He's peaked at tens of millions, hasn't he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's what? | |
| Hasn't he peaked recently? | ||
| He got, like, his ratings hit, like... No, no, no. | ||
| Five million was, like, the historical record. | ||
| He's, like, the most viewed. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| But when you combine CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, it's tenfold. | ||
| Because you're combining all of the left-wing media, and arguably some of these are barely left-leaning, with one partisan right media. | ||
| If you take a look at all of talk radio, if you take a look at Fox News, if you take a look at OAN, for example, No, it's not. | ||
| It's not great, but it does have a lot of influence within the government because we know that Trump watches it and Trump is himself a form of media. | ||
| When he talks about things with the broadcasts that he gives, he reflects essentially far-right partisan talking points. | ||
| These are in many ways reflective of the political opinions that right-leaning people have forthcoming. | ||
| We got off a little bit here. | ||
| I want to talk specifically though about Trump with regards to his practice in government even if we're | ||
| to leave aside the supported criminality of any Candidate because as far as I'm concerned being the | ||
| president is a crime. I'm not I'm not it's a weird job I'm really not in a position to | ||
| This is one of the things that I've said Even if because you know | ||
| You don't want Bernie Sanders to win he would you my fellow lefties whoever's watching would be | ||
| Devastated to see what even a left-leaning person has to do to be and stay president in the United States | ||
| We're especially with regards to foreign policy but if we want to look past that stuff and we want to look | ||
| at stuff like climate change or if we want to look at stuff regarding | ||
| like education or if we want to look at stuff just regarding like the | ||
| Fundamental gentlemen's agreements that have operated in this country for centuries now that seem to be | ||
| Unweaving. | ||
| I don't think that the Trump presidency is anti-establishment. | ||
| I think that he's very pro-corporate. | ||
| I think he's very pro-government as long as it's his government. | ||
| I think that his persistent refusal to acknowledge that if he loses in the election that he should actually step down peacefully is terrifying. | ||
| And I think that while Joe Biden is a haughty institutionalist crony who probably has as many original thoughts in his head that weren't given to him by like focus groups, as like your average chipmunk. | ||
| I think that he is a- That's me to chipmunks. | ||
| Yeah, I apologize. | ||
| I've known many wonderful chipmunks. | ||
| I think that he is, at least with regards to climate change, which I think is a very | ||
| simple, very, very easy thing to focus on, an objective improvement, and that he also | ||
| allows for meaningful left-wing populism, as opposed to what Trump is, which is a gateway | ||
| to very, very bad far-right populism. | ||
| Have you read about Obamagate? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I- You mean the thing where he spied on Trump? | ||
| So the meeting with Sally Yates and Comey and Biden and Obama where Joe Biden suggested using the Logan Act against Michael Flynn to falsely prosecute him, where they then threatened his son with imprisonment unless he agreed to testify against Trump. | ||
| Did any of that actually happen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
OK. | |
| So so to clarify, though, the notes that were released in the investigation by the FBI show that there was a note scrawled that ascribed Logan Act to Joe Biden in a meeting with Sally Yates immediately afterwards. | ||
| I think it was Sally Yates who then wrote an email to herself explaining everything that happened and sent it to her. | ||
| And then several government employees in the FBI took out liability insurance, saying in like I'm paraphrasing that we're in serious trouble. | ||
| We better buy insurance because we're going to get sued over this. | ||
| I can't speak to the specifics of this. | ||
| I know that Trump has vaguely alluded at some sort of left conspiracy to deny him the presidency, which has always come off very fascist to me. | ||
| So the notes are released. | ||
| Do you know about the Peter Strzok and Lisa Page things? | ||
| I have to say, and I apologize if this comes off like, I guess, disinterested, but having followed, I guess, the events leading up to and I've explored this Obamagate thing pretty extensively, from what I've seen and from the media sources that I've looked at and the information, the analysis, I haven't seen anything that even remotely justifies the claims that Trump has made about this. | ||
| Do you know about the text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok? | ||
| I don't know the specifics. | ||
| So where he said, we're going to stop him, we have an insurance policy. | ||
| Like, this is all public information. | ||
| I think the issue is when you talk about Russiagate and Trump's actions, it's coming from a place of you not actually looking at the evidence. | ||
| No, I assure you I have the issue is that... Well, if you didn't know about the meeting with Comey and Yates and Obama and the Logan Act and what Michael Flynn was threatened with, and like, do you know about the ongoing court case where Judge Sullivan is blocking the government from dropping its own case? | ||
| Now, I'm familiar with the things that you referred to here. | ||
| The issue is that what usually happens with this is that there are a lot of nuances to these cases that need to be looked over thoroughly, and usually the way they're presented is extremely hyperbolic. | ||
| Like Russiagate. | ||
| Well, Russiagate provide... Well, again, keep in mind, this is the big difference between right-leaning claims and Russiagate. | ||
| Russiagate was investigated dozens of indictments and arrests. | ||
| All these accusations... Not related to Russiagate, though. | ||
| Well, they were brought about by the investigation into Russiagate involving the misappropriation of campaign funds. | ||
| And we have an FBI lawyer who was recently indicted on altering evidence to frame Carter Page and get false FISA warrants to investigate in the Russiagate. | ||
| So some of these may have been, may be, what's it saying? | ||
| Fruit of the poison tree or whatever? | ||
| Fruit of the poison tree. | ||
| Fruit of the poison tree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the Trump administration has found themselves arrested. | ||
| Do you know how Paul Manafort ended up getting found out? | ||
| It was actually Ukrainians colluding with the DNC operative in providing documents which led to the investigation of Manafort. | ||
| So it was all overtly political actions. | ||
| There's nothing necessarily wrong with political actions. | ||
| We're talking about the investigation of a political administration, of the Trump administration. | ||
| The reason I bring this up is... And by the way, we've moved somewhat off of the electability or the electoralism argument here. | ||
| So here's the point. | ||
| The way you framed everything about Trump and the actions and the things he was saying Firing Comey. | ||
| Sounds like Comey should have been fired based on the information that's come out since he fired him. | ||
| That is- Wait, hold on. | ||
| That is abso- First of all, even if that is the case, which I sincerely doubt it is, that is absolutely not why Trump claimed to. | ||
| The evidence that was provided with regards to his attempt was he wanted Comey fired because Comey was looking into him. | ||
| You can't post-talk justify an illegal act because it turns out later- Hold on. | ||
| Trump tweeted early, way early, that he was being spied on by Obama. | ||
| He wasn't being spied on by Obama. | ||
| That is what the FBI does. | ||
| No, the FBI does that for every campaign. | ||
| that were going and having meetings with Trump's people and then spying on them. | ||
| That is what the FBI does. | ||
| It's a colloquial... | ||
| So, so sure, so you have people who were spying on Trump's campaign. | ||
| It's a colloquial... | ||
| I mean, if you wanna argue semantics about the way they're spying... | ||
| No, that's... the FBI does that for every campaign. | ||
| That's their job. | ||
| So if you have, before Trump is inaugurated, a meeting with Obama, Yates, Comey, | ||
| and then you have these notes, you have these text messages between FBI agents, | ||
| and Trump knew about this, but it wasn't declassified, so Trump took action and fired the guy, I mean, it sounds | ||
| justified. | ||
| Well, he didn't fire- he attempted to fire the guy, and he wasn't able to. | ||
| Comey? | ||
| Yeah, but- We did fire Comey. | ||
| Well, no- Comey was like, I have a great recollection, Trump said this to me, and I'm like, what? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| When he was being investigated for the rush against death. | ||
| Oh my goodness! | ||
| No, there's a cat. | ||
| I think a cat just knocked the... She did. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, the cat ran afterwards. | ||
| Well, we gotta fix everything. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| You keep talking. | ||
| Carry on, yes. | ||
| His efforts to fire, there was the intermediary who asked to fire the guy. | ||
| I'm forgetting his name right now. | ||
| The person who he attempted to fire, and he said no, and then Trump fired that guy. | ||
| Do you remember that name? | ||
| Was that... What was his name? | ||
| I can't remember, I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm completely, huh? | ||
| Sessions resigned. | ||
| No, no, yeah, Sessions resigned. | ||
| Look, look, look, look, look, I'm not bringing this up to be like everything's perfect. | ||
| Yeah, I just feel, well, no, no, but it's just, it's, it's interesting to me, because again, it's just, it falls, like, on this vague conspiracism, like, with regards to- It's not, it's not vague, I mean, look, if you read the news on these things, you'd know what I'm talking about. | ||
| No, but I have, it's just, a lot of these claims get jumbled up, and to be honest, I forget which narrative or which universe that I'm operating in at any given point. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| regards to like the uh... rush agate investigation there was solid evidence | ||
| they went in they investigated what was the evidence the evidence with regards to the russia uh... russia gate | ||
| investigation uh... wasn't there like uh... | ||
| uh... some evidence that there may have been like meetings were held with | ||
| members of the trump administration uh... with regards to them accepting uh... deals or | ||
| information from russia i don't know are you sure | ||
| i mean it's been like three years since this was politically relevant i don't | ||
| What I can tell you is that we know that the FISA warrants were obtained through malpractice, I guess that you can put it. | ||
| So we had. | ||
| So they lied. | ||
| A next FBI lawyer has been indicted and charged for altering evidence to imply that Carter Page was not an was not. | ||
| An asset of the CIA when he was having these meetings when in fact he was doing it for the US government | ||
| Yeah, I'd have to look so they essentially got bunk FISA warrants | ||
| Then we ended up with before Trump got it got inaugurated You have these notes released that to the best of our | ||
| understanding It's it's a meeting between several individuals in the | ||
| Obama administration To try and find a way to go after Michael Flynn to get him | ||
| to I guess The FBI notes actually read what's our goal? I think it's a | ||
| text message What's our goal to prosecute or get him fired? My question | ||
| when that came out was Why why is the FBI trying to get a guy fired from his job? | ||
| Why were they Obama told Trump not to hire Michael Flynn? | ||
| Trump hired him. Anyway, I guess Trump did it as an F you to Obama. So for some reason then Obama has a meeting | ||
| They take notes on Logan Act, maybe, for Michael Flynn, then Michael Flynn gets accused of breaking the Logan Act, or this was what launched the investigation, even though no one's ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act. | ||
| It's an obscure law that says U.S. | ||
| individuals can't represent themselves as agents of a government, because as acting National Security Advisor, he had a conversation with the Russian ambassador asking him not to escalate tensions between the countries. | ||
| That was the justification for launching this It was insane. | ||
| Then you have text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, where they're saying, we have an insurance policy, we'll stop him. | ||
| So Trump complains about this. | ||
| Trump wants to fire these people. | ||
| But then the Russian investigation stopped him from taking any action against them. | ||
| I'll tell you what, man. | ||
| If at the end of this, we say no Trump, no Biden, but we get rid of all of these intelligence bureaucrats, I'm down. | ||
| I'm totally down. | ||
| You'll find most leftists aren't big fans of intelligence agencies. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| So when Trump says, I'll put it this way. | ||
| Do you agree with Trump then when he says that they're spying on me, I didn't even get my first term, frankly I should be allowed a third term? | ||
| No, but I'll tell you this. | ||
| He says a lot of really weird stuff sometimes. | ||
| Now, I'm at something of a disadvantage here and I apologize for that because with regards to the Russiagate investigation thing, it's been a while since I've brushed up on this respective information. | ||
| I do know that the investigation that did lead to a number of legitimate investigations and arrests and indictments And I think there's something to be said about that. | ||
| I feel it's often very difficult to understand the totality of like a government conspiracy, or like something going on behind the scenes, until everything is sussed out through a proper investigation. | ||
| And for that reason, sometimes it can be really difficult to understand not only the specificity of events that have taken place, but the severity of them as well. | ||
| Because if you want to, and I'm not saying you're doing this, because everyone does this to some extent, if you want to, a disparate set of pieces of information that can be assessed and collected and presented in such a way as to | ||
| give a narrative and then once you have that narrative you can run with it and | ||
| that's what Trump has done very often with this Obamagate thing for example | ||
| like I remember when a reporter asked him what Obamagate was and he was like you | ||
| know and then he walked away which I think was fair I think it was Trump not | ||
| knowing well well then I mean but that's the thing and that's one of the | ||
| issues that I have as well the the | ||
| I think that there has probably been more confused information put out from our government over the past four years than possibly any other single presidential administration, in large part because there doesn't seem to be any sort of cohesive narrative. | ||
| It's just scraps of information being used whenever they're politically convenient and discarded when they're not. | ||
| And this is, if I may bring this back around to what we were talking about earlier, one of the things that really concerns me about Trump. | ||
| This is an anti-establishment tendency. | ||
| This is just incompetent governance. | ||
| This doesn't break the government in a way that makes it more fair or more representative or more kind or more decent or more efficient. | ||
| This is a type of governance which just makes it worse. | ||
| So do you want a competent establishment or an incompetent one? | ||
| I mean competent in certain ways when it comes to coronavirus handling, when it comes to the dissemination of healthcare, when it comes to proper schooling, all areas I think Trump has been woefully inadequate in. | ||
| I would absolutely prefer a competent establishment because education, handled properly, empowers us. | ||
| Not keeping us in our homes to be sick and die from coronavirus, that empowers us. | ||
| There are ways the government, when managed properly, even in an establishment sense, even like someone like Obama, and I hate Obama, Um, can give us tools that we need to become stronger. | ||
| The best example of this that I use, and I use this when arguing with Bernie or Buster's all the time, is, um, they say Obama stopped the wheels of history. | ||
| His, his corporate neoliberalism prevented the American people from waking up and recognizing what was wrong with the system. | ||
| And I say to them, okay, I don't like Obama either. | ||
| Great, sure. | ||
| After Obama had two terms, guess who ended up coming in second, narrow second? | ||
| under Hillary Clinton, the next Democratic primaries, some nobody, independent senator, | ||
| who then, in large part because people were disillusioned with Obama, but nonetheless given | ||
| the tools to think and to act. That's the internet. The internet, yeah, but also people weren't | ||
| terrified of a pandemic or of global warming, at least not as much as they are today. | ||
| People weren't dealing with substandard schooling. | ||
| The more people are terrified and confined and weakened by their circumstances, the less politically emancipated they are. | ||
| You know what makes it a real challenge, having conversations like this, is just that there's a lot of things you've read that I haven't, a lot of things I've read you haven't, and there are a lot of people who have read things that neither of us have or haven't, but everybody expects us to, like, come to a definitive understanding and solution within the span of a couple hours. | ||
| I'm just bringing it up because I know that no one's going to be satisfied. | ||
| Oh, I have never come to a definitive solution on anything over any length of time in a conversation. | ||
| The reason I say this is because when you bring up global warming, when you bring up the far right, when you bring up Russiagate, I'm like, wow, to like have a conversation on each of those subjects would take an hour to three or four hours. | ||
| Like, so just to briefly mention this. | ||
| In your opinion, you said there's no actual right-wing libertarians. | ||
| Because whenever it comes to it, they actually end up, you know, being more authoritarian. | ||
| Libertarianism was originally a leftist ideology, and it was appropriated. | ||
| Not to get into it, just to mention that. | ||
| Then there's also like Russiagate, where you're like, oh, it's been a while since I've talked to this. | ||
| And then I, like, the reason I brought that up was like, oh, we got to really break that down to address one point. | ||
| And then climate change. | ||
| There's a lot there, too. | ||
| Like, What are we doing internationally? | ||
| Why hasn't Joe Biden done anything about China? | ||
| Not to open up those conversations, I'm just pointing out, there's a lot in each of those we'd have to actually break down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course. | |
| It's literally impossible to. | ||
| Even if you have a very specific policy-focused discussion on one issue, say school choice, that's a big one for Republicans these days, that's easily a three-hour discussion. | ||
| Depending on how many sources you bring, that can go the whole day. | ||
| Are you for school choice? | ||
| I am not for school choice, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| Why shouldn't people have the right to just choose? | ||
| I think it puts the blame on that. | ||
| So here's my concern, right? | ||
| Individual responsibility is the mantra of the Republican Party. | ||
| Why are things in your life not going well? | ||
| Individual responsibility. | ||
| Often, sometimes, that's true. | ||
| We are agents capable of making our own decisions. | ||
| But when it comes to systemic issues, like neighborhoods with poor schooling, these people don't get bad educations because of poor decision making. | ||
| They get it because their neighborhoods have been wastelands that the government hasn't invested in for decades. | ||
| My concern, and this is what I fear, I wake up at night in a sweat thinking about this, It's, imagine some single black lady, you know, two kids, two jobs, and now all of a sudden, school choice happens. | ||
| Her local district is crap. | ||
| There's one 30 minutes away she could drive her kids to, maybe even 20 minutes away. | ||
| It's better. | ||
| Okay, so you drive your kids to and from. | ||
| Well, maybe you don't have time for that. | ||
| Do you hire like a sitter to do it? | ||
| No, you send them to the crappy school, like they would normally have to go to. | ||
| Right, but that's the thing. | ||
| And now, when that woman Sure. | ||
| writes online or writes an article or appears at a town hall and she says, | ||
| what can I do? I am struggling. The answer is you should have took them to a better school. | ||
| Sure. That worries me. Why take away the option? | ||
| Because I think there's a better solution to the same problem. We just invest in these communities. | ||
| Also, we have to keep in mind, if a lot of people choose to move to different school districts, or like take their kids there, whatever, you know, the school district that's already there is going to be even worse, because these schools get funding based on, you know, participation. | ||
| They're going to get cut more and more, meaning it'll be even worse for the people who don't have the option to go to the other ones. | ||
| I say, why enable people to leave their wasteland and blame them if they don't when we could just fix the wasteland? | ||
| So this gets into the bigger question about socialism, I suppose. | ||
| Why I'm not a fan of socialism. | ||
| I'm in favor of a mixed economy. | ||
| I'll get you one day. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Mixed economy, I think we need regulation, but I think we need people to freely trade. | ||
| And the issue I take with schools, for instance, is that when they have problems, we just dump more money into it as if a general investment fixes it. | ||
| The problem, though, is we say, okay, what about review boards? | ||
| What if we have like a review of the expenditures? | ||
| Nobody wants to be the person to cut the job or to gut the schools. | ||
| And then when people actually do, they complain the schools are being gutted. | ||
| If the school isn't functioning properly, and I shouldn't say school, just government spending in general, what we tend to see, like in Chicago, for instance, is you get a wound. | ||
| This is a way to describe it. | ||
| You get a wound in your society where you have people who are suffering or struggling. | ||
| We put a Band-Aid on it. | ||
| We say, we're going to provide funding in this area to try and solve the problem. | ||
| A few years ago, buying this house and going, I don't know, throw more money into it. | ||
| And they put another Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid. | ||
| Eventually, you just have a festering wound. | ||
| It's never been solved. | ||
| With a lot of Band-Aids. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Because they keep trying this. | ||
| I don't disagree, by the way. | ||
| Throwing money at schools doesn't work. | ||
| I think we've seen this time and time and time again. | ||
| But not just schools. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, there are some, like, for example, like the more you give like the EPA money, they can like more reliable testing or whatever. | ||
| But generally speaking, yeah, I think like schools in particular. | ||
| And the reason for that is because schools aren't a product of the money that goes into them. | ||
| Schools are a product of the minds that are inside of them, from administration to teachers to the students. | ||
| And the issue is minds born under broken circumstances are just more fragile. | ||
| That's just how it is. | ||
| Money on its own is not the solution. | ||
| What I'd like to see, the pipe dreaming here, is a proper public works program instituted in certain districts in this country. | ||
| A lot of the big issue that we have here is that the reason these kids don't care about school is because they know nothing's going to come from it. | ||
| A lot of the people in their neighborhoods end up burnt out druggies anyway with absolutely nothing to do with their lives because there's just no opportunity. | ||
| Public works programs, you have to invest in the community not by paying private contractors to do it, but by paying the inhabitants of that community. | ||
| Fair, healthy salaries. | ||
| You need to have, um, works up there. | ||
| You can have, for example, um, revitalization of the rails and the roads and the public transportation. | ||
| People become less reliant on cars. | ||
| I mean, they have to pay less car payments. | ||
| There are so many things that you can do to these neighborhoods. | ||
| And this is class-based. | ||
| I don't want this to be like a black or a white thing. | ||
| There are white communities in this country that are struggling. | ||
| And I think that if, with these steps, we can We can, I don't know man, just the idea of an America where it's like, here's a quarter of the country, we just don't go there. | ||
| You can invest in new kinds of roads made out of bitumen which will last for like decades, but they like planned obsolescence. | ||
| They want to build things that will break so that they can spend more money on it again. | ||
| Corporations do. | ||
| Yeah, and that's where the money's coming from. | ||
| Politicians want to be under budget. | ||
| And they want to be friends of the corporation, so. | ||
| So, I mean look, there's a lot of problems. | ||
| I want to say, can I say one thing quickly about socialism? | ||
| I don't mean to interrupt, I apologize. | ||
| I was going to say it's great, it's fantastic. | ||
| Yeah, so let me just talk about that for five. | ||
| What I'm in favor of is something called a worker's state. | ||
| This is called by some people a dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a horrible term because it was termed before the term dictatorship meant what it currently means. | ||
| But it essentially means I just want to state where the workers have power. | ||
| That doesn't mean bring out the guillotines or anything. | ||
| It just means that when I think of like, what is a good country? | ||
| Like what is a good democracy or good republic look like to me? | ||
| I imagine one where the people inside of it have a lot of control over what goes on in a way that's responsibly | ||
| channeled It's not just like crazy, you know will of the masses stuff | ||
| and one of the big issues to me Is that as you just pointed out? | ||
| Corporations have a lot of power in this country and we defer to them quite a bit of government power as well | ||
| Much in the way that the old monarchies did with with mercantilism, you know | ||
| You want to do an East India Trading Company spice run, you know | ||
| You get the King's Guard to help you. | ||
| You get that fleet. | ||
| Because the state is invested in the corporation succeeding, and the corporation makes a lot of money off that mutual partnership. | ||
| But if these corporations, or these construction companies, or even these schools, frankly, are being run by people from the community who have a lot | ||
| of internal democratic control within it. | ||
| I think that could go a long way towards fixing this problem we see where we just put money | ||
| into these problems and it just burns through it falls through. | ||
| I think one of the problems we have with with all government spending is that we don't know | ||
| how they've had to fail them whereas with businesses they mostly just fail. | ||
| The big problem I see with the way things are going right now, for one, I think a lot of the critiques of capitalism are more about the massive corporate structure and the imbalance of power. | ||
| That once you reach a certain threshold of capital or wealth, you just own the system. | ||
| You will never be poor. | ||
| You will never fail again. | ||
| Your kids will never fail. | ||
| I mean, that's not necessarily true. | ||
| There's generational wealth fades. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Small businesses fail all the time. | ||
| But if you're an ultra-wealthy person, you keep pumping money in until you figure it out. | ||
| Or lobby to get subsidies, or tax breaks, and then you just forever. | ||
| So these are the two issues I see, and it's interesting because this argument is actually more of a classical, I guess, left and right argument of the days of yesteryear, ten years ago, when it was like government versus corporations. | ||
| you know, during like Occupy, you had a lot of people on the left saying the government can help | ||
| us, we need these programs, and the right was like we need the free market, we need the corporate | ||
| solutions, and I'm like both are problems in different ways. | ||
| Massive multinational corporations. | ||
| You're both wrong. | ||
| Right, you're both just so awful. Government and massive corporations. | ||
| We want small government and small business. So I like a mixed economy. | ||
| I think we need to figure out how we do government programs in a way that if they fail, they fail, and we need to make sure we don't have massive multinational corporations with no interest in helping the people, but selling them out because they can get better laws to violate human rights in other countries, where they can just hire people for a quarter, and then have them do, you know, essentially slave labor, and then sell garbage to the American people at a marked-up price, and then become... | ||
| But this is the final stage, right? | ||
| And one problem I have, a lot of people say this is globalism. | ||
| I critique this strongly. | ||
| This would happen exactly the same if we locked off all borders for corporations. | ||
| Because one of the most unequal periods of American history was the Gilded Age at the beginning of the 20th century. | ||
| And we were highly protectionist, highly isolationist at that point in time. | ||
| But high taxes though, like really high taxes. | ||
| Hey, listen. | ||
| I'm not besmirching those, necessarily. | ||
| But at the time, the problem isn't the internationalism. | ||
| I believe that corporations and governments should be able to work together on an international scale. | ||
| The issue is, they're not doing it for us. | ||
| They have a completely separate set—Marxists call this class interest between the bourgeois and the proletariat. | ||
| What does your average parole, an average worker, want? | ||
| They want clean roads. | ||
| They want decent, low crime. | ||
| You know, good schooling, good job, all that. | ||
| You know, they want water running to their house. | ||
| None of these systems benefit the bourgeois. | ||
| None of these systems benefit the ultra-wealthy. | ||
| They don't go to public schools. | ||
| They don't drive on roads. | ||
| They don't drink tap water. | ||
| They don't need to invest in these programs because they aren't a part of them. | ||
| How would you define socialism? | ||
| Or, yeah, we'll start with that. | ||
| How do you define socialism? | ||
| Socialism is an economic system where the workers control the means of production, so you have democratic worker control of the businesses, and you've decommodified at least a significant portion of society. | ||
| So, like, you no longer produce a given commodity or service for the purpose of selling it. | ||
| It's provided free of cost, essentially. | ||
| How would you define capitalism? | ||
| I would say that laissez-faire capitalism, at least, is a free market system whereby private ownership of capital is afforded to essentially every citizen, and that the civic structuring of the society is done in such a way as to maximize the economic benefit of the proliferation of the free market. | ||
| Where on, uh, well actually, so how would you define left and right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm trying to, I'm trying to just create... Like economically, or socially, or? | |
| So, uh, I guess economically. | ||
| To be honest, I've thought about this more and more. | ||
| I don't know if there is an economic left and right. | ||
| I think most people who care about economics want the same basic thing, which is good life for as many people as possible. | ||
| And I feel like we just have different ideas on how to achieve that. | ||
| And maybe that, the implementation, is the left-right element. | ||
| But I don't think the left is like more government, the right is less government. | ||
| I think that generally speaking, left-leaning people want as much power in the hands of as many people as possible, and right-leaning people believe certain individuals are deserving of higher levels of power that they use to adjudicate. | ||
| The reason I bring this up is because, you know, you mentioning far-right early on. | ||
| I don't think anybody knows what far-left or right actually means. | ||
| They're definitely really arbitrary terms. | ||
| I try, I should say, I was lazy of me to use that. | ||
| I try not to use that very often because they are necessarily definitions which require sort of like immediate codification and it changes depending on the context of the conversation. | ||
| I think defining far left is actually kind of easy. | ||
| Because you tend to have tendency, not absolute. | ||
| You have leftists who are adamant in socialism, communism, and alongside that typically fall some kind of social progressivism. | ||
| Typically, not always. | ||
| You have the dirtbag left, which are not woke, and you have the woke left, so there is a divergence there. | ||
| But when you come to the right, Individualist? | ||
| make sense at all. | ||
| I think that what defines the right individualist. | ||
| I mean, you're looking at collectivism and individualism. | ||
| The way we just like white nationalists are collectivists. | ||
| They're not individualists at all. | ||
| And many of them are authoritarian collectivists. | ||
| So it's like we call them far right, though. What does that really mean? | ||
| Then we say that these, you know, and cap extremists are far right, but | ||
| they absolutely in no way align with white nationalists. | ||
| Maybe it's just time to do away with those ideas. | ||
| Left and right. | ||
| We should eliminate all conservatism. | ||
| Yes, ban it! | ||
| I'm the school. | ||
| I actually, I think this could be my partisanship showing. | ||
| No, the left and the right is what I meant. | ||
| Get rid of that. | ||
| No, I gotcha, I gotcha. | ||
| This could be my partisanship showing, possibly, but I think one of the reasons for this is because the right is a lot more idiosyncratic than the left is in a lot of ways. | ||
| Most left-leaning values were hammered into books 150 years ago, you know? | ||
| Like, if you talk to, like, your average socialist or communist online, You're probably going to find that a lot of them have an investment in some type of theory or literature that is very specific and very laid out, and you can agree or disagree, but it was written there, you know? | ||
| And a lot of right-leaning ideas, I feel, are more of, again, I understand this is a product of my partisanship, but sort of an emotive response to a given set of material conditions. | ||
| Same argument goes the other way, man. | ||
| I know, and it really depends on perspective. | ||
| Like nationalism, for example. | ||
| Very few people subscribe to the intellectual tradition of nationalism. | ||
| Yet, we have a lot of nationalists in this country. | ||
| What do you mean by the intellectual tradition? | ||
| Well, the intellectual tradition of nationalism came along with the codification of the nation-state, and the idea was that the individual will should be subservient to that of the nation, because the nation was the sort of amalgamation of the people's will. | ||
| The individual dies, the nation lives. | ||
| Really weird Orwellian stuff, you know? | ||
| Trump supporters. | ||
| That's like authoritarian nationalism. | ||
| The evolution of monarchy. | ||
| So you have a libertarian argument over borders. | ||
| And some people are like, no, true libertarian supports borders. | ||
| No, you can't be libertarian without borders because how do you protect your ideas? | ||
| Like, I see it from left, right, up, down. | ||
| Everybody says, you know, the left this, the right that. | ||
| I think in terms of trying to actually identify the right and the left, you've got right in terms, | ||
| right and left in terms of social values, tradition versus progressivism, traditionalism. | ||
| And then you have economics, right, laissez-faire capitalist | ||
| versus left socialist. | ||
| The problem is people use them interchangeably and they essentially end up meaning nothing. | ||
| This is one of the things that I really respected about Bernie Sanders. | ||
| People disagree with me on this. | ||
| I think there are a lot of people in this country who are just, let's be real, just don't like black people very much and that it forms a lot of their political opinions. | ||
| And I don't think there's anything I can do about that with policy or with my channel or anything like that. | ||
| But there is something the vast, vast, vast majority of the people in this country want and care about, and that is a good life for their children. | ||
| I think virtually everyone. | ||
| You'll have some antinatalists now and again, but almost everyone wants that. | ||
| And Bernie Sanders was good at tapping into that. | ||
| Bernie Sanders did not align himself with any, like, nouveau-woke tendencies with regards to progressivism. | ||
| He, well, he would support, but his main messaging was very consistent all the time. | ||
| Until he got on the debate stage and said, when you're white, you don't know what it's like to be poor. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| That was bad. | ||
| That was a slip up. | ||
| I know if I talked to him and he was like, yeah, of course they're white people. | ||
| He gave in. | ||
| Well, he gave in. | ||
| Well, what do you mean gave in? | ||
| Like, now he endorsed Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Now he... I voted for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| I'm farther to the... Oh, why? | ||
| Because she wasn't Trump. | ||
| No, come on. | ||
| She's worse than Trump. | ||
| I understand Biden, at least. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, wait. | ||
| I think that Hillary Clinton is an odious person, but when it comes to basic policy issues like climate change or like what economically you're going to do for the country, I think the Democrats just generally have a better plan for this country than the Republicans. | ||
| But we had the best economy in generations. | ||
| It's a continuation of Obama-era policies. | ||
| What policy did he implement? | ||
| So, uh, we had tariffs. | ||
| We had strict border controls. | ||
| He bailed out Freddie May and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and tariffed trillions of dollars in the economy. | ||
| So it looked great. | ||
| It was a terrible economy. | ||
| One at a time, the tariffs were maligned by virtually every economist in the country, and he has had to spend an enormous amount of money with subsidies. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So I don't think that had anything to do with the economy. | ||
| That could be considered a detriment. | ||
| When it comes to closing down the border, I have seen no evidence that that's improved the economy. | ||
| All of the unemployment rate, the GDP, this was a straight-line continuation of Obama-era policies. | ||
| Obama said you wouldn't reach these numbers, and then he did. | ||
| Sure, I don't think that changed anything I said, though. | ||
| Factories came back to Michigan. | ||
| That he massively overstated the extent to which the manufacturing industry came back. | ||
| He said it was like tens of thousands. | ||
| It was like a couple thousand. | ||
| And even then, that's your goal? | ||
| Like a couple thousand? | ||
| Whenever we get a presidential change, I remember this since I was little. | ||
| It's like, oh, actually the success of this president is from the past president. | ||
| Everybody always does this. | ||
| We look at policies, though. | ||
| If so, Obama did inherit a mess from George W. Bush. | ||
| This isn't just like, oh, it was because he came after Bush. | ||
| It was a objective thing that had happened under Bush's presidency. | ||
| And Obama's policies allowed the economy to get back on track in a straight line trend that continued into Trump's years. | ||
| I haven't seen any evidence that Trump's policies meaningfully affected that trend, with the exception of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which did end up spiking everything back into the into the touchdown zone. | ||
| And of course, that spike Down. | ||
| Would have happened under any precedent. | ||
| It's a pandemic. | ||
| But recovery has been in large part hampered by a non-existent federal response and the tone-deafness of, again, like, we have conquered coronavirus the day after the worst record number of cases since it all started. | ||
| I just, this type of leadership, even if we're to leave aside populism and whatever, I think populism flourishes when people are happy and healthy because it gives them time to think and it gives them room to breathe. | ||
| And for that reason, I think we need four years of Competent, milquetoast, neoliberal, centrist governance under Biden. | ||
| He's not competent. | ||
| Moderately competent. | ||
| He's not competent, and he's... He's diluted. | ||
| He's an angry racist, man. | ||
| It's gonna be Kamala Harris. | ||
| Plastic as she comes. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't... She locked up people and held them past their parole days. | ||
| Yeah, she's terrible. | ||
| For cheap labor. | ||
| Neither of them are competent, that's the problem. | ||
| Well, they're certainly more competent than Trump. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait, I just want to say, again, I'm not defending the moral character of any of these politicians, but if we want to go back-to-back, policy-by-policy, promise-by-promise, absolutely, I'll wrap... | ||
| It's an abusive relationship you keep going back to, man. | ||
| You're going back to Trump. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm not going back to Trump. | ||
| I didn't vote for Trump in 2016. | ||
| I'm saying right now, I'm sitting back with my feet up watching a bulldog trash around the ivory tower and make me laugh. | ||
| People are dying while you laugh. | ||
| No, you brought this up earlier. | ||
| It was a really great point. | ||
| We have no metric of success for COVID. | ||
| I look at what Fauci said in March when Trump was taking action. | ||
| He said no one could do better. | ||
| Why would I now change my opinion on this? | ||
| Because he said that once and because he's in a political position where he has to say things that are positive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Betsy, I think she's scratching her face. | |
| We had several governors praise Trump for his response in, I think it was May. | ||
| Look, look, look. | ||
| A quarter of the deaths from COVID worldwide in a country with four percent... Nursing homes where the governors of Democrat-controlled states put sick people, killing... That's not, wait, wait, wait, again, that's not good. | ||
| I feel like we're engaging in whataboutism right now. | ||
| The fact of the matter remains that this country has more federal power and more wealth than literally any other country in the history of this planet. | ||
| That's... No, no, no. | ||
| These other countries don't have the state structure we do where the president is inhibited from taking actions. | ||
| How is he... He absolutely had the ability to do a national plan. | ||
| It was... Wait. | ||
| It was... I'm sorry. | ||
| I can't engage in this apologism. | ||
| You say you dislike both... Apologism? | ||
| Apologism. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| You say that you, like, don't like either candidate, but the Tenth Amendment doesn't prevent a national response to the COVID crisis. | ||
| Trump would have to invoke serious powers. | ||
| Yes, people were encouraging him to evoke the war powers because this is a time more people have died during this than they've died over the past 50 years. | ||
| You're making a political statement about whether the Republicans who wanted it or who didn't want it, the Democrats who did, one side was right or wrong. | ||
| I am, yes. | ||
| What I'm saying is, you made the point earlier, we have no bar of success on what this would have looked like, because it is what it is. | ||
| Yeah, but that's the thing. | ||
| That's the apologism. | ||
| Just because we don't have a bar where we can objectively determine how well Hillary would have done, doesn't mean we can't criticize. | ||
| So it's do you like Trump or do you not? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| We know that this country has done terribly. | ||
| We know this administration lies about it. | ||
| We know we have 4% of the world population and a quarter of the total number of deaths from COVID. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Wait, Trump is the president of the whole country, Democrats included. | ||
| you got to take out the nursing home deaths and then tell me what about the 94% that were 2.6 | ||
| comorbidities. No that's not an issue. Trump is the president of the whole country, Democrats | ||
| included. The Democratic governors and everything they do is all part of Trump's overall... | ||
| Trump can't control the governors. | ||
| For good reason? | ||
| control the governors, he can control our national response, which has been non-existent. | ||
| He's lied frequently about the nature of the coronavirus, the extent to which it will harm | ||
| this country. | ||
| We know he wouldn't... | ||
| For good reason? | ||
| No, not for good reason. | ||
| Do you think a panic would have been better? | ||
| I think being honest would have been preferable. | ||
| Wait, you earlier on Twitter, you were criticizing Fauci for saying that masks weren't effective when we know now that they are, but you'll defend the President of the United States of America lying to the population? | ||
| For repeating? | ||
| No, Fauci never said that COVID would be no big deal. | ||
| Trump was informed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he did. | |
| He actually did. | ||
| He actually did. | ||
| You need to watch the videos, because he did. | ||
| And the video was put out with all of Fauci's statements. | ||
| And Fauci, I've criticized Fauci over and over again. | ||
| Early on, I was very much- And not Trump. | ||
| Because Trump's repeating what Fauci says! | ||
| Trump does not just- wait, they fight constantly! | ||
| No, early on they didn't. | ||
| Early on, Trump made the mistake of just parroting Fauci, and I got to the point where- He did not exclusively parrot Fauci early on. | ||
| Wait, I can watch the clips. | ||
| Wait, I understand there was a lot of complexity here when it comes to the information that was disseminated and who did it, but that doesn't change the fact we know Trump was given information and then lied about it. | ||
| And your opinion is- That's not an opinion. | ||
| Yes, and your opinion is, he shouldn't have, and mine is, I don't know, maybe there would have been a panic, maybe there wouldn't. | ||
| Trump made a call, and you're criticizing him, and we don't know what the result would have been. | ||
| You've criticized Fauci for what he said about the masks. | ||
| How can you say, Trump, well, maybe it would have caused a panic, but then not say the same thing about Fauci when he said that masks weren't effective sometime in March. | ||
| We should have worn masks the entire time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you sure? | |
| We don't know. | ||
| Are they made of cloth and dirty? | ||
| We don't know if a panic would have destroyed everything and killed 10 times the people. | ||
| How would that, being honest about the extent, first of all hundreds of thousands are dead and they're dying in large part because we don't have a consistent national policy about social distancing and about mask wearing. | ||
| And obesity. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Trump does not have the constitutional authority to issue a mask mandate. | ||
| He has. | ||
| Wait, first of all, he has war powers. | ||
| He absolutely can. | ||
| He uses executive actions all the time. | ||
| This is not something that he would do. | ||
| This would not be legally challenged. | ||
| He was being called for to do this, even by the Democrats. | ||
| He was being called to do this. | ||
| He disbanded the pandemic response team. | ||
| He removed people. | ||
| And consolidated it. | ||
| No, he withdrew their power. | ||
| So who did he consolidate then? | ||
| What? | ||
| See if I can find it. | ||
| I don't want to pull up the fact check on this. | ||
| Trump consolidated the roles of the pandemic response team. | ||
| Factcheck.org. | ||
| I've been through this like a million times. | ||
| So Trump did disband the pandemic response team. | ||
| Where did they go? | ||
| And then allocated those functions into a group of people. | ||
| Wait, was that Pence's task force? | ||
| No, this was the existing CDC. | ||
| The existing CDC that he defunded by like a massive percentage? | ||
| So, factcheck.org, the way they put it was Trump was trying to streamline the process early on, and that it's been weaponized by partisans to make it seem like he just straight up got rid of it. | ||
| So he got rid of it, then took its functions and put it into the CDC, and he's cut the CDC's budget. | ||
| No, no, no, we gotta pull up, no, it's factcheck.org, it's trumpdismanned. | ||
| I'm familiar with the site factcheck.org. | ||
| I mean, do we want to look at, like, CDC cuts or what he did with the people in Wuhan that he pulled out? | ||
| What I'm trying to talk about is the totality of evidence that he's mishandled this pandemic. | ||
| And it's interesting to me that you were extremely unwilling to criticize him for that. | ||
| that. | ||
| Because what's the alternative? | ||
| The alternative... | ||
| What would have happened in any other circumstance where we have no control group? | ||
| What am I supposed to say? | ||
| So wait, how many would have... | ||
| Well if Trump were to backflip, he'd save a life. | ||
| How many would have had to have died before you would criticize him? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Give me a number. | ||
| Wait, so you could have led a million? | ||
| So what you're telling me is that we have no idea what would have happened if Trump did anything else, and now we're supposed to make a determination? | ||
| You're making a tautological statement. | ||
| That's how the universe works. | ||
| We don't ever know what would happen if other things didn't. | ||
| So what am I supposed to say when Fauci early on praised him, when governors early on praised him, now they're critical of him in an election year? | ||
| First of all, the praise of governors is irrelevant. | ||
| Are governors health experts? | ||
| Second of all, Fauci praised him a couple of times. | ||
| He's also under a lot of political pressure to do what Trump says, or otherwise there's a very decent chance of him getting canned. | ||
| Fauci has made plenty of statements which Trump has later contradicted. | ||
| Trump has been back and forth on the mask issue, going so far as to make fun of people for wearing masks. | ||
| I do not have the expertise nor the clairvoyance to say if only Trump did X, Y would have happened. | ||
| Wait, but then you can't criticize anything. | ||
| What if we didn't go into the Afghanistan war? | ||
| What if some terrible thing would have happened if we hadn't done that? | ||
| What if we hadn't gone into Iraq? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I think we can objectively say, wow, that war was bad. | ||
| We shouldn't have done that. | ||
| Yeah, I can say this is objectively very bad. | ||
| We should be doing something different. | ||
| And I can say Trump should have done these things, but I can't get overly angry about making assumptions on what I think would or wouldn't have happened. | ||
| So you are of the opinion that you should not be able to criticize a sitting president as long as you don't have... I think you're using semantic arguments. | ||
| This is not semantic at all. | ||
| Because I actually said you made a good point and... | ||
| We don't have a measure of success for what Trump should have done. | ||
| So what's happening now is, you're using hindsight to make it seem like you could have done a better job than he did. | ||
| Right. | ||
| he lied at the time. Wait, I'm not the president. I'm not saying I could have done a better | ||
| job. I'm saying that he messed up. And if you actually are anti-estab— | ||
| Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| If you actually are anti-establishment, as you claim to be, you are shockingly unwilling to criticize Trump on some of the most objectively... That's not... That's ridiculous. | ||
| Wait, you listed the tariffs that he did, even though it destroyed American farming for essentially no benefit, as a positive... As a policy he did... To the economy, as a positive... And then we ended up with a good economy. | ||
| As the... No, we had the good economy. | ||
| 27 trillion in debt right now. | ||
| As we had the good economy. | ||
| You mentioned that as a positive, even though all that did was hurt American workers. | ||
| You are willing to defend him... How did that hurt American workers? | ||
| The subsidies that we needed to provide farmers because they were being destroyed, the manufacturing that was being hurt from our inability to import- But the manufacturing came back. | ||
| Also, there's a flood. | ||
| So Trump threatened the auto industry to put tariffs on their vehicles manufactured overseas, and then they brought their factories back. | ||
| We brought back a shockingly low number of jobs that don't- The point I was making about panic was I don't know what would have happened if Trump caused a panic by coming out and saying, you know, America, there's a dangerous pandemic coming. | ||
| Why not constantly downplaying it? | ||
| Like he did. | ||
| This is going to be over any second. | ||
| We're rounding the curve now. | ||
| The heat's going to get rid of it. | ||
| Constant statement after statement. | ||
| Why didn't George W. Bush come out and say, keep shopping, keep shopping? | ||
| I don't like George W. Bush. | ||
| I'm not saying you do. | ||
| I'm saying there are presidents, and there is a decision to make, and sometimes they're hard, and we don't know what would have happened if they panicked or otherwise. | ||
| This is the fundamental issue that I have. | ||
| You're coming out and saying, Trump should have told everyone. | ||
| Maybe he should have. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| If you actually consistently held to this, then you would never be able to criticize anything a president does because you don't know what would have happened if they hadn't done it. | ||
| That's not an argument. | ||
| You're not arguing what I'm saying. | ||
| Wait, hold on. | ||
| I would like to. | ||
| What I'm saying is your standard for assessing the validity of this behavior is nonsensical. | ||
| It's a panic bed. | ||
| You don't know that it would have caused a panic. | ||
| Trump said he wants to avoid a panic. | ||
| Why not not lie about it? | ||
| Why not say, hey, why not say we need to buckle down as a nation and we need to recognize that we need to be wearing masks and socially distancing? | ||
| Yeah, he could have done that. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Okay, that's great. | ||
| So wait, why isn't it okay for Fauci to have been wrong about the mask? | ||
| Because he didn't want to incite a panic. | ||
| That's not incorrect. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| So you're in favor of Fauci saying that you didn't need to wear masks? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think it's like you're purposefully misunderstanding to make an argument. | ||
| No, the argument that I'm making, fundamentally— You can't criticize Trump over masks and then act like Fauci was a saint the entire time. | ||
| I have never done that. | ||
| I'm not saying—it's the rhetorical use of other people. | ||
| You're talking with me. | ||
| If people are going to look at Trump and say, Trump said all these things, and then I can go back and see that Fauci was the one who said them to Trump and Trump repeated them, then my issue is maybe we could have done better. | ||
| Maybe we could have done worse. | ||
| Trump banned travel early on. | ||
| He formed the task force. | ||
| He brought Fauci on in the first place. | ||
| And the New York Times is estimating if the infection rate reached a certain level, it could even be as high as 6 million. | ||
| First of all, nobody ever knows that we don't have vision into alternate futures. | ||
| We have to make reasonable assessments based on the fact that we are doing terribly. | ||
| This is exactly what I mean, and this is the issue that I have. | ||
| You claim to have a disaffected, anti-establishment view of all of this, but your channel is hyper-partisan against the left, and then when anyone criticizes Trump, you'll either defend him harshly or you'll back up and say, well, they're all bad. | ||
| You are taking the choice to defend Trump. | ||
| You are the partisan here. | ||
| You're not a distanced anti-authoritarian. | ||
| You are standing with him, and you are saying, yes, I am anti-authoritarian. | ||
| I am anti-establishment. | ||
| But also, we don't know if him lying to the American people was bad. | ||
| It could have caused a panic. | ||
| So should I make a video right now where I just scream about Nancy Pelosi causing all of the problems? | ||
| I haven't done that. | ||
| I don't know what that has to do with what I just said. | ||
| This is whataboutism in the extreme. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| You can't accept criticisms of Trump. | ||
| You can criticize those people. | ||
| This is whataboutism in the extreme. You can't do it. You can't accept criticisms of Trump. | ||
| You can't tell me that I'm whatabouting by... | ||
| You can criticize those people. You can criticize those people. | ||
| You only criticize what about Trump. What about Trump? | ||
| This is whataboutism. | ||
| You can criticize those people. | ||
| I criticize those people. | ||
| I love the paradox of you whatabouting me on Trump and then claiming I'm whatabouting. | ||
| Let's talk about Trump lying. | ||
| Is that good or bad? | ||
| Well, that's my point. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You keep defending him and backing up to other people. | ||
| It might have been good that he lied. | ||
| Do you want me to make a video where I go over how all of the Democrats screwed everything up? | ||
| I haven't made a video about Fauci and Mass. | ||
| I haven't made a video about Pelosi and Chinatown. | ||
| I haven't made a video about de Blasio. | ||
| What does this have to do with what I was saying? | ||
| You can if you want to. | ||
| You want to say that I say they're all bad? | ||
| They are all bad. | ||
| And I didn't make a video critiquing Pelosi the same as I did about de Blasio. | ||
| I've mentioned all of it and Trump in a sort of, we don't know what would have happened. | ||
| But I'll tell you what, if you want to say Trump was bad for the things he did, so were they. | ||
| And I haven't dedicated an entire thing to it. | ||
| You are describing whataboutism right now. | ||
| Listen, it's this simple, okay? | ||
| If you actually... Wait, I would really like it if you would let me. | ||
| If you actually think they're all bad, you wouldn't be this uncomfortable with a conversation about how Trump messed up. | ||
| Who said I was uncomfortable? | ||
| Wait, hold on. | ||
| What I'm uncomfortable with is when I answer you, you change the subject and then use semantic arguments. | ||
| I'm trying to very specifically talk about Trump's failure. | ||
| I've already given you my answer on panic and you haven't let it go. | ||
| Your answer is that you don't think it's acceptable to criticize Trump because we don't have vision into an alternate universe. | ||
| No, that's not true at all. | ||
| I think Trump is an arrogant blagger who screwed tons of things up. | ||
| In this specific respect. | ||
| And I think you are partisan biased pro-Biden and you don't even know about half the things that have happened that you're criticizing Trump for. | ||
| Oh wait, I'm talking about Trump's handling of the coronavirus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so don't come to me and say you're hyper-partisan because you're saying I don't know about Trump when I also said I didn't know about Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait, hold on. | ||
| Again, I don't know why you keep moving on. | ||
| We're talking about Trump and coronavirus? | ||
| I acknowledge my partisanship, by the way. | ||
| I'm totally fine with that. | ||
| You moved on and made a whataboutism statement about me saying, you criticize Democrats, but what about Trump? | ||
| Yes, because I was trying to explain to you my broader issue. | ||
| So don't use whataboutism claims against me. | ||
| That's not what whataboutism is. | ||
| Whataboutism is when you say, oh, you want to talk about this? | ||
| Well, what about this? | ||
| What I was trying to do... Yeah, I didn't do that. | ||
| You immediately jumped into how you hadn't made a video on Pelosi or Cuomo or what have you. | ||
| Because you claimed I was only defending Trump when I pointed out I also did not make a video about Pelosi and de Blasio. | ||
| But we're talking about Trump. | ||
| The point is... You brought up Pelosi. | ||
| You brought de Blasio. | ||
| You can't accuse me of whataboutism. | ||
| And then when I say, actually, I haven't criticized either of them, you say, that's whataboutism! | ||
| No, I'm not defending either. | ||
| He didn't lie about masks. | ||
| He lied about the severity to avoid a panic. | ||
| To keep the stock market from plummeting. | ||
| That's an opinion. | ||
| Do you think he did a good thing? | ||
| He didn't lie about masks. | ||
| He lied about the severity to avoid a panic. | ||
| To avoid a run on masks. | ||
| To keep the stock market from plummeting. | ||
| And that. | ||
| That's possible too. | ||
| That's an opinion. | ||
| All he said was to avoid a panic. | ||
| He fear mongers all the time. | ||
| He talks about how Antifa's going to burn down suburbs. | ||
| He doesn't care about a panic. | ||
| And then when Antifa went to the suburbs... No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| The CIA lies. | ||
| This is its job. | ||
| The president has to lie. | ||
| It's his job. | ||
| That's one of his duties is to lie when you need to lie. | ||
| Right, and we can criticize them when they do that. | ||
| Trump fearmongers constantly. | ||
| Every rally of his is a treatise on how America is about to be destroyed by far-left lunatics. | ||
| I don't think he has a problem with panic. | ||
| I think he had a problem with panic being tied to his name. | ||
| Whether that be a product of the stock market dipping, which ended up happening anyway, that was pretty much inevitable given the consequences of the action. | ||
| Or whether that just be a matter of his personal image, which is also something presidents have to be concerned about, I think this is worthy of criticism. | ||
| But it's weird to me. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| By the metrics of this country's performance relative to other countries, we have done shockingly poorly. | ||
| Tell me the metrics on nursing homes. | ||
| Wait, I think that's bad too. | ||
| You can't just talk about Trump. | ||
| You have to bring up other things. | ||
| How many deaths were caused by the nursing homes, by the way? | ||
| I believe it was like 40% or some really large number. | ||
| Of the deaths in America? | ||
| Uh, can you pull up the numbers? | ||
| Yeah, I can look. | ||
| Do you mean, wait, I thought you were just referring to the New York- I think it was like 7,000 in New York. | ||
| Okay, so if you want to ignore that, we're looking at what, 218,000? | ||
| Look, even, again- If we're gonna compare the numbers, there is so much nuance in this discussion, and I think- He's the president. | ||
| What you are misunderstanding is, I think Trump has very serious problems. | ||
| I think he lies often. | ||
| I think he's a blagger. | ||
| He boasts he won't shut up. | ||
| And I think most people know he's got a mouth that he couldn't stop blabbing to save his own campaign. | ||
| I think he caused a lot of his own problems. | ||
| And there is an actual really great argument that he should have been honest with the American people. | ||
| This stemmed from me saying, I don't know. | ||
| And then you turned into, why won't you criticize the president? | ||
| Because I don't know what would have happened. | ||
| Well, first of all, the statement, I don't know, and the statement, I think there's an excellent argument for your point, are not the same statements even remotely. | ||
| You said there was no standard by which we could... There's no control group for what could have been done. | ||
| As I have clarified, there's no control group for anything like this, but we still have to be able to criticize. | ||
| So when I say stuff like, he lied, and he has downplayed relentlessly, even though he had information which suggested that would not be the case, and he has constantly scapegoated this onto China in a pathetic attempt, to avoid any responsibility or culpability for his actions or those of his administration, or the fact that he has done absolutely nothing to invoke war powers, and one of the few instances where even I, a left-leaning person, a socialist, would say is perfectly acceptable. | ||
| These are worthy criticisms, I think. | ||
| It seemed to me like you were being rather defensive about them. | ||
| What would he do with war powers? | ||
| Do you think he should have invoked the Insurrection Act against the riots when they were at their peak? | ||
| God, I hope not. | ||
| I'm sure they haven't. | ||
| I would like to know. | ||
| about coronavirus. What would he do with war power with coronavirus? Have 225,000 | ||
| people died to riots? Can we pull up the numbers on that? I'm sure they haven't. | ||
| The question is at what point are you okay with authoritarianism? | ||
| First of all I don't think invoking war powers is the same kind of | ||
| authoritarianism. You said an executive order was. Yeah an executive order to ban | ||
| a type of speech for partisan purposes. | ||
| No, to ban trainings, and then you inflated it to be speech. | ||
| He didn't just ban the trainings. | ||
| He banned critical race theory. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Do you actually know that? | ||
| Do you want to look at the language of the executive order? | ||
| Because I guarantee you it doesn't specifically say these trainings. | ||
| We both agree the trainings would be bad, but you brought it to a speech argument and then went off on First Amendment rights and everything. | ||
| Because the language of the executive order was not specifically targeting those training seminars. | ||
| You said earlier that Trump's use of executive orders was him expanding federal authority. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is. | |
| But now you're also arguing he should have overridden constitutional competition using war powers. | ||
| Wait, first of all, that's not overriding the Constitution. | ||
| That's a power delegated to the president in times of great need. | ||
| Second of all, I would say that's legitimate use of it. | ||
| I'm a pragmatist. | ||
| I'm a utilitarian. | ||
| So it's opinion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| I don't disagree. | ||
| All of it is opinion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I think it's okay to use federal power to keep hundreds of thousands from dying due to a pandemic. | ||
| I think it's not okay when you're attacking an entire subset of academic critique because of some federal training programs. | ||
| I'm okay with X and Y. I don't think it's okay to use the police to arrest a child for dropping a lollipop stick in the ground. | ||
| I think it's okay for them to go after rapists and murderers. | ||
| There are contextual uses for state power that I think can be justified in different ways. | ||
| So the issue is, my opinion was, I don't know. | ||
| Should we criticize Trump for not telling the American people? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what would happen if a panic started. | ||
| All the other stuff I mentioned too, it wasn't just that. | ||
| It was also the constant downplaying. | ||
| It was also, even after people knew how severe it was. | ||
| That was literally it. | ||
| That was him trying to avoid a panic. | ||
| But then he kept doing it. | ||
| He said, I downplayed it because I didn't want to start a panic. | ||
| He kept not wanting to start a panic. | ||
| Every week he'd start it over again and be like, and we're going to get it next week. | ||
| In two weeks it'll be done. | ||
| I agree with you when he comes out and he puts out these videos where he's like, Antifa is coming. | ||
| Because clearly, I don't think panic is the real issue. | ||
| I think it's fair to criticism on that broad point. | ||
| As for COVID, maybe that was a real threat that, you know, really could have screwed everything up to an extreme degree. | ||
| It's killed like a quarter million people. | ||
| That's a pretty real threat. | ||
| New York Times high estimate was like six point something million too. | ||
| It wasn't just two million. | ||
| It was, it was the, the, the, the slider bar they had for their analysis was the worst case scenario was like six plus million. | ||
| But we can, yes, but the best that we can do at this point is see how other countries have done. | ||
| And we can tell, just from the responses they've taken, that ours has been woefully inadequate. | ||
| But you already said no two countries are the same and we can't compare them. | ||
| Wait, we can't compare them exactly, but of course we can take info- How can we compare a federal system with 50 states to a single state of 10 million people? | ||
| Well, maybe we could find a single state with 10 million people and then compare what it did to a single one of our states. | ||
| Sweden. | ||
| Well, Sweden did rather poorly, didn't it? | ||
| Sweden's no, Sweden's doing fantastic. | ||
| They just had a massive drop off in cases and they're doing great. | ||
| My friends in Sweden said they've never encountered problems. | ||
| Testing is easily available, but cases have gone down and they've never locked down and everything's improved. | ||
| Did they lock down their borders? | ||
| Meanwhile, the UN has said the economic lockdowns will lead to mass starvation and that now they've said we advise against them, they must be avoided at all costs. | ||
| It's fair to say everyone screwed this up royally. | ||
| Yeah, and that is to be expected. | ||
| Just us more than many other countries. | ||
| Our states stayed open. | ||
| We never had closed borders in the states. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| No, you can't because they closed their borders. | ||
| We never closed our state borders. | ||
| Europe isn't beholden to a single executive power. | ||
| The EU can't tell every country to adopt. | ||
| It doesn't have war powers over the entire continent of Europe. | ||
| So it's an opinion on whether or not Trump should or shouldn't have... What I'm saying is, it's not an issue of, we know what could or would have happened. | ||
| It's just an issue of, I believe things would have been better had Trump used these powers. | ||
| Yeah, but that's the case with literally all public policy. | ||
| We have to be able to assess these things from inferring data examples that we already have and applying to them to the different situations. | ||
| We can't say... So your issue is I'm not criticizing him saying, I don't know, whereas you're taking a position. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| Well, you don't know that, but what about all of the other things I mentioned? | ||
| Like him repeatedly saying that it was going to be away anytime now, him making fun of people for wearing masks, him not publicly appearing. | ||
| Okay, I'm glad that we agree on that. | ||
| My only concern here is that the way you talked about it initially, where you said we don't have like a metric for objectively analyzing. | ||
| You said that. | ||
| I did say that. | ||
| And I said that's a good point. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Yes, but that doesn't mean you can't make inferences. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| Say you have two cities, different cities, different demographics, populations. | ||
| One city applies a policy, works great, people get happier, wealthier, richer. | ||
| Those two cities aren't exactly the same. | ||
| If people in City B, the one without the policy, start saying, hey, mayor, you want to maybe do that? | ||
| And the mayor said, well, our city isn't exactly like their city. | ||
| and then just dead stopped as like an excuse for not engaging. I don't think that's acceptable. | ||
| I think we need to look into the policies these other countries used, the nature of their country, | ||
| the way their balance of urban and rural populations played off each other. Did they do | ||
| lockdowns? Did they do mask mandates? And if we can do that, honestly, and this is not something | ||
| the Trump administration is willing to do because he has fousted all responsibility for this onto | ||
| Absolutely all of it. | ||
| And he praises himself every time the opportunity comes for his handling of coronavirus. | ||
| This administration, I think, frankly, is, at least with regards to COVID handling, a death cult. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| No, people are dying! | ||
| But a death cult? | ||
| Well, people are dying. | ||
| And many of the people who are dying, or I guess not dead themselves, because that'd be voter fraud, are then going to go out there and affirm the practices of a candidate who has lied to them. | ||
| I just read it was a 97 to 99.4% recovery rate for the virus. | ||
| That doesn't seem deadly at all. | ||
| Well, I mean, if you hit millions of people with that, that'll be hundreds of thousands dead. | ||
| But the flu does that too. | ||
| The flu doesn't kill nearly as many people as COVID. | ||
| Or heart attacks. | ||
| People with obesity with the flu. | ||
| Like a third. | ||
| How many people with 2.6 morbidities? | ||
| The flu is also not as transmittable and also it's not as... Another thing people don't talk about with COVID, this is what scares me personally. | ||
| Like coming out here for example, I flew across. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| I love flying. | ||
| I say sarcastically. | ||
| COVID-19. | ||
| I'm young and healthy. | ||
| Like a horse. | ||
| I'll be fine. | ||
| But sometimes there are after effects, you know? | ||
| I've heard a lot of cases. | ||
| People have had COVID-19 that's a pre-existing condition. | ||
| Heart and lung problems. | ||
| Sometimes even brain problems. | ||
| That really, really scares me. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Ventilators mess people up too. | ||
| Well, they're not doing that anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the secondary effects are serious. | ||
| They're crushing their lungs. | ||
| It's like actually terrifying. | ||
| And it's because a flu could never, I mean, I guess in very rare cases, a flu could do that. | ||
| Look, I think COVID is very serious. | ||
| If you mix it with other diseases, it can really, the flu can mess you up. | ||
| If we were going to make any determination, I think we can look at, if we were going to go country by country, I think we should look at Sweden and say, we really screwed this one up. | ||
| Did they close their borders? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't know if they did at all. | ||
| I'm looking at New Zealand. | ||
| They apparently have... They were full lockdown. | ||
| Well, they are crazy. | ||
| Well, they did it. | ||
| They did it. | ||
| No, it came back. | ||
| And then they did another hard... There was a light resurgence and they locked down again. | ||
| Oh, well, I mean, I suppose they're very sensitive to fluctuations, but as of the moment, I think they're doing... Hawaii has a lot. | ||
| Like, not to disparage New Zealand, they've got, I think, Auckland and Wellington. | ||
| Yeah, there are a lot of Kiwis right now who are pretty mad at what you just said, Tim. | ||
| Well, it's like 4 million people, so... Yeah, small country. | ||
| Of course it gets easier the smaller you get. | ||
| Island. | ||
| Island nation. | ||
| They could easily suspend travel, do a short lockdown. | ||
| COVID can't swim. | ||
| I swear, the food supply, man... | ||
| Unhealthy people are going to get sicker faster if you have an obesity epidemic. | ||
| Right, that's true. | ||
| So the United States has other health issues which contribute to this. | ||
| In New Zealand you have to fish for all your own food. | ||
| The police will shoot you if you buy anything from a grocery store. | ||
| Rice and fish? | ||
| No, you know what it is? | ||
| The cost of living is really high in New Zealand. | ||
| Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| By the way, from what I've seen though, beautiful country. | ||
| I've never been there. | ||
| I don't even know why I'm repping them. | ||
| And the seasons are inverted. | ||
| Let's go in the winter! | ||
|
unidentified
|
and the and the and the word of the reading yet they have let's go where they have chris they have | |
| christmas in like a july | ||
| but school I wanted to ask you, just out of curiosity, and this isn't a criticism thing. | ||
| I'm not a public health official. | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| You had war powers, whatever. | ||
| What direction do you think is best for getting America on track with COVID? | ||
| Early on, I think in a bunch of videos I did, I talked about the severity and the need for locking down our borders. | ||
| But I never thought an economic lockdown... The concept didn't even exist to me. | ||
| And I think at this point, based on everything we've learned, it probably is a really, really bad idea. | ||
| So the few things I would say is... | ||
| Protect the vulnerable. | ||
| Take strong measures. | ||
| Keep the economy open. | ||
| Suspend travel and border crossings for the time being. | ||
| And that's probably the best we can do. | ||
| And then we really want to make sure that we have control in the hands of local officials who know their regions better than anyone else. | ||
| There were a few cities in New Mexico that shut down. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| When I drove out that way, there was a city where the sign actually said no outside visitors allowed. | ||
| That's up to them. | ||
| And I think there's a big difference between the way that America handles things, the way Americans will respond to things, and travel suspension. | ||
| Leaving it to local officials. | ||
| And I think the one place where Trump did well but then did poorly was early on he was providing quick assistance. | ||
| He got praise for it. | ||
| But then, as you mentioned later, he started, you know, playing games with federal assistance, which I guess, you know, there's a conversation about the riots, but perhaps the issue is a difference between a view of America as a single nation or as a union of states and a balance of authorities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My view is I don't think Trump should have used the war powers. | ||
| And it's also similar to how many on the left want to get rid of the Electoral College. | ||
| I don't, because I don't think this country would run better through a top-down executive approach. | ||
| I think we need to have a balance of powers at local, regional, and then federal levels. | ||
| I don't think the electoral college does much to empower the small states. | ||
| I think the Senate does. | ||
| So we should abolish that too. | ||
| No, I'm kidding. | ||
| Oh, well, oh, yeah, sure. | ||
| I mean, you can hear that argument. | ||
| It's really hard to say with the COVID stuff. | ||
| I agree that the localization thing is really, really important. | ||
| China has the ability and the authority to do stuff we can't do. | ||
| And I wonder, to what extent is that effective? | ||
| Hypothetically. | ||
| Well, China has the ability and the authority to do well, they can do stuff we can't do. | ||
| And I wonder, I mean, to what extent is that effective? | ||
| Like hypothetically, imagine money's not an issue, you know, if you could do a month lockdown | ||
| where you suspend all rent, mortgage, everything, like suspend all forms of systemic, you know, | ||
| debt payment, and provide people a base stipend, and then have like, local officials who are | ||
| tasked to provide like groceries or rations to every house, if you could do that without | ||
| That would do a really, really, really good job. | ||
| But that in America, in a country this huge, with this many different people, with this many different ideologies, that would be a Well, it's authoritarianism versus libertarianism. | ||
| And so I've had this argument with many libertarians who don't want to accept it, but there is a strong efficiency in serious authoritarian regimes, notably China. | ||
| When a pandemic hit, they welded people into their homes and sacrificed the individual for the sake of the collective. | ||
| They glued everyone to their seats in their house. | ||
| It was a big campaign. | ||
| They'd run in with the Elmer's bottle, you know. | ||
| Well, they really would while their doors shut. | ||
| No, yeah, but, and the thing is, but this would be my counter-argument. | ||
| I like to fashion myself a libertarian socialist. | ||
| I don't like the government. | ||
| When it comes to this, there are two types of freedom, positive and negative freedom, you know? | ||
| And I always get it mixed up, which one is which, but I'm just gonna guess and hope it's right. | ||
| You have positive freedoms, like the ability to do whatever you want, freedom from law, you know, essentially. | ||
| And that's what most libertarians talk about. | ||
| Are you talking about rights? | ||
| Like negative and positive rights? | ||
| Yes, I think I get them mixed every time. | ||
| A positive right is something granted to you, and a negative right is something that can't be done to you. | ||
| The easiest way to put it is, a positive right to life means if Ian threatens me with a knife, you must save me. | ||
| A negative right to life means you're not allowed to kill me. | ||
| I don't blame you. | ||
| I will butcher it if I attempt to recite it verbatim, so I'll simply say this. | ||
| I think there is a freedom in not living in a country with a pandemic. | ||
| Because there are implicit threats to my safety that come not from the autonomy or agency of any individual, but simply now from the process of participating in society. | ||
| So which freedoms do I value more? | ||
| Do I value my freedom to not get locked into my house by the government for a month? | ||
| Or do I value my freedom to live in a country over the next two years in which there's not a pandemic? | ||
| And I don't have an answer to that. | ||
| I genuinely don't. | ||
| It's often a rural versus urban issue in the United States. | ||
| So people in cities It's probably better just lock in your house for a short time and then get back on with it. | ||
| But people who live out in the middle of nowhere are going to be like, screw you, I can do whatever I want. | ||
| Oh yeah, true. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| Yeah, you go out to Wyoming or something. | ||
| These people are never, ever... Because we have such a diverse country. | ||
| That's one of the things I love so much about this place. | ||
| That's why a national mask mandate would not even be enforced. | ||
| Because in, I would say, more than half the states, and I would say probably 95% of the country, you know, outside of the blue counties, they wouldn't even enforce it. | ||
| Well, 95% of the country by landmass, maybe. | ||
| They probably wouldn't enforce it. | ||
| I think the best thing they probably could have done was set up a system of incentivizations for all the cities and governors and what have you, with like relative levels of coverage. | ||
| Get paid to wear your mask, now we're talking. | ||
| Or like a piece of crypto every time you're seen in public with a mask on. | ||
| Like a state gets an extra so-and-so much if they can report a certain number, but then you have toxic incentives too, like what if they under-report cases because they want to meet a federal quota or something. | ||
| Terrible like that. Um, yeah, it's I had a question you said you were libertarian socialist, but you don't like the | ||
| government You said that in quick succession, but I always think | ||
| socialism is using the government to do things So, what do you how do you rectify that socialism should be | ||
| about the people controlling the systems? | ||
| They live within the state, uh if it's functioning properly And I don't think it is right now in america should be an | ||
| apparatus of the will of the people And so far, such a thing exists. | ||
| Right now, we're like... You're like authoritarian statehood. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the authoritarianism, the non-populist element, you know. | ||
| When corporations get involved, or when long-standing career politicians start solidifying their power in a way that's really, really hard to remove them, then the will of the people matters less and less. | ||
| I want the government, to whatever extent it does exist, to be beholden entirely to the will of the people, a perfectly democratic society. | ||
| And then I want corporations to do the same thing, too. | ||
| I think corporations should treat every single employee like a little citizen. | ||
| Yeah, I was thinking you should give stock to employees, like a scaling mechanism. | ||
| Oh man, I don't have the math on me. | ||
| Bernie's proposed, I think, like a 20% stock package. | ||
| I couldn't believe he did that, by the way. | ||
| That was based as hell. | ||
| Very socialism-y. | ||
| Very socialism-y. | ||
| I was getting hot under my collar just imagining that. | ||
| That'd be nice, because I've worked for startups, and when you have a percent, when you have some part of the company, you have such more incentive to make it great. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I just don't care about it if I don't have anything. | ||
| We're self-employed though. | ||
| Because I've worked on a bunch of companies where giving up equity to people is really, really difficult because you'll find a lot of people immediately go, I got equity, later. | ||
| Oh no, but you have to put them on like a five year plan where they earn only a percentage of the equity every year. | ||
| So they're incentivized to stay to make the equity. | ||
| I think you should just split the revenue from the company fairways. | ||
| That might be cool too. | ||
| Have people vote out. | ||
| It's not so easy how to determine how you do that. | ||
| Well, there are a lot of different, this is a worker co-op, it's just a lot of different ways that you can do it. | ||
| There's actually a lot of really interesting data in worker cooperatives that's come out from Latin America over the past 20 years that indicate that in certain fields it's an extremely efficient form of corporate structuring. | ||
| Because, you know, one of the big problems that we have with your average company, you know, maybe not the very high-end tech ones where the big brainy folks work at, but Even just in the lower end of things. | ||
| Retail, whatever, restaurants. | ||
| People don't work too hard. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You get crap wages, you know? | ||
| You're not really respected that much because your work is pretty interchangeable. | ||
| It's that creative investment in the work process, I think, that sparks the ingenuity, the investment, the work ethic in a lot of people. | ||
| I had a conversation with an accountant in New Jersey, I think it was like a year and a half or two years ago, and they were complaining about the $15 an hour wage hike that was coming or whatever, and how he lost like 30% of his clients. | ||
| They shut down immediately. | ||
| Because what people don't realize is many of these small businesses, and most businesses are small businesses, the people who own them aren't wealthy and making tons of money. | ||
| Like the guy who owns a hardware shop might make $40,000 a year, and he might pay his employees $12,000 or $13,000 an hour. | ||
| Then they come and they say, we're doing a 30% hike on all of your costs. | ||
| And he goes, then I won't make any money for my family. | ||
| And so he just shuts down. | ||
| Well, the goal would be that if things are parted out equally, or fairly, I shouldn't say equally, because sometimes people are deserving, I think, of more compensation, that stuff like that wouldn't happen. | ||
| A model that I've seen that looks really, really nice is you have a type of payback investment on the part of anybody who's founded a given company, where they get a proportional wage in addition to a higher percentage. | ||
| that they pay back until they've made back a certain percentage of whatever they initially | ||
| invested. And then after that, they're just kept in a higher tier. And that way you have like the, | ||
| because a lot of people say, you know, what about rewarding ingenuity? Great. Ingenuity | ||
| is phenomenal. You know, just got to find a way to set it up properly. I wish we, I wish we, | ||
| I don't know, experimented more with different ways of running governments, companies. | ||
| That's what America could be. | ||
| We have all these states, they're all- But that's just choice. | ||
| People could do it. | ||
| They could, yeah. | ||
| Though there are systemic barriers to forming worker cooperatives. | ||
| Banks tend not to loan to them because it's kind of like a spooky form of managing people. | ||
| But- No, I kind of want to segue off from this because I just thought of something. | ||
| You're in favor of political violence as a means of revolution. | ||
| If it's done, I mean, given that it's done well, effectively, and for good reasons, sure. | ||
| So what is well and effectively? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, like, for example, if the working class and Jewish and queer people of Nazi Germany had risen up sometime immediately after Hitler was appointed chancellor, I think most of us would agree that's probably... Like, I mean, things get messy, sure, but like, now, in hindsight, like, we know. | ||
| And I think that, like, right now in the United States of America, the idea of, like, political violence for a revolution is It's like a comedy. | ||
| It's not gonna happen. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| Who's to say that the Jewish violent leader wouldn't have been worse than Hitler? | ||
| Because that stemmed from the communists being violent, then the Nazis were violent in response, and then if the Jews had been violent in response, you'd have three groups of violence. | ||
| I agree with you on that point. | ||
| And the point I was going to make is that the argument about political violence isn't just it's always good, it's always bad. | ||
| It's that there are certain things we accept and certain things we don't. | ||
| The American country came from political violence and revolution. | ||
| I'm totally cool with that. | ||
| But that's different. | ||
| The regulars were sent here when we asserted our rights. | ||
| So if the Jewish community in Nazi Germany were like, you can't do this to us. | ||
| And the Nazis came in and they rose up. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Political violence in defense of rights, etc. | ||
| To me, it's just another tool. | ||
| Take, for example, like, again, with the police, you know? | ||
| Imagine you've never heard of police, never heard of prisons, foreign concept to you, you know? | ||
| And somebody says, hey, what if the state had the ability to lock a person up in a steel cell for an indefinite length of time if they make a mistake? | ||
| Make a mistake? | ||
| I would say violate some pre-ordained structure. | ||
| Sure, right, but even then the law is just codified morality, right? | ||
| I mean you get flexibility with that. | ||
| Different countries consider different things. | ||
| In Singapore, if you spit gum on the street, you can get to jail for that. | ||
| There are states where pornography can get you in jail. | ||
| And I certainly don't agree with those things, but I'm sure if I argued with them, they would | ||
| say, well, you have a civic duty to not pollute your streets or whatever. | ||
| But with regards to like violent revolution, it's just a tool, same as any other type of political violence, like policing, absolutely a form of political violence. | ||
| Laws are codified by people in power to enforce a certain set of principles, and police are charged to enforce it. | ||
| It's legitimized political violence, but it is nonetheless that. | ||
| And with regards to this violent revolution thing, there have been many tyrannical, despotic governments in human history, and the reason at any point in time why a revolution would be justified is the promise that it would make life better. | ||
| Often it doesn't, and that's the issue. | ||
| If there was ever a point where I felt it would in America, then I would support it. | ||
| At the moment, I absolutely do not. | ||
| Good point. | ||
| I guess the way I see it is I would never trust someone to know what's best for anyone else. | ||
| And so that's, I guess, the libertarian. | ||
| I guess the reason I ask is because socialism requires cooperation to an extreme degree that capitalism doesn't. | ||
| I'd say it depends. | ||
| To the extent that democracy requires cooperation, then I would agree. | ||
| I think you mentioned before, socialism, you viewed it as certain goods become... I don't want to put words in your mouth. | ||
| Decommodify industry and make sure workers are in charge of the industries, essentially. | ||
| Those things still have to be produced. | ||
| Someone still has to do that work. | ||
| And that means resources still have to be allocated to those individuals. | ||
| So it puts a certain group of people in charge of allocating resources to those people. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And this is the flaw with democracy. | ||
| If you go very far left, like very, very, very far left, there are some anarchists who will say that even democracy is a metric of oppression, because democracy is a system by which you put people on top of you. | ||
| So you must necessarily as an anarchist, you must rid yourself of these political structures, because all you're doing is choosing who will next stomp on you. | ||
| Now, I think that's perhaps a little bit hypothetical, but Vosh, I'm really glad you came on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This has been fantastic. | |
| We're gonna do superchats? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| I hope both left and right got their hot takes of both of us. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We have a ridiculous amount of superchats. | ||
| Oh man. | ||
| It's just, it's 1130. | ||
| Oh yeah, no, I'm sorry. | ||
| Let's read some superchats. | ||
| I have no sense of time, I apologize. | ||
| I think this is fantastic. | ||
| Really fun. | ||
| You probably got me a bunch of things people are gonna highlight. | ||
| I'd like to think that there were a few things I threw at you and I don't think it's, my intention was not ever to be that. | ||
| I think it was awesome to have a conversation and I think it was interesting hearing your perspectives. | ||
| So I am really grateful you came on and I'm gonna, I'm looking at the comments and there's like somewhere like Tim sucks and somewhere like Vosh sucks. | ||
| If I don't tweet after this it's because Tim had me shot outside of the studio on my way back to my hotel. | ||
| You were mentioning earlier like I'm your way here. | ||
| The driver is like Oh, yeah, the the Uber driver was because this, you know, the right the studios in the middle of nowhere, the Uber driver was telling me and I'm, you know, I'm on the other side of the country. | ||
| So I'm already I'm already hyped up. | ||
| And he's like, you know, the Blair Witch Project was shot here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my gosh. | |
| These sure are some winding roads. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, it's like just like, there's no streetlights. | ||
| It's all black. | ||
| There's mountains and it's like, welcome. | ||
| By the way, I'm sorry, this is completely irrelevant. | ||
| What microphones are these? | ||
| These are SM7Bs. | ||
| These are really nice. | ||
| These are just, like, everyone uses them. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| I'm using an AT40, I think. | ||
| These are nice. | ||
| I am excited for anybody who wants to make those clips and be like... You know, it's really funny because it always happens where both sides will think that their person won. | ||
| And I'm more than happy to provide that entertainment. | ||
| Let's read some superchats because I already see, like... | ||
| You're probably touching yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| He says, get back to the actual argument, Beanie Man. | ||
| But then, Yorozuya says, this guy's disingenuous. | ||
| Don't bring him back, Tim. | ||
| Oh, snap. | ||
| Actually, no. | ||
| I absolutely would love to have you back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great conversation. | |
| Yeah, because I don't think I know everything, and I probably could, you know... Fun election night party. | ||
| You can make it. | ||
| Well, he's a busy guy. | ||
| I can only fly so much. | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| I'm terrified of flying. | ||
| JV says, ask Vosh if he thinks Mao was better than Trump. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| It's apples and oranges, literally. | ||
| No, no, wait, wait, hold on. | ||
| Is he better or worse? | ||
| No, Mao was very, very bad. | ||
| Mao killed so many people. | ||
| We don't even know. | ||
| He did like, I think if I remember, he did like three good policies in an ocean, like you'd have to dig for those. | ||
| I dis a Mao. | ||
| His wife. | ||
| So what you're saying is that you prefer Trump over Mao? | ||
| This is Mao. | ||
| Listen, if Mao... | ||
| You're not getting me clipped. | ||
| If Mao came back, listen, maybe he's reformed, okay? | ||
| I don't believe in cancel culture, okay? | ||
| I think Mao should have to come on this program to give his side of the story. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| I'll pay too. | ||
| Good comment. | ||
| Mr. Comfy Pants says, Amazing exchange. | ||
| Great discussion. | ||
| Love your work. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I'll be too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then Dick Johnson, I will literally pay you $5 | |
| to never have this guy back on. | ||
| Listen, man, I think this kind of stuff is important. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And so I'm willing to invite anybody once I have a conversation. | ||
| Some people were like, why don't you have the far right? | ||
| Dude, we didn't even talk about magic cards and Dungeons & Dragons, which we all play. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I was really psyched up for that part of the conversation. | |
| I actually said early on, I was like, how about we just ditch the whole political conversation, talk about D&D, DM a game on the fly. | ||
| It's 1130, is it crazy? | ||
| Oh my gosh, you guys. | ||
| Fireball. | ||
| Can I dispel that on the phone? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh oh. | |
| You know what? | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I don't know if this this comment is fair, so I don't know if I should actually read it. | ||
| Uh oh. | ||
| Uh, it's it, I don't know what do you think? | ||
| I, you know what, uh, go for it. Why not? | ||
| They said, ask him why he thinks child... | ||
| Fraud. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Should be legal and and is moral. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It's a misinterpretation of an argument that I made like a year ago or something, and I phrased it horribly. | ||
| My basic argument is that like, why is that material bad? | ||
| Because it hurts people to produce it, yeah? | ||
| There are other commodities that hurt people to produce, like the child slaves that mine up like cobalt and stuff like that. | ||
| So my argument was like, It's all bad. | ||
| However, sometimes it really bothers me when people will be like, dude, whatever. | ||
| We make computers. | ||
| They look sick, bro. | ||
| Don't think about it. | ||
| That was essentially the argument that I was making. | ||
| Yeah, I really don't like that. | ||
| There's so many out of context clips of me. | ||
| That's why I was like, I don't even know if I should read it, but I kind of felt like you probably would have a response to it. | ||
| I bet if we had video those child slaves, that there'd be a lot less of that. | ||
| I talk about this stuff all the time. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of people who say things like, I'm more effective, that's why I should be allowed to use this computer. | ||
| I'm like, look man, I fully acknowledge this was probably made by, you know, like, the Foxconn laboratories are really, really bad. | ||
| But at least, like, own it, you know? | ||
| Like, it'd be like, okay, this is bad, but we can do something about it. | ||
| There are more slaves today on Earth than there ever have been in all of human history. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| That's not good. | ||
| Alright, let's see. | ||
| I assume that's directed at me. | ||
| I guess I should again, it's just been a while. | ||
| It's a dark time. | ||
| people like you hate more. You wouldn't be here at this point | ||
| right now without the lies getting your head wake up. I don't know who's talking. I assume that's directed at you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you said you mentioned getting brush up on Russia. I guess I should I should again. It's just been a while. Dark | |
| time. Yeah, I don't like the gate part of it. It's done. | ||
| Watergate. | ||
| Everything escaped. | ||
| Watergate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, here we go. | ||
| Sean Kennelly says, Tim, I'm your biggest fan, but you completely let this guy run your | ||
| show tonight. | ||
| He diverted your questions. | ||
| He had no clue about Russiagate or Obamagate, but you still used kid gloves. | ||
| Thought you were better than that. | ||
| Like I said early on, look, as much as we did have a bit of a back and forth and some | ||
| debate, this show isn't a blood sports debate where I come here with a big stack of notes | ||
| to be like, I'm taking you out. | ||
| It's a conversation show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's IRL, man. | |
| I want to have people to have a conversation. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chill. | |
| Like, I'm sorry if you come here, and I mean this sincerely, like, thinking that I prepared a big list and, like, I'm preparing a takedown. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| No preparation. | ||
| Be disappointed. | ||
| I was like, I'd really love to have this guy in and just have a conversation. | ||
| I kept trying to look up what happened with the Philadelphia riot, because I've been in a news dead zone for too long. | ||
| I kept trying to look up, and I kept getting distracted by D&D talk, so I came in equally... It's so much better. | ||
| I'll tell you my thoughts on this, and with respect, Sean, to your opinion, thank you for your chat, I do. | ||
| Like, I let Enrique Tarrio come in here and speak a whole lot, and I pushed back less than I pushed back on Vosh. | ||
| Like, seriously, I actually raised my voice, and we went back and forth. | ||
| I didn't do that with Enrique. | ||
| That's great, yeah. | ||
| So, you know, I'm trying, man. | ||
| I really am. | ||
| But this is not a show where I'm here to just take people down. | ||
| You know, I want to bring people on, have them say their thing. | ||
| I'll give them my thoughts. | ||
| Sometimes it'll be more adversarial. | ||
| And I think it's fair to say I was harder on you than I was on the leader of the Proud Boys. | ||
| Oh, by the way, I'm going to get the exact same comments on my Twitter feed after this. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah, this will be fun. | ||
| It's the mutual. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The mutual. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I've seen it already. | ||
| I wish people would just, like, most of the comments, they're actually pretty cool. | ||
| They're great, yeah. | ||
| They're like, this is a really great, great conversation. | ||
| Hey, I like you guys too. | ||
| Is this the camera? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I like you guys too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| The way I tell people, like, dude, feel free to hate me. | ||
| Like, you know? | ||
| I mean, I wish there was less hate, but I don't think I'm perfect. | ||
| You can handle it. | ||
| And I think people can criticize you and whatever, man. | ||
| Look, I'll tell you what. | ||
| You know what the craziest thing to me is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I'm just some dude who turned a camera on and started talking about stuff on the internet. | ||
| I got no degrees. | ||
| I'm just someone who reads stuff and has opinions. | ||
| And I want to talk to people who have opinions. | ||
| And sometimes I probably sound like a moron. | ||
| That's just the way it is. | ||
| And we have conversations. | ||
| Live to cringe. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I'm sorry if I don't live up to the expectations of some kind of Walter Cronkite or something. | ||
| I don't think I ever will. | ||
| But, uh, a lot of criticism coming your way. | ||
| I'm sorry I'm not as tall as Hasan Piker. | ||
| Oh, what the heck? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| I'd love to have him on as well. | ||
| Personal failing. | ||
| Bo Darville says, this dude is in a huge bubble. | ||
| How could he not know the details of Obamagate? | ||
| Or is he lying? | ||
| You're not alone. | ||
| No, I think it's fair. | ||
| I don't assume everybody knows. | ||
| That's why I asked instead of just saying, well, you're wrong about Russiagate. | ||
| No, I asked you. | ||
| I have a quick two cents about Obamagate. | ||
| I think that it is very complicated. | ||
| I think this is why Trump doesn't want to talk about it. | ||
| And I think this is a part of the issue that people have with it, is that it's just complicated. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| And I think that you should read up on it for sure. | ||
| I definitely should as well. | ||
| Once they use that gate word again, they're confusing everybody by like, this gate, and that gate, and gamer gate, and what? | ||
| It's all the same thing. | ||
| A lot of hotels call it water gate, like let it go. | ||
| Use a different word to describe these different situations. | ||
| A lot of it really does come to the media that you consume, because even with all the complexities, you get different types of complexities depending on what you consume. | ||
| Because what I've read in Obamagate has largely been a denunciation of certain perhaps hyperbolized claims. | ||
| Though, as is the case for many situations like this, there usually are bits of legitimately worrying information underneath anything. | ||
| And I think that's totally valid and I'm happy to look more into that. | ||
| You know what I do? | ||
| I use a third party app called NewsGuard. | ||
| Everybody mark off your bingo cards for me mentioning it. | ||
| And what I try to do is I typically start with mainstream media and then I check right-wing | ||
| media because mainstream typically has a left bias or at least a left perspective. | ||
| So I try to read both and then this is really funny because I was criticized for this for | ||
| using the Daily Mail very often. | ||
| Daily Mail is certified as credible, and... That's interesting. | ||
| I really mean this. | ||
| They usually have the most comprehensive take on a story. | ||
| If I go to The Hill, like I go to The Hill often because they're considered center and they talk politics, I'll read a story about Amy Coney Barrett that'll have like one paragraph, and then I'll search for it and find several other articles, Fox News will have two, Daily Mail will have like 15. | ||
| And it'll be breaking down the nuances and getting into depth on it. | ||
| You know what actually does really good reporting? | ||
| BuzzFeed News. | ||
| I was actually surprised when they split off from regular BuzzFeed. | ||
| I found they actually have really, really, really good in-depth coverage of stuff. | ||
| They've done a really good job on a lot of things. | ||
| I'm critical of them on a lot of other things. | ||
| Notably, they ran a racist piece claiming that two black men fought to the death over a chicken sandwich, which I'm not kidding. | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
| Oh, I didn't hear about that. | ||
| It was fake news and it really made me angry because I'm like, I know what they do, I know what they're doing, and it's disgusting. | ||
| I give, I give... Wait, did they actually fight to the death, or did they completely make it up? | ||
| Or was it just sensationalized? | ||
| A dude was at Popeye's and cut in line. | ||
| And so, like, he walked outside and some guy was yelling at him for cutting in line and got shot. | ||
| Okay, so it was literally just racist. | ||
| It was totally racist. | ||
| Okay, wow. | ||
| Cut those clicks, man. | ||
| Made me mad. | ||
| BuzzFeed does have some good stories they've done. | ||
| I actually read one recently. | ||
| But often they have poor framing, I think. | ||
| Okay, fair. | ||
| To be fair, a lot of right-wing media has poor framing as well. | ||
| It's the same issue. | ||
| Buzzfeed is a left-partisan source. | ||
| Yeah, I'm rolling through Breitbart articles pretty much every day these days. | ||
| Breitbart has some good report. | ||
| People are going to get mad, but I think it's comparable to BuzzFeed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's going to trigger the left and the right. | |
| Breitbart's released some breaking stuff. | ||
| We're in the super chat section, so I'll let my facial expression carry the weight. | ||
| Right and left. | ||
| Rob in 123 says, Vosh said right populism can only be fascism. | ||
| What is his view of left populism? | ||
| Well, I think left populism can go in a lot of directions. | ||
| I think that societies become potentially more complex the further you go to the left, in large part because there are so many different ideas on how to achieve the basic underlying goal. | ||
| I feel like the farther right you go, it's pretty much just absolute power of the state or absolute power of corporations. | ||
| I guess it's conceivable to be a right-leaning populist and not be a fascist. | ||
| I admit I'm struggling to find them at times. | ||
| Well, it's simple. | ||
| It's a bunch of people in a small town who use capitalist systems, have traditional values, and want to be left alone. | ||
| Sure, well, but traditional values left alone, like this can mean a lot of things. | ||
| Isolationism, ethno-nationalism. | ||
| No, like, this is my farm. | ||
| Please don't steal my stuff. | ||
| I hope we could do that anywhere. | ||
| But that would be arguably right-wing. | ||
| You've got people waving American flags and Gadsden flags and saying, we love this country. | ||
| And that's about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Well, populism usually is about, like, the manifestation of the popular will, you know, the idea that the establishment is something. | ||
| But usually, the way the establishment gets codified in right-leaning narratives means that, like, in addition to the establishment, you have other threats from without. | ||
| In some states, it's been the Jews. | ||
| Here, we have, like, for example, MS-13, the cartel. | ||
| We have ISIS. | ||
| We have undocumented immigrants. | ||
| And we have, within our own country, we have Antifa. | ||
| We have, you know, this sort of thing. | ||
| And I guess fear, I think, is the underlying emotional pinning to these tendencies. | ||
| So would a far-left populist be a warlord? | ||
| Well, I think a far-left... Mao? | ||
| Well, I think... Because the issue is when you think of a populist, like you have somebody like Lenin, right? | ||
| Lenin, you know, he stirs up the peasantry for a long time. | ||
| He gets his armies, he marches alongside the partisans and the Democrats and such, and eventually he seizes power. | ||
| And what does it become? | ||
| An authoritarian state. | ||
| Is that populism? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| In fact, I would argue there are elements of Lenin's government that were distinctly right-leaning in spite of all the aesthetics and sort of performative socialism. | ||
| Is that left and right? | ||
| It's so confusing. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| No, but that's exactly what I mean. | ||
| The term left and right. | ||
| I think at the end of the day, I want people to be happy. | ||
| I want people to be healthy. | ||
| I think everyone in this country should be able to get good health care, good food. | ||
| And I think that most of us lived under the thumb, two thumbs of corporations and of government | ||
| in ways that are vastly disproportionate and unjust. | ||
| What do you think about the Federal Reserve? | ||
| We barely got into it. | ||
| That's a whole subject. | ||
| I think the issue with socialism is that the only way to create a system as of right now | ||
| where everyone adheres to the commodification of certain things is by force. | ||
| Well, let's take steps then. | ||
| Maybe... But it's still force. | ||
| Oh, I mean, well, then any policy is force. | ||
| I mean, it is, because any law passed by a government is mandated by... The libertarian argument would be yes. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| The government telling you you must at gunpoint. | ||
| But again, what's the quote, you know? | ||
| The poor man and the free man are both equally disallowed from sleeping beneath the bridge. | ||
| Freedom, in a legal sense, means very little if you're starving. | ||
| So if the government, say for example, uses its authority to provide everybody a base stipend of food and education, you may technically be removing freedoms in a certain way because now people have to do this or whatever, but on the other hand, you've given an entire population of people a different, more essential kind of freedom. | ||
| It just feels too utopian. | ||
| Well, but you agree with public education, don't you? | ||
| Um, no. | ||
| Actually, no. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, the Founding Fathers did. | ||
| They thought that public education was about emancipating the mind of the average person. | ||
| That democracy could only function if we were sufficiently educated. | ||
| I should clarify that, in its current form. | ||
| Oh, yeah, sure. | ||
| I mean, it hasn't changed in 150 years, right? | ||
| When you ask me, I'm imagining as it exists today, and I'm like very much against this. | ||
| It's broken, completely broken, and needs to be redone. | ||
| Then in a different phrase, that education should be a human right. | ||
| I'm 100% for social programs and government programs. | ||
| The issue, I think, is that we need to fix them. | ||
| I feel like you were operating off of civics developed hundreds of years ago. | ||
| That haven't scaled properly. | ||
| Especially education, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Nothing's changed since, like, schoolhouse days. | ||
| Like I said, I'm for a mixed economy. | ||
| I think we should have regulations, we should have taxation, we should have some government programs. | ||
| But the problem is our government programs don't fail. | ||
| So when public schooling breaks, we just keep dumping money into it, and it's just a broken thing. | ||
| But we also can't let it fail. | ||
| Because you can't wake up one day and say, like, oh, sorry, Timmy, your school went bankrupt. | ||
| You'll be working around the house for a year. | ||
| Well, why not? | ||
| Well, the systems have to be kept up. | ||
| Or if they're going to be broken, then accommodations have to be made by those hurt. | ||
| And that, I think... So, for example, like our failing schools, right? | ||
| If anyone defends the education system as it currently exists in this country, they're delusional. | ||
| This education system is terrible. | ||
| It's broken. | ||
| We're worse than other countries with half our GDP. | ||
| Not GDP, GDP per capita. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| But at the same time, if we just let every failing school just shut its doors, we would have a spike and everything would be bad. | ||
| Parents use school as daycare. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they can go to work. | ||
| Now, I read the Super Chat where they said, how does he not even know about Russiagate? | ||
| So I'll read this one where Redway2 says, Vosh is so obviously winning it's not even funny. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| I think it's fun. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if everyone walked away thinking that I was a moron. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I don't think I'm the, you know. | ||
| Have Tome says, this is like watching that Joe Rogan interview with Barry Weiss. | ||
| Vosh is extremely uninformed and lives in a bubble. | ||
| You see, it goes both ways. | ||
| What it reminds me of is I remember I had a hosted or like a moderated debate with anti-climate change guy fairly recently, like full-on anti, like it's all a hoax, you know, flat earth, whatever. | ||
| And afterwards, you know, the Super Chats roll and the moderator reads them and it's like, you know, the 50-50. | ||
| It's like, Vosch, you did really good there. | ||
| And then the next one's like, Vosch clearly lives in the globehead bubble if he actually believes that temperatures are rising. | ||
| And it's fun, you know? | ||
| Not to say this is equivalent in that respect, but I like the back and forth. | ||
| Ken W. says, Scandinavian socialist countries have school choice. | ||
| Japan has school choice, and compulsory education is only up to junior high. | ||
| They rank higher than U.S. | ||
| education. | ||
| Why should we continue failed U.S. | ||
| public education policies? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| In Japan, first of all, even though high school is not compulsory, you'll find that if you want to get ahead in Japan, you absolutely need to get to a good high school. | ||
| That is a culturally obligatory thing. | ||
| Additionally, middle school goes up to ninth grade in Japan. | ||
| Also, with schools like Sweden, School choice to me is acceptable in concept as long as it's not being used as a way to demonize people who are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to where they're taking their kids. | ||
| And a school choice would be something I would 100% support as long as I felt like it was going along with a genuine effort to revitalize all of these communities. | ||
| That I would be in favor of. | ||
| On its own though, I don't think so. | ||
| I think we gotta do something, man. | ||
| Yeah, we gotta revive. | ||
| We gotta Publix Works program. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| We gotta start building them roads, you know? | ||
| We have the money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you know much about graphene? | |
| You mentioned it earlier? | ||
| I think we should start implementing programs where we're like, we're gonna do a public education thing, maybe it's school choice, maybe it's something else, and then we gotta wean ourselves off these addictions. | ||
| I think you're right about public schools. | ||
| Uh, in that if we just shut them down overnight or they went away, it would hurt a lot of people. | ||
| Parents rely on this. | ||
| This is why Trump's been so adamant, like, we gotta get the schools open because people want to go to work and their kids, they need, you know, their kids need to go somewhere, be occupied. | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| I think it's a huge problem. | ||
| And I think we've given away our responsibilities as parents. | ||
| So I think we need to change this, but it's like a drug. | ||
| We just end it. | ||
| It causes massive destabilization. | ||
| The same thing is true with, with, with our healthcare system. | ||
| So my thing is, I've said over and over again, I would love universal healthcare. | ||
| The difference between us and many European countries is that universal healthcare in Europe was born out of World War II. | ||
| A necessity, a mandate, and it had to exist. | ||
| In the U.S., we've tied our economy up to it to an extreme degree, where I think it's wonderful to want a system where we can guarantee, what did we call it? | ||
| Non-acute treatments? | ||
| Universal, is that what you were saying? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Acute treatment you would fund. | ||
| I like the idea of doing that, but chronic treatment I wouldn't want to fund. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| If you eat poorly and then you get chronic disease, I find that that's usually dietary and I don't want to fund other people's chronic diseases. | ||
| But acute problems, like they fell down the brick, their leg, there's an emergency, I like funding that stuff. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| People shouldn't... | ||
| You have it's hard to quantify where we draw that line on what would qualify as a chronic thing caused by you or whatever but I think ultimately my point is Flipping that over to get off the addiction of this like... I'll tell you a story, man. | ||
| I got a kidney stone in 2014, and the bill was like $20,000 for going to the hospital and being given water and painkillers. | ||
| $20,000. | ||
| And then I told them, it's the worst timing ever. | ||
| I just changed jobs right after I left Vice, and there was a week period where I was unemployed. | ||
| And they were like, oh, oh, no problem. | ||
| It's $4,000. | ||
| I'm like, that's still a ridiculously large amount of money, but why did you just cut off so much of the price? | ||
| And they were like, we thought you had insurance. | ||
| I'm like, that makes literally no sense. | ||
| No, they make it up. | ||
| The hospitals, they're in bed with, or some say coerced by the insurance agencies, you know? | ||
| They literally just make up these numbers and then they say, hey, insurance company, you don't have to pay this much. | ||
| This guy has to pay this much. | ||
| You get to pay a tenth of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they dropped the price for me when they realized I did have insurance. | |
| But because it's inflated. | ||
| Because sometimes, you know, it's like with other debts. | ||
| Like if your student debt gets collected, you know, you can actually argue it down from | ||
| debt collectors. | ||
| You know, if it's $30,000, you can sometimes say like, oh my God, my car just crashed and | ||
| my arm fell off and I'm dying. | ||
| Please God. | ||
| And they'll knock it down a little bit. | ||
| But they're operating in the margins. | ||
| Whatever they bought for it. | ||
| With the hospital, though, they inflate this so high that the actual relationship between the cost of care and what you have to pay is... it's like fantasy. | ||
| I think we could start with covering basic acute treatment, broken bones, really simple place, and like flu and immediate sicknesses, so we can make sure kids aren't dying of, you know, because their parents couldn't afford Tamiflu, like that one story. | ||
| Getting to the point where we can cover chronic treatments and severe treatments could be really, really difficult. | ||
| But my main point is I would love to live in a world where it's like you could walk in and there's no bill. | ||
| The problem is we have two very different circumstances for how some countries emerged in their national health systems versus how we developed ours. | ||
| So I think it's like, what, 20% of our economy is tied to health care. | ||
| And I think Bernie Sanders said, was it 2 to 4 million jobs, I think, would be lost if we abolished. | ||
| I like the idea of acute treatment plus private healthcare for supplemental. | ||
| Ultimately, getting to a point where we have a functioning system would be very, very difficult, but I'm for it. | ||
| I don't want to rant too much on that stuff. | ||
| I'm already angry that you can buy Pepsi with food stamps and then go into the doctor because you have the flu because of the Pepsi, and then I'm not going to pay for it. | ||
| Well, I do want to say, though, if we do want to drop the cost of healthcare in this country, we also need to start regulating food companies way, way harder. | ||
| One of the reasons why we have this obesity epidemic, it's not because people got less responsible or whatever. | ||
| Our moral character didn't decline. | ||
| The chemicals they put in food are designed to make them addictive, and they use whatever chemicals make them addictive, and those chemicals tend to be really, really bad for you. | ||
| And I think that, listen, you're an American. | ||
| You have a God-given right to eat as many Twinkies as you want on any given day. | ||
| But I think we also have to recognize, just as a matter of public policy, that it'd maybe be good to make it easier for the average person to get a hold of quick, cheap, easy food items that weren't made, you know, out of kerosene and toothpicks. | ||
| Don't pollute the environment with your body. | ||
| We have a lot of anti-Vosh comments, but Zeffan says, I disagree with Vosh a lot, but I'm glad you've had him on and would like to see it again or someone similar. | ||
| Also, is that a new watch? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Because I've been doing, I'm trying to track fitness. | ||
| Measure your biometrics or something? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Apparently I have a really great heart rate. | ||
| I'm very fit. | ||
| Oh awesome! | ||
| He's fit. | ||
| What are your numbers? | ||
| So my resting heart rate this morning was like 46. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That actually is really good. | ||
| I skate almost every day and now I'm mountain biking. | ||
| And, uh, yeah, I've been trying to go on a jog every, uh, every morning since, since lockdown, you know, you know, uh, Corona virus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shut down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Tyga says this guy makes me want to be a proud, uh, be a proud boy. | ||
| Trump 20. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Doing my work. | ||
| Go either way, man. | ||
| Grosham says great conversation for showing how the selection comes down to low information versus high | ||
| information voters Yeah, I think that could go honestly depending on which | ||
| which go either way man Look, I I do believe that's the case, but I think it's fair | ||
| to say that I'm not gonna pretend like I | ||
| Know everything. I think it's fair to say there's probably a bunch of clips of me looking like a moron, you know | ||
| None of me whatsoever Even the right is going to be making memes saying you were so smart. | ||
| They're going to be painting you. | ||
| Actually, there was one comment where someone said they agree with you on schools and they were shocked because they don't like socialism. | ||
| What do you realize when you have a conversation? | ||
| It's just not that different, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Humans are so similar. | |
| I think a lot of our difference in opinions is rooted in what we've read. | ||
| That's why I said it earlier on. | ||
| Fundamentally, I am and always have been of the belief that given the right conditions, and realistically speaking, the right media exposure, because we do live in two different worlds these days, because of what's recommended to us, at least two, at minimum two, I think functionally most people would want the same basic things. | ||
| And I think we can find those, I think, and we can work towards them, and it's just a matter of agreeing or disagreeing on the Pragmatic implementation. | ||
| Yeah, the Founding Fathers would go at it. | ||
| A lot of these comments are like, Tim is really dumb. | ||
| You nailed it, Tim. | ||
| Vosh is so dumb. | ||
| Vosh is winning. | ||
| So, you know. | ||
| I'm bringing it up again for like the eighth time because I'm scrolling through trying to find comments. | ||
| There's a lot of threat trend, yeah. | ||
| Paulie V says, you can't get mad at Trump for executive authority when you say he should have used more to force a national plan. | ||
| Choose a side. | ||
| I think there are good and bad reasons to use national authority. | ||
| Like imperialism, for example. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hate it. | |
| I mean, lefty, right? | ||
| What does American imperialism do? | ||
| Kill democratically elected Latin American socialists. | ||
| Not my thing. | ||
| However, sometimes interventionism can be decent. | ||
| We had soldiers in Syria, for example, that were helping out the Rojavan army. | ||
| I'm a fan. | ||
| Whatever the case may be, together they were doing a phenomenal job against ISIS, and Rojava was a burgeoning anarchist project that was one of the, and still is to this day, one of the most legitimate examples of, like, a democratic anarchist society. | ||
| By pulling out, we ended up endangering them, and we still have because of Turkey, and in that instance, I am in favor of military intervention. | ||
| It's just a matter of how it's applied. | ||
| You know the problem with, like, these democratic anarchic states is? | ||
| Well, they usually get destroyed by larger, more military. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I'm of the opinion. | ||
| An anarchist society can only truly exist, perpetually exist, in a global sense. | ||
| Because the existence of outside authoritarian influence is a very strong destabilizing one. | ||
| But what if the aliens come? | ||
| Then we are well and truly gone, my friend. | ||
| Listen, anarchist world with highly authoritarian geosynchronous defense cameras. | ||
| I'm into it, dude, like an AI. | ||
| Orbiting around. | ||
| This is an account and it's got the Antifa, what is it called, the strikethrough? | ||
| Is that the three arrows? | ||
| Oh, yeah, three arrows, yeah. | ||
| Very nice comment. | ||
| I accept it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was reading a factcheck.org article, and we didn't pull it up, so if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't able to find it. | ||
| My bad. | ||
| I haven't seen any of your screens. | ||
| I'm not the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I'm vibing right now. | ||
| Vibing with Biden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You sure are. | ||
| They're mad you're not wearing a mask. | ||
| He was earlier. | ||
| He was. | ||
| He's wearing a mask. | ||
| None of us are wearing masks. | ||
| He's sanitized. | ||
| He came in. | ||
| We have hand sanitizer. | ||
| He's wearing a mask. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| We got it. | ||
| Someone says fix Tim's audio feed. | ||
| I tried. | ||
| I did everything in my power. | ||
| I was literally under the desk trying to get it. | ||
| There was a cat sitting on a cable. | ||
| I couldn't find it. | ||
| Bosh is hot right now. | ||
| Oh, snap. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Facsimile says Trump blows Trump then calls himself a centrist based, huh? | ||
| Okay Let's see | ||
| Ender says no federal aid by Trump didn't Trump send a Navy medical ship to NYC which went unused | ||
| Your argument is Trump didn't provide aid but that but he stayed to war powers to get businesses to convert to create | ||
| masks and ventilators Yet Trump didn't use war. I got to find the | ||
| War powers to get governors not to mess up, but the governor's didn't mess up leading to those deaths | ||
| Blasio didn't use the medical ship didn't use Samaritan's Purse | ||
| Then we had like three months of riots where governors didn't prevent people from gathering though | ||
| Well, the riots seemed to have not increased COVID-19 spread. | ||
| There was a ton of data done on this. | ||
| And it wasn't because people didn't get COVID at the riots. | ||
| It was actually because the existing... By the way, by riots, we mean protests. | ||
| I'm sorry, I shouldn't adopt this narrative. | ||
| The vast majority of these gatherings are protests without violence. | ||
| These protests Well, to be fair, we definitely need to draw a distinction between riots and protests in this regard. | ||
| during protests. I think, well, to be fair, we definitely need to draw a | ||
| distinction between riots and protests in this regard. Well, some protests are riots. | ||
| Well, no, the protests that we're referring to are large gatherings of | ||
| people marching down the street. The protests would be way more at risk for | ||
| Because people don't march right next to each other during riots. | ||
| The riots are people running around randomly. | ||
| So that's an important distinction when we're talking about COVID. | ||
| So with regard to the protests, it doesn't seem like it's increased COVID-19 spread because people stay inside when there are protests because they don't want to get caught out in any of the mess. | ||
| And maybe you can say that's a toxic disincentivization. | ||
| But whatever the case may be, of course there are governors who bungle this. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And one of the unfortunate downsides of the way our system works is that we have to accept the fact that decentralization will lead to decentralized failures. | ||
| That being said, I do think there were stronger federal steps that could have been taken, generally speaking. | ||
| But we already went along with that. | ||
| I will say, you know about the riots in Europe right now over COVID lockdowns, right? | ||
| that are viewed too as too authoritarian. Lots of people have gone crazy with things | ||
| are now. Given the anti-authoritarian culture tracing to the founding people would be wildly | ||
| crazy. I will say, you know about the riots in Europe right now over COVID lockdowns, | ||
| right? | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm not entirely sure what that donation was referring to. | ||
| Um, yeah. | ||
| Well, I think what they're saying, the first part, at least you're discounting the public response to the COVID lockdown measures when people view them as authoritarian. | ||
| So in, in Spain, Italy and Prague, there's rioting over the lockdown has been going on for several days. | ||
| And in London, there's been clashes with police. | ||
| I won't call it rioting, but it's, it's overt rioting in, in, in like Italy, for instance, Molotovs and. | ||
| I'm honestly mixed on the effectiveness of lockdowns, just generally speaking. | ||
| I think that maybe if they had been done very early, it would have been possible for us to contact trace. | ||
| Like very, very early, you know, but that would have required a response so immediate that it's almost impractical for a government of this size. | ||
| At this point, I really do think it's just about really, really, really promoting the mask wearing, the social distancing. | ||
| And then additionally, I think we need to divert funds towards providing businesses and schools materials that they need to Yeah. | ||
| Vitamin D, I hear, is really good for you. | ||
| that be plexiglass screens or like cleaning materials. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Vitamin D I hear is really good for you. | ||
| Yeah, everyone can use some vitamin D. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| Mark Grains says, can confirm, Tim definitely plays Orzhov stacks, Lids plays Boros, I think Ian would play obscure | ||
| Simic combo deck, Vosh plays mono green stompy. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Simic? | ||
| That's green blue, right? | ||
| Green stompy? | ||
| You animal. | ||
| He's red green. | ||
| Is that black? | ||
| It's black and white. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tim's got some blue in him and also some red. | |
| Yeah, Tim's kind of fiery. | ||
| He's white, white, blue, red. | ||
| You don't want to give Tim black, that's dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate black too. | |
| I don't think anybody was talking about magic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I completely disavow. | |
| I'm not racist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| Nobody here was talking about Magic the Gathering. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no, Ian. | |
| I completely disavow. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I don't know where I am. | ||
| Please. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| Stephanie B says, Now 27, back in uni, had had to take ethnic class, learned colorism, was told because I'm pale, I'm less Mexican than someone darker. | ||
| Even if they didn't speak Spanish, lived in Mexico, I did. | ||
| It's racist, toxic BS. | ||
| Well, I don't think. | ||
| Yes, Tim's intelligence and looks are highly attractive. | ||
| Oh, snap. | ||
| That's the best part. | ||
| Shout it out. | ||
| Nailed it. | ||
| I obviously don't think, again, judging from the characterization, because you never know how accurate people are telling anything, that's obviously not very good. | ||
| The difference, though, distinctly, is that a Mexican is an ethnicity, not a race, of course. | ||
| When it comes to race, race is a social construct. | ||
| Like, we were all talking earlier, what makes a race? | ||
| Like, skin color? | ||
| Even that? | ||
| Not really? | ||
| Facial features? | ||
| Facial features, yeah. | ||
| But even then, like, you can find people who, like, they're black people, you know? | ||
| But if you change the tone of their skin, you would instantly assume they were white looking at them. | ||
| You can find black people for whom that is not the case. | ||
| And then genetically, it's a whole mess underneath the surface. | ||
| So when we talk about, like, what makes a person more white? | ||
| I mean, am I more white than Tim? | ||
| I made a joke in a video once about mixed race supremacy, like being sarcastic. | ||
| If we look at genealogy, I mean, I'm all European, so by that measure, sure. | ||
| But when it comes to culturally, how do we treat people, you know? | ||
| There are black people who get treated pretty good, because they're really, really light | ||
| skinned, and it's really complicated. | ||
| I made a joke in a video once about mixed race supremacy, like being sarcastic. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| That's the future. | ||
| Well, I was reading an article that said that people with parents from different parts of | ||
| the planet typically have, it's not hybrid vigor, but it's kind of this concept. | ||
| More robust immune systems, right? | ||
| More diverse genetics results in more robust certain features or whatever. | ||
| And so I was making a joke about it, and I was kind of poking fun at ethnonationalism, and a bunch of leftists screenshotted it to make it look like I was actually against myself It was the weirdest thing people have tried to smear me with. | ||
| I unironically believe that, by the way. | ||
| I mean, eventually, assuming we don't do some really weird international ethno-national stuff, eventually we're all going to be a light shade of mocha. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| I think maybe, but China's ethno-nationalist. | ||
| We'll see how long. | ||
| I do not like China very much. | ||
| We'll see how long that goes. | ||
| And then, of course, eventually, I mean, even if everyone's a light mocha brown, eventually the people who have settled in Africa are going to get darker and the people who have settled in Scandinavia are going to get lighter. | ||
| But whatever the case is, I'm just glad we can travel around the planet. | ||
| Do you want to know something crazy? | ||
| What? | ||
| There's, like, I was reading this article about a place in China where the people there are very white, but with Asian features, and there's a legend of a Roman legion that was making its way, that never came back, and they think it settled and then had a big family and created this area where all these people have, like, white Mediterranean. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I looked it up. | ||
| And people don't realize that Russia is in Asia. | ||
| And, like, they don't realize that Russia is north of North Korea. | ||
| Yeah, they call it European, but it's all Asia. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's almost all Asia. | ||
| There's a lot of people in eastern Russia who have Asian features. | ||
| There's a lot of that with Polynesian features as well. | ||
| There are places all from, like, South Africa all the way up to Japan and Russia and even parts of Africa, apparently, where there's genetic clusters of people who the old, like, seafaring Polynesian cultures would go to. | ||
| It's actually pretty crazy how much diversity there was even before we were really an international species. | ||
| I think we need to clarify too when you said race is a social construct, because this is something that I think is missed. | ||
| There's a semantic difference between left and right on this one. | ||
| We're talking about... There's a phenomenon where, like, you might see someone who is an albino black person, and people will say that person is black, regardless. | ||
| And there are people who are, who identify as black, even though their skin is clearly white. | ||
| Which shows that, you know, what features define what we qualify as, like, a race or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, almost exclusively, yeah. | ||
| reason I bring this up is that there is a genetic component to specific races as | ||
| we view them and this is important because we actually have a law that | ||
| protects people based on medical research to make sure they're getting | ||
| adequate treatment. So I think sickle cell anemia is more prominent among African | ||
| Americans. Yeah. It's going down since they since they got shipped over here | ||
| apparently because a lot of it was geographically determined. | ||
| So, like, the conditions necessary, because the malaria is not that much of a thing over here. | ||
| Yeah, malaria. | ||
| Weird thing. | ||
| Mal-air. | ||
| It doesn't really have a meaning. | ||
| It's just bad air. | ||
| With regards to the social construct thing, it's all a matter of social perception. | ||
| For a while, Italian people were considered like swarthy, like kind of the way we would | ||
| consider Spanish people, but now Spanish people are white. Obama is genetically half | ||
| black and half white, but we all consider him black. It's just, yeah. The world | ||
| is not so black and white, is what they tell me. But people are? No. | ||
| No, we're not. | ||
| And yet you hate black. | ||
| Do you think we can evolve as a species to not call each other white and black? | ||
| I think, well, that's the thing. | ||
| We didn't until the mid 1600s. | ||
| The entire modern conceptualization of race was like an ad hoc intuitive response to a desire to scientifically separate the races. | ||
| And what we ended up with was a system to cement white supremacy. | ||
| Initially, that was literally like, we're bringing slaves over from Africa. | ||
| We know we're better than them. | ||
| Let's study the genes as they knew it back then. | ||
| Skull shapes, whatever. | ||
| Craniology. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| So they were like, well, of course we're different. | ||
| Look at our brow shape. | ||
| So here are the three categorizations of man. | ||
| And what we use today are intuitive, Asian, black, white. | ||
| Exactly the same. | ||
| We've updated a little. | ||
| Same basic system. | ||
| I got a comment that might make you angry. | ||
| Get me. | ||
| Are you sure? | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Hindu Andy says, tell Vosh to debate Nick Fuentes. | ||
| He always dodges him. | ||
| Dude, so the position that I'm in right here is that I'm totally fine to have Nick on the channel if he wants to come on, and he keeps posturing on his own. | ||
| All I ask, he just send me an email. | ||
| We can set up a time. | ||
| It's really that simple. | ||
| But I never get that. | ||
| Come on, Nick. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| I want to say this. | ||
| I know there are a lot of people on the left who are going to insult me and tell you I brought up a million times, but I've been reaching out to a bunch of lefties, and Vosh was like, I'm totally down. | ||
| It was a simple booking. | ||
| We reached out to you. | ||
| We set it up. | ||
| You came on the show. | ||
| There are a lot of other people who are like, it's impossible. | ||
| They either ignore, they deflect, they won't do it. | ||
| So there's a lot of people who don't do this, but I'm grateful that you came on because it's not an easy thing to do. | ||
| I love talking to people. | ||
| No, uh, yeah, the, uh, it's, it's, it's actually a little bit like kind of annoying though, because I've said like 80 times, like, just email me, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Yeah, but it's, it's midnight. | ||
| I think we, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm making faces over here because we really gotta call a lid, because I gotta get up and clip this up in the morning. | ||
| I'm calling a lid. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I have an early flight to catch, I think. | ||
| We're gonna have to do this again. | ||
| Oh snap, yeah. | ||
| Did we do four hours? | ||
| Oh my gosh, dude. | ||
| This was great, man. | ||
| I really appreciate you coming on. | ||
| I'm glad we had a lot to talk about. | ||
| We had like a second wind at 1030. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| I don't know, it was magic. | ||
| You brought up the time, and then we were all, you know, we all were invigorated. | ||
| I'm not tired. | ||
| I'm not either, man. | ||
| You will be in the morning. | ||
| You know what I think it is? | ||
| I feel like we've been playing D&D. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of the conversations that we typically have are with people that we've either heard from or ideas we've heard. | ||
| And so with you, it's like we're getting into a lot of things and challenging having a back-and-forth, which is good. | ||
| And, you know, everybody thinks they're the smartest person in the universe, and we want to have real conversations with people, and that's what we did. | ||
| So I'm going to wrap it up. | ||
| Do you want to mention your channel or whatever? | ||
| People who hate you to troll you, or for people to like you to subscribe? | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| If you enjoyed what I had to say, or if you didn't, but are just really angry and want to let me know. | ||
| I'm on YouTube at Vaush, which is V-A-U-S-H. | ||
| And, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I do political commentary. | ||
| I'm a libertarian socialist. | ||
| I also play video games a lot. | ||
| It's a fun time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Cool, man. | ||
| Appreciate you coming on. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And we'll have you back, dude, whenever. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Parler, at TimCast. | ||
| You can follow my other channels, YouTube.com slash TimCast, YouTube.com slash TimCastNews. | ||
| We are also on every single podcast platform, wherever they exist. | ||
| Of course, you can follow Ian. | ||
| Yes, Ian Crossland, that is, at Ian Crossland. | ||
| And you can follow me anywhere, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. | ||
| I have a YouTube channel. | ||
| And of course, you can follow at Sour Patch Lids. | ||
| I am here. | ||
| Still here, four hours later. | ||
| I'm dying over here. | ||
| I'm tired, but I've had such a great conversation. | ||
| L-Y-D-S. | ||
| Friends, I wish you good tidings and good clippings of this video. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh gosh. | |
| My favorite is probably Ian saying he doesn't like black. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I said I hate black. | |
| That was really messed up, man. | ||
| Come on, Ian. | ||
| Necrotic. | ||
| What the heck, man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to bed. | |
| We're going to bed. | ||
| We'll see you all tomorrow. | ||
| Talking about the color of the magic. | ||
| Magic the Gathering. | ||
| All right, it's too late. |
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