Feb. 18, 2022 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:49:17
Participants
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unidentified
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Peace. | |
| Every other word out of my mouth must be civil war or something like that. | ||
| And people are in the chat saying, Tim, civil war pool. | ||
| Well, I certainly think we're in a cold civil war. | ||
| Maybe it's even hot. | ||
| It's just too early for us to realize it on a grand scale, but things are absolutely getting crazy. | ||
| We have a couple of big stories. | ||
| I mean, one of which is this Black Lives Matter activist who was arrested. | ||
| Turn that volume down. | ||
| What are you doing here? | ||
| I got you, homie. | ||
| I get one. | ||
| You get one. | ||
| This Black Lives Matter activist was bailed out by BLM, by Black Lives Matter in Louisville, after he was arrested over the attempted assassination of a Jewish Democrat. | ||
| Now, they're saying he's mentally unwell. | ||
| Other people have pointed out, it's been reported, that he was actually advocating for a black nationalist organization called, what was the name of it? | ||
| I'm forgetting the name. | ||
| It's the armed forces of some extremist organization or whatever. | ||
| Pan-African Socialists or something? | ||
| No, it was like it was it was a similar group to the black Hebrew Israelites. | ||
| And so when this stuff happens, and you're getting the, you know, attempted assassination of politicians, it's coming right after Adam Kinzinger said, you know, he believes that it's possible civil wars could start. | ||
| And if it does, you will see targeted assassination. | ||
| So I want to get into this, and we do have a lot of stories coming out now. | ||
| We've got the National Guard deployed in New Mexico to be teachers and things like that. | ||
| We've got the trucker convoy, obviously. | ||
| That's up in Canada, but there's talk of an American convoy. | ||
| We've got cancel culture. | ||
| We've got, you know, similar issues around this. | ||
| We've got, in Florida, they've just passed a bill to ban abortion after 15 weeks, which, of course, is generating a lot of controversy. | ||
| Joining us to discuss this in depth is the author of The Next Civil War, Stephen Marsh. | ||
| Hey, pleasure to be here. | ||
| Do you want to quickly introduce yourself? | ||
| I'm a writer. | ||
| I'm a Canadian. | ||
| I wrote this wonderful book. | ||
| Yeah, and I sort of think a next Civil War is very much a real possibility for the United States in the near future. | ||
| I think you wrote... What did you write for The Guardian? | ||
| The next Civil War is here. | ||
| Well, that was an excerpt from the book. | ||
| I mean, the book got excerpted in The Guardian and The Washington Post and Foreign Policy. | ||
| Sort of the more technical aspects got excerpted in Foreign Policy. | ||
| And so yeah, like it's, it's been around like this. | ||
| And it was based on an article I wrote in 2018 in Canada, about the possibility of civil war, which I was talking about then in 2018. | ||
| And so yeah, I'm a, you know, I'm a stray cat journalist, I go around and write for whoever leaves that a little plate of milk for me. | ||
| So I think we've actually, on this show, discussed your article. | ||
| I know I talked about it on one of my other channels. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| And I think there's like a core that we completely agree on, but then there's like a divergent worldview we have based on, you know, the different political parties, which I think will be a really interesting conversation. | ||
| What's the core we agree on? | ||
| I think it's, you know, people are forming... At the time we read the article, it was easy for me to pull out the excerpt and be like, you mentioned something about people are sort of tribalizing, they're focusing more on, you know, their own in groups and things like that, and that's causing this like outward spread. | ||
| You've talked about things like cancel culture, specific scenarios and stuff. | ||
| So I'm like, I'm reading your articles and I'm like, I think we agree on those things. | ||
| But then there's certain specific points in politics, I think, we'll have disagreements on. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| But that doesn't, you know, whether or not we agree on something like the trucker convoy, it doesn't change the fact that the core of what's happening, civil war, conflict, the escalation, we agree. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I definitely think a non-partisan observer can look at the United States. | ||
| I mean, it's a textbook case of a country headed for civil war. | ||
| It's not really a question of your political affiliation. | ||
| It's really a question of deep structures that, you know, anyone can see. | ||
| So those are not, I don't really think of that as a partisan issue. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I agree. | ||
| And what I keep saying is, you know, to a lot of people who maybe are, you know, one side or the other, it doesn't matter if you think you're right. | ||
| What matters is both sides think they're right. | ||
| Well, I mean, there's that old expression, would you rather be married or right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And like in America, a lot of people would rather be right than married. | ||
| You know, that's, that's where you're at now. | ||
| I mean, I should say, like, I don't really think of myself as a partisan in the United States cause I'm a Canadian. | ||
| So my, like when I talk about Canada, We can definitely talk about Canada, but, you know, what we're seeing in Canada is essentially a proxy conflict for the hyper-partisanship in the United States. | ||
| And, you know, I think of myself like, I think when you think of Canada, you think left. | ||
| But honestly, as I've crossed the United States writing this book and as I've interviewed the experts, I'm not part of these tribes, right? | ||
| Like I'm outside of all of these tribes. | ||
| So it's not really that we have a difference in tribalism so much as I have a different perspective because I'm a different citizen of a different country. | ||
| Well, so we'll get into everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We'll get into all this stuff. | ||
| Plus, we have a bunch of other stories, too, we get into specifics on. | ||
| But also hanging out is Daniel Turner. | ||
| Yes, great to be back. | ||
| Daniel Turner, your favorite energy expert, powerofthefuture.com. | ||
| And because of the coming civil war, I live on a very large farm, far, far away from civilization. | ||
| So I'm fascinated for this conversation. | ||
| So good to be here. | ||
| We have incredible chicken conversations. | ||
| Behind the scenes. | ||
| This seems like a pretty functioning farm to me. | ||
| I mean, you got fresh eggs. | ||
| I see the incubator downstairs. | ||
| I mean, like, you're one step away from Jeremy Clarkson running a, like, I own a farm show. | ||
| I mean, we grew some vegetables in our garden, but... How'd they go? | ||
| We grew all tomatoes at once because we were newbies and didn't know what we were doing. | ||
| And then we had, like, 50 tomatoes to eat at one time. | ||
| Oh, that's when you need to can them. | ||
| You need to get the sauces going. | ||
| We went berry picking because there's, what are they called, wine berries everywhere. | ||
| This is a beautiful part of the United States of America, I gotta say. | ||
| This little corner of West Virginia and Maryland. | ||
| In the summertime, there's wineberries. | ||
| They're a Chinese raspberry and they're everywhere. | ||
| And people pull over their cars on the side of the road and pluck some and just eat them. | ||
| But we'll get into all that as well. | ||
| Am I here to talk about agriculture? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How do you rate wineberries on a scale from 1 to 10? | ||
| Good to see you, man. | ||
| Pleasure to be here. | ||
| I'm looking forward to hearing about this documentation you've come across. | ||
| I'm not going to waste any time, Ian Crossland. | ||
| Catch you guys soon. | ||
| I am stoked for this conversation with our northern neighbor. | ||
| Canadians are always incredibly nice guests and very nice people in general, and it's been a really interesting conversation before the show. | ||
| It's gonna be a great one, so glad you're here. | ||
| Before we get started, head over to TimCast.com and become a member to help support all of our work, support our journalists, support this show. | ||
| As a member, you'll get access to exclusive members-only segments from the TimCast IRL podcast. | ||
| Now, truth be told, because of how we're going to be handling today's episode, it'll be a little different. | ||
| Normally, we focus on, like, topical news. | ||
| I don't think we're going to have a members segment, because I think we're going to try and hit every possible point we can in one big conversation. | ||
| Whereas normally, we try and, like, create, like, a special segment for members. | ||
| So I think we just might go a little bit longer than usual, but let it be open and free to the public for everybody to just watch. | ||
| But that being said, we do have a massive library of members-only videos. | ||
| You definitely want to check those out because you're helping make sure this business can continue to operate. | ||
| If, in the face of cancel culture and all that stuff, this is how it all operates and you keep our journalists employed, don't forget to smash that like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends. | ||
| Let's just jump into the first article we have here from January 4th by a man named Stephen Marsh. | ||
| The next U.S. | ||
| Civil War is already here. | ||
| We just refuse to see it. | ||
| I saw this. | ||
| It's tagged by The Guardian, The Far Right. | ||
| And as I was reading it, you know, there are some things in it that I was like, OK, I don't know if I agree with that. | ||
| I think you talk about voter suppression and things like that. | ||
| It's one of the issues. | ||
| But I was but I was as I was getting into it and talking about how we've got these, you know, look, a potential political assassination attempt. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's not necessarily like a left-right thing with this Black Lives Matter activist. | ||
| It just shows that there's extremism emerging in this country. | ||
| But of course you also have serious things over the past several years like Charlottesville | ||
| where there's just clashes in the street. | ||
| So let's just start from the beginning though. | ||
| You wrote a book, The Next Civil War. | ||
| This article is titled The Next U.S. Civil War is Already Here. | ||
| I don't write the headlines. | ||
| You didn't write that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do you think that it is likely? | ||
| Is it your opinion or is it a journalist's assessment? | ||
| Well, the book is really based on the best available models. | ||
| That's how I did it. | ||
| I tried to keep myself out of it as much as possible. | ||
| So you know the leading experts that foreign policy did a survey like their number was a 67% chance of a civil war. | ||
| That also coincides with polls about average Americans think how likely they think a civil war is. | ||
| So you know I feel with this stuff you don't need to exaggerate. | ||
| It's so scary anyway that like what I wanted to do in the book is be as precise as possible. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And use the best available evidence that I could. | ||
| So, you know, yeah, there's there's a process underway in the United States is a textbook case of a country headed for civil war on a number of fronts. | ||
| And it's not one thing. | ||
| It's actually what they call a complex cascading system. | ||
| So it's things feeding into each other. | ||
| So on one hand, it's political illegitimacy. | ||
| On the other hand, it's effects of climate change. | ||
| On the other hand, it's the levels of inequality, which are at unprecedented levels, you know, literally levels that haven't been seen since 1776. | ||
| And all of these things contribute to each other and factor into each other. | ||
| And that's why the United States is kind of in a unique position, because, you know, all these things are happening in the rest of the world as well. | ||
| But it's the way that they feed into each other that creates such a dangerous situation for the United States. | ||
| Are there specific things that you found factored across multiple potentials that you just kept showing up like, this is one of these things that it seems to be in all these scenarios? | ||
| Well, the big, I mean, there are a few ones that are big, like, I don't, I don't really separate them out, because I do think they feed into each other. | ||
| But like the decline of faith of institutions, so the fact that only 20% of Americans believe their electoral system is fair. | ||
| You know, that's right. | ||
| That's a condition that's just right for civil war. | ||
| The fact that 33% of Americans think that it's OK to use violence if your side loses, and that's equal Democrat-Republican. | ||
| Well, they're very similar. | ||
| One's 32% and one's 36%, right? | ||
| So that is a huge factor. | ||
| So that's a big one. | ||
| I'm curious how much of that is honest. | ||
| And what I mean by that is... Well, you know, these models are all of different strengths. | ||
| So, like, all I can do is tell you what they say. | ||
| No, no, for sure, for sure. | ||
| So I think, you know, just leaping off from there, we have the story about the Black Lives Matter activists accused of allegedly shooting this Democrat. | ||
| Certainly there have been instances where far-right and right-wing groups have engaged in violence. | ||
| But if you look at institutional support, When it comes to, say, Black Lives Matter in 2020, you get Kamala Harris soliciting donations to bail out rioters. | ||
| You have a Black Lives Matter activist who's arrested for the attempted assassination of a politician, and Black Lives Matter fronts $100,000 to bail him out. | ||
| You don't have that same kind of thing on the right. | ||
| Well, let me answer that question in two ways. | ||
| OK, so the first thing is that the process that civil war experts talk about, and this happens all over the world, happens in Chile. | ||
| It happened in other places that civil war is called complementary radicalization. | ||
| So what you have is left wing groups or right wing groups taking extremist positions. | ||
| And this causes people on the other side to get more radical. | ||
| So that's that's that's an area that transcends, you know, Partisanship like that's that's another that's a process that's underway. | ||
| Yeah, where as things get more extreme on the left They get more extreme on the right that causes the left to get more extreme that then causes the right to get more extreme Right, and so that's that's a very toxic Process that is extremely hard to escape from now. | ||
| The other thing I would say is that when I talk to You know, this is just let me just give you this perspective. | ||
| You can take it or leave it. | ||
| You know, it might be useful to you. | ||
| It might not be. | ||
| But when I talk to like members of Secret Services of other countries and they're thinking about what a collapsing America looks like, they're not really afraid of the left because the left is inherently self-defeating. | ||
| It is much less organized than the right like and it's also it's much less effective as it as a group. | ||
| So like when you look at a group like the Oath Keepers, They have it together. | ||
| They have it together in a way. | ||
| Whereas when you look at left-wing institutions, like the Women's March after the Trump inauguration, it had somewhere between half a million and a million people at its opening rally. | ||
| It imploded in inter-Nicene politics almost instantly. | ||
| And the term woke institution basically doesn't exist because they eat themselves, right? | ||
| So all I would say is both these processes are underway, but I would say that when I talked to experts on civil war from other countries and people who are worried about the stability of the United States, it was definitely far-right extremists that were their primary worry. | ||
| What about the institutionalization? | ||
| Well, hold on. | ||
| I wanted to address this real quick. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| I don't think you're wrong, but the way I see it is the right I would describe as sharp, the left I would describe as blunt. | ||
| Black Lives Matter was able to raise, you know, what, tens of millions of dollars for relatively nebulous causes, but that attracted thousands of people to riot in the streets over 2020. | ||
| The damage caused was severe and it did result in a lot of death, but it was very, very widespread. | ||
| So typically what we see a lot of, especially at the start of, you know, Donald Trump's run for | ||
| the presidency, I was actually on the ground at a lot of these Trump rallies, you see blunt level | ||
| terrorism. It never exceeded the, it was political violence. | ||
| Terrorism to me is a technical term that would not apply to that. | ||
| I mean, in terms of this book, like, like. | ||
| Terrorism is very specific. | ||
| It has very specific consequences. | ||
| Not to say that we're not dealing with political violence. | ||
| We'll just say political violence. | ||
| Political violence to me is a better term. | ||
| So the political violence you'd see on the left would be rampant, but low scale. | ||
| So there'd be a lot of instances of someone getting punched in the face. | ||
| Or someone getting pushed in the street. | ||
| Or people running around and knocking over garbage cans. | ||
| It was incessant. | ||
| It was never rising to the point where, you know, for a lot of it, people were losing their lives until, I think, the riots. | ||
| But we've seen riots in the past. | ||
| But see, to me, as an outsider, who's right and who's wrong, and the nature of the violence is less important to me than the stability of the system. | ||
| Right, like as a Canadian up north, like wanting America to hold on so that we can trade with you, like what I'm concerned with is the stability of the system. | ||
| So, you know, like when defund the police happened, right? | ||
| Maybe the worst political idea of. | ||
| I mean, it's a high bar. | ||
| No, I'm on board with it. | ||
| Keep it going. | ||
| We love it. | ||
| For electoral purposes, keep supporting it. | ||
| But, you know, also completely non-doable. | ||
| Well, they did, though. | ||
| Well, they did in one place. | ||
| They couldn't get it achieved anywhere else. | ||
| They got it in Minnesota, and then where else? | ||
| I think 260 departments had their budgets slashed. | ||
| And then they came back, right? | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| But a lot of them did come back. | ||
| Yeah, or CHAZ, right? | ||
| Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, which is probably the number one example of left-wing resistance to federal authority. | ||
| I mean, that is a subject in the book, but it has very little impact when compared to the militias. | ||
| So what is it? | ||
| What are the missions like? | ||
| So I can name a ton of things like Chaz, the Chaz chop. | ||
| There was there was that was in Seattle. | ||
| Then you also had the Portland attempts. | ||
| You had the occupation in Minneapolis. | ||
| Well, the Oath Keeper list. | ||
| I mean, they have well, obviously, January 6th, I mean, would be at the top of the list, but, you know, as a very highly destabilizing action. | ||
| But, you know, like the other thing about the right is that they're they understand the importance of institutions in a way that the left does not. | ||
| This is, you understand, I'm not judging. | ||
| I'm just saying, I'm just saying. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| Like they, like when you look at the Oath Keeper list, like when it came out with that 40,000 names, like they'd infiltrated very deeply into police departments, into, you know, school boards. | ||
| Like when I talked to Michael German, who's like a, who was an undercover agent with the FBI and far-right movements, he was like, once they discovered I had no tattoos, they were like, you're never going to talk to anyone rough ever again. | ||
| We're going to run you on a school board. | ||
| That's what we're going to do. | ||
| What I mean to say, just because I want to make sure I can let Daniel come in, is I think one of the reasons there's a lot of people who don't think that the far right elements, many people on the right don't think that there's a big threat from them because they don't see it a lot. | ||
| The way to describe it is it's sharp versus the left's blunt. | ||
| I think you're right when you say that they know the importance of institutions. | ||
| The right talks about losing institutional control at the time. | ||
| What the left doesn't understand, what they have is numbers. | ||
| People will go out in the street and march and smash things, but a day later, where are those activists? | ||
| Yes, and they have no policy. | ||
| Like, their policy ideas are unfeasible. | ||
| Well, that's generally true. | ||
| I mean, I think, like, that's true of the left and the right. | ||
| Well, what's happening in America is it's entering a post-policy phase. | ||
| The government can... I mean, this is the other thing we talked about. | ||
| You asked, like, what are the major causes? | ||
| Like, one is this decline in institutions, but it's also that the government is... America is essentially becoming ungovernable, right? | ||
| Like, Biden has spent 11 months getting diplomats In place, right? | ||
| The US government is constantly threatening to renege on its debt. | ||
| I mean, that's playing Russian roulette with all of this. | ||
| All of this prosperity. | ||
| The Federal Reserve is ungoverned. | ||
| They've never audited it. | ||
| There is a huge number of ungovernable... To me, as a Canadian, when you look at the big Build Back Better bill, or whatever it's called, that's a budget. | ||
| That's a Wednesday in a mature democracy. | ||
| Like, you just pass a budget and that's it. | ||
| In the United States, those basic functions of government are increasingly impossible or extremely difficult, and that leads naturally to a politics of rage, right? | ||
| Where it's like, because you can't ever enact policy, Whether you're left or right, everything becomes aesthetic. | ||
| Everything becomes an aesthetic, artistic gesture of your own anger and your own beliefs in a concept that transcends, essentially, real actions. | ||
| Real government actions. | ||
| And that's a huge, to me, that's maybe the number one factor. | ||
| Yeah, people think they're supposed to be creating policy. | ||
| They should be stripping away bad policy right now. | ||
| When I hear American politicians think tanks and so on, say like, we have to do this with the tax rate. | ||
| No, no, I'm saying pop your mic. | ||
| Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. | ||
| Like when I hear them talking about parental leave or something, it's like, you guys can't pass, you can barely pass a budget. | ||
| Why are you even having these conversations about parental leave or whatever? | ||
| You're in a system that is increasingly non-functional. | ||
| And the thing is, one of the most important models in the book is that that is only going to increase. | ||
| Dude, I was watching Canadian Parliament go nuts and people were heckling, basically. | ||
| I was like, in an American court, you'd be thrown out if you heckled. | ||
| Well, have you ever seen the British one? | ||
| It's like, it's like a, it's like a holdover from British. | ||
| Like even the speaker was like, you guys cut it out. | ||
| Like they're trying to like, it's 21st century where adults don't scream over each other, but it comes from, it did come from like British parliament where they're trying to interrupt the guy speaking. | ||
| They're trying to disrupt them and. | ||
| British Parliament is one of the great entertainments of all time. | ||
| What do they call it? | ||
| The questions session? | ||
| Friday questions? | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| The question period. | ||
| The point of a parliamentary system, as opposed to the American system, is that there's a concept of the loyal opposition. | ||
| So your job is to attack the government. | ||
| Whether you think they're right or not. | ||
| And that's just when they're like, yeah. | ||
| And that, and that creates, that creates an environment where I, where, you know, every leader has to be humiliated. | ||
| Like, like every leader, every politician, no, everyone's just a servant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's, that's, that's just a completely different condition in the United States. | ||
| I don't know if we lost the point you were trying to make before, Daniel. | ||
| No, I think it's, it's, it's worth bringing back, not just because it's my point, but I think it touches on what you were saying of institutions. | ||
| So you mentioned the Oath Keepers, and we were also talking about Black Lives Matter, and the sense of institutional dysfunction, and how I love that you said the right sees institutions as inherently necessary. | ||
| Or valuable. | ||
| Well, as opportunities for advancement of their own program. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Like that's both sides now are are destroying the institution. | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| But one of the things that I'm curious about is when you take a group that is, I think, incredibly polemic, and that does cause a lot of division, which is something like Black Lives Matter, institutionally, They're golden, right? | ||
| You have Bank of America who writes them checks. | ||
| You have the NBA. | ||
| You have major institutions that support what I think is a purely political entity, but it is held up to this level. | ||
| And I think that causes a lot of rage because the Oath Keepers, regardless of what you think of them, would Bank of America ever write them a check? | ||
| They probably couldn't even get a loan. | ||
| At Bank of America. | ||
| So I think institutions have chosen sides and I think that's leading to a greater level of the division. | ||
| Well, the money in American politics is really confusing. | ||
| Because, for example, you saw the New York Times article about dark money that came out a week ago. | ||
| Like, I mean, that to me is the most appalling story in American politics that I know of, where the money that $2.4 billion that decided the 2020 election, no one knows where it came from. | ||
| Some of it came from foreign sources for sure, but nobody knows where it came from. | ||
| Now, $1.5 billion went to the Democrats and $900,000 went to the Republicans. | ||
| 900 million? | ||
| Sorry, 900 million. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did I say billion? | ||
| You said 900,000 went to the conference. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| My Canadian small-time politics stuff. | ||
| And then there's the other fact that while Republicans are pro-business and so on, 70% of American GDP comes from Biden-voting counties. | ||
| That seems to me like one of the key facts that's going to determine the future of this country In civil war or out of it or at the end of it and so like I think there's that I will acknowledge I find it confusing like where where money goes to where is coming from like where what it is supporting and what it wants. | ||
| I find it confusing that certain political causes are objectively accepted to receive money, or to be on the board, or write a check to, and others are not, because those causes are aligning more and more towards people's beliefs. | ||
| I mean, the Karp Brothers wrote a check. | ||
| Coke. | ||
| No, they do. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But you're never going to go to a Knicks game and at the halftime show have them give a $500,000 check to this political cause, but you will see it for... | ||
| Something like Black Lives Matter, you will see it, or something like Planned Parenthood, you will see. | ||
| So the philanthropy of politics, I think, has become very, very divisive because certain philanthropic groups are tolerable, and others are not. | ||
| And real quick, it's only one Koch brother, the other has passed. | ||
| Right, sure, right. | ||
| But just, you know, I thought that was right. | ||
| Well, I think they also stopped giving money to political causes, too, like a few years ago. | ||
| I think they give it to, like, reform things. | ||
| They just decided they're not doing partisan politics anymore. | ||
| There are a lot of wealthy individuals that are willing to fund either side. | ||
| You know, Peter Thiel's got a lot of money and infrastructure. | ||
| I mean, the point is really not who is giving money to who. | ||
| The point is, like, all this money is destroying the system and making it inherently unstable. | ||
| There's also the politicization of everything. | ||
| Which is where you have homophobic chicken and you have LGBTQ positive cookies. | ||
| Like, you know, like there were like literally every aspect of life is politicized. | ||
| That also is classic prelude to civil war. | ||
| But this is an interesting point because potentially what was the start of the culture war, depending on who you asked, Gamergate, you're familiar. | ||
| This was a lot of people who identified themselves as left libertarian on the political spectrum being angered that everything was becoming political because you had these quote-unquote news organizations, video game, you know, news and video game companies increasingly putting very specific ideologies in their games and people were upset with that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they would agree with you, like, why are we politicizing everything? | ||
| Please don't bring me into Gamergate, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, my life is hard enough. | |
| I was playing Heroes of the Storm last night on Blizzard, and I was like, if I type F the CCP, am I gonna get banned off of Blizzard? | ||
| I didn't test it, but I was wondering. | ||
| Well, there are certain things that YouTube banned, but to the point about politicizing everything, video games did used to have a lot of politics in them, but it was more of background, acceptable American views. | ||
| When they started becoming very different, at core, having some kind of Marxist tinge to a lot of them, What do you mean by Marxist? | ||
| I will say in America that word has a meaning that I don't understand. | ||
| In the true sense of Marxist ideology of oppressed versus oppressor. | ||
| Well, okay, I mean, to me, Marxism is, there's lots of oppressed versus oppressor ideologies, but Marxism to me is strictly a class-based struggle. | ||
| All other structures are invalidated. | ||
| No, but that was a key point. | ||
| I mean, I think around Occupy Wall Street, we had the very much class-based narrative of the 1% versus 99. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| Occupy Wall Street to me is, that's a Marxist struggle. | ||
| But video games almost can't be. | ||
| I mean, he rejects any aesthetic category. | ||
| Well, so are you familiar with the origins of critical race theory? | ||
| Yeah, but that's not... I mean, to me, that's... | ||
| That's not Marxism. | ||
| I mean, you know, I think it has come to mean something in this country that I just don't recognize in my own readings of Marxism. | ||
| To me, that's an identity politics formulation which is a completely separate thing from Marxism. | ||
| Well, when it comes to Roblox, you want to talk about video games enslaving people in a class-based system? | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| That's totally off-subject. | ||
| So critical race theory, specifically, Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote that Marx didn't understand American racial politics and that the idea of oppressed versus oppressor can't just be class based when race is inherently tied to class. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, that's inherently a rejection of Marxism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, I mean, right. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| Like Marx is like in the Jewish question, he says, you know, there are there are no there are in effect no ethnicities. | ||
| All there is is class. | ||
| So to me, this whole reading of Marxism... It's a semantic issue, though, is what I would say. | ||
| I guess so, but it does seem to me pretty important that... Because Marxism conjured so much evil in the world, because it conjured so many totalitarian regimes, to call something Marxist to me is... I mean, that's kind of the ultimate insult, because it was ultimately So evil, right? | ||
| And that's not what applies to these other forms. | ||
| Let me bring you there. | ||
| So I went down to Occupy Wall Street on like day three. | ||
| So I ended up streaming and stuff, but it started out with conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and leftists all in one place. | ||
| saying we very much oppose the bailouts, the corruption in the system, the revolving door | ||
| policies. | ||
| In the first week there was so much talk about these big banks got bailed out. | ||
| The guy who works for the pharmaceutical companies gets a job with the FDA. | ||
| The guy from the war machine Halliburton becomes the vice president. | ||
| It's a revolving door. | ||
| Yes, sure. | ||
| But within about two weeks. | ||
| critical race theory took over and all of a sudden you couldn't speak at their assemblies | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| if you're a white man | ||
| and if you wanted to speak or I should say you're at the bottom of the list on their | ||
| progressive stack right so it started out as | ||
| in uh... essentially marxist the class-based oppression quickly turned into a bunch of | ||
| intersectionalists critical race theorists coming in and saying no no you | ||
| guys don't understand Race is actually the core component. | ||
| And then all of a sudden the narrative there shifted, the libertarians and conservatives left. | ||
| And this was one of the starting points, at least in the culture war that I've experienced, where all these things took over. | ||
| When I'm talking about self-defeating left-wing politics, this is what I'm talking about. | ||
| Like, what is required from the left now, more than ever, in a complete sense, is solidarity. | ||
| And it is completely incapable of providing that, even on the most basic levels. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And that's why, to me, like, because my book, what my book is about, is about collapsing systems. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And how systems collapse. | ||
| And like, what is causing the collapse of systems? | ||
| And the left is actually too weak. | ||
| To cause a collapse of the system, because it eats itself in five minutes. | ||
| That's why Occupy Wall Street went nowhere. | ||
| But that's technically not true. | ||
| Occupy Wall Street resulted in a massive shift of wealth from for-profit to credit unions, and it resulted in... I think the Democratic Party pulled their money out of Bank of America and moved it to Amalgamated, which is a union-operated bank. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| How much was that? | ||
| The DNC's funds. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| Tens of millions, maybe. | ||
| Tens of millions. | ||
| I mean, like you're talking about the United States of America. | ||
| But it's a big, you know, you plant the seed of a cultural shift and that matters. | ||
| So when I look at Occupy Wall Street and I see the rise of what was effectively a form of, I think it was overtly critical race theory. | ||
| It then makes its way into something bigger, into media, it expands. | ||
| That was the first experience I had with it. | ||
| It was kind of a crazy experience to see how racist they were. | ||
| I mean, overtly separating people into different racial categories to make them vote on policy was insane. | ||
| Do you think you would qualify as someone who was—like, the process of complementary radicalization would apply to you? | ||
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So so how do you like how do you negotiate that? | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| There's like do you like because you know, the way that they think about it, the way that the experts that I talk to think about it is like an inverse pendulum. | ||
| So like as a pendulum swings, you know, it tends to the center. | ||
| But in American politics, it tends the energy sends it to more extreme forms. | ||
| We're not seeing the same level of extremism on the right as we are on the left. | ||
| Oh, I disagree. | ||
| I mean, I would have to disagree with you there. | ||
| Like, I mean, you see, there's all kinds of right-wing extremism. | ||
| I mean, there's... and the other thing about extremism on the right is also way better armed. | ||
| Well, let's talk about some examples. | ||
| January 6th? | ||
| We got, that's a big one, for sure. | ||
| There you go! | ||
| But what else? | ||
| The Oath Keepers list, 40,000 people. | ||
| What did they do? | ||
| What have they done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, January 6th, I mean... But look, January 6th you had 800 people? | |
| Well, I mean, certainly, like, they're... Relatively disorganized. | ||
| Okay, well, the extreme right in the United States is, of course, really hard to figure out. | ||
| You know, the way I think of it is as a, like, a smorgasbord of ideologies, some that are completely incompatible, and some that are... So there's... It's true for the left, too. | ||
| Oh, the left is totally chaotic. | ||
| I mean, for my own sake, I think we can just dismiss the left as a force, right? | ||
| Because in America, because it is so disorganized and it eats itself, right? | ||
| So what you see on the right is like, there are sovereign citizens, there are three percenters, there are You know oath keepers there. There are sagebrush rebels. | ||
| There are You know | ||
| Second Amendment absolutists there are tax evasion people. | ||
| There are Tax avoidance people. So there's a whole what have they | ||
| done? | ||
| well of the political murders of every year which are amount to like about 70 on average since | ||
| I think the number don't quote me because it's in the it's in the book and I don't have it on my fingertips but I think it's like 72 percent are far right and like 7 percent are far left and the middle is like various. | ||
| So like I would say like when I talk to the experts the fear of political violence is much clearer from the right. | ||
| And that's why I said I feel like the far right is more sharp, right? | ||
| When they do take action, it's extreme. | ||
| Well, you know, we're also dealing, I think we should acknowledge this because we are all trying to stay human beings here, is that we're dealing with a lot of people who are on the line between mental illness and political affiliation. | ||
| We're dealing with a lot of people who are criminal. | ||
| You were just simply criminals and use politics as a cover for their violence and like that has to be acknowledged too, right? | ||
| And that this and that this political radicalization gives them cover for mental illness and for and for their violence, right? | ||
| So those things all like. | ||
| Also, those numbers, to be clear, are not from the FBI. | ||
| They're from journalist reporting organizations who are going through newspapers to figure out what are violent crimes. | ||
| And they're defining who's far right and who's far right. | ||
| Well, they're trying to pick up the pieces, but honestly, this work has not been done at a government level, and it's been done at an academic level, so it's not ideal. | ||
| I want to get back to that point, because I don't think we've got a chance to flesh it out. | ||
| So my point was that there's substantially more far left polarization and extremism compared to the right. | ||
| And to make my point, let me ask you a question. | ||
| Would you fear violence against you at a right-wing rally? | ||
| I've always gotten along really well with far-right people. | ||
| I quite like them. | ||
| Just real quick for the sake of argument, you wouldn't really? | ||
| I definitely would. | ||
| When you go to a far-right rally, there are many, many people walking around with large weapons. | ||
| I don't know what a far-right rally is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Also, I look like this. | |
| I'm like a white dude from Alberta. | ||
| You know, I've been on the ground for I went on the ground for maybe also I look like this. | ||
| I mean, I'm like I'm like a white dude from Alberta. | ||
| So you'd be more likely to get attacked by the far left. | ||
| Well I don't I've never felt threatened by the far left now. | ||
| You know. | ||
| I'll give you I'll give you a specific. | ||
| Let me give you an example. | ||
| I attended the 2016 inauguration. | ||
| I covered it for a Canadian magazine. | ||
| What I fear, genuinely, is not really either side. | ||
| It's when the two sides are together. | ||
| That's what's scary. | ||
| Donald Trump's inauguration. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There were about 400 black-clad leftists smashing windows, starting fires, and attacking people in the streets. | ||
| Yeah, there were plenty of far-right groups there, too. | ||
| But they weren't doing anything. | ||
| Well, they were sort of triumphantly there too. | ||
| Well, there was some violence, but I would say that the atmosphere of menace, like you're just asking me my feelings, right? | ||
| So it's just, you know, it's my personal experience, but there's also a really great example. | ||
| But you look like you looked him. | ||
| I mean, if you were a black woman and you were at a far-right rally, I think that would be a completely different thing. | ||
| And that's one of the things that I've always found... Far-right people get along with me very, very well. | ||
| I like talking to them. | ||
| They're nice guys. | ||
| Honestly. | ||
| They're perfectly polite. | ||
| You want to know what I saw in Portland? | ||
| I saw the far-left screaming the N-word over and over again at right-wingers. | ||
| I saw the Proud Boys with a bunch of different people of different races, and there was a black Proud Boy who was walking down the street, and Antifa was screaming incessantly the N-word at him. | ||
| I've been on the ground on all these things. | ||
| Daryl Davis. | ||
| We have very different experiences with these things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| Are you familiar with Daryl Davis? | ||
| No, I don't know who that is. | ||
| He's the black jazz musician who, he decided, you know, he thought to himself one day, how could someone hate me if they don't know me? | ||
| So he started going to Klan meetings. | ||
| Oh yes, that guy. | ||
| Yeah, he's fantastic. | ||
| And we booked him to speak at an event called Ending, what was it called? | ||
| Ending Violence, Racism and Authoritarianism. | ||
| He was our keynote, our headline speaker to talk about de-radicalization. | ||
| Antifa threatened to burn the theater down, so they canceled on us. | ||
| The after-show venue refused to back down, so Antifa came and protested. | ||
| And he said, look guys, don't worry, I'm gonna go talk to him. | ||
| And when he went out there, they started screaming at him, chanting at him, and wouldn't let him speak. | ||
| He wrote a Facebook post, which went viral, where he said, I've never experienced anything like this. | ||
| That I was able to go and talk to Klan members as a black man, but he couldn't even talk to these leftist activists outside without them screaming at him. | ||
| Well, look, all I can tell you is the experts I talk to, the people that study this stuff, are much more afraid of the right than the left. | ||
| Could it be that they are on the left? | ||
| Well, they're from foreign countries. | ||
| So the answer is yes, they are on the left. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| If they're from Belgium, yes, they're on the left. | ||
| I'm going to go back to one thing you said. | ||
| I haven't been to a far-right rally. | ||
| I've been to Trump rallies. | ||
| My experience has been that if you are a black woman, people will go so much further out of their way to be accommodating because they want to demonstrate that much more that they are not racist because they have been pinned by | ||
| the left as you are a Trump person you must be a racist. And I think I find that amazing that that | ||
| that that's what has to be done but that is what happens. Don't you think the time has come to stop | ||
| asking yourselves who is more to blame and start figuring out either how do we reconcile this or | ||
| how do we come to some kind of conclusion that is not violent. | ||
| I mean, you're talking about all of this stuff. | ||
| You're getting yourselves really angry about this stuff. | ||
| Oh, but no! | ||
| Not in the slightest bit angry. | ||
| No, no, no, look. | ||
| No, no, no, that's not fair. | ||
| Just because it's a heated conversation, it's not angry. | ||
| Listen, I'm not blaming anyone. | ||
| I'm just saying the point of this book It's really that the moment has come where you have to ask yourself, how do we get ourselves out of this cycle of, of those people are awful. | ||
| Oh, we're all people. | ||
| Our people are awful, but that's in response. | ||
| Like that's the crisis that is facing you is no longer one of who is right. | ||
| But like, how do you, how do you work out these structures into a way that is civilized and that is civilized and is killing me. | ||
| I know the answer. | ||
| You've got to give them something to live for, and you've got to unify people with an idea. | ||
| Civil war is the worst thing that can happen. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Death is the worst. | ||
| Being conquered by a foreign country is nothing compared to civil war. | ||
| It's the worst thing that can happen to a country. | ||
| It's a disaster. | ||
| China will come in if this escalates. | ||
| In part of the book, I'm imagining what it would be like to have a negotiated settlement with the United States, which would have to be internationally monitored. | ||
| And we love that in this country. | ||
| We love foreigners. | ||
| What would America love more than Chinese peacekeepers on the ground? | ||
| Again, I have my bias, and I am very well aware that I have my bias. | ||
| So, no bones about it. So, go after me, but let me make my point. | ||
| So, you said when you look at political assassinations or political murders, | ||
| and you said those numbers were based on journalists who dig into and look at... | ||
| Well, assassination is a separate question. | ||
| Not assassination, murders. | ||
| Political violence. | ||
| Political violence, and they were done based on journalists who dug into the story and read it. | ||
| In five years from now, if a journalist reads an op-ed in the Las Vegas Post which talked about the Black Lives Matter attempted murder in Louisville, They called him a right-wing Trump supporter, basically. | ||
| They said that this is the cause of right-wing violence. | ||
| And they said, although he is not, and if you read the op-ed, and I sent it to Lydia, because I was so apoplectic, as of now, he has not been identified to any right-wing groups, but this is Trump violence, this is an editorial in the Las Vegas Sun, after it came out that he was a Black Lives Matter activist. | ||
| So you want to say to that editorial board, What are you doing? | ||
| Why are you writing a story saying this is a right-wing extremist who shot a Jewish, tried to kill a Jewish man running for mayor, when all of the evidence there says he is a left-wing radical? | ||
| But I'll answer that, and then I want to answer a point you made. | ||
| I don't want to hear your answer to my question, because I think you're a very interesting case of somebody who has lived through complementary radicalization. | ||
| And I would like to know how you see escaping from it. | ||
| There isn't an escape. | ||
| But to your point, it's a conflict. | ||
| They're going to say what they need to say to support their side by any means necessary. | ||
| And so you actually have groups called, like, by any means necessary. | ||
| The reason why there is no escape, so you asked me if I am, I forgot how to phrase it, but like if I am subject to complimentary Well, I'm curious. | ||
| Like, I don't know you, but you seem to me like you would fit into that category that I've seen sociologists describe. | ||
| I mean, maybe that's not fair. | ||
| And if it's not, please tell me. | ||
| No, no, it is without a doubt. | ||
| But I think the issue at hand is, What's the best example to give? | ||
| The truckers in Canada are a really great example. | ||
| I supported Occupy Wall Street, their right to protest. | ||
| I interviewed people on the ground. | ||
| I defended Extinction Rebellion when they blocked the streets in DC and put up a boat and said, we demand to be heard. | ||
| When Ron DeSantis was working in Florida on the anti-riot law, I said, it is wrong to make it a felony to block a road. | ||
| Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. | ||
| See, I'm the opposite. | ||
| I want them all banned. | ||
| But here's what happens. | ||
| The same people that I met 10 years ago who defended the right to occupy streets are now opposed to it in Ottawa. | ||
| Well, Ottawa's a very different situation because it's been going on for three weeks. | ||
| And Occupy Wall Street went on for two months. | ||
| Well, I was opposed to Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| And you also had the Chazz and the Chop. | ||
| You also had Minneapolis. | ||
| But it's not about your views. | ||
| It's about the fact that we have, in this country, Two parent factions within those parent factions. We | ||
| describe them as left and right. It's fairly nebulous You have several smaller groups. Many of them don't like | ||
| each other Antifa people don't like Democrats, but often they're hate | ||
| them, but their politics do align sometimes well barely but | ||
| But institutionally, right? | ||
| So the Democrats support Black Lives Matter to try and earn votes, which then gives funding to, say, the federal government gave funding for COVID relief that the Illinois government then gave directly to Black Lives Matter. | ||
| I believe it was $300,000. | ||
| That would never happen with the Oath Keepers. | ||
| That would never happen with the Proud Boys. | ||
| In fact, the Proud Boys get called terrorists and evil and demonized. | ||
| So here's my point. | ||
| When you look at civics data, civics, if you're not familiar, they're a polling organization that have a massive map, a time spread going back like five years of all these different issues. | ||
| You can see that independent voters, people who are unaffiliated, right now overwhelmingly agree with the right when it comes to issues of the economy, when it comes to issues of job, presidential performance, when it comes to black lives matter. | ||
| But you know why that is, right? | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because there are no independent voters in America anymore. | ||
| It's only about 7%. | ||
| I think the last one is a 4%. | ||
| Lots of people on the right call themselves independent, but if you talk about voting behavior, people who actually shift, vote Democrat sometimes and vote Republican sometimes, that percentage in America is negligible. | ||
| It's always been negligible. | ||
| Yes, that's true. | ||
| Independent voters have always somewhat leaned Democrat. | ||
| Republicans would win if they could convince just enough to move on the other side. | ||
| Republicans call themselves independent on a much higher level. | ||
| That's why that number is that way. | ||
| But what we're seeing now with Pew data is that there's a specific graph showing hyperpolarization, and you have a larger portion of Democrats becoming Republican, Independents becoming Republican, than the inverse. | ||
| So here's what I see. | ||
| I see my views mostly unchanged on principle, save the Second Amendment. | ||
| In the past several years, I went from moderate to, hey, we should respect people's rights, but maybe have some gun control. | ||
| Now I'm just outright, you got to change the Constitution before you can do any of this stuff. | ||
| Second Amendment is Second Amendment. | ||
| That's chapter five. | ||
| So, but, you know, to have in this country people who are uninformed on policy or a specific industry try to regulate it and then fail repeatedly, that's exactly why one of the reasons my position's on this changed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when I say something like... Yes, I see what you mean. | ||
| Let me explain the complementary radicalization. | ||
| It's not that my positions have become far-right. | ||
| It's not that my positions have become increasingly conservative. | ||
| Nope, I've always been pro-choice. | ||
| In fact, I used to be further left when I was 18. | ||
| Then I became fairly liberal and I've remained there save gun rights. | ||
| I became a little bit more libertarian. | ||
| The issue is that the other side is increasingly becoming authoritarian. | ||
| The left is increasingly embracing insane tactics that are destabilizing the system. | ||
| And then, of course, I do watch the right respond in turn. | ||
| Now, this is a storm. | ||
| There is no way out of it. | ||
| But I'll be damned if I'm going to give up my principles to try and negotiate with psychopaths. | ||
| So when I say something... But you just acknowledge. | ||
| Like, see, this to me seems to be a key point. | ||
| You're like, well, the right responds the same way. | ||
| So surely you've got to get to a point in your country, or just for your own soul, where you're like, the psychopaths are everywhere. | ||
| We need to find a way out from the psychopaths. | ||
| It's not just, the problem is not just the other side psychopaths. | ||
| It's all of the psychopaths. | ||
| Well, so let me put it this way. | ||
| If a guy comes into my- If I'm in the middle of a field, and I watch two guys, and one guy's, like, hanging out with his kid, and they're playing catch, and then some dude in a black mask walks up and punches him in the back of the head, he turns around and starts fighting, I'm not gonna be like, oh no, a fight! | ||
| Can we please compromise? | ||
| I'm gonna be like, that dude punched that guy! | ||
| Arrest him! | ||
| Arrest him! | ||
| That guy's defending himself! | ||
| But you know, somewhere there's some guy who's in a left-leaning podcast who thinks exactly the same thing, except from the other side. | ||
| And he's wrong. | ||
| He thinks, but he's not. | ||
| I mean, like, does it matter? | ||
| It does. | ||
| So I don't think it matters. | ||
| Well, listen, Joe Biden, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Joe Biden is not the source of this. | ||
| No, no, no, but I'll give you an example. | ||
| Joe Biden, based on all available journalism and research we've done, engaged in a very serious criminal act with Ukraine. | ||
| We have reporting from the New York Times. | ||
| We have his own statements. | ||
| We've got Matt Taibbi's reporting. | ||
| We have sworn affidavits out of Ukraine from Viktor Shokin. | ||
| As opposed to the fully legal activities of Donald Trump. | ||
| Well, give me a specific example. | ||
| Of Donald Trump's illegal... I mean, he's about to be charged. | ||
| Don't make the mistake of creating false binaries. | ||
| Biden and Trump have nothing to do with each other. | ||
| I'm specifically citing Joe Biden taking a very specific action with respect to Ukraine that any reasonable person can look at the journalism coming out of this and be like, wow, what he did there. | ||
| Now look, by all means, call out Donald Trump for any criminal activity he may have done, but everyone seems to do it. | ||
| He seems to be in the hot seat 24-7. | ||
| He was under investigation for a hoax. | ||
| The Russiagate hoax was just not true, but that doesn't happen to the establishment Democrat side or the leftists. | ||
| Black Lives Matter engages in wanton destruction in some of the smallest towns in this country, over $2 billion in damage, and your perspective is the right is more dangerous. | ||
| It's not really my perspective. | ||
| I would say that would be the general perspective of experts on civil war and the conditions of the United States. | ||
| I mean, those are the models that I'm working from, right? | ||
| But I would say, surely you can see that these sides, that each side has a case. | ||
| And that the problem here is not that, you know, what has happened, but the fact that there's no way for anyone... You know, democracies only work when, if you lose, the other side is still valid. | ||
| Those are the conditions of democracy. | ||
| And so what you're saying to me and what I hear is that that's no longer possible. | ||
| Didn't. And so that like what you're saying to me is what and what I hear is that that's no longer possible. | ||
| And that's that's really what the book is about. | ||
| And that is like I'm kind of like I'm imploring you as a neighbor. | ||
| This is a book written out of love. | ||
| This is not a book written out of contempt for the United States. | ||
| This is a book written out of profound love for the United States. | ||
| This is someone who is. | ||
| I've lived in the United States. | ||
| I've worked there. | ||
| I have a lot of American friends. | ||
| I have my Trump voting cousin in Seattle. | ||
| Like, you know, I've got like I've I feel akin. | ||
| You know, I think Canada has a kinship relationship with America. | ||
| Where we're, you know, Northrop Frye, the great Canadian literary critic, said that a Canadian is an American who rejects the revolution. | ||
| And I think that's largely true, right? | ||
| Quebec was asked. | ||
| They said no. | ||
| They said no very close, though. | ||
| I mean, you know, like, the other thing is, we almost took Montreal by 1812. | ||
| No, you had the worst general in the world. | ||
| You had the terrible, terrible general in 1812. | ||
| The real danger was 1860. | ||
| Where was I? | ||
| I now completely lost my train of thought. | ||
| My point, though, is that as someone who is concerned for your country and as someone who wants you to have a stable country, you are going to have to get to a point where you either come to some kind of divorce, which seems to me like when a marriage reaches the point that the United States is at, you'd sit the kids down and say, like, it's over. | ||
| But that will lead to violence. | ||
| Well, I don't think there's a way to avoid violence at this point. | ||
| The question is, how do we get out of it? | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| Stop focusing on the psychopaths and start focusing on what's causing psychopathy. | ||
| Because if you try and wipe out the psychopaths, they're just going to keep appearing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's like trying to drown a vampire in blood. | ||
| Let me ask you then. | ||
| You want to end the conflict. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What I want is for America to survive as a democracy. | ||
| That is what I want, very specifically. | ||
| How do you feel about your healthcare system in Canada? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Okay, get rid of that and go fully private. | ||
| We got a deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| You have to compromise with me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Will you give up your state fund? | ||
| You know, that's a fair point. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| I'm sitting here. | ||
| I see what you mean. | ||
| I'm sitting here with people telling me that. | ||
| So I'm going to go right into the stereotype for everybody who's listening. | ||
| I come from a second generation mixed race family. | ||
| They fought. | ||
| My grandparents were forced to flee numerous states because it was illegal to cohabitate and to have kids. | ||
| This is something my family experienced. | ||
| I grew up, once again, with my mom, who's mixed race, marrying a white guy and having a second generation mixed race family. | ||
| And I genuinely believed when I was a kid, growing up in Chicago, like we had come to this position where we recognized race was less important. | ||
| Martin Luther King Jr.' 's dream. | ||
| It didn't matter what I was, or my Latino friend, or my Asian friend. | ||
| We were all just friends in the neighborhood. | ||
| And then I got to experience critical race theory. | ||
| And these people looked me in the eyes and said, I don't know what you are, so you're not allowed to be in any of these groups. | ||
| But all the white people go there, the black people go there, the Asians go there, and the Mexicans go there. | ||
| That's what they did at Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| They were called spokes, the spokes council. | ||
| And they said there were working groups and there were caucuses. | ||
| And the caucuses were race-based and gender-based. | ||
| And so they quite literally said, if you want to vote on how we spend money, all the black people have to go in the group of black people and decide how black people want money spent. | ||
| And I said, that's insane. | ||
| And I will fight against that tooth and nail because my family experienced this. | ||
| In this past election in California, they tried to repeal their civil rights amendment from their constitution. | ||
| I ask you, you say that we've got to come to this position where we come together. | ||
| Would you be willing to allow a bunch of white people in a majority white state to discriminate against black people in the name of peace? | ||
| You know, I don't think I'm going to be faced with that question. | ||
| And certainly the world is perplexing to me enough without what ifs. | ||
| But I'd actually like to ask you a question, because I don't I don't know the answer to this, even after I spent five years writing this thing. | ||
| Like, how do you think this is going to end? | ||
| I mean, I've heard you say there's going to be a civil war. | ||
| I think we're in a civil war. | ||
| I mean, I think you're, well, you're literally in civil strife. | ||
| Civil strife. | ||
| In a technical sense, you are already technically in civil strife. | ||
| And that was 27 deaths per year or something? | ||
| No, it's 25, but America's a funny country. | ||
| America's so big and so diverse and so geographically huge that those numbers are probably not as meaningful as they are in the rest of the world. | ||
| But on the other hand, I think we're in agreement, right? | ||
| Is it an older metric? | ||
| No, it's the standard metric, but it's still not. | ||
| You know, America is different, right? | ||
| Like, America is a very different place. | ||
| Like, I don't think America is an exception. | ||
| I don't think the laws of political gravity don't apply to the United States. | ||
| But, like, when you're applying these standards, it's just a little more complicated than it would be for Canada, right? | ||
| But on the other hand, do you think political violence is going to become normalized? | ||
| That there's just going to be a lot more assassination? | ||
| Do you think there's going to be street fights? | ||
| All of those things are happening. | ||
| I can't foresee a scenario. | ||
| One of the problems here is that by 2040, 50% of the country will control 85% of the Senate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is like this becomes like this is classic anocracy. | ||
| So, you know, civil wars tend to happen in like civil wars don't happen in full democracies like Denmark and they don't happen in autocracies like Russia. | ||
| They happen when there's a in the gray area. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In this in this area where it's unclear whether it's democracy or autocracy. | ||
| So do you think like I can't foresee a scenario where there will be an uncontested election ever in the United States? | ||
| Oh, you're completely correct. | ||
| I mean, going back to Since Gore and Bush. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even then, you still had some degree of strife and insanity with previous elections, but it was really bad starting then. | ||
| There's a bunch of different ways I see this. | ||
| I don't think the right wants to control the left, but the left does want to control the right. | ||
| Well, the right wants to control the country. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| So you think the right would be happy with just the states controlling their own? | ||
| Because, I mean, one answer to this is radical defederalization. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, that's something that's been talked about on the left. | ||
| We are supposed to be radically defederalized. | ||
| We're not. | ||
| Well, you already are. | ||
| No, but we're not de facto. | ||
| We're supposed to be radically defederalized. | ||
| Compared to other countries, like compared to any country in Europe, compared to anywhere in Asia, you are radically defederalized. | ||
| As you were traveling the country writing this, geographically, did you find intensity in certain areas? | ||
| Well, um... I'm just curious, because it is a big country. | ||
| What do you mean by intensity? | ||
| As you were traveling the country writing this book, when you were in State X, where you were like, wow, I really feel a burgeoning civil war here. | ||
| New York City. | ||
| I'm from New York City. | ||
| No. | ||
| Texas, not to knock Texas. | ||
| Did you go to any region that you were like, these people are ready to be separated from their friends? | ||
| I found it everywhere. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it was extraordinary to me where I would find it. | ||
| Like my friends who are in media in the Hudson Valley, they feel very much under threat. | ||
| Like they feel, they feel like if you run for dog catcher as a Democrat in Hudson Valley, someone will send you a picture of a gun saying we're coming for you. | ||
| The thing about America right now is that everyone feels under siege. | ||
| Everyone feels under siege from one kind or another. | ||
| Whether it's cultural siege, whether it's political siege, whether it's siege from political machinery. | ||
| That's the extraordinary thing. | ||
| I'm going to talk to you guys. | ||
| You all feel under siege. | ||
| I'm going to go to varying degrees with the censorship algorithm on YouTube. | ||
| I mean, what you described, like they're trying to take, they're hitting me in the back of the head in an open field. | ||
| Well, no, no. | ||
| They're trying to tell me to live in a segregated world. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I will go and talk to Black Lives Matter organizers, which I have also done, and they will say exactly the same thing. | ||
| They will say literally exactly the same thing. | ||
| And they're lying to you. | ||
| And that's what they say about you. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And when Russiagate was a hoax, when the Covington Kids was a hoax, when Jussie Smollett was a hoax, at a certain point don't you say to yourself, maybe they're lying to me? | ||
| Well, then there's the, you know, then there's January 6th. | ||
| Then there's Trump calling up the tanks in Washington on the 4th of July. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Well, on the 4th of July, on Washington. | ||
| Doing a parade? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But hold on, hold on. | ||
| Oh, sorry, am I not close enough to the mic? | ||
| Yeah, just stick with it. | ||
| That's not a lie. | ||
| January 6th was... Listen, if you're gonna make... I don't do the rage. | ||
| So if you want to have someone on to explain to you the crimes of the right, you can definitely find a lot of people. | ||
| If I'm going to cite overt, widespread lies, and then you cite January 6th, which is unrelated to what I was talking about, I'm going to ask you... Oh, I think you're asking... Well, I mean, if I were to count Trump's lies... | ||
| I mean, how many hours do we have here? | ||
| If we're going to talk about the lies of the right, any Trump speech has 30 of them. | ||
| I don't like comparing Trump and Biden. | ||
| They're both authoritarian. | ||
| I'm not talking about one guy. | ||
| Trump is a symptom of this. | ||
| I actually say that in the book. | ||
| He's a symptom rather than a cause, for sure. | ||
| But if you're asking me, are there any right-wing people who lie? | ||
| That's not what I'm saying. | ||
| I'm saying you'd say that Black Lives Matter would accuse me of lying. | ||
| And my response is, Jussie Smollett, that thing was an obvious lie, but it was picked up by actors and celebrities and every mainstream news organization. | ||
| Russiagate was three, four years of outright lying. | ||
| Ukrainegate, all of it turned out to be lies. | ||
| Hands Up, Don't Shoot, another lie. | ||
| The Covington Kids, another lie. | ||
| Eleven Trump associates have been indicted. | ||
| But indictments don't mean anything other than people are at war with each other. | ||
| John Durham is investigating them the same as they're investigating him. | ||
| What I'm talking about is... Are you really going to argue with me? | ||
| Are you actually going to say that the Trump administration was an honest administration? | ||
| You don't believe that. | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
| Okay, so you would admit that they're lying. | ||
| Oh, absolutely! | ||
| Well, there we go. | ||
| But my point is, Trump is... How many viewers does the right command in terms of institutional media? | ||
| 10 million relative to... Well, Fox News is the biggest news organization in the country, by far. | ||
| Except they only get about, like, 3 million in total viewers. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, we're in media breakdown. | ||
| This is actually a large part of the structure, too, like the information breakdown. | ||
| That's also a big part of the book. | ||
| When I talked about a complex cascading system, that feeds into both sides in different ways, in asymmetrical ways. | ||
| But one way of thinking about this struggle is that it is a mimetic struggle, in the Jeff Jesea definition of it. | ||
| Here's the point I'm trying to get to. | ||
| If you look at the politically homeless faction, The intellectual dark web faction, the post-liberal faction, conservatives, and even hardcore MAGA Trump supporters. | ||
| They all agree, for the most part, on a typical worldview, except for certain, like, Q elements, which don't make up that many people. | ||
| I don't think I can really agree with that. | ||
| I mean, I really tried. | ||
| I mean, maybe it is my own failing, but, I mean, part of my job was trying to figure out, like, what are the intellectual coherences that you find in this? | ||
| And I found that, I mean, one of the things I find really interesting about the American right in general is their love of esoteric information, right? | ||
| Like an esoteric knowledge, where like something becomes more valuable because it's less believed. | ||
| What's an example of that, if you have one? | ||
| Well, QAnon would be like the ultimate example. | ||
| But it's not prominent. | ||
| I mean, you have... QAnon is pretty powerful. | ||
| I mean, there's two Congress, there's 50 people going to run in 2022 who are QAnon supporters. | ||
| But what does that mean? | ||
| Well, 50 members of the Republican Party support QAnon. | ||
| They're going to run in 2022. | ||
| Here's the issue I think you might have. | ||
| We've had Marjorie Taylor Greene on the show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she's rejected all of that stuff. | ||
| So when you don't actually... The space lasers and so on. | ||
| That's not true, actually. | ||
| That's a lie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you base your perception off a faction that is lying to you nonstop, of course you're going to believe, well, that both sides must be bad. | ||
| Do you not understand that I've had this exact conversation with people on the left? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't tell me. | |
| I've actually stated exactly this in a hundred plus shows of this | ||
| That that the reason Civil War in my opinion is inevitable is because you have two sides both saying I'm right | ||
| I'll give you I'll give you an example a riddle You may have heard this one. This will be fun for all the | ||
| kids at home. Don't tell me I want to guess You come across you're walking down a road and you come to | ||
| a fork in the road and you see there's there's two paths and | ||
| And and you know that once one road will lead you to a minute death and one road will lead you to safety | ||
| There are two men standing on each side. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| The old one. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| One always tells the truth. | ||
| One always tells a lie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I know this one. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| I heard it differently. | ||
| Which road is the right path? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I know it. | ||
| You ask... I've heard it as heaven and hell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where the angel always tells the truth and the devil always tells a lie. | ||
| And you ask the devil... No, no. | ||
| You ask the angel, is the other one a devil? | ||
| You don't know which one is which. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| You want me to give the answer? | ||
| Yeah, I can't remember it. | ||
| I've heard it before. | ||
| You ask either one of them what the other would say. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then take the opposite path. | ||
| And take the opposite path, yeah. | ||
| So the issue here is there is obviously a more complex system of variables here. | ||
| Well, that's my point. | ||
| But... That's actually a really good way of putting it. | ||
| So if that's the condition where one's the angel and one's the devil and you don't know which one is right, Like, surely we have to come up with something more clever than the other side's wrong. | ||
| I suppose the issue is, the reason I use the Biden example is because if you were to ask the average journalist in this country, did Joe Biden engage in a quid pro quo in Ukraine, they will tell you no. | ||
| But the actual answer is yes, he did. | ||
| I think journalists actually are pretty complicated. | ||
| I mean, I know a lot of them. | ||
| You know, as I said, I'm a freelance writer. | ||
| So one of the advantages I have is that I go into a lot of shops. | ||
| I'm like a stray cat. | ||
| Like I go into the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in New York or the Atlantic and so on. | ||
| And I would say that the general opinion that the American media are all the same. | ||
| That's not necessarily true. | ||
| What is true is that people who went to Ivy League schools tend to have a very similar outlook on life. | ||
| These organizations, most of them are in New York, or they tend to be in big cities where they're surrounded by like-minded people. | ||
| I will say, as far as I know, they're only in New York, Washington, and LA. | ||
| But let me ask you, because I think the best example is the Biden thing. | ||
| Were you aware that Joe Biden engaged in a criminal quid pro quo? | ||
| Well, I'm not sure I would define it that way, but also I'm not sure I have that whole story. | ||
| Why don't you? | ||
| Like, and you know, when I don't like, there's a lot of things. | ||
| Why don't you? | ||
| You know, I was with a president. | ||
| Well, there was a bunch of, I was at a, I was at a cottage with these friends I have | ||
| who are in their eighties. | ||
| And one guy told me in a really, they were all giving me life advice. | ||
| And this old dude said, you know, one of the most important things in life is to know you don't have to have an opinion on everything. | ||
| You don't have to think I know the answer to X when you don't. | ||
| And so I actually go through life not knowing the answer to almost everything. | ||
| And so when I write books, what I try and do is figure out exactly what I do know. | ||
| And also be clear about where I got my knowledge. | ||
| What happened with Biden in the Ukraine? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Shouldn't you, though? | ||
| I mean, if you're writing about a civil war and there have been accusations made against Donald Trump in terms of a quid pro quo... Donald Trump does not figure in this book. | ||
| Neither does Biden. | ||
| To me, honestly, horse race politics? | ||
| Irrelevant. | ||
| Like what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, what Ted Cruz said today, irrelevant. | ||
| The structural problems that the United States faces are so profound that all of the politics, to me, that consumes everything is all irrelevant. | ||
| It really, really does not matter. | ||
| The reason I bring it up is just to try and set a baseline. | ||
| I started covering Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| I had been an activist in my younger years. | ||
| I worked for non-profits. | ||
| I go to Occupy Wall Street, I start documenting things, and I say, I just want to show people what's happening. | ||
| I end up getting a job at VICE and being the founding member of VICE News. | ||
| We're doing on-the-ground reporting in Ukraine and Brazil and Venezuela. | ||
| And then from there I went and joined ABC Univision's joint venture, once again trying to do news. | ||
| That's where they got hyperpolarized. | ||
| Within six months of me being there, they said, we're far left. | ||
| That's our pitch. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We are targeting progressive young people. | ||
| Oh, as a freelancer, you think I don't see that? | ||
| Institutions all the time that I'm part of suddenly become hyperpolarized. | ||
| But it's always to the left. | ||
| What institutions? | ||
| No, you're fair. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| They almost always go hyper-polarized left. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And then they immediately die. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| Vice's evaluation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's one of my points about the left. | ||
| Once an institution becomes woke, it almost immediately starts dying. | ||
| That's my fear about the Federal Reserve, man, which is happening slow. | ||
| I want to make this point. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sorry. | ||
| I don't mean to interrupt. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| I'm talking a lot this one. | ||
| But I do want to make this point. | ||
| As a baseline, I've been reading the news and doing the research and the fact-checking on all of these stories, and it's come to a point where the right tends to be correct on these things, and the left goes off into Wally world every time. | ||
| Ukrainegate being a really great example of the corporate press, the establishment Democrats, and the left all lying about what Joe Biden did with respect to Ukraine, when more and more reporting keeps coming out proving he actually did this, even based on the mainstream media's own previous reporting, say from Politico. | ||
| Politico publishes a story, as does the New York Times, that Ukrainians meddled in the 2016 election in an effort to help Democrats. | ||
| Not that the Ukrainian government did, but that elements of higher-ranking officials in Ukraine did. | ||
| A court even ruled this in Ukraine. | ||
| Joe Biden engages in a quid pro quo where he brags about it on camera. | ||
| But if you come out and say that, you're called right-wing. | ||
| They say it's fake news, you're lying, and it's not true. | ||
| I live in a world based on, do you have sources for that? | ||
| Just the other night, we got reporting that the person who tried to assassinate the Democrat was a BLM activist, and I said, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We are not. | ||
| That is a rumor. | ||
| It is not confirmed until we can get official confirmation on this story. | ||
| Even though there had been, I just hadn't seen it. | ||
| Because if I don't have the official reporting from a trusted source, it didn't happen. | ||
| But every single time I go to the news, a good majority of what's considered mainstream corporate press is outright wrong and they defend it. | ||
| For example, the crack pipe story. | ||
| Jen Psaki goes on TV and says we were never going to give out crack pipes. | ||
| That's a lie easily proved by looking at the organizations they were contracting who give crack pipes. | ||
| I pulled up two different sources, international and national, that say safe smoking kits include meth and crack pipes. | ||
| Yet when the right comes out and says this, Snope says, false. | ||
| All of the corporate establishment press are saying it's not true, there were never any crack pipes. | ||
| Then Jen Psaki goes on TV and says, no crack pipes. | ||
| Why was there an objection to them giving out crack pipes? | ||
| The right felt it would exacerbate crack pipe smoking. | ||
| See, in Canada, I remember in the 90s, there was a... I remember going to parties and there was a government program to give out straws for snorting cocaine. | ||
| Because it was because it was being AIDS right being communicated nasally And so I remember and I was like, yeah, that's that's the government. | ||
| I like they give out This is what happens But listen, do you do you honest are you honestly telling me that you feel like when you see something on Fox News? | ||
| You feel like it's probably correct and that it's not and that it's and that it's and that you've never seen a story on Fox News That was not was a lie No, I call out Fox News, it's just I call them out less frequently. | ||
| And Fox News is one station compared to 70. | ||
| The problem here is the informational networks. | ||
| It's not the sides. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to tell you. | ||
| But what ends up happening is, after a decade of this... | ||
| It has become so divergent that you cannot convince an 18-year-old who's voting for these policies that the majority of their life was based on lies. | ||
| So I'll give you another example of what's caused all this, and I don't know if you looked into this, but have you looked at the LexisNexis data on critical race theory and woke terminology? | ||
| No, I have not checked that. | ||
| At the end of the 2000s, LexisNexis tracks massive spikes in the New York Times saying things like white privilege, racism, class privilege, et cetera. | ||
| You don't need LexisNexis to tell you that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, so several things happened. | ||
| One, millennials who were in colleges, who are learning these things, started to age into the workforce. | ||
| But the biggest thing that happened was Facebook created the algorithms that prop up content based on how many keywords are in them. | ||
| So someone who's eight years old, it goes on Facebook, and they start getting inundated with videos of police brutality for 10 years. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it clicks really well. | ||
| Anger and justice themes do really, really well on Facebook. | ||
| But so does the opposite, dude. | ||
| I mean, definitely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, like... Anger and justice can go either way. | ||
| Well, like the... I mean... | ||
| I feel like I'm repeating myself, but surely we can all see that I've definitely not been a friend to wokeness. | ||
| You can read my writing on it. | ||
| I've been punished enough for it. | ||
| But just to be clear, my point here is really this, that the crisis that your country is facing is so severe that these debates are increasingly meaningless because they take place in a context of Essentially, semantic collapse. | ||
| Dude, you could see people in the metaverse wearing with black avatars and with white avatars. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they're black or white in real life, but you'll see them segmented into their little avatars in the game, and they're going to act like real life, as if it's real. | ||
| People are wired to be like that. | ||
| I want to make this point real quick. | ||
| And we can change that. | ||
| But semantic collapse, I want to hear what you think about it. | ||
| I want your opinion on that. | ||
| I'm curious about that. | ||
| You already mentioned that these media organizations tend to drift left. | ||
| Well, there's both. | ||
| Fox definitely has gone way right, and keeps going way right. | ||
| Tucker Carlson has become increasingly more populist and supportive of previous left-wing positions. | ||
| Now, Hannity, I'm not a big fan of, but hold on. | ||
| Hold on there a minute. | ||
| Mike.com is a really great example, and I'll tell you why I think this is happening, and probably why it is happening. | ||
| Mike.com, when they first started, they were libertarian. | ||
| They were pro-Ron Paul. | ||
| But within a few years, they became completely woke. | ||
| Why? | ||
| At Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, what is deemed safe? | ||
| Wokeness. | ||
| So I had this conversation with Jack Dorsey, for instance. | ||
| There are certain things you can't say on social media. | ||
| It almost always favors the left. | ||
| But you're massively successful doing the opposite of that. | ||
| And I'm a centrist! | ||
| And I'm a centrist! | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Like, there are certainly right-wing people. | ||
| Like, Joe Rogan? | ||
| Joe Rogan's not right-wing. | ||
| Well, no, I wouldn't say he is either. | ||
| He's pro-UBI. | ||
| I wouldn't say he is either, but... Well, then maybe... The right has been decimated on social media. | ||
| And so these companies see the algorithms favoring... Certainly the left would say the other thing. | ||
| But it's when Mike.com starts off libertarian and then becomes woke. | ||
| When Vice.com starts off as an edgy, bro, frat boy kind of punk website and becomes feminist. | ||
| When ABC News funds hundreds of millions of dollars and then six months later says, we're going woke everybody. | ||
| It is not going the other direction. | ||
| It's flowing one way. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, it is just flowing always. | ||
| The process that's underway is complementary radicalization. | ||
| I mean, that is what it is. | ||
| It's like the right becomes more right because the left becomes more left. | ||
| Have you seen the Pew data on this? | ||
| Well, yeah, but the Pew data unequivocally supports radicalization online as being a right-wing phenomenon. | ||
| Stochastic terrorism would be that. | ||
| Except Pew shows that the Republican Party has moved on a scale of 0 through 10, with 0 being left and 10 being right. | ||
| They've moved 1.5 degrees to the right since 1994, and the left has jumped three points. | ||
| Yeah, but it depends also if you check the racial resentment numbers, which spike hugely for Republicans, right? | ||
| So like, there are a whole bunch of ways of reading those numbers. | ||
| What are those numbers? | ||
| The racial? | ||
| Racial resentment. | ||
| So racial resentment is like, well it's a pretty complicated sociological thing, it's a bunch of different factors, but it's like, it's not necessarily racism per se, it's whether you feel threatened. | ||
| And so that number, rather than being an ideology, as in, I am a racist, it is how you feel about certain aspects of life. | ||
| And those numbers were identical for Democrats and Republicans in, I think, 1990. | ||
| Again, don't quote me on that. | ||
| I want to address the semantic. | ||
| Yes, because I would really like, you know, we're here, we're doing this show, people are listening to it right now. | ||
| What are we doing to prevent semantic breakdown? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't know. | |
| I mean, having a conversation that clarifies definitions like Marxism, for instance, is probably helpful. | ||
| Racism has come to mean completely different things. | ||
| Well, that's essentially... I've been doing this for so long that I try to stay extremely precise in all the terms. | ||
| As you said, I don't like to use terrorism unless it is actually the technical definition of terrorism. | ||
| Part of the book, because this stuff is so fraught, I want to have the terminology exact. | ||
| Like, what is civil war? | ||
| What is civil strife? | ||
| What is so on. | ||
| Well, I think you can be, but it requires a certain amount of loss. | ||
| It requires a certain amount of loss of force in your argument. | ||
| For sure it does. | ||
| Humility, man. | ||
| The left and the right, the right has a traditional view of language, like we use words that mean things they meant 20 years ago, and the left has redefined things. | ||
| Well, the left is involved in a language etiquette that is totally destructive and just as self-consuming, as I said. | ||
| As Mark said in the German ideology, there was a man who thought, if I define river differently, no one will drown. | ||
| And that's what the left has become, where they think that definitions will change reality. | ||
| I have a good example of what I think is contributing to the breakdown and why I think there's no solution. | ||
| I feel like many on the right are looking for an anchor. | ||
| Like, just tell me where we stand and where we are, and I'll try and figure out what's going on. | ||
| Whereas the left just says, I will do as the tide flows. | ||
| So the example on this is... But the left eats itself. | ||
| Well, certainly they're a swarm. | ||
| But that doesn't mean they go away. | ||
| Let me finish this point. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Well, nobody goes away. | ||
| I mean, if people went away, it would be easier. | ||
| The point I was going to make is, I saw a meme recently where someone was talking about vaccines. | ||
| And then someone responded, they said, someone made the meme about seatbelts. | ||
| They were like, oh, we should ban seatbelt mandates. | ||
| And someone said, you know, hate to break it to you, but seatbelts aren't intended to prevent an accident. | ||
| They're meant to reduce your risk of injury in the event one happens. | ||
| And then all of the people on the left started laughing, saying, how stupid do you have to be? | ||
| That's literally what vaccines do. | ||
| The problem is for people on the right, Joe Biden came out publicly and addressed the nation saying vaccines prevent transmission. | ||
| And Dr. Fauci and they all said something very similar. | ||
| Now I understand science changes, but it's very difficult to latch onto something if it goes back and forth. | ||
| Well, I mean, we're dealing, like, the situation with, like, this is a chaotic moment of real chaos. | ||
| That has nothing to do with semantic chaos. | ||
| That has to do with the fact of trying to figure things out. | ||
| Also, suddenly there's Omicron. | ||
| I mean, people are doing this on the, well, that's just, you know, stuff happens. | ||
| Like, you're just trying to figure out what the hell happened. | ||
| I am not saying, you know, fault on either side of this, what I'm saying, one of the things that is causing a divide is people have different tolerances for a change in information, or they have expectations. | ||
| That's possible, although it seems to me like the radicalization is happening, you know, at the same level, and happening, and don't you feel everyone's out there looking for an anchor? | ||
| I mean, God knows the people I talk to on the left are desperate for some kind of stability. | ||
| I mean, that's the one hope I have is that, you know, the chaos has become so intolerable to people that they need some kind of, they really start to crave structure. | ||
| They're scared to step through the fire. | ||
| So again, to throw it back to Jussie Smollett, for instance, Covington kids, big cultural moments that were absolutely wrong. | ||
| For a lot of people that, you know, we've even had on the show, they've said, this was the moment I said, I just can't live this way anymore and I need something solid. | ||
| And so I said, I can't trust these people who keep lying to me. | ||
| And I look for something else. | ||
| I mean, those are very specific moments. | ||
| Like what's the, what's the technical term for the fallacy where you take one example and exclude it to everything else? | ||
| I mean, you know, everyone has their example. | ||
| God knows there's enough tolerance. | ||
| God, there's enough chaos out there. | ||
| There's enough nonsense. | ||
| Because they never apologized, they never admitted it. | ||
| See, I think, not to be too much of a salesman, you actually have a lot of information about this that I don't have, but I think what I try to do in my book is go 30,000 feet in the air. | ||
| I think your book buys a lot of information I don't have. | ||
| Yes, I think it does. | ||
| But I think we need some perspective on this stuff. | ||
| Like, Jesse Smollett is not a major incident in American history. | ||
| It's a grain of sand in a heap. | ||
| That's a really good way of putting it. | ||
| But it was a joke! | ||
| But it wasn't a joke in the sense of the way institutions latched onto it, the way elected officials latched onto it. | ||
| The media latched onto it, and I think one of the ways where, I don't want to say I disagree with you, but where we see the world differently, I do not see the right trying to cancel the left the way the left tries to cancel the right. | ||
| Small example of that, you have this lovely singer, British chick Adele, who won an award and because of the current time period, A week ago, it was a gender-neutral Artist of the Year, and in her acceptance speech, she said, I wish it weren't, I won't fake a British accent, I wish it weren't, although she's Cockney, I wish it weren't Artist of the Year, I wish it were Woman of the Year, because I love being a woman. | ||
| That turned into Adele's trying to cancel the trans movement, Adele should be banned on Spotify, stop buying Adele. | ||
| I don't ever see that on the right, and proof of that is, two years ago, The NFL, they kneel at the anthem. | ||
| Stop watching the NFL. | ||
| No one stopped watching the NFL. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at the Super Bowl numbers. | |
| Look at the playoff numbers. | ||
| The right can't go to a cancel culture the way the left can. | ||
| What would have to happen for people to stop watching the NFL? | ||
| It's unimaginable. | ||
| I don't know exactly like the Civil War could happen, but look at the movement to get Taylor Swift to pull her record off of Spotify because of Joe Rogan. | ||
| I don't think you see that on the right. | ||
| There are calls for it. | ||
| Certainly there are calls for it. | ||
| We should stop the NFL being the best example. | ||
| We should stop watching the NFL, but they don't. | ||
| Yeah, the right couldn't boycott Netflix after Cuties came out. | ||
| You guys are worried about Jussie Smollett and you're worried about the NFL and you're worried about the Halftime Show. | ||
| No, no, no, hold on. | ||
| Those are grains of sand in the heat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| I'm worried about commentary. | ||
| What the left's worried about is that by 2040, 50% of the Senate is going to be controlled by 50% of the country. | ||
| 40 40 50 percent of the country is going to be in 50 percent of the Senate is going to | ||
| sorry 85 percent of the Senate is going to be controlled by 50 percent of the country. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| But that's well I mean that really to me devolves into like pseudo democracy. | ||
| We're a constitutional republic, not a democracy. | ||
| Ah, well, see, this is where we get into, it's time to separate. | ||
| Because, like, I think there are two visions of America. | ||
| One is a constitutional republic, a settler republic, and the other is a multicultural democracy. | ||
| And I think they are fundamentally irreconcilable. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And they're actually, you need two countries. | ||
| Because, like, the time has come for, like, these are both visions that have their merits and they have their demerits, right? | ||
| But, you know, certainly I am on the side of multicultural democracy all day, forever. | ||
| That's where I come from. | ||
| You mean like 51% decides the law? | ||
| Yeah, with minority protections. | ||
| What's a minority protection? | ||
| Well, those are by law. | ||
| If you actually want to know what I believe, it's the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of the Canadian Constitution, which is incredibly specific. | ||
| It was written in 1982 and contains all of this beautifully articulated in a simple way. | ||
| But my point really here is, Like, whichever side you're on of this, these two countries can't coexist. | ||
| Like, it has to be one or the other. | ||
| And it really can't be both. | ||
| I'd like to see people democratically choosing where their tax dollars go, but also having some sort of republicanism. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| That would be an idea of an amalgam. | ||
| Well, America has been an amalgam. | ||
| America is a massive contradiction. | ||
| And, you know, the beauty of America, its great gift, has been its capacity to hold contradictory ideas at the same time. | ||
| Um, like that is, that is the glory of America. | ||
| And because it's a constitutional republic, it's able to. | ||
| Well, I think actually it's, when you go back to the original constitution, it contains a whole coast of political ideas that are in conflict. | ||
| And also, you know, it, it believes in, it believes in, in struggle as it believes in disagreement. | ||
| I mean, that's the, that's the amazing gift of the American constitution is that it believes that You don't need unity. | ||
| You need disagreement to get to the best answer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that that only works if you have a concept of yourself as a unified whole. | ||
| And when that evaporates, when that dissolves, you're left with, you know, irreconcilability. | ||
| And that like I think, you know, have you read Washington's Farewell Address recently? | ||
| I mean, it's really worth reading because it's a great work of genius. | ||
| Like it is. | ||
| It's a really fascinating Book because he worked because he predicts exactly where you are right now, like exactly where you are right now. | ||
| And he did it, you know, on his retirement. | ||
| I imagine you did a lot of research on the first American civil war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's so much work on it. | ||
| Like I would never call myself an expert on that. | ||
| Like I definitely read a lot of books about it, but just, you know, I'm not, I would never, there's some things in here that I do consider myself an expert on, but that there are so many civil war experts. | ||
| Just because you asked me earlier what I thought was going to happen. | ||
| We didn't quite get into it. | ||
| I will say we spent a lot of time, you know, you from 30,000 feet, me from someone on the ground trying to explain my positions. | ||
| I don't think I need to explain them to you for the most part. | ||
| I think, you know, you wrote a book. | ||
| I obviously want to explain it to the audience. | ||
| But as for what I think is going to happen, we hear a lot of peaceful divorce. | ||
| You mentioned these two countries can't exist. | ||
| But there is, in my opinion, no scenario in which there is a peaceful divorce. | ||
| It's almost impossible. | ||
| And the reason for it is, it was actually someone on the show brought this up, I can't remember who, but they made a great point. | ||
| There's two countries, you can say multicultural democracy and constitutional republic, both have their merits. | ||
| The first civil war, what happened? | ||
| It was like, I think four states legally seceded. | ||
| Everybody was like, all right. | ||
| Then I think seven more states joined in and they all went, well, okay then. | ||
| And then the North said, but these military bases are ours, and we're going to remain in them. | ||
| And that's when Fort Sumter, South Carolina, they said, no, no, no, no, no, hold on. | ||
| You gotta leave. | ||
| Nobody believed the muskets were loaded. | ||
| Nobody believed the cannons were armed. | ||
| They all thought that it was just bluster, and there would be no fighting, because it could never happen here. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And then the bombardment started. | ||
| No one foresaw the first civil war. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, even though in hindsight, it all seems perfectly clear, and the structures are all there, and it's like, there's no way that it couldn't be a civil war after the... | ||
| Nullification crisis and the bloody Kansas. | ||
| After whatever happened here. | ||
| Harper's Ferry. | ||
| Harper's Ferry. | ||
| We're like 15 kilometers away from where this happened. | ||
| But even Fort Sumter, Jefferson Davis said, it's probably nothing. | ||
| I bet the leaders of the North knew there was something coming. | ||
| As soon as they left, they're like, yo, we're getting that back. | ||
| They had to go to Europe to buy guns, the North. | ||
| The industrial superpower of the world in 1850 had to go to Europe. | ||
| I wonder how much of our treasury they sold out for those weapons. | ||
| They bought a lot of guns. | ||
| And so here's what happens now. | ||
| There was a great statement, I think Texas had written this, that they had joined the South simply by nature of geography, not ideology. | ||
| Same thing would happen today because Well, Texas was a slave state. | ||
| California was a free state. | ||
| And that's where they lined up. | ||
| But they were so nascent. | ||
| I mean, you're not talking about large groups of people in the first Civil War. | ||
| And then you also had slave states who joined the North by nature, by geography. | ||
| Yeah, because of geography, yeah. | ||
| So what I think would happen... But there was only one, right? | ||
| Maryland, I think? | ||
| I think West Virginia, too. | ||
| West Virginia was not a slave state. | ||
| West Virginia seceded from Virginia. | ||
| So what would happen today is you would likely have New York, Illinois, California, maybe Washington, maybe Oregon. | ||
| You write all that stuff, I imagine. | ||
| I'm going to show you the map that I got. | ||
| I want to know whether you think it's reasonable. | ||
| But go on, please. | ||
| So I think it could start with rapid defederalization. | ||
| But then ultimately what will end up happening is one side's gonna say, yeah, slide that over. | ||
| 218. | ||
| One side's, what's the page number? | ||
| 218. | ||
| 218. | ||
| One side's gonna say, let me grab this book. | ||
| Hey, those nukes, those weapons, those resources are ours and we want them. | ||
| The other side's gonna say, sorry, no dice. | ||
| Fighting starts. | ||
| Well, the problem is, like, to negotiate a settlement, you need goodwill. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| There are countries that negotiate separation, like Czechoslovakia, where they do negotiate in goodwill, and that's what happened with Norway and Sweden. | ||
| Yeah, tell me what you think of that. | ||
| I mean, that is not a... I wonder what the best way to show this is actually, because I don't... I wonder if I... So... | ||
| I can't admit it. | ||
| Well, it's basically the North, Northeast and then the South and Midwest and then California to Oregon and Texas. | ||
| Have you seen the poll? | ||
| I think it was YouGov data showing the different five different regions of the U.S. | ||
| You've got the Midwest, the South, and they were all basically saying, yeah, let's break off. | ||
| You know what you will really like in that book is the psychometric data, which is like different personality types by region, which is actually fascinating and like goes to really deep seated structural differences between these groups. | ||
| But the one that I had only had three. | ||
| I like how Texas just goes back to Texas. | ||
| Well, Texas, they have a very active nationalist movement that's quite together. | ||
| And also, Texas would 100% work as a country. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Do you think it's close? | ||
| I think you're close. | ||
| The only issue is I think it ends up with a bunch of war. | ||
| Well, the problem is, first of all, to negotiate a settlement, you need goodwill. | ||
| And then the U.N., to negotiate with the U.N., which I know sounds ridiculous, but, you know, you can't, no one will land in an airport until you have a U.N. | ||
| agreement that you're a separate country, is really, really hard, especially with a country that has security, general, what's it called, security council placement. | ||
| So, like, it would be incredibly difficult. | ||
| Let me, let me ask you a question. | ||
| To negotiate a secession. | ||
| Have you researched abortion? | ||
| Well, no, that's, that's, that's polarization. | ||
| That's part of polarization. | ||
| Of course, I did just write about it, something about it in Lit Hub, about, about the politics of abortion as a factor in, in polarization. | ||
| I mean, you know, the most bizarre thing about it is that, you know, the, when, this is again looking at it from a foreign country, is like, Abortion in the United States should be one of the policies that everyone agrees on. | ||
| It is a success story. | ||
| Women get more control over their reproductive health every year. | ||
| Abortion rates have declined 19% between 2011 and 2017. | ||
| If you want to end abortion in America, keep doing exactly what you're doing. | ||
| It's a policy success. | ||
| No one can see it. | ||
| Everyone is screaming at each other. | ||
| No, like someone said is screaming life. | ||
| The other one is screaming choice. | ||
| If you were to ask yourself what the correct policy is, you would see that the policy is both like women get control over their reproductive health. | ||
| That's what leads to declines in abortion rates. | ||
| And so it's a win-win for everyone. | ||
| But because it's so divided, they can't see those basic facts. | ||
| But that's not really a contributing factor to what I'm talking about in the book. | ||
| The reason I bring it up is I think it could be a strong moral issue in this civil war. | ||
| Oh, it's huge. | ||
| It's a huge thing. | ||
| But there are a whole bunch of them. | ||
| Church attendance, corporal punishment in schools. | ||
| The sociological factors that go into it are actually really significant. | ||
| So are you familiar that the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Roe v. Wade? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, not on Roe v. Wade, on Mississippi. | ||
| On Mississippi, yeah. | ||
| Florida just, they just passed a ban after 15 weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And so, man, we've had a bunch of people in here, we've had legal experts, and everyone seems to agree that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. | ||
| It's going to cause so much anger. | ||
| There's already 12 states that have trigger laws. | ||
| As soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned, instantly banned. | ||
| So my question is, you mentioned the far right, is what I've said. | ||
| Do you think that when that happens, do you think Republicans will try to ban abortion nationally? | ||
| Oh, I have no idea. | ||
| Like, that's not... I don't have expertise in that. | ||
| Like, I'm sorry, but like, I just can't really give an honest or accurate answer to that question. | ||
| I mean, I would say that once that happens, that... Like, one thing that I notice in this book is, like, the right has had concept of civil war for a long time, right? | ||
| Like, for at least since the 90s. | ||
| And it was a fringe position, but it sort of became more mainstream in 2008. | ||
| But I think the left is actually starting to catch up. | ||
| The left is actually starting to catch up to the idea that, like, this country isn't working, its institutions are failing, there's gonna have to be a response to this, and I think abortion could be a major trigger of it. | ||
| Like, I think there are a lot of people who don't... You know, you asked me that question, like, what if healthcare was taken away from me? | ||
| Like, it will be like that for them. | ||
| So there's a lot to this. | ||
| For one, many conservatives have told me, no, Republicans will never try to ban it federally. | ||
| Not only that, they can't. | ||
| It can't be federally legislated. | ||
| It has to be at the state level. | ||
| But my question is, do you think there's any number of right-wing people, any small number, who would be willing to go to an abortion clinic the moment Roe v. Wade is overturned and say, with force, end what you're doing right now? | ||
| Well, you know, the criminalization of abortion is one of the worst policy ideas it's possible to have because you have to ask yourself all kinds of questions. | ||
| Like, are you going to start a DEA for abortion? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| That's not an argument. | ||
| But my point is, like, they're not really thinking about policy. | ||
| No, no, for sure. | ||
| But do you think people would be like, do you think there would be a John Brown of abortion who's going to walk up to an abortion doctor and just blow his brains out? | ||
| But it's already happened. | ||
| It's happened many, many times. | ||
| There's been a huge amount of violence around that. | ||
| It's kind of the question I'm getting to. | ||
| When we're talking about the numbers of what constitutes political violence, that doesn't qualify as political violence in the stats that we looked at. | ||
| Going up and killing an abortion doctor. | ||
| But I, of course, would qualify it as that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So like, yeah, like, absolutely. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| So the point is not really the violent extremists. | ||
| The point is, do they start a police force? | ||
| Like, how are they going to actually manage? | ||
| Like, you know, the Texas law was not policy. | ||
| It was just like, we're going to start this crazy bounty system that I mean, no one knows what the hell that would look like. | ||
| They don't want to actually answer the question of what Yeah, and they've gone a long way already. | ||
| regulation of this would look like, especially given the fact that, you know, America can't | ||
| even control the flow of heroin out to the streets. | ||
| I think it's simple. | ||
| I think these red states are going to, they're going to shut down all of their Planned Parenthoods | ||
| and providers. | ||
| Yeah, and they've gone a long way already. | ||
| I mean, when you look at proximity to abortion access in America, like red and blue states, | ||
| I mean, just the world of difference. | ||
| So you either get to a point where, you know, California, immigrant sanctuary state, they're | ||
| already defying federal law. | ||
| Then you've got... Yes, they certainly did in 2016. | ||
| I mean, Jeff Sessions, that's a big chapter in the book. | ||
| But I'll tell you what else. | ||
| I mean, New York voting for non-citizens to have the right to vote. | ||
| Massachusetts voting for non-citizens to get driver's licenses. | ||
| This is my point. | ||
| Like, I think the left is starting to figure out, like, that would have been, those kind of defiant actions would have been typical of Red states for its whole history. | ||
| But I think now. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| I've got it mixed up. | ||
| You know, everywhere else in the world, red means left and blue means conservative. | ||
| You know why that changed, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was 2000 election, right? | ||
| Someone explained it to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it used to be the other way around. | ||
| It used to be the other way around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But so now people on the left are figuring out we're going to be in defiance of federal authority. | ||
| So, well, so we've had sanctuary cities on the left for a long time. | ||
| We've had now California sanctuary state. | ||
| Do you know how our elections work in this country? | ||
| The Electoral College? | ||
| I've tried, well, yeah, I mean, I tried, like, as I almost put a chapter in the book about it, but I could not find unbiased opinion. | ||
| Like, that was the thing that was so amazing. | ||
| It's like, I can't find anyone who could explain it to me in a coherent way. | ||
| The Electoral College. | ||
| Well, the Electoral College, yeah, I understand that. | ||
| In the United States, non-citizens do have voting power in every single election. | ||
| So when California says, we are going to allow non-citizens into this country and provide them benefits, they are seizing federal authority. | ||
| The way it works is... I'm sorry, seizing? | ||
| Oh, okay, I see what you mean. | ||
| Seizing federal power. | ||
| Yeah, okay, gotcha. | ||
| They're stealing disproportionate amounts of power within our federal... Well, I would say they're in defiance of No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| They're actually stealing. | ||
| Okay, all right. | ||
| So here's how it works. | ||
| The Electoral College is based on congressional seats. | ||
| You get an electoral, uh, elector vote, and your seats in Congress are based upon your population size, not citizen size. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when California allows in non-citizens, the census is done, non-citizens are counted, and they get extra congressional representation, which then results in, it results in disproportionate voting power, and it results in disproportionate power to elect the president. | ||
| I think, according to the Heritage Foundation, California in the last election only got one additional electoral vote. | ||
| But when we're talking about, you know, what is it, 538? | ||
| I mean, that's substantive. | ||
| That's a decent amount of gained power. | ||
| And it's not just California, it's other sanctuary cities and states. | ||
| So the left likes to come out and say it's unfair that the Senate is comprised of, you know, X amount of senators who come from only a certain amount of states when they're engaging in defiance of federal authority to give themselves disproportionate votes in Congress and the Electoral College. | ||
| But I mean, it's really kind of much of a muchness because the problem here is like, I think you're going to have an election relatively soon, like not, I don't know if it's 2024, I don't think, I don't know if it's 2028, might even be 2032 if you're lucky, where you're going to have a president lose the popular mandate by 10 million votes and still win the election. | ||
| And that's the way it's supposed to be. | ||
| Well, I mean, whether that's the way it's supposed to be or not, you're going to have a huge number of people in your country who don't regard themselves as living in a legitimate democracy. | ||
| But we're not a democracy! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Never have been. | ||
| OK. | ||
| Well, I mean, you did call yourself the world's greatest democracy for a long time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in 2000, you said we're going to export democracy to the world. | ||
| But this is our media establishment and politicians who have no idea what they're talking about. | ||
| Well, you know, you did call yourself a democracy for 240 years. | ||
| I mean, like... Who did? | ||
| Well, like, Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Like, I mean, like, every American president I ever heard called you a democracy. | ||
| So if you're saying you're not a democracy... And this is part of the problem. | ||
| So there's a reason we have an electoral college. | ||
| There's a famous quote from Benjamin Franklin. | ||
| Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for lunch. | ||
| A republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote. | ||
| I'll give you a- That's not- that's- that's minoritarian, but that's not the same thing as- that's minority protection. | ||
| That's not the same thing as minoritarian rule. | ||
| I mean, that is- that is very big distinction. | ||
| I mean, in Canada, we understand this really implicitly. | ||
| Right. Like we have a minority population, French Canadians who are, you know, who have to be protected from the | ||
| majority rule by like just to keep the country together. | ||
| Good call. And we also. | ||
| Right. So that's like a very distinct. | ||
| That's a distinct thing. | ||
| And we also have the system because there was a period where California was much like Wyoming with no electoral | ||
| power. | ||
| The fact that people choose to live in populous states, you actually need a functional control for that. | ||
| So people don't all just crowd into one tight space and they actually spread out. | ||
| And that is the system. | ||
| But that's the opposite of where we're going in this world. | ||
| I mean, other than you, who moved from... No, no, no. | ||
| We're actually seeing people leave cities because of the problems. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's probably also because of COVID. | ||
| From Wikipedia, it looks like we are officially a federal presidential constitutional republic. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So let me give an example of... So you mentioned minority protections is a good thing. | ||
| The example that I experienced... But minority protection is different from minoritarian rule. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| So in California, when I was covering the drought, we went to East Porterville, a small, mostly migrant city with no water. | ||
| Why? | ||
| The farmers were not allowed access to surface water because of the drought. | ||
| The surface water had to be rerouted to cities. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the cities had voting power and voted away the water from the people who actually had it. | ||
| So what happens is the farmers, being a large portion of the United States' economy, said, we're gonna have to drill deeper and deeper into groundwater. | ||
| And they went down thousands, even tens of thousands of feet. | ||
| The small family migrant workers could only drill about 30 feet and their water went dry. | ||
| That's chapter three. | ||
| Big cities, inequality, etc. | ||
| Well, it's not that so much as the water problem that the United States faces. | ||
| I mean, actually, that was the that was the chapter that kept me up at night. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Not any of the none of the politics stuff. | ||
| Like, it's funny. | ||
| The one that kept me up was talking to, like, an expert at the USDA on corn. | ||
| Did you did you look into the lawsuit attempts to seize Great Lakes water? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, well, of course, in Canada, we're really obsessed with this because like we have all the water, right? | ||
| Like we have one fifth of the world's natural water supply. | ||
| And so what happens when you guys run out of your water is of great concern to us. | ||
| So there was, there was an attempt by, I could be getting this wrong, it's been a while, Arizona I think was filing a federal suit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Claiming they had access to the Great Lakes, but the problem for them was the Great Lakes Coalition includes Canada. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I think specifically Ontario. | ||
| And yeah, well, and Manitoba as well. | ||
| And Manitoba. | ||
| And so basically they were like, we have an international treaty on this water, you can't That's right. | ||
| And that's really important to us. | ||
| Important to you? | ||
| I'm from Chicago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| The thing about Lake Michigan, for instance, is that we were depleting it because so much water was being consumed. | ||
| We had to put in environmental protections to make sure the water replenished before. | ||
| So we could only take so much from it. | ||
| Well, I mean, the worst thing to me is the Ogallala Aquifer. | ||
| Which they're accessing to grow. | ||
| Like we live in an era of completely cheap food, like artificially cheap food, largely driven by Midwest, the genius of Midwestern farmers who have innovated corn to a point of, you know, extreme productivity. | ||
| And that's driven by this aquifer that is not renewable. | ||
| That's just water they're taking out of the ground that when it's gone, it's gone. | ||
| And where they go from there, they don't really know. | ||
| I want you to imagine a world where we don't have cheap food anymore. | ||
| That's added to all this stuff we're talking about. | ||
| Added to all this conflict. | ||
| That's when things start to get real in a hurry. | ||
| I tweeted this a while ago. | ||
| In 50 years, we are going to look back and laugh about literally flushing fresh water down the toilet. | ||
| Well, I mean, you already have it in certain places. | ||
| Like, you know, when California goes through its droughts, right? | ||
| Like, you know, people brush their teeth very carefully, right? | ||
| Like they, you know, like it's not like, you know, you know, some people do. | ||
| Some people do. | ||
| Some people don't. | ||
| I think most people don't. | ||
| I was encouraging people to pee in the sink for a while. | ||
| Do it, don't waste that water for it. | ||
| Ian, you pee in the top of the toilet. | ||
| I rolled a 20, roll initiative. | ||
| No, you pee in the top of the toilet so you can flush with urine. | ||
| Oh, that's the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
News you can use, that's useful stuff. | |
| Did you ever like, in any of these like, when you were like stinging of all the potential possibilities, did you ever find out like, No, I mean, that was not something I looked at. | ||
| hey, we're going to supply your weapons and help you win. | ||
| When you give us states when you win, we'll take Florida on. | ||
| No, I mean, that was not something I looked at. | ||
| I mean, what I looked at was inequality levels, which are, of course, like | ||
| catastrophically high. | ||
| And, you know, they there are no examples of history of countries with inequality rates like the United States | ||
| that don't end in war, revolution or mass death. | ||
| Like it's like it's a like it's a like you go like you're like | ||
| I have a lot of like, on the one hand this, on the one hand this in the book, right? | ||
| Some examples go this way, some examples go the other way. | ||
| But when you look at inequality levels like the ones you have in the United States, they only go one way. | ||
| This is financial inequality. | ||
| Well, it's income inequality is the main one, but the one is also the wealth inequality, the wealth gap, which is catastrophic. | ||
| And this past couple of years, it's just exploded. | ||
| Well, it builds on itself, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the thing about capital. | ||
| It builds on itself. | ||
| It might be a problem is that you give money to your kids. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I mean, it's always been normal, but, like, it's making stupid rich people. | ||
| Like, kids that aren't qualified for the money are growing up with it, and hell is power. | ||
| Well, as I say, like, I try not to judge anyone. | ||
| Like, I'm not... Yeah, it's not every time. | ||
| I'm looking at structures here, but what I do know is that when you get to inequality levels with this kind of structural problem, it just creates huge amounts of turbulence. | ||
| Obviously, you've pointed out problems. | ||
| Have you thought of any solutions? | ||
| Well, I mean, like Tim here, like, I'm not sure I see, uh, I mean, so don't judge me. | ||
| Well, I'm not, I think what I think, I think my strength in this book is that I'm not on either side of this. | ||
| So I don't really, I disagree. | ||
| Well, I want stability. | ||
| I think, I think you are on the left side. | ||
| Well, I guess maybe. | ||
| But, you know, I would say that I kind of tried to consciously work against that. | ||
| Like, obviously, I'm a Canadian. | ||
| I believe in socialized medicine and gun control. | ||
| But the Conservative Party believes in that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, so it's I definitely don't feel affiliated with the Democratic tribe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, and I don't and I don't feel like like when you mentioned Biden, like, you know, he means nothing to me. | ||
| But the truckers. | ||
| Oh, you want to do the truckers now? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| You finally got your first A in. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's been all evening. | ||
| Did I say A? | ||
| Yes, you did. | ||
| Finally. | ||
| I was waiting for it. | ||
| Well, I actually say it a lot. | ||
| So, just to start this off, the same people who supported occupational protests with Occupy Wall Street and the Chazz and the George Floyd... See, I would never support any of those, and Canada wouldn't support any of those. | ||
| But, um, in America, these same people are now at odds and defiance with these people. | ||
| Well, if I can be honest with you, like, when I hear the debate here about the Trucker Convoy, it is, it's like, have you ever seen, like, a movie where you know what really happened? | ||
| And like you see the movie and you're like, it has nothing to do with, like it's just so distorted that it has nothing to do with reality. | ||
| Like that, when I, the largest support for the Trucker Convoy I've seen in my life was driving here in Maryland and someone had a big sign up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you have to remember, like here, it's become like all this stuff about Trudeau and, you know, all this like the person who did the the original Emergencies Act was Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, who's a populist conservative. | ||
| And I personally have called him a tinpot Northern Trump in the pages of The New York Times. | ||
| He would like this is this is a very the political context of this. | ||
| in Canada is just completely separate from the political context here. | ||
| It's just a completely different framework of interpretation of events. | ||
| We get our news about it from Canadians. | ||
| Well, they're coming to talk to you, right? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We watch people on the ground who are reporting. | ||
| They're on the ground talking and interviewing people. | ||
| Well, yes, but they're sending their sites to American news sources. | ||
| If you look at the Globe and Mail... Viva Frye is a Canadian lawyer who's live-streaming it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I just turn on his stream and we just watch what he's talking about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's not the only source we use. | ||
| So for the most part, I would just say the reporting that I've seen in American sources from both sides, like it has really like I was trying to I was trying to think like, how could I explain this? | ||
| And I was like, well, you know, the Quebec premier, who is a conservative, like he's he's he's definitely the right. | ||
| A month ago proposed a tax on the unvaccinated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like just a straight tax. | ||
| This is a different world than the world you guys are in. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because of universal health care... But we have that too, though. | ||
| Like, DC had a vax mandate. | ||
| You couldn't go inside buildings. | ||
| A tax? | ||
| Did any American politician suggest, you know what, if you don't get a vaccine, you're going to have to pay a levy? | ||
| No, they gave people free money. | ||
| They gave people free money to get it. | ||
| Not even to get it, just to sit at home. | ||
| I want you to imagine an American conservative politician saying, we're going to tax people for not getting vaccinated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What we saw was... I've got to put this back up here. | |
| Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| Because this will be the part that everyone's actually going to listen to. | ||
| Big, big organizations, hospitals and corporations saying, if you don't get vaccinated, we're deducting, we're slashing your pay. | ||
| Or firing you. | ||
| Yeah, or firing you. | ||
| Universal health care just completely changes the dynamic of all of these questions, right? | ||
| And that's why, like, Canadian anger at the truckers is so profound and so wide. | ||
| Like, you know why 70% of Canadians want to call in the military, right? | ||
| And like 70%, 70% like, these are people with kids, right? | ||
| Like, and you know, like 90% of Canadians want them gone, right? | ||
| Like the reason for that is like when you're in a universal health | ||
| care system there when they get sick | ||
| it costs me money. | ||
| It's a burden on the taxpayer. | ||
| Right. And like when they get sick it takes a space like my cousin Cam | ||
| who's got problems with his heart and needs surgery. | ||
| Like when they're sick they when they're filling up the | ||
| hospitals he can't get the treatment that he needs. | ||
| I have a question. | ||
| Did they distribute vaccines on the basis of race in Canada? | ||
| Yeah, well, they went to indigenous populations first because they were more vulnerable to the disease. | ||
| So they did go, but those are, you know, very, those are remote communities. | ||
| I had a friend... Like that's an affront to... No, I don't think so. | ||
| No, for our values? | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, but they're more, they're more vulnerable. | ||
| Like those are, those, they, it went to vulnerable communities first. | ||
| That's very right. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Quite literally, in the United States, to claim that a certain person of a certain race has different susceptibilities or different traits based on race is overtly racist. | ||
| I think sickle cell anemia was endemic to the African American population. | ||
| That's racist. | ||
| In America, it's smaller, I guess. | ||
| So it's contradictory. | ||
| I wouldn't say it's contradictory. | ||
| In the United States, it is. | ||
| Yeah, well, what I'm saying is that the Canadian facts on the ground are just totally separate. | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| From the debate that you guys are having. | ||
| And I mean, another thing is like, you know, less than 30% of the fundraising for this group came from Canadian sources. | ||
| I actually read that wasn't true. | ||
| Well, there's different... It really depends on how you read the numbers, but it's definitely the majority of the funding came from American sources. | ||
| The only source I've actually seen on it... But that's the GiveSendGo. | ||
| That's the GiveSendGo. | ||
| The only sources I've seen on it are that the majority was actually Canadian sources. | ||
| No, I have completely different sources. | ||
| Therein lies one of the big problems. | ||
| It's a six, it's a nine. | ||
| Yeah, you guys are both, who knows, it's the same shape. | ||
| Well, you can look it up. | ||
| You know what the problem is? | ||
| There's no way to look it up. | ||
| I know, isn't that the truth? | ||
| If I type in Canadians funded truckers, I'll find all the sources. | ||
| Yeah, everything. | ||
| If I type in Americans did it, I'll find all the sources. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I know. | ||
| So I'm like, I don't even know what to search for. | ||
| But like I would just say like it's when I see the American debate around it like I've I've yet to see an American left wing source say that the number one enemy of the truckers is Rob Ford's brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like the left wing source? | ||
| Like, yeah, like MSNBC, it's become this debate around Justin Trudeau or whatever. | ||
| But like, the point is, like, the conservatives have all said, go home. | ||
| He is the most conservative. | ||
| He's also the most powerful conservative in Canada. | ||
| If I were gambling, I would say he'd be our next conservative prime minister. | ||
| I think this might make him the next conservative prime minister. | ||
| He's very active in this, right? | ||
| So no one seems capable of mentioning that. | ||
| I'll tell you, you know what? | ||
| I got a prediction. | ||
| Here's what's gonna happen. | ||
| When the Civil War breaks out in the United States, we annex Canada. | ||
| First thing. | ||
| I want to do a TV show about it. | ||
| I've asked myself the question, how would an occupied Canada act? | ||
| Would we resist? | ||
| Because we're talking here, if I were to tell you I was an American, you would believe me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We would believe you. | |
| So it would create, what kind of occupation would it be? | ||
| Let me tell you. | ||
| I'll tell you exactly. | ||
| Do you have ideas how it would go? | ||
| I know exactly how it would happen. | ||
| So imagine now, it's one year after the occupation. | ||
| All the Canadians are dancing in the street in their cars, throwing money in the air. | ||
| They've all got gold chains. | ||
| Everyone owns a Lamborghini. | ||
| They're all rich and successful. | ||
| And they're like, man, this freedom stuff worked out way better than our crappy government. | ||
| Everybody's drinking water. | ||
| That's pretty funny. | ||
| I think America and U.S. | ||
| should get together. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| What I really wonder about it is what if they made every province a state? | ||
| So that would be, let's say, 10 provinces a state. | ||
| That would make America way left wing. | ||
| Suddenly, overnight, America would be a left-wing country. | ||
| Wasn't there a belief back in the 80s or 90s when Quebec was doing its stronger separatist movement that Northwest Territories would try to apply for American statehood, giving us a direct road to Canada? | ||
| There was Alberta. | ||
| There was a lot of chaos. | ||
| There was a lot of crazy thinking out there. | ||
| So you always had your civil war. | ||
| I mean, so, there's martial law declared in my country now. | ||
| Like, if the government wants to seize my bank accounts, they don't need a court order. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Right, like... Still? | ||
| No, like... Oh, right now, I thought you meant from the Québécois separatist movement. | ||
| In 1970, when they declared martial law, they arrested people. | ||
| You didn't need a warrant to arrest anyone. | ||
| My country's nearly died twice in my lifetime, 1982 and 1995. | ||
| This is not a book of judgment. | ||
| This is a book of like, what's amazing to me, what's the most shocking thing, maybe one of the most shocking things that's happened in my life, is that somehow Canada has become the stable country, and America has become the unstable country. | ||
| I mean, if you told me that that would happen when I was 20, everyone would have laughed in your face. | ||
| I think it's, in all seriousness, I do think Canada gets involved in whatever civil war happens in the United States. | ||
| Oh, we're, we're, I mean, we're in trouble. | ||
| Like, you're, well, this, the trucker convoy is already your political proxy. | ||
| It's a political proxy conflict on our soil of your toxic discourse. | ||
| It feels right. | ||
| I don't think it's our toxic discourse. | ||
| I think it's, it's, it's, the UK has been experiencing this. | ||
| Canada's been experiencing it. | ||
| The US. | ||
| But Canada, Canada has resisted it in a lot of ways because of, Because of a bunch of really odd policies. | ||
| Like, we have very strict immigration, but we are very pro-immigration. | ||
| And we have... 2008 didn't happen to us, right? | ||
| Like, we didn't have Occupy Wall Street because we are... because we're so vulnerable. | ||
| Because we're not America. | ||
| Like, we had to protect our banks, and our banks came through very safe. | ||
| Well, America is the tip of the spear. | ||
| It's the center of the empire. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I think Montreal is the most culturally diverse city in the... Toronto is. | ||
| Toronto. | ||
| Toronto's more than half foreign-born. | ||
| It's an open city. | ||
| Except I'm pretty sure Toronto's majority white. | ||
| Um, no. | ||
| I mean, the thing that's funny is like Canada has multicultural policy, even though we're about seven. | ||
| Well, I'm sure Toronto is multi is majority white. | ||
| It's just half foreign born. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, Toronto, you know, Canada is about 78 percent white. | ||
| And yeah. | ||
| Whereas the United States is 58 percent. | ||
| So it's you know, there's there's a there's quite a gap there, too. | ||
| 47.9 is the plurality. | ||
| The plurality is white. | ||
| The plurality. | ||
| So it is not a majority white city. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| It is not majority white. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Well, that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, which is interesting. | ||
| That's very different policies over in Canada compared to... Well, we're bringing in 400,000 immigrants next year, right? | ||
| And that's in a country of 40 million. | ||
| In Canada, the more patriotic you are, the more in favor of immigration you are. | ||
| I think that's a huge difference and I think you were talking about abortion and how you think it's a polarizing issue and it is. | ||
| I think should the Civil War come, those who are not here legally should be the ones who are most concerned. | ||
| Because there are parts of this country that they will ask for your papers and you will flee to California or Illinois or New York. | ||
| Well, already in 2016, there was a flood of people across the border. | ||
| You know how many in a civil war people would flood the borders that aren't natural, that would fight for a side to get their citizenship? | ||
| Like, you'd have millions and millions of foreign people. | ||
| Oh, like my great-great-grandfather, who was Irish, who fought for the North because he wanted to be an American. | ||
| Except Ian, in New York now, you can vote as a non-citizen. | ||
| So they're going to just go to the state and be like, we're here anyway. | ||
| And then that's it. | ||
| So, you know, that point I made about taxes and geography before, I think one thing you might end up seeing in the map you have in your book might actually be an accurate starting point. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's very much like... States will align based on... Yeah, I mean, it's like a, that's, that's like, you know, a bar room suggestion. | ||
| Like, obviously, it's not, it's not like how it would actually happen. | ||
| Actually, I think, interestingly, I would, I'd be willing to bet New Hampshire, at this point, would declare independence in any conflict. | ||
| Well, that's another possibility. | ||
| Because you're familiar with the Free Staters, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, and also Vermont. | ||
| There's a huge separatist movement in Vermont that's very serious. | ||
| And, well, I mean, they're not as serious as Texas. | ||
| But they'll get occupied very quickly. | ||
| You know, do people want to occupy countries anymore? | ||
| No. | ||
| What would be the value in occupying New Hampshire? | ||
| Access. | ||
| To what? | ||
| To maple syrup? | ||
| To the other states that are a part of your union. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I mean, I don't really go there. | ||
| I would assume that what would happen is that there'd be the attempt to control. | ||
| It would be the civil war that I envision. | ||
| would not be really between sides. | ||
| It would be between the forces of order and chaos. | ||
| People would try. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It would be between people who want disorder and want breakdown and people who are trying to keep the institutions alive by by force. | ||
| And like and of course the problem is as America's learned in its counterinsurgency strategy and as you know I talked to an anonymous colonel who was responsible for drawing up what they call full spectrum operations in the homeland like The more you try to control a population militarily, that just spreads violence. | ||
| I think you're right about that point about ordering chaos. | ||
| But my vision of it is the Democratic establishment, which used to be the Democrat-Republican like uniparty until Donald Trump came in. | ||
| Then you ended up with these neocons joining the Democrats like Bill Kristol, the Lincoln Project people. | ||
| The Democrats saw these far-left individuals, these progressives, as a way to bolster their ranks and get votes. | ||
| Essentially, the one ring. | ||
| They thought they could wield the power, but they can't. | ||
| Because the woke, the cancel culture stuff, the far-left, they are a chaotic and destructive force. | ||
| But it's also that the institutions themselves are rotting from the center. | ||
| It's not just a question of the partisanship. | ||
| It's a question of like, is the Senate a functional body? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| It isn't. | ||
| It's not a functioning body. | ||
| You should check out... You're in a government where supposedly has control of all three levels of... And they can't pass basic policies. | ||
| Well, people don't know what agrees on them. | ||
| Do you know how Congress works? | ||
| You know like they can't like in in Canadian Parliament British parliamentary system when you control the system | ||
| You make the decisions and then you were responsible for them. Do you know how you still? | ||
| So we had Marjorie Taylor Greene on yeah, and she said When she went to Congress | ||
| She was confused because she's sitting there and there's like 10 Democrats or like five Democrats and like five | ||
| Republicans and there's some random guy She doesn't know at the speakers podium pulls up a bill and | ||
| goes bill assembly bill You know, you know congressional bill 473 in favor | ||
| Democrats and they go Republicans no Democrats have it next bill and she was like | ||
| wait, no one's even voting on this stuff, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They must have hated her. | ||
| a roll call vote which forced all of the members of Congress back to actually record their | ||
| votes. | ||
| They must have hated her. | ||
| And they come after her for it. | ||
| And that's probably why you hear these insane stories about her in the press because she's | ||
| in defiance of none of these people want to work. | ||
| So we had Thomas Massey on. | ||
| Well, you know what their job is. | ||
| Fundraising. | ||
| Their job is fundraising. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, when you actually talk to, I've been interviewing a politician lately about the inner workings of electoral politics for a possible sequel to this book, and, you know, it's staggering. | ||
| Like, I had like a 20 minute conversation with this guy and I was like, oh, well, no wonder this system is so screwed up. | ||
| Like, all they can think about all day is the three levels of fundraising. | ||
| Dark money, social media money, and bundled money. | ||
| That's what they do all day. | ||
| That's a big problem. | ||
| It is non-functional. | ||
| Like, it is a non-functioning system. | ||
| I agree, and we need to go to Super Chats, so we did a little bit longer show today because You know, typically what we do with the Members Only segment is we'll save like a spicier story for a TimCast.com segment. | ||
| But I figured because we're going to be having kind of an amorphous conversation about Civil War and politics, it wouldn't really work out to do that. | ||
| So I just, we extended the normal show. | ||
| Now we'll go to Super Chats. | ||
| The hate mail's already started. | ||
| Just forewarning, there's a lot of Canadians and they're like, truckers, no! | ||
| Well, I mean, you know. | ||
| Let's read it. | ||
| It's actually a good question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wrestler Town says, If Mr. Marsh started writing his book five years ago, I'd like to know which right-wing activists he had to compare to the left at the conception of his book. | ||
| His go-to January 6th example happened one year ago. | ||
| Well, it was like what inspired it was the Trump inauguration and the general atmosphere of violence. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't say at the beginning of it, I was like, I mean, I went and talked to various prepper groups. | ||
| I went to talk to various far right groups. | ||
| I talked to Richard Spencer. | ||
| I talked to like various members of the far right and going and meeting them in Ohio and like, you know, in the field research. | ||
| So that's different than I would say icons or something like that. | ||
| And I just, you know, I got along very well with them. | ||
| And they and also like, you know, Sons of Confederate Veterans and things like this, like, you know, and and sovereign citizens and constitutional sheriffs and sagebrush rebels. | ||
| And so, yeah, I would talk to all these different groups. | ||
| Now, you know, like the specific violence that they're involved in is sometimes purely | ||
| in their own minds. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And sometimes the right wing groups. | ||
| I mean, you go and meet these guys and sometimes it's like this is a hobby. | ||
| Thinking about the Civil War, it's like, am I with a far-right group who's plotting the overthrow of the U.S. | ||
| government, or are these basically like birdwatchers? | ||
| Ben, how do you compare them to the $2 billion? | ||
| And that's the insurance maximum. | ||
| We think the damage from the George Floyd riots was actually higher than that. | ||
| Well, there's lots of violence on all sides here. | ||
| I mean, surely. | ||
| There's not. | ||
| Well, I mean, you can read the book and check my sources, but those are the sources that I have. | ||
| They come from foreign sources. | ||
| They're not Democratic or Republican. | ||
| There's no lack of right-wing violence in this country. | ||
| But there's certainly substantially more coming from the left. | ||
| I would not say that. | ||
| My evidence would say the opposite. | ||
| So there was $2 billion in damage across the United States. | ||
| Well, that's property damage. | ||
| I mean, it depends, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think I ever... 30 people dead. | |
| Well, I was dealing with murders, right? | ||
| I don't think I was... I think 26 of those were murders. | ||
| I never did a comparative analysis of property value damage. | ||
| I guess I probably should have done that. | ||
| I just went with the murder rates. | ||
| That's where you get closer to the definition of civil war. | ||
| I guess technically, but I disagree. | ||
| I mean, if you've got a mass movement funded by corporations that advocates, and the vice president herself is providing bail for people who are burning down buildings and smashing windows and killing people, we're there, man. | ||
| Look, Kamala Harris raised money. | ||
| How about the Republican Party saying January 6th is legitimate political discourse? | ||
| What was the specific context around that? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| Then I don't think you have a point. | ||
| Well, I would just say that there's certainly been legitimization of violence on the right. | ||
| I don't really think that's debatable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've got to give me a specific example, because I can name... January 6th. | |
| January 6th is one thing that happened one time, and I can give you over the past several years... I mean, the French Revolution is one thing that happened one time. | ||
| Sure, but hold on, we're talking about 800 people, of which several hundred fought their way to the front tunnel entrance, and the other several hundred walked through the back door that was opened by police. | ||
| But I can also go back to like... Well, there's... I can talk about Ferguson... How about Oregon State? | ||
| The Oregon... Mike Nierman, when he let in the rioters who... I mean, Nothing happened there. | ||
| They opened the door and the guy got in trouble. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can talk about the guy went to the ice... Well, the vandalism of the legislature. | |
| A guy went to the ice facility with an AR and firebombed it. | ||
| We had the guy, Aaron Danielson, get shot and killed. | ||
| We had over 800 instances of low-tier, what I call blunt force violence. | ||
| Do you really... I mean, you've... Like, this is something that has been repeated in this conversation. | ||
| You say, show me an example. | ||
| Then I do. | ||
| And then you say... He keeps saying January 6th. | ||
| Well, that's a pretty big one, man. | ||
| But that's the only one? | ||
| I mean... Like, it happened one year ago. | ||
| After a decade of political violence from the left... Well, would you consider sovereign citizenship to be right-wing violence? | ||
| Because certainly the groups that I do, do. | ||
| On what scale are these guys? | ||
| About 50 murders a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And those are murders based on... People killing cops at traffic stops. | |
| So, as I said, there are definitional questions here. | ||
| I'm not trying to hide anything. | ||
| But certainly, you would probably not consider that a far-right group. | ||
| You might just consider those criminals. | ||
| What makes them right-wing? | ||
| They believe in no taxes. | ||
| They come from small government ideology. | ||
| They believe in the rejection of the 14th Amendment. | ||
| They're the roots of QAnon mentality. | ||
| Ben Stewart did a documentary called On Grip, if you want to hear about those people. | ||
| How does that relate to a Trump supporter? | ||
| Well, we're not in the realm... Well, they're roughly on the same spectrum. | ||
| I mean, when you're dealing with the far right in the United States, you're dealing with a huge collection of ideas that are not coherently connected. | ||
| But Black Lives Matter is. | ||
| And they marched together in the line of thousands. | ||
| Well, and it also strips itself apart very quickly and is also filled with a lot of segmentation. | ||
| So, like... Like, I mean, there's no... Like, I would say... All I'm saying here is, you know, you would say that your right wing does not commit any violence. | ||
| I don't say that. | ||
| Well, there's some violence. | ||
| But if you're looking at, like, mass terms of violence, like, you have to look at things like sovereign citizens, or QAnon, or, you know, etc. | ||
| It would just not be reasonable to say that those are not right-wing political violence. | ||
| This is why I explained in the beginning that the right engages what I define as sharp, acute instances, and the left is blunt. | ||
| Well, let's stay with that. | ||
| Because, like, that seems to me quite correct. | ||
| But one's substantially worse. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| I believe that... Well, it depends what you mean by worse. | ||
| Let me explain. | ||
| So the sovereign citizens of the United States are not a destabilizing factor? | ||
| They absolutely are. | ||
| I mean, the FBI declared them the number one threat to police. | ||
| It's because they're onto something. | ||
| But the FBI goes and sends 12 agents to a garage pole rope. | ||
| Well, you know, this is the thing where I'm a Canadian and I'm an outsider. | ||
| So to me, when you're against the FBI, that's where... Americans have not had a good relationship with the FBI. | ||
| Well, no one has a good relationship with the police forces of their country. | ||
| All police forces need reform. | ||
| The FBI is called the administrative state or deep state. | ||
| J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI for 48 years. | ||
| So, you know, the motto of Canada, the motto of America is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| The motto of Canada is peace, order, and good government. | ||
| The motto of America is, in God we trust. | ||
| What I find with peace, peace and order, is you can have a slave state that's suppressed its population into peace and order, and they're still slaves and unhappy, but there's peace. | ||
| So I think a good example of the breakdown, and there's no middle ground, right? | ||
| Well that's it, the middle ground is gone. | ||
| Everybody in the chat perceives you as far left. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, in my own country, that would just be so ludicrous. | ||
| Well, no, but far left doesn't mean, like, you refer to certain people as far right, far left, it's meaningless. | ||
| They're worldview signifiers. | ||
| Yeah, that's a fair point. | ||
| I mean, I would say I'm talking about a specific category of ideologies. | ||
| I'll tell you, you know, like, I'm doing research and I come across a story about a guy, no one say his name, seriously, Because if you do, YouTube will shut the show down instantly. | ||
| That is, there's nothing, on the left, so I sit down with Jack Dorsey, and we pull up a tweet of an Antifa account overtly calling for, organizing and inciting violence and giving instructions on what to do, and they went, meh. | ||
| But a right-wing person- Look, dude, there's lots of evidence of right-wing radicalization through social media networks. | ||
| Like, lots of it. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, my point is, I mean the algorithms point to extremism of both kinds. | ||
| So the data actually shows, because I've covered this for years, a flow towards the left. | ||
| But we've actually had, there's a researcher who mapped out all of political YouTube and found it flows 2 to 1 to the left. | ||
| And this is easily exemplified by the fact that right-wing channels get banned all the time and left-wing channels don't. | ||
| They get propped up and they get mainstream media coverage. | ||
| I have no evidence of that. | ||
| So like Stephen Crowder, for instance, he's a mainstream conservative. | ||
| He gets strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, and then he has to go on hiatus to let the | ||
| strikes roll off his channel. | ||
| He gets forced onto rumble. | ||
| Meanwhile, you have Antifa channels. | ||
| They don't, left-wing political channels, they don't experience the same thing. | ||
| On Twitter- But the top 10 people on Facebook are all right-wing groups, | ||
| right-wing guys. | ||
| The Ben Shapiro's of this world. | ||
| And Facebook is predominantly older, you know, and boomer and stuff like that. | ||
| Well, so what? | ||
| I mean, people, eyeballs are eyeballs. | ||
| I mean- But those are very, very different. | ||
| My point is that- Like- | ||
| You have to understand, I've gone across this country. | ||
| I've talked to people from both sides. | ||
| You all say they're both very different. | ||
| But that means you haven't done the fact check. | ||
| Because I haven't come to your side? | ||
| I'm 30,000 feet in the air. | ||
| I don't think you understand, right? | ||
| The right calls us liberals. | ||
| Trump supporters call us liberals. | ||
| Ian is a weird, hippie, communist, something-or-other, I don't know, authoritarian. | ||
| And we had Luke, who was a libertarian. | ||
| And I'm in favor of universal basic health care. | ||
| I support progressive taxes. | ||
| But in this country, the left will call me right-wing and the right will call me left-wing. | ||
| Well, I'm, you know, honestly, I'm kind of in the same position. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Your group is calling me far left, but when I was an Esquire columnist for years, I was considered like Norman Mailer and constantly called out for all these kinds of questions. | ||
| Here's my point, though. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| No, go ahead. | ||
| Finish. | ||
| We've got to do Super Chats. | ||
| The main issue was when you cite the FBI, it's a signal to these people you haven't done any research into the FBI. | ||
| I've interviewed a lot of FBI agents. | ||
| But you haven't done the fact-checking. | ||
| So, like, when the New York Times lies and makes up fake crap, and then we have to fact-check it and prove it wrong with evidence... This book is deeply fact-checked. | ||
| This is why I used the joke... Deeply. | ||
| I mean, I'm... I don't... I have a lot of failings. | ||
| I have a lot of stuff to be humble for. | ||
| But this book is correct. | ||
| So, but this is why I use the Joe Biden Ukraine gait as a really good example. | ||
| Because if you go to the New York Times and ask them, did Joe Biden quid pro quo, they'll say no. | ||
| And that's factually incorrect. | ||
| All evidence points to the fact that Joe Biden did this. | ||
| He's even on video saying he did it. | ||
| And for some reason, So when the FBI doesn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, doesn't prosecute Joe Biden or even investigate these things, when you have the collusion between Twitter and Facebook shutting down the story about Hunter Biden's laptop, when Hunter Biden is publicly known to have illegally acquired a handgun or disposed of one, nothing happens! | ||
| Oh no, they reported on all that. | ||
| No, no, no, I'm saying the FBI hasn't done anything. | ||
| Oh, well, I mean, you know, the number, like, everyone always says that about crime, and the thing about crime is, like, tiny, only tiny little amounts of crime are ever prosecuted. | ||
| But the DHS specifically comes out and says it's effectively the right that is the problem. | ||
| Without talking about BLM and the billions of dollars in damage, people say they have no credibility. | ||
| If you cite them, they'll say... Well, one site says that they have no credibility. | ||
| I mean, the problem we're in is the one we keep going back to, which is like the sides are so divided now that like literally there is no common ground. | ||
| In fact, there is no common ground in narrative. | ||
| There is no common ground in institutions. | ||
| There is no common ground in language. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And like when you're in that condition, you either have to find a way back to that common ground or split up. | ||
| You're not far left or right. | ||
| I mean, like this is it. | ||
| Like you either have to work towards let's find a way to talk together or you have to say it's done. | ||
| You're not far left, and it's unfair to say you are far left. | ||
| Far left? | ||
| I mean, look at my suit! | ||
| No, no, for anyone to say you are, because the reason why you're not far left is because you're here, because the real far left in America, and people may say the real far right... Well, you may underestimate my desire to sell books. | ||
| They would not sit together and have this conversation, and that is one of the biggest problems. | ||
| I mean, I do political debate for a living, even though I've been very taciturn this evening, but it is hard to find an open-minded And I'm sure they would say the same about us, but we don't sit together. | ||
| Crossfire is gone. | ||
| We don't sit together and have these intellectual conversations. | ||
| We have four panelists who think the way we do on our program. | ||
| And who can scream the loudest. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's political discourse now. | ||
| I do think, you know, some of these super chats are making points that we've probably already made and it's probably not relevant to make, but I do want to read them anyway. | ||
| Madison says, easy experiment. | ||
| Wear a MAGA hat at a leftist event. | ||
| Wear a BLM hat at a right event. | ||
| You'll see who talks and who uses violence very clearly the left. | ||
| Blair White, for example, wore a MAGA hat around Hollywood and got physically assaulted. | ||
| I mean, I've been to, I went to, one example is Boston. | ||
| I don't I mean, those those kind of experiments to me have so little value. | ||
| They don't they don't mean they don't mean anything. | ||
| I went to a rally in Boston, the right came with shields, the left came with clubs and bats. | ||
| And There's lots of clubs and bats on the others. | ||
| Everyone has clubs and bats. | ||
| I think the 30,000 feet perspective is super important if we're going to survive. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| I want you to survive. | ||
| Please survive. | ||
| As your neighbor, as your friend and neighbor, please survive. | ||
| And the only way you're going to survive is by either finding some way to get into common language or to break up. | ||
| I think science is part of it. | ||
| Let me, let me, I've just got to read more of these. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, go ahead. | ||
| Mike says a major pipeline project in Canada was attacked by 20 masked individuals with axes and flare guns deep in the woods this morning. | ||
| Millions in property damage, destroyed heavy equipment, and work camp media silent. | ||
| Well, the left would take that because like all of the indigenous protests about pipelines got broken up very quickly and quite aggressively. | ||
| And like for, you know, like the Ottawa police were sued for $60 million successfully for their for their brutality over the G7, the leftist protests. | ||
| So actually, I think I mean, that's a Canadian example. | ||
| So it's actually not very relevant. | ||
| But, you know, one of the things is like there are many people on the left asking, like, well, if these were left wing protesters in Ottawa, would they be treated anywhere near as decently as they have been so far? | ||
| Like there's a there's a lot of I and I and I frankly, I sympathize with that. | ||
| We have this super chat from, uh, Legama Thigayan. | ||
| I'm probably pouncing that wrong all the time. | ||
| He says, right-wing esoteric knowledge like QAnon is crazy, but is less insane and far less dangerous, | ||
| mainstream and institutionally entrenched compared to standard progressive dogma. | ||
| It's ridiculous to make an equation between the two. | ||
| I mean, I do find that interesting. | ||
| That's not in my book and I find it one of the more fascinating things that I didn't answer. | ||
| Like, there are a few, like, mysteries that were kind of around the edges of the book that I... because I tried to be really specific and, like, really only say what I know. | ||
| But, like, the fascination with esoteric knowledge on the right, I just find it fascinating. | ||
| Are you familiar with the, you're probably not, you're Canadian, the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act? | ||
| No, I don't know that. | ||
| Although I should. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| So in, I think it was 2012, Barack Obama signed into law, our National Defense Authorization Act reauthorizes, you know, spending on national defense and stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Obama signed into it. | ||
| He was like, oh, no, I can't believe they're doing this. | ||
| But it was everybody, you know, the United Party puts it in. | ||
| It allows the U.S. | ||
| to detain anyone anywhere in the world for any reason at any time and hold them wherever they want. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so Dave Smith was telling a story on Joe Rogan's podcast where he said Brian Stelter was complaining that conspiracy theory videos about how, you know, certain tragic events didn't really happen were dangerous. | ||
| And, you know, Dave's point was like, if some weirdo guy makes a YouTube video, it's like, sure, it's annoying, and Brian Seltzer's like, no, it's dangerous! | ||
| And he goes, you know what's dangerous? | ||
| That Barack Obama signed into law the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, and the media didn't cover it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think there's so much that's dangerous right now. | ||
| Like, you know when I called it a complex cascading system? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These things all feed into each other. | ||
| You know, like one of the things that I think is happening that's, you know, probably I shouldn't have brought up right at the end of this conversation, is like people's sense of what is real is fraying. | ||
| They don't know what is real. | ||
| That's part of the esoteric information. | ||
| They lose faith in institutions, but what is actually happening is very hard to tell. | ||
| And I think that's part of the contribution to this chaos. | ||
| What was the term you used? | ||
| Semantic? | ||
| You had a really good way of phrasing it. | ||
| I'll look at the tape later. | ||
| Semantic argument? | ||
| No, semantic carnage or something. | ||
| I forget what it was. | ||
| I don't think that was me. | ||
| I think you said that or something. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It was you. | ||
| I said it. | ||
| Oh, you did. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| No, I'm just taking credit for someone made a good point. | ||
| I was going to take credit. | ||
| Say it in the chat, you guys. | ||
| You know, semantic corruption? | ||
| I forget what it was, but it was good. | ||
| When you're talking about that love of esoteric knowledge, that's kind of what God is. | ||
| And it seems like that resonates with people on the right. | ||
| I don't think of people on the right or left much like that. | ||
| Ian, it seems like religion was always part of that. | ||
| One of the core components of religion is to proselytize and spread your religion, not to hold it within. | ||
| The decline of religion in American life is actually a huge part of this, in my opinion. | ||
| And if people are reaching for some sort of knowledge that they can latch on to, and that's Q or whatever it is. | ||
| I think exactly. | ||
| And I think you get the sense of meaning that you got from church, you get in politics now. | ||
| And it's... Wow, that's super dangerous. | ||
| Yeah, and that's very dangerous. | ||
| I want to address a lot of these super chats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I think, you know, one of the things I was making early, the point I made early on is that we agree on a lot of the core issues that's happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we probably, we disagree on like... Well, I think you have a perspective and my perspective is 30,000 feet in the air. | ||
| That's what I would like to say. | ||
| A lot of people are commenting like, oh, he's wrong about this. | ||
| He's wrong about that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and he's wrong about. | ||
| No, I think I think Stephen is very much correct about civil war. | ||
| I think there's probably core political issues that we have different views on. | ||
| But like that, that's why I thought. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think when you actually like you're in favor of universal health care, you're in favor of progressive taxation. | ||
| I mean, the problem that we're dealing with here is that when you talk about politics, we've had this this whole this we talk for like two and a half hours now about politics. | ||
| Policy has been Five minutes? | ||
| Ten minutes? | ||
| Like actual policies. | ||
| But let me explain. | ||
| I can back up everything I claim with a source that is effectively academic and mainstream certified. | ||
| And I'm a civil libertarian. | ||
| My views are on freedom of the individual. | ||
| Decentralization is typically how I put it. | ||
| I don't like the idea that you get one despot who thinks he knows everything. | ||
| We've seen how that goes. | ||
| But the problem is I've been on the ground at all of these protests. | ||
| I spent my start of my career going to different protests and talking to people. | ||
| And what did I find? | ||
| When I would go to like a right-wing event, they would be very specific to the point of like, this is my thing, this is my thing. | ||
| And so like a Trump rally, they'd say, my factory closed down. | ||
| Trump wants to bring factories back and end free trade. | ||
| I'd go to left-wing rallies and they'd say, I don't know. | ||
| See, I had this experience when I was in 2015 where I covered the Canadian election and then I went down and covered a Trump rally and a Sanders rally, like right after each other. | ||
| They were both in Iowa within three days of each other. | ||
| And so this is what a Canadian debate is like. | ||
| Sir, we need to spend $428 million on education. | ||
| You're completely wrong. | ||
| We need to spend $485 million on education. | ||
| It's all numbers and it's all boring technical policy things. | ||
| I mean, it's unwatchably boring. | ||
| Then you go to America and it's God and socialism. | ||
| These grand ideas that have no practical applications, that are incredibly vague, and just simply are essentially aesthetic categories. | ||
| What we're talking about here is language. | ||
| But if you were to actually... I think the abortion question comes up here again, where it's like, if you were to actually sit down, what are our policy objectives? | ||
| We want women to be in control of their bodies, and we want abortion rates to decline. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| There's a really good way to do that. | ||
| But you're wrong. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'm wrong, because that's not what they want. | ||
| No, they want no abortion at all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, if you want to get... Well, that's not ever going to happen. | ||
| It will by force or by decree. | ||
| The United States cannot control the flow of heroin onto its streets. | ||
| The idea that it's going to control a major surgical procedure that you can get chemically... You don't got to look at it so absolutely. | ||
| The idea among the pro-life right is... Well, that's my point. | ||
| You don't have to look at absolutely. | ||
| Shut down the abortion clinics and end the government sanction of murder. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's their view. | ||
| That's their view, and that is essentially a religious view. | ||
| Whereas if their views were policy-based, if they were like... How is that not policy-based? | ||
| Because the policy asks, what is the end we're looking for collectively? | ||
| Ending the government support of murder. | ||
| But see, that's not a policy, that's a vision. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| A policy is like, we want a result. | ||
| The result we want is fewer abortions. | ||
| want the if you want result we want is the government to stop supporting | ||
| abortions that's that's it again you're in this that you're in a static | ||
| political category you're like you're asking large questions about what your | ||
| government is who you are what you are as a people put aside those questions | ||
| Ask, what do you want? | ||
| They want the government to stop actively supporting... Well, see, that's right. | ||
| And see, I would never, like, I would say that, you know, in sensible countries, what you ask is, what do you want to do here? | ||
| Like, what do you actually want to achieve? | ||
| If you want to achieve lower abortion rates, there are many, many ways to do that. | ||
| Criminalization would not be among them. | ||
| But I think this is your bias, right? | ||
| Well, I think my bias is pro-policy. | ||
| Like, what I believe is that government is an agent of policy. | ||
| There certainly is, like, hey, we live in a country and the country takes X position. | ||
| We would like the government to stop taking that position. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And see, that's, to me, is the least interesting question in politics. | ||
| The question of what is the government... The pro-life crowd understands abortion will still exist. | ||
| They just say, like, here's the line we want to set. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's a moral question of their own identity, of who they are and who their government is. | ||
| And that is the thing about America. | ||
| It's like you have this idea of yourselves as a shining city on a hill, as a beacon for the world, whereas I think in other countries that are perhaps more stable, it's like, well, what are we doing here? | ||
| How can we make life a little bit better? | ||
| How can we make it, how can we make it, how can we make things, we're in these systems, how can we make these systems better? | ||
| And like, when you get to the systems questions, when you get to those policy questions, there's actually a lot of common ground. | ||
| There's actually, it's easy, it's actually quite possible to build things together. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| We have another super chat here. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| I'm going on too long about this. | ||
| No, but I agree on that. | ||
| We probably agree on a lot of things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we have a good, this is a good super chat. | ||
| Seth Houser says, there are no two versions of America. | ||
| It has always been a constitutional republic formed by the founding fathers. | ||
| It's actually a really good point. | ||
| When you said that there's a multicultural democracy and a constitutional republic, what you're, this country has always been a constitutional republic, albeit with politicians making improper statements about being a democracy or whatever. | ||
| Like for 240 years. | ||
| Sure, I mean, but the Founding Fathers had arguments over federalism and what the Republic was. | ||
| Ulysses S. Grant, in the First Civil War, wrote about what the Republic was. | ||
| They didn't call it democracy. | ||
| Benjamin Franklin has comments about democracy, about we're not a democracy and why we're not a democracy. | ||
| But the point is... But that's not what Madison said, but anyway. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But the point is, if this country was formed as a constitutional republic, And we now have an emergent multicultural democracy. | ||
| No, no, I don't think that would be accurate to say that it's emergent. | ||
| I mean, it is in place. | ||
| It has been in place for at least since 1860. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll tell you what the real government is right now is Google. | |
| Well, that's the other question. | ||
| And that is another aspect of the book. | ||
| Did the First Civil War properly end? | ||
| And I agree. | ||
| When you go back to the original founding father documents, there's immense contradiction built into them. | ||
| I think the Civil War never ended. | ||
| Well, also you could say it began at the beginning of the country. | ||
| It began with the Three-Fifths Compromise. | ||
| It began with all the compromises that were embedded in the Constitution that ultimately were between slave and free states that were not subject to compromise. | ||
| Did you read about, I think it was the 1872 election in the United States? | ||
| 1876, you mean? | ||
| 76. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I always mix it up. | ||
| Where they basically were like, we'll just rubber stamp, you know, and negotiate who's the president. | ||
| Well, I mean, you know, one of the subjects of this book is what an American occupation would look like. | ||
| And of course, 1876 was the end. | ||
| of the first American occupation, which was the North's occupation of the South, which was a low-level civil conflict, right, with lots of terrorist groups and lots of, and lots of conflict. | ||
| And basically 1876 was, you know, the thing is occupation doesn't, never works, right? | ||
| Like it's simply never, you can't, you can't really occupy people against their will. | ||
| It just is not, Well, I don't know, 20 years in Afghanistan I think proves you wrong. | ||
| I mean, when you read, like, one of the guys I interview for the book is a guy named Daniel Bolger, who's a real expert in counterinsurgency, and, you know, saw it in Iraq and saw it everywhere, and he's like, you know, there are basically no examples of this working. | ||
| But when you read his book, you keep waiting for the, this book's called Why We Lost, You keep waiting for the losses. | ||
| They don't lose at all. | ||
| They win everything. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It makes no difference. | ||
| I think if we were doing wargaming of your book, which we're not going to do because we'll go back to Super Chats, I think the most important variable is who is what party, what faction is the president at the time. | ||
| Who controls the military? | ||
| And that would be, I think the Civil War, the American Civil War, I think would have | ||
| been very differently, it would have been very different if there was a different president | ||
| of a different party. | ||
| And so who controls DC, who controls the military, who controls the powers of the federal government, | ||
| I think will determine an awful lot. | ||
| Again, if we were playing war gaming. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I worked on the assumption in the book that the military oath would hold. | ||
| Because it does seem to me like it would. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| It was taken extremely, extremely seriously. | ||
| I mean, one of the problems here is that the military is the last institution with widespread respect in the United States. | ||
| which is not healthy right like that's not it when that's when that's the back the backdrop like that's not good but um you know the the generals in the washington post a few months ago openly discussed like with the military fragment in the case of a contested electoral college vote that's a that's a whole level of terror that i didn't put in the book but it seems to me entirely plausible So we have this one from Babak. | ||
| He says, Hi, I am 20. | ||
| And throughout high school, my teachers told me the party's switched and that Dems are not trying to take your guns. | ||
| The left lies to children. | ||
| When I was a child, I will not compromise. | ||
| I thought this was a good comment. | ||
| One thing that I think is apparent to a lot of people, if you pay attention, is that the Democratic establishment makes demands. | ||
| The Republican establishment says, no, wait, don't. | ||
| And so gun control is a really good example. | ||
| Well, yeah, one's progressive and one's reactionary. | ||
| I mean, that seems to be the pattern, yeah. | ||
| So there's no one actually fighting for... This is why Trump comes around. | ||
| Even though he was in favor of gun control and banned bump stocks, which was an insane and absurd policy, rule by decree. | ||
| But when people on the right say, the Second Amendment says, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. | ||
| The Democrats ban guns, seize guns, arrest people for guns, and the Republicans say, slow down there, Democrats. | ||
| This results in the Trump phenomenon. | ||
| People finally being like, I can't take it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Give me the human Molotov cocktail. | ||
| I'm done with this. | ||
| Well, that I mean, and there's going to be that on the left, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| Well, the left. | ||
| That's what we were saying. | ||
| That's what we were saying before. | ||
| Like the best way to think of Trump is as a symptom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, I mean, I think that's when I go and talk to like NPR people and so on. | ||
| I wonder if I'm the only person this year to talk to you and NPR at the same time. | ||
| But possible. | ||
| But like the part they find controversial is that I say, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, all of this would be exactly the same. | ||
| Right, like that the Trump, like what we're dealing with here are deep-seated structural | ||
| problems that are built into the, they transcend completely the outcomes of elections. | ||
| This is why I can't stand the Trump fraud narrative that I'll give you a funny example. I have never once stated | ||
| that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, nor that there was widespread fraud that | ||
| would have changed. In fact, quite the opposite. My first reaction | ||
| when I started hearing this was I was like, dude, I'm not playing the same game | ||
| where Hillary Clinton came out and claimed Russia and all this other | ||
| garbage, trying to be fake. Then they said we're gonna do audits. | ||
| They did audits. | ||
| They didn't come out with anything substantive. | ||
| And the company shuts down. | ||
| People are like, Tim, look at all the data. | ||
| I looked at all the data. | ||
| There's some interesting stuff there. | ||
| But ultimately, here we are. | ||
| It's 2022. | ||
| And, you know, the issue for me is, are we just going to keep playing this back and forth? | ||
| You are. | ||
| I mean, absolutely. | ||
| I think you are. | ||
| The country just rips apart. | ||
| If that's what we keep doing, we have to change course. | ||
| But I'll tell you the funny thing. | ||
| There are organizations right now that, there's an organization that has raised tens of thousands of dollars off of the lie that I am a proponent of Trump's fraud narrative. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even though it's 100% fake. | ||
| You'll get news outlets lying about my views. | ||
| Oh man, I'll give you a great example. | ||
| They take clips of me, they take clips of Joe Rogan. | ||
| There's a really great post, I can't remember who put it up, I think it was Zed Jelani. | ||
| We've had him on as a guest several times. | ||
| He said, in all those instances of Joe Rogan saying the N-word, he was actually arguing against racism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they were taken out of context to make him seem racist because... Sure. | ||
| So here's why I think, you know, you mentioned we're in civil strife. | ||
| I think it's civil war. | ||
| Well, that's a technical threshold. | ||
| It's strictly terminology, but we're definitely seeing the normalization of political violence. | ||
| I think we can agree on that. | ||
| I'm talking about fourth and fifth generational war. | ||
| Have you researched any of those things? | ||
| Well, not really. | ||
| Think about what the purpose of war is, right? | ||
| To gain control of an asset resource land or a people. | ||
| When you look at what started the first civil war, it was these military bases and then eventually, like preserving the Union, gaining control and holding one government over the South because they were trying to secede and form their own country or whatever. | ||
| What if you never had to fire a shot to accomplish that? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| So, fourth and fifth generational warfare is when you get into insurgency with fourth generational, and fifth generational is manipulation and propaganda. | ||
| You mean mimetic warfare. | ||
| I mean, the thing I find pretty... I actually wrote about that for Foreign Policy. | ||
| I think it's a really... You know, I actually think what's happening in Russia and the Ukraine, not to go off on a completely different thing, but I think it's one of the earliest instances of truly mimetic warfare. | ||
| You know, Marshall McLuhan said the Third World War will be an information war fought with no distinction between | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| civilians and military. | ||
| Yep. And we're in it. | ||
| Right. Like and I think and I think in that sense, if you were to think of the Civil War as a mimetic war or as an | ||
| informational wars or diathetical war, which is what Lawrence of Arabia called it, then you are absolutely in it. | ||
| That's why I think when we if we talk in terms of left and right, we've already lost the war because our mind has been changed by the meme to think in that way. | ||
| Well, I think, you know. | ||
| I think it's natural to have a left and a right, and I think it's natural to have disagreement. | ||
| I don't think you need to be in a unified country that that's somehow better. | ||
| You have to feel you're on the same team, though. | ||
| It's true that it's natural to have a left and a right, but not to have two political parties in control of a government. | ||
| That's not natural. | ||
| That's been formed on purpose. | ||
| I want to read this one super chat and then make a point about many of the other ones. | ||
| Gold Mekro says, thanks for coming, Steven. | ||
| You've been an interesting voice on these matters, but understand for many you're asking | ||
| them to sacrifice all they feel is right and honorable for the sake of peace with those | ||
| who hate them. | ||
| Well, would you rather be married or right? | ||
| It's like what I said right at the beginning. | ||
| That's why I asked you about the healthcare thing. | ||
| And you know, I take that point. | ||
| Like, I genuinely do. | ||
| Like, if someone were to ask me that, if that were the choices, I don't know what I would do. | ||
| There's a lot of comments where they're like, you know, this guy is wrong, and you know, obviously. | ||
| I'm not everyone's cup of tea. | ||
| I'm okay with that. | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| And I knew, having seen your Twitter, we had these disagreements, but I thought, you know, we try inviting many other people of opposing views. | ||
| They don't come on the show. | ||
| Well, you can have me anytime. | ||
| Oh, I thought it was a fantastic conversation. | ||
| And for the people who are saying they don't want to buy your book, I think that is wrong. | ||
| I think they should buy your book. | ||
| The book has stuff in it that is not me. | ||
| I genuinely think it's worth reading. | ||
| Look, so I understand if people are like, I don't want to buy his book because he doesn't deserve my money or it'll make him richer or whatever. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I think they should read it because, as I often say, if you think he's wrong, wouldn't it be valuable if they knew all of your thoughts and ideas and research and where it came from? | ||
| And then, by all means, you can take the book. | ||
| We've actually had a couple people comment saying they did read your book and felt you were wrong or whatever. | ||
| And that's the right answer! | ||
| You know, at least almost 40% of the sources are Republican. | ||
| Like, I would just add. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think these people like Republicans either though. | |
| I probably didn't help myself there. | ||
| No, but I mean, I read CNN all the time and then I'm like, that one's wrong, that one's wrong. | ||
| And then I read Breitbart too and I'm like, that one's framed poorly and that one's wrong. | ||
| But like, because you have to read everything and then try and figure out, on a lot of articles it's tough. | ||
| So like, because when the New York Times says X is true, I'm like, you just said something. | ||
| Like, how am I supposed to know it's true just because you said it? | ||
| Well, as someone who's worked for a bunch of publications, I would say if something is in the New York Times, that's the most reliable news source of anything I've worked for, with the possible exception of the Atlantic. | ||
| The New York Times has written— When something's fact-checked by the Atlantic, it is fact-checked within an inch of its life. | ||
| The New York Times, I caught in what I view as a major scandal of publishing a news piece, getting boosted in the algorithm, and altering it to an op-ed for sustained growth. | ||
| And they do it all the time. | ||
| It's called stealth editing. | ||
| But other than that, I mean, you look at what they did with Project Veritas, where they just lied about them and then basically never fact-checked it, got sued. | ||
| It was so egregious that they've actually, surprisingly, Veritas has gotten passed a motion to dismiss, which is crazy in public definition. | ||
| I thought the New York Times lost a lot of its credibility when they published Anonymous and they said this was a high-level Trump staffer with intimate details of the Trump administration. | ||
| And then it turned out it had like the same position I had in the Bush administration where, you know, you have a job, but like their editorial board, their senior leadership allowed that to go forward saying this is, they made it look like it was a cabinet position and they did it for political expediency. | ||
| What did you guys think of the Palin trial? | ||
| Oh, the dismissal? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We talked about that last time and libel is very hard. | ||
| I think times to be Sullivan needs to be removed. | ||
| Are you familiar with what that is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get rid of it. | ||
| You really think so? | ||
| I mean, it would make you... | ||
| I thought it was fascinating that someone was the fall guy, right? | ||
| That one editor said, yeah, this is on me. | ||
| James Bennett, the ultimate. | ||
| I mean, James Bennett is a fascinating man because he's been in the middle of these struggles and attacked by both sides. | ||
| For being absolutely superb at his job. | ||
| I mean, the best op-ed editor I've ever worked with. | ||
| I just don't think the New York Times would ever allow such a piece about Kamala Harris. | ||
| Oh, I don't know about that. | ||
| I would not agree with that. | ||
| Brad Stevens, there's a lot of people. | ||
| Let's wait and see. | ||
| For those that aren't familiar, Times v. Sullivan is the standard that basically you have to prove, if defamation is of a public figure, you have to prove they either knew it was false or were acting recklessly. | ||
| And malice. | ||
| Actual malice means that they knew. | ||
| That they knew and that they wanted to hurt this person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Hurting is... In Canada, it's completely different, and it's so much easier to sue somebody for libel. | ||
| In the U.S., actual malice doesn't refer to intention to cause harm, necessarily. | ||
| It's that you knew it was wrong and you didn't care. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Very hard to prove. | ||
| And impossible, unless you get into discovery. | ||
| Recklessness is that, for the New York Times, for instance, if they publish something, you'd have to prove that they didn't follow their standard procedure for verification. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And if you can't get past a motion to dismiss, and you can't because of its own stance, it's insane. | ||
| Someone, they outright make up stories about me. | ||
| I can't get into them because of litigation and stuff like that. | ||
| But they'll outright lie and make everything up. | ||
| And then they're just like, we assume it to be true. | ||
| Like we had a source who said it, therefore it's fact. | ||
| That you should not be able to get away with that. | ||
| And the anonymous sources stuff has gotten out of control. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And then on top of that, you have to prove damages. | ||
| That's easier to do. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Well, Palin could have done that. | ||
| So with Project Veritas, the New York Times argued their reputation is so tarnished, you can't possibly cause them damage. | ||
| That's what happened with Benedict Arnold. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| He was sued for libel. | ||
| He won. | ||
| And he said, but your reputation is worth six cents. | ||
| That's what they gave him? | ||
| And they gave him that. | ||
| That was like in whatever, you know, the traitor, Benedict Arnold. | ||
| Like in the Revolutionary War, he was like, they were like, yeah, you were slandered. | ||
| Your reputation is worth sixpence. | ||
| Before he left America? | ||
| No, after. | ||
| So I'll read, we'll just read two more because we've gone a bit long tonight and I think it was worth it. | ||
| Papa Romano says, I disagree with him a lot, but a great guest. | ||
| Yo, thank you people need like need to understand we would we would have a lot more guests That are more like mainstream journalists and leftists if they were willing to come am I gonna become your pocket leftist? | ||
| No Maybe the pocket Canadian Dude, Crossfire was one of the best shows of all time, news-wise, and that's kind of what I want. | ||
| I will say, we have made a lot of money off people not liking you. | ||
| They're sending in superchats like, he's wrong, I don't like him. | ||
| It's so good to have someone from Canada, because your perspective is invaluable for me as an American. | ||
| I was grown in this system, so I need... | ||
| Well, I do think we, like, you know, we're, as I say in the book, we're like Horatio to your Hamlet, right? | ||
| Like, we're the small, irrelevant country, right on the edge. | ||
| We've, like, I've all, we've lived in, I've lived in America. | ||
| I have American friends. | ||
| I love America, but I'm not American, right? | ||
| Like, so I'm not part of this, you know, America is not my mother, right? | ||
| Like, it's like when you say, like, like healthcare, like that, my blood goes up. | ||
| With your stuff, my blood does not go up. | ||
| You see? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's different things that are important. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Gun control, stuff like that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Gun control's different. | ||
| Canada's, like, again, it's really odd, because, like, nearly half of Canadian homes have a gun in it, but it's not the same gun culture at all, right? | ||
| So there's, like, and it's certainly much, much more regulated. | ||
| And in Canada, cops kick in people's doors and go into their houses and arrest them, and it's harder to do in the United States. | ||
| Though they do it, for sure. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't think we have, like, quite, Canadian cops are incredibly non-violent. | ||
| I mean, that's part of the problem with Ottawa. | ||
| When the truckers came for Paris, they just sent in the tear gas, and it was all over in half an hour. | ||
| That happens every day in France. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what would happen here, incidentally. | ||
| If a trucker convoy started and they went into Chicago, it would be over in a day. | ||
| It would not be Canadian police being like, let's try and not hurt anybody. | ||
| Occupy Wall Street, they couldn't shut down. | ||
| Well, Occupy Wall Street is actually an interesting counter example. | ||
| But I think if this thing ends without any violence, God willing, it will be oddly a kind of national achievement. | ||
| Was there violence from BLM in Canada? | ||
| There were BLM marches. | ||
| They were much smaller. | ||
| than here. | ||
| There were a series of indigenous movements that were about pipelines, but also about, you know, historical genocide, cultural genocide. | ||
| They were burning down churches because of they were essentially... Right-wing indigenous groups? | ||
| Well, I would say national groups. | ||
| They would not fall into either category. | ||
| They're themselves, right? | ||
| And so I would not put them... They got support from the left, though. | ||
| I actually think they have a lot of broad support. | ||
| Like Stephen Harper, who was the last conservative prime minister, he was the first person to acknowledge crimes in the educational system. | ||
| And he actually made a very powerful statement about it. | ||
| I want to I just read one more because we've gone long and we'll wrap it up but | ||
| Cowboy ish says Tim the guy has demonstrated that he has bias | ||
| Why is it wrong to give him our money to check for ourselves? | ||
| So I think I wonder if this question is shouldn't it be wrong, right? Is that what they mean or? | ||
| Or are they agreeing with me? | ||
| I wanted to read that because my point is if you only get news from one source, you'll have no idea what you're arguing against. | ||
| And then I remember I was working for Greenpeace and I was outside of a bookstore and I saw Glenn Beck's book, Arguing Against Climate Change, and I was like, I should read that. | ||
| And I went, I was, I think I was like 21. | ||
| I went to the bookstore and I started skimming through it to see like some of it, read a couple of chapters and I didn't buy the book. | ||
| I put it back. | ||
| Buy my book! | ||
| Don't read it in the stores. | ||
| If someone's going to make an argument and you're like, I completely disagree with this person, wouldn't you want to arm yourself with the facts and data to properly be able to argue your points? | ||
| And not only that, I don't think people should take everything you've said here as everything that's in the book. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| We barely touched on, we only touched on two chapters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| I think people might read through that and be like, oh, okay, this one has less to do with some of the stuff they talked about because we have our bias on this show. | ||
| But long story short, I understand them saying they don't want to give you money. | ||
| That I get. | ||
| But reading as much as you get. | ||
| It's not that much money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man's gotta eat also, send his kids to school. | |
| I only get a royalty. | ||
| It's not like you're giving me the money. | ||
| I just think I'm a proponent of learning and reading as much as you can, and that's why I'll watch CNN, read what they're writing, and be like, when I come out and say, hey, this story was wrong, it's because I read the story, read about the author, looked at what they were researching, and said, here's what they missed. | ||
| Not because I saw the headline and went, that's not true, bye, and then to close out the article. | ||
| No, I gotta read that stuff. | ||
| Otherwise, I'm like... I think reading in itself is an act of depolarization. | ||
| I think actually trying to understand people and trying to be in their language for a bit is really helpful. | ||
| I wrote this book explicitly trying not to judge. | ||
| I went and talked to all sorts of people. | ||
| But like I went and talked to all sorts of people. I wanted to get there | ||
| like I really would feel like I'd failed if I didn't feel like the | ||
| Oathkeepers that I interviewed felt that they were represented fairly like | ||
| I am not trying to skew anything. | ||
| Even people who I consider outright criminals. | ||
| I'm trying to get their point of view and put it on the page. | ||
| And I think that's key. | ||
| If you want to understand people, that's what you have to work towards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I think we should wind it down here. | ||
| So go to TimCast.com, become a member. | ||
| We're not going to do the member segment because we decided just to do this segment extra long to have this deeper conversation. | ||
| But becoming a member does help support all of our work and there is a massive library. | ||
| So there's tons of other segments you can watch and it is greatly appreciated. | ||
| when you sign up because your membership sustains us. | ||
| You can follow the show at TimCastIRL on Instagram. | ||
| You can follow me at TimCast as well. | ||
| Don't forget to like this video, smash the like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends. | ||
| Do you want to shout out anything else? | ||
| No. | ||
| Your book, your social media? | ||
| Just the book. | ||
| Well, I'm at Steven Marshall Twitter if you want to follow me. | ||
| But, you know, you probably don't. | ||
| They'll probably disagree with you. | ||
| No, they should. | ||
| They should tweet at you. | ||
| The book's... Oh, please don't tell them to tweet at me. | ||
| Just tweet nice things. | ||
| Don't do that to me. | ||
| Like, six months from now you come back and you're wearing a MAGA hat and you're like, I learned, I believe everything they've said. | ||
| I was depolarized. | ||
| I was depolarized. | ||
| Or I was repolarized. | ||
| Or I was just turned into an American, really. | ||
| Yeah, you're wearing an American flag. | ||
| Yeah, right on. | ||
| Daniel? | ||
| Yes, Daniel Turner, Power of the Future. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| And I want to give a shout out to our farm Instagram page. | ||
| So love your local gay sheep farmers here in Virginia. | ||
| Bristol Farm, Virginia. | ||
| And it's called Bristol Farm because that was the first hotel we ever stayed at in Vienna, the Bristol Hotel. | ||
| So we named our farm after that hotel. | ||
| And so Bristol Farm, Virginia on Instagram. | ||
| It's new. | ||
| Trying to get people because we love small farms and we're trying to connect with other small farmers. | ||
| Now everyone can agree with that. | ||
| If you've kicked, you'll agree with that. | ||
| Local farming. | ||
| These leftists, they hate farm animals, I swear. | ||
| They just don't want to eat. | ||
| They hate food. | ||
| The way to depolarize is to get the hell out of cities and get away from people. | ||
| Not that wrong. | ||
| And breathe. | ||
| Make people raise a couple chickens together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And have them focus on the chickens. | ||
| The chickens' eyes. | ||
| And people won't be so angry to tweet and hate and things like that if they have to muck out stalls and clean. | ||
| Plus fresh eggs. | ||
| And get fresh eggs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Thanks for coming in and doing the Top Down View. | ||
| That's really, really... | ||
| Pleasure. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| And maybe next time you're here, we can go a little higher and look from like 100,000 feet. | ||
| From well to cosmic next time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Cosmic orders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Beautiful. | |
| Follow me iancrossland.net. | ||
| I'll see you guys next time. | ||
| Thank you guys all very much for tuning in. | ||
| I always love to have conversations where we don't fully agree on everything. | ||
| To me, that's very much the spice of life. | ||
| So I appreciate you guys for bearing with us and for sending us all your crazy superchats. | ||
| You guys can follow me on Twitter and Minds.com at Sarah Patch Lids. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out, everybody. | ||
| Become a member at TimCast.com and we will see you all tomorrow night. |
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