Tim & Co. join NBA player Jonathan Isaac and Daily Wire superstar Ben Shapiro for exclusive back-to-back episodes following Timcast's blowout week at the Daily Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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|---|---|---|
| Welcome to our special weekend show, Sunday Uncensored. | ||
| Every week, we produce four uncensored episodes of the TimCast IRL podcast exclusively at TimCast.com, and we're going to bring you the most important for our weekend show. | ||
| If you want to check out more segments just like this, become a member at TimCast.com. | ||
| Now, enjoy the show. | ||
| Right now, we are hanging out for a special interview with Jonathan Isaac, who is an NBA star who refused to kneel for Black Lives Matter. | ||
| He's publishing a book called Why I Stand, and I'm just reading about this. | ||
| I am so impressed by your willingness to stand up for what you believe in. | ||
| There's so much crazy stuff about this story. | ||
| First and foremost, I'll tell you why I get fired up seeing your story, Jonathan. | ||
| Because a lot of people refuse to stand up, even when deep down they deeply believe something. | ||
| And that's all you got to do. | ||
| Everybody just stood up for what they believed in. | ||
| Things would be better. | ||
| So here's your story where everyone around you is kneeling for the national anthem. | ||
| Which is crazy to me because it's the national anthem. | ||
| Every sporting event we have, they sing the song, special guests come out and sing it. | ||
| How do we get to this point where all of a sudden you're supposed to be kneeling? | ||
| During this. | ||
| And that you, standing up for what you believe in, which is essentially like a long-standing American tradition, becomes this profound statement. | ||
| I'm impressed by your willingness to defy the crowd because of what you know is right. | ||
| So let's just jump into your story, I suppose. | ||
| Of course, we also have Ian. | ||
| He's hanging out as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, everyone. | |
| And I want to learn your story, man. | ||
| So tell me what's going on. | ||
| Yeah, so first off, just thank you so much for having me on. | ||
| I'm a fan of everything that you guys are doing. | ||
| So I would say to kind of just wrap it up in a whole thing of how it all makes sense. | ||
| So around the time of the whole Black Lives Matter thing, George Floyd, as tragic as it was and as awful as it was, goes down. | ||
| And then there's the whole Play of black lives matter everywhere. | ||
| Everyone is pledging their allegiance to Black Lives Matter on the organization and early on in the process. | ||
| I never felt comfortable Standing in that arena, you know, I'm a Christian. | ||
| I feel that Christ is ultimately the answer for the world's problems That's me. | ||
| That's what I've I've grown up on and what I've come to truly believe later in my life here is now and And I never felt comfortable professing that in the Black Lives Matter space. | ||
| And so as everything got kind of just worked up, we get to the NBA bubble and there's the pressure that everyone is going to take this stand. | ||
| They're going to kneel and they're going to wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. | ||
| And I had made the decision that that's not what I want to do. | ||
| I don't believe in it. | ||
| I didn't believe that the Black Lives Matter spirit in terms of what they were ultimately trying to do Went hand in hand with where I was in my heart. | ||
| And I decided not to. | ||
| So obviously it was super crazy. | ||
| A bunch of, you know, people feeling the way that they felt about me deciding to stand came out and it just, we get to the point we are now about writing this book about the story of why I stood. | ||
| The backstory of who Jonathan Isaac is, what has gone on in his life to get to this point of standing and offering that as the remedy to the situation we find ourselves in now. | ||
| Isn't it crazy that it was, you know, several years ago, Colin Kaepernick, he kneels, and he gets criticism for it, and we're in this moment where we're like, oh, you can't do that. | ||
| Now it's inverted! | ||
| Now everybody's kneeling, and you're standing up like, I'm not gonna kneel for this. | ||
| And now there's a story behind standing up and refusing to bend with the crowd. | ||
| It's interesting in how this trend quickly swept across sports. | ||
| And to that point, when Conley Kaepernick did kneel, the NBA itself, you know, we had a team meeting, we had everything, and they said, you're not allowed to kneel. | ||
| We're not going for it. | ||
| We're not going to kneel. | ||
| It's not what we're doing. | ||
| And even though they didn't, the teams didn't come out and say, it's something that you're absolutely not allowed to do. | ||
| It was absolutely the sentiment of like, we're not doing that. | ||
| We're going to focus on basketball. | ||
| We're going to play. | ||
| That was the sentiment, especially in our team meeting. | ||
| And then to have it flip, you know, two years later and everybody like, We have no choice. | ||
| And that was ultimately my issue, part of my issue, where the feeling was you either did this, and if you did it, you agreed, you stood with black lives, you cared about black people, and if you didn't, you were an enemy, and you were evil, and you didn't care. | ||
| And the sentiment was, wearing a t-shirt and kneeling for the national anthem, do not go hand-in-hand with supporting black lives. | ||
| It's not the only way to support black lives, because when I look at my life, my life has been supported by Christ. | ||
| And that's the message that I wrote on. | ||
| So tell me your quick life story, I guess, how you came to be in the NBA. | ||
| What was it like growing up for you? | ||
| So I grew up in Bronx, New York. | ||
| Family was super Christian. | ||
| We were in church all the time. | ||
| My dad was super into it. | ||
| I got into basketball when I left New York and moved to Florida, where my parents had split up. | ||
| There I started playing organized basketball, AAU, started falling in love with the game, really finding my identity in the game, getting liked, getting cared about, having people gravitate around me because of basketball. | ||
| So I started to really just fall in love with it. | ||
| And worked extremely, extremely hard at it. | ||
| Went to Florida State for a year, got drafted, and ended up in Orlando. | ||
| So when you were growing up, how would you describe your experience? | ||
| And I'm asking you from the context of Black Lives Matter, right? | ||
| So you're a young black kid growing up in the Bronx playing basketball, and we hear this narrative from BLM that this country is racist, white privilege, all that stuff. | ||
| Considering that you didn't take a knee for it, I'm curious as to your thoughts, based on your life experience, about the general narrative from Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Not the underlying politics, which we know gets deeper, but... | ||
| Yeah, I would say there's two parts to that. | ||
| I would say growing up in New York, it was definitely something that we were taught about, you know, as kids, you know, there's certain things that you want to watch out for. | ||
| You want to make sure you're respectable to police. | ||
| You want to make sure you're not out here causing any trouble. | ||
| but my family household was definitely, I would say, unspokenly on a conservative trend | ||
| in terms of work really hard, compete in the workplace, compete in what you're doing, | ||
| become the best that you can be, and ultimately that God is gonna take care of the rest. | ||
| If you trust in God, you're gonna get to exactly where you need to be, where you're supposed to be, | ||
| and there's not an outside pressure that can take away from that. | ||
| There's not something that trumps God being in your life and ultimately guiding you into where you're supposed to be. | ||
| And then when it comes to Black Lives Matter, it's the sentiment that the only problem when it comes to black inequality is racism. | ||
| And that's ultimately, not ultimately, but a part of what I would say I reject. | ||
| So I don't know if you guys have seen, I'm sure you guys have the Jordan Peterson interview with, what was her name? | ||
| I just had her name in my head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kathy Newman? | |
| Kathy Newman. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right. | ||
| And what he's trying to get across to her is that it's the notion that sexism is the only reason why there's inequality in pay between women and men. | ||
| And does it account for something? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But is it everything? | ||
| No. | ||
| And I would say the strand of the Black Lives Matter is to teach you or to get you to believe that racism is the only reason for inequality between black and whites. | ||
| They actually say it's a I think Ibram X. Kendi. | ||
| He says it's not a question of did racism happen happen. | ||
| It's how did racism manifest that is to say that that is to say in any circumstance. | ||
| There's always racism present and to me that's that that that's a crazy thought but it also forces people. | ||
| I think what it ends up doing, this narrative that we see from Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter, is you're basically telling people success is out of your reach due to things you can't control, but that's just not true. | ||
| You can succeed if you work hard, and I think you're an example of that. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| putting in the work to become an NBA basketball player, grinding every day, and just almost the work being | ||
| in my hands, it being my job and my duty to go out there and work to become who I wanna be. | ||
| And I even wanna say, the overarching theme in the book is love. | ||
| It's saying that as I've become the man that I am today and growing in the love that God has for me | ||
| and walking that out, I'm believing that if we could truly love each other, black, white, | ||
| and different over our deficiencies of what we do wrong, the destructiveness of both sides, we could get ahead. | ||
| And so the book is saying that because of, I'm gonna show you how Christ's love has been manifested | ||
| in my life, and I believe that that love is gonna be what really changes the world for the better. | ||
| What's the book called? | ||
| Why I Stand. | ||
| When did you finish writing it? | ||
| We finished writing it... Shoot, that's a good question. | ||
| I would say towards the... What month is it now? | ||
| April? | ||
| I would say towards the beginning of this year. | ||
| So around December, January. | ||
| How long did you spend writing it? | ||
| About a year. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I can't write a book, man. | ||
| I don't know how people do it. | ||
| Yeah, did you have other people helping you write it? | ||
| I had another person help me write it, Amy. | ||
| She's fantastic. | ||
| She helped me write it, but just, we had time. | ||
| So a part of the, you know, kind of the blessing in disguise from the injury is that I had down time to just focus on my rehab and work through this book. | ||
| What was the injury? | ||
| I tore my ACL. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Yeah, I think I had an ACL tear at some point. | ||
| You told me earlier that you got injured and I was like, oh okay, well we'll hear about that. | ||
| An ACL tear? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was that on the side of the knee or something? | ||
| Right in the middle, right? | ||
| Right in the middle. | ||
| I've been skateboarding my whole life and the ACL tear is the dreaded injury. | ||
| It's definitely a lot different than what it used to be in terms of, you know, obviously back then and today, you hear ACL and it's like, oh my gosh, it's the most dreaded thing. | ||
| But, you know, where we are today, you know, you get about a year and some change and you're good. | ||
| You get like the PRP injections, platelet-rich plasma? | ||
| We didn't do that, but, you know, the whole thing, it's good now. | ||
| We're pretty much ready to roll into next season. | ||
| So, Colin Kaepernick experiences a big backlash when he takes a knee. | ||
| I'm wondering if now that the narrative's kind of inverted, and you're the only one, you know, standing up basically, are you getting flak from other players? | ||
| Are you getting anger from activists? | ||
| Are they mad at you? | ||
| Uh, I would say yeah, it's definitely a part of it. | ||
| There's a little part in the book where I talk about directly after I stood and there was a whole team meeting that I got kind of pulled into and it was about me and my decision to stand and that I was hijacking the narrative of what they were trying to | ||
| accomplish. | ||
| And ultimately what the sentiment was there for me is that I respected your decision to kneel. | ||
| When we had that team meeting and we said this is what we're going to do, | ||
| I didn't say, well why the heck are you guys doing that? | ||
| Give me your reason and everything like that. | ||
| But that's all that I wanted in return. So we were able to walk away from that meeting. | ||
| So do you consider yourself conservative, right-wing? | ||
| I would consider myself, I've tried my best to allow my Christianity to guide my principles | ||
| and ultimately what it is that I believe. I I believe in the love of Christ. | ||
| I believe in obviously the tenets of the Bible and what it teaches. | ||
| And I think that it's definitely caused me to lean on the conservative side on a lot of those different issues. | ||
| But I wouldn't come out right saying I'm conservative, I'm Republican. | ||
| To me, it kind of feels like we're seeing a lot more intolerance from the left, I guess as you'd call it, however you want to define it, in that you say, I respect your decision to kneel, you know, do your thing, they get mad at you for not doing it. | ||
| And we see similar things in a lot of different facets. | ||
| We often see, I mean, in terms of guns. | ||
| In blue states, where I understand they got high gun crime and they want to try and solve that, Okay, fine. | ||
| But then why do you want a law over red states, where it's rural and very different? | ||
| It seems like there's constantly a, you know, you gotta live this way, you gotta do what we wanna do. | ||
| And it used to be, when I was younger, at least the perspective was that the right was more, like, that more moral authoritarian. | ||
| Now it's kind of flipped. | ||
| And I'm sitting here talking to people at the Daily Wire, more conservatives, who are very much like, I disagree with you, but pursue your happiness, do your thing. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I think there's definitely a trend on the left that is like, we are so tolerant. | ||
| We're not authoritarian, but it really is the complete opposite, where we want you to be tolerant towards us, but we don't have to be tolerant towards you. | ||
| And so that's definitely the strain that's coming out of the left. | ||
| And you're not telling people they got to stand or anything like that. | ||
| You're just doing your thing. | ||
| You're staying true to yourself. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It was it was projected to be a symbol. | ||
| It was projected to be us kneeling and wearing this t-shirt. | ||
| We're symbolizing support for black lives. | ||
| But when it's a symbol, everybody doesn't have to go along with their symbol. | ||
| Once it becomes you have to do this, then it's no longer a symbol. | ||
| In my opinion, it's a command. | ||
| And that is what I was rejecting. | ||
| So by standing, was this more a statement in support of the pledge or was it just a statement not in support of Black Lives Matter? | ||
| I would say both. | ||
| Definitely not in support of Black Lives Matter, but at the same time, I love the country that I live in. | ||
| One of the things that we're taught in church all the time is that you haven't done everything right, but you haven't done everything wrong either in terms of striving to be better. | ||
| And I think that that's a sentiment that's lost when it comes to America. | ||
| I love to live in America, the freedoms that we've been granted, and obviously everything hasn't been done right in terms of the history, but everything hasn't been done wrong either in terms of taking the steps for us to help. | ||
| Progressing get to where we are today. | ||
| Yeah when it comes to terms of like racism and systemic racism with BLM and things like that I I think we talked a lot about this actually on the show The history of like slave slavery in the United States was like an African slave trade So the people that came over happened to have that skin color, but it was just those were the slaves that were brought They could have been from Ireland. | ||
| They could have been from you know wherever Middle East or whatever but so the ancestors of those people it's like a class issue like the great-grandfathers of slave or the great-grandchildren of slaves The family wealth that's passed down is there's not a lot of wealth passed down because or or Education maybe isn't passed down because a lot of times your parents will be the ones that teach you when you're young and so it's misrepresented as a racial issue when it's more of like a class issue that happens to be | ||
| Those people from that place. | ||
| And so to say that it's the skin color that causes it just drives me insane. | ||
| I don't know if you agree with that or what. | ||
| I would say it's both. | ||
| I think it's definitely a class issue but especially when you get into the Jim Crow era and that it definitely became a much about the skin color of like black versus white and hating blackness in a sense for sure. | ||
| So I would say it's both. | ||
| I would say as it is today in terms of definitely the tone of Hey, it's Kimberly Fletcher here from Moms4America with some very exciting news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| See you on the tour. | ||
| See you on the tour. | ||
| hate of blackness has decreased and now it is definitely become more of a class issue | ||
| and if we're able to kind of break down those barriers of education um to me getting back | ||
| to god in the first place we can see a huge increase and that's that's also in | ||
| The different, you know, people that are dark skinned that are over in America today, the West Indians, the Nigerians that come over and do really, really well. | ||
| If we could adopt some of those family principles, education principles, along with, like I said, for me, the biggest point is getting back to Christ in the first place. | ||
| You know, I think we could see much more progress than we've seen when other than beating the racism horse. | ||
| I completely agree with how you put it. | ||
| I think when you look at the past, there was absolutely racism. | ||
| It was absolutely, somebody would look at someone, see the color of their skin, and immediately just be like, I have a problem with that. | ||
| Today, there's elements of that, absolutely. | ||
| People are racist. | ||
| But I always tell people at this point, it's a class issue. | ||
| I do think, in my view on this, and maybe I'm wrong, but because of the historical racism that we saw with slavery through Jim Crow and all that, you've got less generational wealth that's passed down, which results in a pronounced class issue today. | ||
| But we've passed a bunch of these laws to make all of the race-based stuff illegal. | ||
| What scares me is, I feel like we've made a tremendous amount of progress from the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. | ||
| Not perfect, but we've done a tremendously, a great job. | ||
| It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in, say, housing or whatever, or school. | ||
| But now, we're actually seeing, there was an article I saw earlier about a woman, a white, progressive, liberal woman, saying, segregated classrooms are a good thing. | ||
| And I'm like, that kind of sounds like going backwards, and it's part of the problem. | ||
| I want people all to hang out together and be comfortable hanging out with each other and being happy with each other. | ||
| Her argument was, white people have white-only spaces by default, because there's so many white people, they'll go into a room, and it's only white people, and that's not fair to black people, so there should be spaces that don't allow white people, and I'm like, No, I mean, like, I get it if it's a private thing and you want to hang out and do whatever you want, sure, that the clan can have their rallies, whatever, I don't like that. | ||
| Like, I'm not going to hang out with those people. | ||
| But in public institutions and public accommodation, I actually enjoy being with people from various backgrounds. | ||
| I don't understand how they're the ones claiming they're arguing for diversity while simultaneously trying to put forward these things that create, like, POC and non-POC spaces. | ||
| Did you see the, it's hilarious, the video, I don't know who put it out, some comedian, but he's pretty much conflating the similarities between the racist and the woke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ryan Long, he's a friend of ours, yeah. | |
| And the sentiment of that is even, even take the justice, the lady justice that just got nominated. | ||
| Katonji Brown. | ||
| Katonji Brown. | ||
| It's like, with this narrative of it's impossible to get ahead, it's impossible to be black and have opportunities and stuff, here you have someone, you may not agree with their ideology or anything, somebody who has ascended to the highest court, it's like, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't complete, and if racism was such an issue, it didn't prevail in that case. | ||
| Well, I mean, look at Thurgood Marshall, for instance. | ||
| I believe he was the first black Supreme Court justice, and this was back in, what, the 60s, I think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Then you have Clarence Thomas. | ||
| And the funny thing is, they put up these articles, they were like, Etanji Brown Jackson is the first black Supreme Court justice. | ||
| And I'm like, Clarence Thomas is still alive. | ||
| He's still here. | ||
| And then you get Bill Maher. | ||
| Bill Maher said, Republicans would be happy with no black Supreme Court justices. | ||
| And the funniest thing was this Republican guy got a viral tweet. | ||
| He said, literally, the black one is the only one I like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw that. | |
| It frustrates me seeing how the left is... I think many of these politicians, many of these personalities, not all of them, I think they're scared to give up racism because it empowers them. | ||
| To go to people and say, you are constrained by this problem and only I can solve your problems. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't like the victimization tactic. | |
| That's what I feel like Black Lives Matter is doing, maybe not even intentionally, maybe it's intentional or not, but saying that because of the way you look, you're gonna have a harder time. | ||
| I don't think that it's the skin color that's causing it. | ||
| There might be reasons why people... But like you said, if you try hard, it doesn't matter what your skin looks like, your eyeballs are telling the story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think... I have no problem... Actually, I don't know if you said that. | |
| I said that. | ||
| I don't know if you said that. | ||
| I don't want to put words in your mouth. | ||
| I got no problem if there's anyone of any race and they say the United States is a majority white country. | ||
| And that means there's going to be assumptions made about you. | ||
| That means some people might be racist. | ||
| But, if you work hard enough, if you work smart enough, and you figure out how this system works, you can be the richest person on the planet. | ||
| You can be successful, you can be famous. | ||
| That will not be, you know, race... I mean... | ||
| Any factor if you're born with your height. | ||
| Muggsy Bows, for instance. | ||
| Bows, am I pronouncing it wrong? | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| That dude, he's an inspiration my whole life. | ||
| Because when I heard, what was he, 5'3"? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he could 360 dunk? | ||
| He could jump higher than his own height. | ||
| And I'm like, you see? | ||
| This is a guy, there's so many people who are like, I can't do this because of this thing. | ||
| And it's like, man. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe there's some limitations, you know? | ||
| Maybe you're not going to be tall enough to play. | ||
| But there are people who defy those odds and say, I will do whatever it takes. | ||
| I will work hard and overcome any of these presumptions. | ||
| That's what I want to know. | ||
| What was your work ethic like when you got to Florida and you started playing ball and you realized, I'm going to do this for a living? | ||
| I just fell in love with it. | ||
| Basketball really became a love for me and so it was all I did. | ||
| I woke up and I went to the courts and I played from sunup to sundown every day, all the time. | ||
| Got with friends, organized, let's play here, let's play here. | ||
| And it just became, I just got better. | ||
| But there wasn't even a thought of anything outside of that. | ||
| There wasn't fear of somebody stopping me from making it. | ||
| It was just that I love this game and I'm going to play it. | ||
| And I honestly just got passed along from one stage to the next and here I am in the NBA. | ||
| Not everybody can be in the NBA. | ||
| True. | ||
| It might be like Ben Shapiro. | ||
| I don't think it's going to happen for him. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| But that's the reality of life, too, is that as much as some people might say, oh, there's some physical disadvantage you have that's holding you back, well, sometimes you have advantages, too. | ||
| The way I view life is we're all dealt this hand of cards. | ||
| And I've seen people win poker hands with the worst possible hand because they knew how to play it right. | ||
| How much of it do you think is physical gifts that get you in the NBA versus work ethic? | ||
| I would say it's a lot of things in a whole. | ||
| It's absolutely, if you average out NBA players, we are a specific build, we are a specific height across the board. | ||
| And in that same group of guys, you also have probably the most, the hardest working guys who have kind of risen to the top in their different fields and or different positions and stuff in different places in the country. | ||
| And their physicality goes in that as well. | ||
| But then there's another piece in terms of just mentality. | ||
| Being able to block out the noise, being able to block out the distractions, being able to focus in on this one thing really hard. | ||
| The NBA is a culmination of all those different things and guys that are different heights, come from different places. | ||
| They're usually the hardest working guys with the best attributes and the best mentality that have got them to that place. | ||
| Do you think other players, you know, so you're standing, I see this photo of these other guys kneeling. | ||
| Do they all support Black Lives Matter? | ||
| I would say no. | ||
| I would say, and I would say that because of the sentiment. | ||
| When we had that conversation about what it is that we're going to do in terms of are we going to kneel or are we going to stand, it wasn't that everyone was saying, man, I care so much about this issue and I'm so in line with the Black Lives Matter movement that I want to kneel. | ||
| That was definitely the sentiment from a couple guys, but the rest of them was that we don't have a choice. | ||
| It was that either you do this or you do not care about black people. | ||
| The first question that I got asked after I stood in the press conference was, do you even believe that black lives matter? | ||
| And I'm like, and I'm like, I'm thinking in my head, like, wait, you're a part of the problem. | ||
| You're a part of the problem because in your mind, you're conflating a t-shirt and kneeling for the national anthem with the very care for black lives. | ||
| And to me, that's it. | ||
| They don't go together. | ||
| Who asked you that? | ||
| I don't remember the reporter's name. | ||
| Probably some white woman, I imagine? | ||
| No, she wasn't white, but it was a woman. | ||
| I'm pretty sure she was a black woman, but it was just the first question out of the gate. | ||
| You didn't kneel. | ||
| You didn't wear a t-shirt. | ||
| Do you even care? | ||
| How crazy? | ||
| This blows my mind. | ||
| You're black. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| How could you ask somebody that? | ||
| Candace Owens, they say that she's... They tell us that only white people can be racist. | ||
| Then they tell us Candace Owens is a white supremacist. | ||
| And I'm just like, I don't want to hear it, man. | ||
| I want to hang out with people. | ||
| I think people are cool people. | ||
| I don't think race determines whether someone's cool or not. | ||
| I think some people are cool and some people are bad people. | ||
| There's bad white people, bad Mexican people, bad Asian people, bad black people. | ||
| There's good black people. | ||
| There's good Asians. | ||
| Just because people are all different types. | ||
| I just, what really, really bugs me about the whole thing we've seen in the past several years of the rise of critical race theory is the hyper-focus on race and, you know, specifically in this example, if you don't take an action in support of a brand, of a non-profit, it's a statement about your morals as pertaining to a racial group of people, And that's exactly what it was. | ||
| Because of the name, because of the name Black Lives Matter, you forget that it is in support of an organization. | ||
| And organizations have ethos, they have ideologies, and now you have the same organization going and buying a six million dollar house. | ||
| So it's like, when something as tragic as a George Floyd happens, and they're able to put out this phrase or this slogan that says Black Lives Matter, it's like, how could you not jump on board with this? | ||
| Of course Black Lives Matter, of course this was a Of course, this was a terrible moment in time of a black man being killed. | ||
| Cops, racist or not, it was awful. | ||
| But everybody agrees with that. | ||
| So it's like you distance yourself from the organization and just come through with the phrase that everybody agrees with. | ||
| And that was ultimately, I'm thinking about the organization. | ||
| I'm thinking about what the organization stands for. | ||
| I'm thinking about that the organization is against God and against family and against all these different things. | ||
| That's not something that I can support. | ||
| They are. | ||
| They head on their website, disrupting the nuclear family. | ||
| That, to me, you know, I personally believe in God. | ||
| I was Catholic a little bit growing up, but I don't consider myself religious, like, theistic. | ||
| I just believe that there is a God is the simplest way to explain it. | ||
| But I also recognize the importance of some kind of faith for people. | ||
| And without that, they turn to tribalist, critical race theory. | ||
| They try and find purpose somewhere, and they get this weird facsimile of it. | ||
| I also think that family is extremely important. | ||
| I had two parents. | ||
| I grew up in a house with two loving parents who helped me become a better person, and I think that's a major advantage. | ||
| So when I see Black Lives Matter say, disrupt the nuclear family, when I see these articles written by feminists who say, if feminism is to succeed, we must end monogamy or the family or something like that, I'm like, that's going to be really, really bad for kids. | ||
| It's a political statement made by a non-profit corporation, basically. | ||
| Like, what you're saying, if you really want to help black people and black lives, and you're in a room with thousands of people, and I've got all this money, I'm not, if I turn and give money just to the black people, it's going to cause resentment amongst all the other people, and then it's going to disprove, it's going to make it worse for those people that I gave the money to, because they're going to become, like, hated by the others. | ||
| You want to improve everybody's life together, and then it improves black lives, and white, and everybody can rise up. | ||
| But I do understand the systemic Class problem that we're having from the slavery issue. | ||
| Let me elaborate on that because what I think what's happening now, you know, we had serious racism in this country for a long time, even up to the 80s. | ||
| Are you familiar with blockbusting and redlining? | ||
| Redlining, not so much blockbusting. | ||
| Blockbusting is dark stuff, man. | ||
| So, what would happen is, a real estate company would go to a white neighborhood, buy a house, and then move a black family in. | ||
| They would then go door-to-door to the white families and say, oh, look who just moved in, your property value is gonna go down now, you better sell to us before it's too late. | ||
| They would, it's crazy that they would do this. | ||
| And then the white people would get scared and they'd start selling their houses. | ||
| And then once the real estate company bought up a bunch of the houses, | ||
| they would say, thank you to the black family, your lease is up, you can leave now. | ||
| And then sell all the houses back at the profit. | ||
| They would use racism and the fear of racism to rip people off. | ||
| And it was destructive to the black families. | ||
| It was destructive to these white families. | ||
| That was happening up until the 80s. | ||
| That stuff, it's dark stuff. | ||
| And redlining, too. | ||
| Now, some people try to argue, oh no, it was all a victim of market forces, and I'm like, yo, we know people did this. | ||
| Like, there's stories, it was in the 80s it was happening. | ||
| But here's my point, what I'm trying to get to with your point. | ||
| We made that illegal. | ||
| You can't do that anymore. | ||
| You can try. | ||
| There may still be remnants of it. | ||
| You can try. | ||
| It's illegal, and people will come after you. | ||
| You will get sued. | ||
| So this means, now that we've said, by law, like, we don't want this to happen anymore, you've got poor white people on the South Side of Chicago, living alongside poor black people. | ||
| All of a sudden, Democrat comes along and says, we're gonna give all the black people money. | ||
| And the poor, you know, white person is sitting there wondering, like, why am I starving? | ||
| Me and my neighbor are both people, but he's being given money and I'm not. | ||
| I think the issue is we've dealt with it policy-wise. | ||
| There's still, I think, some policy, you know, things that we could probably accomplish. | ||
| We've not solved every problem in the world. | ||
| But I think it's a class issue today that is solved. | ||
| If the issue is that black communities in this country are disproportionately impacted by historical racism, then it would be true today that a class-based solution would disproportionately benefit black families, and that should be That should make the left and the right happy, because it's not a race-based issue anymore. | ||
| There may be, you know, out of nine families in one block that are black families that are impoverished, there's one that's white, or whatever the number might be, but everybody gets an opportunity to be lifted up and be helped out. | ||
| For some reason, the modern left is not okay with that. | ||
| You know, in California, they tried repealing the provision from their constitution that prohibited racial discrimination in college and public contracting. | ||
| And I just think that's them walking us backwards. | ||
| They're gonna bring the problems of racism back. | ||
| How deep do you go into it in the book? | ||
| In terms of? | ||
| Well, the history of, basically the history from slavery to now the history of racism and classism. | ||
| You know, honestly not so much. | ||
| The book is mainly about, again, about the love of Christ. | ||
| It's about Taking where we're at and ultimately all the problems that we have that are not just racism, just world problems in a whole, but saying that if each of us could find the answer in loving our neighbor, loving someone who has done wrong to us, loving someone who we don't like or anything like that, we would ultimately see progress. | ||
| before all of these other things come into play. | ||
| And it's an interpersonal answer of affecting one person, then affecting a family, then affecting a city, | ||
| then affecting a society, and ultimately the world. | ||
| Do you know who Darryl Davis is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, | ||
| a podcast for the First Podcast Network. | ||
| Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that. | ||
| There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare, debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. | ||
| We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. | ||
| Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. | ||
| He's this black jazz musician. | ||
| One day he went to a Klan rally and he said he thought to himself, how could this person hate me if they never met me? | ||
| So he shows up and people are, they're a bunch of racists, but he starts talking to them. | ||
| In his time, I think he's been doing this for a couple decades, he's de-radicalized like 200 Klan members. | ||
| They've taken their robes off, they say, I was totally wrong about being racist. | ||
| He didn't do it by starting a movement, waving flags. | ||
| He didn't do it by going on TV and making demands of government. | ||
| He did it by going to an individual person and saying, hey, I'm Daryl, nice to meet you. | ||
| And he tells these stories. | ||
| One of these stories is amazing. | ||
| He's hanging out with this high-ranking Klan member. | ||
| And then it turns out this Klan member is a huge rock and roll fan. | ||
| Well, Daryl's a blues musician. | ||
| He's got connections. | ||
| And he's like, oh yeah, that famous Cadillac you really like? | ||
| Yeah, I know the guys who have it. | ||
| You want to take a ride in it? | ||
| Or you want to sit down in it and check it out? | ||
| And he's like, are you kidding me? | ||
| It's a dream come true. | ||
| And he's like, come with me, man. | ||
| And then this guy's like, all of these things they told me about race and racism was not true. | ||
| Darryl's a great guy who's a good friend of mine. | ||
| Just by being friends, talking to these people, he made them not racist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the amazing story. | ||
| And taking him to that car and letting him ride in it, that would be, in my opinion, an action of love. | ||
| An action of extending an arm across the aisle that's saying, I don't believe all of this other stuff that people are saying. | ||
| I want to get to know you. | ||
| I want to know who you are. | ||
| And extending that love. | ||
| And if you get it in return, amazing. | ||
| If you don't, you keep on loving. | ||
| And I believe that that is the it's the message that has helped get us to this point in terms of Martin Luther King about you overcome evil with good and love ultimately and not fighting back in the way that is riots and these other things but ultimately finding it in your heart to love your neighbor because you've been loved by God. | ||
| I believe it's going to be the how we progress. | ||
| I saw a tweet from a prominent atheist personality, I'll just leave it at that, and he said that he's tired of playing on defense. | ||
| He says every Bible must be sold with a warning label that it says it may lead to mental derangement. | ||
| And that's crazy to me because Here we are having a conversation. | ||
| Every conversation I've had with any prominent religious person, obviously not every person is a good person no matter what their religion is, is a similar message to what you're saying. | ||
| Love your neighbor and try and be your best. | ||
| You know, our good friend Seamus, who we have on the show, is a very, very devout Catholic. | ||
| There's a lot of things he does not agree with and he thinks are wrong. | ||
| But he doesn't force himself upon people. | ||
| He doesn't attack people. | ||
| He doesn't insult them. | ||
| Well, we all insult people, especially when we do comedy, but he doesn't attack people and scream and he's not vile. | ||
| He's like, I want you to do better with your life and I wish you would do better. | ||
| I wonder how it is that, you know, the narrative from the left, perhaps it's because they want to do away with Christianity, they want to attack it at its core. | ||
| They keep pushing these lines about what Christians believe, but then you actually sit down with any prominent religious individual and they're talking about love and forgiveness and trying to reach across the aisle and things like that. | ||
| I'd agree with you in terms of it being about Christianity and it's ultimately the one to attack. | ||
| You don't hear much about attacking other religions, even Islam or anything like that. | ||
| It really is the Christian ethic of love and ultimately the morality of it that gets attacked because the left wants to do away with all of that and just live in a state of what feels right for you. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| I believe because Christianity is true. | ||
| I truly believe that that is the, it's the relationship with God that is based on God loving us in our sin | ||
| and working our way to us and not us working our way to him. | ||
| And it being, and the crux of it being about love, I believe is the reason why that it gets attacked | ||
| in the way that it is. | ||
| And because even if you go through it, the people who do attack it know that it's true. | ||
| And it's ultimately the one that you have to contend with. | ||
| And it is the religion of the West. | ||
| And ultimately, if you're going to take down the West, you're going to have to take down Christianity. | ||
| You know, one thing I often bring up on the show is that this culture war we're experiencing, | ||
| I think has a lot to do with two different moral frameworks. | ||
| There is the Judeo-Christian moral framework, which I think everybody in this room agrees with, but then there is the Marxist or fascistic moral framework. | ||
| I had a conversation with a, there was a family coming around my neighborhood in South Jersey, Philly area, and they were preaching, or what is it called? | ||
| Evangelizing. | ||
| Evangelizing, coming with the Bible. | ||
| And I had a good conversation where I pointed out that I'm not theistic. | ||
| I don't go to mass or anything like that. | ||
| I do believe in God. | ||
| But I also recognize the lessons from the Bible that we hold true today, that are core principles in our country, such as the presumption of innocence. | ||
| If you are accused of a crime, we are supposed to presume you are innocent until it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. | ||
| And that tenet comes from the Bible, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, that, you know, God said, if there's but one righteous person, I will not destroy these cities. | ||
| And it was only after the righteous people were all saved from the cities that God, you know, he rained fire and crimson on Sodom and Gomorrah. | ||
| But the point is, I was reading about the Fifth Amendment, how powerful it is in protecting the innocent. | ||
| This country is far from perfect, but it's pretty good. | ||
| I've been to a lot of places. | ||
| And it said the Founding Fathers had, you know, Benjamin Franklin, it is better that a hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer. | ||
| And I said, wow, a hundred? | ||
| That's huge. | ||
| Because Blackstone, he was this British judge, I think, where he said it's better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. | ||
| And I said, where did he come up with that? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I like that idea. | ||
| He talks about how If your society would punish the innocent, then people would have no faith in your society. | ||
| And if they're so inclined upon just punishing someone for doing something, you'll actually let the bad people go free. | ||
| You need to make sure you have a very high standard for whether or not you're going to imprison somebody or punish them or seek retribution or justice. | ||
| Because if you're getting the wrong people, the bad guys are getting away with it, and the good guys are hurting, everybody's mad. | ||
| But that idea came from the Bible. | ||
| And often, law is not good. | ||
| So, in times of evil law, you need to let the criminals go free, because they're the good people, like a Nazi. | ||
| You know, you can claim all sorts of things. | ||
| Right, and Frank was the criminal. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But so, you know, in thinking about this, I see people like Bill Maher, he's like a secular atheist, but he doesn't understand when he believes in free speech, when he believes in the right presumption of innocence, these are founded in Christian moral values. | ||
| Now we have the rise of this wokeness and things like BLM, they don't believe in that framework, they hate it, they want to destroy it. | ||
| They abide by, typically, the ethos of there is no truth but power. | ||
| Where they think that if we get enough people to say it, it will just be true, and that's all that matters. | ||
| I'm a big fan of take care of yourself before you attempt to take care of your neighbor. | ||
| Take the plank out of your own eye before you attempt to take the speck of dust out of your neighbor's or something like that. | ||
| I think that's incredibly valuable now. | ||
| Jordan Peterson talks about cleaning your room. | ||
| Take care of yourself right now. | ||
| Now is the time. | ||
| Do you have a favorite tenet in Christianity? | ||
| Well, I'll just start off by saying, to your point about how much of the Judeo-Christian ethic is baked into everything in the West, and it's almost like to attack it is to very attack the foundations of society itself. | ||
| Maybe on purpose. | ||
| Maybe on purpose, for sure. | ||
| But I say probably my favorite tenet is you do unto others how you would want to be done unto yourself. | ||
| I think that it speaks to the very crux of a human being in terms of the way you want to be treated, the way you want to see things happen in your own life. | ||
| You give that to someone else and ultimately you'll create a society that wants to be lived in. | ||
| And I think that idea is rooted in the belief there's something outside of you. | ||
| There's something bigger than you. | ||
| That another person exists, they have inalienable rights, the same as I do. | ||
| When you understand that, you try to do better by other people to the best of your abilities. | ||
| But then I look at a lot of what's happening with Black Lives Matter and this activism as very narcissistic. | ||
| Individuals who are going to smash up a window or set fire to a building or hurt someone because they don't care about what they're doing to others. | ||
| They don't believe what you just said. | ||
| Because you know for a fact that these people who are smashing windows would freak out and be angry if someone smashed their window. | ||
| They don't want their windows smashed. | ||
| It's almost like they don't care about what exists outside of them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And to the point is that I believe that those people can be reached with love. | ||
| So it's almost as if the people who are out there to me who have been manipulated by media, manipulated by whoever's at the top that is trying to get these things done, manipulated by the Black Lives Matter organization, that those people if shown love can in a sense be redeemed in a sense of because we've been redeemed ourselves but ultimately that those people are not evil those people are not terrible people they're in a they're in a predicament of again being manipulated by the powers that be and ultimately take the Klansman for example that person | ||
| You could say from the jump that he never hated black people, but he's been manipulated by the ideology. | ||
| But because there was a black person that was willing to reach his hand across the aisle, he could wake up and see that there's a better way and see that he can ultimately love or like whatever a black person. | ||
| I'm a little bit more pessimistic, but I ultimately agree with you. | ||
| In the story about the Klan, there's another really crazy story in that we booked Daryl Davis to speak at an event in the Philly suburbs, South Jersey, and far-left activists threatened to burn the theater down. | ||
| So the theater kicked us out, without question. | ||
| We ended up having to find a new venue. | ||
| The After Party was still in the same area, and these activists were outside protesting. | ||
| And Daryl tried to go talk to them, and they wouldn't. | ||
| They screamed at him. | ||
| And he said he'd never experienced anything like it. | ||
| He said that he has gone to Klan meetings, and they've gone up smugly, like, oh, we know what we're talking about, we know what you are. | ||
| But they'd still talk to him. | ||
| When he tried walking up to Antifa, they started screaming at him, calling him a fascist and a Nazi, and he couldn't even get a word in. | ||
| This is the argument we've received on the show. | ||
| I feel very much like you about communication and love. | ||
| I feel like if you allow someone to understand you, that they will become living in a place of love. | ||
| It just happens. | ||
| But the argument we're getting is that these people, this Black Lives Matter, these leftists or whatever, feel like they're at war mentally. | ||
| And when you're at war with someone, You may want to love them, but they're still going to kill you because you're at war. | ||
| And if you can get one of those soldiers over to your side and then you're able to talk to them, they will convert. | ||
| But during the war, love is not the tactic. | ||
| And I don't know if that's true, but this is the argument that I've been getting. | ||
| I think it's fair to say. | ||
| And we'll wrap up with a couple of thoughts here. | ||
| There have been many people who are on that side, who have come around and been like, wow, I was wrong to think these things. | ||
| There's many people. | ||
| We've talked to people like Carrie Smith, who used to be a woke progressive activist on the left, and now she's Christian. | ||
| I'm pretty sure she's Christian, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She is, yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I think Candace Owens herself even was on the left, you know, some time ago. | ||
| And then people start to break through. | ||
| They start to get access to information. | ||
| I think a lot of what we hear about Christians, and maybe this is one that's always benefited me, is that going to Catholic school, When I see these narratives from the media about how Christians are manipulative, mentally deranged, or just mean, or nasty, or hypocrites, I'm like, you're not talking about any of the people I ever met or grew up with. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like, sure, there was bad people, but people were just people. | ||
| I think they mainly use the word zealot. | ||
| It doesn't really matter what religion you are. | ||
| If you're a zealot, then you can become kind of hard to communicate with. | ||
| So, we went a little bit over, but it's cool because this has been fun. | ||
| Jonathan, do you want to tell people where they can get the book? | ||
| How to get it? | ||
| Head to Amazon and just type in why I stand and pre-order your book. | ||
| Pre-orders are really, really important, so I appreciate the support. | ||
| I appreciate you standing up for what you believe in, man. | ||
| Hearing that there's a lot of players that don't agree with it, but they're willing to kneel for it, that scares me. | ||
| I got a final question. | ||
| What's the best part of playing Power Forward? | ||
| The best part of playing Power Forward? | ||
| I'd say getting the dunk. | ||
| Getting the run-up and down the court and dunk. | ||
| One-handed or two-handed? | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Any way you want it. | ||
| Right on, man. | ||
| So what should people look forward to? | ||
| Anything else you want to mention before we bounce? | ||
| I say just look forward to reading it. | ||
| I think that the message of love, the message that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and ultimately to free ourselves, and even to the point you were talking about, and you were saying that like, In the midst of war, love is not something you lead with. | ||
| And my mind automatically jumped back to Martin Luther King, right? | ||
| He died for what he believed in, but I believe that he won because of what was able to transpire after that. | ||
| And so it's ultimately that the truth is the reason why you treat someone with love is because you're aiming above them at not pleasing them, but pleasing God. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| And so for me in this, my rationale is I'm going to continue to communicate, talk, but share the love of God with people. | ||
| And whatever happens in that process is the right thing for that time because love wins always. | ||
| God's love wins always, in my opinion, because of what I've experienced in my own life and what's laid out in the book and just what I've seen and what has come after it. | ||
| I want to say, I'll say one last thing. | ||
| Bill Maher made a documentary, it was called Religulous. | ||
| And the one thing he said, I think it was in this documentary, he said that people came to him and said, I'm going to pray for you. | ||
| And he's, as atheists, they come and he said, thank you, that means a lot to me. | ||
| Because he understands what it means to dedicate your energy and your thoughts in a positive way for someone you disagree with. | ||
| So even though he doesn't believe the way they do, he knows they're trying really hard to help him and make his life better. | ||
| And that was a great message. | ||
| You know the song Pray by Sam Smith, where he says, everyone prays in the end. | ||
| Everyone prays in the end. | ||
| And it's ultimately like, take a Bill Maher, in time of need, in time of death, in time of things like that, he may not pray, but the people around him that love him and care about him will pray, or they'll seek somebody to pray. | ||
| And to me, it's the ultimate underlying truth in us that there is something greater than us. | ||
| And I believe that that's Christ. | ||
| I believe that it's God who has worked his way to us through Christ. | ||
| You ever hear the saying, there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole? | ||
| I have. | ||
| People might want to deny it, but it's true. | ||
| It doesn't mean that you'll instantly believe the Bible is real. | ||
| It means that when you're in that moment, where you're facing oblivion, you think, if there's someone or something or anybody listening, please help me. | ||
| Yeah, it's that lack of control that people feel, and it's like when you realize you're really not in control of this world. | ||
| We might feel like we are because we have money, but things can happen. | ||
| It's magnetic, you know? | ||
| I think the West has had so much control because of what it is that we founded on, that we've gotten to the place of the woke, feeling as if they can transcend that reality, and it's only going to crash and burn ultimately in time because That that reality is more real to me than reality itself that the bedrock of what it is that America has been founding on and Because we've got it so good. | ||
| It's easy to turn around and say Biology doesn't exist and other things don't exist All right, let's wrap it up. | ||
| So you're going to be playing again. | ||
| You're back next season? | ||
| Next season. | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| We look forward to it. | ||
| And your book is Why I Stand on Amazon. | ||
| People can pick it up. | ||
| Pre-order it now. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| It's going to come out in what, May? | ||
| May 17th is the release date. | ||
| May 17th. | ||
| Jonathan, thanks for hanging out, man. | ||
| It's an honor and a privilege for you to talk to us, and I appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Peace and love. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Take care, everybody. | ||
| Joining us is Ben Shapiro. | ||
| What's going on, dude? | ||
| Do you want to introduce yourself? | ||
| Not that I think you need to, but... Sure. | ||
| So I'm Editor Emeritus of The Daily Wire, co-founder of The Daily Wire, host of The Ben Shapiro Show. | ||
| You know, some books. | ||
| That'll do it. | ||
| Right on, right on. | ||
| So we're also hanging out with Seamus Coghlan of Freedom Tunes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is actually my first time here with Ben Shapiro instead of just doing his voice for the audience. | |
| Right on. | ||
| And we got Ian Crosland. | ||
| Hi everyone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What up? | |
| Oh. | ||
| So anyway, we'll just jump in. | ||
| We've not done anything like this before, but considering we're out here in Nashville, we've got, you know, you're here and able to make time for us, as well as we had Jonathan Isaacs, so we're all excited. | ||
| And I'm just going to jump into this viral Twitter trend. | ||
| We have the story from Newsweek. | ||
| Ben Shapiro called Bozo by student during anti-transgender event. | ||
| I just love how they frame stories, as if that was the takeaway from the event. | ||
| I mean, so a couple of things. | ||
| One, it's not a news event when someone calls me a name. | ||
| I mean, that's like most of my life, actually. | ||
| Including from my children. | ||
| So, like, being called a bad name is not actually a news event. | ||
| What actually happened here is if you watch the entire clip, there's a kid who got up there and he started... | ||
| By, you know, suggesting that he was a mathematician and a physicist, double major, and he'd won all these awards, and I congratulated him on that. | ||
| And then he proceeded to spew a bunch of nonsense. | ||
| And then when he was rebutted on his nonsense, like, he actually accused me of using the DSM-IV as opposed to the DSM-V, which wasn't true. | ||
| He suggested that I use the language gender identity disorder as opposed to gender dysphoria. | ||
| That wasn't true. | ||
| I corrected him. | ||
| And when he had sort of run out of arguments, then he called me a bozo and then made a reference to that famous video from about a year and a half ago where I read the lyrics to Cardi B's WAP. | ||
| Which was hilarious. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I mean, if you actually watch the 15-minute version, they've only played like the two-minute version. | ||
| I will say I'm quite proud of the 15-minute full takedown and breakdown of WAP. | ||
| It slaps significantly harder than her original version. | ||
| And frankly, it's It's pretty funny. | ||
| It's one of the funniest things I've ever done on the show. | ||
| And so that's sort of become a meme online. | ||
| So he started saying this stuff. | ||
| He started insulting my wife. | ||
| And I said back to him, I don't really feel like I need to have my masculinity challenged by somebody. | ||
| I have three kids. | ||
| Really, I don't need to talk about my sex life with you. | ||
| And then the takeaway from this, according to the media, was that somebody called me a bozo. | ||
| Now, the reason that happened is that I've noticed that Twitter plays this game. | ||
| I trend once about, probably once every three weeks on Twitter or so. | ||
| It really charts out. | ||
| So the day after the Twitter trend, I'm kind of happy because it's like three weeks until I trend again. | ||
| But the way that it typically works is that there will be a good story that starts to get some traction about me on Twitter, and it won't trend. | ||
| And then within 24 hours, Twitter will be trending me about something that is either unrelated or recasting the story. | ||
| So yesterday, or earlier last week, when this video came out at the beginning, it already had a couple of million views. | ||
| And it was the full version. | ||
| It was like a two-minute version that had a couple million views. | ||
| I think now it has, you know, four million views online. | ||
| And a lot of people are talking about it. | ||
| And then they waited for about 24 hours for somebody to come up with like a 10-second version of the video with just this kid insulting me. | ||
| And then they trended it with that video. | ||
| Because the idea is that the story can never be that we had this exchange and this kid came off pretty badly. | ||
| And if you watch the entire exchange, honestly, I feel bad for him. | ||
| He came off pretty badly. | ||
| Well, here's the craziest thing about it. | ||
| Are we concerned with people being convinced by someone just insulting you and not really making any substantive arguments? | ||
| I mean, that really is the question. | ||
| I mean, that wasn't the only time that happened during the event, by the way. | ||
| I mean, there was a point earlier in the event where it was disrupted by a guy up in the rafter shouting, fuck you at me. | ||
| And I immediately responded by saying, fuck you is not an argument. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And which, it isn't. | ||
| And also, number two, no thank you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Those are the things I said back to him. | ||
| And, you know, that sort of stuff is not a headline. | ||
| They had to recraft, the entire media apparently, had to recraft the headline so that the big issue was that somebody said something nasty to me. | ||
| Now, here's the way that works. | ||
| If I had said something nasty to the student, right? | ||
| I'm invariably pretty polite in these exchanges. | ||
| If I had said something really nasty back to the student about his sex life or something, Yeah, exactly. | ||
| been a major story about what a jackass I am. But somebody says something like that | ||
| to me, and they do, what a hero, what a stud this kid is. | ||
| Okay, you know what, if that's the way the game is played, I guess that's the way the game | ||
| is played, whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. When I saw this headline, my first thought was, of course, they concentrate | |
| on the fact that this kid called you a bozo, rather than the fact that he made depraved | ||
| sexual remarks and insults about yourself and your wife. If the reverse had happened, | ||
| if some conservative audience member had shouted at a left-wing pundit this really disgusting, | ||
| perverted stuff about their sex life with their spouse, that would absolutely be the | ||
| headline you would be hearing about how harassment is such a serious problem on the right side | ||
| of politics. You know what I see as interesting here? | ||
| You know, I tweeted about it. | ||
| The dude made no argument, as you stated. | ||
| So I'm thinking, you know, why would he get up there and just insult you while he wants his friends to hear him? | ||
| He wants to go home and high-five them. | ||
| My concern is, does that convince people? | ||
| Because I have a concern about the future of this country if there are voters convinced by what that guy did. | ||
| First of all, it was funny when he got up and said, I'm a mathematician and a physicist, so I know I'm right, and then talks about mental health and biology, while criticizing you for not being a biologist, when neither is he, which you pointed out. | ||
| I suppose my greater concern is, are we wasting our time trying to have logical arguments with people who are not interested in logical arguments? | ||
| Um, I mean, yeah, yes. | ||
| I mean, the argument wasn't with him, but the argument is on behalf of the audience. | ||
| And I think that this is where the media coverage really gets ugly, because the truth is that | ||
| for the people in the room who may not have been decided, who showed up or who watched | ||
| it online and who may not have really had an opinion on the issue, if they just watched | ||
| that entire clip, they're going to come away with, I think, what any sane person would, | ||
| which is this person really didn't have an argument, and that I was making a large number | ||
| of arguments, citing data, citing recent studies and all the rest. | ||
| And they would come away with that impression. | ||
| The way the media coverage comes off is it's just rock them, sock them robots. | ||
| And this is, by the way, how you end up with pretty much the worst of every aspect of politics. | ||
| And it bleeds up, right? | ||
| And this is why when you get to presidential debates, you'll see that it turns into basically | ||
| something that looks like a seventh grade sort of playground school fight, just people | ||
| shouting names at each other. | ||
| And there's no way to fight that. | ||
| There really is not. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What am I supposed to say to that if somebody gets up and they insult my wife right or somebody gets up there? | ||
| And they insult my sex life or something How am I supposed to come back at that as a sort of? | ||
| Rational and polite human being the answer is you can't and if you go low then you're the person who's really the bad guy So it's a lose-lose. | ||
| It's it's the reason why you know not all these debates are worth it, but I agree. | ||
| I think it's a lose-lose no matter what. | ||
| However, the way I typically respond is, I don't understand why you're being so mean to me. | ||
| So I've actually, you know, I've gotten in Facebook arguments, and I'll always try to approach it reasonably, calmly, rationally. | ||
| And if they immediately come back and say something nasty, I just say, I'm sorry, I don't understand why you're being so mean to me right now. | ||
| And that's just my approach. | ||
| But in the end, it doesn't matter because what's really happening on stage here is, The audience who agrees with a rational discussion of the ideas and real answers is looking for those, and the people who just want to hate because they're driven by emotion just want to see you be insulted, so whatever you say doesn't matter to them. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Tell us why you have to be super careful in terms of who you actually engage with. | ||
| So the nice thing about going to college is that you do get, you know, a lot of people from the other side of the aisle who engage, some of them in really good faith, and that's awesome when that happens. | ||
| Whenever I do these Question lines. | ||
| I always say, if you disagree, you go to the front of the line. | ||
| That's the standing rule. | ||
| But it's also why when I decide who I'm going to talk to on the show, I tend to try to talk to people who I think, on any side of the political aisle, are actually going to have an honest conversation. | ||
| So for example, I had on my show Ro Khanna recently, the California congressperson. | ||
| Ro is really far to the left. | ||
| And we had this really good conversation about minimum wage. | ||
| He's going to come on the show again. | ||
| I've had Andrew Yang on the program. | ||
| We've done universal basic income. | ||
| Anybody who's willing to have a good, long-form discussion, Is great. | ||
| The problem is that the way that everything is framed and the way that everybody is sort of exposed to this material is... Ben Shapiro debates X. Well, if you actually watch the conversations, it's usually not a debate. | ||
| Usually it's a discussion and somebody kind of comes up short in the discussion. | ||
| So it's not a debate where some... Even the Ben Shapiro destroys videos are typically not something where I'm being like an asshole to somebody. | ||
| It really is much more... I make an argument, the other person doesn't have like a very good comeback and that's sort of the end of the conversation, but... | ||
| Good example was you on Bill Maher with Malcolm Nance. | ||
| And I'm watching that and I'm listening, then Malcolm Nance just immediately goes for the emotional attack. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that was kind of shocking to me, honestly. | ||
| I mean, I was trying to be as polite as I could be. | ||
| I really try to be polite in all these scenarios. | ||
| And I was complimenting him. | ||
| I was saying, listen, you're a former intelligence analyst. | ||
| Like, you know that this is true. | ||
| And there came a point where he just started being incredibly insulting on the show. | ||
| And there's not much that you can do with that, frankly. | ||
| And like when you say, oh, well, I can't believe anybody listens to your show. | ||
| Well, I mean, first of all, you know, you never want to make the ego play. | ||
| This is a lesson that I've learned before. | ||
| I've been in situations like just as a human being. | ||
| One of the lessons you learn as you get more notorious is that making the ego play is almost invariably a mistake. | ||
| You'll be in a situation, and you'll be like, ah, I'm bigger than this person. | ||
| More people listen to me than this person, and it ends badly for you. | ||
| That's what happened on that famous BBC interview, right? | ||
| No idea who's interviewing me. | ||
| And so I'm like, I have no idea who you are. | ||
| And of course, it turns out the guy's pretty famous in Britain. | ||
| I'm just not from Britain. | ||
| So you can make that mistake. | ||
| I just said, if someone came to me and said, I don't even know why people watch your show, I'd just be like... | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Honestly, I just, you know, the way I describe it is like, I don't know, I complain on the internet to a camera, but apparently people, you know, like watching it. | ||
| So I'll always just be like, dude, if you want to be the mean person in the room, that's fine. | ||
| Cause I don't know how we convince people whose, whose intention is just to be mean to emotionally destroy the people that I'm looking for solutions. | ||
| That kid seemed to be disappointed that he said, what, DSM IV and you were talking about the DSM V, and so he was humiliated and lashed out. | ||
| And if you can say it seems like you're humiliated because you were wrong about the DSM IV thing, usually puts them in their place. | ||
| Also, you just gotta take the humility when you do that. | ||
| Being on stage and being a performer, let people rock you and breathe out your mouth, you know? | ||
| Everybody's seen your debates, discussions. | ||
| When you're wrong, you say you're wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I try to. | ||
| I mean, I think I'm one of the only public figures in America where I have like a running list on our website of all the stupid and dumb things I've ever said in my entire career, like going all the way back. | ||
| I've been writing columns, syndicated columns, since I was 17 years old. | ||
| I'm now 38. | ||
| So I've been doing this for over two decades. | ||
| And most of the dumb crap that I said was in the first, I would say, quarter of my career, like from the time I was 17 to the time that I was maybe 23, 24. | ||
| And so I have a whole running list of every bad tweet that I think that's bad, and I'll say, like, that was a bad tweet, that was stupid, here's why I did it, here's why I was wrong. | ||
| You try to be a reflective human being, because I think part of being a good human being is trying to be reflective, but when you're a public figure, you also have to balance that out with the fact that there are a lot of people who just want... | ||
| You to be destroyed and so how do you take criticism? | ||
| You have to have a filter system where people in good faith and come to you and say you did this wrong and you really | ||
| Think about it, but then there are a lot of people who are just you know going on stage and calling you bozo | ||
| And that's not a good faith criticism, and so at that point you just kind of have to be done | ||
| I'll give you I'll give you an example on on our end. I don't we | ||
| We've never done, for TimCast IRL, any digital debates or any conversations, because they're just not that good. | ||
| You know, I went on Sunday Special with you, and it's kind of stunted in that you'll talk, then I gotta kind of wait, because we're not in the same room. | ||
| So, there was a point where I tweeted out, we've tried to book big left personalities, because the door is always open, we want these conversations. | ||
| Vosh, who many people don't like, has accepted on more than one occasion with a smile on his face. | ||
| And he's had a lot of really creepy things that a lot of people call him out for. | ||
| They're mad at us for platforming, but I'm like, bring him on, have him say it, and then we'll challenge him. | ||
| And he's tried deflecting from these things. | ||
| But there are a few personalities, I'll leave their names out of it, who publicly accept. | ||
| Tim, I will come on your show! | ||
| Name the time and date. | ||
| And I say, here's the time and date. | ||
| We will pay for your tickets. | ||
| We'll fly you out first class. | ||
| We'll get you a hotel. | ||
| Just let us know. | ||
| And they go, you got it! | ||
| Then they DM me privately and say, I'm not coming on your show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all for show. | ||
| So we've got one individual who is just one of the worst, you know, most bad faith individuals. | ||
| I won't even, there's no open door for this guy. | ||
| But, you know, just recently, Hasan, this is the funniest thing, you know, you know, Hasan, he's a left personality. | ||
| David Pakman tweeted... He owns a mansion, right? | ||
| That's mostly what I know about him. | ||
| Like most good socialists, he has a dacha in the woods. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold on, just because you're a socialist doesn't mean you can't participate in society. | |
| A mansion is necessary to participate in society. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I mean, he needs to be comfortable. | ||
| He streams a lot. | ||
| But he tweeted, David Pakman tweeted, is anybody actually pro-abortion? | ||
| I've heard this, but I've not seen anybody actually say it. | ||
| Hassan responded, me, I am... David said, is anyone trying to increase the number of abortions? | ||
| Hassan said, me, I am trying to do this. | ||
| Look, it was tongue-in-cheek, and I felt it was obvious. | ||
| Of course, he doesn't literally want to challenge David Pakman and give ammunition. | ||
| But David responded with, sounds weird. | ||
| Someone then responded with, what's wrong with more abortions? | ||
| So I screen grabbed that interaction. | ||
| I said nothing. | ||
| And I tweeted it. | ||
| I thought it was funny that Hassan appeared to be trying to snark David. | ||
| David didn't seem to realize and then someone actually agreed with the true premise not thinking it was a joke. | ||
| Hassan assumed that I took him seriously and then started disparaging me on Twitter. | ||
| So I said, He said, I pretend to be a true progressive or that I'm an me and Dave Rubin and I are influential to people who claim to be true progressives. | ||
| And I said, I never said I was a progressive. | ||
| I'm not a progressive. | ||
| I say I'm a moderate with some left policies. | ||
| He responds with, you're doing exactly what I'm making fun of you for. | ||
| My immediate response is, you have an open invite to come on the show and say anything you want, unimpeded, and the immediate reaction is everyone saying, for one excuse or another, we won't do it, we can't do it, I'm not gonna do it. | ||
| The first excuse he gave before was, oh, COVID, so we can't. | ||
| He publicly said, I will come on your show, then privately says, oh no, COVID, I can't do it. | ||
| This is the difficulty with trying to engage with these individuals, because I don't think they actually care about solution or logic-based solutions to our problems. | ||
| I feel like they do what they accuse us of doing. | ||
| Emotional arguments for the sake of making money. | ||
| And I'm like, if that's the case, why is it that Ben Shapiro is the debate-me guy? | ||
| Who's trying as hard as he can to have you come and explain all of your ideas and I'm sitting here saying I will literally pay for you and first-class five-star hotel so you can tell us your ideas, but it's constantly that side that says we won't do it. | ||
| Yep, and I think that they also play this game where they act as though if you would like to have a conversation, they get to determine the format of the conversation. | ||
| The format of the conversation does matter an awful lot. | ||
| I mean, as you point out, there's a big difference between having somebody in person for something that you do versus doing something via Zoom. | ||
| This actually is a pretty large-scale thing. | ||
| It makes a big difference in terms of, are you having a conversation or are you having a debate? | ||
| If it's a debate, is it something where there's a moderator or is there not a moderator? | ||
| Is it going to be timed or is it not going to be timed? | ||
| Because you actually prepare for these things differently. | ||
| So for me, when I'm preparing for an actual debate, Then I actually do research into the person I'm debating. | ||
| I try to look at everything that they've said. | ||
| I try to see how they approach arguments so that I know exactly what I'm facing. | ||
| I treat it like you would a prize fight because you sort of have to go in with that mentality. | ||
| And then sometimes, you know, it gets pugnacious and sometimes it doesn't. | ||
| But you have to treat it like that. | ||
| But you have to know the format going in. | ||
| And what I find very often is that there's a lot of sandbagging that goes on. | ||
| And I really try not to sandbag people. | ||
| When I have people on my show and I say it's just going to be a conversation, it really is just a conversation. | ||
| I try to give them space to expand on what they're saying. | ||
| And when I say it's a debate, it should be like a formal debate where there's an actual timer here with somebody with a clock and there's a moderator and somebody asking questions. | ||
| But failing to distinguish between the two is one way of preventing those good conversations from happening. | ||
| It's something I also see in the comedic world. | ||
| I mean, there's this whole school of thought, mostly existing in the comedic left, Where it's the clown nose on, clown nose off routine and it's really obnoxious. | ||
| It's the reason why I've said I won't do, you know, I've been invited on Trevor Noah before and I've said I won't do it unless it's live. | ||
| I'm not going to do it taped because I know that you guys cut this stuff and I'm not going to be humiliated by the cuts that you make around a comedian whose job it is to just make funny faces in the camera. | ||
| He's going to be better at that than I am. | ||
| I'm never going to be as good at that as he is. | ||
| If he wants to have like a political conversation, we can do that in long form. | ||
| If he wants to just sit there and make faces at the camera, he's going to win. | ||
| I mean, there's no way I can win because he's a comedian. | ||
| So, you know, the terms matter. | ||
| The other thing, too, is if we're going to have a real discussion, a lot of people, well, I'll just point out, again, not saying certain names, but they do ambushes. | ||
| They lie. | ||
| They'll say, yeah, I'll have a conversation with you. | ||
| Let's do Zoom. | ||
| And then it's somebody else. | ||
| Or they've got a chat going, giving them answers and helping them because they're not actually prepared for these real conversations. | ||
| I have no problem with that. | ||
| Some people have said they're going to get help from the audience, and I'm like, let the audience help them all. | ||
| The issue is when I have conversations, I did a conversation with David Pakman before and some other individuals, and the left calls them all debates. | ||
| And I was like, I never agree. | ||
| I don't debate people. | ||
| I don't think I have all the answers. | ||
| I'll ask questions. | ||
| I'll tell him what I think. | ||
| I'll say, oh, I didn't know that. | ||
| But they're acting like we're all going in to just fight each other. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. | ||
| How important is it? | ||
| How invested percentage on 1 to 100 do you think you should be in your argument when you're taking on an argument? | ||
| So, you know, I think that it depends on how much you know about the topic, really. | ||
| So there are certain topics where I just don't know all that much, and so I'm not particularly invested in the argument. | ||
| When it comes to drugs, I literally have never tried them. | ||
| I don't know that much about them. | ||
| You know, this is not something where I feel I'm an expert in the subject. | ||
| So when I'm on Joe Rogan and he's talking about legalization of marijuana, I'm like, well, he knows way more about this than I do, so I'm just going to let it go. | ||
| Or DMT. | ||
| Well, he does way more than I do. | ||
| And this is true on a lot of topics. | ||
| If, however, I'm really deeply invested in a topic and I really feel like I've studied it, then I'll stick to the arguments. | ||
| But the one thing that I won't do is pretend that I know something that I don't. | ||
| So you'll see pretty frequently that in these scenarios, these debate or discussion scenarios, if somebody mentions a study and I don't know the study, I'll just say, I don't know that study. | ||
| I'm happy to take a look at that study. | ||
| I'll assume that what you're saying is true, assuming what you're saying is true, and then I'll ask a question. | ||
| Just being in this space for a long time, one of the things that you learn, again, it goes back to sort of the ego problem. | ||
| If you say that you know something that you don't, you're going to get caught with your pants down. | ||
| That's just the way it's going to work. | ||
| Do you find that if you're really emotionally invested in something that it's easier for someone to twist you, twist your ego in an argument? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, absolutely. | ||
| That's why the hardest thing is where somebody, you know, says something about your wife or something, right? | ||
| And that's very difficult. | ||
| So you have to, like, take a breath and just kind of, you know, calm down. | ||
| That's the whole goal. | ||
| I mean, that's really why people try to throw you off your game by doing that sort of stuff. | ||
| And it's also why there are certain topics I... | ||
| Frankly, I don't enjoy debating very much because I feel like I have to make a conscious effort to separate myself off enough emotionally from the topic that I can have a good back-and-forth conversation without getting angry or upset. | ||
| And that's where the good conversations happen. | ||
| Do you remember the reality has a liberal bias? | ||
| That statement, I think it was Stephen Colbert who said it. | ||
| Was it Colbert? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it? | |
| Because he was pretending to be a conservative. | ||
| You know, I think about this and it's fascinating because I grew up watching Jon Stewart, I watched Colbert, I watched Bill Maher, and today I would say reality has a conservative bias. | ||
| It's not so much that it's conservative values, but for whatever reason, The reason why I'm called conservative has more to do with what I view as true and correct, as opposed to what policies I align with, or whether I'm more progressive or traditional. | ||
| So I can come out and be like, actually, you know, I lean slightly left on a lot of these issues, but more libertarian, so it's a very difficult position to maintain, to be completely honest. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| But Joe Biden is crooked. | ||
| He did illicit business deals in Ukraine. | ||
| You're conservative. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard can come out and say she wants gun control, she wants to ban nuclear power, and that it was wrong to strike Syria with missiles. | ||
| She's a Putin asset, she's right-wing, she's conservative. | ||
| So when I hear someone like Hassan, for instance, say, Tim Pool, you're a right-winger and you know it. | ||
| I'm like, that doesn't mean anything, dude, because I know right-winger is just, what news do you believe? | ||
| But the issue I see with this that makes it very difficult for me looking at the state of this country and moving forward is, how many stories have to come out that are proven false | ||
| before any one of these people is going to be like, okay, maybe I should listen to Ben Shapiro or Tim Pool or | ||
| Seamus or Ian and hear what they have to say about these ideas because I've | ||
| insulted them and now it turns out that story I believed was false. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, and it's not even just about listening to us. | |
| It's just about not listening to CNN anymore. | ||
| I don't know, like you said, I don't know how many things they have to get wrong | ||
| before people are willing to say, okay, I'm not necessarily going to move over to the right, | ||
| but maybe I should stop getting information from people who have, A, repeatedly lied to me, | ||
| B, never apologized for lying to me, and C, never faced any consequences when they did. | ||
| It depends on their emotional state. | ||
| If they're calm, it usually only requires a little bit of logic. | ||
| People are erratic. It's a lot more to a point of near impossibility | ||
| Nearly everything in America and a large part of this is social media has become a social litmus test right yours | ||
| you're expected It's not that you're expected to believe that men can become women and women can be men. | ||
| You're expected to say it. | ||
| And you're expected to say it publicly. | ||
| And this is a litmus test as to whether you're a good person or not. | ||
| And so the question is, do you want to be accepted in the proper social circles? | ||
| If you're accepted in the proper social circles, this means that you think that Tim Poole is bad, or you think that he's a right-winger, or you think that Ben Shapiro's a rabid right-winger who's intolerant of other people's opinions. | ||
| These are things that you're expected to say and believe if you wish to be accepted in certain social circles. | ||
| The pronouns test is there for a reason. | ||
| The reason that people are putting their pronouns in their Twitter profiles is not because people have doubts about 98% of the population whether they identify as male or female. | ||
| Because again, 98% of the population identifies as either male or female. | ||
| It's there when a clearly male person puts he him in his profile. | ||
| That's there to say I'm part of your group. | ||
| I'm part of your in-group and I wish to be accepted in your in-group. | ||
| Because what other reason would there be for that? | ||
| They say that it's all about acceptance and making people feel accepted. | ||
| It really isn't. | ||
| It's about making them feel that they are accepted. | ||
| It's about saying the thing that you're supposed to say in order so that everybody treats you. | ||
| It was like this with Trump, too. | ||
| You couldn't just say, you know, here are the 10 things I hate about Trump, but I like that the Abraham Accords happened. | ||
| If you said even, I like that the Abraham Accords happened, people were like, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| This means that you're pro-Trump because you have broken, you have violated the taboo by saying that he is not evil and satanic. | ||
| It was, I think, Nate Silver. | ||
| I think it was Nate Silver, or it might have been Ezra Klein, one of the two, said they wouldn't even give Trump one good day when he took out the leader of ISIS. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just one thing we can all be like, yeah, that dude was a monster. | ||
| And they were like, nope, nope, it was bad. | ||
| And that's nauseating. | ||
| I mean, I want things to improve. | ||
| But, you know, looking at, say, like the transgender issue in schools, which we can, you know, move into a little bit. | ||
| I grew up in a very urban Democrat area. | ||
| I went to public school. | ||
| I did go to Catholic school for a little bit. | ||
| I went to public school. | ||
| I never learned about my teacher's sexuality. | ||
| I never learned about their private lives. | ||
| In fact, that was kind of taboo. | ||
| In a public school on the south side of Chicago, 6th, 7th, 8th grade, and even high school, many of us don't even know our teacher's... I can't tell you my teacher's first names. | ||
| And there's only one circumstance. | ||
| Where, uh, I learned about my teacher's personal life, her name changed. | ||
| Oh, she got married! | ||
| And she had a picture on her desk, and one day we're leaving, and someone's like, who's that? | ||
| And she goes, it's my husband. | ||
| And they were like, oh. | ||
| And they were like, let's go, kids. | ||
| And that, that was, that was the end of it. | ||
| Now there's some kind of... You know, I bring this up because... | ||
| I grew up in Chicago. | ||
| Everybody knows, they always bring it up, like, oh, Tim says it a lot. | ||
| Yeah, but I grew up in, you know, a city that's been controlled by Democrats for now, what is it, a hundred years. | ||
| And I don't think it's normal what they're trying to claim these teachers are doing to kids. | ||
| It seems like a new phenomenon. | ||
| It seems like it crosses a line. | ||
| And the Wall Street Journal wrote, their editorial board wrote about this poll that came out showing that even among Democrats, I think it's 59% of Democrats, support Florida's parental rights and education bill. | ||
| I don't know where they expect to go with this politically, but clearly something is wrong in these schools that goes beyond left or right. | ||
| But I suppose to wrap this together, you're right-wing if you just say, hey, maybe strangers shouldn't talk to my kids about this. | ||
| That's a conservative position, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I've never seen anything quite as politically inept as trying to turn parents into a voting bloc. | ||
| It's an unbelievable thing. | ||
| I mean, there are 63.1 million people in the United States who have a kid in their house under the age of 18. | ||
| And you're turning those people into a massive voter bloc, which has never happened, really, before in American life. | ||
| We had, like, security moms in 2004. | ||
| That wasn't the same thing. | ||
| It wasn't like we are actively targeting parents and saying that parents are indoctrinating their kids, we have to counter-indoctrinate their kids so that we can make sure that these are tolerant and diverse little people who accept and approve of our ways of life. | ||
| If you're seeking approval from a child, you're doing it all wrong. | ||
| I mean, the entire idea of being a parent, I have three kids, | ||
| the entire idea of being a parent is that kids are small monsters | ||
| and then you civilize them over the course of time. | ||
| I mean, they're very cute, they're very innocent, and they're also monsters. | ||
| They're like the worst people ever, who are also incredibly cute and wonderful. | ||
| They demand things from you all the time. | ||
| They have no sense of propriety. | ||
| They have no sense of logic. | ||
| And your job is to civilize them and to make them better people over the course of time. | ||
| Instead, we as a society are now a bunch of adults who are acting like children, and they expect the children to validate their points of view. | ||
| I mean, what you're saying is entirely correct. | ||
| I mean, I went to school in Los Angeles. | ||
| I was in public school for, I would say, about half of my education. | ||
| So I was in public school for elementary and then part of middle school. | ||
| And, same thing, I mean, I don't remember learning about the private lives of my teachers. | ||
| I'm sure I had teachers who were gay, there's one in particular who I'm sure was a gay man, and that never came up in class, because why would it? | ||
| And by the way, if he had put a picture of him and his husband on his desk, and then somebody had asked about it, then the proper response would be, you should go talk to your parents about this, it's a controversial social issue, go home, talk to your parents about it, it really isn't my place to say, I'm a social studies teacher, I'm a history teacher, I'm a math teacher. | ||
| I have no idea why any of this is remotely controversial, except that the left believes that they have to cram down their point of view on everyone. | ||
| And so if you're going to be imperialistic about my kids, you can't expect me to sit there and just take that. | ||
| I think it has a lot to do with that when it comes to the birth rate, conservatives have more kids, liberals don't. | ||
| And this means in 20 years, conservatives are going to keep gaining more political power while the left loses it. | ||
| But I wanted to ask you, when you were growing up, you were religious. | ||
| We became fully religious at about 11. | ||
| So I remember eating a KFC. | ||
| Do you think that helped you? | ||
| I read a bit about your backstory. | ||
| You skipped several grades. | ||
| You seem to have worked very, very hard. | ||
| You played an instrument. | ||
| What do you think it is about you that led you to be successful? | ||
| So, I think that, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm, thank God, I'm a pretty smart guy. | ||
| I was able to skip third and ninth, so I graduated high school when I was 16, graduated UCLA at 20, graduated Harvard Law at 23, but I think that one of the best lessons I ever learned is I was coming from So I was in public school until I was in fourth grade, then I went to private school for a couple of grades, and then I was back in public school. | ||
| When I went to public school, the public school I went to was a magnet, and you had to take an IQ test to get into the magnet. | ||
| It was the highly gifted program at Walter Reed. | ||
| And so they gave you a basic IQ test, and you had to get above a certain score, which is pretty high, in order to get in. | ||
| I got in, but not by like a ton. | ||
| I got in by some. | ||
| I was in this class with kids who had 180, 190 IQs. | ||
| There's a girl in our class who was doing engineering level calculus in maybe seventh grade. | ||
| Geniuses, geniuses. | ||
| And the thing that I noticed is that what my dad said to me is, listen, in most rooms that you walk into, in virtually every room, just assume, when you walk into a room, you're not going to be the smartest guy in the room. | ||
| But you can be the hardest working guy in the room. | ||
| And so, that turned out to be a very good lesson. | ||
| I look back at the people I went to Walter Reed with, and I don't know how many of them are successful. | ||
| I don't know how many of them have built things. | ||
| One of the things that happens when you're very smart, I think, is that you tend to think that things are going to come easily to you. | ||
| And it's very easy to fall into this pattern of taking things for granted. | ||
| For me, that was really never an issue. | ||
| Incredibly hard. | ||
| I've worked incredibly hard for a very long time. | ||
| You know, every spare moment, my staff can tell you, basically every spare moment, I'm reading, I'm writing, like, literally all the time. | ||
| And so, I attribute it, yes, some to thank God, some gifts, but a lot of it is just keeping your nose to the grindstone. | ||
| I had some moments, you know, that made me, I made some realizations. | ||
| I'm at Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| I show up and I'm a high school dropout. | ||
| Nobody knows my name. | ||
| I got a camera. | ||
| What did these activists say to me? | ||
| They said, man, you're the perfect example of what's wrong with this country. | ||
| You know, you're smart, you're hardworking, but look, you come from a mixed race background and you come from the South Side of Chicago. | ||
| It proves there's something wrong with this country where good, smart people should be succeeding and they're not. | ||
| And then a month later, I got featured in Time Magazine for my hard work, and they said, he's a white kid who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. | ||
| Verbatim is what they started saying. | ||
| I started posting, saying, whoa, yeah, white privilege. | ||
| All of a sudden, my family history, all of the stuff I had talked to them about in agreement with on, I wouldn't call it left-wing politics at this point, I'd say populism. | ||
| Like, hey, the financial crash led to a whole bunch of faulty spending, corrupt deals. | ||
| All of that's erased. | ||
| All that matters is, if you're successful, you can't be a part of what it is we're doing, so we're going to tag you. | ||
| This is exactly right. | ||
| I mean, they retcon people's paths on a routine basis. | ||
| So, I mean, for me, if you search about my background online, what you'll see is that I grew up, people on the left say this all the time, I grew up in a wealthy home. | ||
| That is not true, okay? | ||
| Like, I'm not, I never think, by the way, that if you were born poor and then you made it, this makes you better morally than somebody who was born rich. | ||
| I know people who were born poor who are jerks, and people who were born rich who are jerks, and that there's, you know, All that money does is make you more of who you are. | ||
| So if you're a nice person and you make a lot of money, you tend to be nicer because you have a lot of money and you can spend the money. | ||
| And if you're a jerk and you make a lot of money, you're even more of a jerk because now you've been liberated to be a jerk. | ||
| But, you know, I grew up in a two-bedroom home, 1,100 square feet, in Burbank, California, with three sisters. | ||
| Until the time I was 11, I shared a bedroom with all three of my siblings, right? | ||
| It was my parents in one bedroom, and us in the other bedroom, and one bathroom for six people. | ||
| And that's not like impoverished. | ||
| That was a nice middle-class, maybe lower to middle-class upbringing in Burbank, California. | ||
| And it was a great life. | ||
| And it was fine. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because I had the ultimate privilege, which I had two committed parents who were there for me, making sure that we were working hard every day, and making sure that we were taken care of. | ||
| And that's the only privilege that I think really matters in American life. | ||
| This is what the stats show, by the way, also. | ||
| You got two parents, and the parents are there, and they're taking care of you. | ||
| You are the privilege. | ||
| You won the lottery, you were born in America, and you won another lottery, which is you have parents who give a shit about you. | ||
| That sounds a lot like, you know, that's the privilege argument. | ||
| You literally called it privilege. | ||
| It is a privilege. | ||
| The issue is that the left skews the idea of privilege into things that are somewhat meaningless. | ||
|
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Well, things that don't require anything of them, right? | |
| Because if I acknowledge that there's some sort of privilege in being from a two-parent home, then I'm now taking upon myself the moral obligation to ensure that if I do have children, that I stay with the person who I have that child with, so that I'm not depriving them of their potential. | ||
| But they don't want to control themselves sexually, so they'll never acknowledge that. | ||
| What was it like when you were 11, you mentioned it twice already, that you became religious? | ||
| And you said, did you move out of your... Yeah, so when you become religious in the Orthodox community, what that means is that you have to move within walking distance of the synagogue. | ||
| So that was coincident, right? | ||
| So when you become Orthodox, we'd been living not in walking distance of the synagogue, we would drive our car to the, near the Orthodox synagogue, and then you're not supposed to drive, so we'd park about a mile away, and then we'd walk, so as not to, you know, make people feel uncomfortable, that we were driving to synagogue, essentially. | ||
| And then we moved into a neighborhood where we were within a walking radius of a synagogue. | ||
| But yeah, it was, you know, it didn't, I thought it was, honestly, I thought it was great. | ||
| I love living in the Orthodox community. | ||
| I think community is massively important. | ||
| I think it's the main thing that's been lost in American life. | ||
| I think the nationalization of media. | ||
| Has destroyed a lot of the feeling of local community. | ||
| The ties that I have with my neighbors and the community where I live, it's one of the most important things in my life. | ||
| It's one of the most important things for my kids. | ||
| And I'm very fearful of the destruction of local institutions on behalf of national and international institutions that are seeking to dissolve the societal bonds that actually matter the most. | ||
| The stuff you care about is the stuff with your neighbors, not the stuff, you know, that you do on Facebook with some moron. | ||
| About how much time do you think you have left? | ||
| I don't want to keep you too long. | ||
| We've been going for about half an hour. | ||
| couple more minutes maybe. So I wanted to give Ian a chance to ask you about | ||
| climate change because in that in one of the viral videos I saw of you speaking | ||
| you said these these climate change stats and predictions don't take into | ||
| consideration mitigation factors. Ian is obsessed with graphene. Are you | ||
| familiar with it? | ||
| I'm not. | ||
|
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Go for it. | |
| Pure carbon. | ||
| It's a hexagonally-latticed carbon. | ||
| We should pull it up. | ||
| Carbon dioxide to graphene, and you'll find it's... So they've been... It's basically gonna be like the 21st century steel. | ||
| It's a building material. | ||
| You can make touchscreen wallpaper. | ||
| It's a superconductor, super capacitor. | ||
| It can be lightweight. | ||
| You can... | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| it with lots of different materials too and make all sorts of crazy alloys and things. | ||
| So you can deposit it from carbon dioxide and you talked about mitigating factors with climate | ||
| change and how scientific models tend to project without assuming that anything is going to change. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I totally agree. I made a YouTube video about this a couple months ago and I wanted to point | ||
| out I don't know if this you consider this a mitigating factor. | ||
| It's an adaptation. | ||
| Adaptation, that's the other phrase he used. | ||
| Adaptative technologies. | ||
| So I wanted to point you at this. | ||
| You said a little while ago that we're going to be competing with trees for carbon dioxide. | ||
| Yeah, if we do it wrong. | ||
| If we think ahead and we build the system so that we're taking just enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and producing just enough to keep the trees healthy, then we'll be living in symbiosis. | ||
| But if we're reckless, we may end up That's really cool. | ||
| I mean, the one thing that I think about human beings, and this is what I said in that little kind of snippet, is that we are very good at adaptation and very bad at controlling ourselves. | ||
| So basically, when forced to by circumstance, necessity being the mother of invention, we will make moves to preserve our own lives, right? | ||
| We will, if the tides start to rise, we will move. | ||
| If the temperature starts to get warmer, we'll figure out air conditioning. | ||
| We've been doing this for a very, very long time. | ||
| And human beings are, there's a reason why we, who do not have claws and are less muscular | ||
| than other species, why we have adapted to the point where there are seven, | ||
| eight billion of us on the planet. | ||
| And the reason is because, thank God, our prefrontal cortexes are very well structured for adapting to circumstance. | ||
| We are tools. | ||
| We are active. | ||
| We're not just a tool-making creature. | ||
| We ourselves are like a jackknife of evolution. | ||
| And this is not me saying this. | ||
| It's like Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Heyer. | ||
| I always mix up Heather Hying and Heather Heyer because the names are similar. | ||
| Whichever is the one who's the scientist. | ||
| Haiying. | ||
| Haiying, thank you. | ||
| Haiying is the scientist? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, Heather Haiying. | ||
| They wrote a tremendous book about this and basically what they say is that human beings are a jackknife. | ||
| And that's right, we are a jackknife. | ||
| And what that means is as things get worse in one area, we're able to adapt and we're able to change. | ||
| And all of these scientific models that basically say hundreds of millions will die. | ||
| You're assuming that basically people who are living on the coast in Florida today are going to be living on that exact same coastline in a hundred years. | ||
| I'll tell you how we know that everybody is going to adapt. | ||
| The reason we know this is because all the same liberals who are deeply concerned about global warming are buying coastal real estate for tens of millions of dollars. | ||
| If they really thought that in 20, 30 years, all that stuff was going to be underwater, why would they be spending... I mean, that's one of the memes that they use about me online, right? | ||
| They say that if you think that your house is going to be underwater, you're going to sell it. | ||
| And people are like, who are you going to sell it to? | ||
| Well, the answer is apparently a bunch of left-wing liberals who are buying all of the coastal real estate for $30 million. | ||
| Ben, I got this for you real quick. | ||
| What we're looking at right here is Martha's Vineyard. | ||
| As you may know, Barack Obama purchased a, I believe it was a $12 million property in Martha's Vineyard, just near the Edgar Town Great Pond. | ||
| The address is publicly available. | ||
| We're not going to show the address. | ||
| Let me show you what happens when we use the NOAA.gov website to raise the water level by two feet. | ||
| Okay, we've got a floodplain now in these areas, and this means you can see that the water level is starting to rise and erase some of the ground. | ||
| It is already affecting Barack Obama's property. | ||
| Two feet only. | ||
| Let's go three feet. | ||
| Okay, now about, you know, maybe 10 to 15 percent of his property is gone. | ||
| Four feet. | ||
| All right, now about 30 to 40 percent. | ||
| Five feet, more, I would say about 70 to 80 percent of his property is gone. | ||
| At six feet, all that's left is the building. | ||
| At seven feet, his property is completely wiped out. | ||
| At eight feet and beyond, there is nothing of Obama's property left. | ||
| Now- For him to take it off the previous owner's hands so that | ||
|
unidentified
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they would have to use it. | |
| Be safe, yeah. | ||
| The issue is, as you mentioned, I'm looking into this and I'm like, I think there's issues | ||
| if humans just, you know, drive off a cliff and we don't take care of ourselves. | ||
| But you mentioned it's going to take a thousand years for 200 feet of water. | ||
| This is what they've said in a thousand years, 200 feet of water. | ||
| And I'm like, do you think in a thousand years, humans just keep doing the exact same thing without changing? | ||
| They just plant their feet in cement and they just stay right there as the water level gradually rises above their nose. | ||
| It's really dumb. | ||
| The answer is that human beings are going to do what we've always done, which is why New Orleans is still there, right? | ||
| So after the levees broke, after Katrina, and it flooded New Orleans and 10,000 people died, they rebuilt all of the levees and they shorted up the levees. | ||
| And then last year, there was a massive hurricane that went directly through the same area and pretty much nobody died because it turns out that they didn't build the levees crappy this time. | ||
| So what was that? | ||
| That was a good adaptation that preserved the lives of the people living in that floodplain. | ||
| Now, let's say that they had been unable to rebuild those levees. | ||
| Do you think those people would have been staying in New Orleans? | ||
| They would have picked up and they would have moved. | ||
| Many of those people did pick up and move after Hurricane Katrina, figuring that they needed to move out of that area. | ||
| So again, human beings are great at adaptation. | ||
| This is true financially also. | ||
| You can always bet that human beings are going to solve a problem after it materializes. | ||
| We're not very good at foreseeing a problem and trying to avoid it. | ||
| But once the problem materializes, we're pretty good at reacting to it, just evolutionarily. | ||
| If you're going to ask me to do Ben Shapiro's voice right in front of him, it's actually really intense. | ||
| It's happened to me twice. | ||
|
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Firstly, I had to do my Dave Rubin impression in front of Dave Rubin, and then I had to do my Jordan Peterson impression in front of Jordan Peterson. | |
| It's not always a comfortable experience. | ||
| I appreciate that the man's back against the car, but come on, would you do an impression of Summer back in front of me? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I would be embarrassed to do it. | ||
| When you reacted to his video, where he did the impression, and then he reacted to you reacting, that was great. | ||
|
unidentified
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That was beautiful. | |
| You reacted to a cartoon I did of you, and then I did a cartoon of cartoon you reacting. | ||
| It's an infinite regress. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love it. | |
| Right on, man. | ||
| Yo, thanks for hanging out. | ||
| It's been a blast. | ||
| Thanks for letting me come by. | ||
| Absolutely, man. | ||
| Thanks to The Daily Wire for letting us crash in your trailer. | ||
| And before I leave, I just have to ask you, how do I subscribe to that chicken feed? | ||
| How do I make that happen? | ||
| Just go to Chicken City on YouTube. | ||
| YouTube.com slash Chicken City. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can watch chickens. | |
| My kids will be into the chickens. | ||
| And pets and everybody. | ||
| And I'll wrap up with one final thought on this, because it's weirdly, people on the left are insulting me over a live stream of chickens. | ||
| Will they insult you for selling emergency food when they think the world's gonna end in 50 years from climate change? | ||
| They're saying look how stupid these people are and I'm just like if you're not having fun. You're doing something | ||
| wrong I mean if you're mad about chickens, I don't know how we | ||
|
unidentified
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have an argument There's no there's no appeasing them Ben | |
| No, did you want to shout anything out or mention anything before we wrap up? | ||
| I can go check out all of our work over at daily wired You can check out my podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, anywhere you get podcasts. | ||
| Or you can follow me on Twitter, where I'm trending every three weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
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You have Ben Shapiro on. | |
| All right, man. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| And for everybody else, thanks for hanging out. |