Feb. 1, 2025 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:04:13
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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We have breaking news out of Philadelphia. | |
| There has been a plane crash, a small Cessna plane, I believe, a jet, just after 6 p.m. | ||
| Friday. | ||
| It happened in northwest Philadelphia near Cotman Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard just after 6 p.m. | ||
| There are, I believe there are multiple fatalities that have been reported, and we're going to get a little bit into that today. | ||
| It leaves multiple houses on fire, caused an explosion, so it was a good-sized plane. | ||
| It looks like there was a fuel involved, you know, there was a decent amount of fuel on the plane. | ||
| So we're going to talk about that. | ||
| There is... | ||
| Some information about the transportation security announcing the new FFA action to ensure safety in airspace. | ||
| That comes on the heels of the accident in D.C. at DCA where the Blackhawk and the American Airlines commuter plane. | ||
| We've got some information about the J6 protesters, about the prosecutors. | ||
| Interim U.S. attorney fires more than two dozen January 6th prosecutors in D.C. We had some of the J6 defendants and people that were pardoned and had their sentences commuted this morning on the culture war. | ||
| We had a great conversation about that. | ||
| So we're going to talk about that a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's see. | |
| We've got some information about the Federal Reserve advisor that's been charged with economic espionage. | ||
| Apparently he has been giving trade secrets or information to the Chinese Communist Party, which is obviously a big problem for the United States. | ||
| The CBS News is reporting agencies are asked to scrub federal government websites to remove diversity-related content. | ||
| Guys painting over the walls. | ||
| The walls had diversity, inclusion, and all kinds of slogans, and they've been painting those over with the standard government gray, which, as much as the government gray is not really aesthetically pleasing, I think that it's a better option than diversity, equity, and inclusion. | ||
| And then we've also got the information about the Joe Ellis, the trans woman that was alleged to be on the Black Hop helicopter, but that is not the case. | ||
| But before we get into that, head on over to castbrew.com and buy yourself some coffee. | ||
| Normally, this is the time where we talk about how many bags of Ian's... | ||
| Graphene Dream have been sold, but they're all gone. | ||
| Just sold them all, Ian. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| It's bittersweet. | ||
| Well, it was low-acidity coffee, so you might want to get the bitter part out of there. | ||
| But you can head on over there. | ||
| You can get Appalachian Nights. | ||
| You can get Alex Stein's Primetime Grind, which is the closest thing to... | ||
| Cocaine and coffee as you can get. | ||
| You can get Two Weeks Till Christmas, which has got a cool picture of myself dressed up like Santa Claus. | ||
| So head on over to Casper and get your coffee. | ||
| Head on over to Boonies HQ and you can get the newest... | ||
| The 28th Amendment, chickens being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep, bear, and breed chickens shall not be infringed. | ||
| Whereas that does seem like a little quip and a play on the Second Amendment. | ||
| It speaks to a greater cause. | ||
| The idea is that you are free to take care of yourself, whether it be using the Second Amendment to protect your right to defend yourself or the 28th Amendment to protect your right to grow food. | ||
| And be a homesteader or to take care of your family. | ||
| These are all things that are part of your humanity. | ||
| And then we want you to head on over to TimCast.com and join us. | ||
| Join us. | ||
| Become a member. | ||
| Join the Discord. | ||
| You can come hang out at the after show and call in. | ||
| There's a bunch of different shows that they do. | ||
| They do pre-shows. | ||
| They do after shows. | ||
| The community's great. | ||
| Something like 20,000 like-minded individuals. | ||
| I've heard there are people that have gotten married because of the Discord already. | ||
| So it's a great community. | ||
| Go ahead and join us and you can call into the after show. | ||
| We'll take your... | ||
| You can talk to us. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| But, so smash the like button, share the show with your friends, and go and join TimCast. | ||
| We're going to talk about all these stories and much more. | ||
| Joining us tonight, we have philosophy. | ||
| What is it now? | ||
| Inspiring philosophy. | ||
| Inspiring philosophy. | ||
| Yes, I'm sorry. | ||
| Why don't you tell people... | ||
| Your name and where they can find you and stuff? | ||
| Yeah, my name is Michael Jones. | ||
| I'm a Christian YouTuber. | ||
| I make videos defending Christianity, arguing for the evidence that supports it, arguing for the truth of it, God exists, that kind of stuff. | ||
| You can find me at Inspiring Philosophy on YouTube, Twitter, or X, I guess it's called, as well as Instagram, TikTok. | ||
| You're trying to deadname it, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Same name, just everywhere on those platforms, yeah. | ||
| And on X, it's Inspiring Philosophy? | ||
| Inspiring philosophy. | ||
| Yeah, so if you start typing it in, you'll see the symbol, and I'll just come up. | ||
| Ian's here. | ||
| Hi, everybody. | ||
| Ian Crossland, up in the house. | ||
| Come check me out at Ian Crossland anytime, anywhere, but we also have Brett Dasovic here. | ||
| Let's get going. | ||
| Guys, yes, let's get right into it. | ||
| Let's just go for it. | ||
| Oh, you're not even going to talk about who you are? | ||
| My name is Brett. | ||
| I normally host Pop Culture Crisis Monday through Friday right here on YouTube, but let's just get started, shall we? | ||
| All right, so we're going to get started. | ||
| Right now, we have some... | ||
| Some local coverage of the plane crash in Philadelphia leaves multiple houses on fire, causes an explosion. | ||
| CBS News is reporting, emergency crews are responding to an explosion in northeast Philadelphia after a small medical jet crashed in the area of Roosevelt Boulevard and Cotman Ave. | ||
| Philadelphia police confirmed to CBS News Philadelphia. | ||
| The plane, a Learjet 55, was going from Philadelphia to Springfield, Missouri, leaving the northeast Philadelphia airport when tragedy struck. | ||
| The plane crashed into a neighborhood outside the Roosevelt... | ||
| I don't know if you've seen any of the video, but the video of the actual crash... | ||
| So this is actually from someone where the crash has crashed into a neighborhood. | ||
| The debris field, I've been hearing reports that it's about the size of a football field, so about 100 yards. | ||
| By 50 yards or something like that. | ||
| It was a good-sized plane, had a significant load of fuel, which is why there's all this fire and stuff. | ||
| Well, it's right after takeoff, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if it's heading to Missouri, I mean, that's a decent hike. | ||
| This is not the picture or not the video of the following one. | ||
| Hey, Serge, do we have the one with that? | ||
| Can you pull up the one where you can actually see the plane falling? | ||
| And the reason I want to show that is because it's not... | ||
| It didn't look like there was a... | ||
| It didn't look like they were in control and they were trying to land it or anything. | ||
| Like there was no descent. | ||
| It was straight down. | ||
| It was... | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| They lost control and it went nose down into the... | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Wrong one. | ||
| Yeah, after this, you'll see this video of the plane coming down. | ||
| I mean, it's like full speed angling. | ||
| 50 degree angle towards the ground. | ||
| The one from the ring camera, right? | ||
| Yeah, right here. | ||
| After you see this, Ashton Forbes posted on Twitter, it was a missile. | ||
| So, I don't know, that was a little... | ||
| So there you can see it. | ||
| Let's play that a couple more times. | ||
| The idea... | ||
| It was just straight down. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do take issue with people that are going to say it was a missile. | ||
| Maybe they were describing the way that it looked. | ||
| But it wasn't a missile attack. | ||
| It was actually a plane. | ||
| No, but the nature of the political discourse and everything that happened in the last couple of days. | ||
| So when we were, right when this happened, we were watching live on some of the, I think it was like one of the Fox affiliates here. | ||
| And they had live chat while they were, you know, on the ground reporting. | ||
| And a whole bunch of the discussion from the people who were watching or the people who were following along in the live chat were simultaneous discussions about whether it was some type of an attack or whether this was something. | ||
| DEI-related, which really, more than anything, just gives you an idea of where the public barometer is for how people feel about these types of events in the culture right now. | ||
| Do you feel like there's conspiracy brain now? | ||
| Especially, because I feel like we... | ||
| It's because of the internet. | ||
| Go ahead, I'm sorry. | ||
| The point is, when these things happen, I think it said 1,500 plane crashes a year or something, but the idea here is that you are now connected on the internet and connected to the news 24-7. | ||
| So before, when you only checked the news maybe once a day when you got home from work, maybe you read the newspaper when you were getting ready for your day. | ||
| Now, because you are constantly connected to digital communication, you are seeing these things every single day and not just in your area. | ||
| Whereas usually you'd be watching local news. | ||
| Maybe they would have stories on an international level, but most of it was local news unless you were watching cable news like Fox or CNN or like that. | ||
| So you are seeing far more things, which makes you primed to think that there's connected events when there may be, there may not. | ||
| How do you guys feel it? | ||
| I have thoughts, but I want to know what you guys are thinking. | ||
| Well, this is human nature. | ||
| I mean, you go back to how humans evolved. | ||
| We were sort of evolved to see patterns because you're more likely to survive. | ||
| If you go back and you're the ancient hunter-gatherer and you hear a ruffle in the weeds, it's better to think there's a predator there. | ||
| Than it just being the win because you're more likely to survive for the one out of a million chance that there's actually a predator there. | ||
| And that evolutionary thinking just carried over into our modern thinking. | ||
| So we see patterns everywhere now. | ||
| Two plane crashes happen within a couple of days. | ||
| They've got to be connected. | ||
| And humans hate coincidences. | ||
| They hate it. | ||
| So we always got to try connecting. | ||
| We got to think there's some bigger plan. | ||
| And the truth of the matter is sometimes just things happen. | ||
| And we just need to accept that we live in a chaotic world instead of trying to rush. | ||
| Like people do now, to start blaming everyone, trying to draw connections, trying to assume there's some bigger picture. | ||
| And that's not helpful for anyone. | ||
| We've got to get control of our... | ||
| Basic instincts, I guess you could say, and just have a more rational take on this kind of stuff. | ||
| And people have been gaslit for God knows how long, but it's really come out over the last decade, you know, with COVID, where they said, don't wear masks, they don't do anything. | ||
| And then a couple months later, it's like, actually, masks do do something. | ||
| We just lied to you because we needed the first responders to get the masks. | ||
| You know, the vaccine prevents transmission. | ||
| Oh, actually, it doesn't prevent transmission, they found. | ||
| It was a bat, but it turns out that it was actually the lab where it was grown. | ||
| Yeah, so people are hypersensitive to being lied to and they're willing, I think, overcompensating and saying so the opposite must be true then of what I'm being told. | ||
| But then there's also that you can make a living by being by being a conspiracy theorist literally online. | ||
| If you if you see something happen and you say, I'm going to say that it's this this crazy. | ||
| It's a missile and not an airplane. | ||
| And you get 10,000 likes and all these comments on your Twitter post. | ||
| Then you get a check for 500 bucks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I I find no punishment. | |
| I think that, like, I mean, both your points, I think, are very solid. | ||
| My instinct was going to be to say what Ian said, because I think that the fact that the institutions that even normies, like, trusted, right? | ||
| Everybody that was a normal person, they always figured, well, the government is here to take care of us, particularly people on the right, right? | ||
| The right believed in the government. | ||
| It wasn't supposed to be the big government, but they believed that the institutions were reliable. | ||
| They didn't have the same suspicion for CIA the way the left did. | ||
| They didn't have the same suspicion for the police the way the left did. | ||
| They didn't have the same suspicion for government overall the way that the left did. | ||
| And after the way that COVID was treated, and possibly Donald Trump as well, but the way that... | ||
| I think it probably actually is the way that Donald Trump was treated, because again... | ||
| Republicans had been the ones that thought they were the ones that were the side that did things the right way. | ||
| They presented Mitt Romney, who was the most Boy Scout of Boy Scouts. | ||
| He was as clean and polished and prim and proper and unoffensive as a politician could possibly get. | ||
| And he still was considered a misogynist. | ||
| He was called all the names in the books. | ||
| He's a Nazi, he's a misogynist. | ||
| And the Republicans finally got to the point where they were like, well, we're just going to give you Donald Trump then. | ||
| You know, if everybody's a bad guy, we'll just give you the guy that will win. | ||
| And I think that the right has now realized that the centers of power are not... | ||
| Good or bad depending on their opinion. | ||
| They're good or bad depending on who's actually in control of them and who's the person making the judgment about good or bad. | ||
| Because the left will say, oh, it's okay that, you know, it was perfectly fine that... | ||
| Joe Biden pardoned his son. | ||
| You know, it's a father doing all the things, doing what he can for his kid. | ||
| He loves it. | ||
| The left will make the excuses that at one point the right would make. | ||
| The right used to say, well, you know, if a black kid gets roughed up by the cops, well, what was he doing? | ||
| You know, the right automatically sided with the police. | ||
| Nowadays, I think the right will be like, well, was the cop a good guy? | ||
| Why were they roughing the kid up? | ||
| I think that everybody's more suspicious. | ||
| Of, you know, the institutions now, and I think COVID and the way that the left has behaved in positions of power lately. | ||
| So I'm sorry I didn't cut you off. | ||
| I mean, this is more aligned with how humans have been throughout history, just suspicious of powers, suspicious of people and authority. | ||
| And then we go back to the ancient times. | ||
| There was a whole bunch of calamities happening. | ||
| Like, they would be like, well, the gods must be mad at the king. | ||
| That could be a common excuse. | ||
| I mean, if you go back even to the founding of this nation, you read a lot of the papers in the 1800s, very hostile towards their political opponents. | ||
| I mean, like, the idea that, like, the right for a short time was, like, pro-government, yeah, I see that. | ||
| But I think it's just going back to the way more aligning with how humans tend to be. | ||
| We're just suspicious of anyone outside of our tribe. | ||
| Everyone in our tribe is good. | ||
| Everyone outside of the tribe is bad. | ||
| And so we're going to see more of that. | ||
| And we had this brief moment, I think, where there was a little less of that. | ||
| It'd be nice to sort of get back to that, but I don't think we're going to be there for decades. | ||
| I was going to ask that question. | ||
| When did you say a brief moment, when did you think that was? | ||
| Well, I think the 50s is really the abnormal time in American history. | ||
| So like the Red Scare? | ||
| Are we talking like... | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point because the Red Scare caused people to start trusting the government more. | ||
| They're going to protect us from the communists very easily. | ||
| All we have to do is hide under our desks and the nuclear bomb will miss us nonsense. | ||
| You know, that kind of stuff. | ||
| So, I mean, that definitely sort of moved people in a direction. | ||
| But I think the more we just saw corruption—I think it started with Watergate. | ||
| So just blissful ignorance for a period of time where— Not so much that. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that might be the way to put it, but it was like there was a bigger enemy out there. | ||
| I think a lot of what the U.S. government does in a lot of ways is try to make boogeymen so they trust—people will trust them. | ||
| You know, like terrorists. | ||
| You guys got to trust us. | ||
| We'll keep terrorists away now is the thing. | ||
| It's not working as well. | ||
| I think that's actually why the Internet has played such an important role now. | ||
| So we've had that discussion. | ||
| I think me and you have even probably talked about this before. | ||
| Like even if there was— You know, nobody wants another 9-11, but even if there was, the way information is disseminated now, I don't think there would be the same type of coalescing around a nation the way that there was after 9-11. | ||
| I don't think that that's possible. | ||
| One, because of things like this, because people will automatically be suspicious, whether it involves our government, foreign governments, but there isn't going to be the rah-rah nationalism that united more people from both sides of the aisle back in, say, 2001, what, at the latest, and even that didn't last for all that. | ||
| I mean, I agree that it didn't last for all that long. | ||
| I just don't think we'll ever see something like that again in the age of the internet. | ||
| I feel like the charity that was given was really wasted by the Bush administration. | ||
| I mean, I was a guy that was very much a Republican kind of dude after, well, I mean... | ||
| In the late 90s and early aughts, I was very much a Republican. | ||
| And then when George Bush squandered all of my trust, and I was like, okay, well, there's no good guys in D.C. And then I was, you know, I started looking into people like Ron Paul and the Libertarians, and I started looking at the government as, you know, you should always be, at least to some degree, suspicious. | ||
| And I do think that – I think Brett's got a point. | ||
| I don't know that we would have the same kind of coalesce around the government, especially considering the way that the American people, younger generations, they haven't been taught that America is a good place. | ||
| They've been taught that America is a bad place. | ||
| We've been taught that all of the... | ||
| Fundamental principles that our country is supposed to have been founded on, we've been taught that they're all lies. | ||
| Now, whether or not that's true, I think that there's probably a kernel of truth to it, and that's only because human beings are fallible. | ||
| But generally, I think the ideals that the country is founded on and the aspirations that we have for our country are good, and I think that the United States has been a force for good in the world, but I still think that... | ||
| I think millennials and Gen Z feel less that way than I do. | ||
| I think a lot of it actually has to do with the declining religiosity rates. | ||
| You go back to the 90s, most people, whether blue or red, were Christian. | ||
| But that was the core of their identity. | ||
| I remember being in church and my parents were like, oh, they're voting for that person. | ||
| We were all Christians. | ||
| That's – the declining religiosity is – especially on the left, they've moved away from that. | ||
| So now their core identity then moves to politics, and this is what sociologists have talked about. | ||
| When you get rid of traditional religiosity, it makes room for political religiosity to move in, and that becomes the new god, the new religion, and everything starts to revolve around that. | ||
| So when left and right people are now fighting, it's not so much, hey, we'll see you on Sunday even though we disagree. | ||
| Now it's you're attacking our god. | ||
| You're attacking our religion. | ||
| It's going to create more polarization. | ||
| So this – as religiosity has been declining unfortunately, politics moves in to fill that gap. | ||
| Everyone gets more tribal, less trustworthy, and of course sociological research does show Christianity correlates with less tribalism, less prejudice. | ||
| I mean like – so I mean like what do you expect is going to happen? | ||
| So you would see blue dog Democrats next to maybe a Republican at church on a Sunday. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| And it's so weird. | ||
| So I had a boss that I worked with who was – she wasn't very active politically, but she did at least pay attention a little bit. | ||
| And they were very big. | ||
| They loved guns. | ||
| They owned guns. | ||
| They went to church on Sunday, and they were pro-union. | ||
| And I was trying to – I had to try to explain. | ||
| explainer said yours they don't support this anymore just the fact that you like firearms is something that if you were to try to be involved deeper within the party you will be expelled for because it is one of their main selling points when they are trying to fundraise whether it's anti-nra anything anti-weapon especially with school shootings and things like that and they hadn't yet realized because they weren't as politically active as some of us were just how easy it was to be expelled from the group because the tribalism was so heavy now | ||
| yeah i you know you you mentioned the the fact that we're less christian less religious and i mean i i as a a novice uh person who has limited experience to philosophy it still makes me think of nietzsche saying that god is dead and and the average kind of angsty teenager thinks that that was some kind of triumphant statement and Nietzsche was like, this is going to be a horrible thing for humanity | ||
| and then we saw the horrors of the first half, well, the horrors of the 20th century where it was, you know, first it was communism and Nazism and the fight for which of those two, I mean, I want to call them theologies because they both had a significant spiritual element I want to call them theologies because they both had even if, you know, The communists said that they weren't religious. | ||
| They said they were state atheists. | ||
| They weren't at all. | ||
| They didn't behave that way, and neither did the Nazis. | ||
| Well, I mean, historians kind of talk about them. | ||
| There's a whole debate about it. | ||
| But, I mean, a lot of them tend to say these are political religions. | ||
| And as research shows, I mean, look at things like Christian nationalism. | ||
| People are like, this is Christianity's fault. | ||
| 2021 Stroop study shows that Christian nationalism actually manifests among the least churched individuals. | ||
| And what happens? | ||
| I mean, it makes sense. | ||
| If you're on the right and you start moving away from traditional religiosity, they keep a lot of the Christian symbols, but they reinterpret them into political ways. | ||
| Now Christianity becomes a civilization we have to defend, not an actual religion. | ||
| Nazism has been described as a political religion in a lot of ways. | ||
| We start moving away from traditional. | ||
| We start worshiping the state or, in terms of the Nazis, the Aryan race and that thing. | ||
| And what happens? | ||
| Everything now starts to become more materialistic, more focused on this is our territory. | ||
| This is our race we have to defend. | ||
| Tribalism will come up. | ||
| Whereas if you have traditional Christianity, you have Paul saying there's neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male nor female. | ||
| You're all one in Christ. | ||
| Like, yeah, that's going to be more... | ||
| Actually, inclusive or drawing more people in. | ||
| But when we move away from that, you take the foundation away. | ||
| Chaos results. | ||
| And G.K. Chesterton called it Christian ethics gone mad because you take some of the ethics you like, you detach it from its foundation, and it goes off into some wild extremes that just result in a hole. | ||
| I've heard someone describe communism and socialism as that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| The ideas and the morality that's laid out in Christianity. | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| I forget the guy's name. | ||
| He's a British guy. | ||
| He's a historian. | ||
| I think he's a young guy, too. | ||
| Either way, he was describing that if you take the morality that's laid out in Christianity, but take... | ||
| Christ away and take God away, you end up with something like communism. | ||
| Was it Tom Holland? | ||
| Yes, I think it was Tom Holland. | ||
| Yeah, he's not a young guy, but you're thinking of the Spider-Man actor. | ||
| Oh, yes, okay, yes, that is. | ||
| I feel so bad for him. | ||
| I interviewed him on my channel one time. | ||
| He's a great, great guy. | ||
| He wrote a great book called Dominion, where his book is basically arguing Christianity has saturated the world. | ||
| Yes, yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. | ||
| I didn't know the name of the book, and I think I might have heard Ben Shapiro talking about it or something. | ||
| But it does, it makes sense to me that the... | ||
| When you hear people on the left, they talk about morality and stuff, but without any kind of... | ||
| If you're an atheist, I find Nietzsche's argument that if there is no God, then man has to make his own morality. | ||
| It's the uber-mesh mentality. | ||
| Yeah, that without God to tell you what's right or wrong, and if we're all only here for an instant in the grand scheme of things, in the universal time scale, if you're only a... | ||
| I don't see why being quote-unquote good would matter to someone that didn't have any kind of religion. | ||
| Like, they'll say that they do. | ||
| They think that good matters. | ||
| They say, oh, I don't need a god to tell me what's good. | ||
| And it's like, well, why? | ||
| And that's what you see with the whole... | ||
| You know, the communism, it's like, well, you know, you want to be good to people and you want to take care of people. | ||
| And it's like, well, if we're all going to die and your life is actually only a spark in history, you know, of eternal history, why does it matter? | ||
| To steel man them a little bit. | ||
| I mean, they're not going to say, like, it's just great to be evil. | ||
| I mean, they would argue that being good is its own reward. | ||
| Like, it's good to take care of your family. | ||
| It's good to have loved ones around you. | ||
| But it makes it very easy for them to do some of the most evil things. | ||
| True. | ||
| But then you need to ask, why are they doing those good things? | ||
| Will they want to provide for their family? | ||
| Ultimately, what the Christian would argue is that's going to go back down to power, and this is also kind of what Nietzsche was going there. | ||
| Eventually, all that's left is trying to obtain power for you and your tribe or your family at that point, and that's what we see slowly come out. | ||
| I mean, if you are a traditional religious person, like a Christian, God has all the power. | ||
| You can't have it. | ||
| And so the basis now becomes love for him and what he did for us and that kind of stuff. | ||
| So love then becomes the central Christian message. | ||
| God died for us. | ||
| We love him. | ||
| He loves us. | ||
| But if you take that away, what is left? | ||
| Well, love is only useful as long as it brings me power or pleasure in some sense. | ||
| Helping my family is only good if it brings me power or pleasure in some sense. | ||
| So you get through the layers of what they're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, they could argue with, I don't want to go out and rob banks. | ||
| I want to be a good person. | ||
| I want to provide for my family. | ||
| Just go one meta-level lower. | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| What is the driving force? | ||
| And it's going to be something like power, pleasure, or safety, as C.S. Lewis would have said. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I could go on with this conversation all night long. | ||
| And I think we'll probably come back to these kind of... | ||
| I will try to make sure we do. | ||
| Well, these topics, considering you here. | ||
| But I do want to jump to this story that is in relation to the plane crash. | ||
| The U.S. Transportation Security... | ||
| Secretary announces new FAA action to ensure safety in airspace. | ||
| This comes on the heels of the crash in Washington, D.C. | ||
| So it's the Department of Transportation is saying Washington, with the support of President Trump and in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, effective today, the Federal Aviation Administration will restrict helicopter traffic in the area over the Potomac River around Ronald Reagan, Washington National Airport, D.C.A., the Federal Aviation Administration will restrict helicopter traffic in the area over the Potomac River around These areas include Memorial Bridge to South Capitol Street Bridge, excluding the Tidal Basin, Haynes Point to Wilson Bridge, over the top of D.C.A. | ||
| The restriction exempts helicopters entering this airspace for life-saving medical support, active law enforcement, active air defense, or presidential transport helicopter missions that must operate in this restricted area. | ||
| Any helicopter operations outside the These exemptions will be prohibited. | ||
| These restrictions will remain in place until the NTSB completes its preliminary investigation of the air carrier incident, at which point it will be reviewed based on NTSB's report. | ||
| Now, I don't if you've ever been to that area and I'm assuming, you know, there there are a lot of people that are listeners that have never been to DCA. | ||
| I've flown in and out at the DCA multiple times. | ||
| I go down there to pick up my girlfriend when she flies in or out. | ||
| Her family's in Florida, so she goes in and out of there a lot. | ||
| If you look, you can see in this actual picture, I think, the... | ||
| Pentagon is very close to DCA, and the Pentagon itself has regular flights of Blackhawks flying around all the time. | ||
| I assume that that's generals flying from other air bases or from other military bases. | ||
| Fort Meade's not too far away. | ||
| That's up where the NSA is housed. | ||
| Maybe there are people from Langley, from... | ||
| The CIA headquarters flying to the Pentagon. | ||
| So it's a very, very busy area, and it's not really a surprise that they're making these kind of limitations. | ||
| I guess what I do find a little surprising is that with it being such a busy area, and because they're supposed to have two people on staff, one person for aircraft, regular planes, and then one... | ||
| For helicopters. | ||
| What do you guys think, you know, what do you think of the fact that they didn't have people on? | ||
| Now, I know there's a lot of talk, you know, DEI and stuff, and I know that the more that I hear about this after the accident, that they were having significant problems actually staffing the people, and they were, if I understand correctly, they were turning people away based on their race. | ||
| Do you think that this kind of action is actually going to solve the problem? | ||
| And furthermore, do you think that the Trump administration, with their efforts to undo the DEI mess that we have in the government, do you think that that's going to prevent further accidents and further negative consequences from DEI policies in general? | ||
| This looks more like they're trying to quell the fears of the public, like, look, we're going to get rid of some helicopters so it's still safe. | ||
| Because after this, I was like, I'm not flying out DCA for a while. | ||
| That freaked me out. | ||
| I didn't know there were that many helicopters. | ||
| So that's maybe what they're doing. | ||
| Also, maybe general safety, dude, with the whole helicopter hitting the airplane, and they said that it was supposed to be two people watching that, and there was only one. | ||
| I was like, is this because Trump just fired a bunch of people and they were short-staffed? | ||
| I do want to point out, just because I don't want people to lose their minds, the last time there was an accident of this magnitude was 2009, and that airspace has been this busy. | ||
| For every single day since then. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| And the last time there was an accident, it wasn't this airspace. | ||
| It was the last time there was an accident in the United States. | ||
| So this is terrible. | ||
| This tragedy is horrible. | ||
| But I want people to have a sober look or sober thought process when it comes to air travel and when it comes to this stuff. | ||
| We are not in a situation where planes are going to start falling out of the sky all the time. | ||
| These policies do have ramifications, but it's still the safest way to fly, and you really don't need to be on edge just because you have to get into an airplane. | ||
| I know that I'm throwing the wet blanket on the conspiracy theory people here and stuff, but it is important to remember, this is an accident, and there have been no accidents since 2009. This is exceedingly rare. | ||
| When there are accidents, it is almost all... | ||
| There's always multiple human failures. | ||
| Planes don't just fall out of the sky. | ||
| The plane looked like it fell out of the sky in Philadelphia, so maybe I'm eating crow about that one. | ||
| One of the things that really shocked me was they showed video of the actual, what the screens that the air traffic controllers are watching, and it looks like Atari 2600, no, no, not even 8-bit graphics, like 2600K graphics, I don't know what they were, crappy little, an X and an L indicating an airplane, or it was an F, I think, in a triangle. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Like, you have people looking at these things. | ||
| They update every second, and it shows it appearing in a new position. | ||
| Like, dude, we need some top, like, high-tech monitoring systems that give you a warning if it shows that a craft is approaching another craft ahead of time. | ||
| They're looking at, like, 30-year-old technology. | ||
| I think that I saw the same screen that you're talking about, and above the two planes, they had red CA collision alarm, right? | ||
| And I... I think, and tell me what you think of this, I think the reason why they go with very simple-looking graphics is because the less information, because there are so many planes, right? | ||
| There's so much stuff going on. | ||
| I think that they go with simplified graphics like that because it's to keep the actual... | ||
| Only the most important information being fed to the people that are watching, because if there's too much stuff, you can get overwhelmed. | ||
| Now, granted, I would absolutely agree that you have to be well-trained, and maybe that is a training issue, but what do you think of that, Ian? | ||
| This is probably true. | ||
| Like, the whole, it's a triangle to indicate an airplane, and I think it was an L or an F, an F to indicate the helicopter. | ||
| You can see that. | ||
| That's easy. | ||
| I play Caves of Coot. | ||
| It's a 2600-bit game where you get familiar with the symbols and what they mean, but, like, give us a warning, like an audible... | ||
| They have those. | ||
| So I worked in a Rapcon. | ||
| Look out! | ||
| You've worked where? | ||
| In a Rapcon. | ||
| So when I was in the Air Force many moons ago, 2004 was when I joined, I was assigned to be an air traffic controller. | ||
| And I did horrible at it, so I didn't continue it. | ||
| But yeah, the reason why the technology is so old is because, keep it simple, stupid. | ||
| Not you, but you get the idea. | ||
| Complicated computers can fail or crash easier. | ||
| This stuff has been working. | ||
| It's, you know, analog. | ||
| It's going to last. | ||
| So, you know, it's been working for so long they're going to keep it. | ||
| And so there are things that start to warn when planes get close. | ||
| Like, it does come up on the screen. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| It did say that there were multiple indications that there was... | ||
| There's going to be indications on the plane. | ||
| There's going to be indications of the controllers. | ||
| And the controllers can only warn at the end of the day. | ||
| I heard that they said the helicopter was flying too high. | ||
| From what I saw. | ||
| That's what I saw. | ||
| Specifically to keep it out of the flight path of a plane. | ||
| Well, the traffic controllers have a two-dimensional screen they're looking at. | ||
| They don't see how high or low the things are. | ||
| The numbers will indicate elevation. | ||
| So they've got to look away from the plane on the map to see a number up top to indicate its altitude. | ||
| Like, yo, give me a three-dimensional imagery thing to look at. | ||
| They should have a screen where it actually shows the elevation with the symbol. | ||
| Because I remember... | ||
| Again, when I was in the RAPCON, you would see the planes and it would indicate 5,000 feet or 6,000 and you would say things like descend and maintain 5,000. | ||
| And also the elevation or the altitude indicates direction, right? | ||
| If you're at certain altitudes, you are for east-west, certain altitudes are for north. | ||
| And I'm just like throwing it out there. | ||
| It's not exactly. | ||
| But if you're at one altitude, that altitude means you're supposed to be heading on one direction. | ||
| If you're at a lower altitude or a higher altitude, that... | ||
| That altitude is for a different direction. | ||
| The altitude not only is telling you how high you are, but if you're paying attention and flying properly, the altitude will also indicate what direction you should be going. | ||
| So this thing was at the wrong altitude, so it indicated to the controller they were flying in a different direction? | ||
| It was coming in. | ||
| I think when they say they're on approach, that means that they're going to be going through. | ||
| But you know how it takes like 20 minutes to get out of, like, when you're at altitude and they're like, they're going to start descending? | ||
| They don't just go down. | ||
| They go down. | ||
| Down, down. | ||
| They're taking steps down. | ||
| And then once they get close enough, then they say, I think on approach means you can actually begin descending and heading towards the runway. | ||
| And I'm a layman. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just telling you the things that I've heard. | ||
| But you would probably be able to tell better than I would. | ||
| So many. | ||
| It's like 20 years ago. | ||
| But yeah, they would slowly descend and you would see the elevation going down. | ||
| But again, if there's only one guy in there working and he's looking at multiple screens, he's got multiple planes. | ||
| What I remember from seeing on X is that... | ||
| He did send a warning, like, did you see those? | ||
| And that's all he can do at that point, is, hey, I warned you. | ||
| And then he probably was looking at something else, and then... | ||
| They also said even when there's multiple people scheduled, a lot of times if somebody goes on break, they go down to just one and that this has been going on. | ||
| It's like you said, this has been going on for a long time without anything happening. | ||
| And, you know, maybe today is just the day. | ||
| And the problem is, to me, is like, especially given how close this is to the inauguration and all of the policies that Trump is now implementing through executive orders, is that DEI is a very big discussion that's going on right now. | ||
| now, and this is not new to just this incident. | ||
| I mean, over the last year, depending on how often you are on X or anything like that, there is a discussion where people talk about DEI specifically as it relates to flights and plane crashes. | ||
| So in something, you know, whether it's like people getting on airplanes and stuff like this, so this has unlocked a lot of fear that people have regarding those things. | ||
| So, like I said, we were watching that crash earlier, and a lot of the discussion that was going on in the live chat, whether it was Fox News covering this, is people asking if this is something related to policy that... | ||
| Hinder good hiring practices. | ||
| And that's not an unreasonable thing for people to be afraid of, even if they haven't really looked for evidence of it in a particular case. | ||
| What it does is it indicates that when somebody has that the first thing on their mind, it means that that's something that's in the consciousness of the public. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And to Brett's point about this being an ongoing conversation, even though these are the first actual accidents that have happened in a long time, if you watch these kind of... | ||
| Air traffic controller, exit counts, and stuff like that, you would see that there are a lot of near misses. | ||
| That kind of thing happens fairly frequently, and I don't know how much that is because of, you know, errors in the tower, errors with the pilots, you know, and I don't know that we can quantify it either, you know? | ||
| How do you guys feel about integrating artificial intelligence into the control itself? | ||
| So, you've got a machine saying, look out. | ||
| Like, maybe there's still a dude sitting there, but on top of that, you have different... | ||
| If a guy has to get up and go take a piss, there's still an artificial intelligence, or like nine of them, all watching the monitor, all warning crews and pilots, prepare, look, you know, incoming, look out, this, that, and, like, fail six. | ||
| Again, you might be more of an expert on this than I am, but isn't, like, isn't... | ||
| Autopilot, kind of what that does? | ||
| Most planes have instruments that they can see the radar on the plane and they'll see, oh yeah, there's one coming this way. | ||
| This is just an extremely rare occurrence. | ||
| So the pilots can see their own radar. | ||
| They also can, you know, so they have IFR and VFR. They can, you know, visual flight rules versus instrumental flight rules. | ||
| So they have their own instruments and they have air traffic controllers also telling them about stuff. | ||
| So there's... | ||
| All sorts of things. | ||
| And, you know, if they do get close, something does start to beep. | ||
| Remember that. | ||
| The Blackhawk was dark, meaning it wasn't showing up on radar? | ||
| No transponder, right? | ||
| So this is all on the government. | ||
| This is fully to blame Department of Defense. | ||
| I mean, they owe the families a lifetime of servitude. | ||
| They need to repay these people. | ||
| Like, this is a government, basically, assault, an unintentional assault on the civilianry. | ||
| I don't know if I would go that far, because the... | ||
| The way that I've heard some of it described is they were talking to the pilot of the Blackhawk, and they were saying, stay behind the regional jet. | ||
| But there was a regional jet that was taking off, as well as one coming in. | ||
| And so, if I understand correctly, the tower and the helicopter pilot were communicating, and they were telling him, stay behind the regional jet. | ||
| And it seems like, again, I'm not saying that I have inside knowledge or whatever, but it seems like he, the pilot of the Blackhawk, thought he was talking about the plane that was taking off. | ||
| And he was behind it. | ||
| And actually, the tower was talking about the plane that was coming in because they were both the same type or a similar type of regional jet. | ||
| They were both not big jumbo jets. | ||
| It wasn't like a 747 coming in or a 737. They were both smaller jets. | ||
| And the pilot of the Black Hawk thought that he was talking about another one. | ||
| Again, this is just what I heard. | ||
| I didn't actually look into it and stuff. | ||
| So I don't think that... | ||
| I guess what I'm saying is that kind of strong language about an attack and stuff. | ||
| This is people making mistakes. | ||
| And whereas I'm 100% on board, the government can just print money out of nowhere. | ||
| So yeah, pay all the families. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| There's no problem, in my opinion, with that. | ||
| But I don't think that there was any malice involved. | ||
| And I don't think that it was any kind of... | ||
| I think it was just, you know, human error and stuff like this does happen as tragic as it is. | ||
| Yeah, unintentional assault. | ||
| I use the word unintentional for sure, but, like, if a soldier unintentionally drops a grenade into a foxhole and kills nine other soldiers, you still court-martial the guy. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't matter if he intended to do it or not. | ||
| No, the pilot's dead, so... | ||
| But who, the controller that told him to stay behind, vague jet number one... | ||
| The controller's not in the military. | ||
| The air traffic controller, from what I can see, did his job. | ||
| He did warn. | ||
| If it wasn't understood properly, it's not on him. | ||
| I mean, it would be on him if he did not give any warnings. | ||
| But from what I can see from the audio, yeah, he did give warnings. | ||
| It just may have not been understood properly. | ||
| I guess it's just this primal urge to lash out and blame someone is still resonating inside of me. | ||
| I mean, that goes back to human nature. | ||
| Go back to the ancient times. | ||
| Why is it not rain? | ||
| Well, we need to probably kill this Steve because Steve forgot to make a sacrifice to the temple the other day. | ||
| We just want to blame someone to fix the solution. | ||
| What you're feeling is perfectly natural. | ||
| And that's actually why, like you asked at the beginning, you said you listed what the government plans to do and you asked, like, is that even necessary in this case? | ||
| And that's because people have the primal urge to blame someone. | ||
| So the government has to be seen doing something when something like this happens, even if there isn't necessarily known whether it's... | ||
| I mean, you know, you can crucify the person that's the air traffic controller, but it doesn't mean that it's going to, and I mean figuratively, but it doesn't mean that it's going to prevent the next issue. | ||
| I think that sober approach to figuring out why it happened and... | ||
| Doing more to staff these places. | ||
| Maybe you take the government out. | ||
| Maybe they should be all privatized. | ||
| This is an argument that can be made. | ||
| But yeah, I don't think that an emotional attack on the guy that's running or the person running the air traffic controller is a good idea. | ||
| But we're going to jump to this next story here. | ||
| Intern U.S. This, in my opinion, is good. | ||
| But we're going to go ahead and read on. | ||
| on the Washington Post is reporting. | ||
| Interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin on Friday announced the dismissal of roughly 30 federal prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot cases in the Washington, in the Washington, D.C. office over the past four years. | ||
| Two people familiar with the matter said Friday. | ||
| The employees were hired to permanent career positions after serving under special or short term status as the office surged to manage nearly 1,600 prosecutions after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. | ||
| The prosecutors remained under probationary status, which allowed the firings without recourse under Justice Department policy, the people said. | ||
| So, today on the culture war, we had four people that were, three people that were pardoned, and one person whose sentence was commuted. | ||
| It was the QAnon shaman. | ||
| I forget the guy, I don't want to... | ||
| Shout out to Jacob Chansley, the QAnon showman. | ||
| I love the man. | ||
| Jacob was great. | ||
| We had Nick Ox, who was a proud boy, Stuart Rhodes, Jay Johnson, and Jacob Chansley. | ||
| So Jay Johnson was actually on Bob's Burgers for a while, and he basically comes from Hollywood, and he got wrapped up, and he... | ||
| To me, it seems like he was the one that was most likely to have been just in the wrong place at the wrong time. | ||
| Stuart was the guy from Oath Keepers. | ||
| Yeah, he was the leader of the Oath Keepers. | ||
| Yeah, and he was there. | ||
| He's the one who had his sentence commuted, but he's still considered guilty of the crimes. | ||
| I think he was going to get like 20 years or a long, long time. | ||
| But they were all saying, look, You know, the prosecutors essentially were doing things that were illegal. | ||
| They were not—it was not a fair—none of them felt like they had a fair trial. | ||
| The entire jury was all out of D.C. They felt like if those trials were held anywhere other than D.C., they would have gotten a fair trial. | ||
| The judge was biased. | ||
| The judges were all biased. | ||
| You know, Jacob Chansley, he—if I understand correctly, he didn't do— Anything violent, right? | ||
| And there's plenty of video with Jay. | ||
| You can't miss the guy on January 6th. | ||
| You know, I mean, the QAnon shaman went on to, you know, people were, actually, Jay had worn a QAnon shaman Halloween costume after it happened the year, like, you know, the following Halloween, and that was part of the reason why he got such a bad outcome with the court. | ||
| They were like, you can't be sorry. | ||
| If you're dressed like that, you think it's a joke. | ||
| I mean, never mind the guy's a comedian, right? | ||
| He's a voice actor and a comedian for Bob's Burgers and stuff. | ||
| But, you know, I mean... | ||
| I understand why, not that I agree, but I understand why the Oath Keepers got looked at the way they did, why the Proud Boys got looked at the way they did, and why Jacob was looked at the way he did. | ||
| But when it comes to Jay, I mean, he was treated really, really badly for no reason. | ||
| And that's, my understanding is, out of all of the people that were arrested, all these guys did sometime in, or no, Jay didn't, but all the other guys did sometime in solitary confinement. | ||
| Some of them did long stints in solitary confinement, which is like torture. | ||
| I mean, solitary confinement is where the worst of the worst go. | ||
| The people that are violent to other inmates, people that are a threat to other inmates, people that are a threat to themselves, and none of these guys were that. | ||
| Even if you have a distaste for the Proud Boys, Nick was not. | ||
| That guy. | ||
| He was there literally doing... | ||
| He was just being a journalist, right? | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| I forget the name of his group. | ||
| It was something... | ||
| It might have been Murder the Media or something like that. | ||
| It wasn't helping his case. | ||
| The name wasn't helping his case. | ||
| But he was there. | ||
| He wasn't involved in any of the fights with police or anything. | ||
| It's just that he was a Proud Boy. | ||
| And the government was intent on making the Proud Boys out to be an example. | ||
| The same thing with the Oath Keepers. | ||
| So most of these people had their due process. | ||
| Like, they were not given due process most of the time anyways, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So these prosecutors were hired specifically to handle these cases and were kept on in a probationary phase. | ||
| That's why they're allowed to be fired without any sort of following hearings or anything? | ||
| If I understand correctly, yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know what their history was. | ||
| Leading up to this. | ||
| But, you know, if these guys were hired specifically to prosecute J6 people, I imagine that the argument or the directive that they got was, look, these people are guilty, we all know these people are guilty, and essentially the court cases, the actual trials, are kind of just for show. | ||
| That's the kangaroo court. | ||
| Yeah, it essentially, that's the way that it sounds like, especially when, you know, when they articulate it. | ||
| And again, I understand there are people that were here this morning that a person that is not sympathetic to the J6ers at all, they wouldn't be sympathetic to their plights, except for, like I said, you know, Jay Johnson, he was, you know, he was there. | ||
| He felt like it was a boring day. | ||
| He said that he felt like... | ||
| There wasn't much going on. | ||
| It was mostly people just milling about until the tear gas started, and then he was trying to get out of there. | ||
| But I don't recall if he actually went into the Capitol or not. | ||
| But the way they described the people that were in the Capitol, there was no violence in the Capitol. | ||
| And upon hearing that, it did make me think, you know, I really... | ||
| Didn't see any of the closed caption footage where there was fighting inside. | ||
| All of the fighting that I saw with police was outside. | ||
| There's that Ashley Babbitt situation inside. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They were trying to climb over a window to get into the inner sanctum or whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Broke a window. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the cops opened fire and had been broken a window. | ||
| That was one shot. | ||
| And that wasn't, you know, that wasn't attacking. | ||
| Police. | ||
| She was trying to climb through a window. | ||
| Now, granted, she was trying to go somewhere she shouldn't have been. | ||
| I think somebody broke the window before they tried to climb through. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, it was a broken window that she was trying to climb through. | ||
| And on the other side, there were still Congress people. | ||
| So that was the justification for opening fire. | ||
| I think that he shouldn't have, but that's what the story would be. | ||
| But there was no fighting with police inside. | ||
| So, I mean, I do think that it's... | ||
| It's a good thing that these people are fired. | ||
| Less government is never going to be... | ||
| Less people employed by the government will never be a bad thing. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Unless they're air traffic controllers. | ||
| Air traffic controllers could be done privately. | ||
| Less lawyers. | ||
| Never a bad thing. | ||
| Do you have a take on it, Mike? | ||
| I mean, I will admit I am very, very behind on a lot of this stuff here. | ||
| I think this is just really just – I'd be more interested in the actual symptoms of this. | ||
| This is just – I think a lot of people on the left wanted this to happen to the J6ers. | ||
| They were angry. | ||
| They feel like they won the 2020 election, and then when they saw this, the way the media blew out of proportion, they wanted what – They wanted justice and they wanted these people to pay because they keep calling it an insurrection, insurrection. | ||
| They were trying to destroy our democracy. | ||
| And so it just enabled the people in power to really just throw the books at them in every way they can because… Again, as I was talking about earlier, this tribalism stuff just comes up, and with declining religiosity, your political side becomes the new god. | ||
| These insurrectionists, in the eyes of people on the left, were going after... | ||
| Heretics, blasphemers. | ||
| They're heretics, they're blasphemers. | ||
| They were going after their victory in their religious, their political religiosity, and that was considered sacrilegious. | ||
| Do you remember where you were in your own personal context on January 6th? | ||
| What were you doing? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| I was reading a book in my home in Tucson, just minding my own business. | ||
| And then I saw the news. | ||
| I was like, you know what made me think of it? | ||
| It's like, well, yeah, a lot of leftists were rioting in cities around the country. | ||
| Now the right is just doing it. | ||
| Okay, well, yeah, they're angry that Trump didn't win. | ||
| I mean, this is what they're going to do. | ||
| And then I just sort of went back to reading. | ||
| And then I just, I saw it constantly getting blown out of proportion. | ||
| Now, again, I'm a layman in this. | ||
| This is really not an area I've studied a lot, but it just seemed like, I was like, Does this really need to be dragged on and on? | ||
| We're going back to J6 like it's Pearl Harbor, for crying out loud. | ||
| And it didn't really seem like it was that big a deal. | ||
| And as just an average American who's more interested in other topics, I was like, can we just move on? | ||
| I'd much rather talk about inflation or if Biden is really there and what's going to happen in the midterms. | ||
| But no, everyone's going back to J6. And I feel like a lot of average Americans were just over it in a few months. | ||
| And they were sort of mad at a lot of... | ||
| I mean, I heard from people on the left that said, can we just move on? | ||
| Only the most politically indoctrinated were the ones that were the most affected by this story. | ||
| I'm interested in actually hearing both of your takes on that. | ||
| Like, where were you guys? | ||
| Did you work here? | ||
| It was before I worked here. | ||
| Okay, what about you, Ian? | ||
| We had actually talked about maybe going down on the 4th. | ||
| We were like, should we go down and do a show from DC on the 6th? | ||
| And then we were like, no, no, sounds like a bad idea. | ||
| It just doesn't seem like a good vibe right now. | ||
| So we ended up, we were just home. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| So for me... | ||
| Look, even doing this show, I'm not the most political person. | ||
| Certainly most of my social media, you wouldn't see that. | ||
| And I had friends, or what used to be friends, who reached out to me and wrote very long messages about the evils of this event, even though I had not said anything about it, nor did I really care about it in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| I was out skating when this happened and had no idea what was going on until I got home that day and lost friends over this event where I had to read, like, 12-page diatribe. | ||
| It's about why I was a bad person because I did not, I guess, call this out despite the fact that I had nothing to do with it nor talk to them at all about my political beliefs. | ||
| If they said I voted for someone, they certainly didn't hear that from me, so they wouldn't have noted anyways. | ||
| But for the people who are the most politically indoctrinated, the lack of speaking is sometimes worse because they believe that silence is violence and they will take anything you don't say as a crime as well. | ||
| And that was probably one of the bigger awakenings for me at that moment that it's not just going to affect other people. | ||
| It's also possibly going to affect you as well. | ||
| And it was shocking to me because, look, this is also one of those cases where you have to do a ton of research if you want to refute them and talk about it as well. | ||
| Like if I have to talk to them now and point them out and say, when you talk about how many police officers died on January 6th and you don't acknowledge that they were suicides after the fact. | ||
| And one of them was zero. | ||
| I said that there was zero on January 6th. | ||
| I said, I don't have any interest in debating this with you. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| To me, whatever my friends believe politically never mattered to me. | ||
| It's never been an issue for me to have friends on all sides of the aisle. | ||
| I still consider myself, for the most part, a fairly liberal person. | ||
| It never mattered to me. | ||
| And to see people who probably agree with me on a fair amount of things still end 20-year friendships over something like this that had nothing to do with them. | ||
| They weren't there. | ||
| Had nothing to do with me. | ||
| I wasn't there. | ||
| This was, I guess, maybe post-COVID as another issue. | ||
| There was COVID, there was George Floyd, and then there was this. | ||
| And there was all of these events that primed the American people to just start hating each other. | ||
| And certainly, I guess, maybe it's like a game of whack-a-mole. | ||
| Eventually, one of them was going to get to me, despite the fact that I didn't have anything to say about any of it. | ||
| And that's sad. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It goes back to that religious fervor thing. | ||
| Silence is violence. | ||
| If you don't participate in the rain dance, the gods are going to be mad, and they're not going to send rain. | ||
| It's a similar psychological phenomenon where you have to participate. | ||
| I mean, when St. Augustine was around, a lot of the pagans were blaming the collapse of the Western Roman Empire on Christianity because the gods are now mad. | ||
| And he wrote City of God to refute that and say that's just not the way the world works. | ||
| So the same kind of stuff is happening. | ||
| It's just carried on into new modern fervor, I guess. | ||
| I had to point out, I said, look, did you care when people entered the chambers when Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed? | ||
| You don't know about that here. | ||
| Let me tell you about what was going on when Brett Kavanaugh was going to be confirmed because there was plenty of people, and this happens in local governments all the time, especially when leftists and leftist groups dislike something that's going on in the government. | ||
| They feel emboldened to be able to protest. | ||
| Because they understand that the legacy media will never frame them in the way that the legacy media framed the, you know, Donald Trump supporters when this happens. | ||
| So it emboldens them to go out and continue to act that way because they know they're not going to face any repercussions for it. | ||
| Yeah, we were talking about that this morning and that was kind of everyone's sense that like, especially again, I... Keep referring to Jay because Jay was the kind of the most normie guy that kind of got swept up in it. | ||
| Like everyone else was, you know, politically active. | ||
| I mean, even the QAnon Shaman, he, Jacob, he was, he's very politically active, very politically aware, shares a lot of the sentiments about, you know, about what the left is doing in the United States and stuff. | ||
| And Jay was, you know, very much an L.A. normie. | ||
| And when this stuff happened, he was kind of shocked because he went from being a dude that would get parts and get jobs, and after that, all of his work dried up, he lost his job, his agent fired him, you know, or, you know, quit on him and stuff. | ||
| And that, as someone that comes from the music industry, I... Didn't experience that same thing, because I was already persona non grata, you know, almost seven, eight years prior to this, because I was one of the people that would say, no, it's important that we have free speech. | ||
| It's important that we are able to, you know, we should listen to people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro talk, because even if you don't like them, you know, what they say might, you know, inspire a good dialogue. | ||
| And the response from people in the music industry was like, no, we should punch Nazis. | ||
| I'm surprised. | ||
| And there were people that I was friends with that I would have assumed were liberals, right? | ||
| They would have probably called me a libertarian, maybe a conservative libertarian, and I would have called them liberals. | ||
| And then these people were saying, no, we should punch Nazis like Milo and punch Nazis like Ben Shapiro. | ||
| And I'm like, Ben Shapiro is Jewish. | ||
| This doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| And so I outed myself very early when Woke came around as someone that wasn't going to play along. | ||
| And so there was a lot of that. | ||
| I started losing friends long before, you know, the January 6th stuff. | ||
| But I understood what he was going through because he was just like, oh, this all was dropped in my lap. | ||
| And for some reason, now everyone looks at me like I'm persona non grata. | ||
| And I was even getting, as someone that everyone knew, you know, I was on Twitter. | ||
| Just memeing the whole thing all day long. | ||
| I was sharing the Mars Attacks meme where the old lady stands up, they blew up the Capitol, you know, and I'm sending that meme out and laughing about it and making jokes about the riot because it was also my sense that we had just gone through a year of violence night after night after night after night protests and Kenosha and You know, | ||
| there was all the stuff that happened in D.C. and the May 29th attack on the White House and all that stuff. | ||
| And so from my estimation, it was like, oh, just another another riot that happens. | ||
| You know, when Donald Trump was elected, there was riots. | ||
| They burnt that guy's limo. | ||
| You know, they were smashing up D.C. And so I didn't get the sense that this was some big deal. | ||
| But some of the people that I knew that I'm not going to. | ||
| Name them, but they were, you know, sending very accusatory tweets. | ||
| Where were you, Phil? | ||
| I'm like, I was in New Hampshire. | ||
| I'm tweeting from my office. | ||
| And they're like, well, do you think it was okay? | ||
| And I'm like, well, I mean, it wasn't okay, but neither was all the other riots. | ||
| It was just a riot. | ||
| And as far as I was concerned, there was never a time where Pence was actually going to do. | ||
| What the few Trump supporters that were hoping he would not certify, there was never a time that was going to happen. | ||
| It was absolutely ridiculous from as soon as the idea was presented that maybe it was an insurrection, that maybe Donald Trump was trying to take the presidency. | ||
| I was like, there is no way on earth that any other outcome is going to happen aside from Joe Biden will be the president. | ||
| He will get, you know, they will. | ||
| Confirm that all the votes are there. | ||
| There is no world in which that doesn't happen. | ||
| And to even present the idea is so ridiculous that I can't take you serious. | ||
| And then that's what the Democrats did with the whole, like, at first it was, I was thinking it was a riot. | ||
| It's like an insurrection and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Again, I thought the same thing. | ||
| It was a riot. | ||
| And yeah, they definitely went way overboard. | ||
| But then I think the response was, you know, it definitely seemed, from my layman perspective, it went overboard in response. | ||
| Everyone was throwing gasoline on this situation. | ||
| They just made it worse, and it's like we're well past the days when we can sort of come together. | ||
| You look at how the Civil War ended. | ||
| I mean the North had the South defeated, and they were like, we need to work on unity. | ||
| We need to work on getting past this. | ||
| Why can't we return to those days where… Yeah, we're humans. | ||
| We make mistakes. | ||
| We've done bad things on both sides, but we need to work on unity and try to forgive. | ||
| I've just seen none of that from either the left or the right or the past. | ||
| Four, eight years even. | ||
| I mean it's just – everyone's just throwing gasoline on it instead of trying to look for national unity. | ||
| I mean isn't it a big part of that because the majority of the fighting that's happening is being done digitally and it's very easy to other a person when you're arguing with an avatar rather than the actual humanity of a person right in front of you? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| You're behind a screen. | ||
| You're safe in your room. | ||
| You probably don't even have any pants on and you can say whatever you want. | ||
| But that just – I mean honestly, social media is proving one of the main Christian doctrines called total – I mean, I remember Michael Roos, who's an atheist, said like, yeah, total depravity, that's the one thing the Christians definitely got right. | ||
| You just look at human nature. | ||
| The social contract is what actually keeps society together. | ||
| In a lot of ways, yeah. | ||
| And it's, you know, facial, when we see each other's faces, we do have more empathy for each other because, you know, we are a tribal species. | ||
| We have to work together. | ||
| And when you see someone else making facial expressions, you do relate better. | ||
| When you're behind a screen and you don't see that, that's when the dark, selfish nature does start to come out. | ||
| I've been pretty good at holding that back. | ||
| Real quick, Ian, that's exactly why. | ||
| Tim has people come to the studio and we don't do Zoom calls and stuff. | ||
| Sorry, go ahead. | ||
| I've been good about holding back the vitriol via text, firstly, because there's no tone you don't get. | ||
| If I'm being slightly sarcastic, you may not see why I'm saying it. | ||
| So I haven't been deriding people in text anymore for the last 10 years. | ||
| Maybe on video, maybe I'll go on, but even then it's behind. | ||
| But when I'm gaming, if I'm playing an online game, sometimes... | ||
| Anger. | ||
| If the guy, it's a pickup game, it's like a five-on-five, and one of my teammates just is terrible, I'll find myself seeing some pretty horrible stuff to him. | ||
| And then I think later, like, that could have been a nine-year-old, a 12-year-old. | ||
| And I just ruined the next 20 years of his life because I made him question his own humanity. | ||
| And, like, is he really a good person? | ||
| Does he have a good, does he not have a father in the house? | ||
| And I'll just, like, go with these sometimes. | ||
| And I'm like, I've got to stop that hate from coming out of me. | ||
| At those moments, when it's the easiest, you gotta—I don't know, man, I don't know, but it's in me. | ||
| It's obviously in me if it comes out like that. | ||
| Yeah, it's us humans. | ||
| I mean, like, you go back, you study human history, like, before the rise of Christianity. | ||
| I mean, we are evil. | ||
| I mean, like, you would attack a town and you'd send—the soldiers, you're not paying them. | ||
| They're getting plunder. | ||
| So when you attack a city and you actually win, the women, the children— They become your slaves. | ||
| You can do what you want with them. | ||
| Yes, the children, too. | ||
| You get to plunder. | ||
| That's how you paid your soldiers. | ||
| And that was human nature for the longest time until, I mean, like, as Tom Holland and others have talked about, you know, like, for example, if you read, like, the book, like, Christian Virtue Ethics, or When Children Became People by Owen Bakke, I mean, like, Christianity is really... | ||
| We've added something into the mix that has really calmed us down and given us a far better view of ethics. | ||
| Human rights comes out of the Christian tradition. | ||
| Abolition comes out. | ||
| And this idea that if we're going to attack like Iraq, we're not going to send our soldiers into plunder. | ||
| The Romans would have looked at us like we were stupid. | ||
| Why would you not plunder Iraq? | ||
| But yeah, we don't know how far we've come, and it's really unfortunate. | ||
| We still got a long way to go. | ||
| But I mean, like, you study the ancient world, it will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. | ||
| Why don't you expand on that a little bit? | ||
| Because I think that people, especially young people today, again, I think we touched on it a little bit earlier, young people today really look at the United States and Western society. | ||
| They look at it as this total evil because it engaged in slavery, right? | ||
| It might be... | ||
| Part of me thinks that it's just like I'm mad at dad. | ||
| But yeah, the idea that Western society is unique and this time of peace that we're living in is anomalous. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| And I think that it would do well to teach kids how reality is. | ||
| And reality is brutal and... | ||
| Life is full of pain. | ||
| It's short. | ||
| Death is imminent for everybody. | ||
| And the fact that you have any peace at all in your entire life is actually the rare, wonderful, fortunate thing that Western society in particular has provided for the world. | ||
| Well, if you go back to the ancient world, just look at how they treated children. | ||
| I mean infanticide was rampant. | ||
| There's like a letter from one Egyptian father – husband to his wife said, by the way, if it's a girl, just kill it because that was normal in the ancient world to just commit infanticide through exposure, especially deformed infants or weak children like Seneca talks about that. | ||
| And so like, yeah, we can look back at like surveys of like ancient families and like only like a – Six out of like 600. Owen Bakke talks about this in his book, When Children Became People. | ||
| Only six out of 600 had more than one girl in the family. | ||
| Well, why? | ||
| Well, because infanticide was rampant and boys were more prized because they could take care of the family. | ||
| They would be – they're first-class citizens and girls were second-class citizens. | ||
| And so they did that. | ||
| And there they leave. | ||
| Kids out on the countryside have them exposed. | ||
| Now, a lot of them survived, so they could be raised as slaves or in brothels. | ||
| I mean children to the ancient Greeks and Romans were used for sexual purposes. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| The Christians come on the scene, and John Martins talks about this in his chapter, Children in Late – or yeah, Children in Late Ancient Christianity. | ||
| Christians invented a whole new word to describe it because they refused to use the term child lover. | ||
| They invented a new word called child corrupter. | ||
| That's a rhetorical to say, like, you can't be doing this. | ||
| And so they really pushed ethics forward. | ||
| Children need to be protected. | ||
| They invented – When did that idea – what was the spawn of that idea? | ||
| Because – Here, again, we grew up steeped in Christianity, and to us, the idea of abusing a child like that, we think of it as abuse. | ||
| And it makes a gut reaction in most people, and the people that don't have that gut reaction, they are looked at and they are treated as some of the most horrible monsters that... | ||
| I mean, you put a pedophile into prison and word gets out, and they're going to end up dead. | ||
| And that's in a prison with some of the worst, most violent people our society produces. | ||
| So how did that... | ||
| What was the genesis of that? | ||
| Judeo-Christian tradition, especially Jesus saying, you know, let the little ones come to me. | ||
| Anyone who causes one of these little ones to sin, let a millstone be tied around their neck and cast into the sea. | ||
| That kind of language. | ||
| I mean, really, the Jews prior to the Christians were preaching to protect children. | ||
| Then the Christians come on and they really expanded it, working on what Jesus and Paul taught. | ||
| We know that the early Christians were including children and they were baptizing them, including them in communion. | ||
| They were full members of the community. | ||
| The Romans and the Greek looked at them as like becoming adults, like they weren't full adults yet or they weren't full people yet. | ||
| Aristotle talks about them being like less rational along with barbarians, women, and slaves. | ||
| There was a hierarchy, and Christians come on the scene. | ||
| They go, no, everyone here is the image of God. | ||
| They should have specific rights. | ||
| That's something that also develops out of the Christian tradition, and they slowly start to change the culture. | ||
| It took a while for sure. | ||
| I mean you still had infanticide in the Middle Ages because even though the church was condemning it, it took a while to saturate the culture that Tom Holland talks about. | ||
| But the reason why we think these kinds of things, that slavery is wrong, that human rights exist, that humanity has intrinsic value and that children should be cared for, this comes out of the Christian tradition. | ||
| In the ancient world, they were – Beat routinely. | ||
| They were turned into sex slaves as children, boys and girls. | ||
| It's, again, horrifying to read. | ||
| And again, slavery was just the norm. | ||
| No one ever questioned the idea that slavery should be abolished until the Christians came on the scene. | ||
| The first one to say slavery should be abolished was Gregory of Nyssa working on what he was learning in the scriptures and reading Paul in Genesis. | ||
| And that slowly began to change. | ||
|
unidentified
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What was that? | |
| What was that? | ||
| When was that? | ||
| I believe it was in the 300s as Gregory of Nyssa was around. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And the wider culture did ignore him for a while, but you start to see throughout the Christian tradition them slowly moving to end slavery that by the time you get to, like, St. Ansem, like, it's... | ||
| Sort of getting abolished from Europe in a lot of places. | ||
| And so then the Europeans later on going, well, we're not allowed to enslave Christians. | ||
| We know that's wrong. | ||
| Let's go elsewhere to enslave people. | ||
| And that's how you get the transatlantic slave trade. | ||
| And then the funny thing is, is if you read about the transatlantic slave trade, a lot of the plantation owners were trying to keep their slaves away from missionaries. | ||
| Because if the missionaries come in, they're going to evangelize these slaves and turn them in to Christians, and then we'll have to free them. | ||
| And so they were like, you know, a lot of the Quakers were like being oppressed in the Sugar Island. | ||
| Because they were trying to evangelize, and like, no, you can't do that because we need slaves. | ||
| Human nature has always been butting up against the Christian tradition, and Christian tradition has been trying to move humanity slowly but surely in a much better direction. | ||
| You can read about that in Catherine Gerbner's book, Christian Slavery. | ||
| It's a very interesting history of the Sugar Island stuff. | ||
| Did the Jews take slaves in the early days? | ||
| They did, and then early – sometime in the first millennium, a lot of the popes started to outlaw Jews owning Christians as slaves, and then they started outlawing Muslims or Christians being sold to Muslims. | ||
| And then you saw slow reforms happening. | ||
| Like slowly they're like, okay, no more slavery here, but we'll allow it here still. | ||
| So yeah, you saw – I think one of the popes in one of the 600 or 700s said no more Jews owning slaves and no more owning – and then one pope came along and he attacked the Venetian slave trade. | ||
| He said no more selling slaves. | ||
| By the way, he bought all the slaves and then freed them. | ||
| And then even Isabella of Spain did some horrible things, but she also outlawed enslaving Native Americans unless they were hostile or cannibals. | ||
| So again, we saw slow reforms moving us by the time the abolitionist movement comes along. | ||
| Yeah, it was deep in this Christian tradition that there's something wrong here. | ||
| And you can see it in the scriptures. | ||
| Go to Ephesians 6 where Paul says – everyone quotes that. | ||
| Slave masters or slaves obey your masters. | ||
| But no one quotes right after that in Ephesians 6 where Paul says, and masters do likewise to your slaves. | ||
| So he doesn't outright say slavery should be wrong, but he undercuts any sort of reason for slavery to exist. | ||
| If masters need to do exactly to their slaves as slaves are doing, there's no institution of slavery at that point. | ||
| So the Christian values slowly start to undercut it, and this is why Tom Holland says Christianity was like a depth charge. | ||
| It took a while for these explosions to go off and spread. | ||
| At the end of the 1800s, we had what was called the men who made America, the robber barons, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller. | ||
| And they basically, I don't know if they particularly, but they would have underpaid workers and they would pay them in script sometimes, like company currency, and they could only buy products. | ||
| They basically created a slave class of workers. | ||
| They weren't called slaves because they were getting paid something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But was that kind of like... | ||
| Because that was, like, post-slavery. | ||
| Slavery had already become illegal. | ||
| But is it now, like, do people just kind of justify slavery, like, if we're going to pay them something? | ||
| Like, the guy's digging cobalt out of the sub-Saharan African mines or wherever they're with their bare hands, like, breathing in the toxic fumes. | ||
| And we're like, that's fine because they're getting paid something. | ||
| Yeah, we try to justify it like that. | ||
| I mean, but Robert Fogel wrote a great book called, like, The Fourth Great Awakening, where he just talks about how... | ||
| In America, there's been not one, two, but four awakenings. | ||
| And the Third Great Awakening was addressing what you were talking about, this idea that it's kind of like slavery, but we're not calling it, and we need more social reform to fix this kind of stuff. | ||
| So there was a lot of push in the Third Great Awakening for the social gospel to go out and try to fight that kind of stuff, end child labor and that kind of stuff, because we as humans just tend to try to... | ||
| Act in selfish ways where it's all about us. | ||
| What sort of money can I get? | ||
| What sort of greed can I get for me? | ||
| And I don't really care who I oppress, and I'll justify it in whatever way I can. | ||
| That's unfortunately human nature that once again is constantly fighting with the gospel. | ||
| So I want to jump back to some of the stuff that we were talking about earlier when it comes to the way the... | ||
| The left had been behaving leading up to January 6th. | ||
| Benny Johnson has this tweet, Breaking Hakeem Jeffries just called for violence against President Trump's agenda, pushing for fighting in the streets. | ||
| We are going to fight legislatively, we are going to fight it in the courts, and we're going to fight it in the streets. | ||
| Let's listen. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are going to fight it legislatively, we are going to fight it in the courts, and we're going to fight it in the streets. | |
| We are going to fight it. | ||
| I don't think that there's any ambiguity in that. | ||
| Like, there's nothing ambiguous about that. | ||
| And if it were, again, this is the intended double standard, but if it were any Republican saying that, the reaction would be, you know, absolute They would be apoplectic. | ||
| They criticized fight, fight, fight after he was almost assassinated. | ||
| Yeah, and trying to make it as if Trump wasn't the victim of the attack, but Trump was looking to victimize people. | ||
| And yet, here's the Democrats, you know, Hakeem Jeffries, who I don't think he's the leader of the... | ||
| House Democrats? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Was it you that were saying you think he's considered the future of the party? | ||
| No, that's Ricky Torres. | ||
| Ricky Torres, who's... | ||
| I mean, we see this, like, how often does Maxine Waters speak where she says something that's inflammatory? | ||
| Every time. | ||
| Literally every time she opens her mouth. | ||
| And that's the back and forth you have to be willing to have with people whenever they want to call out what they consider to be political violence or political posturing is that they consider it to be political violence from one side. | ||
| But from the other side, it's to be taken as some type of avant-garde, off-the-cuff response that doesn't actually mean what you think it means. | ||
| They're telling you to not believe what you see with your own line of eyes. | ||
| Yeah, and Hakeem Jeffries is the leader of the – he's the minority leader of the House of Representatives. | ||
| So, you know, he's in a position of authority. | ||
| Was he taking questions there? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It would be interesting to know if somebody there, you know, if there was a journalist who actually wanted to ask a question, like, sir, could you quantify what you mean by, like, I get what you say legislatively. | ||
| I get what you're saying. | ||
| What do you mean by fight it in the streets? | ||
| Honestly, I mean, I wish that I were influential enough where I could make phone calls to other news outlets and be like, hey, hold these Democrats' feet to the fire. | ||
| This kind of rhetoric, if the right doesn't push on it and doesn't try to bring the same kind of consequences on the left... | ||
| As would be brought on the right, and if we don't make us think about it, then it's going to continue. | ||
| I mean, I would love to see, I would love to hear Donald Trump, you know, make a statement about this. | ||
| What did you mean by this? | ||
| Yeah, what exactly do you mean by this? | ||
|
unidentified
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Because... | |
| You know, as the minority leader of the House of Representatives, you're the top dog for the Democrats in the House. | ||
| And granted, the House is kind of where the clown show happens, right? | ||
| The Senate is more the serious body, and the House, you get people doing a little more wacky stuff. | ||
| Hey, hey, they're both clown shows. | ||
| It's the government. | ||
| The Senate thinks of themselves as the serious ones, whereas the House doesn't think of themselves as so serious. | ||
| They're like Cirque du Soleil. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Sophisticated clown shit. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| But I mean, I do think that it's worth – it would be worth having the right push on these things because until it's made clear that this is unacceptable, you're only going to get more of it. | ||
| I would say at some point, though, someone needs to take the high road. | ||
| And I totally call out the double standard here because Trump definitely said fight, fight, fight after, and people in the media tried to misinterpret that. | ||
| I just really think at some point it'd be really good to see one side go, we don't want to play the game you're playing. | ||
| So this is obviously just rhetoric. | ||
| Can you do the same for us? | ||
| Republicans do that all the time and it never works. | ||
| I think that not looking to the DOJ to bring charges is actually taking the high road because that's the kind of response that you get from the Democrats. | ||
| They go straight to lawfare. | ||
| Honestly, at this point, anything that the Republicans do that is short of... | ||
| Actually using the levers of government power to attack their political opponents is the measured response. | ||
| There's someone who's, again, just not really talking about politics that lot. | ||
| If I would see, like, Republicans going on about this in my home, I'd just start rolling my eyes. | ||
| Get to work. | ||
| I don't care what they said. | ||
| Like, just get back to getting stuff done. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, the Republicans and the Democrats are trying to earn the vote of the American people. | ||
| So I hope the Republicans just sort of look at this and go, okay. | ||
| Clowns, whatever. | ||
| That's how we think of them. | ||
| But let's get back to working, and that will impress average Americans far more. | ||
| I think that speaks to the difference between people on the right and people on the left in the U.S. today, the conservatives and progressives. | ||
| And I think I said this earlier, but I don't believe in the blank slate. | ||
| I don't believe that people are only created by the conditions. | ||
| I completely reject that idea. | ||
| I believe that people have a temperament. | ||
| People have emotional reactions that are going to be different from one person to another. | ||
| I think that your political bent is largely a result of your temperament and stuff. | ||
| And I think that Jonathan Haidt's work, I think it's called The Righteous Mind, is the book. | ||
| Righteous Mind, yeah. | ||
| Righteous Mind is the book that he did. | ||
| The different personality traits that he sees in the left, care versus harm, justice versus care. | ||
| I forget what they were. | ||
| But the point that I'm making is the people that are conservatives, they're going to agree with you and they're going to say, get to work. | ||
| And that's why. | ||
| Or part of why Republicans and conservatives don't do that kind of stuff and attack this stuff so viciously because it would actually turn off their base. | ||
| Whereas when it comes to Democrats and the progressives, they really do. | ||
| They actually believe these things. | ||
| I do think a good percentage of the Democrats... | ||
| Believe Trump's a fascist. | ||
| You can show them evidence, you can show them all the evidence you want, but in their heart, they believe that he would do the things that Hitler would do if he was given the chance. | ||
| They believe it totally. | ||
| And I see it regularly with the Democrat kind of operatives on X. There are some that obviously are doing it just for money, but there are a handful that they're... | ||
| Buying it. | ||
| They believe everything they're saying. | ||
| There's a couple that come to mind that I'm not going to name because I don't want to promote them. | ||
| Also, ignore the politicians for a second. | ||
| If the media was doing its job, people who are politically motivated, people who are either in government or the ones that are already politically partisan, meaning those who are already considered a Republican or a Democrat. | ||
| Sure, fine. | ||
| Maybe the Republicans shouldn't be, you know, in the eyes of some Republicans, they shouldn't be wasting their time going after something that they believe to be just something that was misspoken, right? | ||
| But it's the media's job, and unbiased media should be doing their job to at least ask this guy, what did you mean by that? | ||
| And one thing this country could do if they wanted to actually heal the divide a little bit is if both sides of the aisle, if we were in a world where there wasn't as politically partisan of a news... | ||
| Of news networks, as we have now, is if MSNBC was willing to ask him a question, what did you mean by that, and then print his answer, or CNN, ask him a question like that and print his answer. | ||
| And if both sides did that to their own parties and held them accountable, it is possible that you wouldn't see the divide in the way where now, anytime somebody cites an article for something in the news, whether it's pro-Trump, they say, well, that was just from Fox News. | ||
| That was from Newsmax. | ||
| I disregard it because your news is biased and it doesn't matter. | ||
| CNN asked a couple of questions of people that were Democrats. | ||
| It might engage people to start asking those questions from both sides and get people a little bit more in the middle, but they're not going to do that. | ||
| Yeah, I think that there's a lot of substance to what you're saying, and I think that I wish that you could see, or you would see, you know, outlets like MSNBC and CNN. I think it's possible with CNN. I don't think it's possible with MSNBC. MSNBC has picked their lane. | ||
| Too far gone? | ||
| Yeah, well, they've picked their lane. | ||
| They may not have a huge viewership, but they have a viewership that they have to cater to, and I don't think they're going to change that. | ||
| I have seen plenty of far-left people on X who call CNN a pro. | ||
| Yeah, it's ridiculous. | ||
| It's run by David Zaslav over there at Warner Brothers Discovery, and they really hate him. | ||
| He's kind of the Trump of the media world. | ||
| They really, really despise him. | ||
| So there are definitely people that actually believe that CNN is somehow a pro-Trump network. | ||
| I'm going to jump to this story here. | ||
| Ex-Federal Reserve advisor, the Washington Post reports, ex-Federal Reserve advisor indicted on charge of economic espionage. | ||
| A former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested Friday and accused of leaking inside information from the Fed to the Chinese government over a period of several years. | ||
| At one point receiving a $450,000 payment, then lying about it to Fed investigators. | ||
| Economist John Harold Rogers, 63, of Vienna, Virginia, worked in the Division of International Finance of the Fed from 2010 until 2021, according to an indictment unsealed Friday in federal court in the district. | ||
| Last year, he told a podcaster that he'd retired from the Fed in May 2021, approximately a year after he had been questioned by investigators for the Fed's inspector general and allegedly lied about how he accessed and transmitted sensitive information to two unnamed Chinese co-conspirators. | ||
| Do you guys think that there is any level or bureaucracy in our government that is not infiltrated by China? | ||
| What was the name of the... | ||
| What was the name of the... | ||
| Federal Reserve advisor? | ||
| Yeah, what was the name of his position? | ||
| He was a senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. | ||
| It was the department of what? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Worked in the Division of International Finance. | ||
| I just imagine that there's so much dark money and bad stuff going on there. | ||
| Yeah, to answer your question, Phil, you'd have to define the word infiltrated exactly because if they, maybe they just talked to some Chinese guy on the phone, I think they've all been connected to the Chinese. | ||
| In some way. | ||
| Every layer of our government, I think, is connected to the Chinese in some way. | ||
| But it's just such a vague... | ||
| Like, the thing is, if a guy has a private company in China, he's a Chinese government agent. | ||
| Because the way the CCP... Yeah. | ||
| There are tentacles in every private company in the country. | ||
| So, like, any business at all with any Chinese company, you're connected to the CCP. Yeah. | ||
| Has anybody asked Eric Swalwell what he thinks of this? | ||
| Zing. | ||
| I don't know, but it's a real heavy assumption to think that every government agency has some sort of infiltration. | ||
| I don't think that it's all that heavy. | ||
| I think it's a big... | ||
| It would be too much to say everybody, right? | ||
| But I think that at least the bureaucracies that... | ||
| I think it's reasonable to say that China has, you know, has at least some kind of relationship with people, whether knowing or unknowing, because there are people that... | ||
| That end up doing spy stuff for other countries without realizing they're doing it. | ||
| If you talk to Swalwell, talking to the Chinese spy, he didn't know that he was talking to a Chinese spy. | ||
| But Fang Fang, she was telling him the things that he wanted to hear. | ||
| And I'm sure that that happens plenty. | ||
| Whether some guy that... | ||
| That likes Chinese women and some Chinese woman is like, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, talking to him. | ||
| And pillow talk will end up, you know, exposing a lot of information. | ||
| And I think that that kind of stuff, that kind of espionage is probably more common than, hey, here's a bunch of money, get me information. | ||
| But I do think that it's probably very common. | ||
| And I think that the United States, it's possible that, you know, previous administrations had looked the other way. | ||
| Not hunted down leads and stuff. | ||
| I mean, there was plenty of evidence that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden had dealings with Chinese companies, and there's no reason to think that they weren't, you know, giving information to the Chinese government. | ||
| Again... | ||
| Knowingly or unknowingly, because who knows what Hunter Biden was... | ||
| If Hunter Biden goes to China, you know they're loading him up with coke and hookers and he's running his face and you know that they're filming and recording everything. | ||
| You know it! | ||
| I don't think that it's a ridiculous thing to say, hey, there's every level of our government to some degree has been compromised. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| I'm not sure how you would clean it out and make sure, you know, how the Trump administration would come in and make sure that it's cleaned up to the best of their ability. | ||
| But I do think that it's reasonable to say, hey, we need to take care of this. | ||
| If I'm, I'm still, sometimes I'll be dating. | ||
| And if I meet a girl that's Chinese from China. | ||
| That goes through my mind. | ||
| I'm like, dude, she's got connections to the CCP. I can't date this girl, which is horrific. | ||
| Crushing hearts for Chinese women everywhere. | ||
| I'm so glad I got married years ago. | ||
| I don't have to worry about any of that. | ||
| Was she Chinese? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I think you'll be okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think China is trying to grab a lot of power before it's too late because they got a huge population crisis. | ||
| I mean, infanticide was rampant for years and they sent a lot of girls into the wilderness and now they've got to... | ||
| An aging population, a lot of boys that can't find women, and I think they see the writing on the wall, so I think they're just trying to grab as much power as they can right now before it's too late. | ||
| What do you think the chances of some kind of political upheaval in China, how realistic are that, or is that because... | ||
| I mean, it's an old saying that too big of a young male population with nothing to do is a recipe for a disaster for a society. | ||
| How bad do you think the situation is in China? | ||
| Obviously, China has significant controls over their population and the information that gets out, but do you have a sense of what kind of situation is going on in China, or is it just kind of your gut instinct because of stuff that you've read in the news? | ||
| It's going to be a lot of my gut instinct. | ||
| I'm not like an expert on this, but first of all, let's remember Trump's in the White House, so it's pronounced China, okay? | ||
| That's how it's pronounced. | ||
| It's a huge nation over there. | ||
| So, I mean, I think you can never really predict because a lot of like East, Far Eastern people are going to have a far different culture where... | ||
| A lot of people in the West, we want to stand out. | ||
| We want to be unique. | ||
| It's the exact opposite mentality over there. | ||
| Like they want to sort of just blend into the crowd. | ||
| There's a lot more collectivist thinking than individualist thinking in the West. | ||
| So I think a lot of the assumptions or intuitions we would have are just completely wrong on how they're going to react. | ||
| I think they would rebel if they're not – if they're running low on food, if they come – But until that kind of thing happens, I think they're just going to try to continue with their cultural norm of trying to stay in the crowd, not create too much fuss, because that's very much the mindset of collectivist cultures, whereas we in the West, we're very individualistic. | ||
| We want to stand out. | ||
| We want to cause a riot. | ||
| I don't think a lot of them are thinking that. | ||
| I think they're just sort of thinking is, how can I go along with what everything is happening and not get too much attention to myself? | ||
| So, you know, it's hard to say what's going to happen. | ||
| I would never have predicted. | ||
| Trump's first term or second term. | ||
| So, I mean, who knows what's going to happen over the last 20 years, next 20 years? | ||
| It could be anything. | ||
| I think my gut tells me they will take those young men and try to get Taiwan because you got to look at it from their perspective. | ||
| They're going to – they have this aging population that they're not having the birth rates up. | ||
| They need to replace people. | ||
| So they're going to have a declining economy over the next 100 years regardless. | ||
| So might as well try for once because either way, they're going to decline a little bit somehow. | ||
| So I think they're thinking of that. | ||
| So I guess we'll see, though. | ||
| I always hear that, and I think about the fact that, like, and I agree with you. | ||
| A lot of people don't realize the real situation on the ground in China. | ||
| They have no idea. | ||
| They don't even understand, like, the reality of being from a collectivist culture and how you view the world as being fundamentally different from, like, a Westerner or an individualistic standpoint. | ||
| But I also, and you're right, it would be a last chance to effort to, like, make this last-ditch attempt to take Taiwan. | ||
| But the problem that I see with it is that... | ||
| The only thing they really want for Taiwan would be, like, a propaganda victory. | ||
| The people they don't really need, there's more mouths to feed for China. | ||
| You're not really getting much. | ||
| You're just getting, like, TSMC's factories and fabrications that you can essentially build in a couple years' time, which is some, there is some stopgap time period to, like, some lead time to build these things up and have them. | ||
| But I just, I personally, I lived in Singapore in high school, so I'm not speaking from a little bit of an understanding of the region here. | ||
| I don't know if they're really going to do it because it doesn't seem like, like, Good point, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you could say, like, maybe for the legacy of She, because his zero COVID... Zero-COVID policy didn't really go anywhere. | ||
| It just caused China to slip years into the past. | ||
| Essentially, it's a real economic problem for them right now, on top of the one-child policy that it caused. | ||
| But I just don't see it happening. | ||
| I think there's just too much that they would lose from going to war. | ||
| Maybe it's a different value point, but I don't know what to make of that. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Again, as I said, I have no clue what's going to happen. | ||
| They may just sort of... | ||
| Roll the dice on it. | ||
| I mean, but yeah, again, they're the collectivist culture. | ||
| They don't want to make too much of a fuss. | ||
| But I do think they're trying to grab as much power as they can right now in hopes that somehow they can deal with their declining population. | ||
| I think that's probably what they're trying to do right now. | ||
| And infiltrating the U.S. government would be one of those aspects. | ||
| I don't know how deep it is, though. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| If the Americans were to take the Panama Canal, I think the Chinese would seize Taiwan and just be like, there you go. | ||
| And also, not only is it what they get, but it's what is being removed from the table, which would be basically a liberal economic imperial stronghold right off their coast, which they don't want. | ||
| It's like a British colony, essentially. | ||
| It's not really, but... | ||
| And they dealt with Hong Kong the same way, which was exactly the same thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what happened with Hong Kong after those riots, what, five years ago? | |
| It's just like radio silence on Hong Kong. | ||
| What's the situation there? | ||
| Well, it's China. | ||
| They just sped up the agreement. | ||
| They decided that we're not going to wait the whole 50 years we agreed to. | ||
| We're going to make it China tomorrow. | ||
| It seems like after the Tiananmen Square riot massacre, where the Chinese just shut down a potential revolt, it was like, what happened if the American Revolution failed? | ||
| Would there ever have been another one? | ||
| or would the British have just seized and clamped down? | ||
| And then like how long after 1776 would there have been the second American attempt at independence? | ||
| Considering the fact that Canada became its own country, Australia became its own country, New Zealand became its own country, and India, like the British stopped the colonial rule of India, I do think the United States would have become its own country. | ||
| It might have become its own kingdom because Canada is a kingdom of Britain. | ||
| Australia and New Zealand are all kingdoms. | ||
| King Charles is the monarch. | ||
| But India is not. | ||
| India is not. | ||
| India is a little bit different. | ||
| How it would have panned out, I don't know. | ||
| And also because of the... | ||
| Even if they'd have lost the revolution, the founders had lost the revolution, I think that the spirit in the United States of that kind of looking for independence was something that was in the... | ||
| In the colonies. | ||
| And I don't think that would have burnt out. | ||
| And I think that had there been a revolution that the Americans lost, I think whenever they actually did achieve their own independence, I think they would be looking back and saying, remember what the king did. | ||
| Remember what the king did. | ||
| We want to break ties with the king. | ||
| Now that you mention it, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had made the United States, it wouldn't be called that, but made this, whatever, its own kingdom, just like Canada. | ||
| And they're like, now you have your own. | ||
| Prime Minister and your own, you know, autonomy under the reign of our King. | ||
| Remember, it was 150, 150, 160 years between, or 140 maybe years between when the United States was formed and you actually got fast passage across the Atlantic. | ||
| Because even boats, it took a couple weeks to get across. | ||
| The Titanic and those class of liners, it wasn't like you could get across. | ||
| So the logistics of keeping a colony under control the way that England had, that was a tall order. | ||
| And so I think that the... | ||
| The revolution, even if the revolution had failed, I think that there quickly would have been some kind of second revolution and so on and so forth because the sense of indignation towards the king wouldn't have changed. | ||
| Maybe instead of being a couple years, it would have been a longer war. | ||
| I think it was kind of inevitable that the United States was going to become its own country. | ||
| I don't know what sparked the Tiananmen Square riots exactly, if it was dissatisfaction with the, not the emperor, the Chinese are no longer an emperor, but with the CCP, basically, there was dissatisfaction with the totalitarian government. | ||
| I don't know what, do you know what sparked the Tiananmen Square riots by any chance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I mean, that's essentially it. | ||
| The students were saying that, like, this is ridiculous. | ||
| It was 1989, correct? | ||
| It was June 4, 1989. | ||
| And then the Chinese government, well, the CCP, you should say, because there's also the Republic of China that's the government. | ||
| They peacefully repressed the students. | ||
| Peacefully reorganized the students. | ||
| Meaning they slaughtered them all and put them all on indoctrination. | ||
| There was a lot of people that paid a heavy toll. | ||
| So whether or not that country will see another... | ||
| Attempted revolt like that. | ||
| Were they all... | ||
| Was that ideology erased? | ||
| If you know anything about China right now and you start seeing the stuff that they're doing now, a lot of Chinese people are freaking out about it. | ||
| But the problem is that there are also an equal number of people that have been so... | ||
| They've... | ||
| People always struggle with this. | ||
| It's hard to understand what it looks like from another man's shoes or from another man's perspective. | ||
| They've lived their entire life within the bubble of China and their idea that Zheng Guo, their center of the universe for them, is that they're like an American. | ||
| They think of their country as the best. | ||
| They're like China number one. | ||
| They literally think that. | ||
| The problem is there are going to be some people to see the injustice in it. | ||
| Some people don't view justice in the same Western mentality that we view justice. | ||
| They don't see it the same way that you or I do. | ||
| It's about the collective. | ||
| Yes, correct. | ||
| If you upset the collective. | ||
| I mean, this is why in Islam there's apostasy laws. | ||
| If you leave Islam, you don't have freedom of religion. | ||
| They want you dead because you cannot apostate from Islam because the collective overrules the individual in these collectivist cultures. | ||
| They'll have that kind of mentality. | ||
| The English had 500 years. | ||
| Before the revolution in the United States, or about 500 years, they made the king sign the Magna Carta. | ||
| And the Magna Carta was a big, big deal. | ||
| It established the rule of law, limited the king's power, guaranteed rights to barons, protected the rights of property and barons and stuff, established that all free citizens could own and inherit property. | ||
| These were all innovations. | ||
| These were all brand new ideas. | ||
| And so this tradition that the American... | ||
| The Englishmen in the colonies, because they all considered themselves Englishmen, right? | ||
| Even though they were Virginians and Massachusettsians and New Yorkers, they considered themselves English. | ||
| They all had that strong tradition of we're free men, that we have a king, but the king is not actually the totalitarian king that other societies had and other kings and other monarchies had. | ||
| The rights of the men of England, they had a lot of rights and because of the Magna Carta that kind of Self-ID, awareness of themselves, that was something that was expressed in the revolution here in the United States. | ||
| So to compare the United States or the U.S. Revolution and what came before it in England and English common law to China, it's really, really, really, really different stuff. | ||
| Because there's 500 years of... | ||
| Believing as Englishmen they had rights that came from God. | ||
| The Magna Carta is great. | ||
| It was King John. | ||
| I believe it was King John. | ||
| It was Richard's brother. | ||
| King Richard's brother. | ||
| King Richard the Lionheart was on crusade, yeah. | ||
| He died. | ||
| He drowned in a river. | ||
| So his brother, King John the alcoholic, was in charge. | ||
| And that was the guy, the king from Robin Hood, that Robin Hood was, you know, the sheriff. | ||
| The funny thing about him is that he's portrayed in Robin Hood as this great king. | ||
| But, like, at one point, like, on his way back from crusade, like, he gets captured by someone. | ||
| And they try to, like, say, like, we got your king. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Richard? | |
| No, yeah, Richard III. | ||
| And the English nobles hated him so much they didn't even want to pay the ransom. | ||
| They were like, "No, thank you. | ||
| You can keep them," until someone convinced them, "All right, fine, we'll pay the ransom." Yeah. | ||
| I love Chinese history. | ||
| There's a book called The Romance of the Three Kingdoms that was written in, like, the 1400s by Liu Kangzhao, and it's basically a historical fiction about, like, the year 200 AD, where China split into these three kingdoms. | ||
| there was this revolt called the Yellow Turban Revolt and then all these local governors formed armies to fight this revolt and one of the governors seized the emperor and took control and was like, I'm ruling through the eight-year-old emperor now. | ||
| And It's a really great story. | ||
| They made Dynasty Warriors based off of it. | ||
| So I learned a lot about... | ||
| But the whole obsession and love of the Emperor, which has been throughout that country for thousands of years, is something different than what England... | ||
| England didn't even exist until 900 AD or whatever. | ||
| 1066 is technically when they go back to William the Conqueror. | ||
| William the Conqueror? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're going to go to Super Chats now. | ||
| We've been running our faces a little long, but that's okay. | ||
| Shane H. Wilder says... | ||
| I want to shout out my homie, Chris Burtman, and his wife. | ||
| They're about to have their baby. | ||
| Let's effing go. | ||
| The cult of Burt will live on. | ||
| Burtman. | ||
| Congratulations, Burt. | ||
| Hey, buddy. | ||
| He's a wonderful, wonderful guy, and here's to hoping that everything is smooth and they have a... | ||
| She has an easy birth, and we welcome the child into the TimCast world here. | ||
| Kelly says, it's clear that any GOP senator who votes against Bobby, Tulsi, or Cash will face a huge primary election challenge. | ||
| Nicole Shanahan, Scott Pressler, and Angela McArdle all have pledged to oust them. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if they're going to face a primary if they get confirmed. | ||
| But if one of them doesn't get confirmed because of dissent from one of the Republicans, then you might. | ||
| But when it comes to people like Collins or Murkowski, those districts are very... | ||
| They're not reliably red. | ||
| They're very purple districts. | ||
| So it would probably have to be someone that was like, hey, I'm dissenting because I don't think... | ||
| Personally, I think it's most likely that it would be Tulsi, and it would be someone from a red district that would say, oh, I think that she's actually somehow a spy, which is, on its face, ridiculous. | ||
| She's been a major in the National Guard for 20 years. | ||
| She's had five different background checks, and she's had a clearance the entire time. | ||
| If there was anything nefarious in her past, that... | ||
| Show was there. | ||
| It would have been found in the background checks. | ||
| She wouldn't be an officer, especially a major. | ||
| Like, that's a pretty high-level officer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| She picked up Lieutenant Colonel. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| My bad. | ||
| Lieutenant Colonel. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, that's a pretty high-level officer. | ||
| So, I don't think that there's anything there. | ||
| So, it's my opinion she should be confirmed. | ||
| But I do think that if it's... | ||
| If it ends up being someone like Murkowski or like Collins, probably not. | ||
| If it's McConnell, I don't think that there would be a primary challenger as well. | ||
| But I don't—do you guys have thoughts on— Well, all three of those, Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel, I feel like if they don't get in, there could be someone that's put in that's way more partisan, way more dangerous. | ||
| Like, those guys are balanced, obsessed with constitutional law and doing things by the book. | ||
| You're not going to get much better than that across the board. | ||
| They might be flashy personalities, but you don't want some sycophant getting in there. | ||
| I think Kash Patel is going to get it probably pretty easily. | ||
| I think that he'll get the votes. | ||
| I think that it'll be the Democrats that don't like him. | ||
| And I think that the Democrats are going to, a lot of Democrats are going to vote against these people. | ||
| And I think that that is a problem. | ||
| Because anyone that's not a swamp monster, the Democrats are just against. | ||
| Like Marco Rubio, he was a senator, so they like their own people, so he got in smooth sailing. | ||
| 99 to 1. Yeah, he got in with smooth sailing, but that was largely because he's a senator, and they don't like to insult their own. | ||
| It's a very small club. | ||
| There's only 100 of them at any one time, so they... | ||
| They're very much like, you know, our people are cool, other people aren't. | ||
| So I think that was a lot of why Marco Rubio. | ||
| And honestly, he is extremely qualified to do the job. | ||
| And he's not particularly MAGA. They don't conceptualize him as a MAGA guy. | ||
| Even though I do think that he's going to do the job that the president wants. | ||
| I think that he's going to be on President Trump's team. | ||
| He's not going to be like some of the previous... | ||
| Trump administration people. | ||
| But my sense is that it's going to be... | ||
| Like, Cash Patel will get through. | ||
| I don't know if I have... | ||
| I don't think that Bobby's going to have a lot of problem. | ||
| I think he'll get through as well. | ||
| But I think Tulsi might have a problem. | ||
| And I think that's a terrible development because I think that Tulsi... | ||
| Of all of them, Tulsi is the one that I think, you know, deserves it the most. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She should... | |
| They put her under surveillance, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| But, alright. | ||
| Perpetual Jonathan says, Finally, IP makes it. | ||
| I came across your work via the Drizzle David Wood years ago, and your series have been very thorough and informative. | ||
| Convert, Phil. | ||
| Well, I'm... | ||
| I follow you on X now, and I do a lot of listening to podcasts. | ||
| I have a long drive that I'm going to be—I'm driving to New Hampshire tonight, so I will be listening to your work. | ||
| What's the Dizzle David Woods? | ||
| The Dizzle—that's David Wood. | ||
| He is Islam's number one opponent. | ||
| I've been on his channel. | ||
| He's been on mine, and we go after Islam when he comes on. | ||
| He's a fun guy. | ||
| You guys should talk to him. | ||
| Thank you for the super chat. | ||
| I do a lot of stuff. | ||
| I just uploaded a six-hour supercut of all my videos on gospel reliability, just showing the gospels are extremely reliable documents. | ||
| Islam could benefit from a Reformation. | ||
| It's never had one before. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Here's why. | ||
| Because if you go back and you just look at what the Prophet Muhammad was saying, I mean, like, you read the Hadiths, their violence. | ||
| I mean, you read, like, Sunnah Abu Daud. | ||
| I mean, like, there's one story that I was just talking with David Wood about today. | ||
| Like, there was a slave girl that was attacking Muhammad, and they killed her, and then they went to the Prophet, and he said, yeah, that's fine, because she was insulting me. | ||
| So, I mean, like, a lot of, like, there have been Reformation attempts in Islam. | ||
| It's called – they're called Salafis, and a lot of them actually get a little bit more radical and traditional. | ||
| It didn't – Islam didn't start like Christianity. | ||
| Christianity started with a guy, Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate. | ||
| He died for our sins. | ||
| He died the death of a criminal, lived the life of a pauper, and then his followers were called to go out and be persecuted to spread the gospel, and they were for hundreds of years until Constantine helped them. | ||
| But Islam started basically with – A warlord for the most part. | ||
| He comes out of Arabia. | ||
| Islam spreads. | ||
| They take over this area. | ||
| They turn the Christians and Jews into dimmies, you know, force them to pay this tax. | ||
| It started off completely different in how Christianity started. | ||
| And there's great books. | ||
| Like Tom Holland actually wrote a book called The Shadow of the Sword. | ||
| He goes into that in detail. | ||
| There's another great book called In God's Path. | ||
| Or they just talk about how Islam spread. | ||
| It was a lot of violence involved, far more than the foundations of Christianity. | ||
| Muhammad was an orphan, basically, in a Bedouin tribe. | ||
| And he lived the life of a warrior because they were being persecuted. | ||
| They had no other... | ||
| Option at that time, fight or die. | ||
| So he led an army to fight and then decided instead of killing you all in Mecca, I'm going to unify everyone under this concept of a god. | ||
| And so he sort of spread monotheism. | ||
| But I feel like if he had been born in a time of bounty, like we have now on Earth, that God would have spoke to him in different ways and ordered him to do different things. | ||
| Because it gives you different wisdom and direction depending on the situation. | ||
| Ian, let's go on to read some more Super Chats. | ||
| Okay, sorry. | ||
| No, no, it's fine, it's fine. | ||
| It's just that we got a bunch of Super Chats and this conversation is not a small conversation. | ||
| I could go on for hours. | ||
| So, no offense, no offense. | ||
| I apologize, Ian. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Justin Royer says, congrats on the album, Phil. | ||
| I've been jamming it all morning and it's absolutely killer. | ||
| It's about time we make guitar solos great again. | ||
| I tell you what, no one can guitar solo like Jason Richardson. | ||
| By the way, people are going to get the new album. | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| Where'd they get it? | ||
| You can get it on Spotify. | ||
| You can get it on Apple Music. | ||
| And if you want to order a physical copy, you can go to alltheremainsonline.com. | ||
| There's actual albums and stuff. | ||
| What's the name of the new album? | ||
| The album is called Anti-Fragile. | ||
| Anti-Fragile on Spotify? | ||
| On Spotify, yeah. | ||
| I'm Not Your Buddy Guy says, is America under attack? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| You can chill out. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Wyatt Clayton Berg says, Phil, I think the anti-government right believes government is unnecessary because people are basically good, while the pro-government right, like me, believes we need government because people are basically bad. | ||
| My take. | ||
| My take is, I do think, I think that I'm in agreement with you, but that doesn't mean, but because people are bad, you can't allow a strong government big, powerful government. | ||
| So I agree, people are, You know, they're incentivized to take care of themselves and their family and their tribe first. | ||
| But because of that, that's actually an argument against big government as much as it is an argument for big government. | ||
| So, I agree with you in principle, but I don't think the solution is big government. | ||
| I think the solution is localized government. | ||
| So, let's see. | ||
| General Cale says, if they were willing to use a virus last time, imagine what's in store this time around. | ||
| They. | ||
| Who are they, though? | ||
| They're the guys in the black cloaks that hang out in the basement in Europe somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, look, historically, there's been a lot of things like famine and food restrictions, and that was what was being proposed in England. | ||
| So, I mean, I think that we can actually imagine what... | ||
| Would be on the table if governments are allowed to run rampant. | ||
| So, let's see here. | ||
| John Sola says, New ATR album is fire. | ||
| Feels like an early aughts New England metal and hardcore fest. | ||
| I'm glad Jay Rich is carrying the torch for Ollie. | ||
| Ripped to a guitar legend in metal. | ||
| I tell you what, it is... | ||
| Jason's great. | ||
| He's awesome in person, too. | ||
| He's phenomenal. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| It's bittersweet to think about Ollie. | ||
| This is the first record that we put out since Ollie passed away. | ||
| The last time we put out a record was 2018 and all. | ||
| That was the last record we did with Ollie. | ||
| And so this is, you know, it's kind of tough, but we're very proud of the record. | ||
| And I think we did Ollie proud. | ||
| So that's the sweet part of the bittersweet. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I'm not your buddy, Guy, says, I hope everyone watches the Piers Morgan interview of Tucker Carlson. | ||
| I agree that the one word which can sum up Western civilization is Christianity. | ||
| As Christianity declines, so too does the West. | ||
| I am very sympathetic to that idea. | ||
| I mean, I'm planning a bunch of videos this summer, like how Christianity ended slavery, how Christianity created human rights, how Christianity created science. | ||
| I did a video last year called How Christianity Changed the World, and I found all these studies that missionaries have just went out. | ||
| They increased literacy rates. | ||
| They built hospitals. | ||
| They actually created economic progress, places like India and China. | ||
| I mean, like, it's the lifeblood of the world, and we just don't realize it. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| But here's the silver lining in all that. | ||
| As Christianity declines, we go to secularism, but secularists have abysmally bad birth rates. | ||
| And so sociologists like Eric Kaufman, who wrote Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, says in about 100 years we're going to be right where we were because who's having all the kids? | ||
| Conservative Christians, and they're just going to just come back. | ||
| But now they're more polarized, so they're protecting their children more than they were in the 90s. | ||
| That's the argument that Tim actually makes a lot, that because the left is, you know, The left is embracing what some people would call debauchery and aborting their kids and not having kids and looking at themselves and saying, we're not going to have kids because we want to spend our money on us and looking at kids as a problem and such. | ||
| That eventually there's going to be a revival of religion here in the U.S. and that the right is ascendant because of that. | ||
| G.K. Chesterton said, I mean, Christianity has died many times. | ||
| It has a God that knows its way out of the grave. | ||
| So, we'll be back. | ||
| Don't you worry. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| John Eddy says, read about my recovery from lymphoma and chemotherapy and share my story on Give, Send, Go, John Eddy. | ||
| Well, congratulations. | ||
| That is great to hear. | ||
| I love to hear people that beat cancer. | ||
| I lost my dad to cancer. | ||
| 25 years ago now, so anyone that can beat that terrible, terrible disease, kudos to you, and here's to a long life. | ||
| In a parallel road, I just was having swelling lymph nodes the last few days, and I went in the sauna for like an hour, and when I came out, the swelling was gone. | ||
| It was just gone. | ||
| So I don't know if that has something to do with lymphoma, your lymph nodes, your lymphatic system, reducing acidity, who knows? | ||
| But it was pretty miraculous. | ||
| Congratulations, by the way. | ||
| From Timothy Curran says, Phil, I think I saw one of ATR's first shows at St. John's Gym in Clinton, Mass. | ||
| New album is excellent. | ||
| Equal parts pushing and inspiring what we needed these dark days. | ||
| Hope to catch you guys on tour soon. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| It would have been one of our early shows, probably back in like maybe 2000, 2001, which is pre-release of our first record, back when we had no idea what we were doing at all. | ||
| We were terrible. | ||
| That's Father Timothy Curran, by the way. | ||
| Oh, Father Timothy Curran. | ||
| Thank you, Father. | ||
| I apologize, Father. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Michael McHenry says, Long time, first time, long time fan, first time, I guess super chatter. | ||
| Found out my wife's pregnant. | ||
| My third, her first. | ||
| Angelic woman who adopted my sons after their mother passed. | ||
| See y'all in eight months. | ||
| That is a beautiful story. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Round of applause. | ||
| Round of applause. | ||
| And kudos to your wife. | ||
| And hopefully she has an easy birth. | ||
| And what a great woman to adopt your children and make a family out of those that lost their mom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's see. | |
| Yeah? | ||
| MF Damien says, do you think the right hollering DEI all the time will have the same boy who cried wolf effect that the left achieves screaming racism all the time? | ||
| I don't, and the reason I don't is because right now there is so much DEI in the government, it is unlikely to find, we are unlikely to find out that it's not. | ||
| If we were to compare it to the left screaming racism all the time, The left screams racism all the time when there's no racism. | ||
| Like, the left screamed racism about the George Floyd situation. | ||
| The left screamed racism and had most of your average normies thinking that 1,000 or 2,000 black men were murdered by police every year. | ||
| And it was like 12. You sound so racist right now. | ||
| That word has no effect on me anymore. | ||
| Like, I was getting it today. | ||
| I'm like, you run along with your magic spell. | ||
| But now, if you were comparing the DEI, the accusations of DEI, with the accusations of racism in the 60s, you might have a point. | ||
| Because there was a lot more racism, you know, before the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| And the Civil Rights Act, there was a lot of substance to the arguments being made that, hey, look, we're a racist society. | ||
| We need to end Jim Crow, etc., etc. | ||
| So I think that... | ||
| The context today, no, but if you were to compare it to the 60s, maybe. | ||
| I think that there's enough DEI going around. | ||
| I don't think there's enough racism going around to actually fill all the accusations. | ||
| I will say Phil has about 60% magic resist, so he is very resistant to magic in general. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| I am concerned about the DEI thing becoming a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation. | ||
| With this helicopter crash into the airplane, I've seen people on Twitter with large followings being like, DEI, they're saying it. | ||
| And that is, to me, hold back, bro. | ||
| But it's only when it appears in the government that it becomes a real Boy Who Cried Wolf. | ||
| If our Department of Defense was saying, it's because DEI, come on. | ||
| But no, they haven't been, so I'm not concerned like that. | ||
| Andre says, TCAS is not active at that altitude. | ||
| Blackhawk mistook the jet for another jet that was landing. | ||
| Hilo pilot wearing NVG2, no depth perception. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I don't know what TCAS is, but like I said, the... | ||
| There was a miscommunication. | ||
| I was under the impression there was a miscommunication with the tower. | ||
| And honestly, if they're wearing PVS-31s, I have 31s, and I know that they have an aviation version, but you can drive with PVS-31s. | ||
| Flying, though? | ||
| Brian was saying there's a lack of depth perception. | ||
| There is a lack of depth perception, but there's still... | ||
| You can tell size, and especially seeing as the wingspan... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| So, but thanks for the super chat. | ||
| Andrew Ho says, the aircraft have traffic collision avoidance systems. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| It's a verbal warning traffic with the distance and which direction to maneuver to. | ||
| Was that not working on either aircraft? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| know I guess we're gonna have to wait until until we hear more from the NTSB and all of that Crowag says Brett what are your thoughts of Stargate partnership with the Pentagon for nuclear projects considering the plot points of Terminator and war games I have no thoughts on it I I do think that everybody should rewatch Terminator 1, though, because it's an underrated film. | ||
| As good as Terminator 2 is, Terminator 1 is just as good. | ||
| You think it's underrated? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Terminator. | ||
| All of the attention comes to Terminator 2. I think Terminator 1 is a vastly different movie. | ||
| It's basically a horror movie. | ||
| And it's fantastic. | ||
| The music of that film, the score of that film gets stuck in my head. | ||
| Like, if I'm sick, I have fever dreams that involve that movie. | ||
| I am completely in agreement with you about the quality of the movie. | ||
| Especially for its time, it was absolutely terrifying. | ||
| And it was a brilliant... | ||
| Brilliant movie. | ||
| I love it to death, but maybe it's because I'm older than you. | ||
| I didn't get the sense that it was underrated. | ||
| I guess underrated now is because when it's referenced in pop culture, most people reference Terminator 2 as one of the few movies that outdid its predecessor. | ||
| You know, it's a sequel that's considered better than the original, so most of the attention goes to Terminator 2 more than Terminator 1. So, I mean, I might be, you know, might be showing my age here, too, but I also don't think that Terminator 2 outdid those. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| I saw Terminator 2 first. | ||
| I mean, they're hard to compare, because they're not the same, they're not even considerably in any way the same type of film. | ||
| I mean, look, just the Terminator 2, when I think of Terminator 2, like, I think of mostly daytime shots and well-lit shots when I think of Terminator 1. Because it was all action, it's under the... | ||
| Under the bridge. | ||
| Yeah, I think of gritty, dark, most of the movie was happening at night. | ||
| Really, just a great early 80s movie. | ||
| So, yeah, go listen to Brett. | ||
| Go watch Terminator 1. It's amazing. | ||
| Also, Terminator Salvation is an underrated movie and you should watch Terminator. | ||
| Which one is that one? | ||
| That's the one with Christian Bale. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| I agree with that. | ||
| I did not like that one. | ||
| I mean, most people don't. | ||
| In terms of story structure, it's just, it's not, they don't do it well. | ||
| I just enjoyed that they actually looked at the I only watch Lord of the Rings. | ||
| Alright, so that one gamer says, Blindsided in a good way, seeing Iron Mike Jones here, with the rise of political tribalism, what's the best way to combat things like Christian nationalism? | ||
| Would love to see you on a Culture War episode. | ||
| I would love to be a part of that Culture War episode. | ||
| Yeah, the best way to combat Christian nationalism is to go to church. | ||
| Because again, studies show Christian nationalism arises among the least churched individuals. | ||
| If we're going to define Christian nationalism simply, it's that the idea that Christianity should be in the business of protecting national borders and identities, and national governments should be protecting a specific culture and a specific identity, which is just completely antithetical to the gospel. | ||
| It's about... | ||
| Creating a kingdom for Jesus on this earth and bringing all people in regardless of background so we all become one great, big, beautiful people at the end of the day. | ||
| So the funny thing is that Christian nationalists take pains to say they're protecting Christian identity, and when they get people in church, they start moving away from Christian nationalism and towards a much better understanding of Christianity where it's our job to go out and help people and love people, not just protect certain classes or certain ethnic groups or certain national identities. | ||
| Yes, I believe absolutely we should be caring for our own people, but we should also be striving to help as many people as we can. | ||
| And unfortunately, a lot of Christian nationalism moves away from that. | ||
| And so, yeah, I have a lot of problems with it, I think. | ||
| But again, you want to combat Christian nationalism, get people in church, and it will fix itself, surprisingly. | ||
| I think taking the plank out of your own eye before you try to take the speck of dust out of the other makes some people... | ||
| Leads them towards a Christian nationalist. | ||
| Like, we need to protect and improve the United States, America first. | ||
| But then at that point, once it's protected or once it's satisfactory, you can remove the dust out of your brother's eye. | ||
| I mean, we have to fix problems at home. | ||
| I mean, I think every Christian would agree with that. | ||
| The problem is, I think, when I look at Christian nationalism, it's the idea the government should be enforcing, like, a certain type of Christianity on its people. | ||
| Like, you know, some people have said, well, we should stay like a white Protestant nation. | ||
| I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Just go back. | ||
| Jack Reed, Augustine, City of God, that these nations, they're going to fall and rise. | ||
| What matters is the kingdom of God, ultimately. | ||
| I mean, his book, ironically, is a great way to combat modern Christian nationalism, because it's all about the kingdom of God. | ||
| Nations will come and go. | ||
| Focus on this. | ||
| Last one here. | ||
| Young Pete Chang says, everybody should give Phil a round of applause for clearing six shows in a row, plus a Culture War episode under his belt with Lion Colors. | ||
| Stan Tall, thank you very much. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| So, yeah, Mike. | ||
| You want to go ahead and give yourself a shout-out? | ||
| Go ahead and tell people where they can find you? | ||
| Yeah, you can follow me on Inspiring Philosophy here on YouTube, patreon.com slash inspiringphilosophy. | ||
| This Sunday I'm releasing a video early for donors. | ||
| We're going to call it something like The Secrets of David and Goliath, everything you've missed in that chapter. | ||
| We're going to go into some things you probably didn't see. | ||
| I'll be streaming on my channel this Monday talking about modern miracles and evidence for that. | ||
| And Thursday I'll be streaming with a scholar talking about evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. | ||
| So, got a lot of good stuff coming up on the channel. | ||
| You can follow me there and donate at inspiringphilosophy.org slash give to help us keep going and keep making more videos defending Christianity. | ||
| Michael Jones, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yo, inspiringphilos on Twitter. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Or on X, rather. | ||
| Follow him there. | ||
| And I'm at Ian Crossland. | ||
| You can follow me on Twitter, follow me on YouTube, follow me all across the internet at Ian Crossland. | ||
| Happy to be here. | ||
| Very deep conversation, man. | ||
| That was super cool. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
| Glad you came. | ||
| All right, let's do that again. | ||
| See you, Brett. | ||
| Guys, if you want to follow me, perhaps you agree or disagree with my take on Terminator, you can follow me at at Brett Dasvick on X and on Instagram. | ||
| That's where you can see all the content where I like to talk about movies and television. | ||
| Also, we do Pop Culture Crisis Monday through Friday at 3 p.m. | ||
| Eastern Standard Time, which is noon Pacific, right here on YouTube. | ||
| You should join us there. | ||
| It's a lot of fun, guys. | ||
| I'm on Thursdays. | ||
| And Phil is on Thursdays. | ||
| I am PhilThatRemains on Twix, where you can subscribe to me there. | ||
| I am Phil that remains official on Instagram. | ||
| The band is all that remains. | ||
| New record just dropped today. | ||
| It's called Anti-Fragile. | ||
| You can go and check it out on YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Deezer, Amazon Music. | ||
| If you want to be a part of the monthly Q&A that I do for subscribers, subscribe to my ex right now. | ||
| It's only two bucks. | ||
| And if you've got questions about the record, questions about stuff around here, whatever, go ahead and we do the Q&A. | ||
| The first Sunday of every month, so this Sunday, we're going to do the Q&A. | ||
| Usually it's about an hour, maybe a little bit longer. | ||
| We will see you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| I was going to ask, do you go live? | ||
| Do you do Twitter spaces? | ||
| I do. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| Oh, it's so fun. |
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