The problem with racism in the United States is not that there isn t enough of it. There is a shortage of racism, and the only way to fill the void is to find more racist incidents, and it s hard to come up with enough of them. So what do we do with the lack of racist incidents? We turn to the media, and they create a fire hose of racist stories about how America is deeply racist, and deeply terrible. And that s how we fill the need for racist incidents. And it s also how we make up for a lack of racism in America, and why it s so hard to find good stories about racism in American history. What's Digital Blackface? And why is it wrong when white people use it? CNN's John Blake explains what digital blackface is, and how it may be the most insidious form of racism we ve ever seen. It's not clear racism, but it's probably one of the most subtle and insidious forms of racism there is, which is why it's so hard for us to see it, because it's hidden under the surface. And it's not obvious that it exists at all. But it does exist, and if you're a racist, it's a symptom of a deeper, more insidious racism that we don't even realize it. That's how we can find it, and that racism is hidden under our very own it's gone under our surface, because we're not even aware of it and we don t even notice it yet because we have no longer see it . yet we are not or we are the in any more but , We don't have it, It s here so And Blackface I In this episode by John Blake by John Blakes is a blackface by RuPaul, a black face by a black girl a black face "Blackface , a black woman black by black what s Blackface, Black face, and so on this is Blackface . What s Digital Black Face by the blackface? What is it is digital black face ? Digital blackface ? and Why it's Blackface is a black face? and what it is?
00:00:09.000And the demand has now dramatically exceeded the supply.
00:00:13.000See, here's the thing about the United States.
00:00:14.000The people of the United States are not particularly racist.
00:00:17.000By every available poll, the American people are not racist. They don't mind having people of different races living near them. They don't mind interracial marriage. None of these things bother the American people in any significant numbers. And that's true across the nation. There are not significant regional differences between, say, the South and the North. That is a self-flattering picture painted by the New York Times about its own constituents. But the reality, again, is that Americans, broadly written, are not a racist people. In fact, we are some of the least racist people on Earth.
00:00:44.000But in order for systemic change to be effectuated by the left in the United States, there must always be a marginalized population to be used as a cudgel against the system.
00:00:53.000Because if the system basically allows people to succeed or fail on their own merit, if the system rewards hard work, for example, and punishes people for not doing hard work, or rewards responsible decision-making and punishes people for non-responsible decision-making, well then disparities may arise.
00:01:07.000And those disparities may not land equally on every group, because as it turns out, every group is made up of disparate individuals.
00:01:13.000And it's possible that a disparate number of individuals who act irresponsibly is located within one group versus another group.
00:01:20.000But if the end goal is equity, all groups must achieve equal outcome, well then you have to have something to say about the system Beyond it's just not fair, you have to have a reason why it's not fair.
00:01:31.000And so we must have, continual supply, a firehose of stories about how America is deeply racist and deeply terrible.
00:01:37.000Now again, the problem is that it's hard to come up with those stories.
00:01:40.000Because those stories actually don't exist broad-read.
00:01:44.000In fact, the most popular stories about systemic American racism typically are false.
00:01:48.000Stories about, for example, the idea that the police across the nation are seeking the lives of black people, are seeking to murder black people in the streets.
00:01:55.000And they'll take that story, which is not true, and they will pin it to another story, like, say, the death of George Floyd, and suggest that that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of systemic racism without ever actually making the accusation that George Floyd's death had anything to do with race per se, as opposed to a bad action by a police officer at best.
00:02:15.000But again, we have to have, this is why the Justice Melies story became immediate fodder for the entire left.
00:02:22.000Because again, when there is high demand for racist incidents, the supply must be filled.
00:02:27.000And even if you have to generate air stats supply, you will do so.
00:02:30.000You can't come up with the real thing, you gotta make something.
00:02:33.000And this is how you come up with an article in CNN today, over at cnn.com, written by a person named John Blake.
00:02:40.000And it is called, What's Digital Blackface?
00:02:42.000And why is it wrong when white people use it?
00:02:45.000Well, you might be asking yourself, what is digital blackface?
00:02:48.000Now, typically, blackface speaks of people back in the 19th and 20th centuries, early 20th centuries, who would dress up as black people in the most mocking of ways in order to be pejorative about black people.
00:03:00.000It's the Amos and Andy step-and-fetch-it kind of stuff, right?
00:03:04.000Ugly, hideous stuff that is designed in order to mock black people.
00:03:08.000So what exactly are we talking about when we say digital blackface?
00:03:12.000Maybe you shared that viral video of Kimberly's sweet brown Wilkins telling a reporter after narrowly escaping an apartment fire, ain't nobody got time for that.
00:03:19.000Perhaps you posted that meme of supermodel Tyra Banks exploding in anger on America's next top model.
00:03:24.000Or maybe you've simply posted popular gifs, such as the one of NBA great Michael Jordan crying, or of drag queen RuPaul declaring, girl, if you're black and shared such images online, you get a pass.
00:03:33.000But if you're white, you may have inadvertently perpetuated one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism.
00:03:54.000Digital blackface is a practice where white people co-opt online expressions of black imagery, slang, catchphrases, or culture to convey comic relief or express emotions.
00:04:03.000These expressions, what one commentator calls racialized reactions, are mainstays in Twitter feeds, TikTok videos, and Instagram reels, and are among the most popular internet memes.
00:04:11.000Because as we know, there are no memes of white people online.
00:04:14.000Nobody's ever used a meme of a white person.
00:04:16.000Despite the fact that Donald Trump is basically the most popular person online because all he is is a series of memes, at least when it comes to the Twitterverse.
00:04:23.000There's never been a white person that you make memes about.
00:04:40.000Digital blackface involves white people playacting at being black, says Lauren Michelle Jackson, an author and cultural critic in an essay for Teen Vogue.
00:04:47.000Jackson says the internet thrives on white people laughing at exaggerated displays of blackness, reflecting a tendency among some to see black people as walking hyperbole.
00:05:12.000And it has to be racism because, again, in order to condemn American society, we must have a constant, steady supply of the heroin that is racist incidents.
00:05:22.000Some may say posting a video of Sweet Brown saying, oh Lord Jesus, it's a fire, is just for laughs.
00:05:26.000You can't even do it, by the way, you can't even, you can't even say the lines from that particular video without laughing.
00:05:33.000That video happens to be one of the funniest videos in the history of the internet.
00:05:37.000That video of Kimberly Wilkins talking about escaping a fire.
00:05:42.000It is one of the great videos in the history of the internet.
00:05:45.000I mean, they made it into like an actual digitized song.
00:05:51.000Why give people yet another excuse for labeling white people racist for the most innocuous behaviors?
00:05:55.000But critics say Digital Blackface is wrong because it's a modern day repackaging of minstrel shows, a racist form of entertainment popular in the 19th century.
00:06:04.000Now, they acknowledge that there's no real great way of telling what digital blackface is.
00:06:10.000There's no actual way of finding out what it is because maybe you're just laughing at a thing because it's funny.
00:06:13.000Like, if I laugh at a Dave Chappelle joke because Dave Chappelle is a funny human, am I now engaging in digital blackface?
00:06:18.000I mean, I didn't dress up as Dave Chappelle.
00:08:18.000Or even systemic racism, where a policy is directed at a racial minority.
00:08:22.000That stuff is now so rare in American society that we have to make it up.
00:08:26.000In fact, the entire incentive structure in the United States, because the demand for racist incidents is so high, is for more people to now masquerade as being members of minority races than the other way around.
00:08:38.000I pointed this out on the program before.
00:08:40.000It used to be, when America was truly a much more racist place, that passing was a major issue for a lot of Black Americans, for example.
00:08:49.000An entire famous novel is written about black Americans trying to pass as white Americans because to live as a black American in America was very, very difficult.
00:08:55.000And if you could pass as a white American, you could live a much easier life.
00:08:59.000Well, today we now see a lot more publicized instances of the reverse.
00:09:04.000When is the last time you saw a black person attempting to masquerade as a white person then uncovered that way?
00:09:08.000But we now have yet another case of a person masquerading as a minority in order to get ahead.
00:09:14.000According to the New York Post, One of Hollywood's leading Native American figures is being accused of faking her claims of Cherokee heritage.
00:09:21.000So we have ourselves and Elizabeth Warren of Hollywood.
00:09:24.000Award-winning Heather Ray, 56, serves on the Academy of Motion Pictures Indigenous Alliance, previously headed up by the Sundance Institute's Native American Program, and claims, quote, my mother was Indian and my father was a cowboy.
00:09:34.000Multiple prior news reports have also cited her as having a Cherokee mother.
00:09:38.000But a watchdog group called Tribal Alliance Against Frauds is now demanding the Academy and the producer drop her false claims, while activists insist she's at best one 2048th Cherokee.
00:09:49.000Which is like even less Native American than Elizabeth Warren is.
00:09:53.000The group accuses her of profiting from usurping real American Indian voices and perspectives and being a fraudulent so-called Pretendian.
00:10:00.000Ray is married to another Hollywood producer, Russell Friedenberg, and the eldest of their three children is actress Johnny Sequoyah, who currently stars in the reboot of Dexter.
00:10:08.000Ironically, Ray was already caught up in the highest Pretendian scandal to hit Hollywood.
00:10:12.000The producer was thanked by the Academy last year for brokering an apology to Sasheen Littlefeather.
00:10:17.000Littlefeather was blacklisted in Hollywood for appearing on Marlon Brando's behalf to decline his 1973 Best Actor Oscar, and jeered as she spoke up for Native Americans claiming to be Apache.
00:10:25.000But, after her death in October, Littlefeather's sister revealed she was a liar who had faked her identity all along.
00:10:31.000So, hilariously, we now have an infinite regress of pretendians.
00:10:36.000So, the person who brokered an apology to a fake Native American in Sasheen Littlefeather And herself, broker of the apology, this woman, Ray, Heather Ray, it turns out that she is a pretendian as well.
00:10:50.000Again, when you have a society where people are literally going out of their way to pretend to be members of minority races, this would suggest a pretty tolerant and diverse society.
00:10:59.000And it also suggests a society where there is a deep and abiding interest for a lot of folks in claiming that society itself is radically discriminatory and therefore needs to change.
00:11:07.000And so, when it turns out that it's very difficult to find evidence that this is the case, we just keep stretching out the boundaries of people who are, in fact, victimized.
00:11:15.000So we've now stretched out the boundaries of people who are victimized to people who are in memes.
00:11:20.000And we've stretched out the boundaries of victimhood to include people who are princesses, in terms of Meghan Markle, for example.
00:11:28.000We have a wide variety of politicians, like Kamala Harris, who claims that she has been a victim of American society, despite the fact that she clearly, clearly has not.
00:11:35.000And then we have, obviously, the most prominent group of people who are claiming to be victims in the West today, not just in the United States.
00:11:41.000And that, of course, is men who pretend that they are women.
00:11:44.000Men who believe that they are women, or women who believe that they are men.
00:11:46.000These, apparently, are victims of an evil, homophobic, transphobic society.
00:11:52.000Now, if this were really, truly the case, then you would not have the President of the United States seeking legislation, federal legislation, in order to stop states from preventing the mutilation of children.
00:12:03.000But again, that is part and parcel of a broader attempt to rewrite the systems of power.
00:12:08.000The real question we should be asking ourselves is, to whom does it seem acceptable, against whom in our society today, does it seem acceptable to, say, do violence?
00:12:16.000Against whom has it now become acceptable to do violence?
00:12:19.000So nobody, nobody, right, left, or center suggests that it is okay to do violence to people who identify as transgender.
00:12:26.000No one believes it is okay to do violence to those people.
00:12:29.000In fact, a large part of the case against doing mutilating surgeries on people who believe that they are a member of the other sex, that actively is.
00:12:36.000Greenlighting an act of brutal physical violence against somebody because even if somebody consents to the physical violence on themselves, you can't do that if you're a child, for example.
00:12:44.000And if you're an adult and you have some sort of mental problem, that's not a good idea either.
00:12:48.000Okay, but there is a group of people against whom apparently it is okay to do physical violence and it just sort of gets ignored or looked the other way by the media.
00:12:57.000And that, of course, is feminists who say that women actually exist.
00:13:00.000We'll get to that story in a moment because this broke out into the public view over the weekend in New Zealand, of all places.
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00:14:12.000Okay, so again, The corollary to people being able to claim victimhood, and there being a big market for that, is that people who are actively victimized by those people are never considered victims.
00:14:24.000Because, if you're a member of the victim class, you can never be a victimizer, by nature.
00:14:29.000This, presumably, is why we are all supposed to ignore the assault, the assaults that were happening, with regard to a so-called anti-trans pundit known as Kelly J. Keene Minchell.
00:14:41.000According to ThePinkNews.com, which, as you would imagine, is an LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, happy face, emoji, tilde, ampersand website, quote, due to thousands of counter-protesters overwhelming Posie Parker's planned Auckland rally in New Zealand, she has reportedly decided to leave the country.
00:14:58.000So far, Keane Minchell, who has previously described herself as a TERF, that would be a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, meaning a feminist who believes that women exist, brought the anti-gender rally to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart, and several other Australian cities.
00:15:12.000She was set to continue her tour in New Zealand, but the backlash by Auckland locals proved too great for the event to go ahead.
00:15:16.000The New Zealand Herald reported that more than 2,000 counter-protesters joined together prior to the event taking place in order to drown out the rhetoric of this person.
00:15:26.000Huge crowd, and some people were actually getting physically assaulted in the crowd.
00:15:31.000Apparently the crowd held signs of LGBTQ plus minus divided by signed solidarity, began to gather around the gazebo with bodyguards telling them to get out of here.
00:15:40.000After several minutes of standing around an ever-growing crowd of counter protesters, the person at issue, Posey Parker, was forced to cancel the event outright.
00:15:49.000That's because people were screaming at her that she was a Nazi.
00:15:54.000And not only were they screaming at her a Nazi, actual violence broke out.
00:15:57.000Here's a little bit of the video from the event.
00:16:01.000You can see Posey Parker being surrounded by security.
00:16:05.000You can see the crowd crushing in on her.
00:16:08.000Again, for the great crime of having said that men are men and women are women.
00:16:14.000Like people are literally throwing, I mean, you can see this, this is crazy.
00:16:17.000People are literally pouring water bottles on her.
00:16:37.000Nice, uh, nice slow-mo of a, of a, this is, Really sweet, sweet stuff that's happening right here.
00:16:44.000And the way this will be played by the media is not as a frontline story.
00:16:47.000Now, imagine that a trans activist went to give some sort of speech and a bunch of people who believe in traditional genders, they showed up and not only did they show up, they actually started committing physical acts of violence against the people by the thousands.
00:17:01.000Like they showed up and thousands of people started crowding the speaker, started crushing the speaker and started actively doing acts of violence.
00:17:07.000It's a national news story when some nut job Throws a firebomb at an unoccupied gay bar, right?
00:17:14.000That's a national- It was a national news story when some dumbass decided to drive a truck over, like, a rainbow crosswalk and then skidmark with the truck across the rain- This is a hate crime.
00:17:26.000But when you have trans activists who are beating the hell out of people, apparently that is totally okay because, again, the victimized class can never themselves be victimized.
00:17:34.000And we have to have victim classes in our society.
00:17:36.000The left requires the victim classes because how else can you claim that the system is unjust?
00:17:40.000Now, normally, we wouldn't say that the system is unjust for, you know, saying things that are true, like men are men and women are women.
00:17:45.000But we have to keep centering the marginalized.
00:17:48.000And as our society keeps recentering the marginalized, it turns out that we run out of marginalized people.
00:17:54.000And so we have to keep broadening the scope of who the marginalized are so as to keep up the constant revolution against the center.
00:18:01.000Now, it's not that there's a solid case being made for any of the transgender here.
00:18:06.000There's a kind of astonishing piece of video of Minnesota Democrat Leigh Fink being asked about gender-affirming health care in the Minnesota legislature.
00:18:39.000Are any of the drugs that are prescribed to children also given, and by drugs I mean hormone therapies or quote-unquote puberty blockers, are any of them prescribed to children, are they also given to violent sex offenders with the purpose of chemically castrating the violent sex offender?
00:19:00.000Representative Finke, Madam Speaker, I have no idea.
00:19:23.000Once you're a member of the victimized class, you can do literally whatever the hell you want, including apparently being a violent male pedophile.
00:19:29.000According to Redux.info, a violent male pedophile has now been moved to a women's prison in Washington after beginning to identify as transgender.
00:19:37.000Jolene Charisma Starr, born Joel Thomas Nichols, is the latest male transferred to the Washington Correction Center for Women, which currently has approximately one dozen male inmates being housed in the facility.
00:19:46.000According to a source within the facility, the transfer was completed within the last few months.
00:19:50.000Starr, 57, was convicted in 1995 of two horrific attacks on young girls.
00:19:54.000The first assault took place in August 1993 and targeted an 11-year-old girl.
00:19:58.000It's a grisly account that really, I'm not even going to retell on the air.
00:20:01.000And then the next year, Starr attempted to kidnap a nine-year-old girl.
00:20:05.000So this is a violent pedophile, but good news for the violent pedophile.
00:20:08.000The violent pedophile now says that he is a trans person and thus must be housed with the women according to the Washington Department of Corrections.
00:20:15.000Once you're a member of the victimized class, it doesn't matter what you do.
00:20:19.000You've been put aside by the patriarchy.
00:20:21.000You've been put upon by these generalists.
00:20:23.000You are now an ally against the evils of society, more broadly speaking.
00:20:28.000And so you must now be washed clean of all of your sins.
00:20:32.000At least insofar as the entire media now has to take very seriously your contention to be a member of the opposite sex no matter how terrible a person you are or what evil crimes you have committed.
00:20:40.000Okay, in just one second I'm going to bring you the update on the situation over in Israel where things have gone Quite wild.
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00:21:48.000Okay, so meanwhile, a lot of focus internationally on the situation in Israel right now.
00:21:54.000Everybody is sort of presenting the situation in Israel, including many of the people on the ground in Israel, as full-scale emergency, civil war is about to break out.
00:22:02.000So I rarely believe that that is the case, particularly in a stable democracy, which Israel has been for almost eight decades at this point.
00:22:10.000The notion that people are going to be shooting each other in the streets over judicial reform is an absurdity, but the situation is kind of shockingly interesting and complex.
00:22:18.000So here is what's happening in Israel for those who are following.
00:22:22.000And it does have some international ramifications.
00:22:24.000Particularly in terms of sort of the broader revolt against actual election outcomes.
00:22:29.000So just to recap, Israel had held a bunch of elections in the last five years, I believe it was like five elections in the last four years, and they could not come to a conclusion on a governing coalition.
00:22:38.000Finally, an actual governing majority was elected in the state of Israel.
00:22:42.000That governing majority is led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:22:44.000Netanyahu is incredibly controversial in Israel because he's been under indictment for corruption charges.
00:22:50.000I tend to think that those corruption charges are pretty scanty, but there are a lot of people in Israel who really, really hate Netanyahu.
00:22:54.000And they had kind of given him up for dead.
00:22:57.000His coalition happens to be a coalition of Likud, which is the center-right party in Israel, combined with a couple of more right-wing parties.
00:23:05.000That would be the parties led by Itamar Ben-Gavir and Bitzelot Smotrich.
00:23:09.000These are parties that are led by people who live in Judea and Samaria and tend to be more right-wing on both foreign policy And also with regard to religious policy.
00:23:19.000And then there are a couple of Haredi parties, right?
00:23:22.000These are the parties of the quote-unquote ultra-Orthodox.
00:23:24.000That'd be UTJ, United Torah Judaism, and Shas.
00:23:27.000Both of those parties are parties that rely heavily on government subsidies in order for people to study day in and day out at Yeshiva.
00:23:35.000And also, a lot of those people are reliant on welfare dollars and don't serve in the army.
00:23:39.000There are actual religious exemptions in Israel where some people don't have to serve in the army.
00:23:43.000So it's that coalition versus on the other side, people who are sort of center left, secular Israelis who are not particularly religious, who do serve in the army, many of whom are working and paying taxes, and Arab parties.
00:23:56.000Those are the people who are out of power in Israel right now.
00:23:58.000Okay, so, Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition comes into power, and the first thing that they do is they see that they want to redo the way the judiciary has done in Israel.
00:24:06.000So in 1995, there was something called the Judicial Revolution in Israel.
00:24:09.000The Judicial Revolution in Israel was led by a far-left chief justice named Aharon Barak, and his basic idea is that the Supreme Court of Israel would now basically make a law.
00:24:17.000There were no limits to what they could rule unconstitutional and not unconstitutional.
00:24:21.000No limits to what they could strike down and what they could not strike down.
00:24:25.000Now, up until that point, they'd sort of tried to hem themselves in a little bit, but Aharon Barak legitimately said that the judiciary will essentially now rule the country.
00:24:33.000And this was kind of important because again, as the right was gaining power, the left controlled the judiciary.
00:24:38.000And so it was just a tool for now taking control of policy.
00:24:41.000What makes it very weird is that in the United States, at least you have to pretend if you're the Supreme Court to speak in the name of a constitution, Israel does not have a constitution.
00:24:48.000They have a series of what are called basic laws, but it's not clear what actually separates a basic law from just a regular piece of legislation.
00:24:54.000So in essence, the judiciary could just do whatever the hell that it wanted.
00:24:58.000And the way the judiciary was selected also was a huge problem because it turns out that it wasn't just that this current judiciary was left wing and now would cram down its view on the rest of Israel, including the elected branches.
00:25:09.000They effectively appoint their own successors.
00:25:13.000The committee to appoint members to Israel's Supreme Court is made up of members of the Israeli Bar Association, retired Supreme Court justices, people who are sort of in the legal establishment, and the elected government has very little to say about it.
00:25:26.000So, the new coalition comes in and they say, listen, the right has never really had a chance when it comes to the Supreme Court at all.
00:25:32.000Also, there are no restrictions as to what the Supreme Court can actually rule on.
00:25:37.000We want to change the way that the judiciary is selected so that the government that is in power now gets to select the judges while they're in power.
00:25:43.000When a seat comes free, it gets the way it would be sort of in the United States.
00:25:46.000They get to select who goes on to the judiciary.
00:25:50.000And there are some other elements of the judicial reform proposal that were also brought to the table, including the idea That the Attorney General of the State of Israel shouldn't be able to preemptively prevent the Prime Minister from just doing things.
00:26:01.000So in the United States, the Attorney General works for the President.
00:26:03.000In Israel, the Attorney General is a separately appointed person who has nothing to do with the government and who actively acts as almost another judicial check.
00:26:12.000So it was actually a majoritarian attempt, what was happening at the Knesset level.
00:26:18.000And so the new coalition came in and they were trying to make things more democratic because now the elected branch of government would have more say over the judiciary.
00:26:24.000The judiciary would not have an unbounded ability to simply strike anything that they wanted down.
00:26:28.000The judiciary wouldn't be able to appoint its own successors.
00:26:31.000There wouldn't be essentially a bunch of robed oligarchs deciding all policy in the state of Israel.
00:26:37.000Hey, so, this seems, like, fairly rational, right?
00:26:40.000Now, there were some provisions of the original proposals put forward by the governing coalition that went too far.
00:26:45.000So, for example, one of the proposals was that a pure majority in the Knesset could overrule any judicial decision.
00:26:50.000That was too far, and I think the governing coalition knew that, and so they pulled that one relatively quickly.
00:26:55.000But the opposition in Israel, instead of sitting down negotiating, they decided that they were going to essentially bring a lot of people into the streets.
00:27:03.000The reason they were able to bring a lot of people into the streets was twofold.
00:27:06.000Number one, again, a lot of people don't like Netanyahu.
00:27:08.000A lot of people are very upset at the way the last election went, and they are freaked out that the current coalition contains nobody from the quote-unquote center or center left or from the hard left.
00:27:18.000It is a pretty religious right coalition in Israel right now.
00:27:22.000So the left is looking for sort of anything to protest on.
00:27:27.000The other problem that they're seeing is the demographic changes in the state of Israel have now created some serious problems internally in Israel.
00:27:36.000Because, originally, when the State of Israel was founded, it was founded essentially by a lot of secular Jews.
00:27:41.000There was a lot of secular Jews, there were some religious Jews, and then there were sort of the ultra-Orthodox Jews.
00:27:46.000And the tacit kind of deal was that the socialistic secular Jews were going to run the place, and the more religious Jews were going to get government benefits and not have to serve in the army, but they wouldn't have a lot of political power.
00:27:57.000Well, demographically speaking, The religious Jews reproduce a lot more, and so a couple generations in, they're now wielding a lot more political power over time.
00:28:05.000And so the left is looking at the future of elections, and they're saying to themselves, we better have some sort of hedge against the legislature.
00:28:10.000We can't have the legislature just able to do whatever it wants willy-nilly.
00:28:13.000There has to be some sort of hedge here.
00:28:15.000Now, this would be a good time for negotiation.
00:28:17.000This would be a good time for the left to sit down with the right and say, listen, we don't want you to do this.
00:28:22.000We understand you have a majority, but if you go through with this, There will be a backlash and the backlash is going to cause us to essentially reverse everything you do in the first five seconds.
00:28:32.000Instead, what has happened is a couple of things.
00:28:34.000One, the judiciary and the attorney general in Israel have basically put their foot on the gas.
00:28:38.000They've decided that they're going to explicitly, almost explicitly, say that they'll strike down anything the legislature does.
00:28:44.000If the legislature passes something changing how the judiciary is picked in Israel, the judiciary will just strike it down.
00:28:50.000Which is kind of a constitutional crisis.
00:28:52.000It's almost as though in the United States, if a constitutional amendment were passed, saying the Supreme Court can no longer rule on issues related to abortion, and the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional amendment, you'd be like, what now?
00:29:07.000The judiciary is now sounding off on questions where it's not clear whether they even have a say.
00:29:12.000In fact, I think the most absurd aspect of this particular controversy and conflagration over there is that the Attorney General of the State of Israel said that Netanyahu, because he's currently under indictment on a corruption charge, can't take part in the negotiations on judicial reform because he's an interested party.
00:29:35.000He can't take part in the negotiations, but she can and she can rule on it even though she's an interested party.
00:29:41.000So what's happened is essentially a stalemate.
00:29:46.000You have the government, which is elected, saying we would like to ram this thing through.
00:29:49.000And then you have the left going out in the street and activating pretty much everything at its disposal in order to stop it.
00:29:55.000They've threatened with the Supreme Court.
00:29:57.000They now have members of the Israeli army who are saying, we're not gonna show up for work.
00:30:00.000You now have the Hiztadrut, which is the biggest labor union in Israel.
00:30:03.000It's like 800,000 people who work for the Hiztadrut.
00:30:06.000Now saying they're gonna declare a general strike.
00:30:08.000You have universities, which are run by the left shutting down.
00:30:10.000You have tech millionaires over there who are saying they're gonna pull their money.
00:30:13.000So basically it's the elected branch, the elected coalition, versus all the established powers that be over there.
00:30:19.000The main issue being not really the judiciary, but can there be some sort of deal that is cut?
00:30:26.000So this all came to a head over the weekend because Yoav Galant, who's a member of Likud and who was the secretary of defense, he was the minister of defense under Netanyahu, he came out and he said that he wanted to freeze the process, that we need to not move forward with this judicial reform right now.
00:30:42.000And he also sort of implied that the soldiers reservists were not showing up to serve in the army, that those people, they may have a case and I'm going to meet with them.
00:30:53.000And Netanyahu, who's the prime minister, says, well, I can't have the minister of defense legitimizing people not showing up for work because they don't like the policy of the government.
00:31:01.000Like in the United States, if Joe Biden did something that members of the military don't like and members of the military said we're not showing up for work, they'll get thrown in the brig.
00:31:08.000So Netanyahu fired his Minister of Defense.
00:31:11.000This prompted massive spasms of protest in the streets in Israel.
00:31:15.000Now, the most likely outcome in any case is going to be that the Supreme Court of Israel is just going to strike down whatever Netanyahu's coalition passes.
00:31:22.000And Netanyahu is not going to activate the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, against the Supreme Court in Israel and cause like an overt war of all against all.
00:31:31.000Everybody who keeps saying this actually has an interest in the chaos.
00:31:34.000Like they have a political interest in the chaos.
00:31:36.000The first thing that would need to happen in Israel is for everybody to calm the hell down, get in a room, and start actually negotiating this thing out.
00:31:44.000But, right now all the incentive structures are misaligned, and so what you're likely to have is the coalition will ram through something, the Supreme Court will strike it down, and then life will essentially go back to quasi-normal.
00:31:55.000But there are a bunch of underlying issues in Israeli politics that are going to have to get solved in order for this thing not to percolate under the surface.
00:32:01.000And those issues are going to be things like, do the ultra-Orthodox have to serve in the army?
00:32:04.000What sort of religious restrictions are going to be acceptable in a diverse society?
00:32:11.000How exactly are members of the judiciary selected?
00:32:14.000All these questions that have been kind of put on back burner for a long time, those are going to have to be answered in Israel moving forward.
00:32:21.000So that's sort of the synopsis of what's going on in Israel.
00:32:25.000The reason it has broader international ramifications is because there are a couple of things that are happening here that are sort of fascinating.
00:32:31.000One is That there is a tendency on the part of the press that any time anyone on the right does well electorally, the answer is, crisis, democracy is in danger.
00:32:45.000If you would like to see robust Republican, small, are Republican, Republicans work.
00:32:51.000If you would like to see democracies continue to thrive, people need to stop acting as though when they lose an election, it is the end of the world.
00:33:06.000Whether you're talking about Israel, where it's the left protesting Netanyahu.
00:33:10.000Whether you're talking about during the Trump administration, where it was the left protesting Trump and suggesting that he was an illegitimate president.
00:33:15.000Whether it was post-2020, when there were a lot of people who were suggesting that it was the end of the country because Trump had lost.
00:33:20.000Trump is the leading candidate on the right right now.
00:33:22.000And everybody needs to cool their heels for a second.
00:33:25.000And one of the things that I think has happened, I said earlier, Joshua has gotten fat and kicked.
00:33:30.000When you lose all those intermediate institutions in society, when you share less and less as a people, and when you're incredibly rich and very distractible, and you have the time to actually go out and protest in the streets, People are tending to do that a lot.
00:36:24.000Kick woke companies out of your bathroom today.
00:36:29.000Meanwhile, Donald Trump went to Waco, Texas, where he launched into a rally that, again, was an attempt to gain attention.
00:36:39.000Donald Trump is operating on a few different bases these days.
00:36:43.000He's sort of running on three separate bases.
00:36:46.000One is this case with regard to the Manhattan D.A.
00:36:49.000So that heated up again end of last week.
00:36:52.000It led off the week before when the Friday before last, Donald Trump went on social media and suggested openly that he was going to be arrested the following week.
00:37:13.000Some fake cases, they have absolutely nothing.
00:37:16.000So that would have been Trump obviously ramping people up with no place to go, because it's possible that the case wasn't going to go forward in the first place.
00:37:22.000But the nice thing about being Trump is that when you say something like that, it reads as a win, right?
00:37:26.000When you say they're going to indict me and then they don't indict you, and the entire left jumps.
00:37:31.000Because when Trump says a thing, the left is like a cat with a laser pointer with Trump.
00:37:35.000Wherever Trump points the laser, the left just jumps.
00:37:38.000When Trump says they're going to arrest me and the entire media jumps to, they're going to arrest him!
00:38:14.000enthusiasms. Like, what is this? I mean, I assume that Trump didn't make the picture himself. Obviously, he's linking to something else, but that is obviously not particularly good stuff. At the same time, Donald Trump always gets the benefit of the media jumping too far. So over the weekend, Chuck Todd was grilling one of Trump's lawyers on the so-called dehumanizing attacks on Alvin Bragg because he suggested that he was like an animal who was out of control. He's like, oh, well, he's only saying that because he's black. Now, Donald Trump use that kind of language with everybody. He
00:39:08.000Again, I'm not his social media consultant.
00:39:12.000I don't... I think that was an ill-advised post that one of his social media people put up, and he quickly took down when he realized the rhetoric in the photo that was attached to it.
00:39:32.000And I got to be honest with you, I think it's one of the reasons why I think that Donald Trump keeps upping the ante rhetorically, because the minute he's not the center of attention, The air kind of just drains out.
00:39:44.000I mean, once when he's not saying something that's brand new and shocking, then it gets kind of boring.
00:39:48.000Like at a certain point, if you just keep being a shock jock, if it's not the policy, like when Trump was president was the policy, and that's for people like me, the attraction is that he did a bunch of things on policy that I really, really liked.
00:39:59.000But if you're now Madonna and you're 60 odd years old and you've got the face filler and you're just showing your butt still and your thing is just, what can I do to be transgressive today?
00:40:25.000And then there are the other two tracks.
00:40:26.000And the other two tracks, I'm not sure, are big winners for him.
00:40:28.000The other two tracks are the attacks on the other candidates and his own campaign, like what he himself will do.
00:40:37.000When it comes to the attacks on other candidates, I just don't think this is playing for a lot of people right now.
00:40:42.000A lot of people are attributing Donald Trump's increase in the polls and Ron DeSantis' decrease in the polls over the last couple of months to Trump's attacks on DeSantis.
00:40:50.000I think that those polls dropped because it's a consistent drop.
00:40:52.000It's not like it dropped in the last two weeks.
00:40:53.000It dropped consistently from December to January to February to March.
00:40:56.000I think the reason for that poll drop for DeSantis is because immediately after the last election cycle, there's a massive spike for DeSantis and a massive decline for Trump.
00:41:04.000People took away a lesson, which I think is probably right, which is that DeSantis won in Florida and Trump lost with a bunch of his candidates.
00:41:10.000And people were like, I'm not sure I want that on the 2024 ballot.
00:41:13.000And then as that faded, people kind of went back to their corners.
00:41:15.000They're like, okay, well, it's been a few months.
00:41:17.000I like that Trump guy and DeSantis is not even running yet.
00:41:20.000And the race isn't really happening yet.
00:41:21.000So, you know, like DeSantis had that one moment, but can he last the test?
00:41:26.000So I think that's really what's happening right here.
00:41:28.000That does not mean, however, that the crowd has already decided for Trump.
00:41:32.000So when Trump attacks the other candidates, there's something weird going on.
00:41:35.000When he himself attacks the other candidates, particularly DeSantis, there's just not a lot of enthusiasm for it.
00:41:40.000In fact, actually, there's some polls right now, the state-level polls, which are the ones that matter.
00:41:45.000There's a survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, March 21 to 23.
00:41:47.00021 to 23. It found DeSantis leading Trump by 8 points 45 37 in Iowa and tied with Trump 39 39 in New Hampshire. In a more crowded field including Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, DeSantis was tied with Trump in Iowa and trailed him by 12 points in New Hampshire.
00:42:04.000So the field could easily split in favor of Trump.
00:42:06.000But there was a clip that was going around over the weekend, Trump in Waco, and he attacked DeSantis.
00:42:13.000And what's fascinating about this clip is not Trump attacking DeSantis, because again, he's going to attack whoever he believes is a threat.
00:42:19.000This is just Trump is all weapons all the time.
00:43:11.000The crowd is not comfortable with this.
00:43:13.000They're not comfortable with this because again, Trump going on the offensive against Alvin Bragg, the crowd is kind of there for it.
00:43:18.000Trump going on the offensive against other Republicans, the crowd is kind of not there for it.
00:43:21.000And so that means that Trump has to ramp up his rhetoric on other stuff, right?
00:43:25.000In order to maintain the attention on himself, he has to ramp up the rhetoric on everything else.
00:43:28.000And that's what he basically did over the weekend with regard to this Waco rally.
00:43:32.000So he opened his Waco rally, for example, by playing Actually, the January 6th choir singing a song, Justice for All, with footage on the giant billboards of the January 6th rioting happening behind him.
00:43:45.000Now that is Trump obviously trolling the media.
00:43:48.000It's obviously Trump doing something for attention.
00:43:50.000It's Trump attempting to draw the fire of the media so that he can respond to the fire from the media.
00:43:56.000It also is evidence not of a candidate who is kind of on his strongest legs.
00:44:01.000Again, what Trump should be running on is very simple.
00:44:02.000If you want to win the presidency and you're Donald Trump, here's what you do.
00:44:05.000You say, I was kicking ass as president.
00:44:12.000Look at all the things I would have been able to do if I had not been hampered by the Mueller investigation and the media that hated me and people rigging social media and the election rules changes.
00:44:20.000All that stuff, if that hadn't happened, I was on a track to success.
00:44:31.000That's the pitch you should be making.
00:44:32.000But the problem is that that's not an intention-getting pitch.
00:44:35.000And again, I think one of the problems here is that as time passes, there will come a saturation, I think there may, not will, there may come a saturation point where people are like, is enough attention grabbing kind of headlines?
00:44:51.000Like how many more times can we see this, this act?
00:44:53.000Here's Trump doing the January 6th thing.
00:44:55.000Ladies and gentlemen, please rise and place your hand over your heart for the number one song on iTunes, Amazon, and the Billboard charts, Justice for All, featuring President Donald J. Trump and the J6 Choir.
00:45:42.000But I'm not sure how many times you can go back to this well.
00:45:44.000You will be vindicated and proud, and the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited, and totally disgraced.
00:45:55.000Our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will, but they've failed.
00:46:35.000You need me back in there because now I know where all the bodies are buried, and I'm gonna go in there, and I'm gonna clean house, and I'm gonna make the country better.
00:46:41.000And I'm gonna do it because you saw that I did a good job last time.
00:46:43.000I would've done an even better job if I'd known then what I know now.
00:46:50.000The good news for him is that Joe Biden is actively making that pitch for him every day.
00:46:53.000The question is whether Trump himself is going to be able to make that pitch or whether he's distracted with insulting Ron DeSantis or whether he's doing the J6 thing.
00:46:59.000I don't think that a campaign in 2024 centered around January 6th, if that sounds like a win to you, I want to see some data to support that notion.
00:47:16.000And he's completely, apparently willing to just lie about his own record.
00:47:20.000That's not a particular shock, but the gall with which he does it really is an amazing, amazing thing.
00:47:25.000Over the weekend, for example, Joe Biden suggested they've done an amazing job on bank failures, which is weird because one thing that I noticed is that the banks are still quite vulnerable, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:47:34.000Global economic growth rebounded modestly this month, although stubbornly high inflation and banking stresses weigh on the outlook.
00:47:40.000Apparently, central banks have kept raising interest rates to cool economic activity, the higher rates are causing pain in the financial sector, and Joe Biden's out there bragging about it in Canada.
00:47:49.000Some on Wall Street have expressed frustration that it's unclear what more your administration is willing to do to resolve the banking crisis.
00:48:34.000Everything's hunky-dory, which is weird, then why the bond market is completely topsy-turvy and people are expecting a recession, according to the New York Times.
00:48:42.000Quote, bonkers bond trading may be sending a grim signal about the economy.
00:48:46.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden is also trying to happy talk his way by the problem of China and Russia now combining to provide a threat on both sides of that alliance.
00:48:56.000Joe Biden over the weekend was saying that he applauds China, which is a strange thing to say.
00:49:00.000So today, I applaud China for stepping up, excuse me, I applaud Canada.
00:49:08.000You can tell what I'm thinking about China.
00:49:17.000By the way, he did say that we vastly exaggerate the threat of Russia on China, which comes as cold comfort to people who are, you know, being killed in Ukraine by Russia and people who are being threatened in Taiwan by China.
00:49:25.000He says that it's all, we're overestimating their power, obviously.
00:49:29.000Look, look, I don't take China lightly.
00:49:38.000I would hear, I've been hearing now for the past three months about China is going to provide significant weapons to Russia and they're going to, they've all been talking about that.
00:49:51.000Doesn't mean they won't, but they haven't yet.
00:49:54.000And if anything's happened, the West has coalesced significantly more.
00:49:58.000I'm sorry, like him happy talking about Russia and China is just it's a fool's errand.
00:50:05.000The arms race in Asia, by the way, is heating up because it turns out that the Saudis are now siding with the Chinese increasingly, which is why they're making deals with the Iranians.
00:50:13.000China has now started to fill the vacuum left by the United States in the Middle East.
00:50:18.000States all around China are beginning to arm up in serious opposition to China, which raises the risk of serious military conflict breaking out in the region.
00:50:25.000And meanwhile, Joe Biden is going back to sleep and talking about what an amazing job he's doing.
00:50:51.000According to the UK Daily Mail, she has now candidly revealed how getting baptized and reconnecting with God inspired her dramatic physical and mental makeover under, which has seen her dissolving her filler, quitting her degrading OnlyFans career, and shedding her infamous stage name in favor of embracing her birth name.
00:51:05.000The 34-year-old's reality star is now going by Angela White, and she's opened up exclusively to Daily Mail about putting a very sudden end to her provocative online content for which she earned $2 million in two years, and beginning the process of reversing all of the cosmetic work she had done over the years.
00:51:19.000She said that she was baptized in May of last year, and she came to the realization that continuing to share very X-rated images and videos on the degrading platform was not what God will want me to do.
00:51:49.000Having joined OnlyFans in 2020, the ex-fiancee of Rob Kardashian was eventually confirmed as the top celebrity earner the following year.
00:51:55.000She's believed to be raking in as much as $20 million per month, although she says that she was actually making about a million bucks a year.
00:52:01.000She regularly treated fans to raunchy content.
00:52:05.000But now, she said that beginning in May of 2022, she was born again.
00:52:08.000to. She was born again. And she says, I think my baptism on my birthday played a big part.
00:52:12.000Everything has been kind of trickling down for me and lining up perfectly. Now I'm just going by faith. I'm not going by black China way or the Angela way.
00:52:20.000She said that she was, um, it was born out of her desire to become holy.
00:52:24.000She said, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired of the same repetitive things.
00:52:27.000I thought, let me dig deep and see what it is I'm doing wrong.
00:52:29.000Because obviously there's something I'm not doing right, even if I think I am.
00:52:32.000Now I'm doing the right thing to the best of my ability so I can become whole.
00:52:35.000You see how she rejected the, whatever you choose to do is the right thing?
00:52:38.000It turns out that when God makes demands on you, when there are moral demands made on you, you can make your life better.
00:52:43.000It's when you decide that what it is that you do is the best thing, and how you feel is the most important thing, that you make yourself miserable.
00:52:51.000She says that it's been a rewarding experience.
00:52:53.000Quote, not only am I doing it for myself, I'm also encouraging other people even thinking about it.
00:52:57.000She said, everybody's been really, really supportive when I posted it.
00:53:01.000I didn't think it was gonna be so massive, she said, of her decision to share a video of herself having her filler dissolved.
00:53:05.000She said, I posted it maybe 3.30 in the morning.
00:53:08.000I was healing from my surgery and I thought, let me post these.
00:53:10.000I went to sleep, I woke up, it had blown up, but in a positive way.
00:53:14.000So, yeah, she said that I was feeling insecure and people feel fake and so they do this sort of stuff.
00:53:20.000But reuniting with a biblical vision of the universe has helped her actually see herself more clearly.
00:53:28.000And yes, once again, as it turns out...
00:53:30.000You know, thinking about your relationship with God, your relationship to roles and rules in society can actually make your life a lot better than looking internally for a subjective sense of happiness, as though that's gonna be found by searching deeper within your feelings and then searching outward for the approval of people who pay you money to see you undress on the only fans.
00:53:57.000So honestly, I didn't think there were going to be a lot of people who are out there defending TikTok, but apparently there are some people who are.
00:54:02.000So AOC has now come out in favor of TikTok.
00:54:05.000She put out a video on TikTok explaining why she thinks TikTok ought to be maintained.
00:54:10.000The essence of the answer, of course, is because she's very popular on TikTok, so she doesn't want it to go away.
00:54:15.000And the yutes like the TikTok, so it doesn't matter that it's a Chinese spy app that is mainlining a bunch of garbage into your kid's brain.
00:54:28.000First of all, I think it's important to discuss how unprecedented of a move this would be.
00:54:33.000The United States has never before banned a social media company from existence, from operating in our borders.
00:54:39.000And this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it.
00:54:44.000Some of the arguments about banning TikTok have come with respect to discussions around Chinese surveillance and utilization of data that is tracked and the enormous amount of tracking on U.S.
00:54:59.000citizens and data that is harvested by TikTok.
00:55:02.000And they say because of this egregious amount of data harvesting, we should ban this app.
00:55:08.000However, that doesn't really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you don't know about.
00:55:23.000So what exactly is her case against banning TikTok?
00:55:27.000So her case basically comes down to a lot of people like TikTok.
00:55:30.000So she says, well, you know, it's unprecedented.
00:55:37.000Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok, donated $150,000 to both the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Foundation back in December.
00:55:49.000She says, TikTok banning it isn't the solution to data privacy concerns.
00:55:52.000Instead, Congress needs to focus on regulating social media companies' unchecked habit of collecting user data without their consent.
00:55:57.000That wouldn't help with ByteDance anyway.