In this episode, we look at the growing cult-like phenomenon that is Burning Man, and the people who attend it. Burning Man has become so big, in fact, that it has become more like a religion than a counterculture. And in order to understand this, we have to go back in time to the early days of counterculture and counterculture, when people gathered to burn a 9-foot tall statue on the beach in San Francisco, and then moved it over to the middle of the desert in the 1980s. And then, a few decades ago, a group of weirdos started gathering on the beaches of San Francisco to build a bonfire. And now, a bunch of billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have come to join in on the fun. And it s all happening in a place called Black Rock City in the desert, and they re selling coffee and water and everything else they can get their hands on. And they re doing it by burning a giant effigy of a Statue of the Virgin Mary. And that s what Burning Man is all about, you guessed it, is a religion. Burning Man a place where people burn a giant statue and then have sex with each other in a giant bonfire in the middle desert. And if you don t like it, you re in the wrong place, because it s a cult, right? or you re part of the problem, and you re not getting what you need to know about what s going on at Burning Man and what s really going on here in the first place, and why it s such a cult like that and why you should go to Burning Man. And what s the point of view of the counterculture is that it s no longer a countercultural movement, it s becoming the culture in which they swim in a sea of people who swim in the ocean of the culture it s actually the culture? and it s become the culture, and not the culture. What s going to happen in the future, you have to be part of it? We ll find out what s happening in the next few episodes of the first episode of the new season of the podcast, coming soon, coming up next week on the second season of The Dark Side of the New York Times, New York Magazine, coming out next week, and much more. Stay tuned for the next episode of our new podcast, Coming Apart. Subscribe to our new show, The New Class.
00:00:00.000So, it's rare to see actual biblical-level events taking place in, you know, normal, everyday life, but that is exactly, apparently, what is happening over at Burning Man.
00:00:08.000Now, I've ignored Burning Man, successfully, for several decades at this point because, frankly, it seemed like a bunch of weirdos out in the desert being weird with each other.
00:00:32.000Each year, more and more people attended the bonfire and then they actually moved it over to the Nevada desert.
00:00:37.000And so now it's held in Black Rock City, a temporary community erected by the thousands of attendees who construct the gathering's infrastructure using nothing but their own tools and equipment.
00:00:45.000Nothing apparently is sold at Burning Man.
00:00:47.000This is one of the sort of communistic properties of it.
00:00:49.000Instead, they sell like coffee and water and everything else.
00:00:53.000So first of all, you have to ask why they're selling the coffee or water, and the answer is because you can't provide supply unless there is actual monetary demand.
00:01:00.000It turns out capitalism is great at getting things from place A to place B for an affordable price, and communism sucks at pretty much everything.
00:01:06.000For many attendees, known as burners, the event is about providing a space for countercultural expression.
00:01:11.000As we're going to examine, however, one of the weird elements of the United States is that the counterculture is no longer a counterculture.
00:01:19.000The counterculture in the 1960s, the weirdos from the 1980s who are gathering on beaches and building giant burning men and all the rest of this, those people who we all used to consider strange, now if you say that they are weirdos who are participating in weird paganistic behavior, You are considered strange.
00:01:36.000You are considered part of the problem.
00:01:42.000Which is why, for example, you see so many rich and famous people now going to Burning Man.
00:01:46.000It used to be that if you were a rich, famous person, you took yourself seriously enough that you didn't show up in the middle of the desert with nothing but a hammer and then expect to basically just go to the orgy dome all day.
00:01:55.000It used to be that the serious people in our culture were, you know, actual serious people in our culture.
00:02:00.000You go way back to the age of the tycoons, when you were looking at John Rockefeller and you were looking at Vanderbilt.
00:02:08.000These were people who were at least pretty serious about their own lives.
00:02:11.000But the reality is the counterculture has now become the culture and the way that you win cultural cachet is by participating in a paganistic set of values that actually is in complete contradistinction to the actual values you live out.
00:02:22.000There's a point that Charles Murray made in his great book, Coming Apart, which is that all of the tech billionaires who show up at Burning Man and then
00:02:29.000proclaim they have allegiance to these sorts of principles actually in their own lives reject these
00:02:33.000sorts of principles. It's just everybody else who picks up the principles and then it becomes the
00:02:38.000culture in which they swim. And it's really, really bad. It's true whether you're talking about
00:02:41.000sort of paganistic versions of communism that you're seeing at Burning Man or whether you're
00:02:45.000talking about single motherhood, which is practiced by nearly no one in the Tech Bay area,
00:02:49.000but given the moral green light by everyone in the Tech Bay area. Right. There is something
00:02:54.000weird about the fact that these weird hippies burning crap on the beach suddenly turned into
00:02:59.000billionaires arriving entourage in tows participate in building a garbage city in the middle of
00:03:03.000nowhere and then having sex with randos.
00:03:05.000Which is effectively what Burning Man is.
00:03:09.000According to therichest.com, in recent years, many longtime Burners have resented how the festival's growing popularity has changed the experience.
00:03:15.000They say it on Reddit, posts about the new class of Burner consisting of celebrities, internet influencers, billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
00:03:22.000It is true, by the way, that again, unlike in the past, when everyone who was poor aspired to be rich.
00:03:29.000And what that meant is that if you were poor, you aspired to also imitate the lifestyles of the rich and famous, which meant that if you go back to the photos of the Great Depression, people are standing in line for Their tickets for their food, and they are dressed in suits.
00:03:42.000Now you have the richest people in our society who are attempting to dress like homeless people to prove to everybody else, while they're earning billions of dollars, that they actually despise the billions of dollars they're earning.
00:03:51.000A culture that hates itself cannot long survive, by the way.
00:03:54.000What you see, in terms of the actual stats from Burning Man, is that in 2006, 14% of surveyed Burners listed their personal income as $100,000 or more.
00:04:02.000By 2016, that number had almost doubled to 28%.
00:04:07.000The surveyors added a $300,000 plus personal income category, and that now represented 3.4% of all the people who are showing up at Burning Man.
00:04:16.000So it used to be that if you showed up at Burning Man, you basically showed up with like a bunch of plywood and a hammer.
00:04:20.000And now, if you are a rich person, you show up at a turnkey camp.
00:04:24.000According to Mashable, these offer luxury amenities, cleaning staff and chefs, while reportedly wrecking havoc on the environment by chartered flights to get there.
00:04:32.000So the entire thing was supposed to be this hippie gathering where you bring what you have and you give what you want and you receive from others who are generous.
00:04:39.000And now it's turned into a bunch of rich people who want to pretend that this is what they are while actively just paying people to set up basically glamping in the desert, which is amazing.
00:04:54.000In 2019, Burning Man CEO Marion Goodall wrote she was stunned by the growing commodification and exploitation of Black Rock City and Burning Man culture.
00:05:00.000So on the one hand, you can say capitalism always wins.
00:05:02.000Like no matter what, everything ends up commodified because human beings are driven toward doing less work and being able to compensate people for the work that they are doing.
00:05:11.000The other way to view this is that, again, you have an entire elite strata of our society that hates itself, and that is constantly seeking to signal to everybody else how much it hates itself by doing things like going to Burning Man.
00:05:22.000They're not seeking to exemplify the behavior that everybody else should engage in.
00:05:25.000And if they do, they believe that behavior should apparently be this hippie-esque garbage, and we should all basically just laugh and giggle along with them as they go to the pleasure dome that has been set up in full Sodom and Gomorrah style.
00:05:38.000According to Burning Man CEO Marion Goodall, she said, whether it's commercial photoshoots, product placements, or Instagram posts thanking friends for a useful item, attendees, including fashion models and social media influencers, are wearing and tagging brands in their Playa photos.
00:05:49.000This means they are using Black Rock City to increase their popularity, to appeal to customers, and to sell more stuff.
00:05:54.000Black Rock City requires significant investments of time, energy, and resourcefulness, she said.
00:05:57.000Part of what makes Burning Man unique and powerful is that everyone has to work to be there.
00:06:02.000So I do love, again, the fact that all of these rich, famous people are showing up and doing, like, Instagram photos for Popeyes, right?
00:06:10.000DJ Diplo descended into Burning Man in 2019 on a Popeyes-branded plane and came out with two plastic bags filled with dozens of chicken sandwiches.
00:06:18.000And then he remarked on social media, Wendy's, your move.
00:06:22.000Some celebrities are different, right?
00:06:24.000These would be like Susan Sarandon, who famously drank the ashes of psychologist and LSD advocate, Timothy Leary, when she showed up in 2015, which by the way, gross, unsanitary, don't drink other people's ashes, by the way.
00:06:35.000It's a great way to get your ash kicked.
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00:07:48.000Okay, so just to fill out what Burning Man is before we explain what God did to it, apparently.
00:07:53.000And I get to say that because the left does this all the time.
00:07:57.000Right, the left acts as though when a hurricane hits Florida it's because of the great sin that we have all committed in driving cars and, you know, running our air conditioners.
00:08:03.000So I also get to make a joke about how, um, if a bunch of morons decide that they are going to jet set into the desert in the middle of nowhere where it's 115 degrees to screw each other and then there's a giant rainstorm, biblical style, that floods them and no one bothered to bring enough wood to build an ark.
00:08:30.000And it just goes to show you that in an era where actual religion declines, traditional Judeo-Christian religion declines, other forms of religion supplant it, whether that is political polarization, and following of the great leader,
00:08:41.000or whether it is this sort of paganistic hippie crap that you're seeing over at Burning Man.
00:08:46.000Radical inclusion is one of the principles.
00:09:36.000Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
00:09:40.000So, first of all, again, back to the radical inclusion point, if you just include everybody who is a leech, and they are living off gifts, with no expectation of any sort of return, it's not going to work.
00:09:52.000Because, again, this stuff doesn't exist at scale.
00:09:55.000The actual real rule of Burning Man, I would assume, is that if somebody gives you something, you give them something in return, which is what we used to call trade.
00:10:02.000We used to call that thing capitalism, but instead we're going to pretend that when I give you something and you give me something, and the real reason we're doing it is because, of course, if I just take something from you and I never give you anything, no one will ever give something to me again.
00:10:12.000We're going to pretend that that's communism.
00:10:16.000In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising.
00:10:26.000It turns out that people saw a giant group of people there, and it is now... It's old-fashioned, cool, Burning Man.
00:10:33.000I'm in a group chat with a bunch of folks who are kind of, like, tail-end of millennial age, and they're like, yeah, I remember when this used to be the cool thing, and now it's a bunch of people who are 42 years old who are showing up.
00:10:44.000The average age of Burning Man has been rising in recent years.
00:10:46.000It used to be the thing for, you know, dumbass 21-year-olds to do, and now it's a thing for people trying to recapture the feeling of being a dumbass 21-year-old, but they're actually 42, divorced, and have a kid.
00:11:07.000How they went when they relied on their inner resources to, you know, be stuck in the mud for days at a time, complaining because they were located, you know, a few miles away from a freeway.
00:11:39.000Well, yeah, except for the fact that radical self-expression as a core value system requires the acceptance, approval, and tolerance of others, clearly.
00:11:47.000There are limits to radical self-expression.
00:11:50.000Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration.
00:11:53.000We strive to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
00:11:59.000Have you seen all the amazing works of art that have come out of Burning Man?
00:12:01.000You know, I mean, other than the STDs.
00:12:05.000Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants.
00:12:12.000They also must assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state, and federal laws.
00:12:16.000Oh, so there is legal liability that attaches.
00:12:19.000So it turns out this one, they just don't do.
00:12:21.000I say, our community respects the environment.
00:12:22.000We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather.
00:12:26.000We clean up after ourselves and endeavor whenever possible to leave such places in a better state than when we found them, which of course is wildly untrue.
00:12:32.000It turns out that Burning Man has had a bad history over the past few years of just leaving garbage strewn along the highways as people careen out of there as fast as possible.
00:12:42.000Go back to the Occupy Wall Street days.
00:12:43.000We had all the socialist lefties who were camping out in the parks in New York City.
00:12:49.000And it was just a wilderness of criminality, drug abuse, and trash.
00:12:54.000And then you went to the Tea Party, right?
00:12:55.000All these people who supposedly hate the environment.
00:12:57.000Everybody at the Tea Party picked up after themselves.
00:12:59.000No one at Occupy picked up after themselves because, again, it turns out that only respect for the communal values that you actually share would require you to do this thing.
00:13:06.000And any community founded on radical self-expression, you're gonna get a lot of freeloaders and people who free ride.
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00:16:04.000It's just the society was not all that durable.
00:16:06.000Maybe that's really what we are finding out right now.
00:16:08.000So here's what happened over at Burning Man.
00:16:10.000According to the EAP, An unusual late summer storm turned a week-long counterculture fest into a sloppy mess, with tens of thousands of partygoers stuck in foot-deep mud, with no working toilets in the northern Nevada desert.
00:16:21.000Some Burning Man revelers said Sunday their spirits remain unbroken.
00:16:25.000Unfortunately, their toilets do remain broken.
00:16:53.000The annual gathering in the Black Rock Desert, about 110 miles north of Reno, attracts nearly 80,000 artists, musicians, and activists for a mix of wilderness camping and avant-garde performances.
00:17:02.000Disruptions are part of the festival's recent history.
00:17:04.000Organizers had to temporarily close entrances in 2018 due to dust storms.
00:17:08.000The event was twice canceled altogether during the pandemic.
00:17:57.000President Joe Biden told reporters in Delaware he's aware of the situation at Burning Man.
00:18:01.000The White House is in touch with local officials.
00:18:04.000Again, the thing I'm making fun of here is that the people who are most interested in this, it has become a glitz and glamour festival.
00:18:10.000This is the part that's truly fascinating.
00:18:12.000Again, making fun of hippies in the desert, that's easy pickings.
00:18:14.000But when those hippies involve, like, the most famous people in our society, and these most famous people in our society are suggesting that there is something to this value system, that is worth noting.
00:18:26.000That a value system that thinks that orgy domes, and not showering, and building crap in the desert that you just then leave there, that this is somehow a form of higher living.
00:18:39.000And in the absence of God, paganism rules.
00:18:40.000It is not that there is no God, it's that many gods rule, and those gods typically involve self-worship.
00:18:46.000Which is really where things currently stand.
00:19:18.000The other part of this that's hilarious is that obviously it wasn't biblical flooding.
00:19:22.000Obviously, thank God, tens of thousands of people did not die.
00:19:25.000And yet, every person who's there, this is why I say the idolatry is actually just idolatry of the self, everybody there is treating this as though they escaped the beaches at Normandy or something.
00:19:36.000Like, this is what they're treating it like.
00:19:41.000Like, for example, Neil Catyell, who you'll remember as a supposedly serious legal analyst, he put up a picture of himself talking about the incredibly harrowing journey out of the Burning Man Festival.
00:19:56.000So apparently people said that they could walk about five miles from the festival site to the nearest town of Gerlach where shuttle buses would take them to Reno.
00:20:03.000First of all, can I just point out that five miles is not a lot of territory?
00:22:36.000You wonder why people don't trust the elite?
00:22:38.000You wonder why there's a giant cultural gap between, say, the left coast and the east coast and everybody in the middle of the country?
00:22:45.000Because people who still go to church look at this stuff and they're like, so you morons went out in the middle of the desert to worship your pagan selves and then got stuck in the mud.
00:22:56.000The cultural arbiters are not on the side of the so-called culture.
00:23:00.000They are on the side of the counterculture, and this is the important point.
00:23:03.000Burning Man's values, or its pseudo-values, represent the actual prevailing mindset for many of the powerful in our society.
00:23:10.000When people try to boil down the Trump phenomenon to, well, the guy really liked tariffs, or Donald Trump, he wanted to build a wall on the border, or Donald Trump, it's really about subsidies to industrial towns in Ohio.
00:23:21.000That's not what Donald Trump is about.
00:23:22.000What Donald Trump is about is about a cultural system that used to be called the traditional culture of the United States.
00:23:28.000He is not personally representative of that, but that's what the Trump movement represents.
00:23:32.000And those people have been dispossessed of the Judeo-Christian architecture that used to undergird the United States of America.
00:23:39.000And they've been dispossessed by a bunch of pagan morons who believe that the actual value system is a radical self-expression and individualism.
00:23:46.000Now, this does unite some of the great capitalists of our era, because there are many of the great capitalists of our era.
00:24:48.000Now it's the most powerful people in the society who have basically decided the reason they became powerful is because they followed their star.
00:24:54.000Again, if you look at the people who are most successful in our society, they didn't follow their star to the tune of, I will ignore basic values like educating myself or living a sexually responsible lifestyle in the main.
00:25:06.000Mark Zuckerberg is a married guy with multiple kids.
00:25:08.000And that's true for most of the people who are actually high earners in American society.
00:25:13.000They're actually more likely to be married with kids than people who are not high earners in American society.
00:25:17.000But they promulgate the values of the low.
00:25:20.000And when I say the low, I mean like the hippies and the commune who are burning giant nine foot statues.
00:25:26.000And the kickback to that is a bunch of people who are angry at the fact that they have had their value system supplanted and insulted and derided by people whose main focus seems to just be tearing things down.
00:25:37.000I mean, burning man is actually an excellent metaphor.
00:25:40.000You build a man and then you burn him.
00:25:42.000That is, you build radical individualism, represented by a giant nine-foot-tall idol, and then you burn it.
00:25:49.000Because what does humanity matter if all humanity is is a piece of meat wandering through the universe with hedonistic impulses?
00:25:55.000It is only when human beings are connected to a higher value system, when they're connected with a divine value system of some sort, that they become worth more than a block of wood that you burn, or an orgy dome, Disconnect human beings from a telos.
00:26:09.000Disconnect them from a purpose, a higher purpose, and what you end up with is Burning Man.
00:26:15.000Live in the moment, immediacy of experience, radical individual self-expression, and then half an inch of mud and you're done.
00:26:23.000So, there is something to be said here.
00:26:25.000It is amazing that the way the organizers here decided to tell people to handle this thing is to get themselves wood blocks and poop buckets.
00:26:34.000According to CNN.com, the first time Masha Maltseva attended Burning Man, the annual ephemeral city that attracts thousands of free-spirited revelers in the Nevada desert, she overpacked.
00:26:43.000I prepared for maybe three months, she recalled.
00:26:45.000I read all the packing lists, all the Reddit threads, all the WhatsApp chats preparing for Burning Man.
00:26:48.000But this year, when heavy rain transformed the remote venue into a muddy mess that forced attendees to shelter in place and conserve precious resources, Maltseva wasn't as prepared.
00:26:56.000She became one of about 70,000 people stuck at the event when Black Rock Desert received over two months worth of rain in just 24 hours.
00:27:03.000The storms turned the desert sand into sloppy, slippery clay that made it impossible for drivers to exit or enter.
00:27:08.000Self-reliance is one of the event's core principles, with organizers emphasizing that participants are ultimately responsible for their own health and safety.
00:27:16.000So that meant that they had to wear trash bags on their feet.
00:27:19.000It meant also that they were told to bring poop buckets.
00:27:24.000In case the rain made the porta-potties inoperable, the website recommended a five-gallon utility bucket with a lid and garbage bag liners.
00:27:30.000This sounds like a great civilization to you.
00:27:31.000It sounds like a great civilization to me.
00:27:33.000Here's festival attendee David Date describing the absolute carnage in the desert.
00:27:38.000What's been the most difficult aspect of this weather and being trapped there?
00:27:46.000I would say the most difficult aspect, uh, you know, fundamental to this, uh, problem we have is, uh, the concept of a Wook.
00:27:52.000Someone who shows up to this event with nothing other than their RV and, you know, their selfish indulgence and they offer nothing.
00:28:24.000It turns out that we are now a civilization that is completely focused on the adults.
00:28:29.000The reason that there are no kids in Burning Man, aside from the fact that it's radically inappropriate and apparently bears some risk, is the fact that if you live immediately in the moment, you're not building for the future.
00:28:38.000That's the whole point of Burning Man, is not building for the future.
00:28:42.000There are times in every culture where you take off and you focus in on just the moment, right?
00:28:47.000But when you build an entire value system around that, around whatever happens tomorrow is not my business, around why build intergenerationally?
00:29:03.000So we celebrate a holiday in Judaism that's coming up in the very near future called Sukkot.
00:29:07.000In Sukkot, you basically do kind of Burning Man.
00:29:10.000What you do is you build a hut outside your house and you actually are supposed to live in it for seven or eight days.
00:29:14.000The purpose of it is to remind you that you're at the mercy of God, right?
00:29:18.000You're supposed to actually build the hut such that you can see the stars and so it's open to the rain.
00:29:24.000But the whole purpose of it is to remind you that you are a physical creature, but that there is something more spiritual to you.
00:29:32.000That's not supposed to represent the entirety of human experience.
00:29:35.000It's one of the best holidays because the idea is that when you decorate all the physical surroundings around you, that's not the essential you.
00:29:47.000Disconnect that and all you end up with is a bunch of morons rolling around in the mud and then being mad at each other when they have to poop in a bucket.
00:30:45.000But let's say that you wanted to replace Matt with somebody who understood what working hours are.
00:30:49.000Well, then what you would do is you would head on over to ZipRecruiter, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter to get a quality candidate within day one.
00:33:46.000They're willing to overlook or maybe embrace a lot of the foibles and the crazy tweets and all that kind of stuff.
00:33:52.000Certainly there's a lot of warmth inside the Republican Party for Trump.
00:33:55.000But the only counter-argument would be, yeah, but also he lost to Biden in 2020 and will probably lose again.
00:33:59.000The problem is, when the polls show that Joe Biden is absolutely weak, that makes Trump look a lot more durable inside the Republican primaries.
00:34:07.000So it's like, well, I mean, I get both of the things I want at once.
00:34:09.000The guy who I really like on a personal level, and also he can probably beat Biden.
00:34:12.000Which is what the Republican polls are showing right now inside the Republican primaries.
00:34:16.000I have my doubts because I think that a lot of the polls that we're seeing right now are overestimating, for example, minority support for Donald Trump, underestimating that support for Joe Biden.
00:34:24.000I think a lot of Democrats who right now are saying that they are wavering on Biden are going to come home in the same way that a lot of Republicans who say they waver about Trump are going to come home.
00:34:31.000However, It is Joe Biden's weakness that is leading to this impasse.
00:34:35.000Voters overwhelmingly think Biden is too old to run for re-election and give him low marks for handling the economy, according to the latest Wall Street Journal poll.
00:34:42.000The negative views of Biden's age and performance help explain why only 39% of voters hold a favorable view of Joe Biden.
00:34:49.000In a separate question, 42% said they approve of how he's handling his job, well below the 57% who disapprove.
00:34:56.000And right now, in a potential rematch, a Trump versus Biden rematch, each of them has 46% head-to-head.
00:35:01.000The journal survey points to a large set of challenges that Biden faces in persuading voters he deserves re-election.
00:35:08.000In Trump, voters in the survey rated Trump as less honest and likable than Biden, a majority viewed at Trump's actions after his 2020 election loss as an illegal effort to stop Congress from declaring Biden the proper winner.
00:35:18.000But if you look at the disapproved numbers for Joe Biden on a wide variety of issues, they are absolutely devastating.
00:35:23.000When it comes to inflation, the disapproval numbers are well over 60%.
00:36:25.000Now, what's amazing about that is that those numbers are really awful for Joe Biden, like truly, truly garbage for Joe Biden.
00:36:30.000You would think that if Joe Biden had numbers that low, his Republican opponent would be like at 50%, 52%.
00:36:35.000The problem is that Donald Trump's negatives are also super high.
00:36:39.000So basically the American public thinks that Donald Trump committed criminal acts, like the, I'm not saying everyone, I'm saying that a plurality of the American public believes that Donald Trump did illegal or at least morally bad things in the aftermath of last time's election.
00:36:52.000And they also don't like him personally.
00:36:54.000But also they think that he's more competent than Biden and they like his record.
00:36:57.000Now, that provides an opening to Trump if he runs on his record.
00:37:00.000But if the entire campaign is going to be about what he did after the election last time and his criminal cases, that's going to be kind of a problem going forward into the election.
00:37:30.000So again, these are really bad numbers for Biden, and it's those bad numbers for Biden that are really strengthening Donald Trump inside the Republican primaries because the electability argument basically goes away.
00:37:39.000Democrats cannot believe that Joe Biden is polling this low.
00:37:42.000They can't believe it because they live in an echo chamber where everybody loves Joe Biden.
00:37:44.000So here's George Stephanopoulos, former lackey for Hillary Clinton, being quite shocked.
00:37:50.000It is kind of shocking in a way that despite all of the baggage that Donald Trump carries, he's tied with Joe Biden right now.
00:37:57.000Yeah, I mean, George, when I looked at that recent poll, the Wall Street Journal, I said, oh, this could keep me up at night.
00:38:02.000Look, the problem is, and the biggest challenge we face as Democrats, I say we because I'm a Democrat, is that young voters, young black and Latino voters, they're not ready to come back to the party.
00:38:13.000They're not even looking at the so-called messaging that's being sent to them about the economy, about climate change, about student debt relief.
00:38:23.000So again, even Democrats are stunned by his unpopularity, but it's not all that stunning.
00:38:27.000Joe Biden is not an empathetic figure, as we've been pointing out for months on this program.
00:38:33.000I love the fact that Joe Biden is trying to steer into his age at this point, but simultaneously denying that he is lazy, which at this point in his life he is.
00:38:41.000He spent like the last month on vacation while Lahaina was burning down.
00:38:44.000Like, what does he do for a living other than sit on the beach and then say words badly into a microphone and then run away from the press?
00:38:52.000Yesterday, he was asked why he was in Rehoboth Beach.
00:38:54.000He's like, well, I certainly wasn't on vacation.
00:38:56.000Well, then what the hell are you doing in Rehoboth Beach?
00:41:50.000They're the people who look at middle class Americans like, ah, those rubes living the lifestyle.
00:41:54.000Remember, it's Barack Obama who's declaring that people voted Republican because they were bitter clingers who were clinging to God and xenophobia because they were losing their jobs.
00:42:02.000It's people like Joe Biden who look down on the middle class.
00:42:05.000Joe Biden is there to enrich his corrupt union buddies, which has been true since literally he was elected to the Senate.
00:42:10.000He has been in the union's pocket since the day he entered the Senate in Delaware.
00:42:15.000Again, Ben Schreckinger writes in his book about the Bidens that there is a very solid basis to believe that Joe Biden won his first Senate race basically at the behest of unions that may have illegally picketed a newspaper to prevent a mailer going out about him from his opposition.
00:42:32.000In any case, one of my favorite things about Joe Biden is that he equates being pro-middle class with being pro the heads of major labor unions.
00:42:40.000It turns out that forcibly removing a piece of people's paycheck and giving it to a bunch of union bosses then to let corrupt politicians like Joe Biden so they can enrich their funds is pretty amazing stuff.
00:42:50.000This is presumably why the acting Labor Secretary right now, Julie Hsu, she's out there saying that Joe Biden, he loves the middle class because he loves labor.
00:43:11.000I mean, this president is the most pro-worker, pro-union president that we have had.
00:43:17.000And that means economic policies that center working people, that are good for workers.
00:43:22.000It has created a tight labor market in which workers and unions have more power to demand change and demand what's right for workers, demand their fair share at the bargaining table.
00:43:33.000We are living in an unprecedented moment in American history.
00:43:36.000of the unions, that's really what it's all about.
00:43:37.000Again, the only argument for Joe Biden at this point is that he's not Trump.
00:43:40.000Bernie Sanders just said that out loud.
00:43:42.000He's like, really, Joe Biden's old, he's bad at this job, but at least he's not Trump.
00:43:46.000So right now you have the Republican Party betting on at least he's not Biden.
00:43:50.000You have the Democratic Party betting on at least he's not Trump, and only one party can be right.
00:44:36.000And so what you have is, as Jim Garrity at National Review says, a frozen battlefield.
00:44:40.000Republicans think that anyone can be Biden.
00:44:43.000Democrats believe anyone can be Trump.
00:44:45.000And so you're going to end up with Trump-Biden in all likelihood right now.
00:44:48.000Meanwhile, the media are attempting to do their best to ensure that Ron DeSantis and everyone else in the Republican Party remain secondary to Donald Trump.
00:44:56.000They're doing so in some cases by just lying.
00:44:57.000So Rolling Stone Magazine, which is not famous for its honesty, they wrote up a report suggesting that a bunch of neo-Nazis marching in Florida by a bunch, I mean like 15, marching in Florida are representative of Governor DeSantis' political support.
00:45:11.000According to Rolling Stone's misleading report, they said some of the marchers individually expressed their distaste for Donald Trump, saying they prefer Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
00:45:20.000And supposedly, they said we're all DeSantis supporters.
00:45:23.000It's only one problem, which is not true.
00:45:45.000Rolling Stone left that part out so they could make it look as though all the Nazis in Florida support DeSantis, which is a weird thing since all the Orthodox Jews in Florida support DeSantis.
00:45:56.000Over the weekend, Joe Biden stopped by Florida very briefly in the aftermath of a hurricane that actually didn't do a tremendous amount of damage.
00:46:25.000Joe Biden is coming around to stand around and look at things and wander around aimlessly and bump into walls and talk about climate change.
00:46:32.000So Governor DeSantis said on Friday there were no plans for him to meet with Joe Biden, contradicting comments that Biden had made earlier in the day indicating that they would.
00:46:41.000The media immediately took this as a great insult to the honor of Joe Biden.
00:47:58.000I remember being on the ground for Sandy, for Hurricane Sandy, way back when.
00:48:02.000And you think back to the meeting that Chris Christie then had, then-New Jersey governor had with President Obama, right, and the embrace.
00:48:09.000And some folks said that is the reason why then-President Obama got reelected.
00:48:16.000Is this, you think, one of the reasons why DeSantis is choosing not to meet with the president today and making it more about politics?
00:48:22.000Well, I would just note, I do not think that going to her, going to be the president, to do your presidential duty when President Obama was president, was in fact the reason that he was re-elected.
00:48:34.000Look, I think that Governor DeSantis, his team, and by the way, he has two teams, right?
00:48:40.000He has a team in the governor's office and then he has a team on his campaign.
00:48:45.000I think that the team of the campaign is likely negatively influencing what the decisions of the team in the governor's office makes.
00:48:57.000Okay, so yeah, the media are not going to let that one go.
00:49:00.000Okay, meanwhile, Elon Musk is now at war with the Anti-Defamation League.
00:49:04.000So let's be clear about the Anti-Defamation League.
00:49:06.000It is a progressive interest group that proclaims that it is speaking in the name of Jewish causes.
00:49:15.000And sometimes they cross streams with actual not horrific Ideas.
00:49:20.000And a lot of the time, they're targeting people on the basis of spurious nonsense or ignoring people on the basis of other spurious nonsense.
00:49:26.000Because, again, they're a progressive interest group.
00:49:28.000Well, Elon Musk is now in a battle with the ADL.
00:49:32.000And he's in a battle with them because he's saying that you guys are basically trying to slur X, formerly known as Twitter, by having advertisers remove their revenue.
00:49:41.000A lot of these progressive interest groups are very much interested in removing advertising revenue from sources where they can't control the speech.
00:49:47.000So he posted on X saying the ADL has been, quote, trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being anti-semitic.
00:49:53.000If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the Anti-Defamation League.
00:49:58.000If they lose the defamation suit, we will insist they drop the anti part of their name since, obviously.
00:50:23.000I mean, they've made excuses for some of the world's worst anti-Semites in Congress, so long as they're Democrats.
00:50:28.000Because again, it is a progressive interest group.
00:50:30.000They posted a report suggesting that X is now filled with horrible hate.
00:50:36.000This is a way for them to work together with groups that we've discussed on the program before, like Garm, in order to reduce advertising to platforms like X.
00:50:44.000Basically, abide by left-wing standards of speech or watch your advertising dollars disappear.
00:50:48.000That's what Elon Musk is sounding off about, and he happens to be correct about all of that.
00:50:53.000And it's really, really ugly, which is why it's very important that if you are an advertiser and you are looking at platforms to advertise on, you probably should be looking at freer speech platforms like Twitter.
00:51:03.000Because otherwise, Twitter slash X is going to revert back to type and it's going to do the same kind of crap that Facebook has done or YouTube has done in censoring material.
00:51:12.000Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
00:51:17.000If you wish to understand what exactly is going on in China, fantastic new book out by a person named Yasheng Huang.
00:51:24.000This book is titled, The Rise and Fall of the East, How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Why They Might Lead to its Decline.
00:51:32.000The basic premise of the book is that for centuries, millennia almost, baked into the Chinese cake has been this system of test taking, that basically chose single standards of merit in order to elevate people.
00:51:46.000And this has led to top-down authoritarian rule in China.
00:51:49.000It's been incredibly durable, a lot more durable than it would have been in, say, Russia.
00:51:53.000And it's why you can have Xi Jinping, who's being as authoritarian as he wants to be, and still maintain control of a country that theoretically... Like, why does it never fragment?
00:52:02.000Why does it seem as though it continues to be durable even when its economic numbers go down?
00:52:07.000It also has some lessons to teach the United States about how economics ought to work,
00:52:11.000and also about the sort of standards that we use in terms of economic growth.
00:52:14.000So one of the points made in the rise and fall of the East is that basically all of the
00:52:18.000test-based systems for elevating people inside the CCP are rooted in growth of GDP.
00:52:24.000If you are a regional leader in China and you grew GDP in your area, you're very likely to be looked at for a top post in the centralized government.
00:52:30.000Well, the problem is that GDP is a standard that is largely reliant in China on government borrowing and spending, which is why you see China now in serious trouble.
00:52:38.000It's borrowed and spent way too much money.
00:52:40.000It's why you have giant empty cities in some of these places, because if you're a public official and you wish to rise in the Chinese Communist Party, what better way to do it than borrow a bunch of money, build a bunch of empty cities and claim that you just increased GDP dramatically?
00:52:52.000The Rise and Fall of the East by Yasheng Huang, if you're interested in the actual situation going on with China and the durability of the Chinese regime, even if they are experiencing economic failure.
00:53:03.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:53:10.000This is a piece by David Gibson, who's director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, and he's ripping into American conservative Catholics for being at odds with Pope Francis.
00:53:20.000He's saying that the loudest voices in American Catholicism are, quote, backward-looking moralists, disconnected from the roots of the church.
00:53:27.000Catholic tradition and history, says Francis, is about moving forward, changing to live the gospel message in the midst of current realities.
00:53:32.000The Pope's words were both surprisingly frank and frankly unsurprising, giving the persistence of right anger directed at his modernizing approach.
00:53:38.000This episode could be read as part of a long saga of tensions between Rome and the U.S.
00:53:42.000Since the nation's founding, popes have regarded the American experiment in democracy with suspicion.
00:53:46.000Separation of church and state is dangerous to souls in society.
00:53:49.000They've issued periodic blasts at Americanism and modernist trends.
00:53:52.000The election of Pope Francis in 2013 flipped the script, however, suddenly the Vatican began pushing Americans to be more flexible, more pastoral, more inclusive, less doctrinally rigid.
00:54:00.000Rome is now the engine of reform, a historic reversal.
00:54:03.000France is a world leader in combating climate change.
00:54:05.000He insistently decries economic injustice and the treatment of migrants, while putting new emphasis on the universal right to healthcare, housing, and decent jobs.
00:54:12.000Indeed in Portugal, Francis criticized the fixation on sins below the waist, while if you exploited workers, if you lied or cheated, it didn't matter.
00:54:19.000Meanwhile, says this columnist, much of American church leadership remains focused on a pelvic theology.