A 16-year-old boy wearing a red hat with white letters appears to have worn one of Kanye West's iconic "Make America Great Again" hats, and a bunch of people are mad about it. So what does the mainstream media have to say about it? And what does it have to do with Kanye and the hat? And why does it matter that the hat belongs to a 16 year old boy wearing it? This week, we talk to writer and podcaster Joe Scarborough about it all, and why it matters that it's a white kid wearing a white hat. Plus, we find out what happened when sleuths tracked down the kid in the video, and the rest is not what you think it is. Guests: Joe Scarborough, writer, podcaster, and host of the podcast "The Nod" ( ) joins us to talk about it, and we talk about why it's such a big deal, and what it really means, and how to deal with it. Thanks to our sponsor, Veneer, for sponsoring this episode! Thanks also to our patron, for sponsoring the show! Thank you so much for supporting the show, Joe! and for supporting us, and for being a good friend of the show and our podcast, and thanks to our sponsors, . and thank you for listening to us! for making us a good listen to this episode and supporting us. We really appreciate it! We really do appreciate it. We can't thank you, Joe, we really really do. and we appreciate you. - and we really appreciate you, really much, really really really much more than we can't help us with our equipment and we can you do it. Thank you. We appreciate it, we appreciate it - we really do, we can t do it, too, really, it means a lot. xoxo, bye. -- Caitie, Sarah, Sarah & Joe -- Sarah, too much, Sarah Caitie Sarah, and Thank you, Caitie & Joe, and love you, too! -- Thank you for being there, bye, bye! - Sarah, Amy <3 - - Elyssa, Jen xo, Caitlyn, Jen, Margo, and Joe, Rachie, and Jack, - Rachel, and Sarah, -- - Emily, and Molly
00:00:13.000Your timing comes right in the middle of this big hubbub about this Native American elder and this young boy with one of those stupid fucking red hats on.
00:01:00.000They believe that wearing it, that a 16-year-old wearing that hat sort of carries intense moral weight that surely we know that a 16-year-old is not aware of all the implications of wearing that hat.
00:01:13.000Yeah, but the problem with that is Kanye wears it.
00:01:37.000One of the things that was just so amazing about the whole brouhaha realm, I mean it was in a way like this perfect encapsulation of our outrage culture, right?
00:01:47.000Because people saw a tiny clip of this video and it was like a Rorschach test.
00:02:03.000And it looked like at first glance that they were smirking and smug and had these sort of shit-eating grins on their faces and that they were surrounding I have to tell you, I had a visceral reaction to it.
00:03:17.000What was really, really disheartening is that the initial outrage was enough for the mainstream press to report on it.
00:03:27.000Like Twitter has kind of become almost an assigning editor for places like The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
00:03:37.000And then when the actual truth of the thing comes out, when we move past the outrage cycle, they have to sort of write the follow up story to the fake outrage to begin with.
00:03:47.000Defending the fake outrage instead of backing up and saying, we made a mistake.
00:03:57.000But one of the things that was so horrifying was that people that are supposed to be adults, you know, people with blue check marks on Twitter, were saying things like, this is the face of white patriarchy, this 16-year-old kid.
00:04:20.000How do these people not understand the implications of that?
00:04:24.000So what happened over the weekend was that the, you know, sleuthy detectives on Twitter found a kid who they thought was the kid in the video wasn't actually the kid.
00:04:34.000So there's the actual kid who was doxxed, the family was harassed, everything that we now know happens in these outrage cycles.
00:04:41.000But then there was another kid who looked suspiciously like him, who was not him at all, whose family, there was an amazing and heartbreaking Twitter thread about it, whose family was in the middle of a family wedding.
00:04:51.000And they had to spend their whole weekend fighting off these mobs who were trying to destroy them.
00:04:58.000And it wasn't even the kid in the video.
00:05:01.000I mean, that is really horrifying to me, that that's where we are.
00:05:06.000And the fact that adults who should know better are fomenting this and don't see how thin, like, it sounds heavy, but like, the veneer of civilization is.
00:05:26.000I felt exactly the same way and I think it's a very unique moment because it's so public and it's so prevalent in whether it's Twitter or Facebook it's everywhere and it sort of embodies everything that's wrong With a lack of nuance and with people taking one side versus the other and sticking with it,
00:05:48.000with not confronting their own personal biases, with looking at these things through the eyes of this is the enemy, I'm on the good side, they're on the bad side, let's get them.
00:05:59.000And also this distorted idea of what it takes to What it takes to be violent.
00:06:09.000This idea of this is a punchable person.
00:07:21.000Some guy who maybe is not that educated, wants to be a contrarian, sees all these liberals that are complaining all the time, so he puts this red hat on, and now he's a white supremacist and a Nazi, and you want to punch him?
00:07:57.000I'm a Jewish center left on most things, person who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, you know, is super socially liberal on pretty much any issue you want to choose.
00:08:09.000If I'm alt-right, what words do we have left for people that actually are that?
00:08:14.000What words do we have left for people who actually are part of a sort of racist blood and soil nativism that's rising in this country and around the world that should terrify people?
00:08:45.000And I really don't think people are understanding the implications of this.
00:08:50.000And I don't think it's a stretch to imagine something like this happening a week, two weeks, a month, two months from now, and someone actually getting killed.
00:09:00.000I mean, very similar to what happened there.
00:09:03.000This kind of, I mean, when that guy drove over those protesters, the ramping up of the dialogue on both sides, the rhetoric, the violent talk, it's so disturbing and so unnecessary, especially when it's disingenuous, like calling someone like you alt-right or me.
00:09:23.000I go left on everything, basically except guns.
00:09:27.000Right, and I'm like, repeal the Second Amendment.
00:09:31.000Yeah, I mean, but I do think that there should be some restrictions for gun use, just like I think there should be restrictions for car use.
00:09:38.000I actually think there should be testing for guns, and you should have to go, look, you have to go through a fucking, you have to take driver's ed to get a car license.
00:09:47.000How come you don't have to do any, you know, you don't have to do anything to get a gun?
00:09:50.000Like, if you're not a criminal, you just get a gun.
00:09:53.000Like, you don't have to know how to take care of it and clean it and safely handle it.
00:09:58.000You don't have to know the ethics of use.
00:10:21.000The thing also, one other thing that jumped out to me about the Catholic school boy incident, it kind of signifies something broader that's happening, which is the erasure of the individual, which is just,
00:10:36.000I think, a horrifying problem in our culture.
00:10:40.000What actually happened was a one-hour incident on a random afternoon in January between a group of individuals, right?
00:11:18.000And they had asked the teacher at one point, in order to drown out the heckling of the Hebrew Israelites, I hope I'm getting the name of that group right, could we do a school cheer to kind of ignore them?
00:11:30.000And they did that, and I think they did that with permission from the teachers.
00:11:33.000At one point early on, it was rumored that they were chanting, build the wall, but no one has surfaced any evidence of that whatsoever.
00:11:40.000Well, that's what I heard from the Native American elder when he was talking about it in a video.
00:11:44.000He said they were chanting out, build that wall.
00:11:52.000And they're also trying to make their friends laugh and they're assholes and they're just being silly and stupid.
00:11:57.000Right, and I have to say, as someone who was a total nerd in high school, I saw the face of the main kid in that still photograph and that video.
00:12:07.000And, like, the 14- and 15-year-old girl in me was, like, enraged.
00:12:56.000And the fact that so many people in so many publications did just that, and in fact, when the real facts surfaced, just sort of dug their heels in and were basically like, well, he's a stand-in for the white patriarchy.
00:14:21.000They're a part of this weird cult that suppresses sexuality amongst its priests and encourages the placement of these pedophile priests in new places in order to get away from whatever crime they've committed in the area where they were initially established.
00:14:39.000This is what the Catholic Church is, right?
00:15:30.000I was small, and I learned martial arts when I was like 15. I mean, I'm sure I was a dick to some people just because I could get away with it.
00:17:04.000I think it's strange that we're covering it like it is.
00:17:07.000And because of the internet, the fact that my timeline on Twitter and on Facebook and on everything, this was way bigger news than day whatever it is, 30-31 of the government shutdown where people are having to...
00:17:40.000And when these things that come up in opposition to what many people believe is a beneficial shift to a more progressive, more responsible culture, when these little hiccups, they get addressed, and they get addressed rapidly.
00:17:55.000And I think it's because people are aware that things are changing in this almost, like, unprecedented way.
00:18:09.000There's nothing you could find in the historical record for human beings has ever been what we've experienced over just the past 10 plus years of social networks and social media and the ability to spread information very quickly with a YouTube video or a tweet or whatever.
00:18:27.000The way people are exchanging information is just very different.
00:18:30.000And because of that, culture is shifting at a hyperspace speed.
00:20:07.000It reinforces people's idea that they should be more committed to their side, more committed to their team.
00:20:15.000The only way you're going to get any support, if you have been attacked and isolated and not alone, is to get back deep, deep into the team again.
00:20:22.000Like, how do you get back deep into the team again?
00:20:48.000But I am saying that the reason, the overwhelming reason, the motivation for this kind of overzealous reaction is often the signaling thing.
00:21:15.000Or save your punch for a real one in Poland or in Hungary right now.
00:21:24.000Not a 16-year-old kid who maybe has no idea what that hat signifies.
00:21:30.000I mean there's a broader point which is like the very same people like one of the sort of wisdoms of criminal justice reform right is which I believe in is that we shouldn't try kids as adults and we should forgive.
00:21:47.000We should have greater generosity and mercy and forgiveness for the crimes of a child even if they've committed them.
00:21:53.000Those same people are the ones saying dox him and shame him generally politically.
00:22:56.000And everyone wants to feel – like not being a part of one of the tribes is an extremely lonely position and you get called all the bad names because people want you to be a part of their tribe.
00:23:07.000And people don't want to be called bad names and they want to feel like they're in an in-group.
00:23:19.000It's just – When you got a president that's so polarizing and you have an opposition to him that's so There's so much momentum in opposing him.
00:23:32.000And I think this is a giant wedge in between these two sides.
00:24:19.000And he's going to some weird thing, some march for life where people are trying to kill babies.
00:24:24.000We've got to stop them from killing babies, right?
00:24:25.000And he goes there and there's black Israelites calling them faggots and there's all these people calling them names and then all of a sudden this guy's beating a drum in front of his face.
00:24:34.000And we're supposed to dox this kid now?
00:26:01.000I don't think they do understand their implications.
00:26:04.000When you have a spectrum, right, the far right and the far left, they have a very similar reaction as they drive a person to the other side.
00:26:12.000The person that sees the far right and sees repulsive racism and bigotry You know, build that wall, fuck these Mexicans, fuck those little kids, they should have known better, they're all illegals.
00:26:25.000That kind of person, that pushes people towards progressivism.
00:26:28.000It pushes people towards much more liberal, even socialist ideologies.
00:28:39.000Someone pointed to me, and I'm just lucky that I looked at it because I normally don't even read comments, but somebody pointed out that I favored a really preposterous tweet that said, honest...
00:28:50.000It said, the reply from the school was pathetic and impotent.
00:31:02.000Like, if you're civil and you believe in civility and you believe in, you know, treating people decently and giving them the benefit of the doubt, like, that word itself has become a code or a signal in a negative way.
00:31:31.000Well, a key ingredient for sure, the thing that hardened the epoxy was Trump.
00:31:35.000I think these trends are going in that direction anyway, but he capitalized on that.
00:31:40.000You know, he's a very smart manipulator.
00:31:43.000I mean, he knew how to capitalize on that.
00:31:45.000I mean, this chant of build that wall, it's not an accident.
00:31:48.000That's something that he concentrates on.
00:31:50.000And it's not just that they're in a political battle right now because if they get him to back down off the wall, then he looks like a loser when 2020 comes around.
00:32:00.000He looks less powerful to all his people.
00:32:42.000If we really are the United States of America, I mean, what is a country?
00:32:47.000I mean, if anything, we're supposed to be a team.
00:32:50.000The idea that we're separated and we're two teams in this one team, the real differences in terms of who gets elected, how it's going to affect your life...
00:32:59.000Involve business, involve some social policies, involve some things, but the way we interact with each other on a day-to-day doesn't involve that at all.
00:33:08.000The way we think about each other on a day-to-day basis.
00:33:11.000There used to be a time where you could have a conservative friend, and you could be a liberal, and you could be a fucking long-haired hippie guy, and as long as you're a good, hard-working person who didn't let their lawn go crazy, your next-door neighbor, who is like a Goldwater Republican, would talk to you.
00:33:29.000Oh, you know, guys at the force are trying to put together this case and this and that.
00:33:33.000And, you know, a professor could live right next to a cop and they would be friends and one would be conservative and one would be liberal and they would make fun of each other a little bit and rib each other a little bit.
00:33:53.000It's confusing because there's a lack of – a frustrating lack of empathy that – when I look at human beings and when I look at people that aren't seeing what everyone else is seeing or they're not seeing things objectively and they're irrational and overly emotional, I always assume there's something else they're running from.
00:34:20.000There's something, maybe some existential angst they're fighting against, some realization of the futility of life, whatever the fuck it is.
00:35:07.000Yeah, that fucking asshole uncle that has a couple of drinks in him and starts talking about the gays and this and that and all the things that are wrong with our culture, the sodomites.
00:35:32.000Realizing that these stupid fucking blow-ups over this kid and the discussion that comes afterwards, hopefully some of this will settle down.
00:37:16.000Mostly talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but also critical thinking.
00:37:20.000Also, realizing that I was fully committed to that idea without really exploring the possibility whether that idea was incorrect.
00:37:28.000And that I had taken everything that I saw in that documentary, which is incredibly convincing, and with 100% confirmation bias, I only looked at that and I didn't look at all the contrary evidence.
00:37:38.000There's some fucked up stuff about the moon landing, unfortunately.
00:37:41.000And the fucked up stuff is mostly people that were involved in publicity that were doing stupid things with photographs.
00:38:14.000This is a photo that they put out as an official photograph of Michael Collins doing a spacewalk.
00:38:21.000But what it actually is, is a photo of them testing equipment, and they blacked out the background.
00:38:27.000So he's in this suit that they were doing with testing, and And instead, because they really couldn't get good photos in space because no one's out there with him taking his pictures, right?
00:38:37.000So see, the one on the left, you see the real photograph.
00:38:39.000And this is him in a studio where they're working on him, or warehouse rather, or some sort of a testing environment, working on how to control these harnesses that you would use when you're on a spacewalk.
00:38:51.000Because that thing propels him forward and back, and he's learning how to use it.
00:38:56.000What they did was they just blacked out the background and reversed it, and then they sold that as him actually being in space.
00:39:03.000So this is probably an overzealous publicist.
00:39:15.000And more likely than not, what you're dealing with is overzealous publicists because photographs were incredibly difficult to get, I'm sure.
00:39:23.000Well, the moral of this story to me, thank God, first of all, that you're no longer a moon landing denier.
00:39:28.000But, also, the power of the media and the press.
00:39:33.000And, like, you saw one documentary, right?
00:39:57.000I don't want – like in an age in which people don't know, okay?
00:40:02.000Like a 15-year-old clicking through their Roku doesn't necessarily know the difference between CNN and InfoWars and the New York Times and MSNBC and whatever.
00:40:11.000And of course, some of those other ones have biases, obviously.
00:41:44.000But it's, you know, it's dangerous ground.
00:41:48.000What do you think of Roku taking InfoWars off?
00:41:51.000I think we have to decide what is Twitter, what is Facebook, what is YouTube.
00:41:59.000The position that most people have is these are private companies that can make their own rules.
00:42:03.000This is just like CBS deciding that if you use, you know, if you drunkenly yell the N-word out at a black police officer that they don't want you...
00:42:16.000There's a private company that can make these distinctions.
00:42:20.000If you take a position, an anti-Semitic position, publicly, they can decide, look, we don't want you on the air anymore.
00:42:27.000And then there's other people that think, Freedom of speech in this form is so important and that the answer to bad ideas is not stopping those ideas.
00:43:05.000Because when you do decide to de-platform someone for having an awful position and spreading a false conspiracy about that, most people are going to agree with you.
00:43:17.000But the question is, does it stop there?
00:45:08.000If we get to a certain point and then our heart stops beating and we die and you left behind 18 billion dollars to your kids because you were the ultimate capitalist and you went hog wild.
00:46:11.000We have, you know, people that parks and recreation, people that are Department of Fish and Wildlife, and, you know, the sheriffs that patrol our national forests.
00:46:21.000We all chip in to pay for these things.
00:46:23.000We all agree these are important things.
00:46:25.000Well, one of the things that was so interesting about Australia is that in certain ways it's a more, you know, it's thought of as sort of a macho culture, maybe more masculine, a little bit more conservative than here generally.
00:46:37.000And yet the left has won there on so many of the major issues that we're fighting, we're killing each other over now.
00:48:42.000Well, you know, that is to be considered, but I think the United States, first of all, we have this momentum of innovation and of ass-kicking and getting things done and creating things that's so different than any other part of the world.
00:48:59.000If we took that shit down a notch, I think we'd be okay.
00:49:02.000You know, I mean, I think we definitely do have to worry about China.
00:49:05.000And, you know, I've been really trying to closely follow all this Huawei stuff where these executives keep getting arrested.
00:49:14.000And, you know, the close relationship between some tech companies and this communist government is very confusing.
00:49:26.000But some people look at over—if you talk to people that are Chinese natives or who have been to China, they almost look at it as a positive.
00:49:34.000It's more—even though the censorship is open, it's at least you know what you're dealing with over there as opposed to, you know, the NSA is spying on us but pretending you're not— Oh, but come on.
00:50:30.000What if Australia decides to ramp up its defense budget by 5,000% over the next 10 years?
00:50:36.000And develop a crazy arsenal of weapons and super soldiers and shoot them all up with steroids and give them exoskeletons and get ready to go to war and start building bunkers and freak the rest of the world out.
00:50:47.000I mean, take this like North Korea with money approach to the world.
00:50:51.000What do you mean, North Korea with money?
00:50:53.000Well, North Korea is basically like this scary spot that nobody wants to invade even though we know that there's a military dictatorship there.
00:54:03.000I was super moved by the Women's March as so many other women I know were.
00:54:08.000But let's look at some of the very troubling ideas and associations that the people who are in charge, the leadership of the Women's March have.
00:54:17.000Namely, the worst of the worst was Tamika Mallory, who had been a gun rights activist beforehand.
00:54:24.000She called Louis Farrakhan the GOAT, the greatest of all time.
00:55:53.000I think that part of it is the fact that in intersectional left-wing politics, Jews have been whitewashed.
00:56:02.000Jews are viewed as sort of the white privileged power and part of the white patriarchy unless they genuflect and say, actually, no, we abhor our privilege and all of the other things that you're supposed to say.
00:56:17.000And there's a blindness to the fact that, first of all, not all Jews are white.
00:56:24.000Half of the Jews in the state of Israel, for example, are Arab and from Arab countries that they were kicked out of in 1948. I mean, the idea that Jews are white is this canard.
00:56:47.000But I think that it's whitewashed by these people.
00:56:51.000And I think that anti-Semitism just isn't taken seriously and doesn't rate because people perceive Jews as having privilege and power in this country, which largely they do.
00:57:01.000But the fact is that the actual statistics show that That more hate crimes were committed against Jews in the past year than any other minority group.
00:57:10.000The FBI is sounding the alarm every other day in Crown Heights and in other parts of Brooklyn.
00:57:15.000Random Jews who look Jewish, who are Hasidic Jews, are just beaten up for being Jewish.
00:57:22.000And yet everyone's ignoring that because they're the imperfect victim.
00:57:35.000Sure, but imagine if any other minority group, someone, I mean, we're outraged when we see, at least I am, and you are when we see a police officer assaulting someone.
00:57:46.000What I'm saying is that they don't make a big deal to go into the public about it.
00:57:52.000They keep it almost insulated inside their environment and their community.
00:57:56.000There's also, what I was going to say is, these people that are That you do hear saying anti-Semitic things.
00:58:05.000They're equating American Jews living in America with the policies of Israel and what Israel's doing with Palestine.
00:58:12.000And that somehow, if you're an American Jew, even if you're not even political, you're somehow or another complicit with atrocities that are going on between the Jewish people and the Palestinians.
00:58:41.000But there's an obsession on the state of Israel.
00:58:44.000Like if you were an alien that landed from outer space, you would think that the greatest oppressor in the world is this tiny state that's the size of New Jersey.
00:58:52.000These people say nothing about the genocide of Uighur Muslims in China.
00:58:58.000They say nothing about any number of- I'm not even aware of that.
00:59:02.000Oh, there's a genocide going on carried out by the government of China against Uighur Muslims.
00:59:07.000They're literally being put into concentration camps.
00:59:10.000This is literally the first I've heard of this.
00:59:12.000So Uighur is spelled U-I-G-H-U-R. What is a good thing to read about this?
00:59:24.000And it's like, the fact that that's getting, that you don't know about it, and that people obsessively talk about the state of Israel as if it's the, and by the way, the state of Israel does lots of things wrong.
00:59:39.000But the idea that it's among the worst human rights tragedies of our time, are you kidding me?
01:00:00.000What I do know from people that have gone there, like Abby Martin, who came back with some pretty horrific stories, I think there's a lot of terrible shit going on.
01:00:08.000There's a lot of awful violence and there's a lot of despair on the side of the Palestinians.
01:00:13.000And I don't know who's to blame for that.
01:00:19.000They blame the Israelis for treating the Palestinians as if they're in this one area of the world that's essentially a large prison.
01:00:26.000Well, lots to say about this, but I think one of the main problems that we have in the way that Israel is covered is that if you have a camera lens and you're only looking at a tiny piece of land,
01:00:45.000Israel, to some extent, is the Goliath in that situation.
01:00:49.000But if you zoom out your camera just a little, you see that Israel is literally surrounded on all sides by genocidal regimes, like in the form of Hamas in Gaza, whose charter Blames the Jews for fomenting the French revolutions,
01:01:04.000the Russian revolutions, both world wars, and says that it wants to kill all the Jews.
01:01:08.000That's the government of Gaza right now.
01:01:11.000I spoke to a mother who fled Gaza recently, and her family's house was just destroyed.
01:01:29.000But when you see people obsessively focusing on this one state and the crimes of this one state to the exclusion of actual dictatorships in the world who are killing their own people, you have to be suspicious of that.
01:04:07.000What's dangerous is the kind of anti-Semitism that says, you know, this one state in the world of all of the almost 200 states, that's the one that doesn't have the right to exist.
01:04:16.000That's the one that should be dismantled.
01:04:19.000That's actually dangerous to Jewish lives right now.
01:04:21.000It's an unusual group in that it is both a religion and a tribe.
01:06:01.000I just find it kind of astonishing, the blindness to this, because imagine a leader of the Women's March said something like, you know, I think Louis C.K. is the greatest comedian of all time, even though I disavow X, Y, and Z thing that he did.
01:06:16.000How fast till that person was kicked out of the leadership of the Women's March?
01:06:55.000It is much harder when someone like Ilhan Omar, the new freshman congresswoman from Minnesota, who's like this incredible American dream story, comes here at 12 years old, refugee from Somalia,
01:07:11.000wears a hijab, is a mother, is the first woman of color representing Minnesota.
01:07:20.000And yet, she has This tweet that she refused to apologize for, where she says, Israel has hypnotized the world.
01:07:27.000May Allah awaken the world to the evil doings of Israel.
01:07:31.000I'm sorry, that's a classically anti-Semitic trope, even if she said it unwittingly.
01:07:35.000And by this point, she should educate herself.
01:07:39.000So it's much harder to criticize that, but it's an untenable position to say that you can't criticize someone for their ideas because of their identity.
01:08:25.000What do you think, if you want to be objective, step outside of your Jewish identity, what do you think is wrong with how Israel is dealing with the Palestinian situation?
01:08:40.000Because this is the big criticism of Israel, the only criticism.
01:09:15.000There are places where it's much more autonomous and the PA is in charge and it really varies depending on the area.
01:09:22.000So the big criticism, right, is that they're occupying another people and that is corrosive to the state of Israel sort of morally, like to occupy another people.
01:09:33.000On the other hand, what happens if they pull out of the West Bank tomorrow, right?
01:09:38.000I'm for a two-state solution, ultimately ending the occupation.
01:09:42.000But if I'm real, I have to be honest about what that would look like.
01:09:46.000Well, what it looked like in Gaza is that now you have a terrorist statelet right at the border, which is ruled by Hamas.
01:09:52.000It is quite likely that that very same thing could happen in the West Bank.
01:09:56.000Now, let's say – we actually should pull up a map.
01:10:01.000Then like the whole of Israel proper is something like, we have to look, two miles wide?
01:10:08.000We actually, yeah, we should look at the distance between like Tulkarim or like the end of the West Bank and Netanya or Tel Aviv and you see how small that is.
01:11:03.000Actually, the one you were on was good because it showed, if you zoomed out, it had everything.
01:11:09.000So you have Egypt there, then you have Jordan, which is teetering, then you have Syria, then you have Lebanon, and Hezbollah's on the southern border of Lebanon, which is constantly...
01:11:55.000It's the people, it's the minorities in the Middle East who have been absolutely...
01:12:02.000I don't think when Americans talk about this part of the world, they fully appreciate the sort of absolutely painful and hard decisions and the grappling with violence, really.
01:12:16.000You know, what happened to Jamal Khashoggi in that Saudi embassy?
01:12:19.000That's like normative for this part of the world.
01:12:22.000So the fact that Israel has somehow, with all of its flaws, managed to eke out a Western-style liberal democracy, frankly, the only place where you and I would feel happy and comfortable living, like, why are we never talking about that?
01:12:36.000Well, I think it's very difficult for people to find the forum to discuss it the way you just did and to really lay it out in cold, stark reality.
01:12:54.000The solution right now is to do everything possible to build up the Palestinian economy, for Israel to build relationships.
01:13:03.000Like right now it has very, very positive relationships with Egypt, which gave back the Sinai, which it had won in the Six-Day War, I believe.
01:13:11.000Gave it back to Egypt for a cold peace, which it's had.
01:13:13.000It has a good relationship, of all things, who would have thought with Saudi Arabia because of their common enemy, Iran.
01:13:22.000But as for the Palestinians, the solution is to build up the economy, make life better, and support people and movements inside the West Bank that are genuinely nonviolent.
01:14:07.000Do you think that people like her have ever had a conversation with someone like you who could lay it out that way?
01:14:13.000No, because I think that, first of all, many people who talk about this issue have sort of exported American domestic politics to a foreign region of the world.
01:15:21.000What is the current position that most people are taking about that woman and about the Women's March in general because of these things, because of these anti-Semitic statements?
01:15:31.000I think a lot of people in the past few weeks, thanks in part to Meghan McCain, had five minutes on The View with Tamika Mallory and Bob Land, and she did an amazing job grilling them on this.
01:15:47.000Because, frankly, because their image was so powerful in the same way that the image at the Lincoln Memorial was so powerful, journalists just sort of accepted it and didn't interrogate them.
01:15:58.000Pink kitty cat hats, 500,000 people on the streets.
01:16:42.000And my thing is, any progressive movement that's asking you to check your Jewish identity at the door, your full Jewish identity, which is acknowledging that we're not just a faith, but we're a people.
01:16:53.000We're not just people that, like, have matzo ball soup or something bigger than that.
01:16:58.000That's not a space I want to be a part of.
01:17:00.000They would never ask that of any other group.
01:17:34.000And the Jews are somewhere close down to there, at least in the way that the left, the left, I mean, this part of the left we're talking about, the fringe, at least for now, perceive the Jews to be.
01:17:48.000The Jews don't have a place in that victim scale because they've achieved so much success because they can pass as white because of any number of things.
01:17:57.000And so I think that that's a huge reason for it, which is a huge reason why I think intersectionality is a dead end and why we need to be talking about Ideas
01:18:31.000And so any politics that's insisting from the left or the right that know actually what we are is this warring set of groups competing for scarce resources, absolutely not.
01:18:41.000To me those kinds of politics are un-American.
01:18:45.000I couldn't agree more in terms of identity.
01:18:47.000I think identity politics and the idea that you belong to a group is so intoxicating but so dangerous.
01:18:53.000It's so important to treat people as individuals.
01:18:55.000It's so important to think of yourself as an individual.
01:18:58.000And this need to become a part of this group and a signal to that group is a big part of the problem that we're having right now.
01:19:06.000And it doesn't mean that you can't have pride.
01:19:08.000I have tremendous pride, the most, in being a Jew.
01:19:13.000Jonathan Haidt talks so brilliantly about good identity politics and bad identity politics that good identity politics says, walk with me in my shoes.
01:19:26.000It says, come along with me while I explain to you my experience in the world.
01:19:30.000Bad identity politics says, you can never escape the gender, the racial, the economic lane you were born into and don't even try and understand me because you couldn't possibly.
01:19:40.000That's bad identity politics and I think that that's in force and rising right now in the country and I think that that's dangerous and I've been thinking about it a lot because it's Martin Luther King Day and he said this like unbelievable thing about – I think it's actually in the I Had a Dream speech but where he talks about the promissory note of the constitution and the declaration of independence,
01:21:15.000The idea of having pride in something is interesting, right?
01:21:21.000You know, there's a lot of people that have pride for their ethnicity, although they had nothing to do with choosing it.
01:21:28.000It's just something that they're born with.
01:21:30.000I think people get nervous about that kind of pride.
01:21:33.000But I think there should be a set, like, it would be wonderful if we could keep all of these cultures, and yet all appreciate each other as equals.
01:21:41.000It would be wonderful if you could go and eat Ethiopian food one day or Cuban food the next day, and these people exist in these small— Well, you can.
01:22:21.000I have to say, I loved Australia, but when I get off that plane and I land, as shitty as they are, JFK or LaGuardia, and I see every kind of human being on the planet.
01:24:17.000But New York, I love New York, but New York always makes me feel like when you have that many people slammed on top of each other, you're in this completely unnatural environment that literally has never existed in human nature up until a few hundred years ago.
01:24:35.000And now it's unprecedented because there's more and more people there that are just buzzing And they're putting these buildings up where you've got 100 floors.
01:24:41.000My friend Jim Norton talks about it all the time.
01:25:27.000But the one thing I'll say is that, yeah, it's important for that and I find it so energizing, New York, all the reasons you said, but I also have to force myself to get out of the bubble.
01:25:37.000I go home to Pittsburgh and I hear a lot more oftentimes political and intellectual diversity than I hear sometimes in a week in New York.
01:26:09.000Because she – for her business, we live in like Squirrel Hill, my family.
01:26:13.000I was bat mitzvahed in the synagogue that was shot up.
01:26:17.000So that's where we live in Squirrel Hill in the Jewish neighborhood.
01:26:19.000But my mom for her work has to drive like two or three hours out of the city and – During the campaign, everyone I knew thought Hillary was going to win, including me.
01:26:30.000And she called me and said, Barry, you would not believe the homemade signs.
01:26:34.000There are giant homemade signs on the side of people's houses and barns that are enormous, that took them many hours to make.
01:26:42.000There's a passion for him that I don't think people are fully appreciating.
01:26:57.000Not only is it incredibly left-leaning, but it's also the entertainment aspect of it where people have to signal the fact that they're left.
01:27:05.000So they go out of their way to project this image of being progressive on top of being progressive.
01:27:44.000When Barack Obama was a president, people can criticize his policies and the whistleblower, the fact that he cracked down on whistleblowers and the fact that there was more innocents killed by drone strikes and all that stuff.
01:28:02.000But what he did do First of all, he represented the fact that a minority, an African-American who was born from a single mother, can somehow or another rise to be the President of the United States and be incredibly well-spoken and measured and calm and just seems to know how to carry himself and makes us feel like someone better than us is in a position of power.
01:28:25.000And also, I feel like there was a lot of racism from horrible white people that looked at him in a terrible way.
01:28:33.000And saw this black person trying to destroy America.
01:28:35.000But way more people that aren't racist go, huh, look at that.
01:28:40.000You can't have an African-American president.
01:28:55.000What she represented was the same old thing.
01:29:00.000The thing that's been fucking you and the reason why your family lost the farm and the reason why...
01:29:05.000And this Donald Trump's going to come in here and he's going to clean up the swamp.
01:29:08.000And when he came out with that drain the swamp and lock her up, build that wall, he boiled it down so that...
01:29:17.000The people that don't have the time or the inclination to really deep dive into their own personal biases, to their own objective reasoning and find out, why do I think the way I think?
01:29:28.000The people that don't have that thought, all that build that wall shit was perfect.
01:29:47.000Well, one thing I'm seeing – when I ask you about people telling you their secret thought crimes, I am noticing – and in a weird way, this gives me kind of a hope – there is a big gap between people's public personas of the politics that they preach – And then what they really think and what they'll say around a kitchen table.
01:30:09.000And a lot of them are experiencing what I think about as like second woke.
01:30:14.000Like they're seeing the poverty or the flaws in the woke worldview and that there are holes with it.
01:30:20.000But they're kind of too scared to say that out loud because they know it'll be a loss of friends and social capital and everything else.
01:31:14.000The only reason I'm sitting here is that I have slightly more courage than most people and that I'm willing to say what I think to hell with pissing some people off or losing some friends that weren't really my friends.
01:31:28.000Most people aren't willing to do that, actually.
01:31:31.000Well, what I like about your writing, and what I like about talking to you today, is that you represent reason and well thought out opinions.
01:32:24.000And like, I think it's really important to think about things issue by issue and not just be like, yep, signing up for this whole slew of policies and views on things when actually some of those things don't go together at all.
01:32:37.000Well, one thing in the woke left you're not allowed to do is criticize the more repressive aspects of Islam.
01:32:47.000If you bring up anything, it becomes Islamophobic.
01:32:50.000Even if it's homophobic, if the ideas are homophobic, or if women have to wear restrictive clothing, any of the things that are incredibly commonplace.
01:33:04.000You are not allowed to criticize those because those fall into a protected category.
01:33:09.000I remember when I first ran into this in college when I was in a conversation with other feminists and I definitely consider myself a feminist about female genital mutilation.
01:33:20.000And I encountered for the first time a species that I've come to know well, which is feminists who sort of defend female genital mutilation on the grounds of cultural relativism.
01:34:15.000You're cutting off a woman's clitoris not because of cleanliness or any fucking weird logic that they're using today to try to justify circumcision.
01:34:36.000Why aren't we hearing the leaders of the women's march talk about, say, I don't know, honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage for girls?
01:35:30.000But even in terms of left versus right in these positions, I often talk to people about gun control.
01:35:39.000And when people find out that I own guns and that I'm not entirely in favor of Second Amendment being repealed, One thing that drives me crazy is they want to always bring up school shootings,
01:35:54.000mass shootings, all these different things, which I agree are a horrific, terrible occurrence in our culture and is happening in this insanely frequent way, and it doesn't make sense.
01:36:06.000What people don't want to talk about is that almost all those people are on psych medication.
01:36:35.000And this is what the NRA would say, and this is what pro-Second Amendment people would say.
01:36:40.000Who are you to decide whether or not someone is healthy enough or well enough to own a gun?
01:36:44.000And does a person who is on antidepressants or a person who has psychological problems not have the ability to defend themselves if they have never exhibited violence?
01:37:19.000The problem is when you have no restriction whatsoever, and you have restriction on all these other ones, right?
01:37:23.000If you say something anti-Semitic or racist on Twitter, they will ban you.
01:37:28.000If you do it on Facebook, they'll ban you.
01:37:29.000And Gab is committed 100% to free speech.
01:37:32.000I've read things the owners of Gab have said about this and that they're very steadfast in their support for freedom of speech because they think, what I said earlier, that the best way to ensure that good ideas get through is to not suppress bad ideas,
01:37:53.000All I was going to say is that the guy who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh was saying the most horrific things about the kike infestation in the country.
01:38:01.000And you can get away with that on Gab.
01:38:03.000And that's where the question is, well, should someone like Roku pull Alex Jones?
01:38:29.000How do you get to those people and have that discussion with all those people?
01:38:33.000But this is, I mean, in terms of there being too much to talk about and cover, that's where I do think that things like the New York Times can make a real contribution.
01:38:56.000You're going to learn about the genocide of the Uyghur Muslims in the New York Times.
01:39:00.000If you really read the New York Times every day, you're going to know a lot about the world and you're going to understand that the government shutdown is a bigger deal than what happened at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
01:39:10.000If you're just trolling through Twitter, which is how every person I know, or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever, like my youngest sister, how she gets her news, you're not going to necessarily know that.
01:39:23.000I don't know how to solve it, other than tell people to subscribe to newspapers which still have some standards and which still, when they make a mistake, correct the mistake.
01:41:05.000What's important is you can at least get a better version of the facts there than you can anywhere else.
01:41:11.000Yes, and I guess there's some people in the new media landscape that I see – and I don't know if it's because they want to sort of gin up their own audiences or what – like nihilistically getting on – like using Trumpist language to describe the press.
01:41:28.000What they don't see, I think what they don't understand is that the loss of trust in the press is a symptom of the loss of trust in lots of public institutions.
01:41:41.000The WHO, you know, the World Health Organization just came out with this terrifying report where like one of the top 10 threats to health in, I think, the country, we should look this up, is people who aren't getting vaccines.
01:41:54.000People who think vaccines cause autism and are not getting vaccines.
01:41:58.000The stakes of like loss of trust in public institutions doesn't just mean like you're going to like hurt the New York Times bottom line.
01:42:06.000It's like a threat to all of our health, like quite literally.
01:42:10.000You know, I see these things as being very, very connected.
01:42:13.000So when I see people gleefully celebrating like the fake news of the New York Times, I'm like, do you have a better alternative right now?
01:42:49.000I subscribe to several on my phone and on my computer, and that's how I digest things now, or an iPad.
01:42:57.000When you think about what they have to do to get those clicks, You know, and you see these weird, like, look, this is not a knock on Forbes.
01:43:08.000I think Forbes is an excellent periodical.
01:43:44.000Remember Happy New Post used to have that too?
01:43:46.000Yeah, that fucking stuff is so dangerous.
01:43:49.000Because as soon as people lose their trust that you are unbiased and you're giving them an objective perspective on exactly what's going on.
01:43:58.000I mean, it might be nothing when it comes to Galaxy S10s or whatever the fuck they're talking about that has a nasty surprise.
01:44:05.000But it flavors your perspective on news.
01:46:03.000It's just lack of understanding about the complexity of the entire landscape.
01:46:09.000The entire landscape in terms of economics, the entire landscape in terms of international politics, all of it, all the above, the war machine, the lack of understanding about the military-industrial complex, the influence that it has, the lack of understanding about the bankers, about how few people went to jail after the fucking crazy economic collapse that we just recovered from.
01:46:43.000It's from 2000, I want to say 10, 11, but it's so sobering when you have this guy who's an economics, a real true economics expert questioning these people who, in many cases, they're economics professors at major universities who give advice.
01:47:59.000The whole premise is that there was a football- You can't spoiler alert Ace Ventura Peck Detective.
01:48:05.000I had to spoiler alert myself because I forgot.
01:48:07.000The whole premise was that this guy steals a dolphin, and when he steals a dolphin, Ace Ventura finds, because he's a pet detective, finds a tiny ruby that's at the bottom of this dolphin tank that is missing from a Miami Dolphins ring.
01:48:25.000And he finds out through this exhaustive search that the one guy who he couldn't account for his ring was a kicker who fucked up the World Series.
01:48:51.000At the end of it, the reveal is that Sean Young is really this football player who wants to get back at Dan Marino because Dan Marino goes psycho because the world hates him because he blew the kick.
01:49:03.000So he's a guy pretending to be a woman and Ace Ventura made out with him.
01:55:30.000But what's fascinating to me about it is, first of all, I love exposing these little people to different parts of the world so they get to see what this is like.
01:57:25.000And it's real spicy because, you know, you kind of have those spices actually protect against bacteria because they're actually antibacterial.
02:01:01.000Jesus Christ, for delivering hot dogs?
02:01:03.000Yeah, at one point a car pulled up next to him and a guy with a gun had it like repped to his head and the cab driver thankfully knew what was happening and took off and he didn't die.
02:01:14.000Why were they going to kill him just for delivering hot dogs?
02:02:24.000Killed by people that were doing it because of the United States involvement in Syria and they cut their heads off and did it on a cell phone camera and they put it on the internet and I watched it.
02:05:49.000Yeah, well, that's why I've thought about this a lot.
02:05:52.000Because right now, I think in most Americans' minds, it's like the shooting happens, then it becomes a hashtag, then it becomes a t-shirt, then it becomes a memorial thing, a memorial concert.
02:06:03.000I mean, it's like actually sickening, like the choreography of it.
02:06:08.000And I think what's lost is what it looks like.
02:06:11.000And this rabbi in Pittsburgh, who's really amazing, described to me what he saw.
02:06:17.000And I'll never forget just the description of what he told me.
02:06:20.000And I've wondered a lot in the wake of that, and I'll think about it, when the next shooting happens, would that have made a difference at all in terms of waking people up?
02:06:28.000What's fucked up is you said when the next shooting happens.
02:06:41.000Because there are a lot of guns in this country and people have access to those guns who are not only mentally unwell, sometimes they're just evil.
02:06:51.000They want to kill people and they want to be famous for a million reasons.
02:06:57.000But the fact that we are living in a culture that seems to worship people's freedom to own those weapons more than human life seems crazy to me.
02:07:10.000The argument against that would be, look, the real crazies believe that these things are happening And that they're happening because of the fact the government wants to take away our guns.
02:07:29.000That the worst aspects of our society, whatever, you know, fill in the blank with whatever left-wing conspiracy, that, you know, whatever person, whatever boogeyman, George Soros, whatever the fuck the boogeyman is, that whatever boogeyman or cabal of boogey people,
02:07:48.000That they are somehow or another either using like Manchurian candidate type influence, whatever the fuck they're doing.
02:07:58.000They're getting people to do this and then even creating false flags where these things didn't happen so they can take away guns.
02:08:13.000It's real in terms of the influence that it has, that people actually do believe that there are these false flag events that they're designing to get your guns, that people are training people to go out and kill a bunch of people so they can take away your guns.
02:08:28.000So it makes them more rabid about their support of the Second Amendment, and they feel like they're being attacked on all sides.
02:08:37.000Have you had Michael Schirmer on here?
02:09:45.000You know, there's photographs from World War II where you can see, from the 1940s, you can see contrails in the sky that look just like the ones up here.
02:09:52.000But people will say, I don't remember those when we were kids.
02:09:54.000And people will go, yeah, yeah, I don't.
02:09:56.000And then it starts fueling this paranoid idea that there's this program going on.
02:10:01.000And then there are real programs that the government is considering to combat global warming.
02:10:07.000They talked about this in the 70s and the 80s.
02:10:10.000They talked about But why do people believe conspiracy theories?
02:10:28.000What is it in the nature of certain people that I'm just so fascinated by it?
02:10:37.000When you see it from the outside, when you see something like the most horrific ones, like Sandy Hook, like Sandy Hook being a false flag, what would be the motivation for someone saying that?
02:10:53.000The only thing I can, I mean, the most plausible, I guess, would be Capturing an audience, like getting people to believe in you as some seer behind the veil?
02:11:07.000Yeah, but that's only the people that are projecting this in terms of in the media.
02:11:18.000Not a person who's profiting off of it.
02:11:20.000I think the reason people look to conspiracy theories is that the world is...
02:11:29.000Deeply chaotic and seems to lack a logic and people are desperate for a system of understanding the world.
02:11:39.000And conspiracy theories often seem to like offer a very, very actually like an incredibly simplistic explanation, which is there's this secret – like there's always a secret thing that is a plan that the public doesn't know about generally.
02:11:55.000But the real thing is that no one really is at the wheel.
02:11:58.000The real thing is that, I mean, haven't we learned that from the Trump presidency, right?
02:12:03.000Like, institutions are just made up of people.
02:12:07.000Like, they can fall apart if the people that take them over are irresponsible, crazy, venal, narcissistic, everything that we're seeing in the Trump administration.
02:12:18.000But isn't that kind of, it's weirdly, I mean, it's both terrifying, but also comforting, I think.
02:12:42.000Do you think that this constant conflict, this social conflict that we're involved in right now, the woke left and the alt-right and all this jazz, that the boiling of it right now will eventually boil down to something more rational?
02:12:56.000Because it seems like if you read Steven Pinker's work and people that study...
02:13:02.000Violence and danger and society over the course of history that we're certainly on an upward trend.
02:13:55.000How many parts of the world could I do that in?
02:13:58.000You know, like, I try and keep that in mind when I'm falling into despair about where we are as a country where I'm like, oh, actually in a lot of ways it's still like...
02:14:09.000It's the best thing in history so far, certainly for women.
02:14:13.000So I try and kind of keep that in mind when I'm losing myself to feelings, to fears that things are going to get worse before they get better, which is what I think.
02:14:24.000I have all daughters and I have friends that are women and I have a lot of friends that are women in the world of stand-up comedy and I often times see misogynist shit online that shocks me.
02:14:43.000And one of the things that shocked me was there's a guy that I follow.
02:14:47.000And he was talking about how his wife, it was a thread on Twitter, well thought out, very smart guy as a lawyer, and he was talking about how his wife's gas tank is always empty.
02:14:56.000It's like every time he gets in his wife's car, she's always out of gas.
02:15:49.000If a guy's had so many bad interactions with women and he's not very smart and he's just decided that women are evil and you see anything that's like saying, hey guys, maybe we should look at it in terms of like how the woman looks at it.
02:17:16.000And I'm looking at these two guys and I'm saying, okay, if some shit goes down, if these guys don't have a weapon, if some shit goes down, I'm going to beat the fuck out of these two guys.
02:17:36.000And like an asshole, I decided to stay and pump my gas.
02:17:39.000But when these guys were yelling at each other, I literally went around the front of the car instead of this back way because it was a shorter path from me being exposed to their view.
02:17:51.000So I'm hiding behind my truck while I'm filling my tank, and I'm a man who could kill these two guys!
02:19:08.000And it made me way more compassionate, way more understanding, and way more patient with people.
02:19:13.000Because now I say, okay, when I meet this asshole at the gas station at 2 o'clock in the morning that's berating that guy, Well, why is he?
02:19:21.000Well, because probably his dad's a fucking piece of shit.
02:20:01.000I'm thinking he's just gonna drive away and eventually he did.
02:20:03.000And that poor guy who probably is probably making just a little bit more than ten dollars an hour is stuck in this fucking cubicle, this little glass box with this asshole berating him at two o'clock in the morning.
02:20:21.000Not acceptance, but my curiosity with socialism.
02:20:26.000My real curiosity with any socialist ideas is how do we recognize the fact that some people are dealt the shittiest of shitty hand of cards and that there's entire sections of cities where everyone has a shit hand of cards and some make it out through basketball and football and sports and rap music and whatever,
02:21:14.000The fact that we don't address that and that our civilization just plows on with the same stupid path that we've had for decades, regardless of the fact that we have an absolute understanding of the complete inequality of the real ghettos of our country,
02:21:29.000whether it's the south side of Chicago or whether it's Baltimore, wherever it is, we have a real understanding of this.
02:23:43.000What we really need is people that have the right idea as far as where humans should go, the way we should behave, the way we should treat each other.
02:23:51.000This overwhelming need for community that we all share.
02:25:58.000Yeah, I don't know what that's about, but I do think that people do have this desire for a space daddy, a higher power, something that knows more than you, some...
02:26:11.000Grand pattern to follow that leads to harmony.
02:26:15.000I mean, I think everybody sort of has that thing because again what we're talking about before we we do realize if we are being honest that no one's at the wheel that we wake up We're almost like we're in a spaceship, and we wake up,
02:26:30.000and we were in hypersleep, and this thing has been flying for millions of years.
02:26:34.000We're like, wait, who the fuck is flying this?
02:27:09.000And while we're avoiding those thoughts, we're concentrating on these very minor differences that we really have that are really framed by our teams.
02:27:19.000You know, this team says you've got to do this.
02:27:31.000The idea also that you know that you're going to die, and yet there are people who are spending their lives hurling pixels at other people.
02:27:57.000But it's so intoxicating and it's so new.
02:28:00.000That's also the problem with social media and phones.
02:28:03.000In a world in which people live alone and stare down at their flashy screen and worship it like a god, these networks give you a sense of belonging and community.
02:28:14.000Yes, and it also gives you something to think about.
02:28:16.000I was talking about Jamie Kilstein earlier, who I accidentally almost tweeted or texted.
02:28:22.000Jamie used to be a heavy-duty social justice worker.
02:29:22.000You know, you catch yourself, like, I remember I was at a dinner party once, and I was, like, describing some Twitter fight I was in, and I was like, oh my god, I've become one of those people, and I'm not going to allow myself to be that person.
02:31:23.000That someone who's a rational person who's on the right is going to look at this person who's maybe economically conservative but socially liberal and say, this is really where I'm leaning towards.
02:31:34.000Yeah, unless they run someone on the far left, like on an identity politics platform.
02:31:46.000I just need to make my base go apeshit crazy for me.
02:31:50.000But they're still apeshit crazy, and no matter what he does.
02:31:52.000I know, and I'm worried that the Democrats are going to try and replicate that strategy and be like, we just need to make our base go apeshit crazy, rather than running someone that can win the center.
02:32:02.000I see where you're going, but I think that – this is maybe my liberal bias, but I think that people on the left wouldn't fall for that the same way people on the right would.
02:32:11.000I don't think people on the left who saw someone who went apeshit, full, woke, far left – I think there's a lot of people in the center who'd be like, well, I'm not just going to vote libertarian, man.
02:32:21.000I'm going to vote for Gary Johnson or some shit.
02:33:48.000Well, my take on her was that I think as a person who's coming from the left, who's also a veteran and is very articulate and sensible and a woman, and in talking to her, we didn't get into Assad or any of those things, but talking to her about what she feels is wrong with the current administration and the way things are running and a direction she thinks things can go in,
02:35:34.000Rep Tulsi Gabbard in the early 2000s touted working for her father's anti-gay organization, which mobilized to pass the measure against same-sex marriage in Hawaii and promoted controversial conversion therapy.
02:36:59.000There's a couple different studies that they did, but one of them they did with this gay guy where they tried to stimulate certain parts of his brain while they were showing him heterosexual porn, and they were trying to convert him into being heterosexual.
02:37:14.000And apparently they had some meager amount of success with this where he engaged in sexual relationships with women and apparently even enjoyed it.
02:37:24.000And they did something to literally stimulate a part of his brain that would excite arousal and tried to connect that with heterosexual porn.
02:37:35.000And made him orgasm, made him masturbate to orgasm while they were doing this and showing him straight porn.
02:37:45.000The idea was they were going to reprogram his mind.
02:38:02.000And one of the things that happens is you get...
02:38:07.000You can have gay experiences when you're young.
02:38:11.000If someone does something to you and imprints upon you arousal at a young age with gay experiences, sometimes even heterosexual men will get aroused by certain gay images and gay things because of their past.
02:38:54.000Taboo areas of exploration and when you start looking at like what makes a person gay or straight Whether it's nature or nurture whether it's a combination of those things whether someone's just radically gay from the room or whether someone's radically straight from the womb these These studies where they were trying to they were trying to turn someone with science They were trying to turn someone straight.
02:40:34.000You know, you ever talk to someone where, you know, because I have children and I do like to think of people as babies that become...
02:40:42.000You know what they are I see them in front of me right now and this constant state of evolution But sometimes I'll run into someone that's depressingly stupid where I realize like god damn this guy's got a nine-volt brain They just do some people just do and no one wants to admit that and we're not talking about mental retardation or any sort of a disease down syndrome or something like that We're talking about people that are just toxically stupid and they do exist just like some people have big noses some people have little noses So when you were talking to Elon Musk,
02:41:10.000did you get the sense that you were talking to a genius?
02:41:18.000Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say.
02:41:20.000I am that toxically stupid person talking to this guy who wants to create gigantic power stations in Australia to fix their grid and wants to shoot fucking rockets into space.
02:41:31.000And they literally let him drill under LA. They're like, go ahead.
02:43:27.000Well, that is the real, the only saving grace of the concept of white privilege, is that we do have to recognize that some people got a really good deal and some people got a really terrible deal.
02:43:39.000But the only reason why white privilege is even something to consider is that racism is real.
02:43:44.000White privilege is not, if the world was Barry Weiss or...
02:43:48.000But there's all kinds of privilege, right?
02:48:47.000I learned Taekwondo from a Korean man.
02:48:51.000When I learned and I was around so many Korean people, I was stunned by the work ethic that exists in these families and the humbleness and the way it was Almost expected that you never brag and that you work harder than anybody.
02:49:12.000And I had a friend who was on the U.S. Taekwondo team to compete in the Olympic Games.
02:49:18.000He was working on his schoolwork Oh my god.
02:50:19.000But that attitude has allowed so many Asian people that discipline and just this culture of performance and of achievement where it's so cherished.
02:50:33.000That has allowed so many Asian people to excel in academia.
02:50:37.000And the fact that Harvard somehow or another steps in and says, well, we're going to make it more difficult for you because you work so hard.
02:50:47.000It's so weird that they, as this, I mean, if you think about If you think about institutions of higher learning, Harvard is the first one you think about.
02:51:10.000That they will be racist against the best performers because they're performing too well and there's a disproportionate number of them in the university.