In this episode of We The People Live, the boys are joined by a very special guest to talk about the current events of the past week, including the election of Donald Trump, the current state of the country, and the rise of the far-right wing of the political spectrum. They also talk about what it means to be a fascist, and how to define it, and why it's a bad idea to use the word "fascism" in the context of the term "right-wing" or "left-wing." Also, they talk about hashtags, and what they do with them, and whether or not they should be used in the proper context. And, of course, they have a special guest on the show to help explain what fascism is and what it isn't, and who it is not, and where it stands in relation to the current political landscape. Thanks to Pale Fire and Mossy Creek for sponsoring this episode, and thanks to our sponsor, WeThePeopleLives! We'll see you next week with a new episode of the new podcast, We'll See You Next Tuesday, where we'll be talking about all things WeThe People's Lives! . Josh's new podcast: We'll Be Seein' You, We're Live! , hosted by Josh Zepes, and we'll Be Talking About It, hosted by Alex Blumberg, and hosted by Joe Pizzi. , produced by Josh, and Alex, who's going to be covering the 2020 Democratic National Convention in San Antonio, Texas, Texas. Josh is in the middle of it all this week, so he's here to cover it all, so you can join us in the next week, and he's coming back next week to be there next week! and we can't wait for the next one, so don't miss it! (and we're going to see you there next Tuesday, next Tuesday! ) Thank you, Josh, for being here, we'll See Yaas, we really appreciate you, we're so much more than you can do it, we love you, you're awesome, we appreciate you. We're looking forward to seeing you, y'all. We'll be seeing you next Tuesday. - Thank you! - Cheers, Josh's Back, Joe, Joe's Back! - And we'll see ya. Joe, Thank You, Joe and Joe.
00:01:53.000That's where he spends 23 hours a day.
00:01:56.000Well, you know how sometimes you don't need to go to them because they come to you.
00:02:00.000When you say something, then you get taken out of context, then you get picked up by some blog, and then all of a sudden, like over the weekend I've been getting all these...
00:02:08.000Tweets just out of the blue about what fascism is.
00:02:11.000I was like, who are these people and why are they tweeting at me?
00:02:14.000I didn't even know that I said anything about fascism.
00:02:16.000Well, it's because Breitbart picked up something that I did on a segment on HuffPost Live last week and wrote something up about it, about how apparently I implied that Donald Trump was a fascist, which I actually didn't mean because I don't think that he is.
00:02:27.000And now all of a sudden, I'm in the hashtag.
00:02:30.000I'm part of the hashtag about fascism without even choosing it.
00:02:32.000I believe that most people who use the term fascist or fascism don't really exactly know what the term means.
00:02:41.000Let's find the official definition of fascism, because I think most people get it wrong.
00:02:47.000Fascism means an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
00:02:55.000So, people use that, there's other definitions of it, of course, but extreme right-wing, authoritarian, people use that for a lot of, like, non-fascist reasons.
00:03:07.000That's true, and I probably used it sloppily myself in the context in which Breitbart was picking me up, and they would have a point if I did come across as saying that Donald Trump was a fascist, but all the people who were tweeting back at me were saying, fascism isn't right-wing, you idiot, it's left-wing!
00:03:24.000You don't even understand the meaning of the word!
00:03:25.000So I just responded with a link to the Oxford Dictionary, which also includes the word right-wing in it.
00:03:30.000Yeah, it's mostly considered right-wing, but people are using it in the left-wing circles now, or about left-wing circles, because they're using it in the authoritarian context.
00:03:42.000I think that's applicable, because a lot of what is going on In, like, really extreme social justice left-wing type organizations or groups is that they're trying to control behavior and they're trying to mitigate criticism.
00:03:56.000Like, you can't criticize these concepts because these concepts are supported by, you know, social justice.
00:04:02.000I've got an interesting study on that that I brought for you, which you're gonna like.
00:04:06.000And before I get to it, I don't want to forget what I was just thinking.
00:04:09.000When you were talking about how here we are in the valley, birds outside.
00:04:33.000So I was in Beirut briefly a few months ago and was standing on the rooftop of this swanky hotel looking out over the Mediterranean and looking out over the houses.
00:04:44.000And I was like, this is like an idyllic, beautiful part of the world in terms of its natural beauty.
00:04:50.000And I could practically swim from here to the Greek islands, how people are, basically, the refugees.
00:04:58.000And I had just been in Athens as well, which is like, geographically, physiologically, Italy, Greece are the same as all these fucked up parts of North Africa and Israel and Palestine and Lebanon and not to mention Syria.
00:05:16.000And I was, like, just struck by how capable we are of fucking things up as people.
00:05:23.000Because the actual geography is the same.
00:05:25.000Like, those waves are the same waves as the ones on the Italian Riviera.
00:05:29.000But the Italian Riviera is the Italian Riviera, and this shithole is this shithole.
00:05:35.000Through no difference of climate or sun, or the birdies are still there, the birdies are the same...
00:05:41.000But religion and politics just has an endless capacity to screw things up.
00:05:45.000You could call it religion or politics, but it's really just power.
00:05:48.000It's human beings trying to achieve power.
00:05:50.000And you could do it through whatever modality you choose, but the reality is it's just people that are trying to control other people and trying to gain things.
00:06:00.000But I think it's in particular tribes trying to control other tribes.
00:06:03.000And politics and religion make you much more likely, make it much easier to be tribal, much easier to not be an individual.
00:06:10.000Sorry, but isn't the argument against that what we were just talking about in terms of social justice warriors and people calling people fascists?
00:06:38.000Well, you know, they'll tell you, well, you're a liberal, you know, you believe in this and this and that, so you're a liberal, and they'll, like, immediately, like, downplay your ideas.
00:06:49.000And social justice warriors will do the same thing.
00:06:51.000They'll do the same thing about, I mean, my, you know, the first time I came to your attention was with that interview with Suey Park, the Council Colbert activist, right?
00:07:03.000When you just broke it down to her, you're like, this is so fucking unbelievably stupid.
00:07:08.000And you could tell she was just, like, devastated that you even had the balls to question her.
00:07:14.000To people who haven't seen it, she wanted to have the Colbert Report cancelled because apparently it was racist, and I did an interview with her on HuffPost Live.
00:07:21.000Well, not only that, it was a joke about someone being...
00:11:01.000Like in Australia, if you go to an awards ceremony, for example, if you're at the Grammys, every single presenter will come up and they will begin by saying, I want to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, the Yadawundi people.
00:11:13.000You know, they'll at least give a kind of politically correct nod to the fact that...
00:11:18.000We occupied a country and basically wiped out an entire people.
00:11:22.000You'll see Aboriginal flags flying on Parliament House alongside the Australian flag.
00:11:27.000I don't even know what the Native American flag is.
00:11:49.000I mean, they were at the time when the British settled Australia, and I always get accused when I say things like this of, you know, by politically correct social justice warriors, of imposing onto traditional societies an idea of human civilization as being better if it's, like, industrialized than if it's not industrialized.
00:12:17.000We have a lot of things that are better than, like, flint knives.
00:12:21.000Having said that, you're such a white man, Joe.
00:12:25.000Having said that, if you think about, like, the traditional anthropological conception of human evolution going from, like, the discovery of fire and farming and then up through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and so on...
00:12:41.000Aborigines, when the British settled Australia, were the least advanced civilization in the world by far.
00:13:10.000I like you for that, because I like analogies, and I like being able to accept analogies without thinking that the person is saying that the two things are the same in every respect.
00:14:26.000So far, removed from what we consider to be advanced civilization that Australia felt it was okay to actually take their children and adopt them.
00:15:26.000You can't steal their fucking babies, no matter how primitive.
00:15:31.000Not to defend it, but this was at the same time that Jim Crow was going on here, right?
00:15:35.000I mean, it's not like we were enlightened, well, our forefathers were enlightened in the 50s about race.
00:15:40.000Yeah, well, everybody was pretty fucked up back then.
00:15:43.000I think it's very difficult for us to understand in 2015 what it was like in 1950. Because I think we assume that they should have known better.
00:16:14.000I don't remember whether I've spoken to you about this before, but when I was in Greece on the trip that I was just talking about, I was standing at the Acropolis, and I was expecting to be wowed like all tourists are by, oh, the sheer age of this thing.
00:16:27.000Oh, I'm at the birthplace of Western civilization.
00:16:31.000And instead, what I thought was, I'd actually just been back to New Zealand because my grandma died.
00:16:37.000She was one day shy of her 100th birthday.
00:17:03.000And what I was struck by at the Acropolis and the Parthenon was not like how old human civilization was, but was like...
00:17:10.000My grandma, her lifetime is a manageable period of time in my brain.
00:17:16.000I can think about that in a way that when you talk to me about something that happened 50,000 years ago, it's just meaningless.
00:17:21.000And when you talk about the size of the cosmos or a light year or something, I might be able to understand it intellectually, but it just washes over my head.
00:17:27.000I don't know what you're talking about.
00:17:29.000But the lifetime of my grandmother, that's a manageable span of time.
00:17:35.000This Acropolis, at the dawn of Western civilization, before humans had even invented anything that we would recognize as being civilized in terms of laws and procedures and technologies, that's only 100 of my grandmas.
00:20:10.000Those people in that audience, if you get a full Chicago theater of 3,700 people, if every one of them lived birth to death, just stop and think about that.
00:20:29.000And you don't even need to go that far before the kinds of lives that people were living and the kinds of concerns that they had to concern themselves with were so parochial and they knew so little.
00:20:41.000I mean, even just back to the Middle Ages.
00:20:43.000I mean, think about having 50 of my—no, sorry, five of my grandmothers get us back to the Middle Ages.
00:23:10.000One Ohio State football game full of people ago, I wasn't true.
00:23:16.000The crazy thing is that the science deniers, the evolution deniers, are the ones who are more monkey-like than the ones who believe in science.
00:23:40.000I mean, we're sitting here, we're not science deniers, and we're looking at the age of your grandma, 100 years, and we're just going back a few grandmas, and we're like, fuck, man.
00:23:48.000Well, this is the first time I've been amazed by that, though, because I... Although, you know when else I had this feeling was Richard Dawkins has this cool analogy where he says, imagine...
00:23:59.000He's talking about how evolution denies...
00:24:02.000I keep wanting to say climate denies, I don't know why.
00:24:04.000We'll talk about how there are these gaps in the fossil record, right?
00:24:08.000And how, like, well, what happened to the species that were interim species in between the species that we find?
00:24:14.000Richard Dawkins tries to make the point, the whole concept of a species is something that we sort of retroactively superimpose onto things because lots of animals, because the vast majority of animals die out and don't manage to...
00:24:32.000But he says, imagine getting a book, imagine getting a picture book, like a high school yearbook, and it's got your photo in it on the last page, and the page before that is your mother's photo, and the page before that is her mother's photo, and the page before that is her mother's photo, right?
00:24:45.000And you go back and back and back and back, all the way back to the first dawn of life.
00:25:12.000But as you flip through the pages of this book, it's such a thick book that over time, like one of those little cartoon figures that you could draw and it looks like it's moving on the page, you just start morphing back, back, back, back, back, until eventually you're a fucking fish.
00:25:28.000Or, you know, your great-great-great-great-grandma is.
00:25:58.000There's a lot of changes that go on in nature.
00:26:01.000Like the growth of animals, death of animals, plants and things along those lines.
00:26:07.000There's all sorts of growth and death and all sorts of changing.
00:26:11.000And while we're looking at it in a static form, if you go outside and look at those trees, they look exactly the same as they looked yesterday.
00:26:17.000And it takes a long time before you recognize, like, oh, this fucking thing's growing.
00:27:05.000It is true, though, that, like, you know, age is on the inside, because I can feel that now, at this age, I just have to do a shit more work not to feel crappy.
00:27:24.000That didn't happen when I was 22. I actually remember the first time in my life when I was getting out of a car, and as I got out of the car seat, I went...
00:28:01.000That's the other thing, is nature is trying to kill you.
00:28:04.000And nature would like you to give in to the same decay that you see in animals and the forest and what have you.
00:28:10.000It would like you to just accept the natural process.
00:28:13.000But us and our clever little minds have figured out how to mitigate that process, at least slightly, with exercise and nutrition, proper rest and supplementation.
00:28:23.000Hormone supplementation and going to the doctors and new inventions and cryotherapy and all this crazy shit that people figured out how to just...
00:28:32.000Just put the brakes on this fucking inevitable demise.
00:29:22.000I absorb, I reabsorb, and the energy that I get from that is so much more amazing than the energy that you would get from an external orgasm.
00:29:29.000And then they just get really into talking to you about tantric, and they get annoying.
00:29:34.000Do they do it by contracting the muscle that starts with a P, whose name I'm forgetting, between your balls and your ass?
00:29:41.000No, there's a particular muscle there, which apparently, if you learn to build it up, like we're doing exercises throughout the day, then it will compress and it will push against the...
00:30:20.000And she puts that ball inside of her pussy and just locks down on that motherfucker and then can literally lift up like 70 pounds of weight.
00:30:28.000I've stood at one end of a strip club in Bangkok, had a Thai stripper fire darts from the other side of the room out of her pussy and pop a balloon that I was holding over my head.
00:33:01.000Not to mention, like, I mean, I've been to shows there where there are just, I remember the finale to one show where it was like, there were about 15 to 25. How many fucking shows did you go there?
00:33:23.000I mean, everything's sort of far for most Australians because Sydney and Melbourne are located on the southeast coast of Australia, so there's a lot of Australia to fly over.
00:33:31.000Australia's the same size as the contiguous United States, so you basically have to do the entire flight from the equivalent of Miami to Seattle before you start entering Asian airspace.
00:33:41.000So from Australia, the country itself, it'd probably only be two or three hours to Bangkok.
00:36:54.000There's a species called the Irukandji, which I can't remember whether it's the same as a box jellyfish or not, but someone's going to tweet me now that I've said that.
00:37:01.000And there was a case where these scientists on the Great Barrier Reef Yeah.
00:38:11.000The reality about Australia is we've managed to export this Steve Irwin crocodile hunter vision of Australia as if we're all rugged outdoorsmen who live in the bush in the outback.
00:38:24.000The reality is almost half the country lives in two big cities and we're all sitting around swilling Chardonnay and drinking lattes complaining about property prices and sitting on yachts and going to the beach.
00:38:34.000Very few Australians live in the outback.
00:39:11.000My friend Adam, my friend Adam Greentree, he lives out there.
00:39:14.000And he works, he has a business and something involves mines.
00:39:19.000And they'll be working, like digging holes.
00:39:24.000And, you know, doing stuff out in the bush, I guess you guys call it, the bush, and they'll just find these brown snakes, which will just fucking kill you.
00:39:34.000Well, actually, people haven't died from a snake bite or a spider bite, I don't think, since all of the anti-venoms were discovered in the early 80s.
00:39:51.000Yep, and most Australians are trained in knowing how to basically, you know, obviously put a tourniquet on so that you can, you know, maybe suck out the venom and spit it out and identify what the snake was.
00:40:01.000Well, I find rattlesnakes on my property out here.
00:40:57.000You know, I really get really pissed off when people talk about healthcare and healthcare in America and this idea that somehow or another it's better to not have people covered with medical insurance.
00:41:10.000And there's always been Medicaid and there's always been, for extreme example, people have had medical issues that have put them in severe debt.
00:41:19.000I don't think that we shouldn't have private care in terms of the best doctors and the best surgeons should be allowed to be compensated for their excellence.
00:41:29.000I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but the idea that we don't have some sort...
00:41:32.000I mean, we have roads that are taken care of by our taxes.
00:41:36.000Why the fuck do we not have medical insurance or medical care that's just standard?
00:41:44.000And this is exactly what we're going to talk about on my podcast, hashtag WeThePeopleLive, which we're going to do immediately after this, because I want to talk to you about Bernie Sanders.
00:43:57.000But he said that that was why he went deaf.
00:44:00.000Because, do you remember, Rush Limbaugh was going deaf.
00:44:02.000But he had a real medical explanation for when you overdose on opiates, when you take massive amounts of opiates.
00:44:10.000It affects your central nervous system in such a profound way, and it affects your entire physical body in such a profound way that it's possible you can induce hearing loss.
00:44:23.000I mean, I have sympathy for the guy just because he's caught up in what is a problem beyond any individual's sort of control.
00:44:29.000Like, the problem of over-prescription of opiates in America and, like, drug addiction.
00:45:14.000What's interesting is that he was really hamstrung and broken down when he called that woman a slut who was trying to get birth control, like she was trying to get...
00:45:26.000She wanted birth control to be covered, right?
00:46:05.000But he ended up getting to slut because his logical argument was she wants to be paid for something that is only needed if she wants to have recreational sex.
00:46:14.000Well, what do you call someone who we pay to have recreational sex?
00:46:51.000Just as easy as it is to get off of heroin.
00:46:53.000As easy as it is for Rush Limbaugh to get off heroin, he could get off sugar and simple fucking carbs and all that stupid shit that makes you balloon up like that.
00:47:01.000Maybe just walk on a treadmill for 30 minutes...
00:47:05.000It's hard for people to change their patterns.
00:47:07.000It's hard for people to get excited about doing something that's difficult to do that's going to be ultimately beneficial for them because it drains your energy in the short term.
00:47:46.000Did you see the study that came out recently about the huge increase in the death rate, the fatality rate of white people between the age of 35 and 50, I think it was?
00:48:21.000And this is the only demographic group in America where the numbers are going up.
00:48:25.000Well, I think there's a lot of people that live a very unsatisfying life, and they got roped into living this unsatisfying life because someone told them they have to make a living, that they have to make tough choices, and they have to go do things that they don't want to do, and then find a good job with a fucking plumbing supply company or some stupid shit they don't really want to do when they really want to be a musician or whatever,
00:49:15.000But we were talking about how you're not allowed anymore to have any feelings as a white man that are anything other than guilt about being a white man.
00:49:25.000Well, first acknowledge your privilege before you even say that.
00:49:28.000You right now should acknowledge your white privilege before you even talk about what white people are and aren't around.
00:49:33.000What about non-cisgendered people of colour?
00:49:45.000So I was just listening to the latest episode of his podcast where he's talking to this guy, Douglas Murray, who's this English conservative, and Douglas is saying that when the jihadi nuke finally goes off, what we're all going to be talking about is transgender pronouns.
00:50:53.000If you were Hunter S. Thompson, there was a lot of jumps you had to go through, a lot of hoops, a lot of ladders you had to climb before you could publish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
00:51:05.000Today, any fucking dipshit can start a hashtag activist, some sort of a...
00:51:12.000You could start a Tumblr blog or anything, and then it can immediately be picked up by people that also want to be outraged, and they'll go on this goddamn rampage, and it's confusing as fuck.
00:51:26.000We were like spoiled rich kids, in a way.
00:51:30.000Spoiled rich kids with our ability to communicate ideas.
00:51:32.000I mean, I think the lowering of the barriers is a good thing and a bad thing, right?
00:51:35.000I mean, the flattening and the fact that I don't have to go and talk to a network executive or a radio station owner about doing my podcast.
00:51:42.000I can just do the show that I want to do and put it out there is great.
00:53:09.000So she's just finished shooting a movie in London called Suffragette, in which she plays Emmeline Pankhurst, who was one of the great women's rights campaigners back in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
00:54:17.000Someone else tries to school him, says, the quote is from Emmeline Pankhurst, who said it in a 1913 rally for women's rights, to which the social justice warriors respond...
00:54:24.000And I'm letting you know that it doesn't matter who said it.
00:55:12.000And I wrote, right, fortunately, that t-shirt has nothing to do with being black.
00:55:19.000And then he went off onto this thing about how you have to understand how other people are going to perceive things, and we have to be cognizant of always using the right words.
00:55:28.000And it just ends up spiralling down into this situation where all of a sudden I have to be censoring every single word that I say in case some idiot misinterprets it and doesn't understand the historical context that we're talking about the women's movement in...
00:55:42.000Like, early 20th century Britain and not the fight against slavery in America?
00:56:20.000If you have an issue with those words, because those words can be used in other forms, well, that's your issue.
00:56:26.000But to make a big deal of it, and that you have to be more aware, and you have to be, you know, because being black is exhausting, or being Chinese, we built the railroads, for you to ride that railroad and not acknowledge the fact that Chinese people died during the making of that railroad, fucking Christ!
00:56:54.000If you're in Paris, I bet it's like that.
00:56:56.000You know, 9-11, after September 11th in New York, New York was fucking amazing.
00:57:02.000And I hate to say this in terms like, this is not minimizing the victims or the families of the victims and horrible tragedy, without a doubt.
00:58:38.000Hundreds of their colleagues had just died.
00:58:39.000It was also the fact that people recognized the importance of having first responders, having firemen, having policemen, and that they really felt it like in a deep, real way, like, thank you.
00:58:51.000If it wasn't for what you do, we would be in so much more danger.
00:58:55.000It's having a very real memory of them stepping in and risking their lives and helping people and seeing them covered with dust as they carried people out of the buildings.
00:59:07.000It was solidified in people's memories.
00:59:11.000Over the past, you know, decade or so, you go back and it's back to being New York again.
00:59:16.000People don't look at each other, fuck you.
00:59:18.000Like, there was a feeling of vulnerability that existed because we had recognized a real problem.
00:59:23.000And we had gone through a real, they had gone through, a real moment of intense adversity.
00:59:29.000Did you see in the wake of Paris, one of the things that I found interesting was...
00:59:36.000This conversation around tragedy hipsters, did you hear about that?
01:00:46.000Yes, people should pay attention to Beirut.
01:00:49.000Yes, people should pay attention to Nigeria and Boko Haram.
01:00:52.000Yes, people should be more aware of what's going on.
01:00:54.000But as Obama said in the wake of the Paris attacks, it is understandable for people to have a more instinctive, sympathetic reaction to a city that they know, a city that they've been to, a city populated by people like them who are doing things just like them,
01:01:09.000going to see a soccer game, sitting in a restaurant.
01:01:13.000Than they are for parts of the world where they think that violence is more commonplace, like Nigeria.
01:01:18.000I don't think you can be belittling people for genuine expressions of sympathy.
01:01:24.000I certainly don't think that you should be accusing them of being racist.
01:01:28.000I don't think you should accuse people of anything negative for expressing sympathy.
01:01:32.000But I think that culturally, when you look at the news, and when you look at CNN, and the people that are supposed to be responsible for...
01:01:40.000Letting us know what's happening in the world.
01:01:44.000Like, why are they concentrating solely on Paris?
01:01:47.000Why doesn't CNN have all this coverage of Lebanon and Nigeria that mirrors it?
01:01:52.000So you get this broad perspective of the actual world itself and say, look, this ISIS issue is not just an issue that happened to Europeans.
01:02:03.000This is an issue that's been happening all over the world for a while now.
01:02:07.000And CNN is fucking awful, and I'm definitely not going to defend CNN. I mean, CNN is the worst example, I think, of just following the most predictable line on everything.
01:02:16.000They try not to alienate anyone by being too left or too right, and as a consequence, they're just a mush of ignorance and parochialism.
01:02:31.000How the fuck do you cover the news in a broad way and also make it a profitable entertainment enterprise?
01:02:41.000Well, I would like to think that there's a market for smart conversations about things, which is what I try to do at Half Post Live, and we don't get small numbers.
01:02:50.000I mean, oftentimes I'm surprised when I have a smart conversation about the relationship between Islamism to Islam and the plight of poor Muslims in the suburbs of European capitals where unemployment is 35%, and the demographics of the types of people in Iraq who are joining ISIS who were 14 years old during the U.S. invasion and who've just endured...
01:04:13.000You have a selective media outlet, which means someone finds out about Josh Zeps from one of your many wonderful appearances all throughout the world and HuffPost Live and all these different things.
01:04:36.000I'm waiting for my flight the other day and they have CNN. And they're showing these people doing these things and it's on.
01:04:44.000There's a difference between something that's broadcast and something that you select.
01:04:48.000And I think when someone gets excited about something like what you do is someone who has chosen to go seek out your perspective and your point of view.
01:04:57.000It's very difficult to do that on a show like CNN or a network like CNN. We have to be able to do better than we are, though.
01:05:05.000Because, like, 60 Minutes, for all of its faults, occasionally hits the nail on the head and does a good job, and certainly used to, and people watch it and watched it.
01:05:38.000On your point about what people are going to watch and seek out, there's a good piece in Vox by Max Fisher after all the criticism of why didn't the media cover the Beirut bombings.
01:05:49.000Because one of the most retweeted tweets the day after the Paris attacks was a tweet about why is the media covering this so much when they didn't cover Beirut.
01:06:09.000So because no one clicks at it, or no one clicks on it, then they just let it go?
01:06:15.000Well, at some point, if you're interested in having a thriving media business, you have to give people what they actually want, which is judged by what they click on.
01:06:44.000But they entertain you by showing you the real reality TV, which is the news.
01:06:49.000But much like reality TV, you know, if you live in a house with a bunch of people and they film six hours a day and then they water it down to 44 minutes on television or 22 minutes on television, when they do that, I mean, they're going to do it the way they want to show it.
01:07:04.000They're going to chop out a bunch of other shit that you're not really interested in and they're going to paint a picture and they can edit it and paint that picture in a variety of different ways.
01:07:12.000But they're going to do it in the way that they think is going to be the most salacious.
01:07:15.000It's going to be the most compelling for you to tune in so they can sell you a Toyota truck.
01:07:19.000So they can advertise Tide laundry detergent.
01:09:11.000And is he going to have any privacy, or is the NSA going to spy on everything that he does, and are we going to let it because we're so afraid of having attacks like this?
01:09:18.000And is he going to live in a pluralistic society, or are we going to be so...
01:09:21.000We're cowed either one way or the other, where either we take our Trump id and oppress Muslims, which only exacerbates the problem, or on the other hand, we become social justice warriors who are like, this has nothing to do with Islam.
01:09:37.000You don't have to worry about the Islamists, which means that we end up with mini-theocracies in our own cities where you basically have illiberal communities that don't respect women's rights and don't respect gay rights.
01:09:47.000Not just don't respect, but actively suppress.
01:09:51.000I mean, ISIS is throwing gay people off the roofs.
01:09:57.000We, and by we, I mean people like me who are broadly sympathetic to minority rights and who are broadly pro-civil rights and want everybody to be able to live life however they want to, and I'm pro-high levels of immigration, and I'm not intolerant,
01:10:15.000I'm certainly not racist or Islamophobic, but how do we talk honestly about the fact that at the fringes of Islam there is a big fucking problem and not yield that territory to the right wing?
01:10:25.000Because you've got this rise of these right wing...
01:10:27.000Can you imagine if there was an election?
01:11:10.000Yeah, I think what we have here is human beings classically react to tragedies and massive events.
01:11:19.000We have problems and then we have solutions.
01:11:22.000And the solution is being debated, and there's the extreme right-wing I think we're also dealing with people like Trump that are gigantic egos that have these platforms where they want to step up and they want to gather all this attention to themselves and point to themselves as the solution to this issue with their hardline stances.
01:11:50.000And I think what's going to happen is Technology, as it becomes more and more pervasive and invasive and as we become more and more symbiotically connected to the ability to express ourselves through phones and through the internet, I think the next level of this is ultimately going to be some level that allows people to communicate in a way that it's not just typing things down and it's not just watching a video online.
01:12:16.000I think we're going to be able to communicate with each other in some sort of a neural transmitting manner.
01:12:22.000There's going to be some next step level of technology, whether it's a decade from now or two decades from now.
01:12:34.000The idea of having a physical thing where you have to go to in order to access information is going to seem absolutely ridiculous.
01:12:42.000And once that happens, we're going to see what we see right now in the world where I think I think, regardless of how crazy the world is, I think, at least in America right now, this is absolutely the safest time ever.
01:12:56.000When all the social justice warrior shit that we're seeing, and all this craziness about outrage and hashtag racism and hashtag this and that...
01:13:06.000It's good because it's all about sensitivity.
01:13:09.000It's good because it's all about inclusion.
01:13:10.000It's good because it's all about eliminating anything that's disparaging or racist or anything where you are marginalizing groups based on something that they can't control, like what they look like or their sexual preference.
01:13:22.000And I think as we get deeper and deeper into this interconnectivity that we're experiencing right now, We're going to absolve a lot of our differences and grievances through our ability to communicate with each other and connect with each other.
01:13:37.000And I think we're experiencing like this adolescent sort of angst before we get out of the fucking house and go out onto our own.
01:13:45.000I mean, we're becoming adults as a civilization.
01:13:48.000And along the way, we're experiencing...
01:13:51.000The fucking teenage hormonal rage that, you know, a 14 year old has when they're still trapped in their parents' house.
01:13:58.000The freedom that human beings are going to have in the future to communicate and express themselves is going to negate a lot of this hashtag college racism or hashtag college activism.
01:14:09.000I think what that's coming from is this feeling that a lot of people have that their ideas and their opinions aren't Black lives matter!
01:14:35.000We're certainly in the adolescence of our species, and I'm trying to find a way of saying drugs without saying drugs.
01:14:55.000But not just drugs, float tanks, meditation, whatever else it is that you do in order to gain a perspective on things that is beyond your own little tribe.
01:15:05.000My concern is whether or not there is a direct correlation between upgrading the means of communication, and I'm with you that obviously the way that we currently communicate is going to seem completely antiquated in decades to come, But what we've seen happen when the internet began,
01:15:21.000you sound to me a little bit like people who I would listen to in the 1990s who would say, once everyone is online, there's going to be no need for a difference anymore because everyone's going to be able to communicate everything and everyone's going to be able to be exposed to so many different ideas that you're not going to be able to be insular anymore.
01:15:37.000You're not going to be able to be parochial anymore, trapped in your own little circle of beliefs.
01:15:42.000Because with the internet, everything's going to be available at everyone's fingertips all the time.
01:17:38.000And once the dust settles in the argument, then people have to, like, you have to take into consideration the validity of other people's opinions.
01:17:45.000Like, whether or not you agree with them or not, you have to understand that it's just a matter of this broad range of people expressing themselves.
01:17:54.000It'll slowly, like, come down to an understandable vibration.
01:17:59.000And let's just unpack two things that we're talking about so we're not conflating two things, right?
01:18:15.000I hope that you're right that what they think that they're doing is being an extension of the great traditions of civil rights in America.
01:18:22.000In other words, that they're being motivated by a sense of understanding, as you say, and of compassion.
01:18:28.000And of outrage against what they perceive as being outrageous injustice.
01:18:32.000My concern is that what they're also doing is buying into a long tradition of intolerance and a lack of respect for pluralism and for other people's ideas about things, for other people's right to express ideas that they regard as being I mentioned earlier this study that I thought you were going to like that I bought.
01:18:52.000Let me just find it because it's good.
01:18:54.000So there's this professor called April Kelly Wozner, and she's a professor of political science at Elizabethtown College.
01:19:00.000And she's got a chapter in this new paper called The End of the Experiment, The Rise of Cultural Elites and the Decline of America's Civic Culture.
01:19:07.000And it's this study, which is called the General Social Survey.
01:19:11.000Which looks at how tolerant or intolerant particular demographics of Americans are, right?
01:19:26.000I was like getting out the popcorn, listen to Joe.
01:19:28.000So in the general social survey, they propose a bunch of different groups and they ask people how much they would like or dislike that group of people, right?
01:19:36.000Just to establish who we really, really don't like.
01:19:39.000The least liked group included in the survey was Muslim clergymen who preach hatred against the United States, right?
01:19:58.000So then they ask people how tolerant they would be towards a person from that class of people giving a public speech in their community.
01:20:10.000And people in their 40s are more tolerant than people in their 30s, and people in their 30s are more tolerant than people in their 20s.
01:20:19.000For people in their 40s, the proportion who say that a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred against the United States should not be allowed to give a public speech is 43%.
01:20:33.000So if tolerance means not like, oh, I support black rights or I support gay rights or I support trans rights, but if it means respecting the right of someone who you really disagree with to express that opinion, Well,
01:21:05.000I think what you're saying, though, is they're less willing to accept hate speech, which they think are dangerous...
01:21:16.000They think that someone who's a Muslim clergyman who wants to express the hate of America, it's dangerous because he could promote terrorist attacks.
01:21:25.000Someone who thinks that black people are genetically inferior to white people is dangerous because they could promote racism or they could promote someone confirming their racist beliefs and then instead of Becoming educated or becoming enlightened.
01:21:40.000They go with their initial racist instincts and they go, I was right.
01:21:45.000You know, the white man is superior, you know, and they're worried about hate.
01:22:19.000Where people who are stupid or have ridiculous ideas about the genetic inferiority of black people are able to be exposed, be argued with, be contended.
01:22:28.000Because racists aren't just going to go away if you ban them from talking.
01:22:39.000I think you want free speech to be a big, roiling debate.
01:22:42.000You don't want to be censorious and judgmental and intolerant towards people whose ideas you disagree with.
01:22:49.000You want to take them on and expose why those ideas are wrong, and hopefully through that intellectual wrestling match, you all end up progressing forward.
01:22:57.000You don't progress forward by simply banning ideas that you think are objectionable.
01:23:05.000I think what they're worried about, though, is these people going to schools and indoctrinating very gullible or very impressionable young people.
01:23:13.000And that's a legit thing because they themselves have been— But that reinforces the gullibility, right?
01:23:20.000That's what I was going to say, is that they themselves have been indoctrinated into the idea of liberalism and liberal thinking by, like, charismatic people with interesting ideas that they believe in wholeheartedly, and they're very confident in what they're saying, and they speak very well.
01:24:33.000If you're discombobulated, if the world is complicated, if you don't know what to make of shit, especially if you're in a situation where you feel like you've been shat on for a lot of time, which is what a lot of these followers of these extremists do feel like, then it's nice to just have clarity.
01:24:50.000It's nice to just have someone who knows what the truth is and who knows what the right path is.
01:24:55.000A perfect example of that is country music.
01:25:00.000If you'd asked me to list five things that you were going to end that sentence with, country music would not have been top 50. I know a lot of people that I love dearly that like country music, and they read the least out of all the people that I know.
01:25:13.000All the people that I know that are really into really dumb country music, these motherfuckers aren't aware of shit that's going on in the world.
01:25:19.000I have good friends that I love, but I have to talk to them, especially from the hunting world.
01:25:26.000Like, the hunting world is goddamn hilarious, because I've somehow or another become a part of this world, because I've expressed this idea that I think is very important, and we should be aware of where our food comes from, and I've become someone who gathers their food from a hunting way.
01:25:41.000But then you connect yourself with these people that are also in this, which become very religious.
01:25:47.000There's a lot of religion, but it's a weird kind of religion.
01:25:50.000It's almost like a hashtag activist sort of religious idea, where they don't understand the texts.
01:26:26.000Yeah, the tattoo thing is very clear, but when I got into it with these people was when that woman from Kentucky wouldn't marry gay people, and I wrote this piece on Instagram and Facebook, and it got millions of likes, and all these people traded it back and forth,
01:26:43.000and I got all this blowback from the hunting community, because all these people that are really into God, or really into religion, and then they're also recognized...
01:26:54.000Getting pressure, my friends who are in the hunting community were getting pressure to talk to me about my stance on God.
01:28:12.000So one of the things that he's talking about is when he's talking about the Balkans, He's saying, like, when the Balkans imploded in the 1990s and we had the collapse of Yugoslavia and, you know, Bosnia and Serbia and all that, he's like, you go there even to this day and you talk to a Bosnian Muslim or you talk to a Serb or you talk to a Croat...
01:28:33.000About the problems that they've endured, and every single one of them will point a finger at the other groups and say, they've been doing this to us for so long, and back in this day they did that, and then they did that, and then they did that.
01:28:45.000It's like the Israelis and the Palestinians or something.
01:28:47.000It's like, oh, well, you know, 10,000 fucking years ago my ancestors got massacred by blah-de-blah.
01:28:52.000And it's so easy to think of ourselves in terms of aggrieved groups, whether or not Yeah.
01:29:23.000Against people who disagree with them, who hold beliefs that they believe are objectionable, whether that belief is that the West is at war with Islam, which is what jihadis think that we want, or whether the belief is that racism is okay, which is what social justice warriors think that all white people think.
01:30:19.000Ideologies where you have locked into a predetermined pattern of thinking that you just have to conform to, I think becomes very problematic for people because the world is fluid.
01:30:29.000There's a lot going on, a lot of weirdness to it.
01:30:32.000There's also an issue in communication through language and communication through words and the ability to express yourself through words.
01:30:39.000It's sometimes difficult because what you're trying to do is you're trying to express intent.
01:30:43.000You're trying to get someone to understand how you think and view things.
01:30:46.000And you're trying to say, well, why don't you express and view yourself like I do?
01:31:16.000That's why podcasts are so unique in a way because, you know, one of the beautiful things about it is that, you know, you do sort of search for the correct way to, I mean, you hear us do this sometimes where this is like...
01:31:30.000And what we're doing is we're just trying to figure out what's the best way for me to express this idea that I've got bouncing around in my head where I'm trying to understand how this thing sort of lays out to everybody else.
01:31:44.000How do I get it out there in a way where you know when I'm actually I think?
01:32:09.000Form of communication that we have to grapple with now is how do we speak to the Muslim community and to one another about the Muslim community and about jihadism without either being bigoted towards Muslims or pretending that there isn't a problem of Islamism that has some relationship to the Muslim community and that has some relationship to the text of Islam,
01:32:31.000Because the moment I say anything remotely Like, the day after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Howard Dean went on Morning Joe on MSNBC and said, these guys are about as Muslim as I am.
01:33:34.000Right-wing xenophobes or fascists, right?
01:33:37.000And so what we have to do is find a way, when we talk about, like, those off-the-shelf ideologies, whether it's jihadism or social justice warriorism, we have to find a way to win over moderate Muslims and make them not feel like they're being alienated and judged.
01:33:52.000We have to not be, you know, sending southwest flights back to the gate as it was the other day because two people were speaking Arabic.
01:33:58.000And watching a video about what's going on in the wake of the Paris attacks or something, and people freaked out because they think all Arabs are terrorists or something.
01:34:07.000We have to make sure that doesn't happen, but we can't have that not happen as long as everyone is pretending that there's not a problem with Islam.
01:34:31.000I believe it just takes a lot of discourse, takes a lot of communication, and the clumsy type of communication that you get through language, through talking.
01:34:39.000I think the more this happens, the more this gets discussed, the more people gain an understanding, And again, like we're looking at people aging or like trees growing, it is a slow process.
01:34:50.000That in the middle of it, it doesn't seem like any progress is happening at all.
01:34:52.000But ultimately, if you look at the world today versus the world of 10 years ago, you see a big difference between what Al Franken was able to publish with that book and what you're able to get away with today.
01:35:02.000And I think that sort of, in a weird way, for lack of a better analogy, it highlights the growth that's going on.
01:35:09.000It highlights this very strange era that we are currently experiencing.
01:35:13.000And with that, let's end this and do your podcast.
01:35:17.000We're going to keep talking, folks, but we have to end this.
01:35:19.000Because I've got to pick up my kid in a little bit.
01:35:21.000But we're going to do an episode of We the People Live.