Jonathan Isaac is an NBA star who refused to kneel for Black Lives Matter and is now writing a book about it called Why I Stand . In this interview with Jemele, he talks about why he decided to stand up for what he believes in.
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00:01:15.000And that you, standing up for what you believe in, which is essentially like a long-standing American tradition, becomes this profound statement.
00:01:22.000I'm impressed by your willingness to defy the crowd because of what you know is right.
00:01:28.000So let's just jump into your story, I suppose.
00:01:37.000Yeah, so first off, just thank you so much for having me on.
00:01:39.000I'm a fan of everything that you guys are doing.
00:01:43.000So I would say to kind of just wrap it up in a whole thing of how it all makes sense.
00:01:50.000So around the time of the whole Black Lives Matter thing, George Floyd, as tragic as it was and as awful as it was, goes down.
00:01:58.000And then there's the whole Play of black lives matter everywhere.
00:02:04.000Everyone is pledging their allegiance to Black Lives Matter on the organization and early on in the process.
00:02:11.000I never felt comfortable Standing in that arena, you know, I'm a Christian.
00:02:16.000I feel that Christ is ultimately the answer for the world's problems That's me.
00:02:20.000That's what I've I've grown up on and what I've come to truly believe later in my life here is now and And I never felt comfortable professing that in the Black Lives Matter space.
00:02:30.000And so as everything got kind of just worked up, we get to the NBA bubble and there's the pressure that everyone is going to take this stand.
00:02:37.000They're going to kneel and they're going to wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt.
00:02:40.000And I had made the decision that that's not what I want to do.
00:02:44.000I didn't believe that the Black Lives Matter spirit in terms of what they were ultimately trying to do Went hand in hand with where I was in my heart.
00:02:57.000A bunch of, you know, people feeling the way that they felt about me deciding to stand came out and it just, we get to the point we are now about writing this book about the story of why I stood.
00:03:08.000The backstory of who Jonathan Isaac is, what has gone on in his life to get to this point of standing and offering that as the remedy to the situation we find ourselves in now.
00:03:17.000Isn't it crazy that it was, you know, several years ago, Colin Kaepernick, he kneels, and he gets criticism for it, and we're in this moment where we're like, oh, you can't do that.
00:03:28.000Now everybody's kneeling, and you're standing up like, I'm not gonna kneel for this.
00:03:31.000And now there's a story behind standing up and refusing to bend with the crowd.
00:03:36.000It's interesting in how this trend quickly swept across sports.
00:03:41.000And to that point, when Conley Kaepernick did kneel, the NBA itself, you know, we had a team meeting, we had everything, and they said, you're not allowed to kneel.
00:04:03.000That was the sentiment, especially in our team meeting.
00:04:05.000And then to have it flip, you know, two years later and everybody like, We have no choice.
00:04:10.000And that was ultimately my issue, part of my issue, where the feeling was you either did this, and if you did it, you agreed, you stood with black lives, you cared about black people, and if you didn't, you were an enemy, and you were evil, and you didn't care.
00:04:24.000And the sentiment was, wearing a t-shirt and kneeling for the national anthem, do not go hand-in-hand with supporting black lives.
00:04:29.000It's not the only way to support black lives, because when I look at my life, my life has been supported by Christ.
00:04:34.000And that's the message that I wrote on.
00:04:37.000So tell me your quick life story, I guess, how you came to be in the NBA.
00:04:51.000I got into basketball when I left New York and moved to Florida, where my parents had split up.
00:04:56.000There I started playing organized basketball, AAU, started falling in love with the game, really finding my identity in the game, getting liked, getting cared about, having people gravitate around me because of basketball.
00:05:10.000So I started to really just fall in love with it.
00:05:12.000And worked extremely, extremely hard at it.
00:05:14.000Went to Florida State for a year, got drafted, and ended up in Orlando.
00:05:19.000So when you were growing up, how would you describe your experience?
00:05:22.000And I'm asking you from the context of Black Lives Matter, right?
00:05:25.000So you're a young black kid growing up in the Bronx playing basketball, and we hear this narrative from BLM that this country is racist, white privilege, all that stuff.
00:05:34.000Considering that you didn't take a knee for it, I'm curious as to your thoughts, based on your life experience, about the general narrative from Black Lives Matter.
00:05:41.000Not the underlying politics, which we know gets deeper, but...
00:05:44.000Yeah, I would say there's two parts to that.
00:05:46.000I would say growing up in New York, it was definitely something that we were taught about, you know, as kids, you know, there's certain things that you want to watch out for.
00:05:53.000You want to make sure you're respectable to police.
00:05:55.000You want to make sure you're not out here causing any trouble.
00:05:58.000but my family household was definitely, I would say, unspokenly on a conservative trend
00:06:04.000in terms of work really hard, compete in the workplace, compete in what you're doing,
00:06:09.000become the best that you can be, and ultimately that God is gonna take care of the rest.
00:06:13.000If you trust in God, you're gonna get to exactly where you need to be, where you're supposed to be,
00:06:16.000and there's not an outside pressure that can take away from that.
00:06:21.000There's not something that trumps God being in your life and ultimately guiding you into where you're supposed to be.
00:06:26.000And then when it comes to Black Lives Matter, it's the sentiment that the only problem when it comes to black inequality is racism.
00:06:35.000And that's ultimately, not ultimately, but a part of what I would say I reject.
00:06:40.000So I don't know if you guys have seen, I'm sure you guys have the Jordan Peterson interview with, what was her name?
00:06:51.000And what he's trying to get across to her is that it's the notion that sexism is the only reason why there's inequality in pay between women and men.
00:07:05.000And I would say the strand of the Black Lives Matter is to teach you or to get you to believe that racism is the only reason for inequality between black and whites.
00:07:14.000They actually say it's a I think Ibram X. Kendi.
00:07:17.000He says it's not a question of did racism happen happen.
00:07:20.000It's how did racism manifest that is to say that that is to say in any circumstance.
00:07:26.000There's always racism present and to me that's that that that's a crazy thought but it also forces people.
00:07:32.000I think what it ends up doing, this narrative that we see from Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter, is you're basically telling people success is out of your reach due to things you can't control, but that's just not true.
00:07:44.000You can succeed if you work hard, and I think you're an example of that.
00:09:02.000She helped me write it, but just, we had time.
00:09:04.000So a part of the, you know, kind of the blessing in disguise from the injury is that I had down time to just focus on my rehab and work through this book.
00:09:25.000I've been skateboarding my whole life and the ACL tear is the dreaded injury.
00:09:31.000It's definitely a lot different than what it used to be in terms of, you know, obviously back then and today, you hear ACL and it's like, oh my gosh, it's the most dreaded thing.
00:09:37.000But, you know, where we are today, you know, you get about a year and some change and you're good.
00:09:41.000You get like the PRP injections, platelet-rich plasma?
00:09:45.000We didn't do that, but, you know, the whole thing, it's good now.
00:09:50.000We're pretty much ready to roll into next season.
00:09:52.000So, Colin Kaepernick experiences a big backlash when he takes a knee.
00:09:57.000I'm wondering if now that the narrative's kind of inverted, and you're the only one, you know, standing up basically, are you getting flak from other players?
00:10:08.000Uh, I would say yeah, it's definitely a part of it.
00:10:12.000There's a little part in the book where I talk about directly after I stood and there was a whole team meeting that I got kind of pulled into and it was about me and my decision to stand and that I was hijacking the narrative of what they were trying to
00:10:28.000And ultimately what the sentiment was there for me is that I respected your decision to kneel.
00:10:33.000When we had that team meeting and we said this is what we're going to do,
00:10:36.000I didn't say, well why the heck are you guys doing that?
00:10:38.000Give me your reason and everything like that.
00:10:40.000But that's all that I wanted in return. So we were able to walk away from that meeting.
00:10:44.000So do you consider yourself conservative, right-wing?
00:10:47.000I would consider myself, I've tried my best to allow my Christianity to guide my principles
00:10:55.000and ultimately what it is that I believe. I I believe in the love of Christ.
00:10:59.000I believe in obviously the tenets of the Bible and what it teaches.
00:11:03.000And I think that it's definitely caused me to lean on the conservative side on a lot of those different issues.
00:11:08.000But I wouldn't come out right saying I'm conservative, I'm Republican.
00:11:12.000To me, it kind of feels like we're seeing a lot more intolerance from the left, I guess as you'd call it, however you want to define it, in that you say, I respect your decision to kneel, you know, do your thing, they get mad at you for not doing it.
00:11:26.000And we see similar things in a lot of different facets.
00:11:29.000We often see, I mean, in terms of guns.
00:11:32.000In blue states, where I understand they got high gun crime and they want to try and solve that, Okay, fine.
00:11:37.000But then why do you want a law over red states, where it's rural and very different?
00:11:40.000It seems like there's constantly a, you know, you gotta live this way, you gotta do what we wanna do.
00:11:44.000And it used to be, when I was younger, at least the perspective was that the right was more, like, that more moral authoritarian.
00:11:51.000And I'm sitting here talking to people at the Daily Wire, more conservatives, who are very much like, I disagree with you, but pursue your happiness, do your thing.
00:12:00.000I think there's definitely a trend on the left that is like, we are so tolerant.
00:12:04.000We're not authoritarian, but it really is the complete opposite, where we want you to be tolerant towards us, but we don't have to be tolerant towards you.
00:12:14.000And so that's definitely the strain that's coming out of the left.
00:12:16.000And you're not telling people they got to stand or anything like that.
00:12:48.000Definitely not in support of Black Lives Matter, but at the same time, I love the country that I live in.
00:12:54.000One of the things that we're taught in church all the time is that you haven't done everything right, but you haven't done everything wrong either in terms of striving to be better.
00:13:03.000And I think that that's a sentiment that's lost when it comes to America.
00:13:05.000I love to live in America, the freedoms that we've been granted, and obviously everything hasn't been done right in terms of the history, but everything hasn't been done wrong either in terms of taking the steps for us to help.
00:13:16.000Progressing get to where we are today.
00:13:17.000Yeah when it comes to terms of like racism and systemic racism with BLM and things like that I I think we talked a lot about this actually on the show The history of like slave slavery in the United States was like an African slave trade So the people that came over happened to have that skin color, but it was just those were the slaves that were brought They could have been from Ireland.
00:13:35.000They could have been from you know wherever Middle East or whatever but so the ancestors of those people it's like a class issue like the great-grandfathers of slave or the great-grandchildren of slaves The family wealth that's passed down is there's not a lot of wealth passed down because or or Education maybe isn't passed down because a lot of times your parents will be the ones that teach you when you're young and so it's misrepresented as a racial issue when it's more of like a class issue that happens to be
00:14:10.000I think it's definitely a class issue but especially when you get into the Jim Crow era and that it definitely became a much about the skin color of like black versus white and hating blackness in a sense for sure.
00:14:25.000I would say as it is today in terms of definitely the tone of Hey, it's Kimberly Fletcher here from Moms4America with some very exciting news.
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00:15:43.000hate of blackness has decreased and now it is definitely become more of a class issue
00:15:53.000and if we're able to kind of break down those barriers of education um to me getting back
00:15:59.000to god in the first place we can see a huge increase and that's that's also in
00:16:04.000The different, you know, people that are dark skinned that are over in America today, the West Indians, the Nigerians that come over and do really, really well.
00:16:10.000If we could adopt some of those family principles, education principles, along with, like I said, for me, the biggest point is getting back to Christ in the first place.
00:16:19.000You know, I think we could see much more progress than we've seen when other than beating the racism horse.
00:16:25.000I completely agree with how you put it.
00:16:27.000I think when you look at the past, there was absolutely racism.
00:16:31.000It was absolutely, somebody would look at someone, see the color of their skin, and immediately just be like, I have a problem with that.
00:16:36.000Today, there's elements of that, absolutely.
00:16:40.000But I always tell people at this point, it's a class issue.
00:16:43.000I do think, in my view on this, and maybe I'm wrong, but because of the historical racism that we saw with slavery through Jim Crow and all that, you've got less generational wealth that's passed down, which results in a pronounced class issue today.
00:16:57.000But we've passed a bunch of these laws to make all of the race-based stuff illegal.
00:17:00.000What scares me is, I feel like we've made a tremendous amount of progress from the 60s and the 70s and the 80s.
00:17:05.000Not perfect, but we've done a tremendously, a great job.
00:17:09.000It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in, say, housing or whatever, or school.
00:17:12.000But now, we're actually seeing, there was an article I saw earlier about a woman, a white, progressive, liberal woman, saying, segregated classrooms are a good thing.
00:17:22.000And I'm like, that kind of sounds like going backwards, and it's part of the problem.
00:17:25.000I want people all to hang out together and be comfortable hanging out with each other and being happy with each other.
00:17:30.000Her argument was, white people have white-only spaces by default, because there's so many white people, they'll go into a room, and it's only white people, and that's not fair to black people, so there should be spaces that don't allow white people, and I'm like, No, I mean, like, I get it if it's a private thing and you want to hang out and do whatever you want, sure, that the clan can have their rallies, whatever, I don't like that.
00:17:54.000Like, I'm not going to hang out with those people.
00:17:56.000But in public institutions and public accommodation, I actually enjoy being with people from various backgrounds.
00:18:02.000I don't understand how they're the ones claiming they're arguing for diversity while simultaneously trying to put forward these things that create, like, POC and non-POC spaces.
00:18:10.000Did you see the, it's hilarious, the video, I don't know who put it out, some comedian, but he's pretty much conflating the similarities between the racist and the woke.
00:18:20.000Ryan Long, he's a friend of ours, yeah.
00:18:23.000And the sentiment of that is even, even take the justice, the lady justice that just got nominated.
00:18:32.000It's like, with this narrative of it's impossible to get ahead, it's impossible to be black and have opportunities and stuff, here you have someone, you may not agree with their ideology or anything, somebody who has ascended to the highest court, it's like, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't complete, and if racism was such an issue, it didn't prevail in that case.
00:18:54.000Well, I mean, look at Thurgood Marshall, for instance.
00:18:57.000I believe he was the first black Supreme Court justice, and this was back in, what, the 60s, I think?
00:19:28.000It frustrates me seeing how the left is... I think many of these politicians, many of these personalities, not all of them, I think they're scared to give up racism because it empowers them.
00:19:39.000To go to people and say, you are constrained by this problem and only I can solve your problems.
00:19:43.000Yeah, I don't like the victimization tactic.
00:19:47.000That's what I feel like Black Lives Matter is doing, maybe not even intentionally, maybe it's intentional or not, but saying that because of the way you look, you're gonna have a harder time.
00:19:55.000I don't think that it's the skin color that's causing it.
00:20:01.000There might be reasons why people... But like you said, if you try hard, it doesn't matter what your skin looks like, your eyeballs are telling the story.
00:20:08.000Well, I think... I have no problem... Actually, I don't know if you said that.
00:20:14.000I don't want to put words in your mouth.
00:20:15.000I got no problem if there's anyone of any race and they say the United States is a majority white country.
00:20:21.000And that means there's going to be assumptions made about you.
00:20:24.000That means some people might be racist.
00:20:26.000But, if you work hard enough, if you work smart enough, and you figure out how this system works, you can be the richest person on the planet.
00:20:33.000You can be successful, you can be famous.
00:20:36.000That will not be, you know, race... I mean...
00:20:41.000Any factor if you're born with your height.
00:21:56.000But that's the reality of life, too, is that as much as some people might say, oh, there's some physical disadvantage you have that's holding you back, well, sometimes you have advantages, too.
00:22:06.000The way I view life is we're all dealt this hand of cards.
00:22:10.000And I've seen people win poker hands with the worst possible hand because they knew how to play it right.
00:22:15.000How much of it do you think is physical gifts that get you in the NBA versus work ethic?
00:22:21.000I would say it's a lot of things in a whole.
00:22:23.000It's absolutely, if you average out NBA players, we are a specific build, we are a specific height across the board.
00:22:31.000And in that same group of guys, you also have probably the most, the hardest working guys who have kind of risen to the top in their different fields and or different positions and stuff in different places in the country.
00:22:43.000And their physicality goes in that as well.
00:22:46.000But then there's another piece in terms of just mentality.
00:22:48.000Being able to block out the noise, being able to block out the distractions, being able to focus in on this one thing really hard.
00:22:55.000The NBA is a culmination of all those different things and guys that are different heights, come from different places.
00:23:00.000They're usually the hardest working guys with the best attributes and the best mentality that have got them to that place.
00:23:06.000Do you think other players, you know, so you're standing, I see this photo of these other guys kneeling.
00:23:10.000Do they all support Black Lives Matter?
00:23:14.000I would say, and I would say that because of the sentiment.
00:23:17.000When we had that conversation about what it is that we're going to do in terms of are we going to kneel or are we going to stand, it wasn't that everyone was saying, man, I care so much about this issue and I'm so in line with the Black Lives Matter movement that I want to kneel.
00:23:30.000That was definitely the sentiment from a couple guys, but the rest of them was that we don't have a choice.
00:23:36.000It was that either you do this or you do not care about black people.
00:23:40.000The first question that I got asked after I stood in the press conference was, do you even believe that black lives matter?
00:23:46.000And I'm like, and I'm like, I'm thinking in my head, like, wait, you're a part of the problem.
00:23:51.000You're a part of the problem because in your mind, you're conflating a t-shirt and kneeling for the national anthem with the very care for black lives.
00:24:43.000Just because people are all different types.
00:24:46.000I just, what really, really bugs me about the whole thing we've seen in the past several years of the rise of critical race theory is the hyper-focus on race and, you know, specifically in this example, if you don't take an action in support of a brand, of a non-profit, it's a statement about your morals as pertaining to a racial group of people, And that's exactly what it was.
00:25:10.000Because of the name, because of the name Black Lives Matter, you forget that it is in support of an organization.
00:25:16.000And organizations have ethos, they have ideologies, and now you have the same organization going and buying a six million dollar house.
00:25:23.000So it's like, when something as tragic as a George Floyd happens, and they're able to put out this phrase or this slogan that says Black Lives Matter, it's like, how could you not jump on board with this?
00:25:35.000Of course Black Lives Matter, of course this was a Of course, this was a terrible moment in time of a black man being killed.
00:26:40.000I grew up in a house with two loving parents who helped me become a better person, and I think that's a major advantage.
00:26:47.000So when I see Black Lives Matter say, disrupt the nuclear family, when I see these articles written by feminists who say, if feminism is to succeed, we must end monogamy or the family or something like that, I'm like, that's going to be really, really bad for kids.
00:27:02.000It's a political statement made by a non-profit corporation, basically.
00:27:06.000Like, what you're saying, if you really want to help black people and black lives, and you're in a room with thousands of people, and I've got all this money, I'm not, if I turn and give money just to the black people, it's going to cause resentment amongst all the other people, and then it's going to disprove, it's going to make it worse for those people that I gave the money to, because they're going to become, like, hated by the others.
00:27:25.000You want to improve everybody's life together, and then it improves black lives, and white, and everybody can rise up.
00:27:30.000But I do understand the systemic Class problem that we're having from the slavery issue.
00:27:36.000Let me elaborate on that because what I think what's happening now, you know, we had serious racism in this country for a long time, even up to the 80s.
00:27:43.000Are you familiar with blockbusting and redlining?
00:27:49.000So, what would happen is, a real estate company would go to a white neighborhood, buy a house, and then move a black family in.
00:27:57.000They would then go door-to-door to the white families and say, oh, look who just moved in, your property value is gonna go down now, you better sell to us before it's too late.
00:28:05.000They would, it's crazy that they would do this.
00:28:09.000And then the white people would get scared and they'd start selling their houses.
00:28:13.000And then once the real estate company bought up a bunch of the houses,
00:28:17.000they would say, thank you to the black family, your lease is up, you can leave now.
00:28:20.000And then sell all the houses back at the profit.
00:28:22.000They would use racism and the fear of racism to rip people off.
00:28:27.000And it was destructive to the black families.
00:28:29.000It was destructive to these white families.
00:29:01.000So this means, now that we've said, by law, like, we don't want this to happen anymore, you've got poor white people on the South Side of Chicago, living alongside poor black people.
00:29:11.000All of a sudden, Democrat comes along and says, we're gonna give all the black people money.
00:29:15.000And the poor, you know, white person is sitting there wondering, like, why am I starving?
00:29:20.000Me and my neighbor are both people, but he's being given money and I'm not.
00:29:25.000I think the issue is we've dealt with it policy-wise.
00:29:29.000There's still, I think, some policy, you know, things that we could probably accomplish.
00:29:33.000We've not solved every problem in the world.
00:29:35.000But I think it's a class issue today that is solved.
00:29:38.000If the issue is that black communities in this country are disproportionately impacted by historical racism, then it would be true today that a class-based solution would disproportionately benefit black families, and that should be That should make the left and the right happy, because it's not a race-based issue anymore.
00:29:55.000There may be, you know, out of nine families in one block that are black families that are impoverished, there's one that's white, or whatever the number might be, but everybody gets an opportunity to be lifted up and be helped out.
00:30:07.000For some reason, the modern left is not okay with that.
00:30:09.000You know, in California, they tried repealing the provision from their constitution that prohibited racial discrimination in college and public contracting.
00:30:19.000And I just think that's them walking us backwards.
00:30:22.000They're gonna bring the problems of racism back.
00:30:24.000How deep do you go into it in the book?
00:30:34.000The book is mainly about, again, about the love of Christ.
00:30:38.000It's about Taking where we're at and ultimately all the problems that we have that are not just racism, just world problems in a whole, but saying that if each of us could find the answer in loving our neighbor, loving someone who has done wrong to us, loving someone who we don't like or anything like that, we would ultimately see progress.
00:30:59.000before all of these other things come into play.
00:31:01.000And it's an interpersonal answer of affecting one person, then affecting a family, then affecting a city,
00:31:07.000then affecting a society, and ultimately the world.
00:31:13.000Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer,
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00:31:20.000Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
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00:31:39.000Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
00:31:42.000It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.
00:33:15.000And I believe that that is the it's the message that has helped get us to this point in terms of Martin Luther King about you overcome evil with good and love ultimately and not fighting back in the way that is riots and these other things but ultimately finding it in your heart to love your neighbor because you've been loved by God.
00:33:32.000I believe it's going to be the how we progress.
00:33:34.000I saw a tweet from a prominent atheist personality, I'll just leave it at that, and he said that he's tired of playing on defense.
00:33:41.000He says every Bible must be sold with a warning label that it says it may lead to mental derangement.
00:33:47.000And that's crazy to me because Here we are having a conversation.
00:33:52.000Every conversation I've had with any prominent religious person, obviously not every person is a good person no matter what their religion is, is a similar message to what you're saying.
00:34:01.000Love your neighbor and try and be your best.
00:34:04.000You know, our good friend Seamus, who we have on the show, is a very, very devout Catholic.
00:34:08.000There's a lot of things he does not agree with and he thinks are wrong.
00:34:11.000But he doesn't force himself upon people.
00:34:17.000Well, we all insult people, especially when we do comedy, but he doesn't attack people and scream and he's not vile.
00:34:23.000He's like, I want you to do better with your life and I wish you would do better.
00:34:27.000I wonder how it is that, you know, the narrative from the left, perhaps it's because they want to do away with Christianity, they want to attack it at its core.
00:34:35.000They keep pushing these lines about what Christians believe, but then you actually sit down with any prominent religious individual and they're talking about love and forgiveness and trying to reach across the aisle and things like that.
00:34:48.000I'd agree with you in terms of it being about Christianity and it's ultimately the one to attack.
00:34:54.000You don't hear much about attacking other religions, even Islam or anything like that.
00:34:59.000It really is the Christian ethic of love and ultimately the morality of it that gets attacked because the left wants to do away with all of that and just live in a state of what feels right for you.
00:35:45.000And ultimately, if you're going to take down the West, you're going to have to take down Christianity.
00:35:50.000You know, one thing I often bring up on the show is that this culture war we're experiencing,
00:35:55.000I think has a lot to do with two different moral frameworks.
00:35:59.000There is the Judeo-Christian moral framework, which I think everybody in this room agrees with, but then there is the Marxist or fascistic moral framework.
00:36:08.000I had a conversation with a, there was a family coming around my neighborhood in South Jersey, Philly area, and they were preaching, or what is it called?
00:36:31.000But I also recognize the lessons from the Bible that we hold true today, that are core principles in our country, such as the presumption of innocence.
00:36:40.000If you are accused of a crime, we are supposed to presume you are innocent until it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:36:47.000And that tenet comes from the Bible, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, that, you know, God said, if there's but one righteous person, I will not destroy these cities.
00:36:57.000And it was only after the righteous people were all saved from the cities that God, you know, he rained fire and crimson on Sodom and Gomorrah.
00:37:04.000But the point is, I was reading about the Fifth Amendment, how powerful it is in protecting the innocent.
00:37:10.000This country is far from perfect, but it's pretty good.
00:37:14.000And it said the Founding Fathers had, you know, Benjamin Franklin, it is better that a hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer.
00:37:35.000He talks about how If your society would punish the innocent, then people would have no faith in your society.
00:37:42.000And if they're so inclined upon just punishing someone for doing something, you'll actually let the bad people go free.
00:37:50.000You need to make sure you have a very high standard for whether or not you're going to imprison somebody or punish them or seek retribution or justice.
00:37:58.000Because if you're getting the wrong people, the bad guys are getting away with it, and the good guys are hurting, everybody's mad.
00:38:18.000But so, you know, in thinking about this, I see people like Bill Maher, he's like a secular atheist, but he doesn't understand when he believes in free speech, when he believes in the right presumption of innocence, these are founded in Christian moral values.
00:38:31.000Now we have the rise of this wokeness and things like BLM, they don't believe in that framework, they hate it, they want to destroy it.
00:38:38.000They abide by, typically, the ethos of there is no truth but power.
00:38:43.000Where they think that if we get enough people to say it, it will just be true, and that's all that matters.
00:38:49.000I'm a big fan of take care of yourself before you attempt to take care of your neighbor.
00:38:53.000Take the plank out of your own eye before you attempt to take the speck of dust out of your neighbor's or something like that.
00:39:06.000Do you have a favorite tenet in Christianity?
00:39:08.000Well, I'll just start off by saying, to your point about how much of the Judeo-Christian ethic is baked into everything in the West, and it's almost like to attack it is to very attack the foundations of society itself.
00:39:26.000But I say probably my favorite tenet is you do unto others how you would want to be done unto yourself.
00:39:35.000I think that it speaks to the very crux of a human being in terms of the way you want to be treated, the way you want to see things happen in your own life.
00:39:42.000You give that to someone else and ultimately you'll create a society that wants to be lived in.
00:39:46.000And I think that idea is rooted in the belief there's something outside of you.
00:39:54.000That another person exists, they have inalienable rights, the same as I do.
00:39:59.000When you understand that, you try to do better by other people to the best of your abilities.
00:40:03.000But then I look at a lot of what's happening with Black Lives Matter and this activism as very narcissistic.
00:40:09.000Individuals who are going to smash up a window or set fire to a building or hurt someone because they don't care about what they're doing to others.
00:40:14.000They don't believe what you just said.
00:40:15.000Because you know for a fact that these people who are smashing windows would freak out and be angry if someone smashed their window.
00:40:21.000They don't want their windows smashed.
00:40:22.000It's almost like they don't care about what exists outside of them.
00:40:27.000And to the point is that I believe that those people can be reached with love.
00:40:33.000So it's almost as if the people who are out there to me who have been manipulated by media, manipulated by whoever's at the top that is trying to get these things done, manipulated by the Black Lives Matter organization, that those people if shown love can in a sense be redeemed in a sense of because we've been redeemed ourselves but ultimately that those people are not evil those people are not terrible people they're in a they're in a predicament of again being manipulated by the powers that be and ultimately take the Klansman for example that person
00:41:11.000You could say from the jump that he never hated black people, but he's been manipulated by the ideology.
00:41:16.000But because there was a black person that was willing to reach his hand across the aisle, he could wake up and see that there's a better way and see that he can ultimately love or like whatever a black person.
00:41:26.000I'm a little bit more pessimistic, but I ultimately agree with you.
00:41:30.000In the story about the Klan, there's another really crazy story in that we booked Daryl Davis to speak at an event in the Philly suburbs, South Jersey, and far-left activists threatened to burn the theater down.
00:41:43.000So the theater kicked us out, without question.
00:41:46.000We ended up having to find a new venue.
00:41:48.000The After Party was still in the same area, and these activists were outside protesting.
00:41:53.000And Daryl tried to go talk to them, and they wouldn't.
00:42:25.000But the argument we're getting is that these people, this Black Lives Matter, these leftists or whatever, feel like they're at war mentally.
00:42:32.000And when you're at war with someone, You may want to love them, but they're still going to kill you because you're at war.
00:42:38.000And if you can get one of those soldiers over to your side and then you're able to talk to them, they will convert.
00:42:43.000But during the war, love is not the tactic.
00:42:47.000And I don't know if that's true, but this is the argument that I've been getting.
00:43:09.000And I think Candace Owens herself even was on the left, you know, some time ago.
00:43:13.000And then people start to break through.
00:43:15.000They start to get access to information.
00:43:17.000I think a lot of what we hear about Christians, and maybe this is one that's always benefited me, is that going to Catholic school, When I see these narratives from the media about how Christians are manipulative, mentally deranged, or just mean, or nasty, or hypocrites, I'm like, you're not talking about any of the people I ever met or grew up with.
00:44:18.000So what should people look forward to?
00:44:19.000Anything else you want to mention before we bounce?
00:44:22.000I say just look forward to reading it.
00:44:24.000I think that the message of love, the message that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and ultimately to free ourselves, and even to the point you were talking about, and you were saying that like, In the midst of war, love is not something you lead with.
00:44:40.000And my mind automatically jumped back to Martin Luther King, right?
00:44:44.000He died for what he believed in, but I believe that he won because of what was able to transpire after that.
00:44:50.000And so it's ultimately that the truth is the reason why you treat someone with love is because you're aiming above them at not pleasing them, but pleasing God.
00:44:59.000And so for me in this, my rationale is I'm going to continue to communicate, talk, but share the love of God with people.
00:45:08.000And whatever happens in that process is the right thing for that time because love wins always.
00:45:15.000God's love wins always, in my opinion, because of what I've experienced in my own life and what's laid out in the book and just what I've seen and what has come after it.
00:45:24.000I want to say, I'll say one last thing.
00:45:26.000Bill Maher made a documentary, it was called Religulous.
00:45:29.000And the one thing he said, I think it was in this documentary, he said that people came to him and said, I'm going to pray for you.
00:45:35.000And he's, as atheists, they come and he said, thank you, that means a lot to me.
00:45:39.000Because he understands what it means to dedicate your energy and your thoughts in a positive way for someone you disagree with.
00:45:46.000So even though he doesn't believe the way they do, he knows they're trying really hard to help him and make his life better.
00:46:02.000And it's ultimately like, take a Bill Maher, in time of need, in time of death, in time of things like that, he may not pray, but the people around him that love him and care about him will pray, or they'll seek somebody to pray.
00:46:16.000And to me, it's the ultimate underlying truth in us that there is something greater than us.
00:46:34.000People might want to deny it, but it's true.
00:46:37.000It doesn't mean that you'll instantly believe the Bible is real.
00:46:40.000It means that when you're in that moment, where you're facing oblivion, you think, if there's someone or something or anybody listening, please help me.
00:46:50.000Yeah, it's that lack of control that people feel, and it's like when you realize you're really not in control of this world.
00:46:55.000We might feel like we are because we have money, but things can happen.
00:47:01.000I think the West has had so much control because of what it is that we founded on, that we've gotten to the place of the woke, feeling as if they can transcend that reality, and it's only going to crash and burn ultimately in time because That that reality is more real to me than reality itself that the bedrock of what it is that America has been founding on and Because we've got it so good.
00:47:26.000It's easy to turn around and say Biology doesn't exist and other things don't exist All right, let's wrap it up.
00:48:40.000We've not done anything like this before, but considering we're out here in Nashville, we've got, you know, you're here and able to make time for us, as well as we had Jonathan Isaacs, so we're all excited.
00:48:50.000And I'm just going to jump into this viral Twitter trend.
00:49:15.000So, like, being called a bad name is not actually a news event.
00:49:18.000What actually happened here is if you watch the entire clip, there's a kid who got up there and he started...
00:49:25.000By, you know, suggesting that he was a mathematician and a physicist, double major, and he'd won all these awards, and I congratulated him on that.
00:49:31.000And then he proceeded to spew a bunch of nonsense.
00:49:34.000And then when he was rebutted on his nonsense, like, he actually accused me of using the DSM-IV as opposed to the DSM-V, which wasn't true.
00:49:40.000He suggested that I use the language gender identity disorder as opposed to gender dysphoria.
00:49:45.000And when he had sort of run out of arguments, then he called me a bozo and then made a reference to that famous video from about a year and a half ago where I read the lyrics to Cardi B's WAP.
00:50:44.000So the day after the Twitter trend, I'm kind of happy because it's like three weeks until I trend again.
00:50:48.000But the way that it typically works is that there will be a good story that starts to get some traction about me on Twitter, and it won't trend.
00:50:54.000And then within 24 hours, Twitter will be trending me about something that is either unrelated or recasting the story.
00:50:59.000So yesterday, or earlier last week, when this video came out at the beginning, it already had a couple of million views.
00:51:07.000It was like a two-minute version that had a couple million views.
00:51:09.000I think now it has, you know, four million views online.
00:51:12.000And a lot of people are talking about it.
00:51:13.000And then they waited for about 24 hours for somebody to come up with like a 10-second version of the video with just this kid insulting me.
00:51:20.000And then they trended it with that video.
00:51:23.000Because the idea is that the story can never be that we had this exchange and this kid came off pretty badly.
00:51:28.000And if you watch the entire exchange, honestly, I feel bad for him.
00:51:57.000Those are the things I said back to him.
00:51:59.000And, you know, that sort of stuff is not a headline.
00:52:03.000They had to recraft, the entire media apparently, had to recraft the headline so that the big issue was that somebody said something nasty to me.
00:52:55.000The dude made no argument, as you stated.
00:52:58.000So I'm thinking, you know, why would he get up there and just insult you while he wants his friends to hear him?
00:53:03.000He wants to go home and high-five them.
00:53:06.000My concern is, does that convince people?
00:53:08.000Because I have a concern about the future of this country if there are voters convinced by what that guy did.
00:53:15.000First of all, it was funny when he got up and said, I'm a mathematician and a physicist, so I know I'm right, and then talks about mental health and biology, while criticizing you for not being a biologist, when neither is he, which you pointed out.
00:53:26.000I suppose my greater concern is, are we wasting our time trying to have logical arguments with people who are not interested in logical arguments?
00:54:24.000What am I supposed to say to that if somebody gets up and they insult my wife right or somebody gets up there?
00:54:27.000And they insult my sex life or something How am I supposed to come back at that as a sort of?
00:54:32.000Rational and polite human being the answer is you can't and if you go low then you're the person who's really the bad guy So it's a lose-lose.
00:54:39.000It's it's the reason why you know not all these debates are worth it, but I agree.
00:54:42.000I think it's a lose-lose no matter what.
00:54:45.000However, the way I typically respond is, I don't understand why you're being so mean to me.
00:54:51.000So I've actually, you know, I've gotten in Facebook arguments, and I'll always try to approach it reasonably, calmly, rationally.
00:54:59.000And if they immediately come back and say something nasty, I just say, I'm sorry, I don't understand why you're being so mean to me right now.
00:55:06.000But in the end, it doesn't matter because what's really happening on stage here is, The audience who agrees with a rational discussion of the ideas and real answers is looking for those, and the people who just want to hate because they're driven by emotion just want to see you be insulted, so whatever you say doesn't matter to them.
00:55:23.000Tell us why you have to be super careful in terms of who you actually engage with.
00:55:26.000So the nice thing about going to college is that you do get, you know, a lot of people from the other side of the aisle who engage, some of them in really good faith, and that's awesome when that happens.
00:55:38.000But it's also why when I decide who I'm going to talk to on the show, I tend to try to talk to people who I think, on any side of the political aisle, are actually going to have an honest conversation.
00:55:47.000So for example, I had on my show Ro Khanna recently, the California congressperson.
00:56:01.000Anybody who's willing to have a good, long-form discussion, Is great.
00:56:05.000The problem is that the way that everything is framed and the way that everybody is sort of exposed to this material is... Ben Shapiro debates X. Well, if you actually watch the conversations, it's usually not a debate.
00:56:15.000Usually it's a discussion and somebody kind of comes up short in the discussion.
00:56:18.000So it's not a debate where some... Even the Ben Shapiro destroys videos are typically not something where I'm being like an asshole to somebody.
00:56:23.000It really is much more... I make an argument, the other person doesn't have like a very good comeback and that's sort of the end of the conversation, but...
00:56:28.000Good example was you on Bill Maher with Malcolm Nance.
00:56:35.000And I'm watching that and I'm listening, then Malcolm Nance just immediately goes for the emotional attack.
00:56:41.000Yeah, I mean, that was kind of shocking to me, honestly.
00:56:43.000I mean, I was trying to be as polite as I could be.
00:56:46.000I really try to be polite in all these scenarios.
00:57:42.000Honestly, I just, you know, the way I describe it is like, I don't know, I complain on the internet to a camera, but apparently people, you know, like watching it.
00:57:48.000So I'll always just be like, dude, if you want to be the mean person in the room, that's fine.
00:57:54.000Cause I don't know how we convince people whose, whose intention is just to be mean to emotionally destroy the people that I'm looking for solutions.
00:58:01.000That kid seemed to be disappointed that he said, what, DSM IV and you were talking about the DSM V, and so he was humiliated and lashed out.
00:58:08.000And if you can say it seems like you're humiliated because you were wrong about the DSM IV thing, usually puts them in their place.
00:58:15.000Also, you just gotta take the humility when you do that.
00:58:18.000Being on stage and being a performer, let people rock you and breathe out your mouth, you know?
00:58:23.000Everybody's seen your debates, discussions.
00:58:25.000When you're wrong, you say you're wrong.
00:58:28.000I mean, I think I'm one of the only public figures in America where I have like a running list on our website of all the stupid and dumb things I've ever said in my entire career, like going all the way back.
00:58:36.000I've been writing columns, syndicated columns, since I was 17 years old.
00:58:39.000So I've been doing this for over two decades.
00:58:41.000And most of the dumb crap that I said was in the first, I would say, quarter of my career, like from the time I was 17 to the time that I was maybe 23, 24.
00:58:47.000And so I have a whole running list of every bad tweet that I think that's bad, and I'll say, like, that was a bad tweet, that was stupid, here's why I did it, here's why I was wrong.
00:58:56.000You try to be a reflective human being, because I think part of being a good human being is trying to be reflective, but when you're a public figure, you also have to balance that out with the fact that there are a lot of people who just want...
00:59:04.000You to be destroyed and so how do you take criticism?
00:59:07.000You have to have a filter system where people in good faith and come to you and say you did this wrong and you really
00:59:11.000Think about it, but then there are a lot of people who are just you know going on stage and calling you bozo
00:59:15.000And that's not a good faith criticism, and so at that point you just kind of have to be done
00:59:19.000I'll give you I'll give you an example on on our end. I don't we
00:59:22.000We've never done, for TimCast IRL, any digital debates or any conversations, because they're just not that good.
00:59:29.000You know, I went on Sunday Special with you, and it's kind of stunted in that you'll talk, then I gotta kind of wait, because we're not in the same room.
00:59:38.000So, there was a point where I tweeted out, we've tried to book big left personalities, because the door is always open, we want these conversations.
00:59:46.000Vosh, who many people don't like, has accepted on more than one occasion with a smile on his face.
00:59:51.000And he's had a lot of really creepy things that a lot of people call him out for.
00:59:55.000They're mad at us for platforming, but I'm like, bring him on, have him say it, and then we'll challenge him.
00:59:59.000And he's tried deflecting from these things.
01:00:01.000But there are a few personalities, I'll leave their names out of it, who publicly accept.
01:01:25.000I thought it was funny that Hassan appeared to be trying to snark David.
01:01:29.000David didn't seem to realize and then someone actually agreed with the true premise not thinking it was a joke.
01:01:36.000Hassan assumed that I took him seriously and then started disparaging me on Twitter.
01:01:41.000So I said, He said, I pretend to be a true progressive or that I'm an me and Dave Rubin and I are influential to people who claim to be true progressives.
01:01:51.000And I said, I never said I was a progressive.
01:01:54.000I say I'm a moderate with some left policies.
01:01:57.000He responds with, you're doing exactly what I'm making fun of you for.
01:02:00.000My immediate response is, you have an open invite to come on the show and say anything you want, unimpeded, and the immediate reaction is everyone saying, for one excuse or another, we won't do it, we can't do it, I'm not gonna do it.
01:02:13.000The first excuse he gave before was, oh, COVID, so we can't.
01:02:17.000He publicly said, I will come on your show, then privately says, oh no, COVID, I can't do it.
01:02:21.000This is the difficulty with trying to engage with these individuals, because I don't think they actually care about solution or logic-based solutions to our problems.
01:02:29.000I feel like they do what they accuse us of doing.
01:02:33.000Emotional arguments for the sake of making money.
01:02:36.000And I'm like, if that's the case, why is it that Ben Shapiro is the debate-me guy?
01:02:40.000Who's trying as hard as he can to have you come and explain all of your ideas and I'm sitting here saying I will literally pay for you and first-class five-star hotel so you can tell us your ideas, but it's constantly that side that says we won't do it.
01:02:53.000Yep, and I think that they also play this game where they act as though if you would like to have a conversation, they get to determine the format of the conversation.
01:03:00.000The format of the conversation does matter an awful lot.
01:03:01.000I mean, as you point out, there's a big difference between having somebody in person for something that you do versus doing something via Zoom.
01:03:08.000This actually is a pretty large-scale thing.
01:03:10.000It makes a big difference in terms of, are you having a conversation or are you having a debate?
01:03:14.000If it's a debate, is it something where there's a moderator or is there not a moderator?
01:03:17.000Is it going to be timed or is it not going to be timed?
01:03:18.000Because you actually prepare for these things differently.
01:03:20.000So for me, when I'm preparing for an actual debate, Then I actually do research into the person I'm debating.
01:03:25.000I try to look at everything that they've said.
01:03:26.000I try to see how they approach arguments so that I know exactly what I'm facing.
01:03:29.000I treat it like you would a prize fight because you sort of have to go in with that mentality.
01:03:33.000And then sometimes, you know, it gets pugnacious and sometimes it doesn't.
01:03:39.000But you have to know the format going in.
01:03:40.000And what I find very often is that there's a lot of sandbagging that goes on.
01:03:44.000And I really try not to sandbag people.
01:03:46.000When I have people on my show and I say it's just going to be a conversation, it really is just a conversation.
01:03:51.000I try to give them space to expand on what they're saying.
01:03:54.000And when I say it's a debate, it should be like a formal debate where there's an actual timer here with somebody with a clock and there's a moderator and somebody asking questions.
01:04:02.000But failing to distinguish between the two is one way of preventing those good conversations from happening.
01:04:06.000It's something I also see in the comedic world.
01:04:08.000I mean, there's this whole school of thought, mostly existing in the comedic left, Where it's the clown nose on, clown nose off routine and it's really obnoxious.
01:04:15.000It's the reason why I've said I won't do, you know, I've been invited on Trevor Noah before and I've said I won't do it unless it's live.
01:04:21.000I'm not going to do it taped because I know that you guys cut this stuff and I'm not going to be humiliated by the cuts that you make around a comedian whose job it is to just make funny faces in the camera.
01:04:29.000He's going to be better at that than I am.
01:04:30.000I'm never going to be as good at that as he is.
01:04:33.000If he wants to have like a political conversation, we can do that in long form.
01:04:36.000If he wants to just sit there and make faces at the camera, he's going to win.
01:04:38.000I mean, there's no way I can win because he's a comedian.
01:04:42.000The other thing, too, is if we're going to have a real discussion, a lot of people, well, I'll just point out, again, not saying certain names, but they do ambushes.
01:05:05.000Some people have said they're going to get help from the audience, and I'm like, let the audience help them all.
01:05:08.000The issue is when I have conversations, I did a conversation with David Pakman before and some other individuals, and the left calls them all debates.
01:05:47.000You know, this is not something where I feel I'm an expert in the subject.
01:05:50.000So when I'm on Joe Rogan and he's talking about legalization of marijuana, I'm like, well, he knows way more about this than I do, so I'm just going to let it go.
01:06:01.000If, however, I'm really deeply invested in a topic and I really feel like I've studied it, then I'll stick to the arguments.
01:06:05.000But the one thing that I won't do is pretend that I know something that I don't.
01:06:09.000So you'll see pretty frequently that in these scenarios, these debate or discussion scenarios, if somebody mentions a study and I don't know the study, I'll just say, I don't know that study.
01:06:17.000I'm happy to take a look at that study.
01:06:18.000I'll assume that what you're saying is true, assuming what you're saying is true, and then I'll ask a question.
01:06:23.000Just being in this space for a long time, one of the things that you learn, again, it goes back to sort of the ego problem.
01:06:29.000If you say that you know something that you don't, you're going to get caught with your pants down.
01:06:33.000That's just the way it's going to work.
01:06:34.000Do you find that if you're really emotionally invested in something that it's easier for someone to twist you, twist your ego in an argument?
01:06:51.000I mean, that's really why people try to throw you off your game by doing that sort of stuff.
01:06:55.000And it's also why there are certain topics I...
01:06:57.000Frankly, I don't enjoy debating very much because I feel like I have to make a conscious effort to separate myself off enough emotionally from the topic that I can have a good back-and-forth conversation without getting angry or upset.
01:07:09.000And that's where the good conversations happen.
01:07:11.000Do you remember the reality has a liberal bias?
01:07:14.000That statement, I think it was Stephen Colbert who said it.
01:07:19.000Because he was pretending to be a conservative.
01:07:21.000You know, I think about this and it's fascinating because I grew up watching Jon Stewart, I watched Colbert, I watched Bill Maher, and today I would say reality has a conservative bias.
01:07:31.000It's not so much that it's conservative values, but for whatever reason, The reason why I'm called conservative has more to do with what I view as true and correct, as opposed to what policies I align with, or whether I'm more progressive or traditional.
01:07:46.000So I can come out and be like, actually, you know, I lean slightly left on a lot of these issues, but more libertarian, so it's a very difficult position to maintain, to be completely honest.
01:08:00.000Tulsi Gabbard can come out and say she wants gun control, she wants to ban nuclear power, and that it was wrong to strike Syria with missiles.
01:08:07.000She's a Putin asset, she's right-wing, she's conservative.
01:08:10.000So when I hear someone like Hassan, for instance, say, Tim Pool, you're a right-winger and you know it.
01:08:15.000I'm like, that doesn't mean anything, dude, because I know right-winger is just, what news do you believe?
01:08:20.000But the issue I see with this that makes it very difficult for me looking at the state of this country and moving forward is, how many stories have to come out that are proven false
01:08:30.000before any one of these people is going to be like, okay, maybe I should listen to Ben Shapiro or Tim Pool or
01:08:35.000Seamus or Ian and hear what they have to say about these ideas because I've
01:08:38.000insulted them and now it turns out that story I believed was false.
01:08:41.000Yeah, well, and it's not even just about listening to us.
01:08:43.000It's just about not listening to CNN anymore.
01:08:46.000I don't know, like you said, I don't know how many things they have to get wrong
01:08:48.000before people are willing to say, okay, I'm not necessarily going to move over to the right,
01:08:51.000but maybe I should stop getting information from people who have, A, repeatedly lied to me,
01:08:55.000B, never apologized for lying to me, and C, never faced any consequences when they did.
01:09:19.000And you're expected to say it publicly.
01:09:21.000And this is a litmus test as to whether you're a good person or not.
01:09:23.000And so the question is, do you want to be accepted in the proper social circles?
01:09:26.000If you're accepted in the proper social circles, this means that you think that Tim Poole is bad, or you think that he's a right-winger, or you think that Ben Shapiro's a rabid right-winger who's intolerant of other people's opinions.
01:09:35.000These are things that you're expected to say and believe if you wish to be accepted in certain social circles.
01:09:40.000The pronouns test is there for a reason.
01:09:44.000The reason that people are putting their pronouns in their Twitter profiles is not because people have doubts about 98% of the population whether they identify as male or female.
01:09:52.000Because again, 98% of the population identifies as either male or female.
01:09:56.000It's there when a clearly male person puts he him in his profile.
01:10:00.000That's there to say I'm part of your group.
01:10:02.000I'm part of your in-group and I wish to be accepted in your in-group.
01:10:05.000Because what other reason would there be for that?
01:10:07.000They say that it's all about acceptance and making people feel accepted.
01:10:35.000I think it was Nate Silver, or it might have been Ezra Klein, one of the two, said they wouldn't even give Trump one good day when he took out the leader of ISIS.
01:10:43.000Just one thing we can all be like, yeah, that dude was a monster.
01:11:16.000In a public school on the south side of Chicago, 6th, 7th, 8th grade, and even high school, many of us don't even know our teacher's... I can't tell you my teacher's first names.
01:12:03.000And the Wall Street Journal wrote, their editorial board wrote about this poll that came out showing that even among Democrats, I think it's 59% of Democrats, support Florida's parental rights and education bill.
01:12:14.000I don't know where they expect to go with this politically, but clearly something is wrong in these schools that goes beyond left or right.
01:12:23.000But I suppose to wrap this together, you're right-wing if you just say, hey, maybe strangers shouldn't talk to my kids about this.
01:12:28.000That's a conservative position, I guess.
01:12:30.000Yeah, I mean, I've never seen anything quite as politically inept as trying to turn parents into a voting bloc.
01:12:47.000It wasn't like we are actively targeting parents and saying that parents are indoctrinating their kids, we have to counter-indoctrinate their kids so that we can make sure that these are tolerant and diverse little people who accept and approve of our ways of life.
01:12:58.000If you're seeking approval from a child, you're doing it all wrong.
01:13:00.000I mean, the entire idea of being a parent, I have three kids,
01:13:03.000the entire idea of being a parent is that kids are small monsters
01:13:05.000and then you civilize them over the course of time.
01:13:07.000I mean, they're very cute, they're very innocent, and they're also monsters.
01:13:11.000They're like the worst people ever, who are also incredibly cute and wonderful.
01:13:14.000They demand things from you all the time.
01:13:18.000And your job is to civilize them and to make them better people over the course of time.
01:13:21.000Instead, we as a society are now a bunch of adults who are acting like children, and they expect the children to validate their points of view.
01:13:28.000I mean, what you're saying is entirely correct.
01:13:30.000I mean, I went to school in Los Angeles.
01:13:32.000I was in public school for, I would say, about half of my education.
01:13:37.000So I was in public school for elementary and then part of middle school.
01:13:40.000And, same thing, I mean, I don't remember learning about the private lives of my teachers.
01:13:44.000I'm sure I had teachers who were gay, there's one in particular who I'm sure was a gay man, and that never came up in class, because why would it?
01:13:51.000And by the way, if he had put a picture of him and his husband on his desk, and then somebody had asked about it, then the proper response would be, you should go talk to your parents about this, it's a controversial social issue, go home, talk to your parents about it, it really isn't my place to say, I'm a social studies teacher, I'm a history teacher, I'm a math teacher.
01:14:06.000I have no idea why any of this is remotely controversial, except that the left believes that they have to cram down their point of view on everyone.
01:14:14.000And so if you're going to be imperialistic about my kids, you can't expect me to sit there and just take that.
01:14:18.000I think it has a lot to do with that when it comes to the birth rate, conservatives have more kids, liberals don't.
01:14:24.000And this means in 20 years, conservatives are going to keep gaining more political power while the left loses it.
01:14:29.000But I wanted to ask you, when you were growing up, you were religious.
01:14:34.000We became fully religious at about 11.
01:14:47.000What do you think it is about you that led you to be successful?
01:14:51.000So, I think that, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm, thank God, I'm a pretty smart guy.
01:14:58.000I was able to skip third and ninth, so I graduated high school when I was 16, graduated UCLA at 20, graduated Harvard Law at 23, but I think that one of the best lessons I ever learned is I was coming from So I was in public school until I was in fourth grade, then I went to private school for a couple of grades, and then I was back in public school.
01:15:14.000When I went to public school, the public school I went to was a magnet, and you had to take an IQ test to get into the magnet.
01:15:19.000It was the highly gifted program at Walter Reed.
01:15:22.000And so they gave you a basic IQ test, and you had to get above a certain score, which is pretty high, in order to get in.
01:15:40.000And the thing that I noticed is that what my dad said to me is, listen, in most rooms that you walk into, in virtually every room, just assume, when you walk into a room, you're not going to be the smartest guy in the room.
01:15:51.000But you can be the hardest working guy in the room.
01:15:53.000And so, that turned out to be a very good lesson.
01:15:56.000I look back at the people I went to Walter Reed with, and I don't know how many of them are successful.
01:15:59.000I don't know how many of them have built things.
01:16:02.000One of the things that happens when you're very smart, I think, is that you tend to think that things are going to come easily to you.
01:16:07.000And it's very easy to fall into this pattern of taking things for granted.
01:16:10.000For me, that was really never an issue.
01:16:46.000They said, man, you're the perfect example of what's wrong with this country.
01:16:49.000You know, you're smart, you're hardworking, but look, you come from a mixed race background and you come from the South Side of Chicago.
01:16:55.000It proves there's something wrong with this country where good, smart people should be succeeding and they're not.
01:17:00.000And then a month later, I got featured in Time Magazine for my hard work, and they said, he's a white kid who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
01:17:09.000I started posting, saying, whoa, yeah, white privilege.
01:17:11.000All of a sudden, my family history, all of the stuff I had talked to them about in agreement with on, I wouldn't call it left-wing politics at this point, I'd say populism.
01:17:20.000Like, hey, the financial crash led to a whole bunch of faulty spending, corrupt deals.
01:17:33.000I mean, they retcon people's paths on a routine basis.
01:17:35.000So, I mean, for me, if you search about my background online, what you'll see is that I grew up, people on the left say this all the time, I grew up in a wealthy home.
01:17:44.000Like, I'm not, I never think, by the way, that if you were born poor and then you made it, this makes you better morally than somebody who was born rich.
01:17:50.000I know people who were born poor who are jerks, and people who were born rich who are jerks, and that there's, you know, All that money does is make you more of who you are.
01:17:57.000So if you're a nice person and you make a lot of money, you tend to be nicer because you have a lot of money and you can spend the money.
01:18:01.000And if you're a jerk and you make a lot of money, you're even more of a jerk because now you've been liberated to be a jerk.
01:18:06.000But, you know, I grew up in a two-bedroom home, 1,100 square feet, in Burbank, California, with three sisters.
01:18:12.000Until the time I was 11, I shared a bedroom with all three of my siblings, right?
01:18:14.000It was my parents in one bedroom, and us in the other bedroom, and one bathroom for six people.
01:18:28.000Because I had the ultimate privilege, which I had two committed parents who were there for me, making sure that we were working hard every day, and making sure that we were taken care of.
01:18:34.000And that's the only privilege that I think really matters in American life.
01:18:37.000This is what the stats show, by the way, also.
01:18:38.000You got two parents, and the parents are there, and they're taking care of you.
01:18:52.000The issue is that the left skews the idea of privilege into things that are somewhat meaningless.
01:18:58.000Well, things that don't require anything of them, right?
01:19:00.000Because if I acknowledge that there's some sort of privilege in being from a two-parent home, then I'm now taking upon myself the moral obligation to ensure that if I do have children, that I stay with the person who I have that child with, so that I'm not depriving them of their potential.
01:19:12.000But they don't want to control themselves sexually, so they'll never acknowledge that.
01:19:15.000What was it like when you were 11, you mentioned it twice already, that you became religious?
01:19:19.000And you said, did you move out of your... Yeah, so when you become religious in the Orthodox community, what that means is that you have to move within walking distance of the synagogue.
01:19:27.000So when you become Orthodox, we'd been living not in walking distance of the synagogue, we would drive our car to the, near the Orthodox synagogue, and then you're not supposed to drive, so we'd park about a mile away, and then we'd walk, so as not to, you know, make people feel uncomfortable, that we were driving to synagogue, essentially.
01:19:41.000And then we moved into a neighborhood where we were within a walking radius of a synagogue.
01:19:46.000But yeah, it was, you know, it didn't, I thought it was, honestly, I thought it was great.
01:19:50.000I love living in the Orthodox community.
01:19:52.000I think community is massively important.
01:19:53.000I think it's the main thing that's been lost in American life.
01:19:58.000Has destroyed a lot of the feeling of local community.
01:20:00.000The ties that I have with my neighbors and the community where I live, it's one of the most important things in my life.
01:20:05.000It's one of the most important things for my kids.
01:20:06.000And I'm very fearful of the destruction of local institutions on behalf of national and international institutions that are seeking to dissolve the societal bonds that actually matter the most.
01:20:16.000The stuff you care about is the stuff with your neighbors, not the stuff, you know, that you do on Facebook with some moron.
01:20:21.000About how much time do you think you have left?
01:21:27.000If we think ahead and we build the system so that we're taking just enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and producing just enough to keep the trees healthy, then we'll be living in symbiosis.
01:21:35.000But if we're reckless, we may end up That's really cool.
01:21:37.000I mean, the one thing that I think about human beings, and this is what I said in that little kind of snippet, is that we are very good at adaptation and very bad at controlling ourselves.
01:21:45.000So basically, when forced to by circumstance, necessity being the mother of invention, we will make moves to preserve our own lives, right?
01:21:51.000We will, if the tides start to rise, we will move.
01:21:55.000If the temperature starts to get warmer, we'll figure out air conditioning.
01:21:59.000We've been doing this for a very, very long time.
01:22:01.000And human beings are, there's a reason why we, who do not have claws and are less muscular
01:22:06.000than other species, why we have adapted to the point where there are seven,
01:22:43.000And what that means is as things get worse in one area, we're able to adapt and we're able to change.
01:22:48.000And all of these scientific models that basically say hundreds of millions will die.
01:22:52.000You're assuming that basically people who are living on the coast in Florida today are going to be living on that exact same coastline in a hundred years.
01:22:59.000I'll tell you how we know that everybody is going to adapt.
01:23:01.000The reason we know this is because all the same liberals who are deeply concerned about global warming are buying coastal real estate for tens of millions of dollars.
01:23:08.000If they really thought that in 20, 30 years, all that stuff was going to be underwater, why would they be spending... I mean, that's one of the memes that they use about me online, right?
01:23:14.000They say that if you think that your house is going to be underwater, you're going to sell it.
01:23:18.000And people are like, who are you going to sell it to?
01:23:20.000Well, the answer is apparently a bunch of left-wing liberals who are buying all of the coastal real estate for $30 million.
01:23:27.000What we're looking at right here is Martha's Vineyard.
01:23:30.000As you may know, Barack Obama purchased a, I believe it was a $12 million property in Martha's Vineyard, just near the Edgar Town Great Pond.
01:23:41.000Let me show you what happens when we use the NOAA.gov website to raise the water level by two feet.
01:23:49.000Okay, we've got a floodplain now in these areas, and this means you can see that the water level is starting to rise and erase some of the ground.
01:23:58.000It is already affecting Barack Obama's property.
01:24:55.000The answer is that human beings are going to do what we've always done, which is why New Orleans is still there, right?
01:24:59.000So after the levees broke, after Katrina, and it flooded New Orleans and 10,000 people died, they rebuilt all of the levees and they shorted up the levees.
01:25:06.000And then last year, there was a massive hurricane that went directly through the same area and pretty much nobody died because it turns out that they didn't build the levees crappy this time.
01:25:47.000Firstly, I had to do my Dave Rubin impression in front of Dave Rubin, and then I had to do my Jordan Peterson impression in front of Jordan Peterson.
01:25:57.000It's not always a comfortable experience.
01:25:58.000I appreciate that the man's back against the car, but come on, would you do an impression of Summer back in front of me?