In this episode, we talk about a new report from The Intercept and a new piece from the New York Times, and we're joined by freelance journalist Zed Jilani to talk about it and much, much more.
00:00:24.000And I think we knew that because there was a study that came out in 2017, Dr. Rand Paul actually held, I think he quoted it, when he was questioning Fauci.
00:00:34.000And in this scientific study, they say they received funding from the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance, and that in this study, they actually made chimeric viruses, which is basically gain-of-function, but Dr. Fauci pushed back saying, up and down the chain, it was determined this was not gain-of-function research.
00:00:50.000Well, as much as most people believe that he was... Well, I shouldn't say most, but a lot of people believe that he was lying.
00:00:55.000We now have this report from The Intercept, which also published 900 pages.
00:01:00.000And we now have a professor from Rutgers saying, outright, this shows they were doing what is defined by the federal government as gain-of-function research.
00:01:07.000There's the grant application, there's the progress reports.
00:02:13.000I was a reporter back at ThinkProgress back when it still existed at Center for American Progress.
00:02:17.000And I contribute to a range of publications, The Washington Examiner, Tablet Magazine.
00:02:23.000Basically, if you read it, I've probably written something at some point there, written in The Atlantic recently, did a mini-documentary for Fox News over the summer.
00:02:31.000So, yeah, in a way I'm prolific, I guess, but I just kind of, you know, I want to go out there and explain the world, I want to figure things out together.
00:02:38.000That's interesting that you worked for ThinkProgress, Alternate, The Intercept, all particularly left or establishment publications, and then you're like, I also did something for Fox News over the summer.
00:02:47.000You know, I think back in the day, you could, and it wasn't really that big of a deal.
00:02:52.000But in this past decade, it's been getting worse and worse to where it's like you're on one side or the other.
00:02:58.000But I do think it's interesting that you having worked at those places, I'm sure many of our viewers are not fans of, but Glenn Greenwald is, you know, citing you on Twitter saying, you're a journalist, Rachel Maddow's a crackpot.
00:03:08.000And I think, you know, that speaks, that says a lot.
00:03:11.000So it'll be interesting to talk about this report from The Intercept and the history of these organizations, I think, or at least the recent history.
00:03:17.000And we'll get into like this shift in culture.
00:03:20.000You know, we have another story from the ACLU.
00:03:23.000The ACLU, what, only a couple years ago was it?
00:03:25.000it? They were saying vaccine passports are bad and wrong.
00:03:31.000I think it was in 2008 or 2009, basically saying that in
00:03:34.000pandemics, government shouldn't be violating civil liberties.
00:03:37.000Right. They need to focus on education, on public health.
00:03:39.000They don't need to focus on criminalization or, you know,
00:03:42.000measures that we would at that time anyway, consider
00:03:44.000authoritarian. But yeah, they've done a total about face basically
00:03:48.000in the past year where they've embraced both mask mandates in
00:03:50.000schools and also vaccine mandates in other contexts.
00:03:53.000One of the articles that I think Glenn posted is from 2020, where
00:03:57.000they were like, PACs passports Now they have an op-ed in the New York Times saying, yes, passports are good and not a violation of your civil liberties.
00:04:04.000These organizations have lost the plot.
00:04:06.000But I really want to talk about a lot of that stuff.
00:04:36.000We're hiring as many as we can as fast as we can, but it's not easy to vet people and make sure that, you know, they're going to do good work.
00:04:43.000But we are actually in the process of formalizing our nonprofit as well, which is going to do fact checking for us and many other organizations.
00:04:50.000And we're also going to issue ratings.
00:04:53.000But generally, you know, If you're a member, you will support our journalism.
00:04:57.000You'll get access to members-only segments, but we're also going to be launching a fact-checking outlet that's going to provide ratings to other news outlets based on a random sampling of recent articles they publish and whether or not they violate any journalistic ethics, and then you'll get a score of, like, x out of 100 articles were considered ethical by SPJ standards.
00:05:15.000And then we'll break down our reasoning, link to the stories.
00:05:19.000With your support, we can do more stuff like that.
00:05:21.000So, like this video, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends.
00:05:25.000Let's talk about this first big story because this is really, really fascinating.
00:05:28.000We've got from TimCast.com, over 900 pages of coronavirus research info at Chinese Lab released following a FOIA lawsuit.
00:05:36.000Documents regarding the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology are now public.
00:05:40.000The 900 pages of documents were obtained by The Intercept through ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation against the National Institutes of Health.
00:05:47.000The collection includes specific information regarding EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization, and its use of federal funding to research bat coronaviruses.
00:05:57.000The outlet also received two grant proposals funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
00:06:04.000Gary Ruskin, Executive Director of the U.S.
00:06:06.000Right to Know, said this is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic.
00:06:12.000But instead of taking it from TimPS.com, or, I mean, with all due respect, this is information coming from The Intercept, who did the work on this one, my respect, we have this statement.
00:06:21.000from Richard H. Ebright, verified on Twitter, so you know he's legit,
00:06:25.000board of governors, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers. He cites the articles
00:06:31.000and then some quotes from the article and then says, the materials show the 2014 and 2019 NIH
00:06:37.000grants to eco-health with subcontracts to the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded gain-of-function
00:06:43.000research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014 and 2017 and potential pandemic pathogen
00:06:50.000enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017 to present.
00:06:55.000He says, this has been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant, but this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and full proposals of the 2017 grant.
00:07:13.000And he ends by saying this, because we don't get to read through everything, but it is particularly damning.
00:07:18.000The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are untruthful.
00:07:34.000To put it very simply, he is saying Fauci lied, Francis Collins lied, and now, I think most of us realized this, but, uh, well, now we have the documents.
00:07:44.000What I think is particularly fascinating is the intercept of all places that published this.
00:07:49.000And so, for what it's worth, we'll kick it off with something I saw from Glenn Greenwald.
00:07:54.000He said, if he was going to make a bet, it was that they were trying to actually defend Fauci.
00:08:00.000And they may have accidentally just proven he lied.
00:08:04.000I don't know what your thoughts on this matter, Zed.
00:08:09.000Yeah, I mean, I can only speculate about why they did it, because I wasn't in touch with any of these reporters.
00:08:14.000I still know some people over there, but I wasn't in touch with any of the reporters who did this story.
00:08:18.000I do think, though, that if that's what they were trying to do, you know, it speaks well to them that they would publish anyway.
00:08:22.000I think we need more of that in journalism, is that you have a certain worldview, or you have a certain hypothesis about the world.
00:08:28.000You go out there, you look for evidence, and maybe what you find disproves that, but you publish it anyway.
00:08:31.000I mean, that's what they do in science.
00:08:33.000It's what scientists are supposed to do.
00:08:34.000It's what the peer review process and the journal process is all about.
00:08:37.000And so I think if that is what Glenn is saying is true, it would actually speak well of the
00:08:41.000Intercept, that they decided to publish something that goes against their worldview, which unfortunately
00:08:44.000I think is something that you see less and less of in a lot of these outlets these days.
00:09:13.000And it's even, I would say, I would even argue it's fine to have journalists who have that particular perspective and are going to go at it from that point of view, but it becomes a real problem when so much of the journalistic world has converted itself into activism because you're not getting people who are just calling balls and strikes, and you're not getting people who are willing, who have the resources and the prestige and credibility to go out and find the facts, who will actually be able to report them even if they go against those preconceived notions or worldviews.
00:09:35.000It's kind of a damning... It's kind of a condemnation of activism.
00:09:40.000The idea that activists who are supposedly fighting for something good are lying to you.
00:09:46.000Maybe propaganda is a better word for it.
00:09:48.000You know, I'd like to imagine that as an activist, if you come across information that disproves what you're trying to push, you'd be like, oh, I was wrong about that.
00:09:56.000I once did fundraising for an environmental non-profit.
00:09:59.000They gave us information on Deepwater Horizon.
00:10:02.000They sent us out to the streets to go ask people for money because they're like, we want to raise awareness, like literally on the ground telling people there's an oil spill.
00:10:08.000And then I was reading what they had given us in terms of, you know, their script and everything.
00:10:13.000And then some guy stops and said, you're lying.
00:10:24.000If we're not out here to tell the truth, to tell people there's a problem and we're misinforming them, why would I do this?
00:10:29.000And so I was like, nah, sorry, I'm out.
00:10:32.000Yeah, I mean, I think that when you have activists, you have advocates, yeah, generally speaking, it would be frowned upon just be outright making things up or lying.
00:10:40.000But I do think they tend to just by the nature of their job, they tend to skew the truth or they tend to arrange facts in a certain way.
00:10:46.000I mean, I wouldn't expect like the NRA to start saying, OK, well, here's all the flaws with having liberal gun policy or like letting everybody own a gun.
00:10:53.000And I wouldn't expect the Brady control to be saying, here's 10 reasons why you might want to
00:10:56.000own a gun for self-defense, right? Like we all anticipate that. But what happens when you start
00:11:00.000seeing like CNN or the Associated Press taking more strident ideological or partisan positions
00:11:06.000and they start being the ones who won't be telling you both sides of the story? I think that is when
00:11:09.000it really gets dangerous for a democracy. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:11:13.000And let's throw it back to these fact checks on this reporting.
00:11:16.000When Rand Paul was clashing with Dr. Fauci, the craziest thing to me is that Rand is literally like, here's a study.
00:11:22.000It says something like, rich gene pool, bat coronavirus or whatever.
00:11:25.000And he's like, it says in the study that you were making chimeric viruses, you were increasing infectivity, and this was funded by you.
00:11:58.000Many left or liberal establishment outlets started saying, Fauci owns Rand Paul.
00:12:03.000And they were highlighting a lot of things like Fauci saying, you have no idea what you're talking about, instead of actually the merit of this research study.
00:12:11.000The craziest thing was how Reddit, which is like, just bots basically.
00:12:15.000Reddit is a bunch of bots who just pump stories to push propaganda.
00:12:18.000And there were still people breaking through being like, I'm confused why we're mad at Rand Paul here.
00:12:36.000BuzzFeed's done similar things where they publish good stories.
00:12:40.000But what do we say about all these outlets that dismiss the story as fake news, as they've been doing with basically everything, like Hunter Biden's son?
00:12:47.000What does that say about journalism today?
00:12:49.000Yeah, and I think this is a big theme of a lot of our recent posts at inquiremore.com, which is a sub stack that we run, which is that I think that a lot of journalists now, they're having to choose between two missions.
00:13:02.000One mission is basically the traditional journalism, going out, discovering things about the world, describing it as the facts as they see them.
00:13:11.000The other one is to promote a certain worldview, to promote a certain set of values, right?
00:13:15.000And so I think that if something like a virus has become politicized, which it has been in the United States, there's actually like a red position, a blue position, a Democratic position, a Republican position, everything COVID-related now, unfortunately, more so here in this country than anywhere else in the world, I'd say also, which is an unfortunate aspect of it.
00:13:31.000Now that you have journalists who kind of adopted this sort of post-journalism mindset, which is basically an advocacy or activist mindset, I think they see their goal and their role as basically debunking or disproving whatever this quote-unquote Republican position on coronavirus is.
00:13:46.000We saw this earlier in the pandemic when they were all making fun of the idea that a lab leak may have been responsible for the pandemic.
00:13:52.000Now, we don't know where coronavirus or COVID-19 came from.
00:13:58.000But they were so quick to dismiss this theory and now you know even the by the ministration's keeping an
00:14:06.000open mind about even they have, have not reached a firm conclusion on whether or not that's true with the might of
00:14:17.000adopt hard positions Rather than keeping an open mind, rather than being curious and actually working to discover the world and report out the facts, you do get things like a Rand Paul being mocked and made fun of because they made up their minds before that hearing ever happened.
00:14:17.000you know I have more than a dozen intelligence agencies looking at it so I think that when you have journalists
00:14:30.000They were going to be against Rand Paul.
00:14:31.000They were going to poke holes in Rand Paul's argument.
00:14:33.000They weren't going to do it in Fauci's arguments.
00:14:36.000And that prevents them from actually being able to do what was done in this case with the hundreds of pages of documents that were obtained through the FOIA by the Intercept was to actually go and look at the facts and see what happened.
00:14:47.000Literally see what happened and tell people what happened and don't have an opinion about it.
00:14:50.000Don't tell people how they should feel, but literally give them the information that any reasonable person would need to know how to think about this problem or how to think about the actual origins of this virus.
00:15:00.000There is still a challenge with this report, and that's who was chosen by the outlet as an expert.
00:15:06.000And so we're sitting here being like, wow, you know, this professor at Rutgers has said these things that are untruthful.
00:15:14.000And of course, there's confirmation bias there.
00:15:16.000There have been several instances where we have seen experts chosen because their expert opinion might fit a specific narrative.
00:15:23.000Now, this one's interesting because The Intercept had no reason to choose a professor who would actually say, you know, Fauci lied.
00:15:28.000So, in fact, I have reason to believe this is likely the case, likely true.
00:15:32.000If you've, like, you see this all the time, where they'll be like, you know, a feminist professor agrees with us that feminism is good, and I'm like, yeah, okay, well, that's obvious, isn't it?
00:15:42.000Or, you know, this critical race theorist proponent is considered an expert on this release of documents, and they're gonna say something positive.
00:15:49.000But when you see a left or right-wing outlet Actually saying, hey, the other side's actually right on this one, or here's evidence to suggest.
00:15:56.000I'm like, that's probably when it's true.
00:15:58.000Like, it's so glaringly true, this story, that even the intercept had to be like...
00:16:21.000Because I guess we don't have accountability in this country.
00:16:24.000But I will say, you know, when you're talking about journalism, I don't know what happened, but maybe journalists didn't do enough to inspire the true tenets of journalism in the younger generation, or the activists got in the colleges and turned J-school into activism indoctrination camp or something.
00:16:44.000Look, I think part of this wasn't, you know, I was working at ThinkProgress, which was like a left-leaning blog in 2009, which is part of a left-leaning think tank, and I think a big part of it was that we had a frustration always that we felt like the news would be reporting two sides.
00:16:59.000You know, if side A says something, side B says something.
00:17:01.000I know side B totally lied, but the news didn't really call them on it.
00:17:04.000The news just kind of weighed them equally and, you know, they call that false equivalence and so on and so forth.
00:17:08.000And there were times, I think, when news outlets were doing that and they were getting stories very wrong just because they weren't actually investigating what was true, because they were trying to provide balance to the story.
00:17:17.000But I think they overcorrected for a lot of that by basically saying that we're basically now offering a justification for being openly biased.
00:17:27.000There's no point to go to them and get comment from them.
00:17:29.000There's no point to go and even investigate whether what they said is true.
00:17:32.000They're clearly wrong, just as most of the press said that it was clearly wrong that there was a lab leak that resulted in COVID-19, which is a conclusion now that even the intelligence community says is actually possible.
00:17:42.000They don't have a firm conviction on it.
00:17:44.000So I think that, one, there was an overcorrection, and two, I think that it's just a reality that A lot of the younger generation tends to be left-leaning, and I think that those are the sorts of people that tend to go into these industries or these fields.
00:17:57.000If you go to your average publication, even if it's something very mainstream like ABC News or CNN, I will tell you like 9 out of 10 people who work there vote for Democrats, you know, or they're left-leaning or they're liberals.
00:18:07.000And I think that just having that level of, like, you know, cloistered communities of people makes it much easier to just become very biased and not have anyone call you on it, not have anyone push back, and not have anyone at least provide a dissenting opinion.
00:18:21.000Even if, like, I would say 60% of journalists were left-leaning or liberals, it'd probably still be okay because you'd still have enough, like, conservative-leaning people around or people who have an open mind towards that point of view to say, hey, you need to consider X, Y, or Z, or we need to go and interview one additional person here to provide that alternative point of view.
00:18:37.000But I think when it's so overwhelming in a lot of these institutions and institutions that feed journalism, you know, for instance, I wrote a report actually for The Intercept a few years ago about how the majority of editors and reporters at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both came from a small sliver of elite colleges.
00:18:54.000Like, and we're talking about, I don't know, how many colleges, it was probably under 30 or something, like, They come from a very tiny slice, a tiny educational and cultural segment of the United States, and I think when you're so close, when you're so segregated from the rest of the country, it becomes much easier to develop groupthink, it becomes much easier to avoid any kind of dissenting opinion, or at least one person in the room is going to stand up and say, hey, we need to consider this other side of this, we need to report the other side of it, because otherwise we're not telling the whole story, because
00:19:21.000I think a lot of these journalists honestly do think they're telling the entire story.
00:19:24.000They think what they're saying is completely uncontroversial, and you have to be kind of nuts to disagree.
00:19:38.000Like, I think a lot of them are evil, right?
00:19:40.000And I'll break that down because evil is not a light word to throw around.
00:19:43.000I mean, they actively understand they're omitting information.
00:19:47.000like the daily beast for instance like the daily beast is just notorious there's no way some of these articles that come out you're going to tell me this guy believes he's telling the truth because some of these things that are said are so absurd on their face you're like how is that even no but they'll write it they'll publish it because their lawyers tell them like yeah you'll be safe on that one when you see when you see these publications Putting out things that are just so over-the-top, you're like, how could that possibly be true?
00:20:15.000I don't think they think they're telling the truth.
00:20:19.000Well, I think that there's probably two things happening simultaneously.
00:20:22.000One, I think a lot of these news outlets have shifted to basically subscriber kind of You know, this is a subscriber business model because the advertising business model was being basically dominated by a few digital firms like Google and Facebook, and so they wanted subscribers.
00:20:35.000New York Times shifted heavily towards subscribers after Trump was elected.
00:20:38.000So one, they have a financial incentive to cater to a certain worldview and a certain type of person.
00:20:44.000That person is not going to complain that much if they get stories wrong, as long as those stories have the right sort of like, you know, oh, you smeared a Republican?
00:21:28.000So, like, they see themselves as part of an ideological battle.
00:21:30.000And as long as they're on the right side of that, even if they're not being 100 percent fair, honest journalists, they still see themselves as morally justified.
00:21:37.000I think that's why they don't see themselves as evil, right?
00:21:40.000So here's where I fall with the whole ivermectin thing.
00:21:43.000There's conflicting studies, data's inconclusive, FDA has not authorized or approved its use pertaining to COVID.
00:21:50.000But the World Health Organization says that it's an essential medicine, that it's used for treating river blindness, that it's basically eradicating this one parasite.
00:21:57.000And there are people who are doing... I think people who are eating horse based are absolutely wrong to do it.
00:22:03.000We know they're doing it because we had Dr. Chris Martinson come on this show and say that people were going to Tractor Supply and doing it.
00:22:18.000Because there's Tractor Supply's horse dewormer, and then there's going to Walgreens to pick up your prescription your doctor told you to get.
00:22:24.000Now it's getting so over the top that there's apparently reports that certain pharmacies won't even fill prescriptions.
00:22:29.000Like, yo, pharmacist, you don't know what the prescription's for.
00:22:32.000If a doctor prescribes it, just say okay, you're not the doctor.
00:22:36.000But that's the problem of hyperpolarization that we're seeing.
00:22:39.000But we'll jump to this story because we have an actual pretty good example.
00:22:43.000Oh, I'm so happy to be using this source.
00:23:23.000A rare thing that used to happen all the time, but now arrives roughly every 18 months, like a solar eclipse.
00:23:28.000Glenn Greenwald has posted something factually correct and only minimally annoying.
00:23:33.000Specifically, yesterday he tweeted about the Rachel Maddow show.
00:23:36.000Rachel Maddow tweeted, quote, Patients overdosing on Ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals' ambulances, quote.
00:23:43.000The scariest one I've heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss, he said.
00:23:49.000Glenn Greenwald says Rolling Stone has now issued a second update that effectively retracts its false story that gunshot victims are waiting in ER rooms in Oklahoma due to overflow from Ivermectin poisoning.
00:24:02.000Yet Maddow still has her tweet up from four days ago promoting it, With no subsequent note.
00:24:08.000Last week, the MSNBC pundit boosted a hoax story on ivermectin overdoses, joining a slew of liberal media outlets in mindlessly digesting the disputed news in another stern missive about COVID-related disinformation.
00:24:20.000In her rush to warn viewers of the dangers of misinformation, she did not have time to fact-check.
00:24:42.000He wasn't saying that all of these hospitals were overflowing the beds, he's saying there were some times that there were some congestion, and some of it was because one guy may have taken too much Ivermectin.
00:24:52.000They ended up issuing the Northeastern Health System, Sequoia, ended up issuing a statement saying the guy doesn't work for us.
00:24:58.000We have not treated anybody for Ivermectin.
00:26:07.000Now, I don't know exactly what's happening after the fact.
00:26:09.000They're saying people get vision loss, and there's some crazy stories, but I gotta tell you, it's really hard to believe some of the over-the-top stories because of how much the media's lied, how much we've heard from, like, lying nurses.
00:26:18.000There was one nurse who was like, someone came in, held my hand, and said, I wish I had been vaccinated before they passed, and had to tell his family, and then someone looked up that there was, like, no one in these age groups who had died in these hospitals.
00:26:30.000Like, a lot of these stories are completely exaggerated.
00:26:33.000The problem is, we got two things going on.
00:26:36.000The media is going completely over the top calling all Ivermectin horse dewormer, like when Joe Rogan says he's taking it, clearly it came from a doctor.
00:26:43.000And they're conflating that with people eating horse paste.
00:26:46.000So then you get people on one side who are like, I tell you this, there are people who just adamantly believe Ivermectin is, is, is a gift, that it's great, and it, and there's, there's, we have, we don't really have great conclusive, we don't have good conclusive data on this right now.
00:26:59.000We've got some studies, some promising studies, some inconclusive studies, and a whole lot of me being like, yo, if I'm gonna be honest with you, I honestly don't know.
00:27:06.000Brad Weinstein can say one thing that's fine, but we just don't know.
00:27:10.000And so ultimately what ends up happening is you've got something that's not FDA approved, not FDA authorized.
00:27:16.000And there's a lot of arguments about why that is or isn't, but ultimately I just I defer to the slew of studies that have conflicting information.
00:27:22.000And then you get the culture war in this.
00:27:25.000Saying people who believe in Ivermectin saying the media is lying, therefore it must be true.
00:27:28.000People on the left saying Ivermectin is horse dewormer and mocking everybody, ignoring the actual nuance of the whole situation.
00:27:37.000And then YouTube banning people who dare talk about it.
00:27:39.000So at this point, I'm just basically like, yo, I don't even care anymore.
00:27:42.000Like YouTube has gone so off the rails.
00:27:44.000They gave Crowder a strike for citing the CDC.
00:27:48.000I don't know how we navigate this other than just talking about it and just saying what, you know, what we think.
00:27:52.000I mean, this Oklahoma story in particular, because we just wrote a post about that at the Substack on Enquirer, and...
00:27:58.000You know, when you just get the details of the story, like if you read the five-sentence summary of it, it doesn't sound believable, right?
00:28:07.000Rural Oklahoma is being overwhelmed with gunshot victims, and those victims cannot get into the hospitals because so many people are taking this ivermectin, which is a drug that honestly most people probably have never even heard of.
00:28:19.000I mean, unless you're really plugged in and following all this, you've probably never heard of it.
00:28:23.000And yet this story, not only did it get tweeted by Rachel Maddow, it got featured on Joy Reid's MSNBC show, The Rolling Stone, Insider.
00:28:30.000It was all over the place, like it was all over the world.
00:29:03.000And the sheriff in Sequoia County in Oklahoma told me, no, it's a ridiculous story.
00:29:08.000We've only had, we've had one shooting victim who died this year and we had one other gunshot victim who went to the hospital and he's treated and he's fine.
00:29:14.000So literally, you know, there's two people who are shot this entire year in this county.
00:29:18.000They're not overflowing gunshot victims.
00:29:20.000And yet, why was the media running this story?
00:29:22.000Because it confirmed a bunch of biases.
00:29:24.000You know, you got the yokel, the rednecks all shooting each other with their guns, with their guns.
00:29:29.000And they're all eating horse face because they're really stupid.
00:29:37.000So, Zed, this must have been an extremely rigorous investigation.
00:29:43.000You must have put a $200,000 budget behind this.
00:29:46.000I mean, how much time did it take you to pick up your phone and press a few digits?
00:29:50.000It probably took me, you know, between all the emails and calls, probably took me half an hour to figure this out, right?
00:29:56.000As a freelancer writing on my sub stack with one other friend who kind of looks over my stuff, right?
00:30:00.000I don't have the resources of MSNBC or Rolling Stone or Insider or all the places that ran this story.
00:30:06.000But what I do have is this idea that journalists should tell the truth and get the facts.
00:30:10.000And that even if people shouldn't be taking ivermectin unless it's prescribed by their doctor, and it's going to be prescribed for things besides COVID because it hasn't been approved for COVID, we shouldn't lie about what ivermectin is and what it's doing.
00:30:21.000I think our top, our utmost, look, I think there's a lot of journalists who think if tomorrow they told people that you would explode if you took ivermectin, they would do it.
00:30:45.000But you have to understand why they think this is justified.
00:30:48.000They think because they have this overall activist goal of not having people take this drug, because overall they think the drug is harmful for you.
00:30:54.000So because of that, fudging facts are not quite getting it right.
00:30:57.000It morally pales in comparison, you know, to what might actually happen in their minds if people take the drug.
00:31:03.000So to them, the telos, or the goal of truth, has been supplanted by this larger moral goal of taking the correct position on COVID, taking the correct position on Ivermectin and this exact bug of post journalism is
00:31:15.000narrative journalism has infected so many different parts of the media industry right now to
00:31:20.000Where I think we're gonna continue to see stories like this over and over and over
00:31:23.000Because again a lot of journalists they don't care about telling the whole truth about something
00:31:28.000They just want to tell you enough information to achieve whatever goal there
00:31:31.000There they want and that's not very different from what the NRA or the Brady campaign do when they're arguing about gun
00:31:38.000Let me pull up this tweet. I was just digging around for So this guy tweets today. I learned Ivermectin apparently
00:31:46.000Sterilizes the majority 85% of men that take it Now this guy's not a journalist, he's an activist.
00:31:51.000And there are a bunch of activists pushing this out, and I don't see journalists pushing this narrative out.
00:31:57.000But it goes to show you the gradient between activist and journalist and how news organizations have become activists, but they still won't go too far.
00:32:06.000So there is a study that I think looked at 385 people in Nigeria and then they reduced it down to like 37 people and then tracked their sperm counts.
00:32:19.000It turns out that nine of those people, I guess, or whatever the number was, were unaffected or something.
00:32:24.000So the overwhelming majority—or maybe—I don't—nine is maybe the wrong number.
00:32:52.000The lie that they are pushing is not about ivermectin and sterilizing people.
00:32:59.000If what they're claiming is true, It would mean that the World Health Organization has been administering millions of doses of a drug sterilizing black men in Africa.
00:33:10.000Now that is an insane proposition, which I think is over the top.
00:33:14.000The World Health Organization has ivermectin on its list of essential medications for curing river blindness.
00:33:21.00099%, because I looked this up, I went to the World Health Organization, 99% of river, it's Ancoker, how do you, Ancoker, I can't say it.
00:33:34.000Anyway, 99% are in impoverished African communities.
00:33:40.000That's where they're saying we need to be giving ivermectin specifically for this parasite.
00:33:43.000Now, if it was true that there was a study showing it was sterilizing these people, what do you think these people would start doing?
00:33:50.000I mean, I'm sorry, if it was true, I mean, it's a horrifying prospect about what these people think the World Health Organization is doing, which they're not doing.
00:33:58.000Tons of people were like, rest assured, these people are having healthy families and babies, this is a lie.
00:34:25.000Because when Ebola, when Ebola broke out, there were, so I know journalists who went and covered Ebola.
00:34:32.000They, they went on the ground in some of these villages.
00:34:35.000And people would break out of quarantine because they thought the doctors coming to treat them were actually hurting them.
00:34:41.000And they were all superstitious, and they believed that you could transfer the curse and things like that.
00:34:46.000If you have impoverished and uneducated villages, and we are desperately trying to help cure their ailments and educate them and teach them, what happens when these activists start pumping out insane lies?
00:34:58.000When they're saying that ivermectin's a horse dewormer, all of those lies from the media are going to be scaring people who are already worried about being manipulated.
00:35:08.000You've already got Joe Biden talking about the Tuskegee experiments, branded Tuskegee Airmen, You know, but you get the point.
00:35:15.000And by the way, like the New York Times had an article about the percentage of young African Americans in New York City who have been vaccinated.
00:35:22.000I think it's something like 27 percent or something when they wrote it.
00:35:24.000It's probably gotten higher since then.
00:35:26.000But they interviewed some people and some people were saying, you know, why am I scared of code?
00:35:29.000I'm way more scared of getting shot by the police.
00:35:33.000You know, the news media spent, you know, 18 months or so, or I don't know how long, but around that, probably longer if you count back out to 2014 or Ferguson, telling people to be scared to death of getting shot by the cops, particularly if you're African-American.
00:35:46.000Now you have people going around and just random people every interview on the street saying, no, I'm way more scared of being shot by the cops than I am by COVID.
00:35:51.000You know, like 700,000 people in the United States have been killed by COVID-19, right?
00:35:56.000Around a thousand people a year are shot and killed by police officers.
00:35:59.000I mean, it's very easy math to say that COVID is much, much bigger risk.
00:36:03.000But I think if you went back to these journalists who promoted a lot of the police shooting stories and asked them, well, why didn't you at least put some statistical context in there?
00:36:11.000They'd probably say, are you minimizing the shooting of black men by police officers?
00:36:15.000I'm like, no, I just want you to report the truth.
00:36:17.000I want you to report the totality, the context, the statistical data that would let people know what the actual risk looks like for them, because it has a real practical meaning to people's lives.
00:36:28.000Yeah, one of the things that we've talked about quite a bit is that you've got kids growing up with Facebook being inundated with nothing but videos of police brutality and then genuinely believing that cops are doing this every day, they're actively seeking people out.
00:36:41.000I mean, we've heard BLM activists say like, oh, they're hunting us down.
00:36:45.000And that's just not true, but I don't think it's as activist-y.
00:36:50.000Maybe it's activists who are watch- Imagine you're 10 years old, you're inundated by nothing but these videos, and now you're 18, 20, you're in college, you get out, you go get a job at, you know, Vox or whatever, and you believe it, so you start writing it.
00:37:03.000But I do think there's a lot of people, when they give you their excuses and their justifications, it's because they're grifters.
00:37:08.000It's because they're like, dude, I got two million clicks on that.
00:38:13.000Like, oh, I'm maybe 70% sure about this thing, but I can change it to 50% if someone gives me
00:38:19.000some new information, some new evidence, because it really is about tying up with your ego.
00:38:22.000And I think you're exactly right, that when we have response systems now,
00:38:27.000or like gamified, you know, we have a gamified world where you're given a certain amount of like,
00:38:31.000you know, happy feelings from taking a certain position, from making a certain stance,
00:38:37.000from describing the world in a certain way.
00:38:39.000You don't want to lose those feelings by saying, maybe I was wrong, maybe I should change my mind about this, maybe it's a little bit different.
00:38:44.000We've set up incentive systems that make us behave in really anti-social and anti-intellectual ways.
00:38:49.000And I think your practice that you just described is very healthy.
00:38:52.000It's like you're setting up a new incentive system for yourself.
00:38:54.000You're saying, actually, my viewers really appreciate it when I admit that maybe I was wrong about something, or maybe it's a little bit different than I thought before.
00:39:01.000My opinions change, um, not all the time, but periodically.
00:39:06.000Like, uh, you know, fairly absolute on 2A.
00:39:11.000You know, I used to be like, well, there's got to be some things we can do.
00:39:13.000We need to have conversations that's urban versus rural.
00:39:15.000And now I'm at this point where I'm like, nah, everybody gets guns.
00:39:17.000Government should be giving guns away for free.
00:39:56.000But he said the left demands universal health care, the right doesn't demand universal gun access.
00:40:02.000But I will say the real argument is, where are the Republicans coming out and demanding a repeal of the National Firearms Act?
00:40:08.000Where are the conservatives coming out and saying, we don't want the government to do things, we want to reduce... They don't do that.
00:40:13.000So you end up with the left constantly demanding things and taking it, and the right doing a whole lot of just saying stop.
00:40:19.000Yeah, I mean I've written a couple pieces actually for the Washington Examiner, which is like a DC-based magazine
00:40:24.000That's right-leaning is like kind of center right or right of center
00:40:27.000About sort of the debates within the conservative movement about where their governing philosophy should be going in
00:40:33.000the next few years And I think for many years the conservative movement has
00:40:36.000basically been tantamount in many ways to the libertarian movement, right?
00:40:40.000Their general philosophy is government should take their hands off stuff, we should spend less money, we should have less regulations, and we should just embrace personal responsibility and individual freedom.
00:40:50.000I think there is a rethink happening about that in many parts of the right right now.
00:40:54.000It's not a dominant philosophy, it's not something you'd see McCarthy's and McConnell's of the world embracing, but I do think you're seeing some people in the Senate and the House and a lot of people on the intellectual right starting to say, hey look, we can't really respond to the collapse of the family by just talking about another tax cut, right?
00:41:09.000Like, you know, it's not that you should never cut taxes, you should never deregulate anything, but there has to be kind of a broader kind of social and political and economic agenda than I think just the libertarian mottos.
00:41:19.000And it's really interesting and kind of what you just said about guns because I think One way that gun policy may be different in some parts of the world is that gun ownership in a place like Switzerland, right?
00:41:32.000It's not super unusual to have training for your firearm, to have a firearm.
00:41:37.000They often keep them locked up or they keep the ammunition separate or something, but they don't necessarily see it as antagonistic to gun rights to have the government involved in it at some level.
00:41:48.000Whereas here in the U.S., the debate's very polarized.
00:41:49.000There's some people who just absolutely hate guns and don't think anyone should own one, and then there's other people who just, you know, they think everyone and their mom and their baby should own a gun, but like, they aren't necessarily saying, okay, the government should put together, you know, a really cool training course and give it to kids when they hit high school in this rural area where a lot of people own guns and, like, actually get, you know, get people's buy-in and confidence and get, like, people who are not gun enthusiasts thinking, okay, there's a way we can use these things safely, and there's a way we can make sure people have access to them, and good training, and so on and so forth.
00:42:20.000Yeah, the gun thing, I think, is one of the most glaring examples of the media lying, or having no idea what they're talking about.
00:42:29.000And so, like, very early on in the gun debate, I just would do basic research as a journalist, and I started to learn more and more and more about how, you know, wrong the media was.
00:42:39.000Constantly saying things that make no sense, advocating for the ban of things that don't do anything.
00:42:43.000Uh, the example I love to give is that in Maryland, the M1A is banned as an assault weapon, but the SCAR-20S is not.
00:42:51.000And for people who know anything about guns, you'd probably be like, that's a weird thing to do because the M1A is, it's a great weapon, but the SCAR-20S is more customizable, adaptable, easier in a lot of ways, I suppose, but just more modern and better.
00:43:06.000And I guess depending on who you ask, some people might like the M1A.
00:43:08.000But the fact of the matter is, this is what you get from media disinformation.
00:43:12.000You get policies that make no sense, and you get the escalation and the indoctrination.
00:43:17.000So actually, taxes are a really great idea.
00:43:25.000We were having a conversation a while ago, and you were like, initially, the income tax
00:43:29.000was going to be like, it was only for the rich, and it was only supposed to be like
00:43:35.000And they were like, it's just the rich, it won't affect you.
00:43:38.000And now here we are, with like 35 to 45% total taxes, not just income tax.
00:43:45.000Like I think they say the average person will pay 45% of their income in taxes when it comes to sales tax, property tax, you know, gas taxes, whatever, food, sales, all that stuff.
00:44:25.000Yeah, I mean, one of the issues where this headed up was school shootings, right?
00:44:31.000I think we had some very high-profile school shootings in the United States coming by in the 1990s in Newtown and Parkland.
00:44:39.000It's really shocked a lot of people's conscience.
00:44:41.000It was heavily covered in the media, and I think it produced a policy response that was He was very well intended.
00:44:46.000I think people were legitimately scared for their children, but now I looked it up and like a majority of states, I think around a majority or at least half, actually require students in schools to do school shooting drills.
00:44:56.000Like, off the top of your head, do you know how many students die every year in a school shooting?
00:45:06.000It must be 70-75 million, something like that, under 18.
00:45:10.000So, you know, school shootings, of course, are tragic, but what's the impact of having, you know, tens of millions of kids, you know, hiding in the hallways, on their desks, being in kind of a war posture, right, within their schools?
00:45:22.000Even Everytown, which is one of the gun control groups, did some studies on this and found that it increased anxiety, increased depression, and now they're advocating for reform, saying we shouldn't be doing, you know, all these all the time.
00:45:31.000Because I think it was a knee-jerk reaction to a highly charged issue, and I think that we've seen a lot of that during COVID-19 as well, which is where people... I think, you know, one of the phrases that comes to mind is, um, better safe than sorry, right?
00:45:45.000You know, you can't over-protect someone.
00:45:46.000But what I always say is, like, If you're overprotecting people from one thing, you could be underprotecting them from another thing, right?
00:45:53.000If we install all these measures on children against something which they almost completely unlikely they'll ever face it, we may be underprotecting them against things like anxiety, depression, you know, long-term kind of suicidal tendencies, all kinds of cognitive distortions about fear of things that really they shouldn't be all that afraid of.
00:46:10.000If you think entirely about protecting a population from one thing, You can underestimate the risk from all sorts of other things and I think reframing it that way might be one way for us to be able to to rethink some of these like overreactions to some of these threats that we we face historically.
00:46:26.000There's like a matrix kind of red pill blue pill phenomenon I'm seeing from this that's causing I'll just call it societal collapse and what I mean to say is When you're inundated by a certain subject matter, school shootings, police brutality, whatever, on social media, and then the algorithm keeps feeding you that content, and then you come to perceive that as the only existence, as the real world, you're basically in this matrix.
00:46:56.000Being fed these stories, you'll immediately become an advocate, saying like, we have to stop this!
00:47:00.000And you'll start giving your energy and power to politicians who don't actually care to solve any problems, just exploit your fears.
00:47:06.000And then there are people who are sort of awakened to this, right?
00:47:10.000So the blue pill, red pill, you're in, and I hate the political red pill, blue pill thing, but I mean quite literally like, There's an algorithm at play on social media, crafting a world for people that makes no sense.
00:47:23.000Because they click on police brutality and the algorithm says, let's give them more of that.
00:47:27.000It's good for business for the company that they're on the website more, so let's do more algorithmic content feeding.
00:47:32.000And then there are people who are just like, I'm sick of the algorithms.
00:47:38.000And then they break out of that system and say, hey, wait a minute, something's not right here.
00:47:43.000Now the problem is we're having this conversation about the rarity of school shootings, the rarity of unarmed black men being killed by police.
00:47:51.000Both circumstances are extremely awful and shouldn't happen, and we should do what we can to make sure they don't happen, but extremely rare.
00:47:58.000So for us to put, you know, 70-something million kids through school shooting trainings, Because you said, what did you say, 10 will die?
00:48:17.000The people who live in the Matrix, in this algorithm, you know, or this media narrative or clickbait, ragebait, grifter, whatever, start voting for policies based on a fake worldview that was fed to them to make money.
00:48:29.000That's why I think it's gotten so substantially worse to the point where it's like, you know We feel like we're at each other's throats.
00:48:34.000There's there was literally a shootout this past weekend One of the guys probably got shot in the they were shooting at him and he got he took a bone leg It was uh, I don't know if he was a proud boy.
00:48:45.000It was the guy tiny I thought he was Patriot prayer But people are saying proud boy and there was a shootout a couple weeks ago and in Portland as well where thankfully nobody got hurt but what happens is you have people and Who will vote?
00:49:00.000And it's not just like you live in a matrix where there is an overseer keeping you in the matrix, like people believe if they saw the movie.
00:49:08.000The people who are running the matrix live in it too.
00:49:10.000The people who are taking the blue pill, who believe that it's a pandemic of police officers going around hunting down black people, they run for office based on that, and then try and pass laws based on that.
00:49:25.000You try and tell them it's not real, and they'll snap at you.
00:49:27.000They'll call you a Nazi, a fascist, all right.
00:49:58.000It's more conservative than what the European health agencies are talking about, or most of the Australian districts.
00:50:04.000And, you know, to buttress my argument, I just put out a basic graph from the CDC showing that child mortality, child deaths from COVID-19 are very, very small.
00:50:15.000They've generally been the same throughout the pandemic.
00:50:17.000And, you know, the instantaneous response you get to that is that you're minimizing the deaths of children, right?
00:50:22.000Literally posted the facts straight from the CDC, showing the context of this.
00:50:27.000And I think that, you know, part of it is that I think once you've adopted the activist mindset or the moralizing mindset, you have one goal in mind.
00:50:34.000That goal, of course, is protecting children from COVID-19.
00:50:38.000But at the same time, when you're not getting the whole picture, you're not looking at all the other possible ramifications of keeping kids in this crisis mode for basically forever, and you're not considering the points of view of other people in the world who are not doing that.
00:50:49.000You know, in British schools, they're not doing that.
00:50:51.000In Australian schools, they're not doing that.
00:50:52.000They're using largely rapid testing, social distancing, some vaccinations at the higher level, like 16 and 17 year olds maybe are getting vaccinations, but they're not having toddlers running around in masks for the most part.
00:51:03.000And UK's had the Delta variant. They've had this experience, they've
00:51:07.000seen this movie, and yet they're not doing it.
00:51:10.000I think we're not really giving any weight to their concerns because we fixate so much on one
00:51:14.000problem, and that I think is really, you know, not only is it corrupting journalism, it's corrupting
00:51:19.000society because I think we need to be well-rounded people, right? A bird can't fly with just one wing.
00:51:23.000You got to have two wings, right? You got to be able to understand things from more than one point
00:51:26.000of view, and you have to be able to look at more than one problem in society because I think we've
00:51:30.000created a lot of problems for ourselves by not doing that.
00:51:33.000I think things like certain kinds of over-parenting, certain kinds of over-scheduling children.
00:51:39.000You know, I talk to kids these days about, like, what they do.
00:51:41.000I do some community work with children, and I talk to, like, some kids about, you know, what's their summer like?
00:51:46.000And they're saying, oh, you know, I go to band camp, then I'm at, you know, algebra class, and blah blah blah.
00:52:04.000But we have to be able to look at both sides of it.
00:52:06.000Otherwise, we're only seeing half the world.
00:52:07.000And we could be missing a lot of threats to our children if we continue to address, or threats to anyone else, if we continue to address social problems in that way.
00:52:16.000You know, the difficulty is the hysteria.
00:52:19.000There's money to be made for the media.
00:52:21.000When, you know, a shooting happens, the media says, this is big, run it.
00:52:25.000Look at, I don't know if you saw the Project Veritas expose where they had the CNN guy being like, you know, we just run the COVID death tracker because it plays well.
00:52:34.000You know, it's like it was gangbusters for the ratings.
00:52:37.000That's what they're thinking about, and it drives panic.
00:52:44.000If you're in a fire, the last thing you wanna do is panic.
00:52:46.000You wanna be calm, rational, be like, okay, here's what I gotta do, here's how I gotta feel the door, I'm gonna get down, get under the smoke, all that stuff.
00:52:52.000Instead, the media just screams in everyone's faces at the top of their lungs, screaming, panic!
00:52:57.000And then people panic, and then they click more, and then they get more, you know, they make more money, they make more ads, they get more subscriptions.
00:53:03.000And it all ends up, you know, going into every facet of society.
00:53:33.000But that kind of evolutionary response or instinct is only useful in some select circumstances where you're really seeing a direct threat in front of you.
00:53:40.000Complex social problems really never really benefit from panicking.
00:53:45.000And if you think about who we think of as the great leaders throughout history, whether they're generals or theologians or activists or so on and so forth, they generally had a calm, thoughtful, reasoned response to the social problems they were dealing with.
00:53:59.000We admire the SCLC and SNCC and King's movement.
00:54:05.000If you actually look at some of the old photos, and I think it actually still exists, the Highlander Center in Tennessee where they were training civil rights activists, they would have people sitting at like a lunch counter, a mock lunch counter.
00:54:20.000I'm going to keep on the course of action, right?
00:54:23.000Those are the modes of thinking or the temperament that you have to adopt when you're dealing with really complex, high-pressure problems at times.
00:54:30.000And I think treating everything like it's, you know, the bear just walked into your camp and you better dart leads you astray a lot of the time.
00:54:38.000And unfortunately, I think that we have so much technology and so much of the commercial products that we use today are basically based on using that kind of response because that's what they want to bring out of you because that's what will make them money.
00:54:51.000Yeah, well, I don't know how you break that, right?
00:54:53.000I guess that's a problem of the free market, right?
00:54:57.000That this system in place makes money, so it is being incentivized.
00:55:02.000You know, I'll go back to what I was saying about the algorithms feeding kids, this endless stream of police brutality stuff.
00:55:20.000So, over the course of six months, the Real News website does decently, and the Grifter outrage site makes tons of money, and then the investors come in and say, Oh, that one makes money.
00:55:36.000And now we've built this massive ecosystem of, hey, we make money when we just tell people what they want to hear instead of informing them of the truth.
00:55:45.000It's not only that they make money doing that, I mean, well, it's not only that it generates money,
00:55:49.000generates revenue, but it's also very quick and easy to do.
00:55:52.000Think about how many articles you read that's like, you know, three people tweeted something.
00:55:56.000It's mildly offensive, but by the time you figure, by the time you get through the article, it's
00:56:01.000going to be super offensive. It's going to be like the worst thing in the world to you. It's
00:56:16.000It's extremely easy, and I think that's part of why it's profitable, because I do think that well-produced, good journalism does get a lot of viewers and readers.
00:56:24.000I think people enjoy it and appreciate it, but it's also more expensive to do, right?
00:56:27.000Which is a challenge, I think, for a lot of people who are producing it and investing in it.
00:56:31.000Unfortunately, I think that's also created a situation where, like, a lot of good media isn't necessarily profitable.
00:56:37.000We are kind of, like, at the behest of, like, philanthropists and billionaires who want to spend money promoting something like Pierre Omidyar did with The Intercept or like Peter Thiel is doing with some, like, alternative video platforms or things like that.
00:56:52.000There was an episode of Joe Rogan's show he did, and I think it may have been with Matt Taibbi, I'm not sure, where they mentioned, like, anybody who goes for legit journalism right now is probably gonna make a killing, you know?
00:57:04.000And we're already seeing it with all these different substacks popping up.
00:57:07.000I mean, Glenn Greenwald, you have a substack, Michael Tracy, for instance, Matt Taibbi.
00:57:11.000And apparently they're doing really... Barry Weiss.
00:57:13.000They're all doing really, really well.
00:57:15.000I mean, TimCast.com is doing really, really well.
00:57:19.000I will say, there's always a challenge in trying to figure out if you're actually doing the right job, or if you're just, you know, partisan.
00:57:26.000But I think it's fair to point out, yeah, the establishment is just pushing narratives, many of these outlets just want to stick to their worldview.
00:57:36.000And if their audience is trapped in a whirlpool of fake news garbage and hating someone else, siding with the audience isn't the right thing you want to do.
00:57:47.000So interestingly, you mentioned these articles where it's like they'll grab a few tweets and then post an article being like, you know, so-and-so said this.
00:57:53.000We've actually talked about this at TimCast.com because we've had a few articles where it's like so-and-so was criticized and then we show some tweets and I'm like, we won't do that.
00:58:01.000And I was like, hey, let's talk about this is this is it might be newsworthy to be fair.
00:58:05.000It might be because if like a congressperson makes an official statement about a specific policy that starts a feud or something, and then it's just you're pulling tweets that may be something people want to know about.
00:58:16.000If we see one of these Twitter spats, we're not just going to pull up someone on the right who's saying, you know, F you.
00:58:22.000I want to see what the left, you know, prominent personalities are saying, and the right, and then we want to actually break down the fact check of who's right and who's wrong.
00:58:30.000You had to actually do some journalism there, but that's the way it should be.
00:58:33.000Conversations are happening on Twitter, very important ones.
00:58:35.000It's kind of silly in some ways, but if a congressperson is debating another congressperson, I think, you know, we want to talk about that.
00:58:42.000Look, I think part of it also is just, like, awareness.
00:58:44.000I think we were... I did some work earlier this year for a guy named Justin Rosenstein.
00:58:48.000He was an early Google and Facebook guy.
00:58:52.000He made, like, I don't know, he's like probably a billionaire worth of his Asana stock and Facebook.
00:58:58.000And his conclusion was that he created all these technologies to help people cooperate with each other and work together as teams.
00:59:04.000But they all kind of went awry and everyone hates each other.
00:59:06.000There's a lot of division and everything.
00:59:07.000So basically he's giving away a ton of money through philanthropy and grant making because he feels guilty about all this.
00:59:14.000I think that, you know, he started this company with... he started these companies with, like, good intentions.
00:59:19.000Like, he was one of the founders of, like, the Facebook like button.
00:59:23.000And, like, I think that they actively debated whether or not to make a dislike button, but they were like, we're not going to do that because it'll be negative.
00:59:29.000People will get fighting and all that stuff.
00:59:31.000But it ended up... Facebook like ended up, like, being pretty bad anyway because people are using it to share content.
00:59:35.000This is like dissing someone or attacking some out group or something.
00:59:39.000But I think that You know, there are large social and cultural changes that happen once you're aware that something is a problem, and I don't think that we looked at, you know, the YouTubes and the social medias of the world and sort of the echo chambers, hyperpolarization, all this as a problem until very recently.
00:59:56.000I think even if you go back to like 2009, 2010, 2011, we were talking about how these things were great.
01:00:00.000We were all communicating with each other.
01:00:02.000They were helping Democrats in elections, so Democrats liked them versus how they felt about Trump using it in 2006, 15, 16.
01:00:10.000Or him using Twitter But I think now that we have the awareness of the problem.
01:00:14.000I kind of feel like the solutions will bubble up as After the awareness is built because I think that's what's happened with other technologies that ended up being harmful for us I think everything from we have much safer cars now with seatbelts and airbags To where we have a dramatic decline in smoking in the United States right smoking was an addictive product it was flying off the shelves making people at Altria and so on and so forth and tons and tons of money.
01:00:37.000But I think once we recognize that it was a problem, start educating people about it,
01:00:41.000creating some alternatives, some minor regulations, I think we actually moved in a healthier direction.
01:00:45.000And I think something similar will happen with social media and a lot of what online, you know,
01:00:51.000monopolization has done to journalism.
01:00:53.000And part of that, I think, is antitrust, like getting very serious about the fact
01:00:57.000that these companies basically are the new standard oil, they are the new railroads,
01:01:02.000and that creating alternatives to them and creating healthier modes and models
01:01:05.000is very, very difficult while they have such high market share.
01:01:08.000And I think more Democrats and Republicans, in the Congress you have David Cicilline, who's the head of the relevant committee in Congress on antitrust, and Ken Buck, who's the ranking Republican, actually agreeing on a lot of the core antitrust issues with a lot of these big companies.
01:01:23.000It was funny that like I think a third of the Republicans in the Senate voted for Lena Kahn to join the the FTC who's a very progressive person who in many ways has talked about breaking up companies like Amazon or turning them into public utilities or having utility regulation instead.
01:01:37.000So I think that we're seeing much more agreement that these things are a problem and some agreement on solutions.
01:01:43.000Now does that mean I think that a year or two from now we're gonna have an entirely different Online and social media environment, which I think ultimately would impact the media environment, no.
01:01:51.000But I do think over the long term, having that awareness and having that recognition is the first step towards creating something better.
01:02:14.000So if we're talking about censorship and you have this major shift where all of a sudden the more establishment, I mean like the neocons and the democrats are basically in favor of massive multinational corporations curtailing speech, I don't see us fixing that because that directly impacts who gets elected in the first place.
01:02:33.000When Jack Dorsey can ban negative news about Hunter Biden, well then Hunter Biden's dad gets elected.
01:02:41.000And depending on what you believe, I mean, there was a survey from Rasmussen which found that if people had been informed, because people didn't know about this, when they learned that Hunter Biden had done these things with Joe and these shady business deals, they would not have voted for him.
01:02:53.000The margin was massive, or large enough to actually question, you know, it was like 10% of people said they wouldn't have voted for Biden had they known the truth.
01:03:00.000Well, we know that Facebook and Twitter suppress negative news about a Democratic candidate.
01:03:06.000That being the case, why would any Democrat ever give in to any kind of legislative reform over these companies?
01:03:17.000I don't think it'll solve the problem, though.
01:03:18.000What people need to understand about Facebook and Google is that antitrust makes sense simply because we're not... You know, some people say, oh, but, you know, who wants to use a bunch of different video platforms?
01:03:58.000In the past, you would find someone to record your music, you'd find someone to distribute your music, and then you would find people to promote your music on the radio.
01:04:22.000YouTube, you no longer can do the ads.
01:04:24.000We're breaking this up into different companies.
01:04:27.000And then all of a sudden you'd see way more competition and ad rates.
01:04:29.000Probably ad rates would improve dramatically for a lot of people.
01:04:32.000You would then get people at YouTube basically being like, you know, this would be interesting because there would have to be individual deals with your channel and YouTube as to how revenue is generated.
01:04:47.000It may actually even destroy YouTube because I don't know if YouTube is possible, if YouTube can even function without subsidy from Google in the first place.
01:04:54.000But if that's the case, there's a lot of questions we have to ask about major companies making tons of money doing one thing, subsidizing and cutting everyone else from the market by dumping money into another thing, right?
01:05:09.000I won't name the big chain of coffee houses, of coffee shops, just for legal reasons, but I've heard these stories from local mom-and-pop cafes, where a big chain shop opens up next door and sells coffee at ridiculous prices.
01:05:26.000Because they're well-funded by a massive conglomerate, they can sell at a loss.
01:05:31.000It chokes out the mom-and-pop shop because now all of a sudden you've got people like, why spend five bucks on my cappuccino when ChainStore has it for three bucks?
01:05:39.000Then once mom-and-pop goes out of business, ChainStore jacks the prices back up and now owns 100% of that market share.
01:05:58.000Google just dumps money into these things.
01:06:00.000So Facebook, for instance, is the same thing, right?
01:06:01.000Facebook is a social network as well as advertising sales and promotion, marketing, all of these things.
01:06:08.000I think we could look at that and find a way to break it apart.
01:06:11.000Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of this is going to depend on the right, because I do think that the tech companies had the mindset that you were describing, that if they aggressively basically took the positions and the stances that the Democrats wanted in the 2020 election, it would avoid regulation from the Democrats when they took power.
01:06:28.000It's not necessarily a super safe bet because the Democrats have their own grievances against tech, right?
01:06:32.000A lot of them think that tech doesn't censor enough, right?
01:06:35.000And the Republicans think maybe it censors too much.
01:06:38.000But I think they run the risk by being so polarized towards the Democrats of actually radicalizing the Republicans.
01:06:43.000So I think that, you know, when I wrote my most recent article for The Examiner about big tech and the Republicans, you know, I asked Ken Buck's office about, you know, A few years ago, he was not talking about breaking up big tech companies.
01:06:54.000He wasn't even interested in the topic.
01:06:55.000And he was like, yeah, I went to a field hearing and a bunch of my constituents were talking about Amazon and how it was, you know, it was making it difficult for them to sell.
01:07:01.000And like, you know, the Republicans are noticing what's happening to them, right?
01:07:05.000So it may be that if the Republicans change their political orientation enough, you know, if they actually respond to events and not just respond with a bunch of slogans and mottos about tax cuts and deregulation.
01:07:15.000But if they actually see these companies as opposed to their base and they need to respond to their base, the next time they get enough power, they would conceivably be able to, either through legislation or through continuing to support people in the regulatory agencies, be able to create the majority for things like breaking up the large companies, imposing common carriage rules, which would help against a lot of the discrimination and censorship issues, interoperability so that different people, users from different companies can talk to each other, so you know.
01:07:44.000It won't be like, okay, I'm on a network with 500 people, so I can't talk to people who use Facebook.
01:07:48.000No, you still would with interoperability.
01:07:49.000So I think that a lot of it really is the ball being in the Republicans' court.
01:07:53.000There are enough Democrats, even though Democrats are more pro-censorship, who do want to address the power of these companies for one reason or another.
01:07:59.000And there are a growing number of Republicans, but I think as long as there's a core group of Republicans whose, you know, their mantra is basically to look at what's happening to their base and do nothing about it.
01:08:10.000Which has been kind of the way they've responded to a number of social crises over the past, you know, generation or so.
01:08:15.000Then I don't think much will happen, but I do think that if somebody like a Josh Hawley or a J.D.
01:08:20.000Vance or some of these people on the right who are very enthused about this issue are willing to work with Democrats on the issue.
01:08:27.000He might have been the only Biden nominee that he supported who's a very, you know, very much to the left on this big tech issue.
01:08:33.000She probably wasn't the only one, but he voted against most of the nominees, so it was rare to see him support one.
01:08:38.000I do think if those people grow in influence and are able to make that argument to the base and mobilize that base against the establishment, then you'd really see movement on this issue.
01:08:47.000I think as long as you see one party that takes a complete laissez-faire attitude towards corporate concentration, which is what the Republicans have been doing, you're right, probably nothing will happen.
01:08:56.000But if they change their orientation and at least a few Democrats are willing to support some reforms, then I think something probably will happen.
01:09:02.000I think we may see a reckoning with the Republicans in the midterms.
01:09:07.0002016, Republicans had everything, and they did nothing.
01:09:11.000In fact, many of them supported the Russiagate investigation.
01:09:14.000Then 2018, the Democrats, you know, recoiling from Trump, take the House back.
01:09:19.000Then Trump loses 2020, Joe Biden is now president, and we end up with people who are sick and tired of watching this problem of social media manipulation, big tech censorship, actually having a major influence on the election, like we mentioned, with suppressing negative news about Joe Biden's family.
01:09:36.000And now you have to wonder what's going to happen with the Republican Party.
01:09:39.000There's a lot of talk about a lot of, you know, right populists who are now running to primary existing Republicans or, you know, current Republicans.
01:09:48.000I think, you know, a lot of people keep saying, oh man, the Republicans are going to win the House in 2022 and they're going to push back.
01:09:54.000But I also think we're gonna see a lot of establishment Republican types, feckless, you know, laissez-faire perhaps is the way you describe them, they do nothing, just whatever goes with these businesses, they're gonna get ousted.
01:10:08.000I don't know for sure, I just think that the sentiment surely is there to not just have a sweep of the House, but also a changing of the guard in the Republican Party, because as it stands, we were mentioning this earlier in the show, Republicans don't do anything.
01:10:39.000Then you have 2016-8, 2016 till today, with every Trump supporter knowing this was a problem going back to 2016, complaining about being banned, the censorship getting worse, and nothing getting done about it.
01:10:51.000Now all of these people are probably fed up.
01:10:53.000How stupid did Republican politicians have to be to ignore a problem that would result in them actually losing elections?
01:11:01.000So, now you get Republicans just replacing those people.
01:11:05.000So, you know, not only did I work in journalism, I worked directly in advocacy earlier in life.
01:11:10.000You know, I was working for a progressive PAC in, I think it was around 2012, 2013, maybe a little bit after that.
01:11:17.000And I went to a progressive conference, and there was a bunch of people in a room from a range of progressive organizations.
01:11:24.000And they were all talking about protecting Social Security and Medicare, and I was like, guys, like, you can talk about protecting it all day long or whatever, but what you need to be doing is seizing the opportunity to talk about expanding these programs, right?
01:11:38.000I think starting six or seven months later, there were members of Congress who started talking about doing it.
01:11:42.000There were other organizations started doing that.
01:11:44.000And I think the Democrats really came to understand something, that if you can control the playing field of the debate and not be on the defensive, you've shifted things in your direction, even if you don't exactly get what you want.
01:11:54.000So now I think when someone like a Bernie Sanders talks about Medicare for all, gets people excited about that, the chances of there being significant Medicare cuts, of raising the retirement age, of different types of privatization, have gone down.
01:12:06.000Because now the public debate is all about whether we should expand it or not, instead of cutting it.
01:12:09.000So I think exactly what you just said, The lack of a proactive Republican response on so many different issues allows the Democrats to control the playing field.
01:12:20.000And if I were the Republicans, I would think it was a terrible strategy, but I think that's just been their go-to mode for so long, thinking that, you know, if we'll just call the Democrats socialists and communists and gun grabbers, that'll win us every election, right?
01:12:31.000And that's just not the reality in this country anymore.
01:12:33.000There are a lot of people who are interested in a lot of progressive ideas, as I think they should be, because I think some of the progressive ideas are worthwhile and worth exploring.
01:12:41.000But as long as there's no response, the progressives, of course, are going to win the day, right?
01:12:44.000You can't just completely fall back to your slogans and your mottos from 40 years ago when the world has changed in 40 years.
01:12:51.000Here's the big difference I see, right?
01:12:52.000We have the squad, we have the progressive left, but man, do they fall in line really fast with the establishment Democrats.
01:12:58.000The Republicans hate the Republican Party.
01:13:01.000Like, I love pulling up these polls, but we go to Civics, and you can take a look at their polling.
01:13:09.000And it's like, you know, 60% of people, or I think they're viewed unfavorably, but like 40% view them favorably.
01:13:15.000Among Democrat voters, it's like 80% favor the Democratic Party.
01:13:20.000Among Republicans, favorability for the Republican Party, it's like 50-something percent.
01:13:26.000Because like, Republicans don't like the Republican Party.
01:13:29.000I think that right there from that polling shows that they're ready to make a big movement, right?
01:13:34.000big change that we're gonna see a bunch of right populists primary a bunch of
01:13:39.000Republicans and then change we'll see we'll see there's been a lot of talk
01:13:42.000about I think I think that the the energy is out there to do that with what
01:13:46.000is lacking is probably the organization so I something that's been really
01:13:49.000interesting and again this was in my examiner article I reported was that
01:13:52.000there are some Republican politicians now we're saying they will not take tech
01:13:56.000Like, if a tech lobbyist or a PAC, you know, wants to throw them a fundraiser or give them money, they will not take it.
01:14:01.000The Heritage Foundation, which is the most establishment, you know, voice on the right, recently said they will no longer take any more tech money.
01:14:07.000Now, does that mean that the Heritage Foundation is completely going with the populace against the establishment?
01:14:12.000Policy-wise, they haven't changed that much.
01:14:14.000But it does tell me that there's a sea change in thinking among their constituency and among the party about their relationship to corporate America to where they actually said there's actually one corporate sector at least that they're not going to be taking money from anymore.
01:14:25.000That's a huge change from what the Heritage Foundation would have been saying 10 years ago.
01:14:28.000So I think There's a lot of this base sentiment on the Republican right that a lot of their politicians have not been standing up for their people, have not been standing up for their bases.
01:14:37.000A lot of what people like me on the left were doing years ago in terms of organizing and changing the way that the parties kind of address these issues and tackle them needs to happen on the right.
01:14:47.000And I think, honestly, a lot of the people who've been controlling the policy arena on the right are just very, you know, they're a very narrow band of people.
01:14:54.000, and I think that's a really important thing to think about, and I think that's a really important thing to think
01:15:16.000about, and I think that's a r They think that the Republican Party needs to be defending the interests of the base first and foremost, including by using state action if necessary, rather than adhering to a sense of, you know, a sense of principles or certain tenets about limited rule of government, irregardless of what's happening to the base or the constituencies of the voters.
01:15:32.000Yeah, why is it that, you know, Bernie Sanders folds so quick though, right?
01:15:36.000And I don't mean him specifically, I just mean like... You know, we look at 2016, you got Bernie and you got Trump, the insurgent candidates.
01:15:43.000Trump said, excuse me, no, kicks the door in, says I refuse, and takes over.
01:15:47.000Bernie says, I'll say whatever you want, Hillary.
01:15:50.000And then the progressives come in and they're like, yeah, whatever the establishment wants.
01:15:53.000The funny thing is, as effectively as somebody like a Hillary Clinton red-baited Bernie Sanders
01:16:00.000in 2016, campaign cycle and so on and so forth, I do think that Bernie is fundamentally a team
01:16:05.000player, right? Like he's someone who has certain policy priorities that he works for day and night,
01:16:10.000and he feels like if he can move the ball a little bit on them, he's willing to work with just about
01:16:49.000And I think that, you know, Bernie, you know, despite, you know, maybe he's not that great
01:16:53.000at telling this story about himself on the campaign trail, but I think within Congress,
01:16:57.000People realize that he's actually a fairly pragmatic figure.
01:16:59.000He's not really the revolutionary that I think he often, you know, was portrayed at in his campaigns, or some of his base, or his, you know, really tough fans really think he is, so.
01:17:10.000Yeah, actually, I think it was the World Socialist website called Bernie Sanders a nationalist capitalist.
01:17:16.000And they were like, he's not a socialist, he does not support us, he's a nationalist who has four closed borders and border barriers, and he is a capitalist who wants business to make money.
01:17:49.000I mean, this is a guy who in the 2016 cycles, in 2015, said that open borders is a Koch brothers proposal to, you know, to exploit these workers and things like that.
01:18:00.000Then come, you know, 2020, the 2019 primaries and all that stuff, he's talking about open borders and free medical care for non-citizens and stuff.
01:18:08.000He totally flipped on all his positions.
01:18:10.000You know, that's what I see when I see, like, the squad.
01:18:13.000AOC, man, I remember as soon as she got elected, all of a sudden her stance on Palestine and Israel started shifting.
01:18:18.000Activists started getting really angry, like, what's going on?
01:18:22.000She needs to, because she didn't know what she was talking about, right?
01:18:25.000So they get in, and they just say, tell me where the line is, and I will tow it.
01:18:31.000Look, I think part of this is that, you know, we think about these members of Congress as, like, what they're doing in Congress with legislation, hearings, briefings, investigations, so on and so forth, but I think this newer breed of members of Congress, and there's people on the right who are this way as well, I think they see a lot of their constituency the same way as, like, an Instagram influencer or, like, a celebrity sees their constituency, right?
01:18:52.000As long as they're making a lot of progress in terms of the retweets, the likes, the shares, the subscribers, they're raising a heck of a lot of money.
01:19:00.000I think AOC is one of the best fundraisers in Congress because of all their small donor base and their support.
01:19:05.000I think they see themselves as achieving some level of success, right?
01:19:07.000And maybe they will even achieve long-term political success in their careers by doing it.
01:19:12.000But it isn't necessarily the most effective or the best way to move things in Congress.
01:19:16.000I think that, you know, Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, You know, they get in a lot of hot water talking about Israel and the Middle East, but what exactly have they accomplished on those issues?
01:19:31.000They aren't any of the authors of any of the primary legislation on Middle East human rights issues.
01:19:35.000That's Betty McCollum or some other members of Congress.
01:19:38.000When there was a recent outbreak of fighting between Israel and Gaza, it was John Ossoff, who was a very kind of low-key senator from Georgia, who organized the letter calling for a ceasefire.
01:19:45.000It wasn't Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib.
01:19:47.000sometimes being the more like outspoken Twitter punchy type person you know
01:19:51.000maybe it'll get your applause your fan base to make you a little bit of a
01:19:54.000celebrity but it isn't necessarily the way to actually move things in Congress
01:19:58.000and actually carve out you know some progress and I think yeah I mean to be
01:20:04.000fair to them I do think that they have sometimes unrealistic expectations put
01:20:07.000I mean, they're fresh members of Congress, so they're like, you know, some of them have been there for two terms now.
01:20:12.000Normally, when you're in that position, you're not going to be that effective, just because of how the House operates.
01:20:18.000You can be very effective as a first-term Senator, or very impactful, but the House is a little bit different.
01:20:23.000So, some of the expectations are maybe a little unfair on them, but also, at the same time, you know, I think of them more as influencers, and I think of them as lawmakers, because that's mostly what they do.
01:20:31.000I think, I will refer to this as the AOC phenomenon.
01:20:35.000How is it that she is such an effective fundraiser?
01:20:38.000The way I describe it is, imagine you have a hundred cities, and in those cities, 40% are Republican, 42% are Democrat, and then you've got a mishmash of Libertarian and Green Party and unaffiliated, whatever.
01:20:55.000Well, I think those numbers are probably unfair, because it's like thirds is probably independent voters.
01:20:59.000But the point is, ignoring that, let's say that out of each city, 1% is Democratic Socialist Pro-AOC.
01:21:09.000Now if you're in that city and you're trying to fundraise, you're not going to make any money because you're like, you know, you got one person who can donate to you.
01:21:16.000But what if you could tap into the power of the internet?
01:21:18.000And now you have every major city across the country, those in each in each and every city where there's just one person who believes that you believe, all of a sudden now through the internet, they're connected to you and funneling money to you.
01:21:31.000And now all of a sudden AOC is raising money.
01:21:34.000Outside of her district and it's a new phenomenon they talk about the squad members getting I think most of the donations came from outside like the Substantial amount like 97% or whatever came not from their own districts So what they're doing is they're they're taking the fringe of each and every city They're online speaking up sending money to AOC AOC is not I would say she's popular in the sense that all of those people are loud now but if we were to if this was before the internet era and She would not be considered popular, I'd imagine, right?
01:22:05.000It's interesting because an equivalent figure, if you go back to like the pre-social media era, would maybe be like Denis Kucinich, right?
01:22:12.000Like Kucinich was probably the most left-wing member of Congress.
01:22:15.000He was a Democrat congressman from Ohio.
01:22:17.000He ran for president a couple times and basically the Bernie platform didn't really get anywhere.
01:22:23.000Like, Kucinich's power base was his actual district in Cleveland, in Ohio.
01:22:28.000Or, like, in the Cleveland area of Ohio.
01:22:30.000Uh, he wasn't tapping into a large sort of internet, social media fan base that maybe represented a small sliver of America, but could give him tons and tons of money the same way that I think Really, starting with Ron Paul.
01:22:42.000Like, Ron Paul on the right, on the libertarian side, you know, represented sort of a minority faction of people, but he was able to mobilize a tremendous number of internet donors, some of which transferred into volunteers, which increased his profile, which actually gave him a real platform and a voice in the political debates, and actually gave him some surprising performance in those couple of primaries that he ran in.
01:23:01.000I remember The Daily Show had a really fun segment about how, like, he got maybe second in a state, and, like, the major media didn't even mention it, but, like, you know, he He obviously was doing very well, punching well above his weight.
01:23:11.000You know, Ron Paul started that, and I think Bernie Sanders continued it.
01:23:15.000And now you have people who I think, I would argue, are much less impactful than someone like a Bernie Sanders, which is the squad, who carved out their social media niches.
01:23:24.000And yeah, I think they provide them with enough money to basically fend off any kind of challenger within their district, which would only come from within their party, because they're all very Democratic-leaning districts.
01:23:34.000But that simply isn't the way that you actually change things in Congress.
01:23:38.000The fulcrum of Congress is typically the swing districts, right?
01:23:41.000It's the districts that a party can't afford to lose, and the ones that give them the majority and the control of the committees and the chairs, but which are always very competitive.
01:23:50.000Because I don't think you can beat AOC talking about prison abolition.
01:23:52.000I mean, that's the real thing she's talked about, and win any swing district anywhere in America.
01:23:56.000That would be turned into an advertisement by the Republicans, and you'd be gone in, you know, the next cycle.
01:24:01.000but you can sitting in a district that I don't know if her district is like D plus 30 or 40 or
01:24:06.000something. D plus 30. Yeah it's pretty it's pretty up there.
01:24:08.000You can say basically anything you want right? It'd be very hard for anyone to defeat her. Incumbents
01:24:13.000very rarely lose any kind of primary challenge and particularly in that in that kind of
01:24:42.000And it's like, well, dude, if you're not trying to influence people on your ideas, you're losing.
01:24:47.000And I'll tell you, it's mostly a phenomenon of the right.
01:24:50.000You know, we mentioned this before, they don't care about culture.
01:24:53.000They're sitting there thinking that appointing federal judges is winning the culture war, and it's like, no.
01:24:58.000Because I'll tell you this, you can appoint however many judges you want, but if Amazon, CNN, Cable TV, New York Times, all of these things are all saying X is right and Y is wrong, the courts are going to be like, I'll just do what they tell me.
01:25:13.000Because, you know, the courts ultimately in the end are just enforcing popular opinion.
01:25:18.000We've had a bunch of changes of precedent over our, you know, several hundred years.
01:25:24.000Free speech as we know it, I think, was only essentially, not literally codified, but precedent was set, what, like 1968, I think it was?
01:25:31.000Well, one example of this would be school prayer, right?
01:25:35.000Like, people today, a lot of people we talk to, and they're like, well, school prayer's not allowed, because that's the Constitution, the Establishment Clause, blah, blah, blah.
01:26:09.000Meanwhile, the left is controlling all these institutions, taking them over.
01:26:12.000So, you know, it is a good point you bring up that someone like AOC couldn't win in a swing district.
01:26:18.000I do think there's something interesting to be said about the need for Republicans to go into an AOC-type district and actually start advocating and presenting an alternative.
01:26:26.000Well, let's remember that one of the—he's obviously in a very different role these days—but one of the icons of the Republican Party, Rudy Giuliani, was only that icon because he was able to win power in New
01:26:37.000York City. Now, the Republicans do have a nominee in New York City, Curtis Sliwa, who's a
01:26:44.000He's actually a very storied figure in many ways. But I, you know, I haven't looked it up,
01:26:49.000but I doubt Republicans are investing just about anything in that race. And, you know, I,
01:26:52.000to be fair to them, I doubt that they would win it no matter what they invested. But it's a matter
01:26:56.000of long-term investment, right? It's a matter of running a series of competitive candidates until
01:27:01.000you get someone like Rudy Giuliani, who's actually going to win, who's going to pave the way for
01:27:04.000someone like a Michael Bloomberg, who is, you know, semi-Republican.
01:27:07.000But if you don't even try, yeah, obviously you're going to end up with that result.
01:27:12.000I think this is what's contributing to the culture war and the hyperpolarization, in that Republicans and Democrats are like, I have no reason to even talk to the people in these deep districts.
01:27:20.000And now that the hyperpolarization has gotten so extreme, now they're even more entrenched in not communicating.
01:27:26.000But if you just leave New York City to get further and further left without even trying, then we're drifting so far apart eventually the band snaps and then there's just two different realities.
01:27:37.000I think we're already starting to see it.
01:27:38.000Like Portland announced they will cut off trade and travel or whatever for Texas.
01:27:42.000California banned state travel to like a handful of states.
01:27:44.000You're going to have this phenomenon that we talked about before where truckers aren't going to go to New York.
01:27:50.000They're going to be like, I can't go there because I don't feel like dealing with the, you know, the ban on public accommodations for people who aren't vaccinated.
01:28:04.000They're gonna be like, I don't feel like doing it.
01:28:06.000Which is gonna be interesting because someone in New York who's a trucker will be like, oh, I can go to Texas, no problem.
01:28:11.000So it's creating kind of a one-way track.
01:28:14.000Yeah, I mean, this is the important thing to understand about polarization.
01:28:17.000So I actually worked on polarization professionally from 2018 to 2020.
01:28:20.000I did a fellowship at a center at Berkeley called the Greater Good Science Center, which works on psychology science.
01:28:27.000And so, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to researchers who study it and practitioners who work on it.
01:28:32.000Here's the thing to understand about it.
01:28:33.000It's not really based on what you believe, right?
01:28:36.000There is a really great political scientist at the University of Maryland, Liliana Mason, who studied this, and what she found was that people who are most polarized from each other are people who have very strong political identities, who very strongly identify with the label, like, liberal or conservative.
01:28:49.000In fact, they are even more polarized from each other than people who disagree more on, like, an issue like guns or abortion or something, meaning you can be all the way to the left, But if you don't identify very strongly as a leftist or a liberal, it's not a core part of your personal identity, you probably aren't going to be as angry or resentful or contemptuous of people who are all the way on the right.
01:29:07.000Versus even if you're somewhat in the middle, but you're like very strongly identifying yourself as a Democrat and you conceive of yourself as that way, You can be much, much more polarized against someone, even someone who agrees with you on most of the issues, but who has the opposite political identity.
01:29:19.000So I think it's really about making that political identity first and foremost, and then just not interacting very much with people with other identities.
01:29:27.000I grew up in the Deep South as a very left-leaning person, particularly at that point I was very left-leaning compared to everyone around me.
01:29:33.000But, you know, all my friends were Republicans.
01:29:35.000You know, you go to Waffle House, you see someone with a Confederate flag t-shirt sitting next to someone with an MLK t-shirt.
01:29:40.000Like, that was the South growing up in the 1990s.
01:29:43.000There was so much mixing and integrating and, like, old-fashioned diversity of, like, people would look at you funny if you were like, yeah, I don't want to have any friends who are Republicans.
01:29:50.000They'd think you were some kind of freak or something, right?
01:29:53.000But the Facebookification of the United States, where everyone has their kind of curtailed personality and very strong identity established through exclusively, in some cases, politics, has made it much easier for people to silo each other, to segregate from each other, and again to elevate this part of your identity versus all other parts of your identity.
01:30:10.000You know, it's not your hobby, it's not your career, it's not your religion, it's not your family life.
01:30:15.000It's, in this house, we believe X, Y, Z. You see those signs around Northern Virginia.
01:30:20.000You see, I don't know why they're putting those signs up.
01:30:24.000Do I care what you believe? I don't really want to give someone a political litmus test upon
01:30:28.000meeting them, but that's what these people really conceive of themselves as. It's tribalism. I
01:30:33.000mean, and I'll tell you, look, Republicans, I think, for the most part, are spineless,
01:30:39.000feckless, and aren't fighting for I have very little to say about a party that's not doing much.
01:30:45.000They're not coming out and demanding the Department of Gun Services and a repealing of the NFA and a gun in the hand of every child.
01:30:51.000You know, as much as I would jokingly be like, yeah, yeah, by all means.
01:31:07.000You're all right-wing grifters, simply for saying, hey, media, that wasn't true.
01:31:11.000I think part of it is that when somebody has a very strong identity, they view it as an identity threat to see someone disagree with them, right?
01:31:18.000And I think one way to resolve— And you must be the other.
01:31:33.000Where you think that everyone who disagrees with you basically has one set of narrow beliefs that all of which you hate and disagree with, right?
01:31:39.000And so, yeah, I think it would be absurd if someone were to look at my resume and really honestly read my writing and think that, you know, I'm a staunch right-winger or something.
01:31:48.000If I went down to my state house in Virginia or something and told them what I believe on criminal justice, they'd probably think I was a lunatic communist or something.
01:31:57.000But if I go on Twitter and I say something that 60% of Americans agree with, people will reply saying, I'm Rudy Giuliani or I'm a fascist, blah, blah, blah.
01:32:05.000And it's just like, what are you talking about?
01:32:39.000But when I post something like, you know, my body, my choice, I get these tribal leftists on Twitter who will say, yeah, but when it come to Texas, you pro-lifers.
01:33:01.000I think the people who tell you that, they always assume that you are captive to somebody else.
01:33:06.000They never assume that, like, let's say if someone who's very right-wing decided to have a conversation with you, that maybe you might convince them, right?
01:33:13.000It actually does work both ways, but they assume it only goes one way.
01:33:31.000Like, I'm fairly independent, centrist, moderate, with some left-leaning policies, some right-leaning policies.
01:33:36.000But if I'm standing next to someone on the right, they'll say, aha, that proves that Tim's far right.
01:33:39.000If I stand with someone on the left, they'll be like, whoa, I didn't realize that Antifa guy was actually far right.
01:33:43.000Because it only can go in one direction.
01:33:44.000There's no circumstance in which you take a right-wing individual, have him hang out and crack beers with leftists, and they claim the right-wing- right-winger is a left-winger.
01:33:51.000Which is wild because I think that, you know, a lot of the recent American history shows that, you know, it's called contact, intergroup contact or contact hypothesis, which is basically when people hang out with each other, you break down barriers between each other.
01:34:05.000So this is, for the most part, been a huge win for the left over the past 50 or 60 years of American history, right?
01:34:10.000There's been much less Racial prejudice, much less religious and gender prejudice, as a result of people basically just mixing it up with each other.
01:34:16.000Like, that was... You can talk about all different ways, techniques, strategies to make this happen, but ultimately, it's people mixing up with each other.
01:34:24.000People just getting to know each other, being friends, has made America one of the most tolerant places, like, on planet Earth and, like, in human history.
01:34:31.000Generally, it's worked out very well for left-wing goals, I would say.
01:34:37.000If you haven't already, smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, share the show, and become a member at TimCast.com because we're going to have a members-only segment coming up after the show.
01:34:51.000I saw a Super Chat, which is more recent.
01:34:53.000Usually I go back to the beginning, but we're going to read this one just because there's two points that need to be said.
01:34:57.000JJ says, Tim, your argument against ivermectin because horses are large shows how little you have actually researched the subject.
01:35:04.000Please do some journalism and actually research the subject.
01:35:07.000JJ, you saying this shows how little you've actually watched my commentary on ivermectin and other medicine because I've done a tremendous amount of research.
01:35:14.000In fact, I would argue more than many commentators.
01:35:17.000And my argument is not that there's something wrong with it because horses are large.
01:35:21.000Clearly, you have not heard the plethora of videos I've made about this.
01:35:24.000What I've been saying is, First, the first thing I'll say is, here's the challenge in doing these shows.
01:35:31.000If I break down, if I do a 15-minute segment explaining my entire thought process so you can understand a subject matter, people complain, Tim, you talk about that too much, we get it.
01:35:42.000The issue is if I don't, I get super chats like this where they're like, you have no idea what you're talking about.
01:35:46.000So I can choose to do a 20 minute explainer on the morals and ethics of a particular issue in the news behind it.
01:35:52.000Or I can just be like, here's a quick summary moving on.
01:35:55.000But then people complain because they don't actually watch my videos.
01:35:58.000So let me just break this down really, really quickly for you guys.
01:36:15.000It's because humans have different quality product grading than animals do.
01:36:21.000And there's also issues like, horses can tolerate certain substances humans can't, or dogs can't tolerate certain substances humans can.
01:36:28.000I can't give you a full list of all of the chemicals and break down the formulation for you, that's why it's important you go to a doctor, ask them, and make sure that if you are prescribing a medication, you go to a pharmacist to get that actual medication.
01:37:02.000When the FDA approves something, they'll be like, okay, it can't have these things in it because humans don't react with it properly and they'll get sick.
01:37:17.000That's why don't eat horse paste in any amount and go to a doctor and find one who's knowledgeable about all this stuff and knows more than I do.
01:37:26.000And putting it simply, there are studies that are conflicted on Ivermectin.
01:37:30.000Some say it's good, some say it's not.
01:37:31.000There's data from countries saying it's good.
01:37:33.000There's some other information saying it's studies that are like, no, it's actually inconclusive and these studies are wrong, or it's a spurious correlation.
01:37:41.000I can't tell you what is true because there's no definitive statement.
01:37:46.000There's competing narratives in a culture war.
01:37:49.000So the only thing I can say is you make the decision that's right for you.
01:38:18.000ChameleonDX says, Tim, big fan of yours, but as someone who makes wine professionally, watching your wine tasting over the weekend hurt my soul.
01:40:04.000He's getting on his plane, or he was about to get on his plane.
01:40:06.000They detained him and questioned him for three hours.
01:40:09.000And your go-to figures on Twitter were cheering for it.
01:40:13.000And I'm like, yo, are we really at the point where one political, like, people, citizens of this country are cheering for a foreign government detaining an American citizen who was leaving?
01:40:23.000It's funny, because I think that a lot of this started with, like, Trump rallies and, like, Lock Her Up.
01:40:30.000And now I feel like Lock Her Up is, like, a universal thing.
01:40:32.000Like, there are always Democrats hoping that a range of Republicans, like, get expelled from Congress and or arrested.
01:40:39.000Which is a weird thing in a pluralistic democratic society for people to be to be asking for or wanting I mean obviously there are public officials who actually commit crimes and like it happens every now and then but like this is all politically motivated it's like pretty obvious right so I think it does not bode well for us.
01:40:55.000We had John Podesta, you know, according to Boston Globe, was arguing for the West Coast to secede from the Union in the event of a Trump victory.
01:41:02.000You've got states saying, we can't travel to these states anymore.
01:41:29.000But I tell you, if I'm right, and I think we have absolutely been on this trajectory towards collapse or civil conflict or something, in 50 to 100 years, they'll be like, oh, this whole period was the breakdown of the American empire and all that stuff.
01:41:43.000This sounds very weird, so I'm gonna read it.
01:41:46.000Josh Oh My Gosh says, Hey Ian, what if parallel universes are a mechanism for a higher dimensional womb using the accumulative experiences of every sentient living creature in every universe to make a baby that knows everything when born?
01:42:26.000Yeah I think Tybee actually writes about this which is that back in the day it was sort of just like something if you were just kind of like you know you you were kind of like second or third tier your school or college and you just you needed a job and because there were so many local newspapers back then right before there was so much consolidation so a lot of people who entered journalism I think We're kind of people who are not at the top of their business or law school, or they weren't cut out for medicine, and so on and so forth.
01:42:52.000It wasn't really seen as an elite trade until very recently, or something that was all that prestigious, I guess.
01:42:59.000At least when you're talking about your run-of-the-mill journalist.
01:43:01.000So I think there's a lot of truth to that.
01:43:03.000Although I don't know exactly, like, I don't have a figure or something of what the average journalist was like 50 years ago versus now.
01:43:08.000But yeah, it definitely, the nature and prestige of the trade has changed a lot.
01:43:19.000Kado Osta says, Tim, do you think fathers have any rights over unborn children?
01:43:24.000Like, if you got your girlfriend pregnant... Like, if you got your girlfriend pregnant, didn't tell you, and got an abortion, would you be upset?
01:43:30.000If society make men responsible for impregnation, it would only be fair they get some rights.
01:43:33.000This is very interesting, and I think the answer is yes.
01:43:37.000I will also add that, you know, we were talking on the show last week, and people were saying that the Texas abortion law has exemptions for rape and incest.
01:43:54.000It is still very difficult to parse this out morally, though.
01:44:01.000There is a medical exemption, but no exemption for rape.
01:44:04.000And that tends to be the main focal point of the argument I'm seeing from many on the left that are advocating for the right at any point to abortion, specifically rape.
01:44:13.000And I'm like, Yeah, the state saying that somebody was forced by someone else and then that person is the one who took the action to impregnate the woman.
01:44:23.000Then the argument from people in the chat was that, you know, if the woman makes a choice, she has a responsibility to the life inside of her.
01:44:30.000But what if she didn't make that choice?
01:44:31.000Texas should have an exemption in that regard.
01:45:21.000Look, some people are arguing, but I think the issue is, are you really going to trust that they're going to keep a product safe when the liability is substantially lower?
01:45:32.000There's another issue with horse medication versus human medication.
01:45:37.000It may be ivermectin as the active ingredient.
01:45:39.000It doesn't mean the inactive ingredients are the same.
01:45:41.000I think the ivermectin paste is like 90... What is it?
01:46:06.000Don't go to a tractor supply because it's just... I hear these stories about, you know, we've heard a lot of stories about people going on Amazon and going on these other websites and buying, you know, prescription drugs, but off prescription by going to other companies, countries and stuff like that.
01:47:52.000And I think it stems back to the birth of the internet and the death of innocents.
01:47:56.000So one of the things we've pointed out frequently is how people have become extremely angry.
01:48:02.000You know, people I've known my whole life all of a sudden are just messaging me saying extremely angry, vile things, and I'm just like, yo, why are you so mad?
01:48:11.000Like, they're people I've known for decades.
01:48:13.000We're friends on Facebook, and all of a sudden they're messaging me with all caps, being like, I'm sick of this!
01:48:18.000And I'm like, why are you yelling at me?
01:48:21.000And they're just, like, they have no real answer.
01:48:23.000It's like, where did this anger and rage come from that people are just so angry all the time now?
01:48:28.000Yeah, I mean, I think part of that is they've externalized their mental state or their problems, right?
01:48:33.000I mean, maybe something is happening in their personal lives, or they have some lack of personal fulfillment, and they've taken that and turned it into a political problem, right?
01:48:42.000If this wasn't happening in the world, if it wasn't happening in society and politics, I'd be happier, right?
01:48:46.000And that's when they personalize those problems.
01:48:49.000I do marvel at, like, you know, I know people who are, like, war refugees who came to the United States who were very chill and relaxed and very happy about living here, and then I know people who grew up here upper-middle class who seem, like, you know, enraged and upset all the time.
01:49:01.000It's just, like, doesn't really make a whole lot of sense if you think about their external life circumstances, right?
01:49:07.000But it makes a lot of sense if you think about this as a failure for them to, like, establish, like, an internal locus of control and actually recognize their personal problems as personal problems.
01:49:15.000And, like, it doesn't mean you shouldn't care about the world or engage with it, but, like, if you find yourself being personally enraged and being antisocial towards your friends or your colleagues, then, you know, there is something that you need to work on personally before you fix the rest of the world, so.
01:50:24.000Their, their work is done, they're sitting at home, they're bored, they want to go out, so they just go to the slot machine and start, you know, pulling the lever.
01:51:01.000There was a documentary filmmaker, Dia Khan, and she's made documentaries about both white nationalists and Islamists, and she got to know them very well, actually.
01:51:10.000And I think she was on Sam Harris' show or something, and she actually explained some of her thoughts on making the documentaries.
01:51:15.000And I think she noticed that there were a lot of similarities between the two sides.
01:51:19.000A lot of people would think, no, those people are diametrically opposed, or different politically, religiously, so on and so forth.
01:51:24.000But she basically found that there were young alienated people who needed some purpose in their lives, and this is what filled it.
01:51:29.000I mean, these people could have easily become like guitar players or bowling enthusiasts or, you know, any number of things.
01:51:35.000They could have filled the hole with something healthier.
01:51:37.000But this just happens to be the door they picked, and it led them to a very unhealthy place.
01:51:41.000And I think that they sincerely believed that if they had won whatever political struggle they were involved in, their sectarian struggle, that they would be happier people.
01:51:51.000, but it was the same it was the same mistake both sides are making ends in this equation, from the extremists
01:52:06.000issued covered in I think that's probably where a lot of it comes from.
01:52:08.000Because under Trump, things were pretty good.
01:52:11.000Maybe one of the components is that with 2019 being so good, you know, I heard from so many people about how they made so much money, and then 2020 was just so awful, and you know what?
01:52:21.000Maybe people starting to realize that this year, with everything that's getting bad, a lot of the anger is coming from their decision to vote for Joe Biden.
01:52:28.000I mean, look at Sam Harris saying he's eating his words.
01:52:31.000So they go through this very, you know, they go through 2020.
01:52:38.000Now it's 2021 and Biden's in charge and it's still bad.
01:52:42.000And now there may be a lot of them are maybe having this cognitive dissonance of maybe it was the pandemic and maybe voting for Biden is not going to change anything.
01:52:50.000And they're just, there's no way to solve it.
01:53:16.000I give it a C. I think that... I could have fixed it.
01:53:19.000They picked a lot of good Chinese or Hong Kong scene actors to be part of it who really kind of stole the show even though they were side characters.
01:53:27.000I think that was a pretty good decision on their part to pick those people.
01:53:30.000I think the challenge was that they were trying to make... They should have gone all in on China, in my opinion.
01:53:37.000Instead, they tried adding some, like, American stuff to it to make it so, like, Americans could relate to it, I guess?
01:53:46.000Nah, it should have been... It should have just been in China, right?
01:53:50.000So, I'm not gonna spoil anything, but Shang-Chi is from China, but he lives in America and then goes to China, and I'm just like... That just made the whole thing confusing.
01:54:01.000Well, what's interesting is like the larger context of it is Disney's trying to expand heavily in the Chinese market as are much of, as is much of Hollywood.
01:54:08.000So I think the more they can set in China, the easier it will be for them.
01:54:12.000Because I think a lot of the Chinese audience isn't as interested in some of the American stuff.
01:54:16.000Um, so I think they were trying to split the difference and get both audiences involved.
01:54:19.000And you know, to be fair, I wasn't right.
01:54:23.000So like, look, we, I, We've got a bunch of Marvel movies that are really, really good.
01:54:28.000If you're gonna make a Marvel movie about the Mandarin with his ten rings, and he's Chinese, and he has Chinese children, you don't need to put him in San Francisco for ten minutes.
01:54:38.000Like, it just made the story not make sense.
01:54:40.000And there were a bunch of things they could have done.
01:54:43.000I already figured out how to fix the entire movie, because I did it with Doctor Strange, the What If episode.
01:54:47.000But I'm like, man, I wish there were so many misbeats.
01:56:05.000And I'm like, they needed only a little bit to make it like totally epic.
01:56:10.000And oh, man, I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't say much, but they needed only a few sentences and a few tweaks in like one or two places.
01:56:18.000And it would have been like one of the greatest films ever.
01:57:53.000Delhiopolis says, the argument governments shouldn't legislate morality doesn't hold water when it's obvious that the left has no problem legislating immorality.
01:58:03.000That's one of the big challenges, I suppose, is that when it comes to any kind of, you know, culture war issue, you have people who are like, I'm going to play by the rules, be nice and tell the truth.
01:58:12.000And the other side saying, we're going to lie, cheat and steal.
01:58:13.000And who's likely to win that in that conflict?
01:58:16.000You know, if you're playing a game against somebody and they're willing to lie, cheat and steal, you're at a serious disadvantage.
01:58:41.000And we talked to Dr. Chris Martinson about that.
01:58:43.000And the issue was, there's a bunch of reports from, like, universities and medical journals saying that, you know, a lot of those studies were done wrong, the methodology was bad.
01:59:06.000It's a- it's- the media's lying about it across the board with the horse-paced thing.
01:59:10.000The media's lying about, you know, Joe Rogan, and they're putting out these headlines to manipulate you.
01:59:15.000I can't tell you about efficacy because there's conflicting studies, even with this one big, you know, meta- meta- analysis.
01:59:21.000There's- there's a bunch of, uh, researchers saying that's not- not correct, so...
01:59:25.000I'm gonna I'm gonna leave it to you guys to go talk to a doctor make sure there's someone you trust and Look, man, there are people in the culture war I don't care which side they're on who are gonna believe things and tell you things and you're gonna have to navigate this world But ultimately I try to be careful of people who are trying to win some kind of you know Cultural issue when it comes to my personal health decisions by all means I think the right tends to be more and more publishing the truth in media Not always and the left tends to be publishing lies and manipulations the establishment left That doesn't mean I'm just going to blindly trust anybody.
01:59:58.000And if I don't have definitive data in front of me, even if I want to believe something, I'm not going to make a move on it.
02:00:23.000So I've got some pushback on the abortion thing.
02:00:26.000Zachariah Kitzman says, Tim, you're wrong about the abortion law not having exemptions.
02:00:30.000It's already written into Texas law, the heartbeat bills, in addition to the newly standing law.
02:00:36.000I'll have to do a deep dive on this one because there's been a... I think the governor was asked about this and this week or this past week and he said something like, well, you have six weeks.
02:01:07.000You know, but I'll do a deep dive to make sure, but I saw that because we had said on the show, we had had people on the show saying there is an exemption for this.
02:01:47.000Someone is asking me for Joe Rogan's phone number.
02:01:51.000It's the weirdest thing when people like, I get, we get a lot of people who come through here email and they'll be like, yeah, oh, and by the way, can you, uh, call Joe for me?
02:02:49.000Sonny James says, with all these mainstream media resignations, are they taking early retirement to save face?
02:02:53.000As the left gets more centralized, the Joy Behar type or Maddow type, operations get too expensive and less needed.
02:02:59.000How many people you need to say the same thing?
02:03:01.000I mean, yeah, well, Rachel Maddow is doing, what, 30 million for, like, a network now or something?
02:03:07.000Yeah, she's kind of grandfathered in though.
02:03:09.000I think she's been at this for a while and it's kind of given her a level of security because they have an audience who wants that every night.
02:03:16.000But it's true that the younger cohorts, Millennials and Zoomers, are probably not going to want or need that format.
02:03:23.000Oh yeah, so people like to point out that the Key Demo ratings are abysmal for CNN and MSNBC.
02:03:32.000And it's true, our ratings are higher in the Key Demo than CNN, MSNBC, HLN, whatever.
02:03:40.000But their total viewership, because they have people who are over 55, brings them up to the hundreds of thousands, close to a million.
02:03:47.000That being said, on YouTube, we can brag all day and night, but there's probably a thousand channels that are in the same category of beating Rachel Maddow's ratings.
02:03:56.000So it's not to say that we're doing that well.
02:04:28.000We're going to have a members-only segment coming up.
02:04:30.000We're going to be talking about the ACLU flip-flopping and the corruption of mainstream institutions and how it took place, why it took place.
02:04:36.000So you'll definitely want to see that.
02:04:37.000Smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, share the show with your friends, leave us a good review.
02:04:48.000Uh, just basically, uh, yeah, check out our sub stack at inquiremore.com.
02:04:52.000Uh, for $6 a month, we hope to give you guys a lot of, a lot of good content, a lot of good original reporting and a news analysis that you won't get elsewhere.