On this episode of RUMBLE Live, Nick Fuentes is joined by Ben Shapiro to discuss the upcoming Destiny vs. Ben Shapiro debate, and to talk about the future of the country and what it means to be a Christian in a post-Christian America. Also, Nick gives his thoughts on Trump's comments about women and women's issues, and why he thinks women should be able to run for president. And, of course, there's a lot more! Thanks for tuning in to Rumble Live! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with all things Rumble! -Nick and Nick -Rumble Live! -RUMBLE - Subscribe and Share on Apple Podcasts, too! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on iTunes and we'll give you a shoutout on the next episode! Thanks again for listening and Good Luck Out There! -Nick, Nick, Roxy, Rachael and the crew at Rumble - Thank you for listening, and Happy Listening! Timestamps: 3:00 - What's Up! 4:30 - Who We Got Up? 5:15 - Who's Good? 6:00 | What's Good Today? 7:30 | Who's Up?! 8:10 - What Are You Gonna Do Tonight? 9:10 | Who Do You Think of Me? 11:00 12:40 - Can I Have a Good Day? 15:00 -- What's Yours Truly? 16:30 -- Who's a Good Idea? 17: What's Too Good? | Can I Say It? 18:00 Is It Better? 19:40 -- Is My Future? 21:00-- What's My Favorite Thing? 22:00 // 21:40 | Do You Have a Story? 26:40 27:00 & 27:30 -- How Will I'm Working It Better Than That's My Best Day? / 27:10 -- How Can I See My Best Place? 29: Is There A Good Day Or Do You Say It Better than That's Good Or Am I Gotta Have It's Good Enough? 30:00? 36:00 Or Do I Think I'm Gonna Go More Than That? 35:00 Can I Do It? / 40:00 Do I Have It Better Next Week?
Transcript
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00:18:14.000Communism, Nazism, all of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century.
00:19:16.000Let's look at the, let's just get a little preview here.
00:19:20.000So it's going to be liberalism versus conservatism, education, Trump and Biden, foreign policy, Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, January 6th, abuse of power, wokeism,
00:19:34.000Institutional capture, monogamy versus open relationships, and rapid-fire questions.
00:19:40.000Lex hosting the Super Bowl for nerds is a great gift to us all.
00:20:17.000Across a wide variety of topics making arguments based on factual, verifiable claims and if-then logic as opposed to just name-calling.
00:20:27.000One big takeaway is that there's a lot of agreement between certain camps, at least between the ones interested in reaching conclusions based on data, rather than reaching data based on conclusions.
00:23:23.000Yeah, so I think that we have a huge country full of a lot of people, a lot of individual talents, capabilities.
00:23:31.000And I think that the goal of government, broadly speaking, should be to try to ensure that everybody's able to achieve as much as possible.
00:23:38.000So on a liberal level, that usually means some people might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to things like education.
00:23:45.000They might need a little bit of a boost when it comes to providing certain necessities like housing or food or clothing.
00:23:51.000But broadly speaking, I mean, I'm still a liberal, not a communist or a socialist.
00:23:54.000I don't believe in the, you know, total command economy, total communist takeover of all of the, you know... Whenever anybody says things like, broadly speaking, that means they're an idiot.
00:24:33.000I notice that when liberals talk about government, especially taxes, it seems like they talk about it for taxes' sake or bigness' sake.
00:24:40.000So people talk about taxes sometimes as like a punishment, like tax the rich.
00:24:45.000I think taxing the rich is fine insofar as it funds the programs that we want to fund, but Democrats have a really big problem demonizing success or wealth, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
00:24:55.000I don't think it's a bad thing to be wealthy, to be a billionaire or whatever, as long as we're funding what we need to fund.
00:25:00.000Ben, what do you think it means to be a conservative?
00:25:02.000What's the philosophy that underlies your political view?
00:25:04.000So first of all, I'm glad that Destiny you're already coming out as a Republican.
00:25:08.000I mean, we hold a lot in common in terms of, you know, the basic idea that
00:25:15.000People ought to have as much opportunity as possible and also insofar as the government should do the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people's lives in order to pursue certain functions, particularly at the local level.
00:25:30.000So a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level end up being discussions about where government ought to be involved, but also at what level government ought to be.
00:25:38.000And I have an incredibly subsidiary view of government.
00:25:43.000I think that, you know, local governments, because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent, are capable of doing more things.
00:25:51.000And as you abstract up the chain, it becomes more and more impractical and more and more divisive to do more things.
00:25:57.000In my view, government is basically there to preserve
00:26:02.000Those key liberties pre-exist the government insofar as they are more important than what priorities the government has.
00:26:11.000The job of government is to maintain, for example, national defense,
00:26:15.000Protection of property rights, protection of religious freedom.
00:26:20.000These are the key focuses of government, as generally expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
00:26:24.000And I agree with the general philosophy of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
00:26:28.000Now, that doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't do more on a governmental level, again, as you get closer to the ground, which, by the way, is also embedded in the Constitution.
00:26:34.000People forget the Constitution was originally applied to the federal government, not to local and state governments.
00:26:41.000If I were going to define conservatism, it would actually be a little broader than that, because I think to understand how people interact with government, you have to go to kind of core values.
00:26:47.000And so for me, there are a couple of premises.
00:26:59.000And what that means is that we have to be careful not to incentivize the bad and that we should incentivize the good.
00:27:05.000Human beings do have agency and are capable of making decisions in the vast majority of circumstances and it is better for society if we act as though they do.
00:27:14.000Second, the basic idea of human nature, there is an idea in my view that all human beings have equal value before the law.
00:27:22.000I'm a religious person, so I'd say equal value before God, but I think that's also sort of a key tenet of Western civilization, being non-religious or religious, that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms.
00:27:33.000But that does not necessarily mean that every person is equally equipped to do everything equally well.
00:27:37.000And so it is not the job of government to rectify every imbalance of life.
00:27:42.000The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell suggests, is something that government is generally incapable of doing, and more often than not botches and makes things worse.
00:27:51.000So those are a few key tenets, and that tends to materialize in a variety of ways.
00:27:57.000The easiest way to sum that up, the traditional kind of three legs of the conservative stool, although now obviously there's a very fragmented conservative movement in the United States, would be a socially conservative view in which family is the chief institution of society, like the little platoons of society, as Edmund Burke suggested, in which
00:28:15.000Free market and property rights are extraordinarily valuable and necessary because every individual has the ability to be creative with their property and to freely alienate that property.
00:28:29.000And finally, I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy that suggests that the world is not filled with wonderful people who all agree with us and think like us.
00:28:38.000And those people will pursue adversarial interests if we do not protect our own interests.
00:28:45.000What's interesting, okay, I just want to jump in here.
00:28:48.000What's interesting about Ben Shapiro being a Jew is that Jews don't believe that Gentiles have to follow God's law.
00:28:59.000They don't believe that God accepts repentance from Gentiles and they believe that Gentiles effectively cannot
00:29:10.000God doesn't ask the Gentiles to repent, and therefore God doesn't accept their repentance, and therefore Gentiles can do whatever they want.
00:29:19.000They only have to follow seven of the Noahide laws.
00:30:00.000It's a codex of law that comes from the Hebrew Bible, which is summed up in the Mishnah, interpreted in the Talmud, enforced by the rabbis.
00:30:12.000So it's interesting that liberalism is really an ideology which proceeds from a Jewish disposition.
00:33:15.000I just want to put that out there, that there is nothing in Christianity that says that government should be separate from religion or that the government shouldn't be Christian.
00:33:24.000That's something that, you know, religious pluralism benefits Jews.
00:33:29.000It doesn't really, maybe it benefits the Christian denomination that may be persecuted if you look at the history of the United States and the history of the Reformation and the religious wars, but
00:33:42.000I'm excited for this conversation because I consider you to be really intelligent.
00:33:57.000But I feel like sometimes there are ways that conservatives talk about certain issues that seem to defy logic and reason, I guess.
00:34:04.000So here- and I'm sure you feel the same way about progre- well, I feel the same way about progressives.
00:34:48.000But yeah, I that's my that's I have a big problem with when people do that broadly speaking broadly speaking Just be precise, you know just Use language and just be precise about what you're saying.
00:35:02.000It's just it's sort of like a hedge if you're about to say something that is not precise or not true or Stupid if it's unintelligible, then you get to say.
00:36:29.000So I used to be a lot more libertarian when I was 20, 21.
00:36:33.000And one of the things that dramatically changed kind of my view on government
00:36:37.000Manipulation of things in society came when it came time to deal with my son and the school that he went to.
00:36:45.000And one of the things that I noticed was when it came time to send my son to school, I could either do private education or I could do public.
00:36:51.000Personally, I did 12 years of Catholic private education.
00:36:54.000However, the public schools in Nebraska, depending on where you lived, were very, very, very good.
00:37:15.000Do you think that there is some type of, I don't want to say injustice or unfairness, because I'm not even looking at it that way, just pragmatically, that there might be children that are in certain schools, that if they just had better funding or more access to technologies or things available to them, that those kids would become more productive members of society, that with a little bit of help, they could actually achieve more and do better for all of society?
00:37:39.000So I think that on the list of priorities when it comes to education, the availability of technology is actually fairly low on the list of priorities.
00:37:46.000Sure, the two things I've heard are food availability and I think air conditioning I think are the two biggest ones that I hear, but sure.
00:37:51.000I mean the biggest thing in terms of education itself, not just the physical facilities that we're talking about.
00:38:36.000Every resource is finite, every resource is limited, and you have to prioritize what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means with which you are seeking them.
00:38:46.000And so, again, I think that the question is... I quibble with the premise of the question, which is that
00:38:53.000Again, the chief injustice when it comes to education on the list of injustices is lack of availability to technology or that it's a funding problem.
00:39:02.000Sure, and I can half agree with you there, but I don't think any amount of changes in the schools will create two-parent households, right?
00:39:09.000We can't bring a... I totally agree with you.
00:39:12.000That's why I think that the fundamental educational problem is not, in fact, a schooling problem.
00:39:17.000Sure, but then I feel like we're now I feel like this is kind of the conservative merry-go-round where it's like what can we do to help with schools?
00:39:24.000So two of the things that I've seen I think that are usually brought up in research is one is air conditioning that children in hotter environments just don't learn as well.
00:39:32.000And then the second one is access to food.
00:39:33.000So, like, kids that are given, like, a breakfast or a lunch that's provided at school, like, increases educational outcomes.
00:39:38.000Now, I agree that neither of these things might be determinative in, like, well, 20% of kids are graduating, and now 80% of kids are graduating.
00:39:45.000Or these kids are all going, you know, with their GEDs into the workforce, and now these kids are all suddenly becoming engineers.
00:39:51.000But in terms of where we can help, do you think there should be, like, some... Okay, so, I mean, he just admitted his whole argument is moot.
00:39:58.000Talk about... See, this is why this guy is such a slippery debater.
00:40:03.000So, if you're following this line of argument, he said, well, what made me a liberal is seeing how, when I got rich, I moved to a nice zip code and I put my son in a nice public school.
00:40:17.000And it's not fair that other kids, whose parents aren't wealthy, can't go to a nice public school with, you know, a well-funded facility.
00:40:27.000But now he's saying, well, maybe it's not determinative how well-funded the school is.
00:41:36.000Is it fair that some people are born stupid?
00:41:40.000And then there's the secondary question of, well, if we can't control
00:41:46.000How people are born well, we can give everybody if we could give the children a fair opportunity because it's a question one of Decision and it's a question of birth people are born unequal and then people make decisions and their life is a product of their decisions plus their starting position plus circumstance
00:42:10.000And I guess liberals want to go in there and they want to say, well, school, education should be a place where the state kind of resets it so that everyone has a level playing field.
00:42:53.000Even if you live in a socialist country, you could always get on a plane and fly to another jurisdiction where you can pay more for healthcare.
00:43:05.000No matter what happens in the world, if you pay more money, you will get better education.
00:43:10.000Your children will get better education.
00:43:13.000Your children will have a better opportunity at a good life.
00:43:16.000But liberals kind of want to circumscribe equality around the school, around the hospital, around a child age 0 to 16.
00:43:27.000You know, but it doesn't work that way.
00:43:31.000So, that's where you get this kind of, he's like retreating from the position where he says, well, maybe it doesn't matter what school you go to, but, you know, can't government help a little bit?
00:43:40.000And if the argument is like, things should be better, yeah, then we agree.
00:43:47.000But the question is not that some schools don't get enough money.
00:43:52.000The question is the kinds of people that are employed.
00:43:55.000And then you get into questions about who these teachers are and how the resources are spent and who's going to these schools.
00:44:03.000I mean, like, for example, I went to a very good school.
00:44:07.000My parents made a lot of sacrifices so that they could pay high property tax so I could go to a good public school.
00:44:18.000And the thing is though, my school wasn't, it wasn't like it was a super rich grade school.
00:44:23.000What made it good is that it was a great community.
00:44:25.000That all the parents were very involved, and they were involved with the teachers, and they were involved with the extracurriculars, and the whole community was involved with the school.
00:44:35.000And, you know, so that's a problem that you just can't solve with money, which is something like what liberals always believe, which is that, you know, if something isn't going right, it's just because government hasn't been giving them enough money.
00:44:51.000Sometimes you get a bunch of communities full of transient people who just suck.
00:44:57.000They're not involved, you know, or they can't be involved for one reason or another, and it's really too bad, but that's also just the way it is.
00:45:55.000Again, at some point, you gotta introduce some culpability.
00:46:00.000Again, I'm going to quibble with the premise of the question because I think when it comes to, for example, food insecurity, school food programs, again, you can always pour money into any program and at the margins create change.
00:46:11.000I mean, there's no doubt that pouring money onto anything will create change in a marginal way.
00:46:15.000The question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement, right?
00:46:49.000In terms of prioritization of values and cost structure, are those the things that I think are going to move the needle in a major way in terms of public policy?
00:47:14.000If there is a better way to do it, then I'm perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it.
00:47:17.000But it seems to me that one of the big flaws in the way that many people of the left approach government is, what if we hit every gnat with a hammer?
00:47:25.000And my question is, what if the gnat isn't even the problem?
00:47:29.000What if there's a much bigger substructure problem that needs to be solved in order to... If you're shifting deck chairs on the Titanic, sure, you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented.
00:47:40.000But the real question is the water that's gaping into the Titanic, right?
00:47:43.000Yeah, and I agree with you 100%, but again, I feel like we're on the conservative merry-go-round, then, of never wanting to address... That's not a conservative merry-go-round.
00:48:20.000That's great we can say that and try to fight against, you know, however many hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, but people will have sex and people will make babies.
00:49:12.000People don't tend to want to get married at 22 when they've just finished college, when they don't have the money to move out, and they can't afford a house.
00:49:17.000Because we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture.
00:49:19.000Meaning that everyone, poor, rich, and in-between, used to get married.
00:49:23.000By the way, a huge percentage of marriages in the United States used to be what they would call shotgun marriages, meaning that somebody knocked somebody up, and because they did not want the baby to be born outside of a two-parent household, they would then get married.
00:49:32.000Do we think that shotgun marriages, though, are a way to bring back equilibrium to education?
00:50:00.000I don't think we've ever regressed social standards back to, like, oh, well, let's go 100 years back and do things that, you know, used to exist before.
00:50:07.000The entire left right now is arguing that we regressed social standards by rejecting Roe vs. Wade, so that's obviously not true.
00:50:11.000The Roe vs. Wade is not a social standard, it's a Supreme Court ruling, number one.
00:50:14.000Number two, if you read the actual majority opinion on Roe v. Wade, we can see that socially we actually never made huge progress on how society viewed abortion.
00:50:22.000This has always been an incredibly divisive thing, right?
00:50:25.000I think part of Alito's writing on it was that things like gay marriage, for instance, we've kind of moved past and it's not really as debated anymore, but abortion was never a settled topic, despite Roe v. Wade.
00:50:34.000The notion that the arc of history constantly moves in one direction is belied by nearly all of the 20th century.
00:50:41.000I mean, in terms of like, women's rights, civil rights... Barbarism, communism, Nazism, all of that was a regression from what was happening at, for example, the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century.
00:50:52.000Nazism and communism were a regression from what was going on in 1905?
00:50:55.000Well, in terms of like, communism being a regression, for instance, I'm not a communist, but like, the industrialization of the Soviet Union happened under a communist society.
00:51:02.000Nazism was the product of what had been happening!
00:52:04.000The regression was the three great monarchies under attack by the Jewish banking-dominated West, which was Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary.
00:52:45.000I think in general, we're more peaceful now than we have been in the past.
00:52:48.000But I think when we look at the way that people live their lives, I think that we tend to move in a certain direction socially.
00:52:53.000So when it comes to things like racism or when it comes to things like slavery or women's rights, I think that there are two huge things that probably aren't changing in the U.S.
00:53:00.000and one is access to contraception and one is women working jobs.
00:53:03.000I think that these two things are probably huge things that are moving us off of shotgun marriages or- This guy's such an idiot, dude.
00:53:13.000That's, you know, it was so valuable that we found all these clips showing what he doesn't know because you listen to him talk and you realize this is just not a high-level thinker when he says, these are probably two huge things that aren't gonna change.
00:53:28.000So do you think that all of human possibility is limited by what your imagination says is plausible on a very short-term timeline?
00:53:40.000That all of human possibilities in this century and the next century in the world is limited by your imagination, limited by what you find sensible and your discretion.
00:54:21.000That is the theory of progress that all liberals kind of inherently believe in, which is the idea that
00:54:35.000That history is this linear marching forward, going towards more freedom and more understanding and our nature is improving as technology develops.
00:54:57.000And I don't see those... Do you think that those two things are going to change fundamentally?
00:55:00.000First of all, what the data tend to show is that actually more highly educated people, as you were saying, tend to get married more.
00:55:06.000So if the idea is that women getting an education somehow throws them off marriage, it's the opposite.
00:55:11.000Usually it's women who are not educated who are getting married.
00:55:12.000But those women aren't getting shotgun marriages.
00:55:14.000Yeah, but now you're shifting the topic.
00:55:16.000My topic was how to get more people married.
00:55:19.000And you suggested that higher levels of education are delaying marriage and making it less probable.
00:55:25.000And what I'm telling you, because this is what the data suggests, is that actually as you raise up the educational ladder, people tend to be married more than they are lower down on the educational ladder.
00:55:35.000If you're a high school graduate, you're less likely to be married than if you're a postdoc.
00:55:39.000I agree with you, but that's because one of the biggest precursors to getting married is having, like, a level of economic stability.
00:55:44.000So as people get more educated, they obtain this economic stability, and then they're in a more comfortable position to explore more serious relationships.
00:55:50.000I mean, the confound is that people in stable marriages tend to be the children of stable marriages, and there's only one way to break that cycle, which is to create a stable marriage, and that is something that is in everyone's hands.
00:56:00.000Again, this notion that it is somehow an unbreakable, unshatterable barrier to get married and have kids,
00:56:05.000I don't understand where this is coming from.
00:56:27.000Again, I've suggested that there's a difference between local community and federal.
00:56:30.000I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches or air conditioning or whatever it is that we all agree to do because the more local you get, the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest and the more interest you have in your neighbors.
00:57:14.000It comes to the actual problem of education.
00:57:16.000What I object to in the political sphere, and this happens all the time, is everybody is arguing on top of the iceberg about how we can move the needle 0.5 percentage points, as opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them.
00:57:31.000We pretend that that's just, you know, sort of the natural consequence of things.
00:57:33.000The arc of history suggests that people are never going to get married again.
00:57:35.000Well, I mean, actually, what the arc of history suggests, realistically speaking, is that the people who are not getting married are not going to be having kids.
00:57:59.000Is that the people who are more religious and getting married are having more kids.
00:58:02.000And so if you're talking about the arc of history shifting toward marriage, I would suggest that actually demographically over time, long periods of time, not over one generation, over long periods of time the only cure for low birth rate is going to be the people who get married and have lots of kids.
00:58:14.000Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but I'm just saying that, again... What are you saying?
00:58:21.000I think that there are good conversations to be had about people getting married, because stable families produce stable children that are less likely to commit crime, that are more likely to go to school, that are more likely to be productive members of society, et cetera, et cetera.
00:58:30.000I'm not going to disagree with you on any of that.
00:58:32.000It's just frustrating that sometimes when you bring up any problem, all of it will circle back to other things that makes it seem like we can't make any progress in any area without...
00:58:41.000Dude, he's just getting dominated by Shapiro.
00:58:48.000Destiny said I'm a liberal because I was able to put my son in a good public school.
00:58:56.000And then it turns into, well, maybe funding for public schools isn't determinative, to, okay, you're right, being in a two-parent household's the most important thing, but being in a two-parent household requires this, and he gets beaten back all the way to saying, well, I'm just frustrated that when we have these conversations... So it started out with, I'm a liberal because the government doesn't provide a minimum level of quality of schooling,
00:59:23.000To, I'm frustrated about conversations.
00:59:30.000Where it feels like any suggestion that we could approve anything is shot down because blah blah blah.
00:59:37.000But that's the problem with liberals, is they always start in the middle of the story.
00:59:41.000Which is, these kids are in these shitty schools, or not getting education, and you always gotta rewind the story to, how did we end up here?
01:00:49.000I mean, I literally just told you that on the local level, I'm fine with people voting for air conditioning.
01:00:52.000Yeah, but so, for instance, on the local level, so for school funding, school funding is done, I think, generally per district.
01:00:58.000So what do you do when you have poor districts that can't afford air conditioning for their schools?
01:01:03.000I mean, the idea there would be that presumably if the society, meaning the state, and I generally don't mean the federal state, I mean like the state of California, for example, decides that everybody ought to have air conditioning, people will vote for air conditioning, and that's perfectly legal, and I don't think there's anything morally objectionable about that per se.
01:01:23.000And I think that what tends to happen in terms of government is people love arguing about the problems that can be solved by opening a wallet, and nobody likes to solve a problem by
01:01:32.000You know, closing their sex life to one person, for example, or having kids within a stable religious community, like the things that actually build society.
01:01:45.000I'm fine with arguing about each of these policies and whether we apply them or not is a matter generally of pragmatism.
01:01:50.000It's a matter of incentive structures, not, per se, morality.
01:01:53.000Because incentive structures do have moral underpinnings.
01:01:56.000There's such a thing as, for example, if you're going to use a welfare program, you have to decide how effective it is, to what crowd it applies, where the cutoffs are, does it disincentivize work, does it not?
01:02:07.000But on a moral level, the generalized objection that I have to people on the left side of the aisle is that they like to focus...
01:02:14.000In these conversations, very often it feels as though it's a conversation with people who are drunk searching under the lamp for their keys.
01:02:22.000The problems they want to look at are the problems that are solvable by government.
01:02:25.000And then all the problems they don't want to look at, which are the actual giant monsters lurking in the dark, and not particularly solvable by government, are the ones they want to ignore and assume are just the natural state of things.
01:02:33.000And I don't think that's correct at all.
01:02:36.000And then obviously my criticism for the conservative side is the exact opposite, where there are parts where government could remedy some issues.
01:02:42.000For instance, you know, children having sex.
01:02:44.000I disagree though because government does have a huge role to play.
01:02:47.000That's where a Christian would disagree with a Jew and say that the thing is about Jews is they're willing to say that let's let the government step out and let people figure out their own problems, but it ignores the fact that
01:03:04.000There's an asymmetry between people and society.
01:03:09.000There's an asymmetry between people in large firms, people in the media, people in Hollywood, and the government's job is to get in the middle of that, and the government's job is to regulate behavior as well as money.
01:03:25.000So Shapiro says, well, liberals want to look at every problem like we could open up our wallet.
01:03:29.000Well, I would say the government is not just about money, it's also about guns.
01:03:35.000And the government should be able to go in there and say, no more pornography.
01:03:39.000If you make pornography, we will send men with guns to arrest you.
01:03:44.000That's a perfect example of something where that's an extremely profitable thing.
01:03:50.000It is something that has totally penetrated the household and the family.
01:04:30.000Everything that's happening there is a result of people's decisions, or is there an incentive structure within marriage as well?
01:04:37.000You know, Shapiro can say, well, all of our families are married, but that's because he's talking about Orthodox Jews.
01:04:44.000What about all the Gentiles out here that do not have a nation, like the Jews have, that provides for each other, that has a sense of community and identity?
01:04:54.000These are things that are not easily rebuilt.
01:04:58.000Things like no-fault divorce, things like feminism, and these schools that push women to go to college.
01:05:08.000And Shapiro's right that higher educated people are more likely to be married, but it delays marriage.
01:05:15.000And for a lot of people, when marriage is delayed for women, they're out having promiscuous sex, and then by the time they get married, it's more likely that they'll get divorced.
01:05:26.000So I disagree about, you know, like, let's leave everybody to their own devices.
01:05:33.000I think government has a role in shaping society, and it should.
01:05:38.000...producing other children out of wedlock.
01:05:40.000Like, sometimes having after-school programs is nice to prevent that.
01:05:43.000Like, I didn't have time for these things when I was in school.
01:05:56.000I'm not going to cite the wires of your life example, but like obviously there's only so much you can do in a school when the children coming in are so beyond destroyed because of the family life and everything prior to them even getting to school that day.
01:06:18.000So the only thing I'm looking at is, as I said earlier, just like these minimum threshold things where it's like, where can government make, because you mentioned marginal, which I think is a really minimum
01:06:25.000You know, he always says that whenever he's losing the argument, he just uses affect.
01:06:31.000He uses these weasel words and these rhetorical tactics to say, well, I'm just saying, you know, minimal.
01:07:57.000So in terms of actual job performance, you have to separate it into a few categories.
01:08:02.000In terms of actual performance in foreign policy, I think Trump's foreign policy record is significantly better than Biden's.
01:08:08.000The world being on fire right now being a fairly good example of that.
01:08:13.000And we can get into each aspect of the world being on fire and where the incentive structures came from and how all of that happened in a moment.
01:08:18.000When it comes to the economy, I think that Trump's economic record was better than Biden's.
01:08:26.000But he also had a very solid record of job creation.
01:08:30.000A huge percentage of the gains in the economy went to people on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
01:08:35.000Actually, the gross income to the average American was about $6,000 during his term.
01:08:41.000The unemployment rates were very, very low before COVID.
01:08:44.000I think that you almost have to separate the Trump administration into sort of before COVID and during COVID, because COVID obviously is sort of a black swan event.
01:09:42.000My view is that on Donald Trump's epitaph, on his gravestone, it will say, Donald Trump, he's had a lot of shit.
01:09:47.000I think that Donald Trump does say a lot of things.
01:09:50.000I think that that is basically baked into the cake, which is why everyone who's bewildered by the polls is ignoring human nature, which is, at the beginning, when you see something very shocking, it's very shocking.
01:09:59.000And then if you see it over and over and over and over for years on end, it is no longer shocking.
01:10:03.000It is just part of the background noise, like tinnitus.
01:10:05.000It just becomes, you know, something that your brain adjusts for.
01:10:08.000And so, do I like a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric?
01:10:17.000When it comes to Biden, again, I think he's underperforming economically.
01:10:20.000I think that his foreign policy has been really a problem.
01:10:23.000Even the things I think he's done right are, I think, band-aids for things that he created by doing wrong.
01:10:29.000And when it comes to his own rhetoric,
01:10:32.000You can argue that it's grading on a curve because Trump was coming in with such wild rhetoric that just a maintenance of that wild rhetoric doesn't really change, again, the baseline.
01:10:43.000In the same way that Obama did, on the sort of soaring rhetoric of American unity, I'm the president for all—like, Trump came in, he's like, listen, I'm the president for what I am, and, you know, I'm going to say the things I want to say, I'm going to be on the toilet, and I'm tweeting.
01:10:52.000And we're like, okay, you know, that's what it is.
01:10:54.000With Biden, he came in with, I'm the president for all Americans, I'm trying to unify everybody, and that pretty quickly broke down into a lot of oppositional language about his political opponents in particular, an attempt to lump in, for example,
01:11:06.000Huge swaths of the conservative movement with the people who participated, for example, in January 6th or who are fans of January 6th.
01:11:14.000And, you know, the sort of lumping in of everybody into MAGA Republicans who wasn't personally signed on to an infrastructure bill with him.
01:11:22.000That sort of stuff, I think, has been truly terrible.
01:11:24.000I thought his Philadelphia speech was truly terrible.
01:11:26.000And again, I think that you do have the problem of
01:11:29.000He is no longer capable of, certainly rhetorically, unifying the country when every speech from him feels like watching Nick Melenda walk across a volcano on a tightrope.
01:11:39.000It really is like you're just sort of waiting for him to fall.
01:11:43.000It's sad to say, I mean, the other day he was speaking for what was, in effect, his campaign kickoff.
01:11:48.000This is one of the areas where we get into... It doesn't, honestly, though.
01:12:18.000When people talk about presidents it's this is almost Like a diversionary tactic to talk about presidents because in this unique
01:12:33.000Scenario, I think that the president is effective when we're talking about Trump versus Biden But under normal circumstances the president is not and so to talk about American society and how it moves by talking about the presidency
01:12:50.000It's not like Shapiro doesn't know how the country actually works.
01:12:53.000It's just to talk about it any other way would actually get to the heart of the matter, which I think he doesn't want to do.
01:12:59.000That's why I think the president talk is just really a diversion to say, oh, Trump versus, you know, people love to talk shop about Trump versus Biden and Pelosi and all these political characters, but the things that are going on are much deeper than that, deeper than the level of the presidency.
01:13:17.000I don't understand if there's brain-breaking happening or what's going on.
01:13:21.000I don't know what world we can ever live in where we say that Trump is less divisive for the country than Biden.
01:13:31.000Not only does Trump make an enemy out of every person in the opposition party, he makes an enemy out of his own party and every single person around him.
01:13:40.000You know, Jeff Sessions, we all watched him bully his own party on Twitter.
01:13:43.000We all watched, like, all of these people walk away from him.
01:13:46.000Even recently, I think, the Secretary of Defense Esper and John Kelly, the Chief of Staff, were, you know, saying, I think Trump is a threat to democracy.
01:13:56.000You know, you've got all of his prior people that were around him, some of his closest allies.
01:13:59.000You've got Bill Barr that won't cosign a single thing that he says.
01:14:03.000You've got all these people that he used to work with that all say Trump is a horrible, evil person, he is ineffective as a leader, he doesn't accomplish anything, and he didn't.
01:14:11.000To say that Biden has failed at bipartisanship when we've gotten the CHIPS Act, we've gotten the IRA, we've gotten the ARP, we've gotten the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, when we've gotten all this major legislation that is working in this historically divided Congress, as opposed to Trump that got us tax cuts and deficit spending?
01:14:28.000I don't understand where we ever are in this world where Biden is somehow
01:14:34.000Even the speeches that Ben is bringing up, they always bring up, I remember that one, I think we might have even done it on our episode, the one speech that Biden gave where at one point the background is red.
01:14:45.000Yeah, and they're like, oh my god, it's over, this is the end.
01:14:48.000And then meanwhile, you've got Donald Trump coming into office saying things like, if you burn the flag, you should have your citizenship revoked.
01:14:54.000Or talking about MSDNC, that I'm going to investigate every single one of these media organizations for corruptness.
01:15:01.000I'm going to open the libel and defamation laws.
01:15:02.000I'm going to take all of these guys to court.
01:15:04.000You've got this weird Project 2025 stuff where...
01:15:36.000You know, like, it's funny, but even as a resident of Florida, if Florida had another natural disaster, do you think Trump would withhold aid?
01:15:44.000Because you had, I think that was one of the few nice things that DeSantis actually said about Biden, was it like, hey, listen, you know, when the buildings collapsed in Miami Beach, yeah.
01:15:52.000That, you know, for the hurricane stuff, that Biden was there.
01:15:55.000He was saying, if you guys need aid, however many billions, you can have it.
01:15:58.000Meanwhile, Trump, I think, was threatening to withhold federal funding from blue states that wouldn't... I think it had to do with the National Guard stuff, the deployment of the National Guard, that they weren't, like, doing enough for the riots.
01:16:08.000And Trump was threatening to withhold aid from some of these blue states.
01:16:12.000Yeah, Trump is literally the most divisive person in the world.
01:16:15.000I don't see how on any metric he is ever succeeding in the divisive category.
01:16:22.000I do think it's funny that Republicans are very keen to say that, like, well, we can't really grade Trump, you know, post-COVID because obviously COVID messed everything up, which is fair.
01:16:53.000Well, all we have for Biden is post-COVID.
01:16:55.000We don't have any pre-COVID Biden, you know, economy.
01:16:58.000And it was the same thing for Obama too, coming in right after the housing collapse as well.
01:17:01.000And it sucks that Republicans are able to walk out of office, you know, having burned the entire American society to the ground economically.
01:17:09.000And now we've got to try to evaluate, okay, well,
01:17:11.000What did Obama do during his first two to three to four years just trying to recover from where the housing crash left it?
01:17:17.000And then we look at Biden now who's trying to recover from COVID and now we're grading him on a totally different scale than what Trump is being graded on.
01:18:28.000Obviously, I mean, and don't get me wrong, Trump had an America First foreign policy, but the simplistic terms, well, when you're an isolationist or a non-interventionist, that's when you don't do anything internationally, like,
01:18:44.000He didn't not do anything internationally.
01:18:47.000He renegotiated NAFTA, attempted to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela, he walked into North Korea and did brinksmanship with North Korea for four years and negotiated them down from doing
01:19:01.000WMD testing, ICBM testing, attempted a backdoor regime change in Iran, drew our troops down in Syria, paved the way for withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying, well that's why he wanted to take apart NATO!
01:19:15.000He was the one that greenlit lethal aid to Ukraine, pulled America out of the Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile Treaty, and redeployed medium-range ballistic missiles to Eastern Europe, which was a huge deal.
01:20:34.000The stock market was high after Obama too!
01:20:39.000Guy doesn't know, he doesn't know anything about anything.
01:20:43.000Crane Russia, and I'm so happy that he decided to go to our European allies and our NATO allies and try to build a coalition of people to help Ukraine so that that wasn't only the United States.
01:20:53.000Personally, especially after doing a whole bunch of research, I do tend to side with Israel over Palestine and a lot of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
01:21:00.000I'm glad that Biden, while remaining a staunch defender of Israel,
01:21:47.000Um, for foreign policy, I mean, blemishes, I mean like the, the biggest one you can give to Biden is Afghanistan and the poll out there, but man,
01:21:57.000Are we going to talk about, you know, the Inspector General report that says that one of the biggest reasons why the Afghanistan pullout was so disastrous was because of the Doha Accords, where Donald Trump headed talks that didn't even include the Afghanistan army?
01:22:10.000Like, when Biden took office, we had 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan.
01:22:14.000Like, what was the options even afforded to Biden at that point?
01:22:18.000Obviously, you've got the abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria, you know, for the Turkish armies to lay waste to.
01:22:24.000You're talking about Iran and North Korea, although I'm not sure where Ben would land on those, but yeah, that's a broadly... That's a lawful... There it is again!
01:22:58.000Do you treat Biden's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness that you treat Trump's rhetoric?
01:23:03.000I should probably put that the other way around.
01:23:05.000Should we treat Trump's rhetoric with the same level of seriousness as Joe Biden or, say, Barack Obama's rhetoric?
01:23:10.000I'm going to try to be concise when I say this.
01:23:12.000Broadly speaking, especially in studying Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia, I try not to take politicians at their word because sometimes they just say stuff to say stuff.
01:23:47.000Can I ask you, like, for our head of state, our chief executive, shouldn't rhetoric be arguably one of the most important things that he does?
01:23:56.000And now I've been given a choice between a person who I think in calibrated ways says things that are divisive and a person who in uncalibrated ways says things that are divisive.
01:24:05.000And so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive is every poll taken.
01:24:26.000I mean, honestly, we may be putting too much on Trump or Biden personally.
01:24:28.000It may just be that the American people themselves are rhetorically divided because of social media, and social media can in fact be assessable.
01:24:35.000One thing that I would ask you about that, though, is I agree, especially when you look at the favorability, but sometimes when I look at these polls, when you start to disaggregate them by party, I wonder if it's actually, is Biden historically divisive?
01:24:47.000I'm trying to think of a really polite way to say this.
01:24:50.000The people that like Trump worship Trump.
01:24:54.000Like, one of the most prescient things that Trump could have probably ever said was that I could kill someone on Fifth Street and nobody would hold me accountable.
01:25:00.000Is it really that Biden is historically divisive, or is it that every single Trump supporter will always say that Trump is great and always say that Biden is bad?
01:25:05.000No, the reason I would say that Biden is, in fact, historically divisive is because Republicans felt much more strongly about Barack Obama than Joe Biden, actually.
01:25:13.000But they didn't feel as strongly about Trump as they did about, like, Romney or McCain.
01:25:47.000And I'm separating that off from, like, the inherent content of what they say, because obviously what Trump says is more divisive just on, like, the raw level.
01:25:52.000I mean, if he's insulting people as opposed to Joe Biden doing MAGA Republicans, like, if I were to just — if I were an alien and come down from space and look at these two statements, I'd say, this one's more divisive than this one.
01:26:01.000But then there's the reality of being a human being in the world, and that is everyone has baked Donald Trump into the cake.
01:26:07.000And Joe Biden, again, started off with a patina of being non-divisive and now has emerged as divisive.
01:26:14.000If you don't mind, I actually want to get to the foreign policy questions, because this one is actually slightly less interesting to me.
01:26:19.000Just one quick thing, I guess, because we can say the reality of it and we can look at opinion polls.
01:26:23.000What if we look at legislative accomplishments?
01:26:26.000Biden is working on a 50-50 divided Senate.
01:26:28.000Donald Trump had both House of Congress and the Supreme Court and got no major legislation passed.
01:26:59.000Well, if you're cutting tax receipts but you're not changing the level of spending, like Biden did with the IRA.
01:27:04.000Again, we have a fundamental philosophical difference here.
01:27:07.000I think that when the government takes my money, that is not the government
01:27:12.000Somehow being more fiscally responsible, and when the government allows me to keep my money, I don't see that as the government spending.
01:27:16.000I see that as my money, and the government is taking less of it.
01:27:19.000That's great, but at the end of the day, the government is still going to be in a deficit spending, and they're going to have to borrow money from the Treasury.
01:27:23.000Right, we have a spending problem, in other words, not a receipts problem, is the case that I'm making.
01:27:26.000The problem with Donald Trump is not that he lowered taxes.
01:27:28.000The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems on the planet, and in fact, if you wish to have a European-style social welfare state, what you actually need is to tax the middle class to death.
01:27:36.000I mean, the reality is that the top 20% of the American population pays literally all net taxes in the United States after state benefits and all of this.
01:27:44.000So, if you actually wanted to have the kind of social welfare state that many liberals seem to want to have, like Northern Europe, for example, you'd actually have to tax people who make 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars.
01:28:22.000There are tax cuts because, as you would, I think, agree with, when it comes to polling data, Americans constantly say they want to cut the government.
01:28:30.000And then the minute you ask them which program, they have no idea.
01:28:33.000And so it's much harder to come up with a bill to cut things than it is to come up with a bill to add things, which is why spending was out of control under Trump as well.
01:28:48.000The task that Republicans think government is there to do is different than the task that Democrats think that government is there to do.
01:28:54.000So the way that the very metric of success for a Democratic president versus a Republican president, namely, for example, pieces of legislation passed.
01:29:01.000As a Republican, one of my goals is to pass nearly no legislation because I don't actually want the government involved in more areas of our life.
01:29:08.000I want to ask a couple questions on the foreign policy.
01:29:30.000Like, why are there not bills where Donald Trump could take— Well, I mean, first of all, I think that whenever the government says something is spending neutral, it rarely materializes that way.
01:29:36.000That is not going to be a spending neutral bill.
01:29:37.000Sure, but there's a difference between, like, at least they say it's spending neutral versus this is a $500 billion bill over, like, 10 years, right?
01:29:43.000Well, but again, I don't see a tax cut as a matter of, quote, spending neutrality.
01:29:46.000The big problem is they keep spending, not that they are allowing me to keep the money that I earned and they did not earn.
01:29:51.000Okay, so then just to understand, so if somebody just did massive, like, reductions in tax receipts, so tax cut after tax cut after tax cut, but they didn't change spending at all, you wouldn't consider that, like, an increase in deficit spending or out-of-control spending?
01:30:02.000You would just— That's not spending!
01:30:34.000I mean, even if you're a vaccine fan, by like April, May of 2021, there was wide availability of vaccines, whether or not you liked the vaccines.
01:30:44.000I agree, but like we're in a post, like how many trillions of dollars have been dumped in worldwide that are like leading to inflation, right?
01:30:50.000The inflation is like a worldwide issue right now because of the economy shutting down for a year or two.
01:30:54.000It's not like those effects are gone in one year, right?
01:30:56.000COVID might be gone, but the after effects of all the stimulus spending and the unemployment and everything else.
01:31:00.000The definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods.
01:31:02.000So pouring more money on top of that makes for more inflation.
01:31:08.000But like, there's also the definition of when do you deficit spend is when economies are headed for recessions, right?
01:31:12.000Rather than when economies are doing really well, like they were under Trump, and he was deficit spending, whereas Biden can at least make the argument that I should, I ought to be deficit spending because the economy is headed for potential recession.
01:31:20.000So here's the thing, I don't think that the economy is actually headed for a recession.
01:31:23.000In fact, if you look at the economic statistics... Every economist said it was.
01:31:27.000They're still saying that there's like a recession coming, right?
01:32:03.000No, I'm not going to attribute it to that because the rates of growth in job growth from September, October, November, were actually very similar to the rates of job growth after Joe Biden took office.
01:32:13.000What you see is actually kind of a straight line.
01:32:15.000In any case, on the foreign policy stuff, this is getting abstruse, but on the foreign policy stuff.
01:32:22.000So the questions that I have with regard to Biden on foreign policy.
01:32:49.000Obviously, you've got the Israel-Palestinian war that's going on right now, which is kind of bad, but broadly speaking, I'm not sure how much that affects the Middle East as much as the collapse of Syria.
01:35:06.000I mean, the reason is because Barack Obama suggested that there was a red line that would be drawn in the face of chemical weapons use.
01:35:10.000Bashar al-Assad then used chemical weapons in Syria, and Barack Obama was unwilling to then essentially create consequences for Syria in the form of any sort of Western strike, and so instead he outsourced it to Russia.
01:35:22.000Do you think there might have been some hesitancy after, like, seeing how Libya ended up, that maybe us, like, intervening?
01:36:16.000And then they became not the JV squad.
01:36:18.000Yeah, but I don't know if ISIS is originating in Syria and Baghdadi and all of the growth of that is necessarily Obama's fault.
01:36:25.000I know that we like to say that Obama created ISIS.
01:36:27.000I don't know if you say that, but I've heard that saying a lot.
01:36:29.000I think that's a little bit simplistic.
01:36:31.000I don't think that when I'm looking at actions that presidents have taken, the
01:36:35.000The biggest criticism I have for Middle Eastern policy is, I think the Doha Accords were a disaster, and I think that's one of the biggest blemishes that we have right now.
01:36:42.000I would also argue that moving the embassy to Jerusalem was also kind of silly, and arguably contributed to some of the conflict we see right now between Israel and Palestine.
01:36:50.000I would argue precisely the opposite, especially given the fact that after the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords continued to sign and actually expand.
01:36:57.000And that if Donald Trump had been elected, I have no doubt in my mind that Saudi Arabia would now be a part of the Abraham Accords.
01:37:03.000In fact, that was basically pre-negotiated.
01:37:05.000And then when Joe Biden took office, Joe Biden took a very anti-Saudi stance on a wide variety of issues.
01:37:11.000The biggest single effect in the Middle East of Joe Biden's presidency, and again, I agree with you that not every foreign policy issue can be laid at the hands of a president.
01:37:19.000Joe Biden's main approach to the Middle East was very similar to the Obama approach, which is why the Middle East was chaotic under Obama and chaotic under Biden.
01:37:25.000And that was to alienate allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, and instead to try to make common cause or cut deals with Iran.
01:37:34.000What that did is incentivize terrorism from Iran.
01:37:37.000What we're watching in the Middle East is Iran attempting to use every one of its terror proxies in the Middle East, and it was specifically launched in an attempt to avoid what Biden actually was trying to do, which was good, which was
01:37:47.000After two years of failure with Saudi Arabia, try to bring them into the Abraham Accords, right?
01:37:50.000That was what was burgeoning at the end of last year.
01:37:53.000And Iran saw that, and Iran decided that they were going to throw a grenade into the middle of those negotiations by essentially activating Hamas.
01:38:01.000October 7th, Israel, as a sovereign nation-state, has to respond to the murder of 1,200 of its citizens and the taken kidnapping of 240.
01:38:07.000Israel has to do that not only to go after its own hostages and try to restore them, but also to reestablish military deterrence in the most violent region of the world.
01:38:30.000If you're talking about the effects of global supply lines, which I totally agree had a major inflationary effect on the economy thanks to COVID.
01:38:36.000Right now, the cost of shipping is nearly double what it was just a few weeks ago, and that is because a ragtag group of hoodie barbarians are attacking international shipping and forcing everybody to stop using the Babel Mound and straight instead of going around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.
01:38:52.000All of that is the result of the fact that Joe Biden reoriented the United States in the very early days in favor of a more pro-Iranian stance.
01:38:58.000He appointed Robert Malley to negotiate the Iran deal, who, as it turns out, was using proxies.
01:39:03.000Many of his aides were actually taking money from Iran.
01:39:06.000The Biden administration, literally one of their first acts was to delist the Houthis as a terror organization and end sanctions against the Houthis.
01:40:25.000So, just objectively, it was more stable under Trump, and moving the embassy, much as I disagree with that, has nothing to do with what's happening now.
01:40:35.000The moving of the embassy has nothing to do with what's going on today and what happened on October 7th, because Shapiro's right.
01:40:45.000Whether, and I don't agree that Iran activated Hamas, I think that probably Hamas acted of their own volition, although it's possible that Iran activated them,
01:40:54.000It had everything to do with a potential Saudi inclusion in the Abraham Accords, which Shapiro's right, Biden was negotiating in August.
01:41:04.000And they were going to promise Saudi Arabia a security guarantee.
01:41:08.000So it had nothing to do with the embassy.
01:41:11.000The biggest disaster was, we are all traumatized by it now, was the Iraq invasion, which happened under a Republican president.
01:41:18.000The deposition of Saddam Hussein and everything that followed after probably contributed more to the growth of ISIS and the destabilization of that entire region, probably more than anything else.
01:41:26.000I think that under, prior to Bush, for Clinton, and even at the beginning of Bush's presidency, we were on some kind of road to normalcy with Iran, which I think has to happen, whether we like them or not, until Bush, for whatever reason, decides to
01:42:23.000Sure, we can disagree on that, but I know that once it got going... By the way, the after-effects, just a quick note, the after-effect of the Iraq war that was the most devastating was the increase in power of Iran.
01:42:31.000I agree, yeah, because of the destabilization of Iraq, and Iraq not having a government there that was functional for at least a decade.
01:42:38.000And was, in fact, a Sunni government, right?
01:43:32.000I feel like moving on a path where, you know, let's do our nuclear inspections, we had that Iranian nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of, let's do the nuclear inspections, make sure you're not on the way to nuclear weapons, let's unfreeze some funds, let's move in some direction where we get on a good term with you, I feel like that's the most important thing that needs to happen in the Middle East.
01:43:48.000As much as people like to look at the Abraham Accords, who cares if, what was it, Bahrain, I think Oman,
01:44:12.000They were already de facto trading partners with each other.
01:44:16.000They had already been collaborating and doing things.
01:44:18.000That's a wild claim that Israel and Saudi Arabia were going to normalize 15 years ago.
01:44:22.00015 years ago might have been a wild claim.
01:44:24.000But after Turkey, after Jordan, and then in the past like 20 years of like economic relations and ties with each other, all of the leadership in the Middle East, and you'll agree with this, look at Israel and they go, okay, well we've got Palestinians who, you know, God bless them.
01:44:48.000All of the leadership in these Middle Eastern countries are wanting to be friendly with Israel and are engaging in trade de facto with Israel.
01:44:53.000And the idea that, like, the UAE and Bahrain were brought in to say, like, oh, well, now we're going to officially say this, I just— Those were the first steps toward, obviously, the formation of a new Middle East in which economics would predominate over sectarian conflict.
01:45:16.000But do we think— Is it the Abraham Accords that's convincing Saudi Arabia to take a stance against Iran?
01:45:21.000No, they're already fighting with each other.
01:45:24.000I don't think the Abraham Accords moved us any closer towards any type of real peace in the region.
01:45:28.000What has to happen is something has to happen with Iran.
01:45:31.000There has to be some diplomatic bilateral communication there.
01:45:34.000No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran, which was what was taking place with the increased normalization with the Sunni Arab world and Israel combined with significant economic sanctions.
01:45:45.000The notion that there's this far-fetched notion in foreign policy circles that diplomacy can sort of be wish-cast out of thin air.
01:45:52.000That if you sit around a table that you can always come to an agreement with somebody.
01:45:55.000The Ayatollahs do not have common interests with the United States.
01:45:59.000And this idea that they are willing to take money in exchange for, for example, some sort of peaceful acquiescence to Israel's existence is obviously untrue.
01:46:16.000The United States paid them a lot of money.
01:46:17.000They had conversations with Israel, and you know what?
01:46:20.000The economy, the economic gains... Jordan, same thing with... Not to get into Turkish politics, but the situation with Turkey was actually quite warm between Israel and Turkey in the 90s when you had the
01:46:33.000Because Turkey recognized Israel in the 40s, if I'm not mistaken.
01:46:37.000They recognized Israel right after independence.
01:46:58.000I thought that he meant, because he kept saying Turkey and Jordan, but Turkey didn't need a deal from the United States to normalize ties.
01:47:05.000They did it shortly after Israel's founding, which was unique among the Arab states.
01:47:12.000Not that Turkey is Arab, but among the Muslim states, I should say.
01:48:48.000That is not a thing that's going to happen.
01:48:50.000But I think people probably felt the same.
01:48:52.000Every single one of their proxy groups, every one of them, not only calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, they also call for the destruction of America.
01:48:58.000I mean, this is literally the Houthi slogan.
01:49:00.000They're busy hitting ships, and their slogan is literally, Allahu Akbar, death to America, death to the Jews, death to Israel.
01:49:06.000It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, and it's not all that catchy, but that is, in fact, their slogan.
01:49:10.000The notion that the regime that propagates that is going to be approached with diplomacy is not only wrong, the problem is that it's easy to say that the stakes of diplomacy are, okay, so we try to talk, right?
01:49:37.000By the way, I think the logic of violence in the Middle East is actually closer to what most international politics looks like than we wish that it were.
01:49:44.000I mean, I think that's part of what's happening in Ukraine as well.
01:50:06.000Which brings me, by the way, here's my question about Ukraine.
01:50:11.000So you think that for Iran, right, a country that has been sanctioned for God knows how many years now, you think that for Iran just continuing to sanction them and contain them is an effective way, is more effective than trying to engage them in bilateral or multilateral peace talks?
01:51:02.000Yoav Galant, who is the Defense Minister of Israel, was encouraging Netanyahu, who is the Prime Minister, and the war cabinet, including Benny Gantz.
01:51:07.000So whenever people talk about the Netanyahu government, that's not what's in place right now.
01:51:10.000There's a unity war government in place that includes the political opposition.
01:51:13.000The reason I point that out is because there are a lot of people politically who will suggest that the actions Israel is currently taking are somehow the
01:51:20.000Manifestation of a right-wing government.
01:51:21.000Israel currently does not have a quote-unquote right-wing government.
01:51:23.000They have a unity government that includes the opposition.
01:51:25.000In any case, Yoav Galant was urging in the very early days of the war that Israel should turn north and instead of hitting Hamas, they should actually take the opportunity to knock Hezbollah out because Hezbollah is significantly more dangerous to the existence of the State of Israel than Hamas.
01:51:39.000As far as what Israel has been doing wrong in the actual war, I mean, I think that
01:51:46.000Again, from an American perspective, I think that Israel is doing pretty well.
01:51:50.000From an Israeli perspective, if I were Israeli, I would actually want Israel to be less loose about sending its soldiers in on the ground level.
01:51:59.000So Israel's attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and the cost of that has been the highest.
01:52:03.000Military death toll that Israel has had since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
01:52:06.000I mean, I personally know, through one degree of separation, three separate people have been killed in Gaza.
01:52:11.000And that's because they're going in door-to-door, it's because they're attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and they're losing a lot of guys in this particular war.
01:52:22.000The problem that Israel has had, historically speaking, is that Israel got very complacent about its own security situation.
01:52:27.000They believed the technology was going to somehow correct for the hatred on the other side of the wall.
01:52:33.000Okay, so our people have to live underground for two weeks at a time while some rockets fall, but at least it's not a war.
01:52:43.000So to me, what Israel did wrong was years and years and years of complacence and belief in an Oslo system that is at root a failure because you cannot make a peace agreement with people who do not want to make peace with you.
01:52:55.000So that's what I think Israel is doing wrong.
01:52:56.000I have a feeling there's going to be wide divergence on this point.
01:53:02.000So in terms of, broadly speaking, I generally oppose settlement expansion.
01:53:09.000Well, in terms of, broadly speaking, I generally oppose settlement expansion.
01:53:14.000It's a thing that Israel does incorrectly, but I think it's kind of, like, provocative to at least all the Palestinians in the West Bank, and it probably energizes hatred in the Gaza Strip for them as well.
01:53:24.000In terms of conducting warfare, the one thing that I always say to everybody, especially Americans, is you can't evaluate things from an American perspective.
01:54:30.000Wow, bro is breaking out the knowledge!
01:54:32.000Well, what I'll break with, Ben, is I think that minimizing civilian casualties and everything is very, very, very important, I think, on the Israeli side.
01:54:38.000I don't think it's important so that the U.S.
01:54:39.000will stay with them, because I think the U.S.
01:54:41.000is probably going to stick with Israel, as long as they're not doing anything crazy.
01:54:43.000And I don't even think it matters for the international community.
01:54:46.000It definitely doesn't matter for the U.N., because Jesus Christ.
01:54:49.000However, I think it's really, really, really important that I think that in the Middle East, broadly speaking,
01:54:55.000I think that leadership, especially in the Gulf, has gotten over the Palestinian issue.
01:55:02.000I think that leadership is kind of like they don't care as much anymore, but the populations still care quite a bit.
01:55:08.000And I think that the main issue that Israel could run into is if the civilian death toll does climb too high, and if they start to hit this, you know, 40, 50, 60,000 number of civilian casualties,
01:55:50.000But I saw on a couple of Twitter accounts, it was leaked that potentially Saudi Arabia was considering installing a government in the West Bank that they would run.
01:55:58.000No, I mean, I think Israel would love nothing better than that, but that is not helping the Saudis.
01:56:02.000One of the big problems in the Middle East is literally no one wants to preside over the Palestinians.
01:56:09.000So I think the issue, and I think, and I'm largely actually, I'm very sympathetic towards the Palestinians because I think that for, since 1948 and onwards, I think that all of the Arab states super gassed them up on that.
01:56:19.000They wanted the Palestinians to fight because they wanted to fight with Israel.
01:56:22.000However, as time has gone on and they've realized that it's kind of a lost cause, states have started to drop out.
01:56:28.000So you're getting these bilateral peace treaties with Egypt and with Jordan.
01:56:32.000You're getting multilateral agreements like the Abraham Accords.
01:56:35.000And now the Palestinians are looking around and like, OK, well, you guys told us to fight all this time.
01:56:38.000And now the only people that we have supporting us are Iranian proxies.
01:56:42.000So the Palestinians are in a very weird spot where they've lost all their support.
01:56:46.000Yeah, I think that Israel, what I would say to be quote-unquote critical of Israel, is Israel needs to take strong steps towards peace that probably involves them enduring some undue hardship.
01:56:57.000So, not the October 7th attacks, because Jesus, that's way too much, but, you know, other types of, you know, attacks that they might have to deal with, that might cause some civilians to die, that they don't come out over the top with and retaliate with, if there's ever going to be peace in that region.
01:57:09.000However, another thing that I've always said is a huge problem between Israel and Palestine is I think that both sides think that if they continue to fight, it will be good for them.
01:57:19.000But the problem is one side is delusional.
01:57:22.000Israel, I think Israel wants to continue to fight because they get justifications for the annexation of the Golan Heights.
01:57:28.000They get justifications for expansions, especially in Area C that I think they're probably going to try to annex soon.
01:58:30.000There's a reason why Abbas doesn't want to do elections in the West Bank, and it's because the Palestinian people really do want to fight with Israel.
01:58:41.000We've got to do an actual addressing of the Palestinian refugee problem, which is handled like a joke right now.
01:58:47.000Iran has to be brought to the table in terms of negotiations.
01:58:50.000There has to be huge efforts made to economically revitalize these Palestinian areas, even though they're one of the highest recipients of aid in the world.
01:59:28.000Israel wants the fighting to continue so they can annex everything, and the world doesn't give a shit.
01:59:34.000Settlements, for example, Israel did have settlements inside the Gaza Strip.
01:59:36.000There were 8,000 Jews who were living inside the Gaza Strip in Gush Katif.
01:59:40.000Up until 2005, they withdrew all of those people, I mean, took them literally out of their homes.
01:59:47.000And the result was not the burgeoning of a better attitude toward the state of Israel with regard to, for example,
01:59:54.000You know, the Palestinian population in Gaza, in fact, is more radical in Gaza than it was in the West Bank.
01:59:59.000The result was obviously the election of Hamas, the October 7th attacks, in which unfortunately many civilians took part in the October 7th attacks.
02:00:08.000There's video of people rushing, who are civilians and dressed in civilian clothing, into
02:00:17.000And when it comes to, you know, Area C and Israel's, you know, supposed deep and abiding desire for territorial expansion in Area C. Area C, so for those who are not familiar with the Oslo Accords, and again, this is getting very abstruse, but the Oslo Accords are broken down into three areas of the West Bank.
02:00:32.000Area A is under full Palestinian control.
02:00:34.000That'd be like Jenin and Nablus, the major cities, for example.
02:00:37.000There's Area B, which is mixed Israeli-Palestinian control, where Israel provides
02:00:41.000Some level of military security and control.
02:00:44.000And then there's Area C. And Area C was like to be decided later.
02:00:46.000It was left up for possible concessions to the Palestinian Authority if the Oslo Accords had moved forward.
02:01:18.000For Palestinians who spent every day since really 67, it's not even 48, because between 48 and 67, Jordan was in charge of the West Bank and Egypt was in charge of the Gaza Strip, and at no point did either of those powers say, hey, maybe we ought to hand this over to an independent Palestinian state, which was originally the division that was promoted by the UN Partition Plan in 47.
02:01:38.000Because of that, the leadership post-67 and really starting in 64, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 64, and it called for the liberation of the land in 64.
02:01:50.000They had the West Bank and they had the Gaza Strip, so they're talking about Tel Aviv.
02:01:56.000The basic idea, as you know, kind of indicated by that, was Israel will not exist.
02:02:01.000And that was a promise that's been made by pretty much every Palestinian leader in Arabic to the people that they are talking to.
02:02:07.000Yasser Arafat famously would do this sort of thing.
02:02:10.000He'd speak in English and talk about how he wanted a two-state solution, and then he'd go back to his own people and say, this is a Trojan horse.
02:02:15.000If Israel could, if you think that Israeli parents want to send their kids at the age of 18 to go and monitor Jenin and Nablus and be in Khan Yunis, you're out of your mind.
02:02:29.000In fact, Israelis didn't want that so much that they allowed rockets to fall in their cities for full-on 18 years in order to avoid sending soldiers en masse back into the Gaza Strip.
02:02:37.000True, but I think Israel does want to continue to expand settlements into the West Bank, right?
02:03:25.000And that's why anti-Semitism is so prominent.
02:03:28.000He was funding the people in the Gaza Strip by allowing Qatari money to come in, even though he was actually speaking in opposition to Abbas, allowing the Gaza Strip to fall for Netanyahu to clear it out for him and then give it back, etc, etc.
02:03:39.000I'm just saying that I think that Israel will take a relatively neutral stance towards conflict enduring, because as long as the conflict endures and as long as the settlements can expand, I think that ultimately benefits Israel.
02:03:54.000If suddenly there arose among the Palestinians a deep and abiding desire for peace, approved by a vast majority of the population with serious security guarantees, I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find Israelis who would not be willing to at least consider that.
02:04:07.000In return for not expanding bathrooms in a frat.
02:04:09.000I kind of, I would have agreed with you on October 6th.
02:04:11.000I think we're probably a year or two away from that right now.
02:04:14.000No, but the point I'm making is that Israelis now realize that the entire peace process was a sham, meaning the people who are on the other side of the table were using it as a Trojan horse in the first place.
02:04:22.000The death of Oslo is not the death of Israeli hopefulness.
02:04:25.000It's the death of the illusion that on the other side of the table was anyone worth bargaining with.
02:04:30.000That's what's happening, and that's why you have this sort of insane disconnect right now between the United States and the Israeli government.
02:04:36.000No one in Israel is talking about making concessions to the Palestinian Authority for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah continues to pay actual families of terrorists who kill Jews.
02:05:23.000Everything else goes second, third place.
02:05:25.000And I will say, I agree essentially with everything you're saying.
02:05:28.000Not to loop back on another topic, but this is one of the reasons then why I was so critical.
02:05:31.000I don't want to say critical, but like kind of nonchalant about the Abraham Accords because they didn't address anything with the Palestinians whatsoever.
02:05:56.000With that said, the rhetoric that he's been using recently and that Blinken has been using recently about Israel needs to make painful concessions for peace, re-centering this issue at the center of relations in the Middle East is doomed to failure.
02:06:07.000The magic, magic is a strong word, the benefit of the Abraham Accords was proof
02:06:14.000Of what you're saying, which is true, which is that all of these surrounding countries, in reality, have abandoned the idea that there is a centrality to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
02:06:21.000That is not the central conflict in the Middle East.
02:06:24.000And by the way, one of the reasons it's not the central conflict in the Middle East is because actually, ironically, because of the rise of Iran.
02:06:29.000It's Sunni states that are largely signing up with Israel because they're realizing they need some sort of counterweight to a burgeoning nuclear power in Iran.
02:06:39.000Do you have a disagreement with what Destiny said?
02:06:43.000My main problem with Biden's policy with regard to Ukraine is that he outsourced the end goal of the war to Zelensky early on.
02:06:53.000Now, that might make sense if that goal were something that he was willing to fund to the point of achievement, or if Zelensky could have achieved it on his own.
02:07:02.000But right now, and this has been true since pretty early on in the war, this point Henry Kissinger made, that pretty early on in the war it was very clear that, for example,
02:07:24.000Zelensky stated goal, and you understand it, he's the leader of Ukraine, right, is that there was a predation on his territory in 2014, and that the Russians sent their little green men across the border, and then they took all of these areas.
02:07:34.000And so he, as leader of Ukraine, is saying, okay, I want all of that back.
02:07:39.000's interest had largely been achieved in the first few months of the war, meaning the revocation of the ability of Russia to take Ukraine and just ingest it, and two, the devastation of Russia's military capability.
02:07:54.000straight because of the war in Ukraine.
02:07:56.000From an American perspective, I'm very much pro all of that.
02:07:58.000I think that we have an interest in Ukraine maintaining a buffer status against a territorially aggressive Russia.
02:08:04.000I think that the United States does have an interest in degrading the Russian military to the extent that it can't threaten the Baltic states or threaten Kazakhstan or other countries in the region.
02:08:13.000The problem I have with Biden's strategy is
02:08:17.000As always, I think that it's a muddle, and I think muddles tend to end with misperceptions.
02:08:22.000War tends to break out and maintain because of misperception.
02:08:25.000Misperception of the other side's strength, the other side's intentions, and all of the rest.
02:08:28.000People misperceive what's going to happen.
02:08:30.000They say, I'll cross that line and nothing will happen, right?
02:08:33.000He thought, I'll cross that line, they'll greet me as a liberator, and because the United States just surrendered in Afghanistan, essentially they won't do anything, and the West is fragmenting, because NATO's fragmenting, and all the rest of this, and obviously he was wrong on all of those scores.
02:08:47.000As with virtually every war, no end line was set.
02:08:51.000And so it became out recently that it was widely reported that actually there was a peace deal that was on the table in the first few months that Putin was on board with that basically would have ceded Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea to Russia in return for solidification of those lines, American and Western security guarantees to Ukraine, right?
02:09:09.000Ukraine wouldn't formally join NATO, but there would be security guarantees to Ukraine.
02:09:14.000It's just taking a lot more money and a lot more time to get there.
02:09:16.000And do you think Trump would have helped push that piece?
02:09:33.000Needed was for Joe Biden to be the person who foisted that deal upon him so that he could then go back to his own people and say, listen, guys, I wanted all those things, but the Americans weren't willing to allow me to have all those things.
02:09:46.000We did a heroic job in defending our own land.
02:09:48.000We devastated the Russian military, even though no one expected us to, but we can't get back those things because it's unrealistic to get back to those things because America, basically, they're a big funder and they're the ones who want the deal.
02:09:58.000Instead, what Biden said, and this was reported in the Washington Post last year, the Biden administration said,
02:10:02.000We're going to fight for as long as it takes with as much as it takes.
02:10:05.000And when they were asked until when, they said, whatever Zelensky says.
02:10:12.000That's just a recipe for a frozen conflict with endless funding.
02:10:17.000Now, it may be that Putin has walked away from the table and that deal is no longer available.
02:10:20.000If that deal is available right now, I certainly hope that's being pursued behind closed doors.
02:10:25.000My main critique, again, of Biden is that
02:10:27.000When you outsource the end goal to another country without stating what America's interest is, that's a problem.
02:10:33.000I also think that Biden did... The problem is the war should have never happened, okay?
02:10:37.000The problem is that Putin... Forget about the deal in the first few months of the war.
02:10:41.000Putin came to Trump in the fall of 2020 and said, let's negotiate about the intermediate-range ballistic missile treaty.
02:10:52.000Let's negotiate about missiles in Eastern Europe.
02:10:55.000And the deal was that they would trade inspections of their missile facilities and try and draw some of them back.
02:11:01.000And Trump didn't take that deal and didn't even negotiate.
02:11:04.000And Putin made the same deal to Biden, as he surrounded Ukraine in the fall.
02:11:09.000And this totally ignores what ignited the conflict, which is that in February, Zelensky came out and said Ukraine should have a nuclear arsenal.
02:11:19.000So Ukraine was in the process of acceding to NATO.
02:11:22.000They had never given up on that prospect.
02:11:25.000NATO was supplying Ukraine with lethal aid and drones, which was changing the tide of the conflict in Donbass.
02:11:33.000Deploying short and medium-range ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe.
02:11:38.000And then they refused the negotiation.
02:12:08.000And they replaced him with Petro Poroshenko, and that's what started this whole thing.
02:12:12.000So, they always try to portray Putin as one of the dictators in the axis of evil that is gobbling up territory and slaughtering people, and preying upon our weakness.
02:12:24.000Like, if you pay attention, that's the theme.
02:12:26.000If Israel doesn't do this, Iran will attack, because in the Middle East, that's how it works.
02:12:41.000It was the Euromaidan which was the first shot in the war.
02:12:47.000Putin drew a red line in 2008 and said Ukraine will never join NATO.
02:12:52.000And we performed a second color revolution in Ukraine in 2014 with the Euromaidan overthrowing Yanukovych because Yanukovych was trying to join the European Union and NATO
02:13:07.000And Putin gave him a better deal to join the CIS and their own bilateral trade deal.
02:13:20.000So then the State Department went in with the National Endowment for Democracy and the other NGOs and they overthrew the then pro-Russian government in Kiev.
02:13:31.000And that's when Putin went in to seize Crimea, because the prospect of a pro-Western government in Ukraine is unacceptable.
02:13:41.000The idea that, and by the way, Crimea was a semi-autonomous oblast in Ukraine, which fielded Russia's naval base at Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet.
02:13:58.000Naval base that has access to the sea because the the port in st.
02:14:03.000Petersburg in the port in the east I Forget the name of the city Novgorod I think both of those ports are not year-round ports because they freeze in the winter because they're so far north so the prospect of Crimea falling under the control of NATO is obviously unacceptable to Russia and
02:14:24.000And the prospect of NATO missiles in Ukraine, and NATO training exercises, and a NATO presence in Ukraine, which is historically Russian.
02:14:42.000So, you could go back a hundred years.
02:14:44.000And the creation of a Ukrainian state is an anomaly of how Joseph Stalin divided up the various territories when the Soviets took over Russia after the end of the Russian Civil War.
02:14:58.000So, and even, and by the way, Crimea didn't even initially belong to Ukraine.
02:15:04.000It was given to Ukraine by Khrushchev in the 50s.
02:15:08.000So, this premise that Ukraine was going to be an independent nation
02:15:14.000This is a result of the historic weakness of Russia after Brest-Litovsk, the historic weakness of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Crimea even being a part of that is its own unique historical anomaly.
02:15:27.000But the United States could never let it go.
02:15:31.000The United States wanted to, just like they did in Georgia, they wanted to bring Ukraine into the EU, into NATO.
02:15:40.000We didn't accept that, so we overthrew their government, and yeah, we didn't invade, because that's not what we do in the 20th century, 21st century, but we overthrew their government in a color revolution and we thought we were going to steal it away that way.
02:15:54.000And Putin, that is when Putin invaded.
02:15:56.000That's when the little green men crossed the border, the Russian proxies that seceded in Luhansk and Donetsk.
02:16:05.000And the whole point of the secessionist war, one,
02:16:11.000One, it was because as long as Ukraine was engaged in internal conflict, they could never join NATO.
02:16:21.000It's a precondition for NATO that Ukraine was stable.
02:16:24.000So as long as Putin kept a simmering, low-boil conflict,
02:16:31.000In the Donbass, Ukraine would be precluded from joining NATO.
02:16:55.000You know, Obama was sending the non-lethal aid.
02:16:58.000Trump got into office, began sending lethal aid.
02:17:01.000Again, pulled us out of the missile treaty and deployed missiles into Poland.
02:17:07.000And that's when things began to escalate.
02:17:09.000So, again, but the kind of perception they're trying to create is that Putin is this land-hungry dictator, power-hungry dictator, that if you're not constantly on your guard, they're just gonna gobble up all the territory on their border.
02:17:51.000But the way that he portrays it, it's like, well, if we didn't, you know, if we didn't bomb Russia, if we didn't give Ukraine all our material, well, then they would have invaded the Baltics and they would have invaded Central Asia.
02:19:09.000And that argument can always be applied unless you actually articulate the reason why it is good for Americans beyond simply the ideological for the United States to be involved in a thing.
02:19:16.000So for example, I think right now, when Biden is talking, I think that what Biden just did, the United States as we speak, is striking the Houthis.
02:19:24.000I think that that's a really, really good thing.
02:19:39.000It's happening because we can't keep Israel in check.
02:19:42.000The Houthis say that they're attacking the straits because Israel will not implement a ceasefire in Gaza, which the United States is asking them to do.
02:20:28.000The idea that Israel did not anticipate the attack by Hamas, it's just ridiculous.
02:20:34.000No serious person would believe that it was a lapse in security, that Israel did not see the attack from Hamas, and that it took them seven hours to repel them across the border.
02:21:16.000Maybe we get at the weasel a little bit on some things.
02:21:18.000On the final thing that he said, though, I wish that Americans could have honest conversations about foreign policy.
02:21:23.000I think that it would just be better for everybody.
02:21:26.000I don't know if it's, you know, Red Scare.
02:21:28.000When you're an idiot and you're losing the debate, that's when you start talking about conversations.
02:21:33.000That's when you start talking about basically something completely without substance.
02:21:39.000And you don't actually make any claims about the subject of the debate, you just start talking about the debate itself.
02:21:44.000When you're an idiot and you have nothing to say, or you've lost the debate definitively, that's when you zoom out and say, well, I just wish that these conversations are so great.
02:21:55.000Okay, so you have now left the actual conversation and now you're talking about it like some spectator.
02:22:01.000Now you're talking about it like someone who's not actually in it.
02:22:04.000If you're in the debate, you're talking about the subject of the debate.
02:22:08.000You're not talking about debating as a concept.
02:25:50.000Funds, training, soldiers, airplanes, and everything to Ukraine.
02:25:53.000I thought those two things were really good.
02:25:55.000In terms of basically writing Zelensky a blank check, I would like to hope that Biden and the entire United States learned a lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan that open-ended missions with unlimited budgets and no clear goal are like the worst foreign policy decisions you can ever do.
02:26:12.000foreign policy for the past two or three decades, which is unfortunate, but seems to be the case.
02:26:18.000My feeling would be—and this is just a feeling, I don't know if internal cables have leaked that say otherwise—is the Biden administration has probably always had a quiet position of, at some point, there's going to be an off-ramp here.
02:26:30.000And I think even a month or two ago, I think those talks were being leaked, that discussion had begun with Zelensky looking for an off-ramp.
02:26:36.000But publicly, of course, the United States is never going to come out and say, we're going to support you guys to fight as much as you want for three months.
02:26:57.000It's always going to come off as, we're going to support you forever, and as long as it takes, and as long as you need, whatever we have to do to defend freedom and democracy in your country.
02:27:03.000And any other statement would be absurd.
02:27:05.000So I can understand why it feels like, on a public level, a blank check and an indefinite time period was granted to Zelensky, but I don't think that's going to be the case.
02:27:13.000I think, again, I hope we've learned our lessons in the Middle East about the forever wars, that this isn't going to be a forever funding to Ukraine to fight for as long as they want.
02:27:22.000I feel like we're playing a little bit retrospectively, saying that, like, well, it's obvious that they're not going to capture the Donbass.
02:27:27.000It's obvious that they're not going to capture Crimea.
02:27:29.000I agree for Crimea, that was incredibly obvious.
02:27:30.000But it was also really obvious that in two weeks, Russia would own Kiev and Ukraine was going to be Belarus 2.0.
02:27:36.000I think that even for a lot of military people and analysts around the world, that that was an expectation, or at least a significant probability.
02:27:45.000Nobody knew, the phrase that's thrown around now is paper tiger, that Russia's military was as ill-equipped as they were.
02:27:51.000So I can understand why, especially if you're Ukraine and if you've repelled an invasion from one of the world's largest
02:28:52.000And I can understand the United States supporting them, but I agree that there has to be some reasonable off-ramp where we're not going to fight forever.
02:29:16.000Do you think Biden should cut this deal on the funding?
02:29:18.000Meaning there's this $105 billion deal that's been held up by debate between Republicans and Democrats over border, right?
02:29:25.000So basically it contains $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, another several billion dollars for Taiwanese defense against China, and that includes some border funding and some border provisions.
02:29:35.000Republicans want the border funding and the border provisions because we can get into the illegal immigration issue.
02:30:14.000Honestly, you're going to be more educated than me on this.
02:30:16.000I don't like, or maybe I just don't know enough.
02:30:19.000I don't like the principle that when we negotiate things in the United States, there's like 50 million hostages at all points in time for every single thing.
02:30:26.000Like, oh boy, here comes the debt ceiling.
02:30:30.000Oh boy, like here, you know, we can't fund our government.
02:30:33.000But I mean, obviously, the argument is going to be that if the Ukraine funding doesn't come in this bill, and if Biden and his administration feel like it's really important that unilaterally, or not unilaterally, but as a single issue, it's not going to pass.
02:30:44.000So, um, I would say that at this point, and I don't know what the conversations look like between the Biden administration and Zelensky, I would say at this point that it's probably fair to start making contingencies on the money that we give to Ukraine that, listen, like, this, uh, conflict has, you know, waged on now, like, now we need to start looking for potential- Waged on.
02:31:03.000This conflict has waged on for so long.
02:31:06.000We can't just write you an unlimited check.
02:31:09.000So I mean, if those strings are attached, I'd be okay with it.
02:31:12.000But the broader question of like, is it okay to make this particular piece of legislation with all this funding contingent on Ukrainian funding?
02:31:18.000I mean, that just seems to be the way the government works now, unfortunately.
02:31:41.000Uh, this is probably ignoring every other issue we've talked about, of which I think there are plenty that I would say disqualify Trump from holding office.
02:31:48.000Um, I think that the conduct and the behavior leading up to and including January 6th, I think is wildly indefensible.
02:32:00.000The three to four stages are the taking, what I think any reasonable person would say, knowingly false information about elections being rigged, or ballot boxes being stuffed, or Ruby Freeman running a ballot three times in Georgia.
02:32:14.000Taking that knowingly false information and trying to call state secretaries and stuff to have them flip their electoral vote.
02:32:24.000The plot that Eastman hatched in order to have these like false slates of electors where all seven states had citizens go in and falsely say that they were the duly elected electors that could submit votes to Congress, that was insane.
02:32:42.000Asking or begging Pence to accept these false states of electors initially and then just say, you should just throw it out completely and throw it to the House delegation, which was majority Republican.
02:32:55.000And then on the day of January 6th, trying to capitalize on the violence by him, Giuliani, and Eastman making phone calls to senators and congressmen saying, well,
02:33:04.000Don't you think maybe you guys should delay the vote a little bit?
02:33:07.000You know, don't you think they're just really mad about the election?
02:33:09.000I think you said to McCarthy, they're more upset than you.
02:33:11.000And his utter dereliction of duty in not doing anything to stop the rioting that happened on January 6th, because he was too busy taking advantage of it.
02:33:20.000I think all of these things are horrible.
02:33:23.000I look forward to seeing the Jack Smith indictments play out in court, maybe even the Georgia Rico case.
02:33:29.000But yeah, I think all of these things are unfathomable.
02:33:32.000And I think when you look at the plot from start to finish,
02:33:34.000Clearly the goal the entire time was to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power.
02:33:38.000That was the goal from start to finish.
02:33:40.000Whether it was through false claims, whether it was through illegal schemes, or whether it was through violence at the Capitol to delay the certification of the vote.
02:33:59.000So if you're asking me, morally speaking, did Donald Trump do the right thing between November 4th and January 6th?
02:34:04.000I said, I will continue to say, no, he did not.
02:34:07.000I think he was saying things that are false, just factually false, about his theories with regard to the election, about the election being stolen, about fraud.
02:34:29.000And I'm very meticulous in how I use this because I happen to speak publicly a lot, and that means there are lots of people who listen to me, which means some of those people are probably crazy.
02:34:37.000And some of them may go and do a crazy thing.
02:34:40.000The media tends to use the word incitement very loosely with regard to this sort of stuff in the same way that Bernie Sanders quote-unquote incited the congressional baseball shooting.
02:35:02.000With regard to insurrection, typically in insurrection, and there are some descriptions in case law, though none in statutory law as far as I'm aware, the typical description in case law is the replacement of one legitimate government of the United States with another by violent means.
02:35:14.000The notion that Donald Trump coordinated any such insurrection is belied by the FBI itself.
02:35:20.000The FBI put out a report in, I believe it was August of 2021, suggesting that there was no well-coordinated insurrectionist attempt coordinated by the White House.
02:35:29.000In fact, what you had was Donald Trump thrashing around like
02:37:32.000So I'm glad that you have the attorney background.
02:37:34.000When we are assessing mens rea, when we're looking at certain criminal statutes where intent is required, it's a reasonable person standard, right?
02:37:40.000Would a reasonable person have known that they were... No, it depends on the mens rea standard.
02:37:46.000If you have to establish individual intent, then it's not enough to say a reasonable person should have known.
02:37:51.000That would be enough for a negligence statute.
02:37:53.000Usually when you're talking about reasonable people, person statutes, just legally speaking, a reasonable person statute is, should a reasonable person have known, that's when you get to, like, manslaughter.
02:38:01.000You can't do a reasonable person standard on, like, first-degree murder.
02:38:04.000You have to establish actual motive in first-degree murder.
02:38:06.000But for first-degree murder, you don't need the statement of, I plan to kill this person, or I intend to kill this person.
02:38:29.000So many people that, ostensibly, he trusts them if he's asking them to look into it.
02:38:33.000And when all of them looked into it and reported back to him, no, we found nothing.
02:38:37.000Unless we're going to literally make the concession that Trump might actually be a delusional psycho man.
02:38:42.000At that point, should he not have realized like, well, okay, maybe that's not a thing.
02:38:45.000I think he should have realized the day of the election that he lost the election, but that's not the question.
02:38:48.000Sure, but I'm just saying that like at that point, should he not have known that for him to go and propagate those claims that he'd asked all of the people he trusted to research, and then for him to take those claims to Michigan and to Georgia and then publicly and to try to convince people to throw out the election, you don't think that... But you're doing the same thing.
02:39:04.000You're reverting to, should a reasonable person have known?
02:39:06.000Yes, a reasonable person should have known.
02:39:28.000Broadly, I would say pretty obviously expanding statutory coverage in weird areas in order to cover a thing that doesn't quite fit into any of these legal categories.
02:39:38.000But the point that I'm making is that Jack Smith is on my side of this.
02:39:40.000He doesn't think that he can actually establish the intent necessary to convict under a seditious conspiracy or an insurrection charge.
02:39:47.000But I think a lot of the underlying facts, though, because he does bring up those calls to Raffensperger in Georgia, he does bring up in the indictments that they were knowingly false information.
02:39:56.000So it seems like that's going to be part of the case, maybe not to convict on any of the four particular charges that he mentioned, but it seems like that's probably going to be part of the case.
02:40:04.000What he's going to have to establish in court to convict Trump.
02:40:06.000So, I want to look at the actual text of the charges.
02:40:09.000So, I'm sorry that I don't have them memorized, but I believe one's a fraud charge that generally does not apply to cases like this.
02:40:14.000Generally, the fraud charge is like you're trying to steal money from the government.
02:40:16.000Sure, fraud has been used pretty broadly in the past, though it doesn't have to just be, because Smith has done oral arguments in response to a lot of the claims by Trump's lawyers.
02:40:24.000The infinite civil and criminal immunity was another one of them, where he cites past cases where these types of things, because I think it was to defraud of civil rights, I think was the fourth charge.
02:40:32.000Right, so the defraud of civil rights is usually somebody standing in the actual like voting house door and preventing you from voting, not you have a specious legal theory that you espouse in court about whether those votes should be thrown out.
02:42:37.000He just kind of folded on both of those.
02:42:40.000And then it turns into, well, you know, maybe, you know, maybe we can, maybe in normal circumstances, we would say that this is an incitement.
02:42:49.000Maybe under normal circumstances, we wouldn't say this is fraud, but this is a very novel circumstance.
02:43:53.000Maybe it isn't all that novel, but hey, if a Democrat did it, this would be perceived very differently.
02:43:58.000We would look at this very differently.
02:43:59.000Again, what are we even arguing at this point?
02:44:01.000It's like at the beginning when he said, I'm a liberal because education is a difference maker and we need to fund it at a minimum level to like, well, I just, broadly speaking, would you fund air conditioners?
02:44:47.000Shapiro has a billion-dollar company, he's got a wife and kids,
02:44:53.000His hair is cut, his beard is groomed, Destiny's gone through two divorces, deadbeat dad to a kid, he's like a low millionaire on drugs, his wife just left him, streaming on YouTube, and he doesn't know anything!
02:45:09.000At least Shapiro went to law school and was a lawyer for a time and did a lot of writing, actually had a career.
02:45:20.000So, I think what I want to get to here actually, so we can be more specific, is why are these terms important?
02:45:29.000We agree on, largely speaking, what happened.
02:45:32.000I think the characterization of the term, are we bouncing around between two different categories?
02:45:38.000We can dump the legal stuff, actually.
02:45:41.000We're not looking at incitement, because like you said, Jack Smith, nobody's charging with incitement, and I don't believe insurrection is a part of it.
02:46:14.000As far as inappropriate, sure, I think tons of inappropriate stuff.
02:46:18.000I mean, inappropriate seems not— The reason why I don't like the word inappropriate, though, is because then conservatives are very quick to say, well, sure, he was inappropriate, but everybody was inappropriate.
02:46:25.000I mean, I'll concede that he's more inappropriate than others.
02:46:27.000I just don't see that... He's most inappropriate.
02:46:30.000Well, conservatives would say... Okay, that's important to me, though.
02:46:33.000Does it not bother you that, like, Donald Trump sought through legal and extra-legal and Trump-magical ways of trying to entrench his power as president past when he should have been able to?
02:46:47.000Is that not something that is incredibly troublesome?
02:46:50.000The question to me is the bigger question that I think the Democrats are trying to promote in this election cycle, which is this means he is a threat to democracy sufficient that if he were to win the election, there would not be another.
02:47:32.000Because so much of the Republican Party, despite feeling like they don't support Trump, when it comes time to actually back him in Congress— Also, I'd have to check whether he would be barred by criminal conviction from holding—I don't know the answer to that.
02:47:44.000I'm figuring out a lot of this right now.
02:47:47.000But I mean like, say if not Giuliani, say if there are any other number of insane people that Trump could theoretically put on his side of the government that wouldn't tell him no next time.
02:47:56.000Because there were a lot of people that rebuked him.
02:47:58.000There were Republicans in a lot of the states, right?
02:48:20.000I think Trump probably thought that if he had people that were like at least in his party and kind of camp, that they'll basically do whatever needs to be done to give him what he wants and with no respect for process.
02:48:31.000But now that he sees it, well, it's not enough to just have allies.
02:48:34.000I need people that are fiercely allegiant to me.
02:48:37.000Would we not be worried that a guy that tried to essentially steal the election for real wouldn't try to pick people that would be more amenable to his plans in the next administration?
02:48:44.000I believe in the checks and balances of American government.
02:49:05.000We already did this segment on running the Krasenstein debates.
02:49:09.000I'm just going to skip ahead because I just can't I just have no
02:49:14.000...bandwidth for this right now, because we watched this debate.
02:49:16.000We watched Destiny do this same debate with Glenn Greenwald and Darren Beatty and Alex Jones for, like, a hundred hours last week.
02:49:24.000The only thing he cares about is Donald Trump.
02:49:25.000I don't think it's the only thing he cares about.
02:49:26.000I think it's certainly the largest thing he cares about.
02:49:28.000It's the largest thing he cares about, right?
02:49:29.000...but, man, the phrasing, for as much as our governmental founding fathers, everybody else, you know, wrote nice amendments... Governmental founding fathers.
02:49:43.000The political future of the United States, it's probably not healthy that the leading opposition candidate is now going to be barred from the ballot.
02:49:56.000It would be, however, like that threat to democracy was earned by Donald Trump and the conservatives that supported him.
02:50:01.000I think conservatives made a dangerous gamble when they threw Trump into office, and now, like, all of the fallout from that is something that we all, as Americans, have to deal with.
02:50:09.000I mean, I think that the unprecedented legal theory that a state can simply bar somebody from the ballot on the basis of, in an informal way, believing that he is, quote-unquote, an insurrectionist, is pretty wild.
02:50:20.000I mean, that's... You can say it's pretty wild, but there is an amendment in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, that says that if they have engaged in this, they shall not be, or you shall, I don't remember the phrasing, because it doesn't require conviction, but it's a self-executing, arguably, thing.
02:50:31.000If we're getting into constitutional law, I mean, there are a number of provisions that suggest that this is, number one, not self-executing.
02:50:37.000Minority opinions in the Colorado Supreme Court case are pretty thorough.
02:50:41.000The number one contention, which is that this is not self-executing because other elements are not self-executing, that ignores subsequent actual law that happened.
02:50:49.000I mean, Congress passed a law, for example, in 1872 defining who was an insurrectionist, who was not an insurrectionist for purposes of elections.
02:50:56.000In 1994, Congress passed a law that specifically defined insurrection as a criminal activity so that somebody could theoretically be convicted of insurrection and therefore ineligible to run for office.
02:51:04.000It is unlike, say, the analogs that are used by the majority opinion, like age.
02:51:10.000Obviously, this is not the same thing.
02:51:12.000We can all tell what somebody's age is by looking at their birth certificate.
02:51:14.000I can't tell whether somebody's an insurrectionist without any reference to a legal statute or a definition of the term.
02:51:19.000I would also be careful with that because remember, one of Trump's first big political actions was challenging Obama's birth certificate.
02:51:24.000Well, and I thought that was dumb at the time.
02:51:28.000One of his first big political actions was... Both said 100% chance that Trump will try to go for third term and 0% chance, which statistically... Third term?
02:52:01.000He should never leave the White House after he gets elected.
02:52:03.000I just think that the, I think it's scary that like Donald Trump, it feels like for all of the accusations that are made sometimes against Democrats, like Biden is ordering Garland to investigate Donald Trump and blah blah blah.
02:52:13.000It seems like Donald Trump would actually do that with his DOJ, would give them orders.
02:52:22.000So, for instance, with Jeffrey Clark, Jeffrey Clark went to Rosen and Donahue and said, hey, listen, I need you guys to sign off on a letter that we're going to use essentially to bully states into overturning their elections by saying we found significant election fraud.
02:52:35.000And part of that threat was Jeffrey Clark saying, listen, if you're not going to do it, Rosen, you know, Trump's going to fire you and just make me the acting attorney general.
02:52:42.000That was the threat that he carried, and I think Trump repeated that threat in a meeting later on that was, I only rebuked when I think like half the White House staff said, if you do this, we're resigning.
02:52:49.000Okay, so that's a slightly different topic, because now you're getting into all the election shenanigans and all this, but... Sure, I'm saying he threatened to fire his acting attorney general if he wouldn't carry the same platform, essentially.
02:52:58.000Like, if Trump could order his DOJ to do something, would he?
02:53:01.000It's not beyond the pale for him, right?
02:53:04.000It's not beyond the pale for him to order them to do it, and then it's not beyond the pale for them to reject him doing that, which is the story of his entire administration.
02:53:09.000Whereas Joe Biden orders his DOJ to do things, and then they just do them.
02:53:12.000Well, we can get into specifics there.
02:53:14.000This is one of the big problems that I have with, I mean, for example, all this talk about Trump tyrant, Trump executive power.
02:53:22.000I mean, Joe Biden has used executive power in ways that far outstrip anything that Trump does.
02:53:25.000Every president has been stretching and stretching and stretching executive power.
02:54:17.000We're talking about the future and we're talking about what ought to be.
02:54:20.000So this is just completely irrelevant.
02:54:22.000Yes, yes, Biden had more executive orders than Trump.
02:54:27.000But this doesn't matter because we would ideally like one final decree.
02:54:34.000Because ideally we would like the final executive order to be the dissolution of any government outside of the personal regime of Donald Trump.
02:54:44.000So I don't really see how this is even relevant anymore.
02:54:48.000I mean, Trump's inability to get border policy passed literally had him using executive power to march the military down to the border to do border policy.
02:54:56.000I mean... I mean, Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration to try to cram down VAX mandates on 80 million Americans.
02:55:26.000Saying that like, well, the guardrails are holding with Biden as much as they're holding with Trump.
02:55:29.000The only difference is that once Biden, you know, exhausts his executive power, he's not running around like lying to people or trying to extort people or trying to concoct insane schemes.
02:55:39.000Well, I mean, so here's the way I would think of this.
02:55:42.000Think of the guardrails holding as the filter, okay?
02:55:52.000Now the question becomes, what liquid are you pouring into the filter?
02:55:55.000Meaning, so if the filter exists, if the guardrails hold, and if Donald Trump can't steal elections, what's the policy that comes through the other end of the filter?
02:56:02.000The policy I get from Donald Trump on the other end of the filter is a bunch of stuff that I like.
02:56:05.000The policy that I get from Joe Biden on the other end of the filter is a bunch of bullshit I don't.
02:57:01.000Recently in the news, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT failed to fully denounce calls for genocide.
02:57:10.000And that rose questions about the influence of DEI programs at universities.
02:57:15.000And so maybe either looking at this or zooming out more broadly at identity politics at universities or identity politics, wokeism in our culture, how big of a threat is it to our culture, to Western civilization?
02:57:30.000So obviously I'm going to say it's a huge threat.
02:57:32.000The reason that I think there's a huge threat, I want to give a definition of wokeism because people are very often accused of not using wokeism properly or believing that it's sort of a catch-all phrase.
02:58:08.000Preserved by an upper crust of people who wanted to cram down exploitation on people.
02:58:13.000That was sort of the Marxist version of postmodernism and then got transmuted into sort of a racial version of postmodernism in which the systems of the United States are white supremacist in orientation and are perpetuated by a group of people who are in fact in favor of the preservation of white power and white supremacy.
02:58:30.000That is the generalized theory of critical race theory as proposed by for example
02:58:38.000That has taken a softer form that we refer to as DEI.
02:58:45.000The key in DEI is the E, meaning equity.
02:58:47.000So equity is a term that does not mean equality.
02:58:51.000Equality is the idea that we all ought to have equal rights, that we all ought to be treated equally by the law.
02:58:58.000Equity is the idea that if there is an inequality that emerges from any system, it is therefore due to discrimination.
02:59:03.000And the best way to tell whether somebody has been victimized is by dint of their race.
02:59:08.000And we can tell whether you're a member of an oppressed group or an oppressor group by the intersectional identity that you carry and by the nature of your group's success or failure, predominantly along economic and power lines in American life.
02:59:22.000This means that if one group is predominantly successful economically, they must be a member of the victimizing class.
02:59:29.000And the only corrective for that would be, as Ibram X. Kendi likes to suggest, effectively anti-racist policy is racism in the service of destroying racism.
02:59:38.000That you're going to have to discriminate on the basis of race in order to correct for discrimination that's baked into the system.
02:59:46.000It leads to a victim-victimizer narrative that is unhealthy for individuals and terrible for societies.
02:59:51.000It relieves people of individual responsibility, and it destroys the very notion of an objective metric by which we can decide meritocracy.
03:00:00.000And meritocracy is the only system human beings have ever devised that has positive externalities in literally any area of life.
03:00:06.000Every other distribution of wealth, power,
03:00:09.000done along other lines that is not having to do with merit has negative externalities.
03:00:14.000Every system having to do with merit has positive externalities because presumably the most effective and useful people are going to succeed under those systems.
03:00:20.000That's the very basis of a meritocracy.
03:00:22.000And the externalities of that mean that other people benefit from the meritorious and excellent performance of those people.
03:00:28.000Maybe you'd be good to get your comments, your old stomping ground, Harvard.
03:00:33.000Do you think the president of Harvard should have been fired?
03:00:36.000I mean, I think she should have been fired not over the plagiarism allegations.
03:00:38.000I think she should have been fired based on her performance just at that congressional hearing.
03:00:44.000If the word black had been substituted for Jew in that statement by Elise Stefanik that she was asking about, or trans, or literally any other minority in America, maybe with the exception of Asian, then the answer would have been very different coming from Cloudy and Gay.
03:00:59.000With that said, I don't think the firing of Cloudy and Gay really accomplishes very much.
03:01:12.000Universities, as truthful as McGillipan also, to basically throw somebody overboard as the sacrifice to maintain the underlying system that continues to predominate at American universities, where they spend literally billions of dollars every year on DEI initiatives and diversity hires and diversity administrators and all of this.
03:01:30.000I mean, one of the costs of education escalating is in the massive administrative function that is now undertaken by universities, as opposed to teaching and cost of dorms and such.
03:01:42.000You guys probably agree on a lot of this, right?
03:02:02.000Back in my day, we called it SJWs, Social Justice Warriors, before it became WOKE, like 2013 onwards, whatever.
03:02:08.000Like, there are aspects to WOKEism that I think are good.
03:02:10.000Like, I like the additional representation that we have in media now.
03:02:13.000I like how, as much as people complain about the internet and how it's regulated, that there are way more groups that are represented on the internet, whether we're talking X, the platform formerly known as Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
03:02:24.000I think in some ways, or whether we're pushing, you know, like women's achievements in school and in the wider workforce, I think that these are all good things.
03:02:31.000The issue that you run into is people don't ever have a stopping point, and I think people kind of get lost in this woke-for-woke sake thing, where we start to see these very weird warpings of these, like, academic, I guess, arguments that are used for really horrible things.
03:02:48.000So, for instance, I think that you can talk about in the United States things like white supremacy or things like oppression or certain demographics, especially with Jim Crow laws and pre-Jim Crow.
03:02:57.000And you can even talk about effects from that.
03:02:58.000But then when you run into this weird world where we've kind of warped these things so that not only is white supremacy still as present today as it ever has been, well, actually, black people and other minorities can't even be racist.
03:03:07.000They don't have the power to because we're going to use a different definition of racism.
03:03:11.000And we can only talk about punching up as opposed to punching down.
03:03:14.000And we're actually going to say it's totally okay for these people to say or do whatever they want, and it's never bad, but like white people who have always been the oppressors, even if you're like a trailer park guy whose family's addicted to meth, you know, you have all this privilege, etc, etc.
03:03:24.000I think that you run into these issues where wokeism, it starts off as like a really good idea, and I would argue has achieved really good things, especially in regards to like women's education and everything.
03:03:32.000And then it just gets so academia-ie, so there's a word there, academic, whatever, where you take something and you put it into school too much and then it comes out as some Frankenstein, you know, cancer baby of, like, horrible things, such that today, when I'm reading stuff, and I know Ben is the same way, like, if I even hear somebody say the word, like, anti-racism, I'm probably ignoring every other thing you have to say.
03:03:50.000If you utter the word, like, colonial anything, I'm probably gonna say you probably don't have anything good to say.
03:03:55.000Yeah, a lot of it is just taken way too far.
03:03:59.000But you know what I will blame, on some of this, is I will blame conservatives for some of this.
03:04:04.000Because I think one issue that happens, and I think Ben might even agree with me here too, is I think there's two huge problems that have happened in the United States, I think broadly speaking, is that one, we've become more different than we ever have been, and two, we've become more similar than we ever have been.
03:04:18.000And when I say this, what I mean is that like we're splitting off into these groups, and then these groups- Shut up!
03:04:50.000...are enforcing this insane homogeneity between these two separate groups.
03:04:54.000And I think one of these schisms has been conservatives' reluctancy to participate in things related to higher education.
03:05:01.000So for a long time, conservatives are saying, like, oh, you know, the educational institutions are against us.
03:05:05.000You know, Rush Limbaugh talks about how evil the colleges are and blah, blah, blah.
03:05:07.000And then what happens is, is conservatives are less and less willing to engage in them.
03:05:11.000So then you get this scenario or this environment where everybody that's engaged in
03:05:15.000Academia on the administrative side are fucking insane.
03:05:20.000They're, like, even more so to— and I also want to draw a distinction between, like, the administrators and the faculty, because oftentimes when you're reading story after story after story of, like, all of these insane admins that are pushing further and further left, usually the faculty is fighting against it.
03:05:33.000A lot of the tenured professors, a lot of people in their departments are saying, like, hold on, well, we actually don't agree with this.
03:05:37.000But I feel like because conservatives for so long have demonized these institutions rather than, like, critically evaluated them,
03:05:45.000And try to, like, have, like, honest critique and engagement that they've just, like, completely broken off.
03:05:50.000And when you only have a bunch of lefties or righties together, all they'll do is they'll veer off, like, even more into their insane directions.
03:05:56.000I feel like that's a big problem that we run into in the country to where conservatives have totally broken off some conversations, broken away from, where they won't participate in them anymore.
03:06:04.000And then the people that you have left just run as far to the left as possible.
03:06:07.000Certainly when you look at certain institutions, I think that one of the things that people on both sides of the aisle are constantly looking at is, has the institution suffered such capture that there is just no capacity to fix it?
03:06:17.000And when you talk about the universities, I'm not going to blame conservatives for the failure of the universities because they haven't been present in major positions at universities since effectively the late 1960s.
03:06:26.000You can go read Shelby Steele's work on this where he talks about how, you know, he used to be, he's now a conservative
03:06:34.000He was a liberal black person at the time.
03:06:36.000He was actually quite a radical black activist at the time in the 60s.
03:06:40.000And he talks about walking into the office of liberal administrators who are largely on his side with regard to civil rights and being a radical, him claiming that the systems of the university were inherently broken, were inherently wrong, unfixable.
03:06:53.000And he talks about this very, it's a very evocative episode where he's talking about how he's smoking.
03:06:57.000And as he's smoking, the ash is growing more and more.
03:07:00.000And the ash falls down on this very expensive carpet.
03:07:03.000And the president of the university, who's listening to him rant and rave, he said, Shelby Steele says, I thought he was going to say something about this.
03:07:10.000I mean, I was wrecking like a thousand dollar carpet in his office being a jackass.
03:07:14.000And instead I could see him wilt inside.
03:07:16.000He didn't have the institutional credibility or the intellect or sort of the spiritual strength to just say, listen, I agree with you on some of these things, but you're acting like a jackass.
03:07:26.000And what you see in the late 1960s and early 1970s is, in fact, the collapse of these institutions to the point where, by the time I was going to college, there was this radical disproportion between conservatives and liberals.
03:07:35.000And the problem is that when it comes to a system like the universities, basically you have to separate the universities off into two separate categories.
03:07:41.000One is STEM, where the universities are still pretty damn good.
03:07:44.000American universities, when it comes to STEM, are still leading universities in the world.
03:07:48.000Harvard's main creations these days are coming from actual hard science fields.
03:07:52.000Then you have the liberal arts field in which you basically have a self-perpetuating elite because that's actually how dissertations work.
03:07:59.000If you have somebody who's very far to the left and you decide that you're going to write a dissertation on the history of American gun rights, the chances that that is going to be approved by your dissertation advisor are much lower than if you happen to write something that tends to agree with the political positions of your dissertation advisor.
03:08:11.000Now, listen, I think there are open and tolerant professors even in the liberal arts at these universities.
03:08:31.000She used to write me recommendations for my legal jobs after we left.
03:08:35.000Randall Kennedy, I don't agree with him very much.
03:08:37.000Randall Kennedy was a terrific professor.
03:08:38.000There are some professors who are like this, unfortunately.
03:08:41.000There tends to be in these echo chambers more and more ideological conformity that is rigorously enforced, and it is by left on left.
03:08:48.000So, for example, when I was at Harvard Law School, the president of the university was another president who ended up being ousted, Larry Summers.
03:08:54.000Larry Summers had been the Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton, and he made the critical error of suggesting that perhaps the dearth of women in hard sciences in prestigious positions was due to
03:10:53.000It's destructive to even the ones who are making a lot of money because when you degrade yourself to being just a set of human body characteristics that other people jack off to, it's bad for you and it's bad for them.
03:13:31.000What is your process of arriving at the truth?
03:13:37.000I think it's really important to—everybody will say that they're objective and that they are nonpartisan.
03:13:42.000I think it's really important to have mental safeguards for bad opinions.
03:13:48.000So, for instance, like, a couple things that I'll ask myself is, for a particular debate that I'm having, like, can I argue convincingly both sides of the debate?
03:14:57.000So, I mean, I agree with a lot of that.
03:14:59.000I think that the easiest practical guide is read a bunch of different things from a bunch of different sources, and where they cross is probably the set of facts, and then everything else is extrapolated opinion from different premises.
03:15:20.000If you read The Daily Wire and you read The Washington Post, and there's a nexus of the same thing, then you can pretty well guarantee that at least, you know, if we're all blind men feeling the elephant, at least if we're all feeling the trunk, we know that there's a trunk there, right?
03:15:34.000You may not know what the elephant is.
03:15:36.000And if you're feeling frisky, then watch Destiny as well.
03:15:40.000You've talked about, you know, having a conversation, debating Ben for a long time.
03:15:46.000What is your favorite thing about Ben Shapiro?
03:15:49.000My favorite thing about Ben Shapiro is, at least when we're in election season, he's very critical of his own party.
03:15:58.000I feel like Ben generally tries to adhere more to the fact-based arguments than other conservatives that I listen to, which is something that I appreciate because it's more fun to fight on kind of like the factual grounds of discussing things like foreign policy or whatever, rather than people that only inhabit the idealistic or philosophical grounds because they don't want to learn about any of the facts.
03:16:26.000And it's a gift to the audience because, honestly, doing what we do, so much of what we do is sitting and reading and being behind closed doors and educating yourself and talking with people.
03:16:34.000But getting to watch you do it in real time is a really cool window into how people think and how people learn.
03:18:02.000I think what happens is when Destiny debates anybody who actually knows what they're talking about, it just turns into more of like a teaching session.
03:18:12.000And what I mean by that is when Shapiro is talking about things, he's actually explaining and introducing new information.
03:18:22.000And I think when Destiny talks, he's just giving an opinion.
03:18:26.000He's not actually providing information.
03:18:28.000He's just... What Destiny is saying, I feel like this.
03:19:00.000I think the ideas are very simplistic.
03:19:02.000Like when Shapiro talks about Ukraine, you know, it's actually a valid... It's actually a valid position to say that degrading the Russian army
03:19:14.000And repelling Russian aggression as a limited strategic goal might have been valuable if they stopped there.
03:19:22.000If they stopped within the first few months.
03:20:13.000I mean, when you look at the Russia-Ukraine war as a whole, and the question is, what's your position?
03:20:20.000What insight do you have on the whole conflict?
03:20:23.000Which is, of course, a very big story.
03:20:26.000It's a very big story about Russia and the United States, about the United States and the rest of the world, about the United States and the unipolar age, about deterrence, about Russia and China.
03:21:16.000He said, well, I'm a liberal because I was able to move to a zip code where the public schools were good and other poor families, they're no fault to their own, have to send their children to a school that doesn't have the same resources like laptops and iPads.
03:21:33.000And this argument just got annihilated.
03:21:38.000If the debate opens up with, I'm a liberal because, and your because just gets wiped out instantly, just, I mean, in 15 minutes, where do you go from there?
03:21:48.000Where do you go with a person like that?
03:22:54.000I think he does have an aptitude for what he does.
03:22:57.000I don't find him charming, but he's a good talker.
03:23:01.000My problem with Shapiro is that he's not on our team.
03:23:04.000You know, he's not a Christian, he's not an American, he's an American Jew.
03:23:10.000So that's really my issue, and I think that as a consequence, he interprets everything through the lens of what's good for the Jews and what's good for Israel, and he doesn't share our Christian morality.
03:23:21.000So that's a big source of disagreement, but I have immense respect for him.
03:23:26.000As a guy, he's obviously tremendously successful, and I think some of that is nepotism.
03:23:30.000But, you know, nepotism doesn't really get activated unless you work hard.
03:23:34.000I think he'd resent that I say that, but if you look at his background, it's just true.
03:23:39.000And that's not me saying that I've resentment, you know, because I'm I'm saying I think he's a hard worker I don't think that he would have gotten to this point if he wasn't skilled, but I can't say the same about destiny He doesn't have the credentials
03:23:52.000And the thing is, I mean, I'm also a college dropout, maybe that sounds hypocritical, but I, of course, am in a very different boat.
03:24:38.000I have an actual show as opposed to I'm just hanging out every day playing video games.
03:24:43.000With him, it's literally, it's a lifestyle of sex, drugs,
03:24:49.000Travel, and then turn on the webcam, play video games, and read Wikipedia articles?
03:24:55.000Like, so this is just not a serious person.
03:24:57.000So, I mean, in a nutshell, that's not, I don't, I guess that's not too succinct, but that's not, I mean, that's really my problem with Destiny, is that I basically just think he's a fraud.
03:25:08.000I think he's masquerading as a serious person, and I don't think that about every liberal.
03:25:13.000I don't think that about everybody that's on the left, but I do think that about him.
03:25:17.000So, it's just not enjoyable at that point.
03:25:21.000But... Someone says, Nicholas doesn't just hang out every day playing video games.
03:25:26.000Well, maybe I play video games frequently.
03:25:30.000But the point is, when I do a show, I prepare and I'm not on time, so yeah.
03:25:36.000Maybe I shouldn't be critiquing everybody else, but...
03:25:40.000I prepare a monologue, and when I'm doing the show, I'm doing the show.
03:25:45.000I wear a suit, I get my hair straight, I have a set, I have a structure, it's organized.
03:25:51.000When I do the show, I mean, it doesn't always happen on time, but when I do the show, you get an hour of prepared monologue, you get an hour of super chats, and I'm dressed for the occasion.
03:26:01.000With him, it's a little bit different.
03:26:03.000With him, I mean, he literally rolls out of bed in sweatpants.
03:26:06.000Turns on the camera and for long stretches of the stream he's playing a video game.
03:29:10.000Distance yourself from the overt jag of racists and Jew haters, although I agree, or you'll be relegated to rumble, with twits commenting on their Jew cats for the rest of your political career.
03:29:21.000I am re... In case you haven't noticed, I am relegated to rumble.
03:29:26.000So I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
03:29:28.000And if I'm not talking about Jews, I'm just... You're not talking about anything, basically.
03:32:53.000So, if he's not, like, homoromantic, so to speak, if he's not attracted to men in that way, he just likes doing that, doing that degrading act, then I think that tells you a lot about his psychology.
03:33:09.000I think that kind of tells you everything, doesn't it?
03:33:13.000Because, you know, not even women, I don't even think women like sucking dicks.