On this week's episode, we discuss the fallout from a recent interview with Nick Fadees, the controversy surrounding his comments on identity politics, and whether or not he should have been more forthcoming with his thoughts on the Charlie Kirk controversy.
00:00:00.000With some kind of collectivist identity.
00:00:01.000And obviously, we are against identity politics as a form of governance.
00:00:05.000But he is saying, look, it's okay to act on generalizations, on general blocks of information, because everyone else does.
00:00:13.000And when we say, as the only race of people who say, oh, no, no, it's just up to the individual, we do so at our own detriment because we're now at a disadvantage when other people say, hey, we're a group, black people, when other people say, hey, we're a group, Jewish people, hey, we're a group, Somalis.
00:00:27.000He's already rejected the premise that there's a problem with looking at group identity as opposed to strictly the individual.
00:00:34.000So you may disagree with it, but Pierce Morgan hasn't done his research because that's no longer a valid line of attack.
00:01:19.000No, because again, it was my job to kind of question him and clarify.
00:01:22.000So he wasn't really in the position to be, you know, convincing me.
00:01:28.000I would say, if anything, what did surprise me, and I told him this afterward, because he did go on a show and he was very praising and very nice.
00:01:41.000He did, and I will say he's been known to release texts and private communications.
00:01:46.000He did go on to say, hey, you know what?
00:01:48.000He said, you know, Crowder, his people reached out and they said that they were going to press me and ask me, you know, to give out, kind of flesh out my ideas.
00:02:07.000I told him that if he had lied about the Groypers, the stuff like people coming out and encouraging them to troll, that it would have been a different interview.
00:02:13.000The fact that he right away said, yeah, I think they kind of did.
00:02:44.000I think this, he was in his early 20s and everyone was trolling.
00:02:48.000And in his mind, sending people to troll Charlie Kirk or Bench or my shows, like to ask questions, whatever it is, about the USS Liberty or like that's a game.
00:02:58.000And I, you know, even though I think it's kind of crappy, I can understand how someone could view that as a game and not necessarily be looking to have people swatted or doxed because a lot of people have experienced that.
00:03:12.000I think it's just there is a subset of his audience that is somewhat unstable because they feel marginalized.
00:03:21.000And sometimes it's aimed at the wrong targets.
00:03:23.000I got the sense that, you know, I don't know that Nick is specifically a part of that.
00:03:27.000And I don't get the sense that he is doing that now.
00:03:30.000He acknowledged that it was kind of a game and he kind of played it sometimes to his detriment.
00:03:35.000And so my perception changed a bit on that.
00:03:37.000I mean, he was in his early, early 20s.
00:03:40.000And I'm one of the only other people who grew up in the public eye the same way, right?
00:03:44.000In my late teens, early 20s with a blue bed sheet.
00:03:46.000Now, I wasn't on for hours at that point.
00:03:48.000These were individual installments with videos.
00:03:50.000I guarantee you there would be things in my early 20s if I was rolling for two hours that I wouldn't want to be held to now, especially if taken out of context.
00:04:01.000Hey, anyone out there maybe wish you could word something more carefully than what you said in your 20s, which is why I tried to get to the issues where we might actually have disagreement contextually or more recent things as far as, okay, is this what you believe now?
00:04:16.000And can you see why people have a problem with that?
00:04:19.000So I wouldn't say he changed my mind or anything, but I would say my perception changed somewhat for the more popular.
00:04:25.000The fact too that he said, if I could say, you know what, I shouldn't have said it that way.
00:04:54.000And I think he can, you know, like all of us can react in a way sometimes that's emotionally charged and maybe you overreach, especially when you're broadcasting for a long time.
00:05:02.000And I think if you look at, for example, Tucker or you look at Candace, he turns on everyone.
00:05:09.000I understand, but I also understand they did kind of do him dirty.
00:05:13.000If after this interview, he goes on a show and says, and Pierce Morgan, you know, and by the way, he did what he did and it wasn't right and it wasn't done in good faith.
00:05:19.000Are people going to say, see, that's Nick, sour grapes?
00:05:24.000And if Tucker Carlson did that interview and was friendly with him, but then at dinner was asking him about his association with white supremacists and then afterwards throws him under the bus, I do think that's shitty.
00:05:33.000And I think that Nick does have a code.
00:05:45.000I think that he does have a, if he, if he, and I could be wrong, and if you guys think I could just be completely led by the nose and then he could break bad and say, Stephen Growder is a piece of crap, paid by Apex.
00:05:56.000I think that very few people have given him exactly what they said they would as far as an interview.
00:06:01.000And I'm willing to bet that that's the case because I've had it happen with me.
00:06:05.000I've had it happen with me where I get brought on and I get asked about being a racist or you have someone trying to go, hey, you're a woman beater or despite a court record showing the exact opposite.
00:06:15.000Very few people who have a longer court record showing the opposite.
00:08:35.000But when we interview somebody like, you know, Myron Gaines, and he has a lot of very unpopular positions and positions that I vehemently disagree with.
00:08:45.000Let's get down to what you really actually believe.
00:08:47.000And for the first time ever, he's like, hey, maybe you don't sleep with 50 women.
00:08:50.000And we're like, clarify the position and help people see like, hey, there's a little difference.
00:08:54.000That's the kind of dialogue we've been talking about.
00:08:56.000When people like Jordan Peterson and, you know, the millions probably of people before him in the United States that have been calling for free speech and calling for people to be able to have dialogue, do you think they meant like just scream at them until they come around to your position?
00:09:39.000When I hear people criticizing people like you for platforming someone like Nick or someone else they might not agree with, it reminds me as a comedian, it reminds me of the CNN reporter who did an hour-long interview with Tim Dylan, trying to get him to apologize for putting JD Vance on his show during an election.
00:10:00.000For the left trying to, you know, criticize Joe Rogan or trying to get him off the internet because he has different views or platforming a certain person.
00:10:10.000Like Mark Marin criticized in a comedy special criticizing Theo Vaughan for having the president, a former president and currently running president, presidential candidate on his show.
00:10:38.000Like around the same time that Nick Fointrust was 20 years old, Pierce Morgan was on mainstream news saying that the Second Amendment shouldn't apply and America has a gun problem and we need to get rid of all guns.
00:10:49.000We used to go back and forth on Twitter.
00:10:51.000Back then it was Twitter where I just lit him up because he was arrogant about it.
00:10:56.000So it's okay for me to be on a platform with someone like that.
00:11:00.000I mean, you can go back to an interview with Jesse Herps, the first transgender mayor.
00:11:03.000If I just think of it as an example, because it was a local sort of politician and it was still very respectful.
00:12:16.000Didn't they brag about how much money they spent to create specific algorithms?
00:12:19.000And didn't someone say, hey, your contracts are encouraging and doing the work of these algorithms?
00:12:24.000Not Ben, but Jeremy Boring specifically.
00:12:26.000My issue there was you do realize that if you penalize conservative creators, 25% for the first strike on YouTube and 15% thereafter, first off, is 110% penalties.
00:12:37.000But you realize that you're actually facilitating the algorithms and the terms of service for YouTube and Facebook.
00:12:45.000And the more conservatives you sign up, the more of a monolith it becomes with people who, per their contract from a conservative company, can't step out of line with these algorithms that are destroying America, right?
00:12:59.000It's almost like someone pointed that out.
00:13:13.000Question for the crew: Do you think that when Fuentes says he loves Stalin without immediately saying not the murder and genocide, he's trying to create buzz?
00:14:24.000I said, so considering that your endgame is very similar, because you've mentioned, you know, Catholic theocracy, and he sort of clarified what he meant by that.
00:14:32.000I said it's much more similar to something like an autocratic state.
00:14:36.000And he's someone you point to as an example because he was successful.
00:14:41.000What concrete example of revolutionary Stalin would you want to see emulated to achieve the end state?
00:14:49.000And that's where then that conversation begins there.
00:14:53.000So you're not spending time going, you said you live Stalin and the one, right?
00:15:24.000Actually, it makes his dad sound a little bit cooler that he was like, hey, we're not going to Olive Garden or we're not going to Red Lobster and Bennigan's or whatever he said it was of Applebee's.
00:15:32.000He's like, we're going to go somewhere else, maybe like a local joint.
00:16:36.000Danny J, 1987 asks, if Nick doesn't hate Jews, why do the majority of self-identifying Groypers believe that he does and openly do themselves?
00:17:23.000But could you do more to maybe discourage the kind of behavior that mass bullies people on other forms and just know, hey, no one here is paid by anybody.
00:17:31.000It's okay if we just disagree and you want to have a civil disagreement on that front.
00:17:36.000Like I said, I think that Nick has views that other people would by and large classify as anti-Semitic.
00:17:42.000He clarifies that he doesn't think they are and separates.
00:17:47.000But I understand that a lot of people would even look at what he says in detail and say, okay, I think there's an undercurrent of anti-Semitism.
00:17:54.000I don't think it's any, I don't think it's as severe as a lot of his followers saying the Holocaust didn't happen and expel all Jews.
00:18:02.000Because the thing is, if you expel all Jews from the United States and then you also believe that Israel shouldn't exist, well, then you are advocating for effectively a genocide.
00:19:42.000And do you explore every possibility until you get to the point where you go, well, this person rejects Christ.
00:19:47.000It's the same thing right now where there's a vein of anti-Semitism.
00:19:50.000And by the way, this, or an undercurrent with Candace Owens is an example where I know that people who believe what she says, they're maybe anti-Semitic because they believe what she says, and it's just not true.
00:20:03.000And so it's incumbent upon me to go, okay, but do you think that because you believe this?
00:20:08.000What if I could disabuse you of that and walk through it?
00:20:11.000And then if at the end of it, they go, I don't care.
00:21:18.000And if they watch it, and if I show them two or three more clips and then show them that Arsenio Hall, the most talentless bag of nothing, won the celebrity apprentice.
00:21:34.000But I'm going to press if I think they have been misinformed because I will tell you this.
00:21:39.000That is, if you can do that with those on the left, and I say this doing change my minds, if you can get through the misinformation and the false premise after false premise after false premise and get someone to accept that their premise is false, that is the only way I've seen people leave the left, leave wrong ideologies.
00:22:03.000And you have to afford them that opportunity.
00:22:08.000You have to afford them that opportunity and go, look, they may not know.
00:22:11.000Once you've gone through it, right, to each man what is known.
00:22:16.000Once you've gone through it, okay, you know now.
00:22:19.000Now, if I see you on the other side of that fence, if I see you saying very fine people, I know you're repeating a lie because I know that I informed you.
00:22:28.000I know that I showed you the clip, watched it with you, where you saw him say, I'm not saying white supremacists and neo-Nazis who should be condemned totally, whatever the exact quote is.
00:23:59.000The Second Amendment isn't enough in the 21st century.
00:24:03.000I think that's a valid argument to make.
00:24:05.000If we start with it's paramount, you can't change that.
00:24:09.000But we may need some more rights enshrined to protect people from a tyrannical government because there are other ways that they can conquer you outside of the end of a rifle.
00:24:20.000Someone makes a compelling case or an argument, I want to explore it.
00:24:25.000All right, final chat from our crime attorney.
00:24:27.000Stephen, when you stated a couple years ago that what was happening would cause more people to become racist, do you think Nick and his followers prove you right?
00:24:36.000No, because I don't think that they're necessarily racist.
00:24:41.000I think you could say that about a lot of, I guarantee you, some Pierce Morgan followers are racist.
00:24:47.000So I don't think that they prove me right.
00:24:50.000I think, for example, what we're seeing as far as the reaction to ladies, and I'm not even saying she's a racist, but her yelling the N-word at Somalis, like you could never picture that a while ago.
00:25:02.000And if you create a bubble and if you just sort of tell, you can't talk about this.
00:25:08.000You can't talk about something that people know to be so.
00:25:10.000This is why this is so ineffective with Pierce Morgan.
00:25:12.000People watching this inherently know that black people in the United States, as a demographic, are much more violent.
00:25:35.000What I was talking about too is, what do you think happens if you're a young white man and you have one white guy who gets expelled because he goes into a black-only space, like at Mizzou or whatever it is?
00:25:46.000Or you get two people, okay, this person has now got an F because they didn't do the check your privilege test or white guilt test or whatever it was that they were issuing at that point in time.
00:25:57.000But then when you have hundreds of thousands or millions and people know that it's a lie and they're saying, look, look, look, I'm not saying all black people and I'm not a racist, but there is a point in time where the person goes, the person who is saying, I am not a racist, but if you keep silencing them and saying, no, no, I don't want to hear your views at all.
00:26:17.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you won't check your white privilege.
00:26:19.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you don't believe in reparations.
00:26:22.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you don't believe in DEI.
00:26:24.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you're citing crime statistics.
00:26:26.000The person saying, I'm not racist, but will transform to, I'm a fucking racist.
00:26:41.000And so what I want is to listen to the person first saying, I'm not racist, but I went to an all-black school and I got my ass kicked.
00:26:50.000And I had black friends, but I also saw what happened with them getting involved with crime.
00:26:55.000I'm not racist, but we do need to talk about the problem of catch and release and this man who killed Irina Zaruska being out 14 times.
00:27:03.000I'm not racist, but Daniel Penny on that subway, who was assisted by other minorities to use the word, because on that subway, they probably weren't a minority.
00:27:12.000I'm not racist, but I think labeling that guy a racist is actually a problem because we need more good Samaritans.
00:27:18.000I'm not racist, but I think there's an incentive for Jussie Smollett to fake a race crime because that's a currency in the entertainment industry.
00:27:28.000I'm not racist, but I think it's disgusting that Bubba Wallace said there was a noose and people ran with it and we knew it wasn't true.
00:27:35.000It was likely as true as the race crime hoax of poop swastika.
00:27:39.000By the way, Nazis don't tend to draw their symbol and poop.
00:27:41.000I'm not racist, but we need to have an honest conversation about what makes us different, the different problems that these communities are facing, why we don't want it in ours, and see how we can fix it.
00:27:56.000Because the only solution, I'm not racist, but the only solution if we stay on this trail is what, the balkanization of the United States.
00:28:02.000I'm not racist, but and all along when that person is saying it, by the way, most of America, certainly all of black and other minority America, they will say these things and they'll get off scot-free.
00:28:14.000There is a point in time where I'm not racist, but will transform.
00:30:35.000Like around the same time that Nick Feunthrist was 20 years old, Pierce Morgan was on mainstream news saying that the Second Amendment shouldn't apply and America has a gun problem and we need to get rid of all guns.
00:30:47.000We used to go back and forth on Twitter.
00:30:49.000Back then it was Twitter where I just lit him up because he was arrogant about it.
00:30:54.000So it's okay for me to be on a platform with someone like that.
00:30:58.000I mean, you can go back to an interview with Jesse Herbs, the first transgender marriage.
00:31:02.000I just think of it as an example because it was a local sort of politician and it was still very respectful.
00:31:07.000Naomi Wolf, you can go back to interviews with their angry feminists, and I've always tried to conduct them the same way as a host.
00:31:14.000There's a different version of me as a host.
00:32:14.000Didn't they brag about how much money they spent to create specific algorithms?
00:32:17.000And didn't someone say, hey, your contracts are encouraging and doing the work of these algorithms?
00:32:22.000Not Ben, but Jeremy Boring specifically.
00:32:23.000My issue there was you do realize that if you penalize conservative creators, 25% for the first strike on YouTube and 15% thereafter, first off, is 110% penalties.
00:32:35.000But you realize that you're actually facilitating the algorithms and the terms of service for YouTube and Facebook.
00:32:43.000And the more conservatives you sign up, the more of a monolith it becomes with people who per their contract from a conservative company can't step out of line with these algorithms that are destroying America, right?
00:32:57.000It's almost like someone pointed that out.
00:33:11.000Question for the crew: Do you think that when Fuentes says he loves Stalin without immediately saying not the murder and genocide, he's trying to create buzz?
00:35:22.000Actually, it makes his dad sound a little bit cooler that he was like, hey, we're not going to Olive Garden or we're not going to Red Lobster and Bennigan's or whatever he said it was of Applebee's.
00:35:30.000He's like, we're going to go somewhere else, maybe like a local joint.
00:36:34.000Danny J, 1987 asks: If Nick doesn't hate Jews, why do the majority of self-identifying Groypers believe that he does and openly do themselves?
00:36:43.000Well, a lot of them definitely do, or certainly, again, I can't speak for all of them, but I've definitely seen some things that are anti-Semitic.
00:36:49.000I think that if you deny the Holocaust, that's anti-Semitic.
00:36:53.000I think if you visit our chat, you'll find some in there.
00:36:58.000That's also because a lot of the Groypers, a lot of Nick's fans come in there, and that's a big thing they do.
00:37:01.000They troll, they try, and there's that sort of thing.
00:37:04.000And guys, I know you're here from the Nick interview.
00:37:21.000But could you do more to maybe discourage the kind of behavior that mass bullies people on other forms and just know, hey, no one here is paid by anybody.
00:37:29.000It's okay if we just disagree and you want to have a civil disagreement on that front.
00:37:34.000Like I said, I think that Nick has views that other people would by and large classify as anti-Semitic.
00:37:40.000He clarifies that he doesn't think they are and separates.
00:37:43.000You know, he delineates between groups of Jews.
00:37:45.000But I understand that a lot of people would even look at what he says in detail and say, okay, I think there's an undercurrent of anti-Semitism.
00:37:52.000I don't think it's any, I don't think it's as severe as a lot of his followers saying the Holocaust didn't happen and expel all Jews.
00:38:00.000Because the thing is, if you expel all Jews from the United States and then you also believe that Israel shouldn't exist, well, then you are advocating for effectively a genocide.
00:39:40.000And do you explore every possibility until you get to the point where you go, well, this person rejects Christ.
00:39:45.000It's the same thing right now where there's a vein of anti-Semitism.
00:39:48.000And by the way, this, or an undercurrent with Candace Owens as an example, where I know that people who believe what she says, they're maybe anti-Semitic because they believe what she says, and it's just not true.
00:40:01.000And so it's incumbent upon me to go, okay, but do you think that because you believe this?
00:40:06.000What if I could disabuse you of that and walk through it?
00:40:09.000And then if at the end of it, they go, I don't care.
00:41:16.000And if they watch it, and if I show them two or three more clips, and then show them that Arsinio Hall, the most talentless bag of nothing, won the celebrity apprentice.
00:41:32.000But I'm going to press if I think they have been misinformed because I will tell you this.
00:41:37.000That is, if you can do that with those on the left, and I say this doing change my minds, if you can get through the misinformation and the false premise after false premise after false premise and get someone to accept that their premise is false, that is the only way I've seen people leave the left, leave wrong ideologies.
00:42:01.000And you have to afford them that opportunity.
00:42:06.000You have to afford them that opportunity and go, look, they may not know.
00:42:10.000Once you've gone through it, right, to each man what is known.
00:42:14.000Once you've gone through it, okay, you know now.
00:42:17.000Now, if I see you on the other side of that fence, if I see you saying very fine people, I know you're repeating a lie because I know that I informed you.
00:42:26.000I know that I showed you the clip, watched it with you, where you saw him say, I'm not saying white supremacists and neo-Nazis who should be condemned totally, whatever the exact quote is.
00:44:07.000But we may need some more rights enshrined to protect people from a tyrannical government because there are other ways that they can conquer you outside of the end of a rifle.
00:44:18.000If someone makes a compelling case or an argument, I want to explore it.
00:44:25.000Stephen, when you stated a couple years ago that what was happening would cause more people to become racist, do you think Nick and his followers prove you right?
00:44:34.000No, because I don't think that they're necessarily racist.
00:44:39.000I think you could say that about a lot of, I guarantee you, some Pierce Morgan followers are racist.
00:44:45.000So I don't think that they prove me right.
00:44:48.000I think, for example, what we're seeing as far as the reaction to ladies, and I'm not even saying she's a racist, but her yelling the N-word at Somalis, like you could never picture that a while ago.
00:45:00.000And if you create a bubble and if you just sort of tell, you can't talk about this.
00:45:06.000You can't talk about something that people know to be so.
00:45:08.000This is why this is so ineffective with Pierce Morgan.
00:45:10.000People watching this inherently know that black people in the United States, as a demographic, are much more violent.
00:45:33.000What I was talking about too is what do you think happens if you're a young white man and you have one white guy who gets expelled because he goes into a black only space like at Mizzou or whatever it is.
00:45:46.000Okay, this person has now got an F because they didn't do the check your privilege test or white guilt test or whatever it was that they were issuing at that point in time.
00:45:55.000But then when you have hundreds of thousands or millions and people know that it's a lie and they're saying, look, look, look, I'm not saying all black people and I'm not a racist, but there is a point in time where the person goes, the person who is saying, I am not a racist, but if you keep silencing them and saying, no, no, I don't want to hear your views at all.
00:46:15.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you won't check your white privilege.
00:46:17.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you don't believe in reparations.
00:46:20.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you don't believe in DEI.
00:46:22.000I don't want to hear your views at all because you're setting crime statistics.
00:46:24.000The person saying, I'm not racist, but will transform to, I'm a fucking racist.
00:46:39.000And so what I want is to listen to the person first saying, I'm not racist, but I went to an all-black school and I got my ass kicked.
00:46:48.000And I had black friends, but I also saw what happened with them getting involved with crime.
00:46:53.000I'm not racist, but we do need to talk about the problem of catch and release and this man who killed Irina Zaruska being out 14 times.
00:47:01.000I'm not racist, but Daniel Penny on that subway who was assisted by other minorities to use the word because on that subway, they probably weren't a minority.
00:47:10.000I'm not racist, but I think labeling that guy a racist is actually a problem because we need more good Samaritans.
00:47:16.000I'm not racist, but I think there's an incentive for Jesse Smollett to fake a race crime because that's a currency in the entertainment industry.
00:47:26.000I'm not racist, but I think it's disgusting that Bubba Wallace said there was a noose and people ran with it and we knew it wasn't true was likely as true as the race crime hoax of poop swastika.
00:47:37.000By the way, Nazis don't tend to draw their symbol in poop.
00:47:40.000I'm not racist, but we need to have an honest conversation about what makes us different, the different problems that these communities are facing, why we don't want it in ours, and see how we can fix it.
00:47:54.000Because the only solution, I'm not racist, but the only solution if we stay on this trail is what the balkanization of the United States.
00:48:00.000I'm not racist, but and all along when that person is saying it, by the way, most of America, certainly all of black and other minority America, they will say these things and they'll get off scot-free.
00:48:12.000There is a point in time where I'm not racist, but will transform.