00:03:36.580Well, I'll name one. I mean, he was a friend, but I'm quite worried about his cultural influence.
00:03:42.720I've named him on many other podcasts, but I think the effect that Joe Rogan's podcast has had has been, I mean, it's been many things, but it has been politically disastrous, I think.
00:03:55.500I just think it's not just what's happened on his podcast, but the instruction that every other independent broadcaster on earth has taken from his example.
00:04:34.740that I don't really understand. Do you have a theory about that?
00:04:40.580Well, it is a form of tribalism. It's a form of confirmation bias. I mean, there are certain
00:04:47.260sources that you prejudge as friendly or through cruel experience, you realize that certain
00:04:54.020sources are kind of weaponized against you and you just are not disposed to take them seriously.
00:05:00.180I mean, if I'm going to tell you, you know, again, so much of this, you can date to COVID and what it did to our society.
00:05:06.920I mean, both the fact of the pandemic and the reaction to it and the overreaction to it and the counterreaction to it.
00:05:13.140I mean, all of that was a great shattering of culture that I still think we're working out the consequences of and living under the shadow of.
00:05:22.900But yeah, you know, if CNN, you know, colorizes your face to make you look sick and tells the world that you're, you're a racist or you're, um, you know, and you're eating, you know, horse tranquilizer or, you know, horse dewormer, um, I mean, you know, Rogan got completely slimed by the mainstream media.
00:05:41.760So it's natural to think he's going to have a reaction against it. And in miniature, I know what that's like, right? And you know what it's like when you see a story that you're close to. Many of us have had the experience of seeing the bias and frank idiocy of even the best organs of journalism, like the New York Times, on full display.
00:06:03.840As recently as today, I'm reading an article in the New York Times and I see them predisposed to get many things wrong because they're tending to various left-leaning shibboleths on a topic that I know very closely.
00:06:19.520Right. So, you know, all of that stuff is infuriating, frankly. And if you don't have enough of a foothold in the norms of proper critical thought, it's easy to see how someone who bills himself as really just an entertainer, someone who's just having fun on his podcast with friends mainly, doesn't have a responsibility to keep bending over backwards to give the gate, the usual gatekeepers and the usual authorities a fresh hearing.
00:06:46.320Right. And so, yeah, there are many people who just think that you shouldn't believe anything in The New York Times, but you should believe what some, you know, fairly crazed person thinks about vaccines, you know, in the same breath as he tells you that he was denied a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work.
00:07:04.300I mean, they're listening to crazy people, but some of these crazy people are running parts of our government now.
00:07:10.880I mean, again, there's been a great unraveling.
00:07:13.380Since you mentioned COVID, do you have a view on how Dr. Fauci has been described, how he's been treated, and how he's been received and thought of?
00:07:24.360Well, there are a few layers to this onion.
00:07:26.480The first thing I would say is that in defense of all the people who are outraged at how the government handled everything, there are kernels of truth to that outrage.
00:07:36.900And one kernel is that the immediate branding of any speculation about the origins of this virus being not a wet market, but a lab leak as racist, right?
00:07:51.080That kind of vilification of people who were just following some obvious chains of thought at the time, that was terrible and terribly counterproductive, right?
00:08:00.780It had nothing to do with racism, but just step back for a second and ask yourself, how is a lab leak more politically invidious, i.e. racist, than a wet market outbreak, right?
00:08:14.800I mean, if anything, I would say the fact that the Chinese can't figure out how to stop
00:08:18.700eating bats and pangolins and raccoon dogs, that is more, quote, racist to observe about
00:08:25.820their culture than their propensity to have a lab leak out of a level two or level three
00:08:30.920lab, which happens to more or less everyone, right?
00:08:33.720So, I mean, the racism charge was always idiotic.
00:08:36.140It was always going to produce rage in anyone who it was directed at.
00:08:58.220Rand Paul's libertarianism is consistent with releasing the diary.
00:09:01.860Yeah, yeah, so there's hypocrisy there.
00:09:03.440So yeah, I don't support the leaking of private journals in this way.
00:09:08.660I mean, I think many people would be embarrassed by that process.
00:09:12.720But what is, in fact, on display is also as objectively embarrassing as as almost anything in a public health official.
00:09:20.980And he was just blown around by his fame in a way that it was it's just hard to defend.
00:09:27.500But he's, you know, and as to whether or not he was doing anything to cover, you know, the the for the improprieties of himself or his friends in trying to quash any investigation of a lab lab leak.
00:09:41.120I mean, I think that remains to be seen, but I do think he's also the focus of a witch hunt and
00:09:47.820the, the attacks on him and the glee with which many people are, uh, expecting an 85 year old
00:09:54.860man to spend the rest of his days in prison. I mean, like all of this is just a kind of moral
00:09:59.760panic and a burning of a witch, which I think is, again, it's a sign of the times we're living in.
00:10:05.740I mean, I think, so I think the most of it's awful and yet there are kernels of truth in there that
00:10:10.100are also understandably getting people tuned up.
00:12:04.140But it's the scale of the thing that is so different.
00:12:06.780And Nancy Pelosi's stock trades are one thing.
00:12:10.020What Trump and company are doing now is orders of magnitude worse, even if you're going to
00:12:16.160take the least charitable view of the Pelosi case.
00:12:19.700So my question to you is, if there are not laws against what Trump and family are doing now, I mean, the cryptocurrency scams or creating an insider trading mechanism, you know, selling access, early access to his truth social posts for $100,000 a month so that you can bet on their implications in the market.
00:12:38.600I mean, one, aren't there laws against that? And why wouldn't somebody be going to prison once the Democrats have enough power to actually investigate things?
00:12:47.720But that's question number one. I mean, are there laws? And if so, why not? But two, my concern is that once the Democrats are in a position to investigate these sorts of things, it's all going to be spun as just more lawfare, more cynicism, more tribalism and attention to details of scale and to the egregiousness of some of these offenses.
00:13:09.260will go completely out the window and we will just be swinging back and forth between these
00:13:14.920misuses of American justice, wherein one is actually its proper use. If this kind of financial
00:13:22.620behavior and self-dealing can't be investigated, I don't know what can be. Well, so number one,
00:13:28.700I think it will be. I think the House will be in the hands of the Democrats. The Justice
00:13:32.820department is not. And you have my erstwhile friend, Todd Blanche, and former colleague
00:13:38.580saying words to the effect of, you know, neither he will say, nor should any attorney general say
00:13:44.600that they're independent from the White House, which is astonishing. But when you ask a question
00:13:49.040like that, and a lot of people do on a going forward basis, there's some history here. And
00:13:54.340Donald Trump has been investigated multiple times, again and again and again, both by state courts,
00:14:00.860I'm sorry, state jurisdictions, state DAs, by federal prosecutors, a number of them,
00:14:05.560by a state attorney general, by Congress multiple times. He has been sued. He has lost. So,
00:14:11.940you know, there is a mechanism for doing this. It doesn't always succeed because there are
00:14:17.080problems of proof or there are problems of who's directing the investigation and who's not. And I
00:14:23.640think the things that you're talking about are ripe for investigation and will be investigated,
00:14:28.360not by the Justice Department over the next two and a half years, but at some point they will.
00:14:32.500Now, the other paradox here is, you know, I come from a law enforcement background. And so if
00:14:37.940someone committed a crime or there's sufficient predicate to investigate a crime, then you do
00:14:43.060that. And you walk away if there's not enough evidence or it's not in the interest of justice.
00:14:47.360And otherwise, no matter what the hue and cry is, you go forward. The problem is when you
00:14:52.740investigate and or prosecute or decline to prosecute someone like Hillary Clinton or
00:14:58.140Donald Trump or anyone else who has a political following, and in some cases, a subset of
00:15:04.200a political following that is sort of blindly following, I'm not going to say which side
00:15:08.740I mean that to be, sometimes politically, the best thing that can happen to them is
00:15:14.040to get investigated or to get indicted.
00:15:16.180Now, I haven't looked at the charts myself, but multiple people have said, and I should
00:15:19.580go look at it myself, that Donald Trump was deader than dead as a political prospect after
00:15:25.060he lost the election in 2020. And if you look at the, people tell me, if you look at the graphs,
00:15:31.580his popularity began to rise again when he was indicted by the Manhattan DA. And the other thing
00:15:37.220that happens is, which I don't know how, you know, this is a sort of a general question for us to
00:15:41.200discuss, the sort of drowning in information and not just information, but drowning in conspiracy
00:15:47.680theories and drowning in lies and drowning in controversies. Donald Trump, even though the
00:15:53.020publicity he was getting was largely negative, right? You had the prosecution in Manhattan,
00:15:57.280you had the prosecution in Georgia, you had the two special counsel prosecutions. He was taking
00:16:02.000up all the air, right? So even if somebody else on his side, on the Republican side,
00:16:06.460had a message, and even if the information about Donald Trump was bad, it was all about Donald
00:16:11.320Trump going to prove, you know, that old saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity. I don't
00:16:15.920know if that's true or not. And you combine that with, and I'm curious what you think about this
00:16:20.200assessment, you combine that with J.D. Vance's recent pronouncement that if Watergate happened
00:16:25.600today, it would be a 12-hour story. And can you imagine how ridiculous it is that that little
00:16:31.640thing called Watergate toppled a presidency? How do you react to all of that stuff?
00:16:37.920Well, I think it's probably right about that, but I would draw the opposite lesson, I think,
00:16:43.920there. I mean, that is a sign of just how deep a hole we are in politically and culturally.
00:16:51.140It's not that it should have been a 12-hour story. It's that it would be now a 12-hour story
00:16:55.560given how much noise and how little signal there is on our information landscape.
00:17:02.920But is there always that noise or does Donald Trump strategically, tactically,
00:17:09.500instinctively create that noise? I mean, was there that much noise when Biden was president?
00:17:13.660I don't I don't think so. Well, there was either there have been kind of Trump like reverberations, you know, that crossed, you know, the four years where he wasn't president.
00:17:25.160I mean, we continue to unravel. And there is a left wing version of the Trumpist noise machine.
00:17:30.860But I mean, for Trump specifically, I mean, this is, I think, a kind of unpopular opinion of him.
00:17:36.440But this is the framing I have always had of him. And I think I still have it.
00:17:41.420I think a lot of his success and, you know, his ascendancy and his invulnerability to scandal has less to do with him being some kind of political genius and more to do with the situation in which he has found himself.
00:17:55.480Right. So I view him as a the analogy that has worked for me is that he's kind of an evil version of the Chauncey Gardner character from the Jersey Kosinski book and the being there and the film by that name.
00:18:08.340If people remember, Peter Sellers played this character who is just kind of alone in the house, and all he is is the gardener, and he gets thrust into a situation where everything he says can be mistaken for political wisdom, but he's really an imbecile, right?
00:18:26.640And he never ceases to be an imbecile, but he's in a context in which everything he does begins to look profound and has a profound effect on the people around him.
00:18:35.360There's something like that going on with Trump, right?
00:18:38.040So ask yourself now, is Trump being a genius when he contradicts himself 15 times over
00:18:45.320the course of 30 minutes on topics of enormous importance, like what's going on in our current