Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has thrown his hat into the ring and spent hundreds of millions on ads, paid endorsements, Trump cringe videos, and more. He s got the media on his side, and it seems to be working. But who is this man? The McSpencer Group looks back at Bloomberg s controversial stop-and-frisk policies as the triumph, and last gasp, of social science-based politics and even race realism.
00:02:42.220I think his name was on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire, but he was not really contesting those.
00:02:50.180He's basically foregone the initial primaries because he wasn't quite ready, but he is in them now.
00:02:58.800And keep in mind, I mean, Bloomberg is a billionaire through Wall Street, but not as an investor himself, really.
00:03:06.900I'm sure he now has billions invested, of course.
00:03:09.520But he created this through the Bloomberg Terminal, which is this kind of fascinating and also kind of now weirdly archaic but still highly useful machine.
00:03:23.340I've never used one because I've never worked on Wall Street.
00:03:26.160But what I've heard, you can basically do everything with keystrokes.
00:03:30.380It was kind of like the Internet before that existed, and everyone had one.
00:03:36.060And if you – I mean, to not have one would be unthinkable.
00:05:05.720And so, as he is a major candidate, he is getting heat.
00:05:11.140And this first major controversy of his campaign came from a Twitter user, who I think happens to support Bernie, but I don't think that's actually quite significant, who leaked audio.
00:05:32.340It was said in public, and I believe at Aspen Institute Conference, about the New York City policing regime that he inherited and expanded dramatically and then ended and ultimately apologized for.
00:05:51.88095% of your murders and murderers and murder victims is one of them.
00:05:59.800You can just take the description, zero access, and pass it out to all the cops.
00:06:10.540And that's where the real time, you've got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that get killed.
00:06:15.440So you thought, if you want to spend the money, put a lot of cops in the street, put those cops, we have the crime, and put them in minority neighborhoods.
00:06:23.480So this is one of the unintended consequences is people say, oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.
00:07:05.460I actually lived in New York City during the height of stop and frisk.
00:07:09.500Yet, for some reason, I was never stopped or frisk.
00:07:14.480But it was basically an idea of, in Bloomberg's words, throwing people up against the wall.
00:07:22.640And even if they have not committed a crime, but simply stopping questioning suspects, searching them.
00:07:30.680And seeing if they had a gun on hand, basically creating a kind of chilling effect for criminals that the police are going to be proactive.
00:07:42.660They are not exactly pre-crime in the minority sense report, but they're going after you.
00:07:50.440And the fact is, this was part of this long-term trend in New York City, from New York being still fabulously wealthy, but also known for crime, lots of petty crime.
00:08:09.900This squeegee guy who would come and wash your car, whether you liked it or not, and then demand payment.
00:08:17.940I can remember as a young person in the, I think it was the late 80s, visiting New York City with my parents when I was, you know, around 10 years old or so.
00:08:27.920And we went to a Broadway show and we went to a Broadway show and the museums and all that kind of stuff.
00:08:31.520But being in Times Square late at night, and it was like what you could imagine.
00:08:42.460These, you know, prostitutes and, you know, outlandish purple garb and so on.
00:09:08.140Whether you think that this is, you know, great or whether maybe some of the grit and grime has been lost and some of the character of New York City's loss is up to you.
00:09:20.060New York City is an exceptionally safe place, particularly thinking about the demographics of the city and so on.
00:09:29.240But, you know, at the end of the day, this is a, you know, triumph of, you could say, identity politics over social science based policing.
00:09:41.700And the stop and frisk has collapsed and Bloomberg has apologized for it.
00:09:47.780Now, I could go into a couple of statistics, which I'm sure Ed will love.
00:09:52.200But do you, do anyone want to jump in before I go into that?
00:09:58.880No, I think you should go into the statistics, because otherwise, whatever you said is just, you know, it's not really backed up.
00:10:06.220Okay, so this is, so stop and, again, he, what he was doing ultimately derives from an article written in the Atlantic Monthly that was co-authored by a man named James Wilson, who died recently, called Broken Windows.
00:10:26.260And basically, it was this kind of triumph of neoconservative social science, in the sense that, no, we actually don't need more welfare to stop crime.
00:10:40.560No, we don't need more after school programs or night basketball leagues and all of these things that kind of liberals threw it through at the wall.
00:10:50.620No, what we need to do is basically enforce the laws against small things, keep everything very nice, tidy, and clean, and that this will have an overall chilling effect on all crime.
00:11:05.160So basically, if you expect to be, you know, picked up by the police and thrown up against a wall for jumping a turnstile on the subway, you're going to be really afraid to go rob someone's apartment or store, and you're going to be even more afraid to engage in, you know, more heinous crimes.
00:11:27.800It had tremendous effect on Giuliani's 1990s mayorship, and certainly end to Bloomberg.
00:11:36.720There was basically a 20-year period of, you could say, neoconservative rule in New York City, and that coincided with not only big financial run-ups and a couple crashes here and there, but also the city being transformed.
00:13:43.020And, again, this is obviously anecdotally, but I can remember, uh, I was actually doing this, um, like, playwriting, theater, acting program when I was a freshman in college or something.
00:13:56.460And I remember being in Chelsea where this theater was, and it was run down, it was extremely gay, uh, you know, it was kind of the, what is it, Castro Street of New York City or something.
00:14:09.420I remember visiting a friend of mine who lived in Chelsea in 2010, so that was, uh, you know, 10 years later, and none of those things were present.
00:14:19.780It was no, it was not run down and gritty, and it was not even gay.
00:14:24.320It was a bunch of financial people living in, you know, 400 square foot apartments paying $3,000 a month.
00:14:32.200Well, I'd imagine, I'd imagine, I'd imagine that the, I'd imagine that the gayness would probably be negatively associated with the crime rate.
00:14:39.540If they were bisexual, it would probably be positively associated, but if they were simply gay, then it would be negative.
00:14:43.740Well, there's the, there's the old adage of, uh, you know, gays are the, um, uh, front line or the, the shock troops of gentrification.
00:14:53.120And the basically gays, because they don't have families to worry about, they don't really care about the schools, uh, they will, they're willing to go live in a neighborhood that's a little bit more crime infested or gritty if it's cool and urban.
00:15:06.420And then they'll set up, you know, pet stores and perfume shops and the, uh, rents and, and real estate values will go up.
00:15:14.440And then 15 years later, bourgeois middle, you know, uh, families move in and then, you know, the whole neighborhood, you know, becomes boring and un-gay.
00:15:23.480So, uh, that's generally the process that this takes.
00:15:27.720Uh, we can talk about other things in New York City.
00:15:29.900This could be a reason from a group, a group perspective why homosexuality stays in the population.
00:15:36.420There, there's this other thing that, uh, just because when I was in my twenties, I was living in New York City, kind of periodically, I went there right after college.
00:15:44.080Then I was back, you know, at the height of, uh, stop and frisk and occupy wall street and all that kind of stuff.
00:15:50.500Uh, and again, I'll get to the numbers soon, but there was this, um, thing called, uh, the Chinatown bus and basically go, you know, taking a flight from say New York City to Washington, not a long distance, but it can be expensive.
00:16:05.600You go to the airport, blah, blah, blah, blah train Amtrak is really expensive for what you get.
00:16:11.220Uh, and so there was this thing called the Chinatown bus that would, that would take illegal immigrants, mostly, uh, workers and Chinese restaurants to and fro Washington and New York City and Boston.
00:16:24.540And it, the, the, the prices of this bus were insane.
00:16:28.640It was like $5 or, you know, $20 at most, uh, you know, at least like 20 years ago, which even then was just insanely cheap for what you were getting.
00:16:38.900And so basically it was this illegal immigrant, like caravan or transport service, but because they were, you know, a certain type of illegal immigrant, they're not going to do anything to you.
00:16:51.240They're, they're cooking, you know, mushu pork or whatever.
00:16:53.960All of these white hipsters started getting on the China bus phenomenon.
00:17:03.860But yeah, there are these like waves of gentrification, uh, that go in, but let me just go in for some statistics about stop and frisk.
00:17:11.540So the, the, the, when this was recorded in 2002, there were 97,000, uh, stops recorded, uh, that was starting to almost double every year in the beginning of Bloomberg's administration.
00:17:25.500So it went to 160,000, 300,000, 400,000.
00:17:29.640And then, uh, by 2011, we reached a absolute peak of, uh, of Bloomberg's policing efforts.
00:17:39.100And there were actually 685,000, uh, over that, um, stop and stop question and frisk, uh, incidents.
00:17:50.100And the overwhelming majority of these, 88% of them, of the people who were stopped and frisked were innocent.
00:17:57.060That is, they were not committing any crime.
00:17:59.720So 600,000, 600,000 of those 685,000 were innocent.
00:18:04.680Um, they were frisking, uh, of these people who were frisked, 53% of them were African-American.
00:18:12.880Um, 34% were, I, I can't believe I'm saying this, Latinx or Latinx or, yeah, Hispanic or, anyway, that, this is how, this is in the, uh, New York City civil liberties.
00:18:26.200They, they, they use the word Latinx, uh, and then 9% of them were white and half of them were basically in the age group that commits crime.
00:18:36.520That's 14 to 24, you know, so this is where you get to this point of Bloomberg's a racist and he's stopping and frisking blacks.
00:18:45.880Uh, and, uh, this is just some kind of totalitarian sadistic effort at intimidating African-Americans.
00:18:52.820Uh, but if you look at the New York City's own crime data from 2011, uh, in, in terms of major, major crimes, um, that, you know, the ones that really matter, uh, this is what you get.
00:19:11.100Uh, so I'm looking at murder and non-negligent, non-negligent manslaughter.
00:19:16.460So, yeah, this is effective, you know, the real murder, uh, basically of the victims, 61, 62% of them were black, uh, 56% of the suspects and more or less the arrestees were African-American.
00:19:32.540Um, 26% of the victims were Hispanic, uh, 35% of the suspects and the people arrested.
00:19:42.040So, uh, and then you can go to robbery and you basically get very similar incidents, uh, which is that, uh, whites were 20% of the victims.
00:19:52.800They were actually only 5% of the people arrested for robbery.
00:19:56.980So robbery is interracial robbery is certainly a thing.
00:20:01.780Um, blacks were 31% of the victims of robbery, but they were actually 70% of the suspects and 64% of the people arrested.
00:20:17.980He's a dull guy, but he's a smart guy when he says these, you know, outrageous things that are pissing off, you know, liberals and progressives and so on.
00:20:30.240I don't, it wouldn't, the thing is it wouldn't, it wouldn't piss off blacks or Hispanics.
00:20:49.860It's the liberals that it's the liberals who are sheltered from crime because they're rich and they live in these areas where everyone's white.
00:20:56.900And then they preach about the benefits of multiculturalism and multiracialism and all that.
00:21:01.120But of course live in somewhere where they don't experience multiculturalism and multiracialism beyond going into a, uh, some corner of town where they can go and have a press a manger or whatever, you know, Indian meal or something.
00:21:26.360Uh, I agree with you to a very large extent.
00:21:32.000Um, but, you know, the, the, I, maybe this is just my perspective, but it does seem like the, you know, at least the image of white cops stopping and frisking black people does get a lot of the minorities up in arms.
00:21:49.300But my, my major point with Bloomberg, and it, and it also demonstrates something, which is the triumph of politics over social science, which all of this is correct, but it ultimately doesn't matter if enough uppity white people yell about it.
00:22:18.960So basically the police, uh, the, it's like 45, New York city as a whole is 45% white.
00:22:26.900And we might there around the edges that might be a little bit deceiving just because of the, um, are, are you Hispanic or, you know, there, are you a non, non Hispanic white?
00:22:36.540And there's a little bit of ambiguity in there, but more or less 45% of New York city's white.
00:22:41.400Uh, the cops are a little bit, uh, whiter than the population, but not by a substantial amount.
00:22:48.480So a, uh, tons of people, police engaging in stop and frisk were minorities.
00:22:54.340Um, but anyway, Bloomberg is simply correct when he says that 80 to 90% of the rapes, robberies, murders are committed by minorities.
00:23:08.040And by, and by minorities, he means blacks and Hispanics.
00:23:10.760Uh, and even that is a little bit deceptive in the sense that 60 year old black ladies aren't committing any crimes outside of speeding or whatever.
00:23:20.320And it is basically, uh, you know, the, the, the perpetrators are in a, a, a smallish group of people between the ages of 14 and 30, let's say, um, Hispanic and black use who are doing this.
00:23:35.040And so if, if, if, if the blacks could operate, I mean, if the, the, uh, nation of Islam or some equivalent could operate some system where blacks between the ages of 14 and 30 were removed from the society as part of a sort of a gogi.
00:23:48.840And, and, and inculcated with the martial values of, of the Spartans, um, between the ages of, well, it would be eight and 30.
00:24:20.940It's, I like, I like honesty in politicians, but unfortunately in a world of, in a clown world run by lies, this is going to be used against him.
00:24:29.800And the thing he has to do is not, and he had the problem.
00:24:40.400If you do it, there's, there's actual data on this.
00:24:42.740There's proper, uh, a number of replicated studies that indicate that in these kinds of situations where you're being criticized by a mob, if you back down, if you say sorry, it shows a, it shows weakness and they're bullies.
00:24:56.060So if you show weakness, you're, you're the weak, you, you, you go from being the gazelle in the middle of the pack that they're going for, because he's quite meaty to the gazelle pack that they can drag down.
00:25:26.000And it damages him among the woke mob of screaming, feminist, unnatural color hair, tattooed women who are going to be screaming about this.
00:25:59.020You've, you've been waiting there patiently.
00:26:01.680Certainly like a, the, the good young Irish boy in the pub who waits his turn to speak while Ed and I are, are, are talking.
00:26:09.720So, uh, please jump in, but I have a lot more to say.
00:26:13.740I was, I was just waiting for you Anglos to finish with all your empirical data.
00:26:20.440Get all the facts and stuff out of it early, you know.
00:26:22.920But, uh, no, I don't think, I, I, uh, I've been thinking about it.
00:26:26.180I actually think, uh, I'm certain to fancy Bloomberg to pick up the nomination and potentially win in 2020.
00:26:33.540Um, it's, it's an interesting approach to basically ignore the, the white places like Iowa and, and target, you know, he's basically targeting the, the non-white voters.
00:26:44.260It's, it's, it's, uh, an interesting tactic and it could be a sign of things to come because Bloomberg is really like New York itself is kind of, uh, as far along the sort of linear path of techno capital as any place in the world you'll find.
00:26:58.620And then Bloomberg is like a proper expression of New York as well.
00:27:02.840You know, he's a proper neoliberal, uh, mayor, like he ran as a Republican.
00:27:14.260And it's interesting as well, like Trump and Bloomberg have, uh, they can kind of a similar start in that, uh, I actually did a video today about, um, what happened to New York in the seventies, because all those transformations you're talking about in New York, this was very much, uh, a top down thing.
00:27:30.540This was New York was like the first real test case together with maybe Pinochet's Chile of, uh, neoliberalism and of some of the ideas of, you know, the business round table and the Hoover Institute and all these people, uh, New York.
00:27:43.920New York in 1975 was, uh, uh, in 1975 was, uh, uh, effectively about to go bankrupt.
00:27:47.740And, uh, uh, that was in part due to, uh, the bankers, the investment bankers that had been lending money, refusing to roll over the dead.
00:27:55.120And it was this incredible power grab in the mid 70s where this disorganization, eight out of nine of the panel were bankers, where bankers started to run the city of New York and started to slash social spending.
00:28:07.000And it's an interesting test case because while the ideas around neoliberalism are sort of individual freedom and economic liberalism and lack of state and all this, what you see with the New York test case, and it happened as well under Reagan and other neoliberal administrations, is that actually the power of the state wasn't curtailed.
00:28:29.000It was just redirected. And the power of the central governing body of New York was sort of redirected from social welfare to kind of corporate welfare.
00:28:39.840And Trump got a start out of this because he got the biggest tax break in the history of New York state to start doing his developments and focused exclusively on these sort of central, more luxury developments aimed at this New York,
00:28:58.440that the finance years were taken over. And at the same time, Bloomberg was working for an investment firm that doubled the revenue in the mid 70s at the time this was going on.
00:29:07.640So this was a, you know, New York was completely reoriented. And those social transformations you're talking about, the liberalization of culture and New York becoming a very sort of cosmopolitan city that focused on sort of cosmopolitan sexual trends and consumerism and stuff.
00:29:24.520So this was all a result of the empowerment of this elite. And so New York is kind of a perfect example of the direction that neoliberalism that our elites are bringing us.
00:29:36.660You know, it's 44% white. It was almost 80% white in the early 70s. You know, it's Bloomberg, the Jewish mayor ruling over this sort of brown underclass.
00:29:47.720It's a tale of two cities. You know, it has the super wealthy financial elite. It's the home of Wall Street. And then at the same time, it has obviously some very poor areas.
00:29:57.140And Bloomberg is like the typical neoliberal politician. He's not very strongly ideological left or right. You know, he's kind of he's a moderate on most issues.
00:30:05.060And he wasn't afraid to invest in infrastructure in New York and use the power of the state. But his government philosophy was basically growth and growth oriented.
00:30:14.320And he basically ran New York like a business and that he was willing to invest in public infrastructure if it was going to be a big return on growth.
00:30:23.500So Bloomberg sort of captures this model. You know, he's targeting non-white voters. He's ignoring white states. He's not ideological. His only ideology is basically neoliberalism and growth.
00:30:35.540And I think Bloomberg is like the kind of perfect encapsulation of the values of the modern elite. And he's rapidly pro-Israel as well, probably the most pro-Israel candidate in the field.
00:30:46.420So I think I think I think it's a toss up between Bernie and Bloomberg. But just because the establishment is so against Bernie, I'm always I'm almost tempted to think that Bloomberg is going to pull it out.
00:30:57.420Also, my colleague, Heiner Rindemann, in his book, a very good book, Cognitive Capitalism.
00:31:05.200And one of the things he argues about America is that the Bloomberg idea of clamp and of clamping down tiny things, you have to stop and frisk them, of the slightest thing is severely punished.
00:31:17.420It's something that tends to happen in multiracial societies. It has to happen because there's nothing to hold them together in societies like Finland, traditionally, or Ireland, even traditionally, or England.
00:31:27.420You're one big family who are related six or seven or eight generations back. You've got common ancestors. There's no. So you have a sort of almost of a love for each other, which is is there in America to some extent in certain parts of America and is promoted by religion and whatever.
00:31:42.740But it's certainly much more difficult to achieve when you have a multi ethnic society and even more so with a multiracial society.
00:31:49.220And so the only solution as well, if you want to have equality, if there has to be equality, everyone's equal before the law and you have a section of the society who are unruly, who have low impulse control, have low intelligence and can't behave, is to have extremely strict rules of conduct in public places.
00:32:05.580And I've noticed that in America, that it's enforced. So whereas you might say in Finland, it's socially unacceptable to spit. It's just something you don't do.
00:32:14.720In America, I see signs saying no spitting. Or in Finland, it's socially unacceptable to what you call in America, jaywalk. People do it. It's not against the law.
00:32:25.100There's laws on it in America. Police can stop you from doing it. Being drunk in public. Again, people might frown upon being drunk in public. In America, you can be arrested for being drunk in public.
00:32:36.240And there's all kinds of things like that, which in other countries are just it's just custom. And the custom is socially enforced because there's a bond between the people, which means there's unwritten rules.
00:32:46.320And in America, that's just that seems a lot of things to be missing. It has to be legally enforced.
00:32:50.860And I think I think Rudy Giuliani kind of got elected in the mid 90s, running on being tough on crime and taking a tougher stance.
00:32:59.220And, you know, a lot of these social problems were directors, you know, the crack epidemic in the 80s.
00:33:03.260A lot of stuff was a direct result of this massive social shift.
00:33:06.720And then what you see in the 90s and 2000s is sort of the backlash of the middle class and of the, you know, the problems that this is that this is inflicting on them.
00:33:15.920And then, yeah, they're willing to be tough with someone like Giuliani or Bloomberg.
00:33:20.140And the middle classes in New York seem to be getting out now.
00:33:23.060They seem to be moving out. They move out.
00:33:24.960First of all, they've colonized. When I was first in New York in 2005, it was what was that place called in New York that Winston Churchill was from?
00:33:32.080Dufner Bridge, Arthur Miller, that area of New York.
00:33:35.000What's it called now? Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn.
00:33:40.240And Brooklyn in those days, in 2005, was poor.
00:33:44.160And when I was there in 2015, 10 years later, it was noticeably rich.
00:33:50.960I mean, it had really changed this Brooklyn area.
00:51:10.760But they're both making – yeah, but, you know, they're both making the same pitch, which is that I cannot be bought because I'm a billionaire.
00:51:19.680And I am going to – the system – Trump's pitch explicitly in the RNC was the system is rigged, and I know how it's rigged, and I'm going to rig it on your behalf.
00:51:32.900That is a direct paraphrase, not even just like an implicit message.
00:51:36.660I'm going to do this for you, basically, religious white people who vote Republican.
00:52:10.660I'm not one of these Black Lives Matter, you know, YouTube progressives or Bernie Sanders types.
00:52:16.920I'm going to maintain this order, and I will explicitly, you know, make sure that this never becomes a welfare state that can help out blue-collar white people.
00:52:29.840It's also kind of part of his message, to be honest.
00:52:33.380It's just we live in a fucking nightmare world, basically.
00:52:39.400I could see him being kind of a Democrat's version of Trump.
00:52:41.980Like, I could see him winning, not based on any policy, but just because such a huge proportion of Democratic voters will just be looking at this as just needing to find someone to beat Trump, like anyone.
00:52:52.240And I think he'd be able to present himself as that very well.
00:52:54.700And if Bernie Sanders keeps kind of surging ahead and it becomes apparent that it's either going to be Bernie or Bloomberg, you know, the dissentrist Democrats are going to jump on Bloomberg.
00:53:05.320I mean, he's taken away Biden's voters in droves.
00:53:08.080And, you know, if Biden keeps doing as badly as it is, it's going to become apparent very soon that he's a dud.
00:53:12.880And where are those supporters going to go except Bloomberg?
00:53:16.140Because Biden's like Trump in the sense that he talks and talks and makes gaffe after gaffe and is just a fool.
00:53:23.300Bloomberg, you know, again, when he says things that are controversial, they're still actually, like, true and backed up by imperial—empirical data.
00:53:33.040And so, and he is a dull but clearly highly intelligent person, whereas Biden, you know, the guy, we're just waiting for him to make a fool of himself.
00:53:50.200I mean, there's no other way to put it.
00:53:52.340Bloomberg, you'd never make those criticisms of him.
00:53:55.260So, yeah, I mean, look, I think Bernie is obviously the frontrunner, but if I had to predict who's going to come out of this, I can't help but say I predict it's going to be a Bloomberg-Trump battle of the vulgar, racist New York billionaire versus the subtle racist New York billionaire.
00:54:18.280Great, really great stuff we've got going.
00:54:20.840You know, this is kind of the last stage of managing clown world.
00:54:26.680Yes, but did you successfully prognosticate that Trump would be the candidate for the Republicans?
00:54:34.020Yeah, and I predicted he would win in 2016 on Twitter.
00:54:38.480And I was on the Trump train in the summer of 2015 and saying this guy's going to do it and BTF-Oing all these never-Trump-lust.
00:54:56.220But I'm willing to, unlike some, I'm willing to look at the world and analyze it and perhaps even change my opinion and not just spout off the same talking points that I might have said in 2015.
00:55:16.420But yeah, I was anti-Republicans up until Trump.
00:55:23.140And then I liked Trump precisely because he was the chaos candidate, in the words of Jeb Bush.
00:55:27.880It was like, this guy's going to change everything.
00:55:29.520We don't even know what's going to happen.
00:55:30.880But he's going to make everything chaotic and there's going to be open up new space for us and so on.
00:55:36.660And that was true to a certain extent.
00:55:39.340But yeah, I mean, I think what has happened with Trump is not so much that he has captured the Republican Party.
00:55:45.340It's that the Republican Party has captured him.
00:55:47.940They've used a lot of his rhetoric, the other N-word, nationalism, populism, which they would kind of use before, but now they're full on.
00:55:57.840And he has basically pursued the Paul Ryan agenda while tweeting like a Twitter, you know, like an alt-right edgelord.
00:56:08.400And it's kind of the worst of all possible scenarios.
00:56:11.860And there's no reason to believe that he would change in a second term.
00:56:15.220And in fact, I think there might be dangers in a second term of going to war with Iran and other things like that.
00:56:20.340There's dangers of Bloomberg going to war with Iran, you know, but and who knows?
00:56:26.980And then all of these things that we've talked about, which are, you know, flawed and, you know, but but but effective social policies.
00:56:36.820Bloomberg has apologized for and, you know, like identity politics and virtue signaling triumph over social science because we aren't in academia.
00:56:48.680We're in the real world where it's about confrontation and victory and identity politics trumps social science.
00:56:55.360So I don't know how he could actually well, I might be wrong, but I don't know how Bloomberg could actually implement, you know, totalitarian policing on a nationwide scale in the United States.
00:57:08.340I think we just get more neoliberalism, more immigration and and not even policing of, you know, murder and robbery.
00:57:23.420Bloomberg versus Trump would really be the worst of all possible worlds, because I mean, I can't even think how Bloomberg would be any different policy wise, really.
00:57:37.160He would do, you know, pro-Israel stuff.
00:57:39.880He would likely have the same foreign policy, maybe more, maybe worse, maybe better.
00:57:46.380You can kind of make arguments on both sides on that because he is more subtle and, you know, more more likely to go to the, you know, talk to be diplomatic and go to the UN and work with other.
00:57:56.500But, yeah, it's just an absolute disaster.
00:58:00.460And we should never underestimate the elite in the sense of their ability to capture energies and use them for their own ends and their ability to maintain themselves.
00:58:12.220I mean, they are kind of crazy at some level, but they're they're they're where they are for a reason.
00:58:17.840I mean, but gig, it's just as bad policy wise, but at least it'd be some good memes for a few years, you know.
00:58:26.500I mean, it's just as bad policy wise, you know.
00:59:18.160And Chastain might go full Elton John on us and, you know, we would have State of the Union addresses where he would perform various musical theater numbers in full drag.
00:59:30.700And that would be much more entertaining than Trump talking about socialism, the Holocaust.
00:59:37.060Well, you know, a lot of a lot of the decline in empires had the growth of like the palace eunuchs.
00:59:42.480So, but it kind of fits in well there.
01:00:07.340He is, okay, there, the other controversy, which we didn't talk about, was that Bloomberg was pretty Trumpian when it came to women working in his organizations.
01:00:18.880So, I can't remember some of these things, but when women would ask for, you know, pregnancy leave or something, he'd be like, oh, another one.
01:00:29.040I can't believe we have to hire these women.
01:00:30.680And he's been accused of very sexual harassment and things like that.
01:03:18.680But that's the funny thing, if they run against each other, because there's so few policy differences, it'd be easy to, like, New York loudmouths, like, insulting each other the whole campaign.
01:03:26.900Yeah, and then Bloomberg does the same thing.
01:03:28.860He just does it more subtly and more kind of postmodern.
01:03:32.280So Bloomberg has created these memes of Trump being fat and golfing, which are pretty effective, because there's just a, you know, you just have a kind of disgust mechanism when you see this asshole golf course.
01:03:47.040You know, so, yeah, that's where we are.