The media says that Trump has lost his mind. But what about Joe Biden？
Summary
The media says that Trump has lost his mind. But what about Joe Biden? Is he mentally capable of being president? Is he up to the job, or is he mentally ill? The answer to these questions, and more, can be found in today's show.
Transcript
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Hello, my Rebels. Today I ask the question that many of you ask. Is Joe Biden all there? I mean,
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mentally? And I don't mean that in a name-calling kind of way. I mean, is he cognitively up for the
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job? You've got to be tough and smart to be president. Is Joe all there? I'll go through
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some of the facts with you. Before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call
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rebelnews.com and sign up. If you buy the whole year in advance, you actually get two months free. It's
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only 80 bucks for the year, not 96. You can get that at rebelnews.com. Okay, here's today's podcast.
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Tonight, the media says that Trump has lost his mind. But what about Joe Biden? It's August 7th,
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer. The only thing I have to say to the
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government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
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Both the left and the right call their political opponents names, but I think the idea of
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denormalizing someone, deplatforming someone, is more a feature of the left, and I think it's because
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it's easier than debating. I mean, the right calls names, too, but nothing like this. I mean,
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here's an example of a Canadian website, which is owned by the sister of the Tides Foundation founder,
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actually saying, Hitler. Well, Donald Trump is worse than Hitler, and quoting Noam Chomsky to that
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effect. Worse than Hitler? That's pretty bad. Do you mean to say that the millions of people
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massacred in Europe, the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, they would have been better off
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with Hitler than with Trump? That's just insane. It's demonization. It's not arguing with Trump.
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It's trying to denormalize him so that people don't even talk to him. It's a form of deplatforming.
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It's not just wacko news sources like National Observer. Here's global news carrying a story claiming
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that Donald Trump has Nazi wear because, you see, there's an eagle on this Donald Trump shirt.
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Yeah, no, an eagle is the American bird that has been for more than 200 years. I don't know if you've
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ever seen a U.S. $1 bill. You can see on the back of it the official seal of the United States of America
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has a rather militaristic eagle on it. That's the eagle that is part of the American iconography
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for more than 200 years. Imagine how mad you have to be to be a journalist claiming that the use of
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an eagle is a secret Nazi symbol. You'd have to be crazy, which, by the way, is another name that is
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called to Donald Trump. Just Google Trump insane and you'll see endless examples. Here's a very
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reputable liberal magazine called The Atlantic. They're calling him insane, according to psychologists
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who have never met him. I don't know about the ethics of diagnosing someone who's not your patient.
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Here's Al Franken. The president is crazy. Yeah, it could be, but that's Al Franken who lost his job
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as a senator because he was groping a sleeping female reporter who was on a USO trip with him.
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I think that's crazy, posing for a photo, groping someone. I think for Al Franken to call someone
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else crazy is a bit much. The number one bestselling book in Canada, by the way,
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is a book by Donald Trump's niece who actually hasn't met him in years. Here she is calling Trump
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clinically insane. Not sure if she's a psychiatrist. There's so many examples. Here's the Guardian
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newspaper, calling him a mad emperor, terrifying to behold. And even one of the most reputable
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newspapers in American politics, the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is Trump
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mentally ill. Psychiatrists weigh in. Again, psychiatrists are actual medical doctors,
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doctors, but none of them have actually examined Trump. Look, the right calls names too, but there's
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a special style of name-calling, deplatforming, and denormalization that the left uses. They call
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you a Nazi so people won't even talk to you. They call you insane because you don't debate with insane
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people. You, at the very least, marginalize them. Maybe you get them help. All these claims against
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Donald Trump's mind. Well, he put them to rest, at least for serious people, by taking a cognitive
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test. That is, a test to test his mind. Is he still with it? Has he gone mad? Is he getting too
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old? He took something called the Montreal Cognitive Test. And I have a couple of questions from it. I was
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looking at it myself. I think I could do okay on it. Maybe I should test myself because I have the odd
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Biden moment myself. Trump apparently got 30 out of 30, and it's questions like this.
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The words face, velvet, church, daisy, and red are read out to you, and you have to repeat them.
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And then five minutes later, after you answer a few other questions, you're asked to repeat them
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again. Did you remember them five minutes later? I think that's probably tougher than it sounds. Or
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you're read out these numbers. Two, one, eight, five, four. Say them in order. And then say
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seven, four, two. Say them backwards. And there's little tricks like that, flipping things around in
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numbers and memory and then come back. And you know what? I mean, I would take that test, but I don't
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know if I'd get 30 out of 30. Trump did. They did this to Ronald Reagan, too. Now, it's true that in
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his final days, he did have early stages of Alzheimer's disease. They did it to John McCain,
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the Republican candidate in 2008. I think he was particularly unfair against McCain. No one doubted
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that he was sharp. It's just that he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and was so physically beat up.
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But they used that as an attempt to call him crazy. The left does that a lot to the right. And in
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Trump's case, I think he's got enormous mental stamina. And I say that not because he allegedly
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passed some cognitive test with 30 out of 30. I say that because like you and like everyone in the
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world, I watch Donald Trump. And one of the things he does, much more than our own Justin Trudeau,
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for example, is he engages in fast, real-time, live national debates all the time with people who
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deeply hate him. I'm talking about his press conferences. Throughout the pandemic, we've
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seen Trump on his feet for up to two hours straight, going back and forth, mastering facts,
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parrying thrusts for two hours with the likes of Jim Acosta of CNN. Donald Trump chooses his most
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hostile interlocutors. He doesn't hide from CNN. He calls on them. When you spar with the toughest
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journalists for an hour or two a day, it would be pretty clear if you lost your train of thought
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or couldn't remember names. I've never seen Trump forget a name or lose a train of thought of you.
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But I guess fair is fair. You do want the President of the United States to be sharp.
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We don't want politicians to lie about their frail health, like some have in the past, including
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FDR. If it's fair for Donald Trump to ask these questions, and I say it is. I think the left
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overdoes it. I think the left demonizes it. But if those questions are fair for Donald Trump,
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are they fair for Joe Biden? And the answer, of course, is of course it's fair. And would you look
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at this new video comparing Joe Biden's mental acuity when he last ran in 2008, when he was running
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for vice president versus today? Take a look at this and tell me, if you were a family member,
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You ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration
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has made them better off in the last eight years. And in addition to that,
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we have to make sure that we are in a position that we are. We can ensure every single solitary
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kid. We can provide catastrophic health insurance right off the bat. We can do that for the cost
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of just one thing, the tax cut for people in the top 1%. And with, I don't know.
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You got to give them to the people who are going to spend the money. You got to deal with making
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sure American companies can be competitive, have a health care plan that doesn't put them
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at a disadvantage when they compete overseas. You know, there's a, during World War II, you know,
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where Roosevelt came up with a thing that, you know, was totally different than a, than the,
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he called it the, you know. That is so painful to watch. I'm not angry at Joe Biden. I feel sad for
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him, like he's being a bullet loaded into a gun shot by someone else. Joe Biden is not his former self.
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I'm not saying he's crazy or insane. I'm not saying he has Alzheimer's. I'm saying he's
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gearing down. He's 10 years past his prime. And yet they're trotting him out as the man who would
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lead the most important country in the world in one of the most challenging times in the world.
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They keep him under wraps. They don't let him go out and about. He would certainly never do
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a two hour press conference like Donald Trump does. But even when he's in controlled environments
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with very friendly journalists, he seems to come apart. Take a look at this when he was asked about
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his cognitive abilities. Have you taken a cognitive test? No, I haven't taken a test.
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Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man. That's like saying you, before you got in this
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program, you take a test where you're taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a
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what do you say to President Trump who brags about his test and makes your mental state an issue for
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voters? Well, if he can't figure out the difference between an elephant and a lion,
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I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Did you watch that? Look, come on, man. I know you're
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trying to goad me. But I mean, I'm so forward looking to have an opportunity to sit with the
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president or stand with the president in debates. There are going to be plenty of time. And by the
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way, as I joke with him, you know, I shouldn't say it. I'm going to say something I don't. I
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probably shouldn't say. Anyway, I am I am very willing to let the American public judge my physical
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mental, my physical as well as my mental fitness. Oh, that's painful to watch. Come on, man.
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That's one of his fallbacks. It doesn't doesn't really work. You know, I think it's fair to say
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that Joe Biden, he's not really in charge of Joe Biden. I don't think he's in charge of the
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Democrats. I don't think he writes anything he says. And I think there's always someone in his ear
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cutting him off, telling him to stop talking. I think if Joe Biden were to actually win this
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November, he would not be the de facto president. Others would be running the country. Here's one
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Hollywood Democrat who doesn't care. I think Biden is clearly more mentally stable than Trump. But
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even if he wasn't, I would still vote for him because I don't care if we have to weekend at
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Bernie's this thing. Just shove a stick up his keister and put him on the White House lawn like a
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scarecrow. It's true. If you put your party loyalty ahead of the country, you would literally like
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Weekend at Bernie's. That's an old movie where a dead guy was. They pretended he was alive and
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walked around with a dead guy for a weekend. If you put your party ahead of your country,
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you'd prefer a Weekend at Bernie's corpse as president to whoever the opposition had.
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That's Hollywood normal. That's Democrat normal. But I don't think it's normal for a country.
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Here in Canada, Justin Trudeau is an empty suit. We know that. He even says so himself whenever he's
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called on things. He said, well, I listened to the experts or I was just there for the relationship.
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Other people sweated the details. Who really calls the shots in Trudeau's Canada? Lobbyists like
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We Charity? Maybe China, which presses him every way and he submits? Anyone firm can probably get
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their way with Trudeau. For a while, Gerald Butts was clearly the operative prime minister in Canada.
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It just gets a lot more dangerous when you're talking about the most powerful office in the world.
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Well, liberal politicians like to demonize firearms. It's certainly easier than blaming criminals for
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the crime. It's sort of like how I prefer to blame my fork rather than myself for being fat. But at the
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end of the day, it was me who did it. In Canada, we pretty much banned everything once, twice, three
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times. But the United States still persists in its Second Amendment. And in fact, the greatest ads for
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firearm ownership have not come from the gun lobby, but rather from the Antifa-style riots across America
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these last months that have terrified Americans, especially with the Democrat cry to defund police.
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If the police won't be there, maybe you have to be there for yourself. Gun sales have hit new records.
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Well, there's a new book out that provides the intellectual basis for this natural American reaction to
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arm themselves. The book is by our friend Dr. John Lott. It's called Gun Control Myths. And the author himself
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joins us now via Skype from Missoula, Montana. Well, Dr. Lott, it's a pleasure to see you again. It's been too long.
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Welcome back to the show. Tell us about your new book, Gun Control Myths.
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It's great to talk to you, Ezra. Well, I mean, I think this election is the most important election
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that we have in terms of determining whether people are going to be able to go and own guns
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in the future in the United States. There's really a lot at stake here. And I wrote the book because
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there are a lot of claims that we've frequently seen in the media that are being made these days
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that I wanted to go and respond to. So there are 36 different myths that I go through in the book.
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You know, claims that the United States has more mass public shootings than other countries.
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You know, it's just one of the things that are there. So, you know, how people should respond
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when they're confronted by a criminal, whether gun ownership in the home leads to more suicides.
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There are lots of different types of issues that we go through in the book.
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But if I could just say before I get into the book stuff, just your comments, because I think
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they're right on at the beginning there. I think, you know, people, anybody who's read my academic
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work knows I think police are extremely important in stopping crime. I think they're the single most
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important factor. But the police themselves have always understood that they virtually always arrive
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on the crime scene after the crimes occurred. And that raises the question what people should
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do when they're having to confront a criminal by themselves. And that's in normal times.
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But now we're in a situation, as you say, where we have calls for defunding the police.
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We have orders for police to stand down during the riots. I mean, if people want to go and see what
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it's going to be like having defunded police departments, just go and see what happens when you
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have the police stand down. We have jails across the country in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
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And Chicago that have released up to half the inmates that they had in the jails there.
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It's kind of a perfect storm for having increased crime. And, you know, and as you say,
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we've had record increases in gun sales because people have begun to realize even more than before
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that they're ultimately going to have to be the ones who are responsible for protecting themselves
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You know, I think that so far in Canada, we have not been faced with massive police defunding efforts.
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There have been some attempts to have votes along those lines, including here in Toronto,
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Canada's largest city. But so far they've failed. I don't think we have the same mania.
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And I don't think we have the same political funding behind it like the anti-gun groups do
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in the States. But there are still many gun myths in Canada. You mentioned one of them about mass
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shootings. Canada recently had our largest mass shooting ever in the Atlantic provinces, where
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someone strangely with a mock police car and a mock police uniform just went on a shooting spree.
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The RCMP have been extremely closed mouth about what went on there. There's been theories that he
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was a police informant or other strange things. But that whole thing went away fairly quickly in the
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media because I think that the Canadian media, they love the narrative of massive shootings in the
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States. They cover those exhaustively. But massive shootings in Canada, well, that contradicts one of
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our righteous delusions, which is that we are immune to gun crimes up here. I think that
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only focus on certain shootings that support their own political narrative. What do you think?
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Well, I think you're right. And I think part of it, which fits in with what you're saying, is
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I'm not even sure we ever knew what gun that the guy used to begin with, at least not in the initial
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news reports that I saw over the first weeks afterwards. And I suspect that the gun that was used
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didn't fit the narrative that was used there. I mean, the person in any case wasn't legally licensed to go and
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own the guns that he had. So, you know, if he's already breaking the law by having that.
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I know there was some initial attempt to go and blame the United States or something for him having
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the guns that were there. But, you know, plus he ended up killing a police officer and taking
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the guns that the officer had had. It's not really clear what you would do to prevent that.
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I mean, I guess he had rammed his car into the other police vehicle that was there. So,
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you know, there were lots of things that kind of didn't fit the normal narrative.
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But, you know, you look around the world and the United States makes up about one percent
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of the mass public shooters, which is way below our share of the world population, which is almost five
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percent. And, you know, there are many countries in Europe. France, for example, has a fatality rate
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for mass public shootings that's about 111 percent higher than the rate in the U.S. Russia has a rate
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that's about 50 percent higher. You have other countries, major countries like Norway and Switzerland
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and Finland, which have rates that are at least 25 percent higher than the rate in the United States,
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and many smaller European countries, which are much higher. And—but, you know, they just don't
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get much news coverage. I mean, obviously, when you had, like, the Paris shooting in November 2015,
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for the concert hall, there were 130 people were killed. That gets news coverage. But I'll just
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give you an example. So everybody knows about the mosque shooting in New Zealand last year.
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But few people would know that within less than 24 hours of that, there was a big school shooting in
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Brazil, or there was a mass public shooting in the Netherlands. You know, I can understand to a large
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extent why American cases get more news coverage in America than cases in the rest of the world.
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But it still creates kind of a misperception in people's minds of the rates that these attacks
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are occurring in the United States versus other places, many of them like France,
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which has extremely strict gun control laws. They ban semi-automatic guns, for example.
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Russia only has about 1 percent of the adult population that is legally licensed to own a gun.
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And yet they have much higher rates. The other thing that happens with the media coverage,
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which really, I think, has a huge impact on the debate, is how they cover these cases,
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or don't cover certain aspects of them. So, for example, relatively few people would know that 94
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percent of the successful mass public shootings occur in places where guns are banned.
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You know, these killers may be crazy in some sense, but they're not all stupid. They know if they go to
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a place where people are banned from having guns, where the victims aren't able to go and defend
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themselves, they're going to be more successful in killing more people. And that's going to make it
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so that they're going to be able to get more news coverage. My guess is if even once in a while the
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media would mention we've had yet another mass public shooting where guns were banned, we'd have
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a different debate. What the media does cover, things like how the person got the gun or what type of gun was
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used, the media is very frequently wrong in their initial news reports. The easiest thing for them
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to determine actually would be did this attack occur in a gun-free zone or not. And the other thing
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is what they don't cover. So just over a week ago there was a case in Indiana where a concealed handgun
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permit stopped with the police captain said she believed would have been many people killed if he
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hadn't been there. He was driving by in his car. His car was hit by one of the bullets. He got out
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and quickly stopped the attack. One of the chapters in gun control myths goes through dozens of cases,
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which have happened in the last few years, where concealed carry permit holders have stopped
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what otherwise would have been mass public shootings. And it's just amazing how little news coverage
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these things get. The five years that I look at there, there's really only two cases that got
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any national news coverage to speak of. And both of the cases, the media completely boxed the story
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and got it backwards. There was one case in Louisville, Kentucky, that had occurred just a few days after
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the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh where an attacker went into a Kroger grocery store, started shooting
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blacks. And what got the attention of the New York Times and ABC, CBS, NBC, Meet the Press, whatever, was the
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quote from the murderer to a customer saying whites don't shoot whites. And it was played as this murderer
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assuring this white customer that since they were both whites, he had nothing to worry about. What
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they missed was the first part of the quote. The first part of the quote was, please don't shoot me.
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Whites don't shoot whites. And that rather than the murderer assuring the customer that the customer had
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nothing to worry about, the murderer was begging the customer not to shoot him because the customer had
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a permanent concealed handgun that it was the murderer. And the murderer was begging the customer
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not to shoot him. At the time, I was still able to kind of text back and forth with Chuck Todd,
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who was the moderator of Meet the Press, which is a big Sunday morning talk show in the United States.
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And I texted him. I said, you know, you just spent five minutes on this, which is a long time.
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And I think you missed some stuff here. And here are some links to the local media
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in Kentucky, which carried the full quote, because it's kind of the opposite of what you said. Plus,
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you know, the racial aspect, which was being pushed so much. You know, here you had a white customer
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who's being assured that he had nothing to worry about. You know, he could have just let the situation
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go. Instead, he came to the aid of the black customers who are being killed there and stopped
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the attack. And so it could have also been played as not just a white killing blacks, but a white
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coming to the aid to stop the attack against blacks. But that didn't fit the narrative that was being
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pushed at the time. Wow. So the media literally said the opposite meaning of what happened there.
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I want to ask you about one myth, because in everyone, non-gun people love the word AR-15.
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It makes them feel like they know the jargon and they're really sophisticated. Ask an anti-gun
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person to define assault rifle, and they don't know how. It looks scary. It's black. They don't know
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what is or isn't an assault rifle. They just know they're against them. And they sure know the word
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AR-15, because that's the evil gun. I don't think there's ever been a case in Canada of an AR-15 being
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used in a crime, in a murder, in a shooting, ever. And I can't find a case. I wonder if you know that
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statistic, or if you know its relative prevalence in uses of crimes in America. Because I bet,
00:27:32.120
I don't think it's ever been used in a crime in Canada, although boy, Justin Trudeau sure bans it.
00:27:37.640
I don't think it's used often in crimes in the United States, but you would probably know.
00:27:41.640
Right. I don't know the numbers for Canada off the top of my head, but I can believe what you're
00:27:47.000
saying. But in the United States, you have a little bit over 2% of the murders involved any type of
00:27:53.240
rifle, of any type. AR-15s would be one type of rifle. The FBI numbers don't even break it down by
00:28:03.240
type of rifle, because you're talking about, you know, a pretty small number of cases that are there.
00:28:09.800
And so they don't break it down by that. So, you know, I can assume that, look, the thing is,
00:28:17.160
as you say, people don't understand what type of guns are there. We're talking about a semi-automatic
00:28:23.880
rifle that fires the same bullets with the same rapidity, doing the same damage as a small-caliber
00:28:30.920
hunting rifle. And, you know, if you want to go and ban all semi-automatic guns, at least there
00:28:38.760
might be some logic to it. But to go and ban certain semi-automatic guns based on how they look,
00:28:46.200
rather than how they function, doesn't make a lot of sense. I think the reason why they're not trying
00:28:52.200
to ban—or at least not many politicians—there are some who are in the United States now who are
00:28:57.800
trying to ban all semi-automatic guns—is because the vast majority of guns owned in the United
00:29:04.360
States are semi-automatic. There's three types of guns. There's fully automatic machine guns,
00:29:11.720
or guns that at least have burst mode, which, as you pull the trigger, you have multiple bullets come out.
00:29:17.080
You have semi-automatic, which one pull the trigger, one bullet comes out, it reloads itself,
00:29:23.720
one pull the trigger, one bullet comes out, and so on. And then you have manually loaded guns,
00:29:28.760
where you have to physically yourself put another bullet in the chamber after you fire the gun.
00:29:37.080
The thing is, people who use guns defensively benefit from having semi-automatic guns.
00:29:43.800
If you're being attacked by a criminal, you may not have the luxury of time to load your gun like
00:29:49.720
that. If you have to fire more than one shot, you may not have the luxury of time to go and reload
00:29:57.480
your gun like that. And so, you know, I think, you know, if we want to ban semi-automatic guns—and
00:30:04.120
we're not talking about any of these murders involving machine guns. I mean, one of the
00:30:08.760
real misimpressions that the media gets, we put out a video a little while ago on how
00:30:16.120
popular television shows cover guns. And if you watch Chicago PD or Hawaii Five-0 or most of these
00:30:26.040
other cop shows, you know, The Rookie or whatever, you're going to think almost all the criminals
00:30:32.440
have machine guns. And, I mean, I suppose it makes the shows more dramatic. But since the 1930s,
00:30:39.720
there's been two murders in the United States involving machine guns. But yet, if you go and
00:30:44.840
watch Chicago PD, you're going to think, you know, 95 percent of all the murders that occur there
00:30:51.000
involve machine guns. And, you know, and they talk about AR-15s, and then they show a machine gun being
00:30:58.440
fired. And it's really, you know, really creates a lot of misimpressions. So I'm not surprised that
00:31:05.800
people have the misimpressions that you're talking about.
00:31:08.680
Hmm. You know, gun control—I use the phrase security theater when we go to the airport.
00:31:15.720
I don't think the TSA has ever caught a terrorist, but we're supposed to feel better. We have public
00:31:20.280
health theater now. We're wearing masks, but I don't think they work. I think it's just to keep
00:31:24.840
people in a certain psychological state of mind. I think we have gun control theater more than we
00:31:30.440
have gun control. I mean, I don't know how many times the mayor of Chicago is going to re-ban
00:31:37.480
the same guns or why she thinks it will work the tenth time where it didn't work the nine previous
00:31:42.920
times. I think so much of gun control theater is a psychological salve to liberals to make themselves
00:31:51.160
feel better. I don't think it's actually designed to make a difference in crime. Would you agree with
00:31:54.920
that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's to shift the blame to somebody else. I mean, so for example,
00:32:00.920
you mentioned Chicago. In 2018, the arrest rate for murder in Chicago was 13%.
00:32:09.080
That means out of every hundred murders in Chicago, they arrested 13 people for those murders.
00:32:16.120
And that's, on average, the rate for arresting gang murders is even lower. And not all those are
00:32:25.080
convicted. And so you're talking about, you know, single-digit, percent-wise, cases and murders
00:32:33.320
in Chicago that result in the conviction when somebody goes to jail. You know, it's not rocket science.
00:32:41.320
If you make it so that criminals don't have much to worry about, that they're not going to get
00:32:46.440
punished for going and committing a murder, then you're going to see a lot more murders that are
00:32:51.240
going to occur. And it's very easy to understand why you have so many murders in Chicago or some of
00:32:57.800
these other cities. And that is, you know, because of the political correctness of politicians over
00:33:03.320
time. I can give you one example. Rahm Emanuel, when he was mayor, made an agreement with the ACLU
00:33:10.120
that every time a police officer talks to a civilian, they have to fill out two legal-sized
00:33:18.040
pages of fine print forms, which take about an hour for them to fill out, where they have to go and
00:33:25.720
say who they talk to, why they talk to them, where they talk, you know, describe in detail,
00:33:35.080
you know, characteristics of the person they talk to. And so if you're a police officer and you talk
00:33:42.040
to, let's say, four people in the morning, your entire afternoon is taken up filling out paperwork.
00:33:48.920
And that has a couple effects. One, it discourages officers from talking to people in the area that
00:33:55.080
they're policing. And two, it takes police officers off the street. I mean, you're talking at the beginning
00:34:01.560
about defunding police. Well, in some sense, this accomplishes the same thing. I mean, you're still
00:34:07.000
paying them. And you still have them on the payroll. But the effective number of hours that a police
00:34:13.000
officer is out there has been greatly reduced. And, you know, so it's, again, it's not too surprising.
00:34:21.800
And that's just one of many things that happens in many of these Democratic-controlled cities. And here's
00:34:27.880
the sad thing. And that is the very people that Democrats claim that they care about,
00:34:33.880
poor blacks, are the ones who get harmed the most by this. When you go and you have police stand down,
00:34:41.640
where do they think the riots are occurring? They're occurring in heavily black areas.
00:34:45.640
Some of those businesses are owned by blacks. The people who mainly work in those businesses are blacks.
00:34:51.960
The people who shop in those stores are overwhelmingly black.
00:34:55.400
But, you know, where are they supposed to have jobs afterwards? What happens to their jobs?
00:35:00.280
What happens to where they can go and shop? And the business owners who've had their businesses
00:35:06.280
destroyed, even if they want to try to open up again, what do you think the insurance premiums are?
00:35:13.880
If you want to go and see the impact of something like this, go look at Detroit. Back in the 1950s,
00:35:20.440
in the first part of the 1960s, Detroit was the wealthiest by far large city in the United States.
00:35:26.680
You go there now, you still have fields where there used to be businesses and buildings that
00:35:34.200
were destroyed that have never been replaced. That's very sad. Very sad. Well, listen,
00:35:40.200
I'm very glad you're writing this book and it couldn't be more timely. The book is called Gun Control
00:35:44.520
Myths. We're talking with Dr. John Lott, who joins us via Skype from Montana. Dr. Lott, I look forward to
00:35:51.160
seeing how your book does, how it's received. I know that you have done interviews in the past with
00:35:59.000
many national media. In fact, you just mentioned a text exchange you had a little while back with a
00:36:07.400
prominent national journalist. Can I ask you, is your point of view even allowed into legacy media?
00:36:15.720
Have you received any interviews or are you in some ways being deplatformed?
00:36:21.320
Right. Well, it's gotten a lot harder over the last 10 years or five years in particular.
00:36:27.720
You know, there are a couple things that have happened. One, the gun control groups have an
00:36:33.000
agreement among themselves not to debate me. And that includes not just on TV and radio,
00:36:39.160
but even in university settings. And when you're talking about TV, they want to make sure that they
00:36:46.520
have people on the other side of the debate, at least if they're going to have me on. And I've had
00:36:52.360
a number of occasions where I've been asked to be on CNN or what have you, and I'll go be driving into
00:36:58.840
the studio and I'll get a call from the booker saying, well, you know, she's sorry, but she just
00:37:04.680
talked to, you know, Michael Bloomberg's Everytown and they won't debate me. You know, and if there's
00:37:13.400
time, she may ask me, well, is there somebody else who has similar views that I could suggest?
00:37:19.880
But, you know, often they'll just let them on by themselves then at that point and not have somebody
00:37:25.160
on the other side. But, you know, we've, you know, last year, twice I had Twitter
00:37:33.640
locked my accounts that we had, both my personal account and the Crime Prevention Research Center
00:37:40.120
account, because we had tweeted on the New Zealand shooter basically telling people that this guy
00:37:48.280
called himself a socialist, that he was extreme environmentalists who hated minorities because
00:37:55.400
he thought they had too many kids and that it was going to damage the environment. You know, I just was
00:38:02.680
tweeting the truth out there. And there are other things like Google has shadow banned our website,
00:38:09.160
our crimeresearch.org website, right after the 2016 election. There's about, in January, there was a
00:38:17.160
set at 90% drop in the traffic that we had to the website. So, I mean, there are lots of things
00:38:23.800
that are going on, but we keep pushing on. That's incredible. Well, listen, it's great to have you
00:38:29.640
on our show. We certainly will never shadow ban you or de-platform you. Keep up the fight down there.
00:38:35.640
I look forward to reading the book. Well, thanks. I think it's one of my best books, and I really
00:38:40.120
appreciate you having me on. Thank you very much. It's our pleasure. That's our friend, Dr. John Lott.
00:38:44.280
And I have ordered the book, and when it arrives, I'll let you know what I think.
00:39:01.800
Hey, welcome back on my monologue last night. Mike writes,
00:39:04.840
Is the only opposition to the liberals the rebel?
00:39:08.280
Well, I certainly wouldn't say the only opposition. And I want to give a shout out again
00:39:12.440
to Pierre Polyev, who did a great job grilling Trudeau whenever that happens. I mean, how often
00:39:17.400
does that even happen? How often has question period been during this crisis? How often and for
00:39:22.600
how long did Trudeau present himself to committee? We're talking a few hours over the course of the
00:39:26.920
whole summer. I think the Conservative Party is sleeping. A few of the B-list or C-list
00:39:33.160
are involved in the Conservative leadership contest. But where's the idea campaigns? Where's making noise
00:39:42.120
about crazy things? We're just opposing the government's ideas. That's their job. Opposition.
00:39:48.120
I don't see it. Provincially in Ontario, Doug Ford seems to be little more than a liberal light. I say
00:39:55.240
that with some regret. Alberta is zigging where others zag, but it's only one province, and it's expected to
00:40:01.480
be a bit more conservative. I feel that Canada does not have the other side of the story being spoken
00:40:08.200
politically. It used to be that newspapers and the media were somehow dissident, or they would regard
00:40:14.360
themselves as the official opposition. That generally only happens when it's liberals in power. And of
00:40:19.960
course, now most of the media is on Trudeau's payroll. I'm not going to say that Rebel is the only
00:40:25.000
opposition in Canada, but sometimes it feels like we're the only ones making a fuss.
00:40:29.000
Tom writes, how do we light a fire under the Conservatives? The Liberals continue to give
00:40:34.840
these perfect opportunities to rally the Conservative base, and yet we hear nothing. Why is that?
00:40:39.960
Well, it beats me. Maybe they're leaderless. Maybe they're just tired. Maybe they're still demoralized
00:40:45.480
from losing the last election that they should have won. Or more likely, maybe they're just afraid of
00:40:51.160
criticizing anything in the era of the pandemic because the media will devour them. That's the thing.
00:40:56.920
The Conservatives made a choice over the last few years that they were going to be more afraid of
00:41:01.480
what the CBC said about them than what the people would say about them, even their own base. I find
00:41:06.680
that very sad. Well, that's our show for today. Until next time, on behalf of us here at Rebel World
00:41:12.200
headquarters to you at home, good night and keep finding for freedom.