Tim Pool SPEECH At The University of Chicago
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Summary
In this episode of the American Identity Summit, we sit down with journalist Tim Stanley to talk about his experiences covering the Occupy Wall Street protests and how they changed the way Americans view wealth and income inequality. Tim is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and many other media outlets. He is also the host of the podcast American Identity, which focuses on the fundamental tenets of American identity.
Transcript
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There is a great deal of these prominent personalities that I would specifically single
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out as part of the conservative movement who don't believe a thing they say, they get paid
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to say it. We saw this when a bunch of conservatives started promoting buying soda on welfare.
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Conservatives advocating for welfare to buy Coca-Cola, that makes no sense.
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They got paid to do it. So they're advocating for India, America first,
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pull the foreign trade, all of a sudden now advocating for India as a great,
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They got paid to do it. And more recently, when I rejected money to promote the film Animal Farm
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by Angel Studios, which is an anti-capitalist retelling of the story, which makes no sense.
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And tons of right-wing individuals promoted the film because they got paid to do it.
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Well, Tim, thanks for being here. We're very excited to have you. Welcome back to Chicago.
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I'm sure you're happy to be here in the city. How was your trip been?
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I mean, there's smaller places that everybody knows about.
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And, you know, my boy Brandon right here, we're both from here.
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And we were talking about going to Nicky's on Archer and Austin.
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But it's hard to get down to the Midway area where we're from and then come down here.
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And Kellen, our producers, he's from D.C., he's never had it.
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You've got to get a Chicago Tavern pizza, you know, square cut.
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You know, this event, the American Identity Summit, it's our second edition.
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And really, we want to answer some fundamental precepts, meaning primarily what are the fundamental tenets of the American identity?
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Obviously, we're at the 250th anniversary of the country this year.
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and so how are those changing and then what does that mean for the next 250
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years of our country so all these panels we've had a diverse array of subject
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matter that we've discussed from foreign policy to economics to AI and crypto to
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to just a legal theory all kinds of subject matter and so I we are really
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glad to have you I want to talk a little bit about some of the experiences that
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that I think most people haven't had the chance to do.
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on the American identity and the fundamental concepts
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So I'd like to really look at one of your first
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And that really touches on the notion of wealth inequality,
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It's treated differently than in other countries.
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is something that people have been frustrated about
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to some extent, but the standard of living in this country
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has been heading up steadily for, let's say, 100 years,
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There's a bigger question with Occupy Wall Street
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as having nothing to do with wealth inequality.
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Certainly, the narrative that had emerged early on
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that was not so much interested in wealth inequality,
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And I'm not trying to say something as so naive
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No, no, these were activists who explicitly stated
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And to the average person when they would say that,
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they imagine a world in which the working class is above the only thing is if you think logically
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about what happens to a pyramid when you flip it over is that it crumbles into a pile of rubble
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reshaping a more crude pyramid with still a few at the top and many on the bottom so uh in
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one of these activist meetings i explicitly asked i you want to flip the pyramid over but
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the analogy there is that the bricks will crumble down forming a crudely
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shaped pyramid with you at the top and they said yes exactly so for a lot of people that were there
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it was not about there are people who are rich they're too rich CEOs are getting paid too much
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it was more so about this system I personally don't like based on my views I should have the
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power and that was a that was a large portion of what it was which I would argue is I wouldn't
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worldview, because I'd been around activist groups, and I'd
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organizations, and many of the biggest ones in the
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let me put it this I personally think there's an issue when you know CEO pay is a thousand fold
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the the smallest worker but there's also a question of is is that ratio as an extreme
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a product of larger corporations whereas you go back 100 years maybe a company had a thousand
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workers now they have 60,000 or 100,000 so of course you're going to have a greater curve
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At the same time, however, it does lend itself to, I don't want to be so blunt and just say jealousy, but some form of that.
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So one example I make, a lot of people on social media, a lot of people on the progressive left will say billionaires shouldn't exist or they blame wealthy elites for their problems.
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The issue is the existence of luxury and wealthy elites doesn't change their circumstance one way or the other.
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We recently saw Zoran Mamdani criticize Ken Griffin's penthouse.
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The existence of his penthouse doesn't do anything negative for the most part.
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I don't know if that's a great thing, if it's meaningful,
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but there's money, there's taxes, there's things being spent on this.
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If we did not have that penthouse, what would change?
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So there's an obvious positive and negative to higher wealth classes.
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I think political instability is the biggest risk from human nature.
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Humans, I think it's, what I find absolutely fascinating is that I was talking to my buddy the other day about how we don't need to work anymore.
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You know, people talk about universal basic income, and I'm like, we're there.
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Go a thousand years in the past and tell a, you know, a serf or somebody working on a farm that in the year 2020,
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there are people who dance and they make a hundred thousand dollars a year like
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what does that mean no no they literally people watch them dance for
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three minutes they do that a couple times a day and they're making their
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they have a house and they have food whenever they want and they're gonna be
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like but if we don't work we die it's like yeah not in the year 2000 you know
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in the year 2000 if you don't work you live with your parents or something I
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don't know we live better than our king we live better than kings do and I'm not
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saying it's something that people want to strive for to live with their parents
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but we're at a point now where the amount of value
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is that you might have someone who's got clean running water,
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refrigerator, air conditioning, they can take a hot shower,
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but compared to other people, they're in poverty.
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But if you compare them to Rockefeller 100 years ago,
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To be fair, I mean, certainly there are still benefits
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being wealthy 100 years ago. But so I think, I think largely the idea pushes forward a politics
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based on envy, which can result in political instability, which is the real problem when the
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system collapses because people are unsatisfied with their conditions. Yeah, no, I completely
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agree. And I think that, as you said, the monarchs of Europe of yesteryear didn't have air conditioning.
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And now basically everybody has that. You can eat food. There are basically no hungry people
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in terms of scarcity in the United States, which is a miracle.
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Does anybody in this room know how many people died
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so that a king could sprinkle pepper on his steak.
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And now it's on every table at every diner and no one touches it.
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I'd also like to ask you a little bit about your time in Sweden.
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and into more the discussion between, let's say, a creedal versus a cultural nation.
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And so maybe you saw in recent days, Justice Gorsuch commented on this subject,
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and he went in the direction of this is primarily a creedal nation,
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meaning if someone comes to the United States and they buy into these ideas, they accept them,
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really very little else matters, and they are now an American.
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And many people were frustrated by that comment and just had a different opinion.
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And so I wonder, you saw the enclave-like nature of migration into Sweden and what that brought about for the Swedish people, the native Swedish people, as well as for those migrants.
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In the context of what you saw there, how do you think that America needs to interpret the sort of promises and responsibilities on both ends of immigration?
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If you agree, if you believe in America and you're not from here and you're from somewhere else and you dream of being here because of our values and ideals, because of the things that we've built, because you like baseball and the Simpsons or whatever it might be, then you can come here and join us.
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That being said, there are people who did that, sacrificed everything so that their children could grow up and have the American dream.
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And so this means that the descendants of those people expect more than just people showing up on an H-1B or something like this.
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As it pertains to Sweden, the reference you're making is, my discovery in Sweden was that they had brought in a bunch of refugees in the 90s.
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It's been a few years since I, this is almost 10 years ago now.
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And when they brought these people in, they said, we're here for you.
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What these people did was they were moved into or moved into enclaves.
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And then by the time I got there, you had neighborhoods that were entirely not Swedish, but still Swedish.
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That is, there were people who were born in that country from Somali parents who were viewed by the government and by the people at large as immigrants, despite being born there.
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And if they tried to go back to their parents' native country, because it's not their native country, they were called Swedes because they were not from Somalia.
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When the police would come in, these people would say, you have no jurisdiction here.
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I think it's important to, how you should understand this is, from the perspective of
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somebody who lives in an enclave like this, the people outside of it are not part of their
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And let's just imagine for a second, they don't exist.
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They're not concerned about interacting with you for the most part.
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but there's another enclave on the other side of town these people they do interact with and
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sometimes they disagree so we end up seeing in sweden is uh these these the children of these
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refugees throwing grenades at each other uh when i went there in 2017 it was actually late 2016
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a grenade had detonated on the balcony injuring a british child who was there with his family as
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tourists as collateral damage in these in these gang fights where they're buying these weapons
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but we don't need to look at Sweden to see the problems of enclaves you can
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come to Chicago Chicago is fascinating in that every neighborhood in the in the
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in Brandon Johnson's mayoral election voted based on race so if you look at
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the initial voting data this is when it was the full field not just the runoff
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you can look at a neighborhood and see its racial demographics and guess what
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their top candidates are going to be the same racial demographic so we have that
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same problem here in the United States. And we can talk about the history of this country and
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why that exists with, say, redlining and blockbusting. But it doesn't matter if you're
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bringing new people in or you have people who are here. You create enclaves. You will create
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animosity between these people. So a good example that I like to cite is I grew up in the Midway
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area. And my buddy and I, who's actually chilling right here, Brandon, we were only a few blocks
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away from the Leclerc courts, which has been bulldozed and destroyed. It's gone now.
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It was almost entirely, I think it was 100% black, maybe
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some Latino. And then right across 47th of the South, it was
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largely white with some Latino, and it was largely Polish immigrants.
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I mean, yeah, it was racial violence all the time. Because you have two distinct communities that identify
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each other immediately based on their race, and they have these enclaves.
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I think ultimately what this leads to in the United States,
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not with the VRA, that we have to stop. It may be difficult, but I think that if we pursue
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politics based on race continually, like they've, like, look, with all due respect to the Democrats
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for whatever they deserve respect for, advocating that we create congressional districts based on
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race is going to exacerbate this. Because you're asking a group of, you're telling everyone in the
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room, split up based on race, find what unifies you based on what you look like, and then argue
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with someone else about what you deserve okay well then you're going to have a guy immediately is
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going to look at a white guy's gonna look at a white guy and say okay you and i have something
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to fight for then because we were told we have to live this way we need to we need to stop this we
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need to let people live next to each other be neighbors and politics should be based on the
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economics of a region the geography of a region what the people need not how we look yeah no i
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think that our body politic cannot continue in that way obviously it's it's anathema to what the
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the founders felt and especially what the sort of feel-good politics of
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yesteryear were sort of about. We just don't really, we can't rely on a racialized society
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and racialized politics. It's just not something we can do. Another sort of segmented racialized
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place is Los Angeles. And the other week I was listening to your show and you had talked about
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how you spent some time in Los Angeles and you actually worked with non-profits and dealing
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with the homeless area and so I'm I'm from LA County is California is my home
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I love it and it's very frustrating to see of course the mismanagement on so
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many levels but I think that the people are nice the weather's fantastic there's
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so much history and in terms of people but also businesses that have come out
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of California it's a very culturally significant place and so I wonder what
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you think about what's going on in California in LA
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Politically and also regarding the homelessness crisis you spoke about what you think that the true character of the homelessness problem
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Yes in terms of whether it's dealing with mental health problems or with addiction or with economics
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Can you talk to what you think the crux of the issue is with with homelessness and how that's in the politics in California?
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In general is a really interesting thing to point out about California is I'm sure you know this
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There are oil pumps hidden as buildings all over this all over the city and county
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That people who aren't from there they don't realize this you'll see a church with a tall steeple
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it's actually fake and behind it is an oil pump. But that's just a point I want to make about
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perception. The reason is you mentioned mismanagement and on the issue of homelessness
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the only reason you'd characterize it as mismanagement is that you're part of the
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outgroup. Because if you're part of the homeless industrial complex as it's called it's not being
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mismanaged. It's functioning actually exactly as intended which is to funnel money from the hopeful
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but ignorant masses and government into the pockets of people who do nothing. Which I think
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we've seen too much of in this country. The scale of fraud in this country is not just as it's
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described at the federal level by Republicans or whatever. I would describe it as the homeless
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shelters in Los Angeles tend to be empty. I don't speak for every single one. The ones that I've
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experienced with empty, yet they will tell you when they ask you for money, they're at capacity
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or they're full. Why? Why would you donate money to a shelter that nobody wants to be at?
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If they came to you and said, well, we literally have no homeless people coming to our shelter,
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they don't use it it's well then what do you need the money for keep the lights on i guess well why
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you're not helping the homeless well the issue is the homeless don't want help there's a there's a
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lot of issues with homelessness especially in my experience uh working with a non-profit
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specifically on the issue of homelessness and it's that the overwhelming majority that are
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long-term homeless either choose to be or incapable of not being the people that we encounter who are
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down on their luck, maybe lost their job or hardship drove them into a dark place.
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Instantly, instantly solved. You find a guy who got laid off from his job, burned his savings and
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got evicted, holding up a sign saying, I'm trying to make it work. You walk up to him and you say,
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we're going to put you in a house. We're going to buy you some clean clothes and we're going to
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find you a job. He will say, thank you. He will go with you. He will do exactly as told. And within
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two weeks, he's working a job. He's now moved on from the principal shelter to a halfway house.
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I don't know if halfway house is the right word, but they have houses owned by shelters
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that are three bedrooms, and then there will be people living together as roommates.
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They start paying rent, get apartments, problem solved.
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They might receive disability or unemployment from the government, which does help, and
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However, 80 to 90 percent, we run into drug addicts, the mentally ill, and people who
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choose to be homeless, and I mean literally choose.
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So you'll come up to a man and a woman sitting in a tent.
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And you'll say, oh, is there anything to get you?
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So the city can't get these people to leave because they don't want to.
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Then you run to the issue of people who, no matter what you give them, they're going to
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And it's very difficult to solve, especially for LA.
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the reason why the homelessness is so bad there and they consider it to be worst and the worst
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of the developed world is that it's just so nice the weather's so good if you're somebody who
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intends to sleep outside la is the place to be for for two big reasons year-round good weather
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you're not going to die in winter and the government's going to give you free stuff
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and you never have to change and then for these government programs for these uh non-profits they
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call it the homeless industrial complex they're happy to get multi-million dollar grants from the
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federal and state government that they know they will never solve any problem with but hey you
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got a three hundred thousand dollar a year job right now to sit around and claim you're fighting
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the good fight why do anything differently yeah no I completely agree and I've I've been out and
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I've gone out to help the homeless actually in my area and I've run into the same exact
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dispositions of people no we're fine we're fine they're very pleased to do it I mean like you
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said it's basically a paradise free stuff everywhere and it's again it's you know and
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to say positively about this country we have a lot of resources and there's not the scarcity issue
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but it creates this problem where um of course the sort of residual presence of the homeless is
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is a nuisance especially when there's drugs involved which is basically always i think i
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think maybe we're too nice an example is i knew a guy uh this is like 20 years ago now he would
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sleep on on state street and he would put a folgers tin can in front of him and go to sleep
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and he would wake up and it would be full or he'd wake up periodically check go back to sleep
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so i i see him there one day i meet him where i'm talking to him and he was probably in his
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late 20s and he said he does about 200 bucks every every day he goes to sleep doesn't do
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anything he literally just puts a can out falls asleep he wakes up it's full of change he would
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walk into the local bank pour into one of those coin star machines what do they call them these
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days and then then he'd have 200 bucks only problem is he was a heroin addict and so i was
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like bro you're doing 200 bucks a day you're not like you must be living really well and he goes
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nah I just spend it on heroin man and I was like okay well there's your problem but there's a
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bigger problem in that regular people are just so nice they they they want to help and it's not
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because they they want a virtue signal or appear to be good it's because they genuinely want to
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help and they feel bad and uh so they see somebody who seems down in their luck and they're like
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I can spare a few bucks the only problem is the people are never going to change
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So maybe we're trying to be nice, but it's the old give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man a fish, feed him for the rest of his life.
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Maybe to actually help these people, we have to be more stern and say the help we give you comes with certain requirements.
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There's this phrase in California politics that is get help or get out.
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This current sort of middle state is not an option.
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So some people, like you say, they end up perpetuating the problem.
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And in fact, some of them acknowledge that they're perpetuating the problem.
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Just, I think if they want to have drugs and be an addict, that's their choice in life.
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There are people, I think, an increasing number of people who actually kind of accept that premise.
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But like you said, the majority of people don't understand that they're actually facilitating.
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And it doesn't mean we can't facilitate charity.
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But it gets to the point where, obviously, you're exacerbating the problem of addiction, which is deeply twisted.
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this is interesting as it plays into the idea of the American identity in how the identity of
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America changes. That is, if you say socially, I don't care if you're a drug addict, you are allowed
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to live your life to hurt other people. What ends up happening is it becomes visible. It becomes
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cultural. So you end up with drug addicts everywhere. You end up with children seeing
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drug addicts. And, you know, it's the inverse of out of sight, out of mind. They see something,
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they see the possibilities they ask questions about it and some people will fall into it
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should you say no public disorder as it pertains to drug use and addiction will not be tolerated
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you will have less people growing up living in that world so the question of this is you know
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the neighborhood where i grew up in with a lot of gangs i mean chicago gangs are everywhere
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how is it that a kid in my neighborhood ends up murdering a couple people well because the gangs
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were everywhere. They were tolerated. The police said, and well, look, you know, if they're on the
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street corner, we'll, we'll, if they're doing something like they set a tolerance very high.
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If they say, if we see them waving guns, we're going to stop them. But otherwise the gangs are
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there. What are you going to do about it? Okay. Then what happens is a 13 year old kid walks by
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and the gang bangers yell out to him. Next thing you know, this kid's hanging out with gang bangers.
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Next thing you know, they say, if you want to join the gang, go shoot these people from the
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rival gang or rival drug dealers. You're creating the gangs or make you're persisting them or you're
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making them persist there's a challenge in that what do we do as a society then
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that I think eventually will come to a reckoning do we then crack down and go
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hardcore broken windows style nope we don't care we're shutting this down and
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removing it from visibility in the public it's a challenge that I think
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we're you know as the question of what happens next for America we're going to
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have to reconcile with the fact that we have a fractured culture it is bifurcated
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down the middle. There are two principal factions in this country at this point with
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massively morally divergent worldviews. And I think one side has a willingness to use violence
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and force, one side less so. But the end result is if you sit back as gangs grow,
00:24:00.580
force children to join or bring them in and sell drugs, eventually life gets bad. And when it does,
00:24:07.020
violence breaks out response to these black markets, to, you know, a lot of the shootings
00:24:11.760
that we see in Chicago aren't related to drugs, which is a misconception. It's honor. It's a young
00:24:16.880
guy insulted another guy's girlfriend, things like that. If we tolerate these things, the end
00:24:21.760
result is people living in different neighborhoods, viewing each other as entirely different peoples,
00:24:28.920
and then solving their problems with violence, which I think we have a problem of in Chicago.
00:24:33.240
Yeah. Among other places, of course. That's right. That's actually very true.
00:24:37.020
is that it is sometimes, you know, construed in different ways, but it's a real issue.
00:24:41.360
And in fact, the students here, you know, of course, it's known we have to be careful just of the activity on campus.
00:24:46.400
And the thinker has reported extensively on criminal activity just in the area.
00:24:50.660
It is a pervasive issue and it shouldn't be understated.
00:24:55.800
I think a lot of the people in the conservative movement, which that's actually a very nebulous term, of course,
00:25:02.040
you know, and it's, I think, become increasingly nebulous over the last seven or eight years.
00:25:05.960
But people in the conservative movement would be opposed to big government encroachment on freedom of association.
00:25:13.140
That's kind of a fundamental tenet of American identity is being free to do what you want and to engage with who you like.
00:25:20.380
And there have been developments to the American identity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that have redefined that.
00:25:28.020
Now, I think so that that goes back to what we were talking about, about gang violence and how do you actually break these up?
00:25:34.380
I think ultimately the United States has been seen as a high-trust society.
00:25:42.360
And so a system of self-governance is possible when people literally govern themselves.
00:25:47.900
When you no longer have that cohesion and that degree of trust, it becomes very difficult to do that.
00:25:53.840
John Adams famously said the Constitution is suited for a moral and religious population.
00:26:00.760
The way I see it, you have the option to have sort of a liberty-minded self-governance, you have totalitarianism, like let's say in China or Russia, and then you have the option of just anarchy.
00:26:13.360
The end result is going to be totalitarian either way because you cannot have two distinct moral worldviews occupying the same nation.
00:26:22.760
Well, the conservative movement exists, but that's like, I guess, the traditional conservative movement would be like Daily Wire.
00:26:30.900
And if I were to sit down with someone like Ben Shapiro, we're going to disagree on most policy-related things,
00:26:36.920
but amicably and in the American tradition with smiles on our faces and a cup of coffee or maybe a beer.
00:26:44.260
However, if you zoom out at the national level, people would argue that he and I occupy the same space.
00:26:50.460
So the bigger picture is there is a constitutional Republican movement, that is the tradition
00:26:55.120
of America, and there's a multicultural democracy movement, and that is the new world, the new
00:27:02.580
Both of these moral worldviews exist, and they cannot coexist.
00:27:07.180
So the question I ask to exemplify this would be for you, do you believe that parents should
00:27:12.480
have the final say on the medical decisions of their children?
00:27:16.520
So if a parent says my child is trans and should have their genitals removed at 13, you would say that's allowed.
1.00
00:27:25.260
Right. Well, then I draw a distinction between medical decisions and decisions that get into the realm of ideology,
1.00
00:27:30.980
which I think is something that may have to be.
00:27:32.780
You're still giving them a moral position of what ultimately comes down to a medical doctor's opinion.
00:27:39.280
So conservatives, you know, I suppose with the typical liberal, these conversations have been harder.
00:27:49.000
But I bring this up to conservatives to point out that there's two distinct, there's two answers they would give depending on context,
00:27:54.900
which shows it's a moral worldview, not a principled one.
00:27:57.320
That is, if you believe that the parents have the final say on the medical decisions of their children,
00:28:02.240
then you would conclude if the parents decide the child is trans and should get hormone blockers
00:28:07.800
double mastectomy at you know 13 or whatever then that's the parent's decision however conservatives
00:28:12.500
are going to say absolutely not that's not medicine it's like lobotomy oh hold on you see
00:28:18.420
you've got another half of the country that would argue a doctor has prescribed this treatment
00:28:21.980
out of fear of the mental well-being of this child and it is a treatment you disagree the
00:28:27.500
inverse is vaccination. So in a similar instance, when the parents would say that the state wants
00:28:37.520
to mandate, so I'll put it like this. If you think the parents cannot have their children
00:28:42.720
get a sex change, then you would say the answer is government intervention. But then you have the
00:28:47.880
same decision on the government trying to mandate vaccination and the parents saying no, now you're
00:28:52.380
saying the government can't enforce. The government can't make a decision on the medical
00:28:57.220
decision of a children or they can't it's it's not identical you know i was having a conversation
00:29:02.080
with brett weinstein he described it as whichever affects the body of the child so you can you know
00:29:07.140
have a distinction there that's not necessarily uh you know an incongruent moral worldview but
00:29:12.200
my point ultimately is what we're dealing with this country right now in terms of these dual
00:29:17.020
political factions is completely distinct ways of reading reality as scott adams described it
00:29:22.200
it's one screen with two movies playing. We can't change that. I think this is born of
00:29:28.820
cultural development at youth for the millennial and younger generations. When you look at the Pew
00:29:35.360
research data, you can see that boomers are almost entirely aligned on their political worldview,
00:29:40.120
which is why when Donald Trump got elected, a lot of the older conservatives joined with
00:29:44.680
Democrats because they mostly agree and they oppose Trump. Each younger generation, I believe,
00:29:49.700
will become more and more entrenched in a bifurcated worldview that cannot solve their
00:29:54.780
problems because they fundamentally disagree on what is. So the end result I see there is,
00:30:01.000
I don't see how you get anything other than physical violence and conflict, especially right
00:30:04.920
now when we're looking at a midterm that will not be decided based on the popularity of party,
00:30:09.580
but based on the institutional power they wield. That is, Republicans have just flipped, I believe
00:30:14.140
it's nine or 10 seats. That's a 20 point swing gained, not because they have the right ideas,
00:30:19.140
but because they controlled enough states to eliminate Democrat districts.
00:30:24.400
They're both going to blame, both factions will blame each other,
00:30:26.580
but the end result is who will gain the institutional power,
00:30:29.620
and then what happens to the minority group when they refuse to be governed by someone
00:30:34.720
Right, and we had a civil war because one party won over the other,
00:30:38.640
and they believed that just governance by the majority party was not going to work.
00:30:42.360
I don't think that's where we're headed, honestly, in terms of an all-out coming to blows,
00:30:46.520
But like you said, two different movies, two different realities.
00:30:50.760
How can we coexist as one nation if we used to have different visions of how to get to the same end,
00:30:56.620
but now we also actually have different ends entirely?
00:30:59.700
I would agree with you on the possibility that we don't get there for one reason.
00:31:04.160
Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck and killed less than a year ago, and nobody rioted.
00:31:09.160
So you can have George Floyd and whatever your opinion is on that,
00:31:13.920
And it results in nationwide riots where thousands rip the barricades down at the White House, throw firebombs under the White House lawn, set fire to St. John's Church, force the president into a bunker.
00:31:25.280
And the response from our media establishment is bunker boy.
00:31:29.860
And then you can have January 6th, probably substantially worse, but still very bad.
00:31:37.000
So May 20th, 2020, you can have thousands of people injure hundreds of police officers
00:31:43.260
and set fire to a church, and you don't get a Wikipedia article about it.
00:31:48.020
You don't get academic review of the failures of democracy.
00:31:52.620
So where I would agree with you that it's not going to come to the extreme blows is
00:31:55.920
that should the more extreme elements of the left be marginalized, they will kill with
00:32:03.460
impunity, and the right will do nothing to stop it.
00:32:06.060
And should the right be marginalized, they will accept it.
00:32:09.060
And I think it also comes back to the distinction you made
00:32:11.960
between a more or less worldview and a principled worldview.
00:32:16.180
I think people who adopt either of those both exist
00:32:20.020
in what we're calling the conservative movement.
00:32:22.620
It's sort of an older conservative, even maybe before the United States,
00:32:26.620
sort of a traditional conservative view that there is an objective right and wrong
00:32:30.920
and government should probably exist, at least in large part,
00:32:34.360
to effectuate the degree of virtue that is most possible for a country.
00:32:40.760
The United States was founded more on a Lockean pretense of
00:32:46.800
They can probably make better decisions for themselves
00:32:53.140
but as we lose the fundamental morals that we used to have in common,
00:33:01.200
to have a system where we genuinely can enable people to live the way that they want
00:33:07.520
and trust that this whole system will continue to function?
00:33:13.080
The idea that the Confederate states, they break away from the Union
00:33:17.800
and they want to enshrine slavery in their constitution.
00:33:21.180
The idea that you can have two distinct moral worldviews occupying the same nation,
00:33:29.980
And so I take a look at what's happening right now.
00:33:31.720
And a great example is, back to the point about whether or not this comes to blows.
00:33:36.540
And I would argue there's a great possibility and tendency toward it.
00:33:41.000
But when you look at the issue of abortion, I think this hits the nail on the head with
00:33:43.840
the hammer in that conservatives will tell you that abortion is murder.
00:33:47.700
They will also tell you that in the event a man is about to murder another man, they
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00:33:53.660
But in the event an abortion doctor is about to perform an abortion, they will not shoot
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00:33:58.020
they don't actually hold that value, in which case, as we're seeing, say, Oklahoma ban abortion
00:34:04.260
outright. Colorado has abortion to the point of birth. The right will do nothing to stop it,
00:34:08.480
but the left will keep pushing as hard as they can. Yeah. Tim, to close, I want to ask you about
00:34:12.980
the future of the conservative movement. Charlie Kirk's killing about a year ago was really,
00:34:19.900
really significant and impactful on the congruence, on the togetherness of the conservative
00:34:26.900
movement, both in the media apparatus and just politically, it's actually really incredible
00:34:32.000
to think about the influence that one man had over our movement.
00:34:38.480
But seeing as though time keeps moving on, we keep moving forward, how can we begin to
00:34:43.960
reconcile a cohesive political movement that is going to continue to be effective in the
00:34:49.480
wake of such bitter disagreements and disputes, many of which seem utterly personal, actually,
00:34:56.900
I don't know that you can. Charlie was feared, respected, and valued tremendously. People saw
00:35:05.620
him as someone who was honorable, honest, but also empowering. He would help you out with
00:35:11.640
whatever you needed, whenever you needed. I always say this, the weirdest thing is how busy the guy
00:35:16.760
was. I could text him, I'd get a response in like 20 seconds, and I'm sitting there being like,
00:35:20.880
I swear to God, he's got like three staffers at his phone answering, pretending to be him,
00:35:24.180
because there's no way. But it's him. It was him. And so what happens is there are a lot of people
00:35:29.360
that saw Charlie as someone who could help them, and they respected that, but they also respected
00:35:34.460
him for the work that he did. And so when Charlie said, we're in this together, stop fighting,
00:35:39.700
people said, for you, Charlie, yes. With Charlie gone, these people are basically saying, you know,
00:35:44.640
as we can see with the AmFest last year, they're on stage fighting with each other, Ben Shapiro and
00:35:49.640
Steve Bannon going at each other, and now you've got, you know, Candace Tucker and everybody's at
00:35:53.780
each other's throat. I think you see, you know, I learned something really interesting. And I knew
00:36:00.740
this to a certain degree, but getting real confirmation of it is magic, I would describe it.
00:36:05.480
There is a great deal of these prominent personalities that I would specifically
00:36:09.600
single out as part of the conservative movement who don't believe a thing they say, they get paid
00:36:13.920
to say it. We saw this when a bunch of conservatives started promoting buying soda on welfare.
00:36:18.860
conservatives advocating for welfare to buy coca-cola that makes no sense they got paid to do
00:36:24.440
it started advocating for india america first pull the foreign foreign trade all of a sudden
00:36:31.080
now advocating for india is a great they got paid to do it and more recently when i rejected money
00:36:35.980
to promote the film animal farm by angel studios which is a it's an anti-capitalist retelling of
00:36:41.480
the story which makes no sense and tons of right-wing individuals promoted the film because
00:36:47.460
they got paid to do it. So I think a strong possibility that we just see this conservative
00:36:52.320
movement, whatever it actually is, fracture as it is continually because, you know, for the likes
00:36:57.820
of Candace Owens, it feels good to be talked about. You make a lot of money. She doesn't
00:37:02.020
actually care about policy. I can quote her as saying, as a quote, we don't care about your
00:37:07.600
midterms. She doesn't actually care about whether or not policy changes. She cares about whether or
00:37:12.180
not she has a big show and she's making a lot of money, even at great personal risk to herself with
00:37:15.860
lawsuits people like her exist in great deals on the left and the right and I
0.99
00:37:21.320
will say maybe these people will be our saving grace because they will expose
1.00
00:37:25.160
the machine for being a bunch of grifters and then people will walk away
00:37:28.400
from that fight saying you know maybe these people were lying to us for money
00:37:31.820
and maybe that calms things down well Tim it's been so great to have you we
00:37:36.020
wish you the best thank you for for engaging and for joining us at the
00:37:39.620
American Identity Summit we appreciate it and we again wish you all the best in