The Culture War - Tim Pool - May 17, 2026


Tim Pool SPEECH At The University of Chicago

Topics
wealth inequality protests enclave violence in Sweden homelessness and drug addiction in LA gang violence Charlie Kirk killing
Hosted by
Tim Pool Phil Labonte Hannah Claire Brimelow
Mentioned
Charlie Kirk Brandon Johnson Ben Shapiro Candace Tucker Zoran Mamdani Candace Owens Donald Trump George Floyd Steve Bannon Ken Griffin Scott Adams John Adams Archer Austin Kellen Nicky
CHUD CHARGE WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER SPENCER PRATT IS GOING TO SAVE LA

Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

197.35

Word count

7,487

Sentence count

313

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

15

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There is a great deal of these prominent personalities that I would specifically single
00:00:04.340 out as part of the conservative movement who don't believe a thing they say, they get paid
00:00:08.340 to say it. We saw this when a bunch of conservatives started promoting buying soda on welfare.
00:00:14.640 Conservatives advocating for welfare to buy Coca-Cola, that makes no sense.
00:00:18.160 They got paid to do it. So they're advocating for India, America first, 0.93
00:00:23.900 pull the foreign trade, all of a sudden now advocating for India as a great,
00:00:27.020 They got paid to do it. And more recently, when I rejected money to promote the film Animal Farm
00:00:32.080 by Angel Studios, which is an anti-capitalist retelling of the story, which makes no sense.
00:00:37.800 And tons of right-wing individuals promoted the film because they got paid to do it.
00:00:43.520 Well, Tim, thanks for being here. We're very excited to have you. Welcome back to Chicago.
00:00:48.060 I'm sure you're happy to be here in the city. How was your trip been?
00:00:54.280 Great.
00:00:54.840 I just got Portillo's.
00:00:55.760 Great.
00:00:56.240 Is that a main say for you?
00:00:57.760 Of course.
00:00:58.500 If you live in the city, you know it.
00:00:59.860 I mean, there's smaller places that everybody knows about.
00:01:02.380 And, you know, my boy Brandon right here, we're both from here.
00:01:04.960 And we were talking about going to Nicky's on Archer and Austin.
00:01:07.680 But it's hard to get down to the Midway area where we're from and then come down here.
00:01:11.860 So we settled with Portillo's.
00:01:13.340 And Kellen, our producers, he's from D.C., he's never had it.
00:01:16.080 So we were like, we have to go.
00:01:17.820 You have to.
00:01:18.520 Have to do it.
00:01:19.380 How about deep dish pizza?
00:01:21.120 That's tourist pizza.
00:01:21.960 Everybody knows that.
00:01:22.680 Okay.
00:01:23.080 Everyone knows that.
00:01:23.920 You've got to get a Chicago Tavern pizza, you know, square cut.
00:01:26.060 I like giardiniera on mine.
00:01:27.540 Great.
00:01:31.080 Once again, thanks for being here.
00:01:33.120 You know, this event, the American Identity Summit, it's our second edition.
00:01:36.200 And really, we want to answer some fundamental precepts, meaning primarily what are the fundamental tenets of the American identity?
00:01:44.620 How are they changing over time?
00:01:46.520 Obviously, we're at the 250th anniversary of the country this year.
00:01:49.520 There's been vast changes on all fronts.
00:01:51.620 and so how are those changing and then what does that mean for the next 250
00:01:55.100 years of our country so all these panels we've had a diverse array of subject
00:02:00.260 matter that we've discussed from foreign policy to economics to AI and crypto to
00:02:07.700 to just a legal theory all kinds of subject matter and so I we are really
00:02:14.060 glad to have you I want to talk a little bit about some of the experiences that
00:02:18.180 that you've had, because you've been all over
00:02:19.940 and you've done some really interesting things
00:02:22.380 that I think most people haven't had the chance to do.
00:02:25.820 So I wanna use those as windows into your view
00:02:28.360 on the American identity and the fundamental concepts
00:02:31.800 that our country holds dear.
00:02:34.180 So I'd like to really look at one of your first
00:02:37.300 bigger initiatives, which was going to cover
00:02:39.480 the Occupy Wall Street protests,
00:02:41.620 just very early on in your career.
00:02:43.360 And that really touches on the notion of wealth inequality,
00:02:46.540 which is different in the United States.
00:02:48.680 It's treated differently than in other countries.
00:02:51.260 I think the capitalist system that we've had
00:02:54.060 has promoted human flourishing.
00:02:55.760 Maybe capitalism's not my religion,
00:02:57.560 but I think it's probably the best system
00:02:59.320 that we can conceive of.
00:03:02.700 The way I see it is wealth inequality
00:03:04.920 is something that people have been frustrated about
00:03:07.540 to some extent, but the standard of living in this country
00:03:09.680 has been heading up steadily for, let's say, 100 years,
00:03:13.320 at least, so I wonder what your thoughts are
00:03:15.540 on kind of what you saw in those protests,
00:03:18.880 how are things changing with regard
00:03:20.780 to how people view wealth inequality?
00:03:23.940 There's a bigger question with Occupy Wall Street
00:03:25.820 in that you have the perception
00:03:28.660 it was about wealth inequality,
00:03:30.100 and that is the nature of history
00:03:31.500 and what we think we know
00:03:32.520 and what we think we're learning,
00:03:33.440 and I would describe Occupy Wall Street
00:03:35.440 as having been there and watched it all
00:03:37.740 as having nothing to do with wealth inequality.
00:03:39.900 Certainly, the narrative that had emerged early on
00:03:43.480 was that we are the 99% against the 1%.
00:03:46.300 And there was this surface level,
00:03:48.480 the powerful elites, you know,
00:03:50.240 they're getting bailouts.
00:03:51.580 But at the heart of it was an activist class
00:03:54.540 that was not so much interested in wealth inequality,
00:03:59.400 but of attaining wealth for themselves.
00:04:01.740 And I'm not trying to say something as so naive
00:04:04.300 as like everybody's trying to get rich.
00:04:06.740 No, no, these were activists who explicitly stated
00:04:08.600 they wanted to flip the pyramid over.
00:04:10.780 And to the average person when they would say that,
00:04:13.480 they imagine a world in which the working class is above the only thing is if you think logically
00:04:19.640 about what happens to a pyramid when you flip it over is that it crumbles into a pile of rubble 0.68
00:04:24.040 reshaping a more crude pyramid with still a few at the top and many on the bottom so uh in
00:04:32.200 one of these activist meetings i explicitly asked i you want to flip the pyramid over but
00:04:36.360 the analogy there is that the bricks will crumble down forming a crudely
00:04:39.880 shaped pyramid with you at the top and they said yes exactly so for a lot of people that were there
00:04:47.820 it was not about there are people who are rich they're too rich CEOs are getting paid too much
00:04:52.860 it was more so about this system I personally don't like based on my views I should have the
00:05:00.440 power and that was a that was a large portion of what it was which I would argue is I wouldn't
00:05:06.020 call it overwhelmingly formative for my
00:05:08.080 worldview, because I'd been around activist groups, and I'd
00:05:09.960 worked for many non-profits. I've seen
00:05:11.540 the corruption from, you know, non-profit
00:05:13.840 organizations, and many of the biggest ones in the
00:05:15.980 world are just lying about everything, but
00:05:18.000 I would say I'm not, I wasn't particularly
00:05:20.140 surprised to see the
00:05:21.740 message and the actions were
00:05:23.600 incongruent, right?
00:05:25.900 And so, what that means
00:05:27.840 for wealth and equality in general,
00:05:30.740 I
00:05:32.120 don't know that there's actually,
00:05:33.540 let me put it this I personally think there's an issue when you know CEO pay is a thousand fold
00:05:39.760 the the smallest worker but there's also a question of is is that ratio as an extreme
00:05:46.680 a product of larger corporations whereas you go back 100 years maybe a company had a thousand
00:05:51.620 workers now they have 60,000 or 100,000 so of course you're going to have a greater curve
00:05:56.400 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.
00:06:09.200 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.
00:06:19.420 The issue is the existence of luxury and wealthy elites doesn't change their circumstance one way or the other.
00:06:25.660 We recently saw Zoran Mamdani criticize Ken Griffin's penthouse.
00:06:30.220 The existence of his penthouse doesn't do anything negative for the most part.
00:06:34.860 It creates jobs.
00:06:36.660 I don't know if that's a great thing, if it's meaningful,
00:06:39.420 but there's money, there's taxes, there's things being spent on this.
00:06:42.800 If we did not have that penthouse, what would change?
00:06:45.780 People would work somewhere else, I guess.
00:06:47.260 So there's an obvious positive and negative to higher wealth classes.
00:06:52.240 I think political instability is the biggest risk from human nature.
00:06:58.260 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.
00:07:08.380 We really don't.
00:07:09.120 You know, people talk about universal basic income, and I'm like, we're there.
00:07:12.100 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,
00:07:19.060 there are people who dance and they make a hundred thousand dollars a year like
00:07:23.340 what does that mean no no they literally people watch them dance for
00:07:27.560 three minutes they do that a couple times a day and they're making their
00:07:31.660 they have a house and they have food whenever they want and they're gonna be
00:07:34.440 like but if we don't work we die it's like yeah not in the year 2000 you know
00:07:38.800 in the year 2000 if you don't work you live with your parents or something I
00:07:41.780 don't know we live better than our king we live better than kings do and I'm not
00:07:46.480 saying it's something that people want to strive for to live with their parents
00:07:48.520 but we're at a point now where the amount of value
00:07:51.960 you have to put into a system to get value out
00:07:53.960 is ridiculously low.
00:07:56.460 The real problem with wealth inequality
00:07:57.700 is that you might have someone who's got clean running water,
00:08:00.420 refrigerator, air conditioning, they can take a hot shower,
00:08:03.200 but compared to other people, they're in poverty.
00:08:07.400 But if you compare them to Rockefeller 100 years ago,
00:08:09.320 they got better dental care,
00:08:10.400 they got heating and air conditioning,
00:08:11.460 they got chlorinated water,
00:08:12.440 they have better circumstances now.
00:08:15.740 To be fair, I mean, certainly there are still benefits
00:08:17.360 being wealthy 100 years ago. But so I think, I think largely the idea pushes forward a politics
00:08:24.660 based on envy, which can result in political instability, which is the real problem when the
00:08:29.440 system collapses because people are unsatisfied with their conditions. Yeah, no, I completely
00:08:34.080 agree. And I think that, as you said, the monarchs of Europe of yesteryear didn't have air conditioning.
00:08:40.700 And now basically everybody has that. You can eat food. There are basically no hungry people
00:08:47.020 in terms of scarcity in the United States, which is a miracle.
00:08:50.640 Does anybody in this room know how many people died
00:08:52.100 to get black pepper from India to Europe?
00:08:55.220 It's like 50,000 people were killed
00:08:57.880 so that a king could sprinkle pepper on his steak.
00:09:00.880 And now it's on every table at every diner and no one touches it.
00:09:04.320 Yeah, it's a great point.
00:09:07.040 I'd also like to ask you a little bit about your time in Sweden.
00:09:11.820 So moving on maybe from wealth inequality
00:09:13.840 and into more the discussion between, let's say, a creedal versus a cultural nation.
00:09:18.960 And so maybe you saw in recent days, Justice Gorsuch commented on this subject,
00:09:23.600 and he went in the direction of this is primarily a creedal nation,
00:09:27.900 meaning if someone comes to the United States and they buy into these ideas, they accept them,
00:09:32.640 really very little else matters, and they are now an American.
00:09:36.000 And many people were frustrated by that comment and just had a different opinion.
00:09:39.840 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.
00:09:51.920 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? 0.53
00:10:01.520 I actually half agree with that statement.
00:10:04.240 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.
00:10:16.940 And I think that's fantastic.
00:10:18.540 That being said, there are people who did that, sacrificed everything so that their children could grow up and have the American dream.
00:10:26.600 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.
00:10:31.640 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.
00:10:39.540 I believe it was Somalia.
00:10:40.620 It's been a few years since I, this is almost 10 years ago now.
00:10:43.120 It was 2017.
00:10:44.640 And when they brought these people in, they said, we're here for you.
00:10:49.160 We've got resources for you.
00:10:51.000 Welcome to Sweden.
00:10:52.120 What these people did was they were moved into or moved into enclaves.
00:10:57.360 And then by the time I got there, you had neighborhoods that were entirely not Swedish, but still Swedish.
00:11:04.100 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.
00:11:13.340 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. 0.59
00:11:20.260 And so they basically were stateless.
00:11:22.520 When the police would come in, these people would say, you have no jurisdiction here.
00:11:26.660 You are not our people.
00:11:27.720 We are something else.
00:11:28.640 You've cast us out.
00:11:30.020 So this leads to gang violence, crime.
00:11:33.100 I think it's important to, how you should understand this is, from the perspective of
00:11:37.180 somebody who lives in an enclave like this, the people outside of it are not part of their
00:11:41.520 community.
00:11:42.160 And let's just imagine for a second, they don't exist.
00:11:44.660 So what does that mean?
00:11:45.820 They're not concerned about interacting with you for the most part.
00:11:48.240 They don't expect to get a job from you.
00:11:49.700 They don't expect to buy or trade with you.
00:11:51.080 but there's another enclave on the other side of town these people they do interact with and
00:11:56.180 sometimes they disagree so we end up seeing in sweden is uh these these the children of these 0.94
00:12:01.360 refugees throwing grenades at each other uh when i went there in 2017 it was actually late 2016 0.73
00:12:06.420 a grenade had detonated on the balcony injuring a british child who was there with his family as
00:12:11.140 tourists as collateral damage in these in these gang fights where they're buying these weapons
00:12:14.700 but we don't need to look at Sweden to see the problems of enclaves you can
00:12:20.700 come to Chicago Chicago is fascinating in that every neighborhood in the in the
00:12:25.500 in Brandon Johnson's mayoral election voted based on race so if you look at
00:12:29.760 the initial voting data this is when it was the full field not just the runoff
00:12:35.820 you can look at a neighborhood and see its racial demographics and guess what
00:12:39.540 their top candidates are going to be the same racial demographic so we have that
00:12:43.380 same problem here in the United States. And we can talk about the history of this country and 0.98
00:12:48.600 why that exists with, say, redlining and blockbusting. But it doesn't matter if you're 1.00
00:12:54.280 bringing new people in or you have people who are here. You create enclaves. You will create
00:12:58.520 animosity between these people. So a good example that I like to cite is I grew up in the Midway
00:13:05.360 area. And my buddy and I, who's actually chilling right here, Brandon, we were only a few blocks
00:13:10.500 away from the Leclerc courts, which has been bulldozed and destroyed. It's gone now.
00:13:15.400 It was almost entirely, I think it was 100% black, maybe
00:13:18.580 some Latino. And then right across 47th of the South, it was
00:13:22.540 largely white with some Latino, and it was largely Polish immigrants. 0.65
00:13:26.520 I mean, yeah, it was racial violence all the time. Because you have two distinct communities that identify 0.99
00:13:30.740 each other immediately based on their race, and they have these enclaves.
00:13:35.620 I think ultimately what this leads to in the United States,
00:13:38.280 not with the VRA, that we have to stop. It may be difficult, but I think that if we pursue
00:13:45.500 politics based on race continually, like they've, like, look, with all due respect to the Democrats
00:13:50.320 for whatever they deserve respect for, advocating that we create congressional districts based on
00:13:54.800 race is going to exacerbate this. Because you're asking a group of, you're telling everyone in the
00:13:59.300 room, split up based on race, find what unifies you based on what you look like, and then argue
00:14:04.480 with someone else about what you deserve okay well then you're going to have a guy immediately is
00:14:09.840 going to look at a white guy's gonna look at a white guy and say okay you and i have something
00:14:12.720 to fight for then because we were told we have to live this way we need to we need to stop this we
00:14:17.040 need to let people live next to each other be neighbors and politics should be based on the
00:14:21.760 economics of a region the geography of a region what the people need not how we look yeah no i
00:14:27.920 think that our body politic cannot continue in that way obviously it's it's anathema to what the
00:14:32.880 the founders felt and especially what the sort of feel-good politics of
00:14:37.140 yesteryear were sort of about. We just don't really, we can't rely on a racialized society 0.66
00:14:45.620 and racialized politics. It's just not something we can do. Another sort of segmented racialized
00:14:50.940 place is Los Angeles. And the other week I was listening to your show and you had talked about
00:14:55.320 how you spent some time in Los Angeles and you actually worked with non-profits and dealing
00:14:59.800 with the homeless area and so I'm I'm from LA County is California is my home
00:15:04.420 I love it and it's very frustrating to see of course the mismanagement on so
00:15:09.160 many levels but I think that the people are nice the weather's fantastic there's
00:15:14.380 so much history and in terms of people but also businesses that have come out
00:15:19.060 of California it's a very culturally significant place and so I wonder what
00:15:22.720 you think about what's going on in California in LA
00:15:26.080 Politically and also regarding the homelessness crisis you spoke about what you think that the true character of the homelessness problem
00:15:33.500 Yes in terms of whether it's dealing with mental health problems or with addiction or with economics
00:15:39.180 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?
00:15:44.820 In general is a really interesting thing to point out about California is I'm sure you know this
00:15:48.580 There are oil pumps hidden as buildings all over this all over the city and county
00:15:51.780 That people who aren't from there they don't realize this you'll see a church with a tall steeple
00:15:55.280 it's actually fake and behind it is an oil pump. But that's just a point I want to make about
00:16:00.580 perception. The reason is you mentioned mismanagement and on the issue of homelessness
00:16:05.540 the only reason you'd characterize it as mismanagement is that you're part of the
00:16:10.040 outgroup. Because if you're part of the homeless industrial complex as it's called it's not being
00:16:13.800 mismanaged. It's functioning actually exactly as intended which is to funnel money from the hopeful
00:16:19.400 but ignorant masses and government into the pockets of people who do nothing. Which I think
00:16:23.860 we've seen too much of in this country. The scale of fraud in this country is not just as it's
00:16:29.120 described at the federal level by Republicans or whatever. I would describe it as the homeless
00:16:34.140 shelters in Los Angeles tend to be empty. I don't speak for every single one. The ones that I've
00:16:38.900 experienced with empty, yet they will tell you when they ask you for money, they're at capacity
00:16:44.400 or they're full. Why? Why would you donate money to a shelter that nobody wants to be at?
00:16:49.520 If they came to you and said, well, we literally have no homeless people coming to our shelter,
00:16:52.640 they don't use it it's well then what do you need the money for keep the lights on i guess well why
00:16:57.120 you're not helping the homeless well the issue is the homeless don't want help there's a there's a
00:17:01.840 lot of issues with homelessness especially in my experience uh working with a non-profit
00:17:06.240 specifically on the issue of homelessness and it's that the overwhelming majority that are
00:17:10.240 long-term homeless either choose to be or incapable of not being the people that we encounter who are
00:17:16.400 down on their luck, maybe lost their job or hardship drove them into a dark place.
00:17:23.080 Instantly, instantly solved. You find a guy who got laid off from his job, burned his savings and
00:17:28.080 got evicted, holding up a sign saying, I'm trying to make it work. You walk up to him and you say,
00:17:32.300 we're going to put you in a house. We're going to buy you some clean clothes and we're going to
00:17:35.440 find you a job. He will say, thank you. He will go with you. He will do exactly as told. And within
00:17:39.940 two weeks, he's working a job. He's now moved on from the principal shelter to a halfway house.
00:17:44.880 I don't know if halfway house is the right word, but they have houses owned by shelters
00:17:48.260 that are three bedrooms, and then there will be people living together as roommates.
00:17:51.780 They start paying rent, get apartments, problem solved.
00:17:55.420 They might receive disability or unemployment from the government, which does help, and
00:17:58.780 I am in favor of.
00:18:00.440 However, 80 to 90 percent, we run into drug addicts, the mentally ill, and people who
00:18:06.020 choose to be homeless, and I mean literally choose.
00:18:09.660 So you'll come up to a man and a woman sitting in a tent.
00:18:13.760 You will ask them, how are you doing?
00:18:16.840 And they're going to say, couldn't be happier.
00:18:18.660 And you'll say, oh, is there anything to get you?
00:18:21.680 No.
00:18:22.820 You sure?
00:18:23.900 Yeah, I'm good.
00:18:24.420 You got any money?
00:18:25.500 Well, I'm not going to give you money.
00:18:26.560 I'm good.
00:18:27.240 We got food.
00:18:27.860 We got shelter.
00:18:28.820 Have a nice day.
00:18:29.780 So the city can't get these people to leave because they don't want to.
00:18:32.460 Then you run to the issue of people who, no matter what you give them, they're going to
00:18:35.800 spend it on drugs.
00:18:36.920 And that is an issue.
00:18:37.960 And it's very difficult to solve, especially for LA.
00:18:40.120 the reason why the homelessness is so bad there and they consider it to be worst and the worst
00:18:44.520 of the developed world is that it's just so nice the weather's so good if you're somebody who
00:18:49.800 intends to sleep outside la is the place to be for for two big reasons year-round good weather
00:18:55.120 you're not going to die in winter and the government's going to give you free stuff
00:18:58.500 and you never have to change and then for these government programs for these uh non-profits they
00:19:04.320 call it the homeless industrial complex they're happy to get multi-million dollar grants from the
00:19:08.780 federal and state government that they know they will never solve any problem with but hey you
00:19:13.060 got a three hundred thousand dollar a year job right now to sit around and claim you're fighting
00:19:16.120 the good fight why do anything differently yeah no I completely agree and I've I've been out and
00:19:22.680 I've gone out to help the homeless actually in my area and I've run into the same exact
00:19:26.940 dispositions of people no we're fine we're fine they're very pleased to do it I mean like you
00:19:30.680 said it's basically a paradise free stuff everywhere and it's again it's you know and
00:19:35.100 to say positively about this country we have a lot of resources and there's not the scarcity issue
00:19:39.620 but it creates this problem where um of course the sort of residual presence of the homeless is
00:19:46.220 is a nuisance especially when there's drugs involved which is basically always i think i
00:19:50.280 think maybe we're too nice an example is i knew a guy uh this is like 20 years ago now he would
00:19:55.880 sleep on on state street and he would put a folgers tin can in front of him and go to sleep
00:20:01.180 and he would wake up and it would be full or he'd wake up periodically check go back to sleep
00:20:05.500 so i i see him there one day i meet him where i'm talking to him and he was probably in his
00:20:10.260 late 20s and he said he does about 200 bucks every every day he goes to sleep doesn't do
00:20:16.880 anything he literally just puts a can out falls asleep he wakes up it's full of change he would
00:20:20.560 walk into the local bank pour into one of those coin star machines what do they call them these
00:20:23.820 days and then then he'd have 200 bucks only problem is he was a heroin addict and so i was
00:20:29.840 like bro you're doing 200 bucks a day you're not like you must be living really well and he goes
00:20:33.380 nah I just spend it on heroin man and I was like okay well there's your problem but there's a
00:20:39.140 bigger problem in that regular people are just so nice they they they want to help and it's not
00:20:44.920 because they they want a virtue signal or appear to be good it's because they genuinely want to
00:20:48.840 help and they feel bad and uh so they see somebody who seems down in their luck and they're like
00:20:53.040 I can spare a few bucks the only problem is the people are never going to change
00:20:57.480 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.
00:21:05.140 Maybe to actually help these people, we have to be more stern and say the help we give you comes with certain requirements.
00:21:12.840 There's this phrase in California politics that is get help or get out.
00:21:16.980 Basically, get help or get out.
00:21:19.180 This current sort of middle state is not an option.
00:21:23.140 So some people, like you say, they end up perpetuating the problem.
00:21:26.320 And in fact, some of them acknowledge that they're perpetuating the problem.
00:21:29.520 Just, I think if they want to have drugs and be an addict, that's their choice in life.
00:21:34.260 There are people, I think, an increasing number of people who actually kind of accept that premise.
00:21:38.420 But like you said, the majority of people don't understand that they're actually facilitating.
00:21:42.360 And it doesn't mean we can't facilitate charity.
00:21:45.140 We believe in charity.
00:21:46.440 That's a fundamental tenet of this country.
00:21:48.360 But it gets to the point where, obviously, you're exacerbating the problem of addiction, which is deeply twisted.
00:21:53.460 this is interesting as it plays into the idea of the American identity in how the identity of
00:21:58.300 America changes. That is, if you say socially, I don't care if you're a drug addict, you are allowed
00:22:05.320 to live your life to hurt other people. What ends up happening is it becomes visible. It becomes
00:22:10.840 cultural. So you end up with drug addicts everywhere. You end up with children seeing
00:22:16.080 drug addicts. And, you know, it's the inverse of out of sight, out of mind. They see something,
00:22:20.860 they see the possibilities they ask questions about it and some people will fall into it
00:22:23.980 should you say no public disorder as it pertains to drug use and addiction will not be tolerated
00:22:32.200 you will have less people growing up living in that world so the question of this is you know
00:22:37.860 the neighborhood where i grew up in with a lot of gangs i mean chicago gangs are everywhere
00:22:40.840 how is it that a kid in my neighborhood ends up murdering a couple people well because the gangs
00:22:46.480 were everywhere. They were tolerated. The police said, and well, look, you know, if they're on the
00:22:51.080 street corner, we'll, we'll, if they're doing something like they set a tolerance very high.
00:22:55.640 If they say, if we see them waving guns, we're going to stop them. But otherwise the gangs are
00:22:59.000 there. What are you going to do about it? Okay. Then what happens is a 13 year old kid walks by
00:23:02.580 and the gang bangers yell out to him. Next thing you know, this kid's hanging out with gang bangers.
00:23:06.060 Next thing you know, they say, if you want to join the gang, go shoot these people from the 0.99
00:23:08.780 rival gang or rival drug dealers. You're creating the gangs or make you're persisting them or you're 0.87
00:23:14.080 making them persist there's a challenge in that what do we do as a society then
00:23:17.860 that I think eventually will come to a reckoning do we then crack down and go
00:23:23.140 hardcore broken windows style nope we don't care we're shutting this down and
00:23:27.160 removing it from visibility in the public it's a challenge that I think
00:23:30.400 we're you know as the question of what happens next for America we're going to
00:23:35.140 have to reconcile with the fact that we have a fractured culture it is bifurcated
00:23:40.180 down the middle. There are two principal factions in this country at this point with
00:23:44.560 massively morally divergent worldviews. And I think one side has a willingness to use violence
00:23:52.280 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.
00:25:41.100 It's 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.
00:25:59.300 It is wholly unfit for any other.
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.
00:26:20.320 So you mentioned the conservative movement.
00:26:22.340 What does that mean?
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.
00:26:43.120 But we disagree a lot.
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
00:27:01.000 vision for progressivism.
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?
00:27:15.880 Yeah, absolutely. 1.00
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.
00:30:22.880 Democrats try to do the same.
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
00:30:32.540 they believe to be morally repugnant.
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.
00:31:34.440 And the narrative is inverted.
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.
00:31:51.180 It is considered acceptable.
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
00:32:44.380 let's let people pursue the good on their own.
00:32:46.800 They can probably make better decisions for themselves
00:32:48.980 than the government can make for them.
00:32:50.840 That's sort of a foundational idea of ours,
00:32:53.140 but as we lose the fundamental morals that we used to have in common,
00:32:58.660 is it still feasible, is what I wonder,
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?
00:33:10.460 No. The Civil War proved that.
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,
00:33:26.340 it's just a mathematical impossibility.
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 0.97
00:33:52.000 will shoot the attempted murderer. 0.65
00:33:53.660 But in the event an abortion doctor is about to perform an abortion, they will not shoot 0.96
00:33:57.320 the doctor shows.
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.
00:34:36.340 It's really profound.
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,
00:34:55.360 and not based on principle at all?
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
00:37:43.460 in your fight for journalistic integrity.
00:37:46.020 Thanks for having me.
00:37:53.220 Thanks for having us.
00:37:54.460 It was awesome.
00:37:55.300 Yeah, good fun.