Today on the Glenn Beck Program, host Glenn Beck is joined by CNN's Jim Acosta to discuss the Democratic Party's new Medicare for All plan and how it's going to destroy our health care system. Also, a new study from the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute shows that only 25% of Americans are devoted to the progressive agenda.
00:01:29.780They didn't come from the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute.
00:01:33.180This is from the annual report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
00:01:38.940And by the way, did I mention they're based, you know, behind the progressive iron curtain of California?
00:01:44.920Did I also mention that Kaiser helped spin the left's talking points when the Democrats were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act and tell us that, oh, no, this is going to be fantastic for everybody?
00:01:57.940Yesterday, President Trump wrote an op-ed in USA Today titled, Democrats' Medicare for All plan will demolish promises to seniors.
00:02:09.740He goes on to explain how the plan would cost an insane $32.6 trillion during the first 10 years.
00:02:19.320The president continued by slamming the left's open border policies and calling out their socialist policies.
00:02:25.880USA Today's tweet pointing out the Trump op-ed read, quote, Democrats want to outlaw private health care plans, taking away freedom to choose plans while letting anyone cross the border.
00:03:36.500Actually, it's really sad that it's painfully obvious that journalists like Acosta haven't even read the left's proposal on Medicare for all.
00:06:32.340They said there are seven distinct clusters now in America.
00:06:38.160Progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.
00:06:48.460Now, according to the report, 25% of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives.
00:07:13.140Their views are even more out of the mainstream and are less typical.
00:07:19.860Two-thirds of Americans do not belong in either extreme progressivism, as progressive activists, or as traditional devoted conservatives.
00:07:35.320The vast majority is now considered something called the exhausted majority.
00:07:43.780The members of this two-thirds of our society share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and have a lack of voice in the national conversation.
00:08:03.360Most members of the exhausted majority dislike political correctness.
00:08:11.220Among the general population, 80% believe that political correctness is a problem in our country.
00:08:21.100Even young people are uncomfortable with it.
00:08:24.22074%, 74%, ages 24 to 29, and 79% under the age of 24, think this is a problem.
00:08:37.940The woke are in the extreme minority in this country.
00:08:48.020Youth, not supporting political correctness.
00:08:53.240And they're not supporting the race thing either.
00:09:00.180Whites are ever so slightly less than average to believe political correctness is a problem in the country.
00:10:19.920You're not the one that is the red skin.
00:10:23.980How are you standing up and telling Native Americans how they're supposed to feel when they don't feel that way in poll after poll after poll?
00:10:33.640One part of the standard narrative of the data partially affirmed is that African Americans are most likely to support political correctness.
00:10:44.000But the difference between them and other groups is much smaller than generally supposed.
00:10:49.280Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness.
00:10:56.000This means there are only four percentage points less likely than whites and only five percentage points less likely than the average to believe that political correctness is a real problem in America.
00:11:07.080While 83% of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, 70% of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical.
00:11:53.100The guy who yesterday we found out is building a 200 or built a 200 pound bomb and was going to detonate it on the National Mall on Election Day.
00:12:05.520That's what's making him feel this way.
00:12:08.740The news reports where they are saying mobs.
00:15:17.880And when people, as I said in 2009, at some point, they're going to drag people out of their chairs in their studios and beat them to death in the streets.
00:15:32.480When these people, who are dismissing and encouraging these people to be violent, when that is happening, a lot of people are going to say, well, they deserve it.
00:17:14.780They've got this chart that shows you how much money you're saving because you actually own the system, so you're not renting it from somebody for five years.
00:21:38.840There is a study out from Morton Bay at the University of Southern California that looks at the role that online bots, particularly the Russian persuasion, might have played in the discourse on social media surrounding The Last Jedi.
00:21:56.840So you just kind of read by surrounding The Last Jedi, the movie, The Last Jedi, nice and low hanging target being a Star Wars movie.
00:22:06.980What do people care about more than politics?
00:22:09.320I would say that it's probably the light side versus the dark side and the eternal struggle in a galaxy far, far away.
00:22:15.340You know, you know, you've mentioned, Glenn, like they prey on these very emotional and personal issues on social media.
00:22:22.580It's not just about politics and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
00:22:25.700It can be about kneeling the national anthem.
00:22:27.740It can be about something that a celebrity might have said, and then it's amplified and sort of turned up to 11 so that people get really heated about it.
00:22:35.400Star Wars is in that category, too, and there might be some evidence to show that this is actually happening every day.
00:22:45.800Yeah, so it's circumstantial in many ways, but that's by nature of what we're dealing with here.
00:22:51.980When you're talking about foreign influence and particularly malicious activity coming from Russian bots or trolls or sock puppet accounts, you are talking about a moving target, people who are deleting their accounts, changing their information, making new accounts, staying active so that they can't actually be tracked to a given location.
00:23:11.040And if Morton Bay, the researcher at USC, could prove definitively that these are Russian agents, then he should be working at the CIA.
00:23:22.280And what you look at is you look at the characteristics of social media accounts online, kind of what I just mentioned is what behaviors do they engage in?
00:23:35.100And then is there a count there the next week when you look them up again?
00:23:38.380These are sort of things that you look for when you're talking about foreign influence online, and it might be Russians, it might be the Chinese, it might be Iranians, or it might be some Floridian with a bone to pick with the rest of the country.
00:23:48.920So what did they plant into our society?
00:23:54.340Well, in this case, what they planted, there was evidence that there were 16 accounts that could specifically be Russian-linked, 105 that sort of had a question mark as to where they could be originating from, that are jumping online when The Last Jedi comes out, and people are starting to debate about the movie.
00:24:13.560And then they start throwing in the tweets about the feminazi, Admiral Holdo, and then they start throwing in tweets about how masculinity is under assault because Poe Dameron wasn't able to lead the ship.
00:24:27.080And then they start throwing in tweets about SJW droids and the fact that there was a droid in the hospital.
00:24:33.720Yeah, and so, but the important thing, Glenn, is that that comes from real people, too, and you can't really distinguish what comes first, like the chicken or the egg.
00:24:43.500Did the Russian, you know, bot or troll online plant the thought in a conservative or, you know, activist or Star Wars fan online, and then they sort of echo it?
00:24:56.160Because it is reasonable to look at Star Wars and see some sort of, like, you know, progressive fingers in the pot.
00:25:02.700But there's also this discourse online that happens where you sort of amplify other opinions that you see.
00:25:09.380You see someone upset about the feminazis now taking over Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy or, you know, the Asian girl in the new Star Wars movie.
00:25:17.320And if you get amplified about that and feel like, oh, well, someone else is angry about that, too, I can now feel a little bit more angry.
00:25:26.280Then the discourse just rapidly gets more radical.
00:25:30.440And it's pretty reasonable to think that there are foreign actors who engage in this malicious activity.
00:25:36.240Steven, it's interesting, I think, and this is part of the crime against journalism that's happened, making every effort of what Russia has tried to do in America about Donald Trump.
00:25:46.300You know, it's like, look at the scope of this.
00:25:51.320The fact that they are trying to go in there and stir people up over not just politics, but culture and Star Wars and all of these kind of separate things, Kaepernick, all of this stuff.
00:26:02.160And not just separating us, Stu, I think also pushing us into a place.
00:26:12.740They're pushing everything, all pop culture, everything into politics.
00:26:18.440Yeah, there's a great book out right now called Addicted to Outrage by Glenn Beck.
00:26:23.460Towards the end of part one, at least in the audio book, it's chapter 19.
00:26:28.220They're talking a lot about the role that foreign actors and particularly Russians might play in trying to sow discord.
00:26:34.940And what we do know about Russians that were able to do in the 2016 election, we don't know if they actually were able to impact the results and how people voted, but we are able to determine that they get their fingers into the way that we talk.
00:26:48.880And what's most important, I think, about American politics and culture is not that we are able to agree on everything political, but that we're actually able to go to a movie theater and sit next to our neighbors in the dark and smile at a Star Wars movie.
00:27:04.000But then when you go in and you've sort of been reading these things online and you've had people tell you that now it's like liberal propaganda and that it's not the Star Wars you grew up with, then you can't even do that.
00:27:16.700And think about what that does to a culture, not in the course of one year, but in the course of 10 years.
00:27:22.120We have we'll have nothing in common if we allow people to manipulate us like this and get us hooked on outrage on a constant basis about anything, whether it's politics or media.
00:27:33.920Steven, thank you for writing about this.
00:27:37.860This is in the Washington Examiner. Thank you for watching writing about this.
00:27:42.600Is it is it because it was Star Wars that this popped up on your radar or why is it that no one else is is catching this, Steven?
00:27:53.260Well, I would say that there was a pretty good deal of writing done about this.
00:27:56.740And for me, I did catch this because I've got Google Alerts set up for Star Wars and I care a lot about it.
00:28:01.500But, you know, I live in Star Wars Twitter as well as conservative and libertarian Twitter.
00:28:06.700You know, these are kind of different ecosystems and the dialogue in Star Wars Twitter is is toxic.
00:28:13.580It was so mean when these movies came out, particularly around Solo and The Last Jedi.
00:28:19.020The Last Jedi really sort of agitated right wing Twitter and Solo really agitated left wing Twitter.
00:28:26.020Everybody was arguing about these different things and just using language that you just don't see or you didn't see a couple of years ago in Star Wars.
00:28:35.040And then you turn on your favorite conservative podcast.
00:28:38.540Right. And I have a couple and they're sort of been echoing those sentiments.
00:28:42.560And then their actual fans are going out and engaging in Star Wars discourse.
00:28:47.480But there's it's not really clear, like who is genuine and who is not and who's coming to it as a really interested fan and who's coming to it as a political activist who just really wants to make people angry.
00:28:59.720And that's what we have to remember when we get online is there is no guarantee that the person, even if they have a real name and a photo associated with their account, is a genuine human being who wants you to leave this conversation happy.
00:29:12.040I don't know if you've ever won an argument on Twitter.
00:29:16.220It's the equivalent of a foreign city.
00:29:18.300You need to be getting off the airplane in this new city and just assume that you're not safe anywhere you go and you should just talk to people that you know and that you trust.
00:31:37.780Have you been following the Khashoggi story?
00:31:43.620This is the journalist, Washington Post journalist.
00:31:46.680He's a Saudi citizen who's just disappeared.
00:31:50.180He went into, I think it was in Istanbul, and he was going into the Saudi embassy because he needed documentation that he was divorced from his wife because he was going to get remarried.
00:33:21.100Now, did anybody ever see Alfred Hitchcock's rear window?
00:33:24.780If they had just left an hour later with those same suitcases and put them on the plane and then left, it might be a little weird, but what do you have?
00:33:37.300Unfortunately, what we do know now is they got off the plane, and they were driving to the embassy, and one of them stopped for extra empty suitcases.
00:33:47.720And another one went shopping for a bone saw.
00:36:52.320I am thrilled to have and introduce you to Helen Pluckrose.
00:36:58.940She is the editor in chief of Arrow magazine.
00:37:02.480She has written an article that I want to go through with her.
00:37:08.260But I also want to point out that if you follow the news a couple of weeks ago, I think it was of these three scientists that came out and tried to publish papers that were complete nonsense of the dog.
00:37:25.100The I think it was the rape culture in dog parks on dogs.
00:37:28.920And one of the responses before they published it was they did they get permission from the dogs?
00:37:34.540They were they were afraid that maybe they were violated a little.
00:38:09.040OK, first of all, thanks for coming on the program.
00:38:13.500I want to talk to you about your essay, how French intellectuals ruined the West postmodernism and its impact explained.
00:38:20.940I read the article and let's just say my audience is very smart.
00:38:28.120I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
00:38:31.620So pretend you're talking to somebody that, you know, doesn't doesn't really know much about this because you are talking to that person.
00:38:40.760And I'm trying to understand it, but postmodernism itself just doesn't make sense at all to me.
00:38:48.640And so I want to make sure that I have it right and the audience understands it, because I think it is the disease that is it's the cancer for the Western world, is it not?
00:39:01.480Well, I don't think it's the only cancer.
00:39:05.600I think it's certainly a problem that's coming up in how we understand knowledge and how we on the left are looking at ethics.
00:39:14.740And I think that's feeding into a rise on the other side of an increase in nationalism and anti-intellectualism and a kind of reversion to some utopian past which never existed.
00:39:30.480But, yes, it is it is a significant problem which has affected affected how we do how we decide what is true and how we evaluate rights and people standing in society.
00:39:45.920Right. And so this is the source of, you know, gender fluidity and and really intersectionality and all of this stuff that we're hearing that most people wake up every day and they're like,
00:39:58.620OK, what new term do I have to learn today? What can I say? What can I not say?
00:40:03.300This is the source of that. Would you agree with that?
00:40:07.480I would. Yes. Intersectionality is very explicitly defined by its founder as contemporary politics applied to postmodern theory.
00:40:15.400OK, so let's start at the beginning of postmodernism.
00:40:21.720Is it related at all to the Dadaist movement that grew out of the First World War, where where they were trying to make a point of nothing really has any meaning?
00:40:35.060And then that kind of just went awry. Is is is any of the roots in that movement at all?
00:40:41.660Yes. I mean, postmodernism, it is antecedents, which I don't actually go into in huge detail because they're just so varied.
00:40:50.060But it comes out of a lot of counter-enlightenment philosophy. It comes out of absurdist art.
00:40:57.680It's a kind of coming together of an artistic and philosophical movement.
00:41:02.700And the artistic side of it is actually really fun. We don't have to worry at all about postmodernism in art.
00:41:12.180It's when it starts being applied to society and we're starting to understand society as completely constructed in systems of power.
00:41:22.560And knowledge is a construct of this power, that it comes from language, that language is dangerous because it constructs reality.
00:41:30.380That that's that's that's sort of the key ideas which are underlying the problem that we're that we're seeing now.
00:41:37.940Now, you say that it doesn't have a that it's not anything worrisome in art, but I would consider literature art as well.
00:41:44.240And this is this is now how we are being taught that we have to read literature, that we read it through the lens of oppression, white, male, European oppression.
00:41:57.560Even if the even if the author is saying, no, no, that's not what the story is about, that's not the author is not even the the last word on this.
00:42:08.720It is the the postmodernist that can take and read that text any way they want. Correct.
00:42:15.380Absolutely. Yes. I mean, I think there there's a slight confusion because that approach to literature is part of the cultural philosophical problem.
00:42:24.960But a postmodern book, for example, would be a very different thing.
00:42:30.900It would be something that had no clear plot, that didn't have an ending.
00:42:34.680There's one which which is just the beginning of a lot of stories, which which doesn't add up.
00:42:39.500So that is a style that is almost completely separate from the moralistic thing.
00:42:45.620All right. So you're saying as an artist, you could create something that has no meaning, but it is only when it's used as a critique that it starts to get into trouble.
00:42:58.040Yes. Yes, exactly. And it's some wonderful and very fun shows, apparently, of postmodern, but they're not political.
00:43:07.560Great. OK. So tell me how it where it grew and how it grabbed us by the throat or our university systems.
00:43:18.560Well, the the original postmodernist, they're just a small group of very, very prolific writers in the late 60s, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Baudrillard and particularly Michel Foucault.
00:43:33.880And they came together all from different disciplines and all seemingly at the same time with the same message that they were disillusioned with the modern period.
00:43:44.880They were disillusioned with Marxism and they were disillusioned with religion and institutions.
00:43:51.880And they they thought that these were all meta narratives.
00:43:54.880They were big, comfortable understandings of things that had just fallen apart.
00:43:59.880This this comes after the world wars, the fall of empire, all these sort of certainties were crumbling.
00:44:06.880And there was a shift in society to try to understand all the things that we thought were true, actually true.
00:44:13.880The postmodernists are those who took this to a new philosophical level and simply said, no, this reality is not something we find.
00:44:22.880It's something that we make and we make it in the service of power.
00:44:27.880So it is powerful groups which have decided for us what is true.
00:44:31.880And these are understood to be white, heterosexual rich men.
00:44:41.880But the first postmodernists were not.
00:44:44.880They didn't have a particular political goal.
00:44:49.880They were certainly leftist, but they weren't.
00:44:51.880They were they were generally quite aimless.
00:44:53.880They wanted to sort of pull things apart, show problems with it.
00:44:56.880It wasn't until the late 80s and early 90s when a lot of feminists and critical race theorists, queer theorists, et cetera, said, well, taking everything apart is all good and well.
00:45:10.880Yes, we need to see that everything is socially constructed.
00:45:13.880But we have to have some kind of reality if we're going to address anything.
00:45:17.880We cannot, for example, address sexism against women unless we agree that women are a certain thing that experience certain things in certain times and places.
00:45:27.880So there was a change here to bring back some kind of objective reality.
00:45:32.880And that was systems of privilege and power that could then be analyzed very subjectively from the perspective of experience and with the assumption that we are always looking at a power imbalance in any interaction between different groups.
00:45:50.880OK, so let me let me let me let me go back and because I think people might be thinking, why are we talking about postmodernism?
00:46:00.880How does it relate to my life? This, I believe, is critical in to if you don't understand this or at least have a basic handle on it.
00:46:09.880You don't know what you're fighting. You don't know what's really happening.
00:46:13.880You don't know who's behind a lot of this or what the theories are behind it.
00:46:17.880So let me let me first say postmodernism.
00:46:21.880The modern world is the world that was created that chased out the dark ages.
00:46:27.880It was the it's the world created by the enlightenment of of science and reason and period empirical evidence.
00:46:36.880And even I mean, when you hear people say mathematics is racist, this is because we're they're trying to deconstruct anything that holds the modern world together.
00:46:53.880Yes, they they they think that it has been constructed unfairly, that a lot of voices have been left out.
00:46:59.880And this relates somehow to a lot of knowledge is I particularly have a problem with the idea that irrational and unempirical knowledge is the property of women or non white people.
00:47:15.880So, yeah, that that is that is how it works.
00:47:18.880OK, I'm going to take you before we move forward.
00:47:21.880I want to take you back one more step.
00:47:25.880I'm going to take a break and then we come back.
00:47:27.880I'd like you to help me on this, because it's my understanding that Deridan Foucault came over to the United States, that this was really kind of shaped in frustration from the 1968 Paris riots and in frustration that they're not going to be able to take this whole thing down unless they take it all down.
00:47:52.880I got to take all the systems down, they're not going to win through culture and that it was that it was actually much more strategic in its planting of a virus, if you will.
00:48:06.880And I'd love to hear your take on that, if that's true or not.
00:48:10.880When we come back, we're with Helen Pluckrose and we also have to ask her about the greatest prank ever.
00:48:18.880They her and two other scientists went and they spent a year just writing peer reviewed papers and see if they could get them published.
00:48:30.880They got seven published and they're complete nonsense, seven.
00:48:35.880And what they learned out of that is astonishing.
00:49:55.880From Helen Pluckrose's article how French intellectuals ruined the West, despite all the evidence that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia are at an all time low in Western societies.
00:50:14.880Leftist academics and social justice activists display fatalistic pessimism.
00:50:20.880This is coming from the post modernist take.
00:50:26.880Now, Helen, I've I've tried to find good purposes for this and the way it is being enacted now.
00:50:37.880I don't know, an embrace of total chaos and destruction.
00:50:44.880I can understand why a lot of people who are not understanding how this has worked and particularly conservatives can see this as completely destructive.
00:50:59.880But that there was a good purpose to it.
00:51:06.880I mean, I am a liberal, so you and I will probably not agree entirely on what good aims are.
00:51:12.880But when postmodernism postmodernism arose and the second wave of it, it's very important to sort of focus on the second wave, which which diversified into critical race theory intersectionality,
00:51:29.880That's what we're seeing now, much more than these earlier, very obscure ideas about knowledge.
00:51:34.880But they came at the time following the end of the civil rights movement.
00:51:39.880They claimed to be the heirs of Martin Luther King, a second wave liberal feminism of gay pride.
00:51:46.880They came and they hit the U.S. and the U.K. particularly because we were in a position of a sort of culturally of power of what what had happened recently for the Brits empire had just collapsed.
00:52:05.880And we were there was an enormous amount of postcolonial guilt in the U.S. and seeing the end of the Jim Crow era and sort of reckoning with a history of slavery.
00:52:16.880So society was largely geared towards continuing this very positive sort of civil rights movement and making society free and more equal for for everyone.
00:52:29.880So Helen, you know, you said a minute ago and maybe we just have a different definition.
00:52:40.880I'm a classic liberal, as you as we would know here in America.
00:53:03.220And I think that many Americans feel this way, you know, with political correctness.
00:53:09.220You know, I go back to the handy capable, you know, nobody wanted to say if that really hurt somebody's feelings that that, you know, nobody wants to do that or very few people want to do that.
00:53:21.220You know, it does kind of say, well, the next generation is going to just assume, you know, just going to attach the same meanings behind handy capable is handicapped.
00:53:31.020But, you know, so it's a little worthless over the long period of time.
00:53:35.020But I don't think anybody I think generally speaking, people are fair.
00:53:39.020What this is turned into is oppression.
00:53:44.020Yes, I mean, I think that's something that we have to hold on to, because when if we accept that everybody is generally trying to be fair, is generally trying to be good and to do good for their societies,
00:53:59.020and they actually care about their fellow human beings, then, yes, we have this situation where the vast majority of us are still very much in line with modern principles of equal opportunity, freedom, rights.
00:54:14.500And we have to understand that a lot of the people who have taken on and internalized a lot of the postmodern ideas are also trying to do good and trying to be fair.
00:54:24.440But what we have to look at is how this is working in practice.
00:54:29.060We are seeing a rising authoritarianism, a totalitarianism from the activists who are drawing on these ideas which have come out of these theories.
00:54:44.300I believe that this is a small part of the population, but it is drawing in more of the left because they want to kind of internalize some of these ideas because the ideals are good.
00:55:00.860The ideals that that women, people of color, LGBT should have the same rights as everybody else is what is underlying this.
00:55:09.360And these aims are good. A lot of left liberals who really should know better are thinking, well, how bad can this be if they have these aims?
00:55:18.620It is a problem because it is supremely irrational. It is supremely illiberal.
00:55:23.900It is taking us away from the progress that we made in the universal liberal advance of the civil rights movements and equal pay for women, the decriminalization of homosexuality, etc.
00:55:36.860It is not continuing that. It is really doing something quite different now.
00:55:41.280So I want to continue our conversation on this and the and the notion that you're you're it's a race to the bottom with the intersectionality.
00:55:51.720You are you're flipping the pyramid just upside down, but it is still a pyramid where the the one who has the most, you know, points, I guess, in their favor of I've been abused with this, this and this and by these groups and this group and this group that they become the power.
00:56:12.140It it it sounds like it's it's it's just not just deconstruction, it is constructing something that is authoritarian in nature.
00:56:21.260And I want to go there. And I also need to find out a little bit about the hoaxes that Helen and two other scientists did who were just they were looking at these peer reviewed publications and saying they don't even make sense.
00:56:38.940I think I could write something that was genuine nonsense and get it published.
00:58:50.280Couldn't, for example, say that it is it is it is powerful overall of society.
00:58:55.500Both your country and mine have both recently voted conservative.
00:58:59.980And I think this is partly to do with some fear of this strange narrative rising on the left, which has caused many who were sort of centrist and leaning left to go further right.
00:59:13.360As a leftist, I'd like them to come back again.
00:59:15.680So that that is why this is is of concern to me.
00:59:19.040May I stop you there and ask you for clarification on something?
00:59:21.880I think and I'm I'm not sure, especially over in England, but I think that there is a misunderstanding sometimes with the press.
00:59:31.860There are bad people who are racist and xenophobes and everything else.
00:59:35.900But I think that there this multiculturalism has taken people to a place to where they are, you know, English are are proud of, you know, their culture.
00:59:46.460And, you know, you either like the queen or you don't like the queen.
00:59:49.640I think most people are like, yeah, it's you know, it's part of our tradition, but we shouldn't be paying for it.
00:59:54.340And the multiculturalism that has made it racist to even say, yeah, I'm proud to be English.
01:00:22.380I don't see the problem as as multiculturalism itself.
01:00:28.280I am I'm in London and and we generally do do quite well with this, with this different color.
01:00:36.260There's a great range of different cultures and walking through London is quite it is quite exciting as you go through Chinatown and you can go through various different areas.
01:00:46.800There are also, yes, some considerable problems with a lack of assimilation with with some groups.
01:01:23.100I see quite a lot of this on the liberal side, too.
01:01:25.940And I think those on the far left who mistake a liking for one's own traditions and culture as a hatred for everybody else's and as a form of racism are actually denying some some pretty basic things core and neutral and even positive aims.
01:01:45.400So can we just spend a couple of minutes on what you guys did to try to get nonsense published and peer reviewed?
01:02:00.460And and you and you know, you were hoping maybe to get one, but you had seven in a year and some of the topics were insane.
01:02:15.940I was I took the lead on on one which called when the jokes on you, which was a bit cheeky, but argued that there there is no acceptable way to criticize social justice scholarship and activism.
01:02:31.600And that anybody who mocked it or or did a fatire of it or a hoax academic hoax of it was trying to preserve their own privilege.
01:02:41.060And that one was accepted quite quickly and was apparently a an excellent contribution.
01:02:49.060So but you took you you guys found out that you couldn't just publish nonsense.
01:03:07.760You really have to understand and navigate a complex arrangement of of rules.
01:03:13.820So it isn't we couldn't say anything that was was crazy, but we had to stay very firmly within orthodoxy and this developing body of theory.
01:03:24.060So sometimes, yes, we take a a mad idea like unwanted humping among dogs reveals rape culture in humans and that men like dogs.
01:03:35.340And then we'd have to find some way to link this to the theory.
01:03:39.560And in that case, we looked at assumptions about implicit bias and claimed that we could read it in humans in their interactions with dogs.
01:03:47.440And that was the hook that enabled us to build on a lot of theory to support this this claim and for it to be accepted.
01:03:56.760And then on a does exemplary scholarship.
01:04:21.680Anyway, but the important thing to it is if you read it through, you would not immediately think that this sounds just like Hitler.
01:04:29.260You know, it has been changed to intersectional feminism.
01:04:32.340That the point of that one was really to draw on the the grievance and the totalitarian kind of feel of that.
01:04:44.640But also we wanted to see we wanted to prove that we could make theory fit absolutely anything if we just brought in enough different bits of it.
01:04:52.640So that one is incredibly complicated, bringing in bits of theory from all over the place.
01:05:01.560Yes, to make that kind of we must all bond together in the right thing against the common common enemy narrative work.
01:05:09.760You know, when this came out and I mean, I would think that this would be something that, you know, the the the the world that you travel in would be outraged that those things were accepted.
01:05:28.820And you would you would you would be viewed as a whistleblower.
01:05:45.820We were delighted, for example, that Mother Jones, which is often extremely critical of criticisms of feminism, other and sort of academic academic leftism.
01:06:49.340And we would I would love to fly you in from London and sit down and and and spend a couple of hours with you and even your cohorts at some point.
01:06:59.920I find you fascinating and refreshing.
01:07:02.740And thank you for having the courage to speak out and explain things to, you know, the rest of us schlubs.
01:09:55.760That's where money always flies to to gold.
01:09:59.700Can't find any place else that it went.
01:10:03.260Look, we are headed for troubled times.
01:10:06.520And this is this is normal and natural.
01:10:10.120We have kept this thing up with the Fed in an unnatural way.
01:10:13.960When we hit an election, if the Democrats take control of Congress and the House and the Senate, you're in for a wild, wild ride for the next two years where nothing is going to get done and chaos will ensue.
01:10:30.080I believe, I believe, financial chaos, please protect yourself.
01:10:34.220In fact, right now they have at Goldline, they have a packet that they have put together.
01:10:40.620It's a research project that they did on what they think the election might mean for the future.
01:10:47.920If it goes to the Democrats, goes to the Republicans, what is it going to mean?
01:12:21.060They're doing something interesting in that.
01:12:22.760Like, normally you see polls and you see it, like, if you think of it as a sporting event, like, a football game happens and then you would see the score afterwards, right?
01:12:29.680Like, you're not seeing the play-by-play of the game with a poll.
01:12:32.080You're only seeing the results at the end.
01:12:34.060New York Times is trying something this cycle that's different, which is they're actually showing you, as they make the calls, who is voting for who.
01:12:40.820And you see the poll build slowly as you watch it.
01:13:03.740That's how hard it is for them to get people on the phone anymore to take these polls, which is part of the reason why it's hard to read, you know?
01:13:09.860Yeah, because, I mean, who's going to answer that?
01:14:26.440Some of our partners for Mercury One are already there.
01:14:30.020Somebody somebody cares setting up a pod hot meal station in Panama City Beach.
01:14:34.960They already had that location identified.
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01:14:47.100As soon as the assessment is done in South Carolina, we have our network of volunteers.
01:14:52.240They will be on site team Rubicon yesterday was trying to get everything tied down in North Carolina because of the heavy rain.
01:15:04.360They were just cleaning up from the last one due to the timing between Florence and Michael and the fact that FEMA has a hold on major supplies right now.
01:15:16.120Team Rubicon is in need of purchasing Tyvek suits and N95 masks with valves.
01:15:24.560Both items are used on flood operations to protect all of the volunteers from the muck with the suits and then the mold and the nasty from the the air.
01:15:34.540They're having a hard time getting a hold of them.
01:15:36.180We need it's about one hundred thousand dollars worth of these.
01:15:41.060The actual number is ninety six thousand.
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01:17:54.680We're all scratching our head wondering what it was.
01:17:56.540I mean, Donald Trump seems to think it was the Fed.
01:17:59.020And there's no question that the Fed interest rate hike and their announcement that they're going to continue to raise interest rates certainly move people out of stocks into bonds.
01:18:07.720Because when interest rates rise, then bonds are more attractive relatively than stocks.
01:18:12.040Usually those effects of Fed changes are short term.
01:18:17.100So I don't I don't think you're going to see a long term effect from that.
01:18:20.400Although I tend to agree with Donald Trump that here we've got this booming economy.
01:18:24.840We don't see real signs of inflation, although energy prices are rising.
01:18:28.420But other commodities are pretty stable or actually falling in price.
01:20:30.300It looks like because there's been disruptions in the Middle East with respect to Iraq.
01:20:37.240And so you're seeing a big, you know, a big sell-off as a result.
01:20:40.840I mean, a big rise in the price because people are really concerned about the, you know, about the price, the global reduction in supply as a result of that.
01:22:56.720You know, I would make the same case that the Fed, you know, was the one that built up this bubble that led to the housing crisis in 2007 and 2008.
01:23:04.360Why do we keep thinking these people are somehow, like, godlike?
01:24:04.800So I used to tell Donald Trump, I don't agree with you on your trade strategy, but I've got to say, so far, you know, the kind of apocalyptic view has not happened.
01:24:16.400He played Canada like a fiddle here where he basically said, you know, we're just going to go ahead without you with Mexico.
01:24:21.180And Canada at the 11th hour, literally 11 o'clock on the night before the deal had to be sealed, Canada came and said, okay, we agree to the deal.
01:24:29.580He's going to get a good deal, I think, with Europe.
01:24:31.800And then that leads to Canada – I mean, to China.
01:24:35.100And this is where I think Trump is going to take a very hard line, and I happen to agree with – I don't know, you and I haven't talked about this, Glenn,
01:24:44.060but I am a hard liner when it comes to China.
01:24:46.440I'm a free trade guy, but China – we don't have free trade with China.
01:24:49.420China's cheating, they're stealing, they're, you know, $300 billion of your intellectual property, they're building up their military.
01:24:56.280They're like, you know, the old Soviet Union in terms of a lot of the tactics they're using.
01:25:01.220And so I do think Trump should get tough with China.
01:25:05.300I just want to make sure that we understand the symbiotic relationship of mutually assured economic destruction when it comes to China.
01:25:13.360Well, let me challenge you on that one.
01:25:14.940And, you know, I'm going to – of course, a trade war would hurt us.
01:25:19.080But I think the way Trump looks at it, and I think he's right about this.
01:25:21.900Look, if we can't trade with China, we sneeze.
01:25:24.980If they can't trade with us, they catch pneumonia.
01:25:27.300And I think there's a lot of truth to that.
01:25:28.660I mean, they can't – their economy depends on access to America's $15 trillion consumer market.
01:25:34.520I mean, damn near everything you buy in Walmart is made in China.
01:25:39.600And so Trump is playing that card and saying, look, we're not going to give you unfettered access to our markets if you're not going to play by the rules.
01:25:46.840I talk to companies' CEOs all the time, Glenn, who basically say it's almost impossible to penetrate the China market.
01:25:52.840You've got to give up ownership of your company.
01:25:54.760You have to give up your trade secrets, your patents.
01:26:10.940Hey, Stephen, quickly, one quick question for you, and you probably have a real insight on this.
01:26:16.380We were kind of talked about the steel tariffs and these things going on, allies like Canada, as a way of negotiating and bringing these countries to the table for what was kind of like a NAFTA 2.0 type of situation.
01:26:31.340Well, that happened, but the steel tariffs are still on Canada.
01:26:34.540Do you have any idea why, or is this going to change at any point?
01:26:37.640Well, this is one of the issues that I find my – as you know, I'm a big fan of Donald Trump.
01:26:41.520I hope to write the tax plan with my buddy Larry Kudlow.
01:26:46.820I don't see the wisdom in steel and aluminum tariffs or auto tariffs, but especially not steel and aluminum because, you know, we have something like 100,000 Americans who are employed in steel and auto.
01:26:56.560But we've got 6 million other manufacturers who use steel and aluminum in what they produce.
01:27:02.580I was over at Anheuser-Busch a couple weeks ago.
01:27:05.900They, you know, when they make, you know, Budweiser's, they're using a lot of aluminum for those cans, and they say their prices are going up, and that's going on around the country.
01:27:14.900Our auto producers, our autos are more expensive because of the steel tariffs.
01:27:18.680So my point to Trump is this isn't even creating factory jobs.
01:27:21.600We're going to lose factory jobs as a result of this.
01:27:23.880So I disagree very strongly with the steel and aluminum tariffs.
01:28:02.320And by the way, the auto care, same thing.
01:28:04.200Even the U.S. auto industry doesn't want the auto care because so many of their supplies come from countries abroad.
01:28:12.320But, you know, the steel might have come from, you know, Canada, the assembly might have come from Mexico, the parts might have come from Taiwan.
01:28:22.100I mean, this is the modern American and global economy at work, and we put ourselves at risk here.
01:28:27.980But at the end of the day, I think Trump is going to prevail on China.
01:28:30.640I think I'll make a prediction within six months.
01:28:32.900I think China is going to come hand in hand and make some real concessions to Trump.
01:28:38.420And ultimately, if that happens, you're going to see the biggest stock market boom you ever saw.