The Megyn Kelly Show - Zaid Jilani and Andy Ngo on COVID Truth and Censorship, Antifa's Tactics, and Failings of the Corporate Media

00:00:00.540 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:12.280 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.480 Oh, great program for you today. Great, great, great, great.

00:00:18.580 We're going to start this show with Andy Ngo.

00:00:21.420 You know Andy, he's an independent journalist and author of the bestseller Unmasked,

00:00:27.500 Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.

00:00:31.580 We had him on not long ago talking about his book and so on, Antifa,

00:00:35.000 but he's been attacked by this group, Antifa, in Portland, Oregon, again.

00:00:40.360 It happened on May 28th, and the backlash against Andy has been bizarre and very telling.

00:00:49.800 No one seems to want to do anything about this.

00:00:52.260 The police don't seem to care. Certainly the local politicians don't care.

00:00:55.820 The media, the holier-than-thou media.

00:00:58.820 Why? How could Trump call us the enemy of the people? He's endangering us.

00:01:03.100 They couldn't care less that Andy Ngo was beaten by this anarchist group.

00:01:07.980 So he's going to walk us through what happened and what it means.

00:01:12.000 What does it say about us?

00:01:13.540 And then we're going to get to a guest I've been looking forward to speaking to.

00:01:16.180 His name is Zed Jelani.

00:01:17.740 Zed writes on Substack now for, it's called Inquire More,

00:01:21.040 and that's where you can go read him, but he's been pretty much at left-wing publications

00:01:26.500 since he got out of school, The Intercept, Think Progress, and I'm going to talk to him about that.

00:01:31.400 How did he go from being at those organizations to being with me on the advisory board for the

00:01:37.480 Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which is a group that's fighting back against this critical

00:01:42.000 race theory and this crazy wokeness?

00:01:43.700 He is not a woke liberal, but he is somebody who's of the left, who's been very bold and brave in

00:01:50.680 pushing back against some of the nonsense.

00:01:52.760 And we are going to get into this incendiary report out of Vanity Fair on what's happened

00:01:59.780 with the Wuhan lab theory.

00:02:01.400 It's so much deeper and more tentacled and disturbing than you know how these scientists were working

00:02:08.540 behind the scenes to shut up anybody who was going to say that it came from a lab as opposed to

00:02:13.220 directly from an animal into, you know, some human in a wet market about how the journalism

00:02:17.940 community completely fell down on the job, accepted that that was just a racist thing to pursue

00:02:23.680 and ignored it for a year.

00:02:26.280 And now Vanity Fair has State Department employees on the record by name talking about how they were

00:02:31.760 told by the State Department in open meetings to say nothing.

00:02:37.420 This is a can of worms you do not want to open.

00:02:39.200 Let's not go into whether research in a lab, gain of function research, as it's called,

00:02:44.160 where you try to make the bat coronavirus more dangerous.

00:02:47.600 We've funded too much of it to really be opening that can of worms.

00:02:50.600 It's stunning stuff.

00:02:52.340 Anyway, we get into all of it.

00:02:53.520 A lot of news in this podcast, and I know you're going to enjoy it.

00:02:55.880 We'll get to those guys in one second.

00:02:57.800 First this.

00:03:04.100 Andy, how are you?

00:03:05.540 Hi, Megan.

00:03:06.180 Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you again.

00:03:09.480 Of course.

00:03:10.080 Thank you for coming back.

00:03:11.200 How are you feeling?

00:03:13.020 I think emotionally.

00:03:15.760 I'm taking this one a lot harder.

00:03:18.140 And the injuries this time are to the body, so it's more painful.

00:03:22.960 Two years ago, it was brain, which was more serious, but no pain in the brain.

00:03:28.260 Um, but, you know, having support of you and other journalists and friends have been, have

00:03:37.640 meant a lot.

00:03:38.960 Laura has taken very good care of me.

00:03:41.700 I know you had her on your show recently.

00:03:45.280 She's amazing.

00:03:45.760 And she's somebody who, like you, has a history of running toward the danger to cover stories

00:03:50.580 and understands sometimes reporters take risks and sometimes it goes south.

00:03:56.120 Um, let's start with what happened, just in case our audience is not up to speed.

00:04:00.100 It happened May 28th.

00:04:01.920 And what were you doing?

00:04:03.900 So I have been out of the country for about half a year now.

00:04:07.240 I went on record earlier this year to state that I had fled Portland because of escalating

00:04:14.660 death threats against me.

00:04:15.920 So I had been in the UK.

00:04:17.920 I returned home recently, uh, temporarily for family matters.

00:04:23.380 I have, uh, elderly parents and, um, I, it's been six months since I've been on, uh, the

00:04:31.420 ground to do observations about this violent extremist movement known as Antifa.

00:04:37.840 And, um, I was beaten two years ago, severely given a brain hemorrhage and, um, my, I was

00:04:46.860 never reckless going back out and I've been out many, many times and diversify the ways

00:04:51.640 to gather information.

00:04:53.180 And, and the result of that is my book on maps.

00:04:57.380 Um, but, uh, I think what I underestimated is that their strategies and sophistications

00:05:04.280 has also evolved in the past six months in ways that I wasn't prepared for, unfortunately.

00:05:12.360 So I was incognito walking amongst them in their, uh, weekly violent protests that's

00:05:19.880 still ongoing in downtown Portland.

00:05:22.080 Towards the end of the night, they became suspicious of me.

00:05:24.760 And I believe it's probably because of the fact that I was not engaging in any of their

00:05:29.720 criminal acts, such as shutting down the roads or throwing projectiles at police or, um,

00:05:35.600 trying to, um, uh, break into the central police station, any of those things that they were

00:05:41.180 involved in that night.

00:05:42.280 Um, how many people were you with just to help set the scene?

00:05:46.760 The Antifa that night was around a hundred people.

00:05:50.740 It was to mark the one year anniversary of when their rioting began.

00:05:56.180 Okay.

00:05:56.780 So, and, and the reason that you can blend in is because they wear masks, right?

00:06:02.300 So you can, you can just put a mask on and kind of pass.

00:06:06.020 That's right.

00:06:06.940 Well, yes, but there's nuances to that.

00:06:09.860 So, uh, I, what, what is their strength in their anonymity is their, the black block.

00:06:17.580 And that, that means dressing head to toe in black, sticking together as a group, but so

00:06:22.380 that when some of them engage in criminal activities, they can easily run back into the

00:06:27.760 crowd, the, the block and blend it in and make it nearly impossible to be identified.

00:06:33.600 Um, that's their strength, but it's, it cannot, can also be a weakness in that.

00:06:38.260 That means other people can show up in that same uniform.

00:06:41.940 However, they develop certain protocols to develop, um, to try to weed out outsiders.

00:06:48.940 Um, cause that's how paranoid they are.

00:06:51.200 The, the press have been intimidated into not recording any of their activities.

00:06:55.600 That's why you're not seeing a lot of the video footage coming out because they've actually

00:06:59.520 have, um, assaulted and beaten, uh, the other local journalists.

00:07:05.180 And so the media reporting we have, um, there's a small media crew.

00:07:09.440 They stay about half a block away and they follow the orders and instructions of the

00:07:14.780 antidote, which is that they do not photograph or record them, even though it's in public.

00:07:19.660 They're engaging in newsworthy activities.

00:07:22.240 So what were they doing when you say they were running around committing crimes?

00:07:25.360 And it, to me, this reminds me of like a gang where you've got an undercover officer there

00:07:31.280 and that guy's got to commit some crimes if he doesn't want to be outed to the gang as

00:07:36.520 law enforcement.

00:07:37.720 There you are not wanting to do the stuff they're doing, but what kind of rebel rousing were they

00:07:43.220 up to that night?

00:07:44.100 So that night was actually rather tame compared to previous events, which is usually involving

00:07:51.220 arson and smashing windows and whatnot.

00:07:54.020 That night they were shutting down the roads of downtown Portland and they were throwing

00:07:58.620 projectiles such as eggs and other things at the central police station and screaming in

00:08:04.560 the faces of police officers.

00:08:06.860 They were driving by standing in front of their vehicles.

00:08:09.340 So that's, for Portland, that's a good night, you know, when you don't have buildings set

00:08:16.740 on fires where people are inside.

00:08:19.760 Now, are you, when you are reporting on this, are you doing it just visually or are you trying

00:08:25.140 to sneak video of this?

00:08:26.360 What are you doing?

00:08:27.500 That night I was observing visually and taking mental notes.

00:08:31.520 Anytime you take out a camera that people notice.

00:08:35.400 And, um, the only time they allow people to take out cameras, this is one of the explicit

00:08:42.140 rules is to record police.

00:08:44.220 So, um, it's to, it, it puts out disinformation.

00:08:48.900 For example, if one of the people gets arrested and all the cameras come out, including the

00:08:54.340 local journalists, then that's when they run in with the cameras and they, they try to

00:08:58.280 portray the police as a arresting peaceful protesters.

00:09:01.380 Okay.

00:09:02.960 So you're, you're there.

00:09:04.180 I mean, that's what most, most reporters don't, we're so used to viral videos.

00:09:07.680 Now we forget that most reporters that they're just there as a person observing with their

00:09:12.960 eyes and ears, and then they'll go report based on the knowledge that they acquired.

00:09:16.580 You don't have to have a video camera with you.

00:09:18.980 And especially if you're in this operation, which is essentially a undercover, you're, you're

00:09:23.200 intentionally not identifying yourself as a reporter, certainly as Andy know who they

00:09:28.300 know and hate and have been a very open about threatening.

00:09:31.840 So, I mean, that this is an undercover reporting situation.

00:09:36.100 That's right.

00:09:36.900 And, you know, uh, some people have asked me like, why didn't you, why don't you stay

00:09:41.780 a couple of blocks away?

00:09:42.820 Like what some of the local broadcasting would do and they'll use a zoom lens.

00:09:46.280 You can do all that.

00:09:47.520 I've done all that before, but to really like hear their conversations and get a kind of

00:09:53.000 an understanding of how the organized nature of the group, as they're moving, you really

00:09:57.900 have to be like a part of them.

00:10:01.180 So, you know, I'm hearing these things like the different monikers that they're referring

00:10:05.140 to one another.

00:10:06.260 They don't use, they don't call each other by the real names.

00:10:09.680 Um, they pay attention to things such as, um, uh, are you socializing with the group?

00:10:16.340 If you're not, why not?

00:10:17.780 Why are you not engaging in the same activities as them and all that?

00:10:21.540 So towards the end of the night, as the night went on is when this suspicion grew, um, one

00:10:28.460 of the Antifa members, um, and I recognized him because he was only partially unmasked and

00:10:35.180 he has a lot of scarring on his face.

00:10:37.520 He had assaulted me two years ago and I, uh, reported that to police and I have an ongoing,

00:10:42.660 um, civil suit regarding that.

00:10:45.020 He went up to interrogate me.

00:10:47.040 He asked me a rather innocuous question, but it sent shivers down my spine.

00:10:51.540 And he looked at me and he said, can you actually see through those goggles?

00:10:55.960 And the point of asking me that was so that he could hear my voice.

00:10:59.880 Um, I didn't respond, but I knew that it was time to go.

00:11:04.060 If they're sending people to ask questions, it's time to go.

00:11:06.940 Um, I made it one block away and, uh, uh, another group of them, uh, we're following now.

00:11:13.700 And, uh, they asked the next question they asked.

00:11:17.900 Um, I didn't want to take off running because I, you know, I was thinking if I immediately

00:11:22.680 do that, I mean, there's no police around, you know, it is in the middle of downtown,

00:11:26.940 everything's wooded up.

00:11:28.160 Um, it's, uh, it's a dead part of the city because of the rides for that's been going

00:11:33.700 on for a year.

00:11:35.200 Um, they said the question that I was asked was, why did you look so nervous tonight?

00:11:41.200 And, and at this point now I'm, I'm panicking and I'm really trying to speak or run.

00:11:46.660 Um, yeah, it's, it's speak or run.

00:11:49.560 And I, uh, my decision was to form a, um, I spoken a fake voice, what I, I tried to put

00:11:56.940 on a fake voice and I said, I have anxiety.

00:12:00.100 That was my answer.

00:12:01.260 And their response was, uh, to each other.

00:12:03.900 I think it's him.

00:12:05.440 Oh God.

00:12:06.440 And then you really did have anxiety.

00:12:09.300 Yep.

00:12:10.120 Uh, oh gosh.

00:12:11.420 So talking about this is kind of hard.

00:12:13.480 Um, uh, immediately started walking away.

00:12:16.260 Not running yet.

00:12:17.060 Um, thinking now, okay, what, what, what is my exit?

00:12:21.120 Look, keep looking, um, on the street.

00:12:23.660 Where are there any police in the distance?

00:12:25.860 I can sprint it.

00:12:26.640 Nothing.

00:12:27.680 Um, they were now saying, take off your mask, take off your mask.

00:12:31.640 I wouldn't.

00:12:32.520 So one of them reached for my face, grabbed off my mask and my goggles, and then I was

00:12:38.020 fully exposed.

00:12:38.840 And then that's when I took off sprinting, running for my life.

00:12:43.640 And I had this mob pursuing me and the fastest one in their group was able to tackle me to

00:12:51.020 the ground several blocks away.

00:12:53.240 All the meanwhile, when I was sprinting down the street, I'm trying to flag down the cars

00:12:58.040 that are on the street.

00:12:58.740 Cause this was a Friday night in downtown Portland.

00:13:01.720 Um, and this was a total bystander.

00:13:03.920 In fact, the drivers just ignored me maybe because there's been, you know, Portland, there's

00:13:08.640 so much dysfunction in the city that having screaming, crazy looking people in the street,

00:13:14.480 you know, you just sort of ignore it.

00:13:16.020 And so, um, nobody helped me.

00:13:19.360 And then I was tackled, um, and punched repeatedly on the head and pinned down.

00:13:25.220 And, uh, I could hear in the background, this, the footsteps and the yells of the mob pursuing.

00:13:31.020 And this is the mob that has been calling for my blood for two years.

00:13:36.400 They write murder and they go.

00:13:38.500 Just, just to refresh our audience's memory, you are public enemy number one of Antifa because

00:13:44.860 you've been fearless and reporting on them where I know you, I think you're actually being kind

00:13:50.320 and saying the press has been intimidated into ignoring them.

00:13:53.520 I think many in the press simply have no interest in them because they're not, they're not outraged

00:13:59.640 by what they're doing and they have similar ideologies and they think, you know, they,

00:14:04.120 they cover Antifa a lot differently than they would cover a proud boys rally or, uh, some

00:14:09.920 rally of a group, you know, known to be affiliated with white supremacists, right?

00:14:14.060 Like they think these guys are anti-Trump, I guess, and, and, you know, sort of pro-Black

00:14:19.720 Lives Matter and they can, they can stand for that cause.

00:14:22.320 So this is a group that you've been covering for a while and that hates you.

00:14:25.840 I mean, the death threats, we don't have to take your word for it.

00:14:28.540 The, the spray painted murder, Andy, no signs are all over the internet.

00:14:34.340 Yes.

00:14:34.540 And another thing they do to try to intimidate me is to release my, the address of where

00:14:40.180 they think my family is.

00:14:41.980 So the, you know, I have two dozen reports of the Portland police, nothing's ever done.

00:14:46.580 And the, the, in addition to the instances of violence and sometimes deadly violence carried

00:14:52.600 out by Antifa, such as when they, one of their members shot dead a man in downtown Portland last

00:14:57.980 year, like what the, what empowers them and what I, you know, really appreciate, appreciate

00:15:04.640 about you as you're a straight shooter and you call that as it is, you have a media establishment

00:15:10.660 since 2016 has thrown their lot in essentially with the far left for the cause of so-called, uh,

00:15:18.260 resistance against the previous administration by any means necessary.

00:15:22.500 So that, that Antifa is a fringe extremist movement.

00:15:26.600 Any, any liberal, any person on the left or right can recognize that.

00:15:30.560 But when you're of, when the public has been fed day in, day out, this propaganda of America

00:15:36.440 has elected, um, a Hitler figure.

00:15:39.040 America is, is a fascist regime now that was the most powering, um, empowering aspect for

00:15:45.800 Antifa and that they had now mainstream recruit, recruiting, um, propaganda that was being put

00:15:52.840 out by legacy media and print and in broadcast and radio everywhere.

00:15:58.120 So, um, you know, my, my job is to rec, recognizing that they're not anti-fascist or anti-racist.

00:16:06.500 They're not peaceful protesters.

00:16:08.380 This is by their own admissions, anti-government, insurrectionary, anarchist, communist ideology

00:16:15.640 movement, and they organize acts of criminality that manifest in, um, at his, at his mildest

00:16:23.700 form, property destruction, all the way to Austin, to, uh, assault and robbery and killing.

00:16:30.780 And it's not, it's not just in Portland, right?

00:16:32.740 I mean, it's Portland's just been an ongoing nightmare, notwithstanding what Nick Christophe

00:16:37.360 of the New York times says, his tweet tweets out.

00:16:39.680 It's delightful.

00:16:40.320 I'm here having my coffee.

00:16:41.340 We're all, you know, I love the, the helicopter reporters who just helicopter in say, I had

00:16:45.900 a delightful lunch and try to essentially diminish your reporting that you've done on

00:16:51.240 the ground there.

00:16:51.880 But it isn't just in Portland for people who are thinking this is a Portland problem.

00:16:55.740 No, it's a problem in urban progressive areas.

00:17:00.040 Seattle is another place that's particularly bad.

00:17:02.200 There's also Antifa cells in Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, there's New York City Antifa, and

00:17:08.320 they all operate in these rather large, um, Twitter accounts, these groups, and that's how

00:17:13.940 they organize.

00:17:14.920 You know, when I was on the ground, I was paying attention to what they were saying.

00:17:18.660 And one of the women, uh, in the group who was using the moniker mama, which suggests

00:17:24.460 to me that she was in a more like leadership type role.

00:17:28.060 She said that we, we're, we can't do what we're doing.

00:17:31.940 We can't do our mutual aid.

00:17:33.080 We can't organize without Twitter.

00:17:34.860 She was talking amongst them.

00:17:36.660 And that's absolutely true.

00:17:38.720 You know, they, this is how they blast out like their crowdfunding links.

00:17:42.560 That's how they get funding through cash app and Venmo to pay for the bails.

00:17:46.700 That's how they organize and announce when and where to go.

00:17:50.220 And I've been trying to bring the attention to, to big tech that, hey, your platform is

00:17:57.060 being exploited and used by violent extremists to carry out criminal activities.

00:18:02.020 It says so on these flyers, uh, fuck shit up, no, no, no cameras, uh, and things like

00:18:09.800 that, or, um, uh, or set fires to the precincts and inciting violence day in and day out.

00:18:16.700 Um, primarily on Twitter, but also Instagram and Facebook and really, um, very, very little

00:18:22.200 has been done.

00:18:23.340 So, you know, for all we've been hearing.

00:18:25.320 That's the crazy thing.

00:18:26.260 Yeah, exactly.

00:18:26.840 But this is the whole reason Parler went away.

00:18:28.980 It's back now, but it went away for a long time because it was supposedly used by extremists

00:18:35.060 to organize the January 6th riot.

00:18:37.900 Now, you know, forget the fact that Facebook was also used and they're up and running and

00:18:41.760 other platforms too.

00:18:43.460 Um, so if, if, you know, the inner, if Amazon, for example, really cares about this, if Twitter

00:18:48.960 really cares about, about stopping violence, stopping organized violence against innocents,

00:18:54.560 uh, why wouldn't they pay attention?

00:18:56.660 Why wouldn't they crack down on, on the use of their platforms for this kind of organization?

00:19:02.200 Yeah, it's because many of the people who work in, in Twitter and these companies are

00:19:06.260 sympathetic to the, the messaging of Antifa.

00:19:09.720 That's why you can have groups like the Youth Liberation Front, which by the way, was involved

00:19:13.840 for organizing the, the riots in Portland and Seattle and other cities.

00:19:17.540 They still have their account operating the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front.

00:19:22.940 You have Rose City, Antifa, they're still on Twitter.

00:19:25.620 So, um, and this is the issue with the, the, the, the mainstreaming of the far left is

00:19:34.240 really what, um, kind of the key arguments and what I'm, I write in, in Unmatched.

00:19:40.460 It's like, they're not, they would not be able to do what they're doing without this

00:19:45.660 critical mass of support that comes through, um, uh, complicit locally elected politicians,

00:19:53.320 complicit media.

00:19:54.740 Or even right down to the president of the United States and his debate with Donald Trump.

00:19:58.060 He said, you know, they're just an ideology partially quoting the FBI director without really

00:20:02.980 espousing what was actually said, which is they are organized at a local level and they've

00:20:06.640 done a lot of damage and continue to, um, but they get a shoulder shrug because they

00:20:11.140 don't wear red MAGA hats.

00:20:13.760 Um, I want to get more to the reaction to what happened to you in particular by the press,

00:20:18.280 the press that is so upset at any nasty Donald Trump tweet about the press is the enemy of

00:20:23.960 the people.

00:20:24.320 Then when an actual person who's trying to do real reporting gets attacked, it's like,

00:20:29.700 oh, he asked for it.

00:20:30.520 That's basically been their reaction, but, but before we do, let's, let's finish up the

00:20:35.280 actual assault because, and I apologize.

00:20:38.240 I'm sure it is.

00:20:39.320 I'm sure it's unpleasant to actually go through it again, you know, just reciting it.

00:20:43.140 But I want people to understand this is not, you know, it's not, it's not just a bunch

00:20:47.680 of people who sort of tried to scare you, tried to scare you and backed off.

00:20:51.580 They didn't back off.

00:20:52.760 You saved yourself by getting into a hotel and even then they didn't leave.

00:20:57.420 So they caught up with you and then what happened?

00:21:01.880 Yeah.

00:21:02.000 When I was pinned to the ground, all the adrenaline just left my body in that moment.

00:21:06.100 As I was hearing the, the mob coming closer and closer, I was, my thought was this, this,

00:21:12.600 this is it.

00:21:13.320 And I just hope they make it quick.

00:21:15.060 Uh, and, and, and either through, um, the, the miracle is that the person who pinned me

00:21:24.060 down and was beating me, he became either distracted or intimidated by the fact now that

00:21:29.880 there were several journalists who were recording and taking pictures of this assault.

00:21:34.620 And he let off enough of his weight that I was, I crawled forward and was able to take

00:21:39.520 off running again a second time.

00:21:41.340 And everything's boarded up on the street.

00:21:43.420 The nearest thing I, the only thing I saw open was the hotel.

00:21:45.820 And I ran in screaming erratically, call police, call police, call police.

00:21:50.440 And the first thing that the hotel staff said to me was, you need to put on a mask.

00:21:55.300 That was what they said.

00:21:55.960 Oh, good God.

00:21:56.940 Yeah.

00:21:57.140 And then they said they, they would not call police.

00:21:59.820 And they said that I needed to leave the property.

00:22:02.280 And by this point now, there's a mob gathering outside the hotel.

00:22:06.800 One of the Antifa had run inside the hotel lobby and was live streaming, threatening me

00:22:12.800 on her live stream and saying, come to the hotel, come to the Nines Hotel now.

00:22:17.320 We may have this soundbite.

00:22:18.380 Can we play that guys?

00:22:19.560 I can't wait for you to come out, Andy.

00:22:22.880 You thought the milkshakes were bad last time.

00:22:24.860 We're going to beat the fuck out of you, bitch.

00:22:27.960 Y'all, Andy knows here at the Nines Hotel.

00:22:30.880 Andy knows inside the hotel called the cops on everyone saying he's going to get killed

00:22:34.420 out here at the Nines Hotel right here by Tynor Square.

00:22:39.320 He's hiding right here on the phone with the cops.

00:22:41.880 And they're trying to kick him out.

00:22:43.520 And that's exactly what she wanted.

00:22:45.540 That's what they all wanted was for you to get kicked out.

00:22:47.820 By the way, if that hotel, the Nines had kicked you out and your assault had continued,

00:22:52.200 you, you would own the Nines, the Nines Hotel.

00:22:54.180 They are very lucky that somebody there finally listened and didn't push you out of that building.

00:22:59.920 Well, actually, up to the very moment, how I escaped from that lobby was I ran into the

00:23:05.780 elevator because the guests had just gone in.

00:23:08.100 And I pleaded with him, please let me go.

00:23:10.220 Let me go.

00:23:10.760 Because it seemed the hotel staff were telling me, you need to stand up now.

00:23:15.740 I was on my knees.

00:23:16.980 My leg was bloodied and injured.

00:23:19.580 And I didn't know if they were going to push me out or what.

00:23:23.320 And so I ran into the elevator.

00:23:26.480 Unfortunately, that guest, thank God for him.

00:23:29.340 He probably thought I was a crazy person, but swiped the hotel card.

00:23:34.540 And I went up to a high level in the building and hid and dozens of SWAT police responded.

00:23:43.760 At this point, I looked at video later to secure the front of the hotel because of the mob was

00:23:49.860 trying to break in.

00:23:51.760 I was eventually led out by through a discreet exit to the back where staff are.

00:23:57.600 And there was an ambulance there and the police and they took me to hospital.

00:24:00.440 And just so the audience knows, since this is just an audio program, there's visual

00:24:06.520 documentation of all this.

00:24:08.420 I mean, you've heard the woman yelling.

00:24:10.120 We have more of that.

00:24:11.620 We've seen the actual pictures of your injury, your bloody eye, your bloody side.

00:24:15.860 We have audio of them banging on the hotel windows.

00:24:19.300 In fact, let's play that so you can hear that, too.

00:24:20.980 No, please stop!

00:24:23.880 You see my face, Annie?

00:24:26.160 Annie, you see my face?

00:24:28.920 You see?

00:24:29.460 You see?

00:24:31.740 You see?

00:24:33.020 That's a derecho.

00:24:34.140 I see in front of her to go.

00:24:36.440 You see?

00:24:36.900 Yeah!

00:24:38.220 Yeah!

00:24:40.640 Yeah!

00:24:48.440 Yeah!

00:24:52.860 Yeah!

00:24:57.460 Yeah!

00:24:57.960 Yeah!

00:24:58.020 Yeah!

00:24:58.820 this is crazy they're screaming nazi scum at you i mean this not that anybody is going there but

00:25:10.580 just for the record this is not a justice malay situation this happened and there's been no

00:25:16.500 accountability for it you point out i didn't realize andy until just now even though i've

00:25:22.120 interviewed you before that you knew the name of the person who attacked you in 2019 and put you

00:25:26.760 in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage i did not know that i he hasn't been arrested no one's been

00:25:32.920 arrested for that attack and now here we are a week after this attack and have the police even

00:25:37.780 contacted you uh well one week out i have not heard from a detective at all not a single phone call so

00:25:45.800 you know if this wasn't my second go around dealing with assault uh in in portland police um i would be

00:25:55.060 angry but in 2019 i i had absolutely no support from uh the local authorities uh or the district

00:26:02.740 attorney or the state attorney general so uh in the conditions i've just gotten worse now we have a

00:26:08.800 district attorney who's even worse than the one that was there before so why don't the cops care i can

00:26:14.820 see the da and elected politician you know these far left wingers not caring but i it seems odd to me

00:26:20.640 the cops don't care so last year in response to uh george floyd dying the city council uh abolished

00:26:28.540 the gun violence reduction reduction team which is a unit of the portland police that deals with

00:26:33.380 shootings and homicides and portland is now at record levels of shootings and homicides and police are

00:26:39.680 overwhelmed uh the department also was defunded by the millions and officers have been quitting in

00:26:46.840 record numbers so they're the detectives um and this is a charitable take the detectives are just

00:26:54.120 swamped with all these murder cases so anything else is just much much lower priority this is this is the

00:27:03.580 same the murder rates up in portland it's up in all major cities in america that have at least a million

00:27:07.960 people by at least one third this well um i saw you tweeted about this not not long ago the portland

00:27:14.240 politician the city commissioner joanne hardesty can you tell folks she wants to defund the cops

00:27:19.460 very badly um until she needed them for something absurd can you tell the audience what we're talking

00:27:26.500 about right so uh late last year this is a woman who uh weaponizes her race she she was the first black

00:27:35.520 woman elected portland city council and she used that as a bludgeon against her political opponents

00:27:42.680 and uh at the forefront of that has been the portland police she's repeated all the same

00:27:47.860 talking points that everybody's familiar with uh she says that uh as a as a black woman she is

00:27:54.000 endangered by police she wants to defund police um she spread conspiracy theories during the riots

00:28:00.780 last year at one point telling in an interview to uh marie claire magazine that uh she believed portland

00:28:08.180 police were behind the arsons at the riots and were using it to blame protesters and when the police

00:28:14.380 chief asked her what's your evidence for this very serious allegation she had none and she was forced

00:28:21.460 to apologize anyways this is her background you know uh we found out um through um public information

00:28:29.900 requests of uh her call to police late last year is that after a gambling trip that she took to a nearby

00:28:36.860 city on the way back to portland uh she had a lift right uh lift ride home uh she called police

00:28:43.440 on her lift driver when he asked her to uh close her window or to keep the window open because of

00:28:50.160 covet uh rules for the company she wanted him to close the window and he wouldn't right yeah she made

00:28:56.740 a scene so he canceled the ride and then she called the cops on him it's fantastic that's that that is how

00:29:04.200 it goes right all these politicians who want to defund the police they don't want cops until they

00:29:09.020 need cops and then they say oh let me call the cops and they don't think about the people who

00:29:13.900 actually live in crime ridden areas who need the cops every day and they don't most normal people

00:29:20.660 don't involve the police over a dispute about a window with a lift driver you know it's it's just

00:29:25.820 absurd and yet when somebody like you actually gets assaulted actually gets assaulted it's a shoulder

00:29:31.540 shrug and i think the reaction has been yeah he asked for it you know he asked for it and so before

00:29:36.360 i get to that because i do want to ask you some of the criticism i watching this even though i admire

00:29:40.860 your your courage and getting in there and shining a light on something nobody else will i also think

00:29:46.540 get out of there you know like get out stop doing this because you already documented what they did and

00:29:53.840 this is getting really dangerous for you yeah you know uh two years ago that that was the same advice

00:30:00.500 i was given and my uh my intuition is that if i if i stop covering this uh then they've won

00:30:09.240 you know everything that antifa does is about deception and they are able to mean that deception by

00:30:17.120 um making sure that there's no record of what they do whether it's their criminal actions on the

00:30:24.300 streets that rise or um uh their mugshots and names and things that they post their social media accounts

00:30:32.580 that tie them explicitly to antifa they don't want that and out and known and so um you know i constantly

00:30:41.620 did risk assessment i mean i you know i just want to remind you know the those critics who have my best

00:30:47.200 interest at heart that you know i went to nearly two years going forward without um other injuries

00:30:54.180 maintaining and constantly thinking of new ways you know and as an independent journalist um you know i

00:31:00.840 don't have access to like a corporate media backing that could potentially give a lot of resources

00:31:05.640 in terms of security and all that so i have to make do with what um what limited resources i have

00:31:12.440 street smarts but but my concern is i i don't want to be doing a podcast months or a year from now

00:31:20.640 playing this soundbite saying he's gone they got him they will kill you they're obviously very

00:31:29.880 serious about it and i i just think is it time now to say this situation's gotten too dangerous for me

00:31:37.480 uh it's this is what i'm thinking about a lot this past week has been uh extremely difficult for me

00:31:48.920 and um i mean i i made the decision to leave portland last year and returning um recently last week

00:32:01.120 uh was a mistake yeah you're you know you you're right that this beat is important but um not

00:32:09.960 important enough to die over um so and you've exposed them you know you've you've accomplished

00:32:16.520 the mission and now it's crossed over to this point where you're you in particular really are their

00:32:23.600 perceived enemy and it doesn't make it right or wrong you know you're just trying to report what

00:32:28.620 they do but i i worry about you i do not want to be running andy no soundbites saying oh my god

00:32:33.760 it happened you know please please make sure that doesn't happen right like to the to your point you

00:32:40.460 don't have security if i went out there for fox news they'd have a team of people around me and i'd

00:32:45.280 have a camera and a light and they'd know they couldn't attack me but the way this reporting has to

00:32:49.440 be done given the nature of that group is very different and on top of all that andy i feel like

00:32:56.460 people like places like the intercept in a way they've put a target on your back a new target

00:33:02.460 on your back you know this that's the organization that glenn greenwald founded and then it morphed

00:33:06.960 into something totally different from what he envisioned and he left in a with a great screed

00:33:13.220 about how unfair they'd become and how ideological they'd become and he'd been going off on them about

00:33:18.720 a month ago because they did this long hit piece on so-called riot squad over at daily caller and it's

00:33:25.700 people like shelby talcott people like yourself richie mcginnis who go into these riots and try

00:33:32.700 to document what's happening for the rest of us and it really does put a target on their back and i feel

00:33:37.540 like you're swept up in that too you know it's just fever pitch right now yeah you know uh people like

00:33:43.380 myself expect um to be targeted by antifa and all that we don't expect other journalists and media

00:33:49.520 organizations to put the targets on our backs uh for to make it easier for antifa and that that's what

00:33:56.540 that intercept piece did and actually um surprisingly or not um when i was um in this past week when i was

00:34:06.800 recovering i saw tweets from a writer self-described journalist named aaron gupta he wrote adding a

00:34:14.300 fucked around and found out on his twitter in response to what happened to me and then he also

00:34:18.740 wrote another tweet that asked from an operational standpoint why did why did you let andy know escape

00:34:24.500 after you caught him and this is somebody who contributed to the intercept as well as washington

00:34:30.240 post at one point in the guardian and other places so you have really extreme political actors who

00:34:38.720 work in the world of media and journalism who um you know it's really like i don't know what we can do

00:34:49.360 but it's like you have these extremists who are in these institutions of um of press and media and

00:34:59.380 putting out poisoning the minds of the public with disinformation or disinformation or inciting violence

00:35:05.800 yeah i mean we we there was something you were trending on twitter as you know journalist andy no

00:35:13.260 independent journalist andy no and and the left wingers complained and and twitter changed it to author

00:35:20.020 andy no like they bowed to the mob in calling you that meanwhile journalism has so evolved to the point

00:35:27.660 now where it's you don't have to be in the nightly news chair as the anchor to be considered a journalist

00:35:34.040 we have a lot of citizen journalists out there doing really great work and that one of the reasons

00:35:39.440 i was so surprised tim pool came after you is because he's one of those guys you know he's been

00:35:44.520 in the middle of a lot of dangerous situations himself as a citizen journalist you know he sort of

00:35:49.120 he came on the show and talked about how he kind of looked looked around one day and realized i'm a

00:35:53.240 journalist you know that this is what i'm doing and let me just read i know you've seen it but so the

00:35:57.900 audience knows this is what he tweeted about your situation quoting what purpose was served by trying

00:36:05.960 to infiltrate antifa some journalists can't cover certain topics women he says were barred from

00:36:11.920 reporting from her tahrir square by some outlets due to violence against women specifically about you

00:36:17.700 he says this was pointless and unbelievably stupid and then he says andy going into the fray with no

00:36:23.540 security no plan is not reporting it's tribal spectacle what do you make of that yeah well with respect to

00:36:33.020 tim um you i'll say this um journalists who um go into dangerous areas who challenge power who go into

00:36:46.120 war zones and do that type of coverage and put themselves at risk and may be injured blown

00:36:53.480 uh killed or have limbs um blown off uh they they need solidarity and support not condemnation

00:37:04.020 and um just respect to what he does now um i i wouldn't be able to we wouldn't know much about

00:37:15.820 antifa if myself and other people have the comfort and luxury of just of sitting in a room behind a

00:37:22.720 computer all day so um this work is dangerous and you yes you have to come up with ways to mitigate

00:37:30.620 risk and i was able to outrun the the death threats and all that for two years and it caught up to me

00:37:38.540 but um i wise up and i'm not gonna ever give them that opportunity again to pin me down again

00:37:47.060 to make me beg for my life like they did last friday um but they they won't have the antifa won't have

00:37:55.580 the last word in the select because if i don't continue to cover them in different ways then they

00:38:01.400 will have won have won so um uh there are other things that i uh i won't disclose at this point of

00:38:09.460 what uh you know i'm brainstorming and all that but um yeah i take i take the criticisms that i get

00:38:16.300 in stride and uh you know i at the same time i stand by my decisions for being on the field because

00:38:25.520 um that's there's no other way do it you it's crazy to me as you know in an under the trump

00:38:35.160 administration trump said the press is the enemy of the people trump went after many reporters

00:38:39.460 can speak to that personally it was fine what did he do he sent out some mean tweets right it's like

00:38:44.840 i think we can handle that that's not in the same league as what you've just been through or many

00:38:49.520 reporters have and yet we were lectured by cnn and others about what a terrible time it was to be a

00:38:57.240 journalist and how we have to stand up for safety of the press and just how the environment had gotten

00:39:05.460 so dangerous silence from those people in response to this attack on you in fact what it felt like to

00:39:13.420 me was there was a pile on against you trying to attack you for i mean you know i don't understand

00:39:22.480 i know tim says that you purposefully escalated escalated risk and danger i don't see that i

00:39:28.080 will say i like tim i just i don't see that you were there you were with them that that is risky

00:39:33.160 it is dangerous but it's not like you were poking the bear you know showing them who you were getting

00:39:39.320 in their faces yelling things at them you know sort of doing something for a camera to create a

00:39:44.140 situation i i don't see that um and so these same journalists not tim but others who are just so

00:39:50.460 sanctimonious under the trump administration i almost felt like it was gleeful andy the reaction

00:39:58.120 of what happened to you yes uh it's very painful to see that i um you know i wish i could say that

00:40:06.200 seeing all that from peers and who do similar work to what i do but at publications and networks and

00:40:15.360 that would uh uh never see me they don't see me as an equal and which is why i was in 2019 and as

00:40:24.040 now the one of the first things is to always say and he's not a journalist and i think they do that

00:40:30.180 because um any decent person can see that attack assault or intimidation of a member of the press

00:40:38.820 um is wrong they they want to take away that sympathy that um that outpouring of support that

00:40:46.260 comes to me from both the left and the right so they want to cast me as a agent provocateur

00:40:52.040 uh somebody who i just went through this with laura logan i we just talked about how this disgusting

00:40:58.700 piece that was written about her in new york magazine after it was about her the the attack on

00:41:04.240 her the gang rape in tahrir square part of the piece referenced it but the actual piece was

00:41:09.660 written after her reporting on benghazi uh which was critical of hillary clinton and barack obama

00:41:14.780 and the reporter diminished the gang rape by saying she'd been subjected to some groping and she was just

00:41:23.180 on this show saying that and her belief was done intentionally to take away the image of her as any sort of a

00:41:30.600 sympathetic figure or somebody who was willing to face down danger to get the story who who paid a

00:41:35.440 very high price for trying to bring that reporting to the people i mean i see a parallel here yeah um

00:41:41.520 and uh you know it's disgusting but um it's to be expected all these it's all um a charade about all

00:41:51.180 these people who talk about how press are under attack in the in the united states and when actual

00:41:58.340 uh journalists face violence in the far left and it's not just me it's many many people including

00:42:03.560 people at cnn and other um liberal um news places you know the silence because it's like

00:42:11.340 there's this effort to make the public not aware of the extremism of the far left you know we have

00:42:21.540 all these organization media um report organizations and reporters who are focused full-time

00:42:28.000 full teams uh focused full-time on the far right and you're not two-point supremacists you don't have

00:42:34.160 any equivalence of that on the far left so the because there's so few of us covering it it makes

00:42:40.980 the risk to each one of us individually much higher yes that's right there's no safety in numbers for you

00:42:47.300 so can you i saw the pictures of the injuries i saw your bloody eye i saw your bloody side i saw a

00:42:55.220 bloody leg what have i missed anything what can you just tell us about your injuries yeah it's so

00:43:02.500 primary injury uh was to the leg i was giving uh crutches after i was discharged um actually after i

00:43:11.800 get off this podcast and get heading to a medical appointment for a one-week checkup um and there's

00:43:18.280 injury to my wrist as well uh from when i was tackled there was contusions to the back of my head

00:43:24.720 uh and then uh bleeding in the eye um so uh physically um this time has been a lot more painful and quite

00:43:38.300 unbearable times um then two years ago even though two years ago was um physically um much more

00:43:46.780 dangerous than that i had a brain uh brain hemorrhage i could have died from that um so i'm just i i i left

00:43:54.940 portland um as soon as uh i was discharged and i've just been focused on recovering and um trying to

00:44:06.700 remind myself that i'm not alone because people who say that i am a provocateur i'm not a journalist

00:44:15.220 i'm an agitator i'm a far-right agitator all that is meant to isolate me to make it so that people

00:44:21.460 don't want to express support for me and um you know i'd be lying if i said that all that stuff didn't

00:44:29.900 bother me it does you know well and i i mean they've said it before and you continue to do it

00:44:36.360 but i i would say as somebody who you know is rooting for you now might be a good time to to

00:44:41.820 do a realistic assessment of the danger and the benefits because we've gotten so many benefits from

00:44:48.620 you already we've got the book unmasked and we can't lose you this is they are not worth dying for

00:44:55.620 i appreciate your courage and your effort but they're these these losers are not worth dying for

00:45:00.280 this has gotten so dangerous for you you know it's it is somebody else's turn to take up this mantle and

00:45:06.840 you know local news desks are dying for reporters andy you could be sitting on a desk you could be

00:45:11.860 filing reports on like a crime on city hall someplace maybe you don't have to go quite to that extreme

00:45:18.800 but um you got to take care of you as they say and i hope you do i really do i have great people

00:45:25.120 around me they're taking care of me good all right well stay well and we'll stay on uh the the police

00:45:32.920 to see what happens and whether they're going to make any arrests in this case it's always good

00:45:38.100 talking to you thank you so much up next zed jelani uh and we're going to start with this piece

00:45:44.400 from barry weiss's blog on and i quote what happens when doctors can't tell the truth

00:45:51.660 essentially because of wokeism that's right after this

00:45:55.520 zed how are you great megan how are you i'm good thanks for being here oh no problem i'm a big fan

00:46:05.160 of this show i listen to it all the time so i'm happy to be here oh i'm honored um all right so let

00:46:09.460 me just start where i just left off which is i just spoke to andy know about the attack that he

00:46:13.980 suffered at the hands of antifa out in um portland and the reaction from the vast majority of the

00:46:22.120 twitterati which was basically well you're no journalist you asked for it and too bad on you

00:46:28.080 the same crowd that got so upset about mean trump tweets doesn't seem to much care that this guy now

00:46:33.900 twice has been beaten uh to a pulp by this group your thoughts on it yeah i mean i think it's sad i

00:46:41.000 i talked to andy actually after this happened the first time because uh a few years ago he was also

00:46:47.420 attacked by some folks in in antifa and in portland and i think he was hurt so badly that he had to

00:46:53.740 have repeated doctor visits brain scans things like that um and you know that that kind of brutal assault

00:47:00.940 over politics i mean that's not the kind of thing that you generally would expect to happen in the

00:47:05.680 united states right it seems like uh something you'd see in maybe like a civil war or you know the

00:47:10.560 weimar republic or or something like that right um and yeah i think so many people have been warped by

00:47:16.240 the the algorithms of these social media apps through you know silicon valley to basically see

00:47:23.020 people who disagree with them politically as actual uh combatants or enemies in some kind of conflict

00:47:28.560 right um and so i think if the exact same thing had happened and he had a different political

00:47:33.160 orientation people would disapprove of it right they would see it as uh you know that's one of ours it's not

00:47:38.400 one of theirs right and that's generally how we view conflicts in an actual war right like in a

00:47:43.180 shooting conflict uh it's not generally how we viewed politics but unfortunately so much of our

00:47:47.980 politics has turned uh virtually sectarian right like uh we have different tribes and they're at war

00:47:53.620 with each other and hey if it happened to one of theirs it's not the same thing as if it happened to

00:47:57.720 one of ours and i'll say this about andy you know i think i disagree with him about i don't know

00:48:01.400 maybe 75 or 80 percent of the things that he says are rights but that doesn't that's no excuse for

00:48:06.020 hurting anybody and the only human response to that say that's unacceptable and the people who

00:48:10.940 are doing it should be arrested and it doesn't matter what the political orientation of the

00:48:14.760 journalist or the or of the human being who they're who they're hurting is and it's sad that so many

00:48:19.000 people i think have become what they what they despise they haven't realized it but that's

00:48:25.200 unfortunate what happened here that tribalism infects everything and this is one of the things

00:48:30.580 that i i feel like has bound you and me together both being on the advisory board for fair foundation

00:48:36.640 against intolerance and racism which is a group trying to push back against this insanity um but

00:48:42.720 the tribalism grows by the day and it's not just k through 12 education or universities or sports or

00:48:47.840 news media there was an extraordinary piece um in on barry weiss's substack and she it's sort of you

00:48:55.720 know it's her column it's her it's her place to write now having left the new york times um i say

00:49:01.180 like you know just sort of like daenerys targaryen with everything on fire she was great she just lit

00:49:06.140 it on fire and walked out now she's killing it on substack and she'll turn her column over to people

00:49:10.960 for reporting or pieces of their own and she did to katie herzog katie herzog who actually has come on

00:49:16.160 the show as she's a co-host of blocked and reported with jesse signal and um they're both great they're

00:49:21.160 fine well she's i think kind of like you correct me if i'm wrong ideologically sort of of the left

00:49:26.760 but intolerant of the intolerance being born on on issues when it comes to identity and so she does

00:49:34.920 this long piece it's 17 pages i read it this morning on barry substack about the medical community

00:49:43.600 and it's titled what happens when doctors can't tell the truth going on is that about how doctors

00:49:50.660 aren't allowed to push back against unsound or quote shoddy as hell uh publications about

00:49:57.840 you know alleged bias in the medical community uh that's just basically being made up they can't

00:50:05.500 push back on it because they're going to get fired they can't push back on affirmative action which

00:50:09.480 even a majority of black people don't support uh in the medical community because they'll get fired

00:50:15.420 and she's got all these examples of how now even the young doctors are are saying openly that their

00:50:22.800 plan is to confront their patients on their perceived racism and they may even prioritize people for

00:50:28.660 treatment based on the color of their skin yeah i mean it's this is actually one of the i would say

00:50:35.900 biggest like civilizational threats right which is this is the cornerstone of i think any society is to be

00:50:43.180 able to have open and free inquiry about any number of topics i think it's very very important

00:50:47.960 in stem in particular because these are the people who are designing our vaccines to end pandemics

00:50:53.440 uh people who are designing our airplanes that fly around and cars we drive around in and computers we use

00:51:01.000 technology uh they have to be able to to pursue questions with an open mind and not foreclose avenues

00:51:07.180 of inquiry based on any kind of political orientation or religious belief or any kind of taboo and i think

00:51:14.020 once these fields start being hemmed in and being told you know you can't ask that question no you

00:51:18.480 can't come to that conclusion even if all the data shows you that it comes in this direction you just

00:51:22.600 you can't come to the conclusion because it's not acceptable uh we're going to start seeing people i

00:51:27.640 think actively work against their own expertise you know work against in some cases their own

00:51:32.360 conscience and i think something like what was happening with the vaccine i mean we know that a

00:51:37.120 virus does not discriminate by quote unquote racial groups because race race is not a biological fact

00:51:42.100 right it's a social construct um of course depending on the geography and the region some of the things

00:51:47.860 that may actually impact whether or not you're susceptible to a virus may be correlated to race but

00:51:52.500 sure they could be correlated to whether you're catholic or protestant whether you're southern or northern

00:51:56.280 you know it could be correlated by gender but that doesn't mean that we should start

00:52:00.040 using those single categories to start distributing a vaccine rather than looking

00:52:03.780 in a more i think specific and nuanced way as to the factors that were actually driving um how people

00:52:09.700 were being infected and how they were falling ill from the virus and but i think that once you have

00:52:14.540 the obsession on a single variable like race uh you start blowing up its importance right and i think

00:52:19.360 when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail uh and that's of course not only in medicine

00:52:24.880 but it's across our our entire country right now i think every field is being pressured

00:52:29.380 to center their work around certain racial narratives which i think honestly often just don't hold up to

00:52:35.860 to scrutiny when you put them under a magnifying glass but again if you if you create a culture that tells

00:52:42.140 you you're not allowed to even question those narratives or you're not supposed to be uh you know

00:52:47.400 you can't even you can't even get to that conclusion in the first place that the narratives are flawed

00:52:51.100 right and it's one thing and it's bad enough in news media where we're supposed to be brokers of

00:52:56.120 of information but in medicine you know in medicine we really need people to be able to speak

00:53:01.840 honestly and openly her piece talks about uh one of the one of the publications that that many of

00:53:09.500 these doctors who are apparently meeting quietly secretly one time a month on zoom to it's like a support

00:53:15.320 group for those who are concerned about the spread of deep deeply illiberal ideology uh one of the articles

00:53:22.120 that they were taking issue with was a quote black newborns are more likely to die when looked after

00:53:26.780 by white doctors they were saying it was so method methodologically flawed that it was impossible

00:53:32.520 to extrapolate any conclusions from this thing at all but no one wanted to criticize it um and in an

00:53:38.960 article like that is the bar is very low for it to get published and articles that would push back

00:53:43.160 against it the bar is very high and then when you have a doctor like this norman wang mentioned in the

00:53:48.700 he's from the university of pittsburgh cardiologist try to say hey maybe not everything needs to be

00:53:56.540 viewed through the lens of race uh they get punished so this guy he published a paper in the journal of

00:54:02.820 the american heart association critical of diversity initiatives in cardiology he looked at 50 years of

00:54:08.120 data he argued that affirmative action has failed to meaningfully increase the number the percentage of

00:54:13.060 black and hispanic clinicians or improve patient outcomes and he argued for race neutral policies

00:54:17.980 saying quote long-term long-term academic solutions and excellence should not be sacrificed for short-term

00:54:24.240 demographic optics well norman went right into the buzzsaw of our social justice press and social

00:54:33.100 justice young folks in medicine and soon thereafter uh the editor-in-chief of that publication issued an

00:54:40.860 apology and retracted it apparently only two pieces have ever even been retracted one was just totally

00:54:45.700 medically unsound and now his piece um this dr wang has been removed from his position as a director

00:54:52.220 of fellowship program in clinical cardiac electrophysiology at university of pittsburgh he's

00:54:57.500 been banned from having any contact with students being told his classroom is quote inherently unsafe

00:55:03.760 because of his piece i i could go on she has a bunch of examples in here where doctors are publicly

00:55:09.300 flogged punished they lose positions just for pushing back on this obsessive focus on race

00:55:15.620 look this is actually very important but i i think one thing that everyone has to remember is that the

00:55:21.780 field of science relies on people sort of attacking pre-existing notions uh the consensus the status quo

00:55:29.040 science is entirely about taking a hypothesis and trying to rip it apart right that's how we advance in

00:55:34.740 the field when you're in a science classroom they're telling you okay this is all the things we believe

00:55:38.020 now but you know what's wrong with this and all the students get to work you're trying to figure out

00:55:41.780 how to change it how to fix it uh it's never supposed to be that you arrived at a conclusion

00:55:46.480 the conclusion is unassailable right if you did that scientific progress would basically end

00:55:51.060 and i think that's it's just terrifying that there are people who think that they basically they they

00:55:57.100 possess the truth and in an almost religious fashion and it can't be questioned in any way shape or

00:56:01.540 form because it's actually anti-scientific it's actually anti-intellectual to do that now of course there

00:56:05.800 should be standards in terms of how you're doing that and that's why we have a peer review process

00:56:09.200 when we publish things uh in journal and academic journals for instance and yeah there is shoddy

00:56:14.120 science out there but the way to tackle that is again to question it to go through that process to

00:56:18.420 lay out the evidence the facts data if you're suppressing that you're preventing science from

00:56:22.600 working right because science is always a process it's never it's never going to be a time when we

00:56:26.880 reach the ultimate truth and then we've got it right and there's no reason to ever to check it

00:56:31.100 against any facts or do any more new research um and i you know when you try to subsume everything

00:56:37.040 to an ideology that's exactly what happens and i think that's it's a wonderful piece uh you know

00:56:41.160 i haven't gotten all the way through it but everything katie writes is wonderful so i i would

00:56:45.480 i would definitely check it out if the listeners haven't well and it sort of dovetails nicely into

00:56:51.560 this explosive piece of reporting just out from vanity fair on whether covid came from a lab in

00:56:58.120 wuhan china as opposed to a wet market where some random animal just naturally wound up there and

00:57:04.500 spread it to a human the latter theory has absolutely no proof they've been able to find

00:57:09.020 absolutely no evidence and no animal that would back it up and yet there's a lot of evidence for a lab

00:57:14.220 leak now the thing that we haven't been allowed to talk about to your point we're not allowed to

00:57:19.680 talk about it for the past year silicon valley has decided that is a quote conspiracy theory that must

00:57:26.400 not be discussed and more and more now i mean we had josh rogan on from the washington post who wrote

00:57:32.560 a great book about this there was a new york times reporter who wrote a long piece about this

00:57:37.020 now vanity fair i mean i hate to be so i don't know deferential to the or or complimentary of

00:57:44.680 mainstream publications getting in on this but the truth is we need that in order for people to start

00:57:50.500 taking this stuff seriously because if it's in right-wing echo chambers people don't listen you know

00:57:55.860 you need a wide swath of the public to to listen and this report i mean it's a it's on fire it it

00:58:05.300 it basically says the state department employees were told explicitly early on not to explore the

00:58:15.020 thought that the wuhan institute of virology which is one of the only three places in the world where

00:58:21.700 they study bat coronaviruses um that their gain-of-function research specifically how you

00:58:27.200 take the bat and make the coronavirus even more dangerous for humans you know ostensibly to help

00:58:33.520 humans survive it if it if it gets unleashed but you know there's a question about that um they were

00:58:38.480 specifically told don't go there don't explore it because it's going to bring unwelcome attention to

00:58:44.600 the united states government's funding of it and here's just a detail from the piece officials at the

00:58:49.100 meeting were advised by christopher park director of state's biological policy staff not to say

00:58:54.120 anything that would point to the u.s government's own role and gain-of-function research according to

00:58:58.400 documentation obtained by vanity fair members of the group were repeatedly advised not to open a

00:59:02.920 pandora's box according to four former state officials smelled like a cover-up said one state

00:59:08.580 employee who's on the record thomas denano speaking to vanity fair he wrote a memo saying staff from

00:59:14.580 his bureau were warned not to pursue this investigation into the origin of covet 19 because it would quote

00:59:19.040 open a can of worms and it goes on to say we were we were funding gain-of-function research on back

00:59:26.060 coronaviruses and the the very doctors who benefited from it who did it who supported it who devoted

00:59:32.280 their life's work to it were the ones who later orchestrated article after article in the press

00:59:37.280 saying anything that says it came from a lab is a conspiracy something that was supported by silicon

00:59:45.260 valley shutting all of us up for a year yeah i mean this was this was a prime example of all the

00:59:52.840 different like pathologies that are involved in in the media right now coming together you know to

00:59:57.420 to suppress i think what was a legitimate line of inquiry and a legitimate story uh on the one hand i

01:00:02.160 think so many people in the media you know they they see themselves intentionally or maybe even

01:00:07.700 subconsciously as i think arms of the democratic party right and i say this as someone who has worked

01:00:12.520 in many democratic party aligned institutions or over the course of my life but it's it's it's galling

01:00:17.180 and it's it's shocking and surprising to the extent which has happened and i think when you saw early on

01:00:22.900 people like senator tom cotton who's a conservative republican from arkansas raising the possibility that

01:00:28.180 there was a lab leak uh you had mike pompeo who's secretary of state under president trump raising that

01:00:33.600 possibility i think there was a reflexive reaction among a lot of reporters saying you know that that can't be

01:00:38.260 right you know trump if it's trump if it's the republicans saying this no they're wrong

01:00:42.440 uh we don't want to be seen as on their side again they're saying they see themselves as

01:00:46.900 in an activist role or an activist position right taking a position rather than than taking

01:00:51.480 a line of inquiry or actually looking into the truth and then at the same time as the vanity fair

01:00:56.720 reveal peace revealed and you just read off uh there was this institutional incentive to to look the

01:01:01.960 other way because it might reflect poorly on a lot of what the united states was funding right and a lot of what

01:01:06.660 uh doctors and public health professionals and scientific researchers here in the united states

01:01:13.240 had invested and decided to to pursue and to forego so i think that the reality is that

01:01:19.140 we had just a massive failing of i would say not just the institutions of the media maybe even the

01:01:28.840 culture of the media because what you'll notice is that like all of a sudden this is like an okay thing

01:01:32.940 to discuss right like facebook actually unbanned people from talking about the possibility this

01:01:38.100 was like a man-made virus right recently so infuriating that is so infuriating who is mark

01:01:43.180 zuckerberg to tell us we can't talk about this it shouldn't have to be that when the the leader of

01:01:49.280 your political faction in this case joe biden decides okay it's an okay line of inquiry or when

01:01:53.160 mark zuckerberg decides okay then okay then it's okay it's okay if the facts lead you there right it's okay

01:01:58.480 because we need to know where it came from because that'll help us prevent future pandemics like this

01:02:02.980 in the future and also it may bring accountability to the chinese government or to the the u.s uh

01:02:08.640 researchers or or the institutions and bureaucracies that set up this funding and this research uh that's

01:02:13.780 why we should have been pursuing this line of this line of inquiry and yet it seemed to be foreclosed

01:02:18.200 entirely for political and institutional you know for turf protection reasons right yeah yeah well

01:02:23.480 that's what's so messed up about it because it is not a new phenomenon to have partisans or parties

01:02:32.300 who have done wrong try to cover it up and try to mislead the public about you know the true origins of

01:02:37.820 whatever the problem winds up being it is a new relatively phenomenon to have the media join in on the

01:02:43.800 cover-up soup to nuts you know across the board except for a couple of random politicians or publications

01:02:50.180 and and when you read this piece what you see is that there's this guy he was featured on the 60

01:02:56.080 minutes report on this whole thing after the who came out with its bs report saying oh we think it

01:03:00.760 didn't come from the lab and even the head of the who had to say well you know we should keep

01:03:04.580 investigating because the people in his piece the guy the people who are running that report were

01:03:09.560 totally conflicted they're in bed with this wuhan lab and what the vanity fair piece shows is that in

01:03:15.640 particular this guy peter dasik who's a zoologist um who's this is his life work trying to show that

01:03:21.560 these viruses come out of bats they come out of pantalons whatever you call them these animals and

01:03:26.400 go directly to humans this guy had been had had had had a ton of money from us and other people to

01:03:33.020 to help with this gain of function research and so on this guy uh was running around organizing the

01:03:39.340 articles to say it came from an animal it came from an animal and vanity fair has proof that dasik and

01:03:44.880 another scientist this guy dr ralph barrack who's from unc uh had collaborated with you the wuhan lab

01:03:51.960 lady they call her the bat lady she's the the expert on these viruses and may have in fact been

01:03:56.360 the person who inadvertently or otherwise released this one um they'd been collaborating with her that

01:04:02.020 that they they they organized this statement early on in the lancet saying it it didn't come from a lab

01:04:09.120 and there's an email that reads and i'm quoting from vanity fair you me and him should not sign this

01:04:13.840 statement in the lancet so it has some distance from us and therefore it doesn't work in a

01:04:17.660 counterproductive way if if this guy was looking for a validation of his life's work because if it

01:04:24.620 was a lab leak says vanity fair it had the potential to do to virology what three mile island and

01:04:30.800 chernobyl did to nuclear science and so they kept it quiet that they they had very good reason to

01:04:37.440 believe that this was a lab leak that this virus had been made more dangerous by human beings

01:04:42.520 with funding from the united states they wanted to cover their asses their life's work and the press

01:04:50.180 bought it hook line and sinker that right there is exactly what the problem is right they

01:04:58.180 institutional actors always have some sort of incentive to kind of shape a narrative to pursue

01:05:04.060 their particular interests or objectives right the news media shouldn't have that right the news media

01:05:08.920 should have one objective right primarily of course there's always going to be activist journalists

01:05:12.540 there's going to be more partisan outlets but primarily their objective should be to seek the

01:05:16.920 truth right the implications of the truth are secondary if it makes republicans look good okay fine

01:05:22.520 that's not the point that's not what your objective as a journalist should be to decide who looks good

01:05:27.260 or who looks bad if it has certain implications for for researchers in the united states who are tied up

01:05:31.800 with china and tied up with this field of research fine but that shouldn't be your first objective your

01:05:36.360 first objective should be to find out what's true and report it out to the public right it shouldn't

01:05:42.260 be to to cover somebody's turf it shouldn't be to defend somebody's interests or objectives and it

01:05:47.280 shouldn't be to take a partisan side and yet all that was happening and it was happening in concert

01:05:51.640 and aligned with uh the the very people here in the united states and honestly a lot of people in

01:05:57.160 the chinese government who i think have the same exact interest right yeah um and that's what corrupted

01:06:01.560 this process and i think we've seen that exact same storyline as exact same confluence of factors

01:06:07.300 play out in story after story after story over the past few years which has been really really bad

01:06:11.540 for the news media's credibility but and i mean that this one is so egregious though like this is not

01:06:17.000 one of those we can just we can just dismiss and say oh they're biased yeah of course they thought

01:06:22.840 it was racist to say it might have been released from a chinese lab that's what the media does

01:06:28.340 this is so much more pernicious than that because there was an incuriosity an unwillingness to

01:06:35.960 challenge these this piece in the lancet which said no not from a lab and anything to the contrary

01:06:41.140 is conspiracy theory right like at something remember dr fauci joined on and that and the same guy peter

01:06:46.040 dasik sent him a note we now know thanks to the buzzfeed foyer request that got fauci's emails

01:06:50.500 he sent him a note saying hey thanks anthony thanks so much for saying that meanwhile we were being

01:06:56.160 fed misinformation but but my point is over three million people are dead we're going on six hundred

01:07:03.280 thousand people dead in the united states all the people who have lost loved ones deserve answers on

01:07:11.400 how this deadly thing became a such a major factor in our lives and even those of us who didn't lose a

01:07:19.520 family member but have given up a year of our lives people who have lost businesses people whose

01:07:23.580 children who still have masks on their face and and people who have been fearful to leave their

01:07:29.460 apartments right because they're immunocompromised what have you they deserve answers a press that had

01:07:35.360 a shred of decency or honesty would have been fighting for them for real answers for a year instead they

01:07:43.120 took these broad brush assertions that you couldn't say that and bowed at the altar of silicon valley

01:07:51.400 to snuff out any intellectual curiosity never mind investigative reporting it's a travesty

01:07:58.180 it is a travesty and it also you know it also demonstrates another factor which is that

01:08:03.240 i think that there are corners of the media who don't entirely understand what expertise is right so

01:08:09.560 like the lancet letter for instance right oh it's signed by a bunch of people who have uh some kind of

01:08:15.080 medical background research background they have fancy degrees so on and so forth they must be correct

01:08:20.100 right that's not really how it works as we were discussing earlier science is a process right

01:08:24.120 there's been plenty of times when there was a legitimate scientific consensus that was blown

01:08:27.220 apart by a new discovery right the fact that a bunch of people with some form of of clout or or assigned

01:08:34.320 expertise can sign on to something and express their will doesn't mean that they're automatically right

01:08:38.700 uh we saw that during covet 19 when you had uh we had two people forget this we actually had two sets

01:08:44.960 of mass protests um during covet 19 the first came from the right those were the anti-lockdown

01:08:50.180 protests right they were conservative libertarian protesters we saw article after article about how

01:08:54.420 those protests are dangerous how maybe they could be spreading covet outside blah blah blah then when we

01:08:59.820 had the uh protest after george floyd's death from the left we had so many people who are medical

01:09:05.440 professionals signing letters saying oh this is totally okay it's completely fine the media echoed it you

01:09:09.780 know there's no risk to this the fact that these people were signing these letters uh was not

01:09:15.340 necessarily an expression of their expertise right they have interests themselves they have ideologies

01:09:19.040 themselves right yes exactly this guy this guy dasik had a very clear conflict of interest that

01:09:26.380 any reporter could see had they bothered to look into it funding from the nih and this non-profit

01:09:33.380 called eco health alliance had parceled out grant money from the u.s government and

01:09:39.320 eco health is run by peter dasik this zoologist who helped organize that lancet piece early on

01:09:45.740 saying this came from an animal and anything else is a conspiracy theory dasik to the end featured you

01:09:54.040 know one of the guys handpicked by china and the who to go over to china to tell us once and for all

01:10:00.660 whether this came from a lab or from an animal surprise he said it was an animal and we're still

01:10:06.840 listening to this guy who was manipulating us by by trying to get well-known scientists to put their

01:10:12.000 names on that lancet thing to try to keep some distance between him and the organization behind

01:10:16.140 the piece um meanwhile he was he was compromised he he his organization had been funding gain of

01:10:23.780 function research he for all i know this guy's been coordinating with bat lady on how to make it as

01:10:29.240 dangerous and deadly as humanly possible and had an oh shit moment right before before he organized

01:10:35.440 that piece so that he didn't have the death of three plus million people on his hands yeah and

01:10:42.180 that's that's something that we have to recognize and see i think in every story that i try to write as

01:10:48.980 a journalist is i try to think what the person's interests their objectives their ideology are and how

01:10:55.160 those could influence what they're telling me and how they're how i'm interpreting the facts right and

01:10:59.320 i think that when people stop doing that when they start deferring to a group of bureaucrats or a group

01:11:03.700 of experts because they think oh they have all the answers maybe they do have a lot of answers but they

01:11:08.000 also have their own personal objectives right and once we stop seeing that layer of conflicts of

01:11:12.940 interest then we're very uh easy easily manipulated i think we're very prone to be manipulated

01:11:17.600 well and what one of the things that concerns me is and i i tip my hat to vanity fair i really do it's a

01:11:23.520 great piece of reporting and it's not the first as i point out you know people like josh rogan and

01:11:27.080 others have been reporting on it too but this one's an explosive piece by any measure um but

01:11:31.880 one thing i do have issues with is they seem to spend a fair amount of time excusing the lack of

01:11:39.660 interest by the press based on trump's toxic racism trump's toxic racism contributed to an alarming wave of

01:11:46.380 anti-asian violence quoting here in the united states and that's one possible answer to this all

01:11:52.300 important question remaining largely off limits until the spring of 2021 i mean i'm sorry he said

01:11:58.820 but bullshit i i don't i'm not taking a position on trump or any of the stuff he said or didn't say

01:12:04.080 it's no excuse you don't just say oh it's racist to say it came from a wuhan lab and i'm going to be on

01:12:11.720 the side of the anti-racists as a journalist and not do my job that that is not an okay excuse

01:12:18.080 one it's not it's not an okay excuse in any in any factor you know if it no matter who says something

01:12:24.220 if it's if it's true or if it's worth investigating it's worth investigating right he doesn't it it has

01:12:28.760 no bearing on you know if trump says water is wet i can't out he can't automatically disagree just

01:12:34.340 because uh someone who i maybe i have some political disagreements with says it uh but second i don't

01:12:39.600 know their timeline is even necessarily correct uh in early in early february 2020 i don't think trump

01:12:46.700 was actually even proposing this as a theory i think it was coming more from tom cotton is coming

01:12:52.200 from some sort of populist right-wing smaller publications and outlets i think blaming trump

01:12:57.600 on it is almost kind of lazy like they don't even know the the timeline of the events in and of

01:13:01.840 themselves actually at the beginning of the pandemic look at it because they did at the beginning

01:13:05.040 trump was downplaying they they quoted trump at some press conference and i don't have the date

01:13:09.880 in front of me um saying something like it came from will on lap but i can't say anything more so

01:13:14.740 i don't know the date that he did that i think a little bit later in the spring he was getting some

01:13:18.880 intelligence that was saying that so he mentioned it but he really did just mention it he didn't he

01:13:22.820 didn't even pursue it that much really and it would be remarkable just trump just mentioning this

01:13:27.400 means it's automatically verboten right that would just be right that's extreme journalistic

01:13:31.840 malfeasance so by the way so my crack team has just forwarded me you're right um trump uh trump

01:13:38.120 and his allies rallied around the wuhan lab theory early on in the pandemic as he sought to direct

01:13:42.180 uh blame for the pandemic onto china during a white house briefing on april 18th 2020 trump said that so

01:13:47.740 you're right on your timing coming up next we're going to get into silicon valley censorship and why

01:13:53.320 zed thinks you know the tide may turn on that and and how he thinks we need to turn it and you know

01:13:59.900 specifically who's working on the side of the angels to try to rein in mark zuckerberg from

01:14:04.000 putting tape over your mouth so we'll get to that next but first we're going to do a feature we have

01:14:08.760 here on the mk show called asked and answered where we answer some of our listener questions

01:14:14.220 and steve krakauer our ep has got today's question of the day hey steve hey megan yeah this one came to

01:14:20.020 us from questions at devilmaycaremedia.com where anyone who's listening can get their question answered as

01:14:26.120 well uh like this one who is from anna maria petrov although it actually really comes from anna maria's

01:14:31.580 sister uh she says that she likes to listen to the podcast with her husband and her sister but her

01:14:36.180 sister wanted to know that uh why do you hate chelsea clinton even more than hillary this was

01:14:41.580 something you mentioned i think in the episode with andrew gutman um and she says she's curious this

01:14:46.440 is not the most important question in the universe but she wouldn't have asked it if it wasn't for

01:14:50.620 her sister's curiosity so spill the beans she says i got i got thoughts anna maria and sister i do um

01:14:57.780 because i don't understand why this person has a voice at all why why is anybody listening to what

01:15:01.740 the hell chelsea clinton has to say what has she ever accomplished that makes her somebody we should

01:15:06.240 be listening to right i mean honestly so she is the daughter of a president and a presidential nominee

01:15:12.580 okay that doesn't entitle her to know anything that doesn't qualify her as an authority and the

01:15:17.960 problem is she acts like she is one and so does the media they also treat her like she has some

01:15:22.560 sort of authority which she doesn't now the mother i get it you may not like the mother's politics but

01:15:27.840 at least hillary clinton has had a lifetime of accomplishment you know she was a very successful

01:15:32.260 lawyer she went to yale she became a united states senator she became the secretary of state

01:15:37.020 um she's done some things you may not like the things on paper and i there's plenty that i don't

01:15:42.160 but she is a woman of accomplishment you can't deny that chelsea clinton's done nothing

01:15:47.120 she's done nothing and yet she's out there she's a part of the cancellation brigade which is where we

01:15:51.740 first sort of got crossed with each other i'll give you one example when i was at nbc i interviewed

01:15:57.080 alex jones and chelsea clinton led the campaign to have me canceled she wanted me to get fired

01:16:05.140 she wanted my show to be boycotted because i interviewed alex jones are you kidding me i mean

01:16:11.620 her mother has actually made decisions that have had people killed alex jones hasn't done that

01:16:16.800 and yet she's out there defending her mom but i can't interview alex jones as a news person does

01:16:21.020 she understand how journalism works oh wait she doesn't you see chelsea clinton worked at the today

01:16:27.420 show for a short time why because of a family connection not because of any talent which she

01:16:32.840 has none it's just none of i'm sorry i know she took a lot of beatings when she was young for her

01:16:38.360 looks and saturday night live that wasn't nice maybe she's still bitter because of that experience

01:16:42.540 but i don't really care you should grow up get over it and go get some real credentials do

01:16:47.680 something on your own before you start casting the cancellation net projecting yourself as an

01:16:51.940 authority because your parents accomplishments and fame say nothing about you okay and that today is

01:17:01.140 the lovely episode of asked and answer i don't know steve i feel like um this is a place for me to be

01:17:08.480 my meanest self so are we should not book chelsea clinton then i guess should we just cross her oh

01:17:12.900 my god didn't i tell you i told you i have a perfect record of never of never booking her and i don't

01:17:17.720 plan on breaking it i if she came on the show i'd have nothing to ask her honestly what what's in that

01:17:23.620 head i got no idea i gotta she married somebody very rich good for her um i mean i might want to

01:17:28.660 ask her how she felt when her dad was stupping the white house intern that's interesting i'm gonna

01:17:32.280 know she thinks about galane maxwell at her wedding oh good point right did you look into that at all

01:17:38.520 like her with the young girls and the massages i just i'm so tired of this know nothing mouthing

01:17:44.200 off about everything she can on twitter and then trying to play herself like she's kate middleton who's

01:17:48.880 above it all she's not kate middleton she's in it she's a bomb thrower and she has no basis to be in

01:17:55.800 there slinging those arrows until she's gone off and actually done something and frankly you know

01:18:00.580 before ivanka trump got to the white house and got all the important roles that trump gave her

01:18:03.920 i would have said a lot about her too i don't i don't dislike ivanka the way i dislike chelsea

01:18:07.980 but i also wondered what the hell ivanka was doing at you know the g7 mingling with these leaders as

01:18:13.700 though she belonged there she didn't right like i appreciate that she did some stuff while working

01:18:18.660 for trump that helped people and i'll give her that but that didn't make her upon entry into the

01:18:24.440 white house a qualified person for that just because she ran some business that focused on women's

01:18:28.580 clothing i don't think you have to be supportive of these outsized roles for these daughters or

01:18:37.640 children of politicians just because you're pro woman right like look i could get started on megan

01:18:44.340 mccain too but at least megan mccain has gone on to actually make something of herself in journalism

01:18:48.140 you know she talks about her dad a lot a lot i understand that for me i would confess it's a little

01:18:53.440 too much um but she's been out there offering opinions based on fact and can will argue her

01:18:59.960 point on the view in a way that's persuade what has chelsea clinton done nothing she failed she

01:19:04.320 failed in the one role she got because of her dad which was the today show role that's it uh okay i'm

01:19:10.400 sorry but i'm showing my really snarky shot side today but i'm feeling it so there you go asked and

01:19:15.940 answered steve how do you like it we're just alienating people left and right i love it

01:19:21.360 i know this has been one of your things you know the growth in the power of silicon valley which

01:19:33.620 to me it's almost like the opioid crisis where you know so many millions of americans fell into it

01:19:39.960 without realizing they were part of something bigger you know they just thought they got addicted to a

01:19:43.960 drug and i think that's kind of what's happened for our millions of americans when it comes to big

01:19:48.440 tech they they didn't realize that they were getting addicted to it that they were being

01:19:52.520 manipulated by it that their every decision that everything they've purchased over the past 10 years

01:19:56.300 they've purchased because big tech put it in front of them and now one of the good things about the

01:20:01.700 past presidential cycle is i think a lot of people were forced to realize it you know they're looking

01:20:07.480 around and they see the swamp around them now in the same way you can see oh opioid crisis that was

01:20:11.620 a thing that wasn't just me that was a thing we see it now with big tech and and yet the danger

01:20:17.300 it hasn't been corrected you know for the first step is awareness but nothing's been done to curb the

01:20:24.040 danger yeah i think that there is greater awareness though as you said there is a growing consciousness

01:20:30.800 among the american public and i think publics around the world that tech is a monopoly power right

01:20:37.880 we have maybe four or five companies that control most of the communications across the world you

01:20:42.140 know we're talking about google facebook you know apple uh to a lesser extent twitter but of course

01:20:48.200 it's very powerful as the former president showed uh these companies are basically controlling access

01:20:53.400 to information and how we get the information because you know i i'm more or less a free speech

01:20:58.720 absolutist so i often get dragged into debates about speech and you know i want people to be able to

01:21:02.640 speak their mind because sending adults be able to speak their mind to each other no matter what they say

01:21:05.540 but actually it's it's a bigger problem than that because it's an economic problem right

01:21:09.700 like something like the majority of digital advertising in some countries now is like

01:21:13.540 controlled by facebook and that actually feeds into the speech problem because it means people

01:21:17.840 have a very hard time starting up alternatives to these companies because you know amazon web services

01:21:22.860 controls uh an enormous amount of your web storage and they can just take off uh an app they can

01:21:28.460 take down parlor right they can take down the twitter alternative uh basically on a whim with zero

01:21:33.760 deprocess or zero accountability if they want to um and this economic power i think is what these

01:21:39.760 companies are really scared that we'll we'll be paying attention to because i think facebook's

01:21:44.240 current strategy for dealing with criticism is saying okay we'll censor more you know they'll

01:21:48.640 we'll slow down the new york post during a crucial election where you know the democrats

01:21:53.280 are likely to win like you know we'll take down these qadon pages we'll suppress uh vaccine

01:21:58.760 theories that maybe end up or a virus theories that maybe will end up being true later who knows

01:22:02.680 um they're happy to do all that because then they feel like it'll help them avoid regulation because

01:22:07.820 what they really fear i think is actually being treated the same way that i think big telecom

01:22:12.640 companies were treated in the past or oil companies or railroad companies which is that

01:22:16.480 they were actually broken up and i think that the the most insightful people about this are

01:22:20.720 actually on the right and the left i think elizabeth warren in early 2019 was talking about

01:22:24.400 breaking them up and i think now josh holly on the right is speaking i think very charismatically

01:22:29.080 and incorrectly about how this is primarily an economic problem they built an attention economy

01:22:34.140 that monetizes basically us staring at screens all day scrolling through screens all day us fighting

01:22:39.940 with each other mark zuckerberg internally in meetings shows a graph where no matter what their

01:22:45.640 prohibited content is content that goes right up against that line always does the best because

01:22:50.380 his product is basically created to make people fight with each other right or to argue or to be

01:22:55.020 to be as incendiary with each other as possible that's how the algorithms are gamed and that's how

01:23:00.220 how the product is designed and no matter how much censoring they'll they'll do it'll always be

01:23:05.780 conflict driven products because they need your eyes on those screens they need you addicted to

01:23:09.900 those products right and i think that it is possible to have communication platforms that don't do that

01:23:14.680 open source uh digital platforms i think the post office could probably run one that just shares

01:23:20.240 photos with with your family members or addresses or helps you meet people you knew in high school

01:23:24.540 uh that wasn't built around algorithms that are there to addict you and make you fight with other

01:23:28.880 people and be contentious and i think that also small independent companies would be happy to step up and

01:23:35.040 make those platforms should the overwhelming monopoly power of the the current ones be reduced through

01:23:41.500 antitrust action through legislative solutions about breaking them up and through imposing things like

01:23:46.960 interoperability through common carriage laws i think it's within the power of global governments

01:23:51.660 to do something about this problem it's always been within the power it's just we haven't had the

01:23:55.860 consciousness to really look at them as a problem until i think barely the past four three or four

01:24:01.060 years and now that we do have that consciousness i do think both the right and the left in this

01:24:05.760 country at some point will converge on some type of solution the same way we tackled the railroad the same

01:24:10.480 way we tackled oil these are the monopoly powers of our time they are among the most powerful

01:24:15.660 corporations on planet earth and they are monopolizing the most basic thing which is our human attention

01:24:20.980 and our human connection with each other right and should that really be controlled by jack dorsey

01:24:25.760 and mark zuckerberg should these like weird kind of techno libertarian bros out in silicon valley

01:24:30.840 really be controlling the the the minds of billions of people have you seen jack dorsey i mean i'm like there's

01:24:37.120 no way that man should be in charge of my life and you know it's it's sad because when i listen to you talk

01:24:41.840 about it it does remind me i confess of my time in cable news i mean one of the reasons i left cable

01:24:47.100 was i was so sick of the outrage machine i i remember saying when i launched the show at mbc

01:24:52.100 i want my audience to feel something something other than outrage you know that was really it was a simple

01:24:58.260 goal and and that's what the cable news industry is i'm i mean i'm just going to be honest it is it's

01:25:04.160 to stoke fear and outrage and that's what makes people tune in and that's what makes the numbers pop

01:25:08.820 and it's a cynical cynical business but at least cable news you know it's not necessarily in your

01:25:16.080 pocket you know people don't generally watch cable on their iphones but the iphone is there with you

01:25:21.100 all the time social media is there tapping you on the shoulder all the time and you know that that

01:25:28.220 movie the social dilemma shows you know sort of a fictional version of where the the brain at

01:25:34.060 facebook is like hey he's awake hey he's looking oh you know pump something onto the phone

01:25:38.740 that'll lure him on and keep him engaged for hours and hours and when you see it like that

01:25:43.880 you recognize those behaviors in yourself right you just went on to check the time you're just

01:25:48.400 going to look at an email or you're going to make a note before you know it three hours have passed

01:25:52.980 and you're all over amazon ordering shit you don't need and like on instagram looking at pictures that

01:25:58.820 are not real yeah and and i think the really important thing to recognize here is that you know these

01:26:03.900 things are all designed to be as profitable as possible and that's why they're designed around

01:26:07.640 addiction that's why they're designed around conflict i think we can have perfectly we can

01:26:12.480 certainly have very similar services that connect people from across the world i think it's it's

01:26:16.340 wonderful that i can talk to you i can talk to someone who's living in india or malaysia or kenya

01:26:21.020 it's awesome that we have the technology to do that but it doesn't have to be used this way it

01:26:26.040 doesn't have to be owned by people who are interested in basically addicting us right we it doesn't have

01:26:31.100 to be that way i think it just happened to develop progression exactly exactly and i just you know

01:26:37.880 every new product that we've had that revolutionized society has at some point um come up against public

01:26:45.320 regulation you know so for instance automobiles automobiles used to be much more dangerous we

01:26:49.320 used to have far more people dying in car crashes every year you know before ralph nader came around

01:26:53.520 and wrote unsafe at any speed and started actually getting regulations for these things of course

01:26:58.480 regulation can be done poorly and we should look very we should look very closely at any time the

01:27:01.960 government regulates anything but i do think that this is when you have corporations that are this

01:27:06.440 powerful they're profoundly impacting public life they can't say okay mark zuckerberg can't say he

01:27:11.700 just owns a website somewhere that's like you know 12 people are on it it's like a web forum about

01:27:15.580 flowers or something and like you know it's a huge it's a big government imposition to have the

01:27:19.900 government come in and inspect it and do things with it like no like this is these are services with

01:27:23.660 billions of people they are literally in some cases they are driving newspapers out of business

01:27:28.260 with their monopolies over advertising they have profound uh public implications with the work

01:27:34.820 they do once once a company becomes so big that its actions are impacting the lives of billions of

01:27:39.820 people i think those billions of people have a right to go to their governments and petition uh for

01:27:46.240 for inspections for accountability and for regulations uh when it's warranted and i think it is it is

01:27:51.700 warranted in this case and i think i think thankfully we are starting to see both the right and the left

01:27:55.700 the u.s get interested in that and in other countries as well yeah so can i pick up on

01:28:00.680 something you said because i like you also consider myself a near free speech absolutist i wouldn't say

01:28:06.380 i am an absolutist but i'm i'm close um and what you'll get i did i recently did a seminar with um

01:28:12.680 some students out at a very very well known one of the top three universities in the in the country

01:28:16.800 and uh they accept that words can be violence they accept that speech needs to be censored because

01:28:27.000 it's hurtful that hate speech shouldn't be constitutional and that facebook uh twitter

01:28:33.840 every other publication for that matter ought to be cracking down on hurtful speech and certainly on

01:28:41.060 speech like let's go to the capitol and fight for our rights you know not like let's let's you know

01:28:49.280 take guns and shoot people right now which is much closer to actual incitement uh but you know

01:28:55.520 stuff that doesn't actually right now currently cross a legal line they want it to

01:28:59.040 and i'm concerned that the young generation is so willing to censor speech that they they really

01:29:07.360 believe that words are violence i mean it is it is concerning to me and i think the the two

01:29:12.840 individuals who wrote the book about this are jonathan height and greg lukiano you know the

01:29:16.320 coddling of the american mind um really brilliant guys i've done some a little bit of work with them

01:29:21.120 in the past and you know what what i would say is that there is a i think there's a real danger

01:29:26.240 that you have more and more americans who simply don't know how to really interact with ideas they

01:29:34.160 don't agree with right like for me it was it almost comes naturally because you know i was in a weird

01:29:39.460 position right i i grew up the the son of immigrants uh a religious minority a racial minority in the

01:29:45.720 deep south you know outside atlanta at a time when the south was going through a lot of changes and i

01:29:50.080 would say i don't know 80 80 90 of my friends were like super conservative uh probably very problematic

01:29:56.600 by today's standards um you know this was when georgia was in a big fight over the confederate

01:30:02.720 the confederate battle flag was our state flag and zamila was trying to get it changed and like

01:30:06.320 i think i just had so much interaction with people i didn't agree with on various things

01:30:10.340 that it it's kind of lowered my my anxiety levels around it right like i had so much immersion like

01:30:16.340 when when psychologists work with people who have anxiety disorders the way the the main uh angle of

01:30:22.700 attack the main treatment is basically slowly uh exposing them or immersing them in the things that

01:30:28.160 give them anxiety not all at once but over time right um and same thing getting over an allergy

01:30:33.440 exactly exactly it's actually very similar medically um so the same as that thing applies to politics

01:30:40.400 right if you have people i think many of these people who you're talking about if i had to guess

01:30:46.600 they probably come from very well-to-do families who tend to curate their social circle tend to curate

01:30:51.220 uh who they live around who they work with um the ideology probably they're exposed to in their

01:30:56.760 their homes in that circumstance if you've never been exposed to anything that's remotely different

01:31:02.000 from you you're going to freak out when you hear it or you see it right to me it's not like a huge

01:31:06.500 deal to hear somebody say something that's like a little bit racist or offensive like yeah i've heard

01:31:11.780 it a million times growing up you know people would tease me i'd tease them back it would be rough

01:31:15.800 housing uh you know i'd see something it's very very normal particularly for people from working

01:31:20.940 class backgrounds or like middle income backgrounds where they're moving around a lot exposed to a wide

01:31:25.440 group of people to see that and to understand it to internalize it and to not catastrophize it right

01:31:29.980 to not blow it up into something much bigger than it is and i think many of the students here talking

01:31:34.100 to you if i had to guess they just haven't had that exposure that helped the amount of exposure

01:31:38.240 and i know some people probably going to freak out hearing me say that i should be exposed to

01:31:42.480 someone saying something racist blah blah actually yeah you probably should be exposed to some mild

01:31:46.420 you should be exposed to some mild adversity in your life because it'll help you deal with things in

01:31:50.260 the future right it's it's literally impossible to go with go throughout your entire life and no one

01:31:55.240 will ever say anything ugly to you right no this is my dream this is my dream is to go in i i've told

01:32:01.620 a story about the the head of school at my daughter's school was saying uh i was telling her she needed to

01:32:06.840 work on the girls grit because they have so much diversity and in a sensitivity training that she needs

01:32:12.020 to remember at some point they may meet somebody who hasn't had the training not everybody is getting

01:32:16.480 the training that they're getting at this school and she said you should teach that class and i said

01:32:20.440 i'll do it but i'm gonna show up in an inappropriate halloween costume you know like yeah i'm gonna

01:32:25.120 my dream is to make all the people show up the kids whatever they all have to sign waivers saying

01:32:30.640 abuse will follow and i accept it and then i'm gonna call them the worst names i could possibly think

01:32:34.880 of i'm gonna say terrible things to them i'm gonna offend them at every turn and you know what

01:32:38.600 they're gonna learn they can handle it they're fine exactly um of course you know there are times

01:32:45.740 when this this turns into like sustained harassment or bullying and i think you know school should step

01:32:51.020 in in that circumstance and so on and so forth but yeah the the mere you know explication the mere

01:32:56.860 the mere expression of certain ideas or words shouldn't really drive people to depression or

01:33:02.440 anxiety or freaking out or crying or so on and so forth that is really a fairly new pathology i think

01:33:10.480 in the united states and it's really an upper class one again because i think the people who are

01:33:14.040 experiencing it in the most harsh ways just have very little interaction with the rest of the world

01:33:18.520 like if you go into any like low-income community in america like you know i've done a lot of work

01:33:22.140 with the homeless and volunteering i've done work with immigrants uh i just you know keep myself busy

01:33:26.980 um you're gonna expose yourself to all kinds of things and generally it's people not even trying to be

01:33:32.040 offensive to each other but they just come from different cultural backgrounds right and they don't

01:33:34.860 have the same ideas about what's what's offensive and what is it and over time i think you learn

01:33:39.240 there's no tolerance for any amount of discomfort now right is that i mean like not like the the the

01:33:45.860 story this week with the tennis player naomi osaka like she's being there was a piece by jemele hill

01:33:51.100 like talking about her empowerment of women and you know because this woman who made 55 million

01:33:56.240 dollars last year just last year alone never mind the years prior she's the number i think four number

01:34:00.720 four best paid athlete in america behind like betterer lebron i mean she's in a very nice class of

01:34:07.560 athletes earning earning income um because she doesn't want to talk to the press she doesn't they

01:34:12.840 get in her head because they ask her questions about how she's not so good on clay that's literally

01:34:17.240 the complaint that she's not so good on clay and they ask about it it's not that she gets bullied

01:34:22.740 because of her race her gender they call her mean it's it's none of that and yet we're supposed to

01:34:29.020 be looking at her saying right on she stood up for mental health you know in this case silence would

01:34:34.440 be violence no i don't sit to see her as a heroine here i see her as weak and i don't even want my

01:34:40.580 daughter being exposed to this story you know this this is also a new phenomenon which is that it seems

01:34:45.980 like everybody who not everybody but a lot of people who are at elite levels in america they're like

01:34:52.340 showing us they're showing themselves bleed to the rest of the world right like they're they're showing

01:34:58.240 their weaknesses they're showing they're trying to portray themselves as victims that's very like weird

01:35:02.980 and unusual typically people who are in leadership positions they try to show strength they try to

01:35:07.580 show confidence and pride they want to show that they can stand up for other people they can they

01:35:11.340 can be models to emulate right we're getting a lot of like you know what i would associate with like

01:35:17.540 victorian monarchs or something like that where like they're not really accountable to anybody so

01:35:21.900 they're they're free to talk about how hard they have it even if they're earning tens of millions of

01:35:25.360 dollars we literally have a model doing that right like it's it's actually very very strange and

01:35:31.400 like it would be very difficult for me to take this story what you just described to me and like

01:35:35.200 tell it to my parents right who came to the united states dirt poor who faced a lot of i think harsh

01:35:40.360 conditions discrimination who grew up in a certain you know countries that at times were at war like

01:35:45.440 it's would be almost impossible for me to tell this story to my parents or for them to actually believe

01:35:50.260 all this was happening because like they wouldn't think this is how a normal human being functions

01:35:54.440 right they would be like yeah she okay maybe she'll just she won't do this interview or whatever and then

01:35:59.900 she'll get a little bit of flack for it and then she'll move on with all her money and her riches

01:36:03.300 and her fan base like it's not a it's not really something for public concern right like it's

01:36:08.320 but again i think so much of this is driven and you know my my colleague and i uh shant

01:36:13.620 misrobian is a really really uh cool progressive political consultant we have a sub stack at

01:36:19.280 inquiremore.com where we write about these issues you know our thesis is that so much of this is because

01:36:23.540 of the class cleavages in america right the upper class in america talks about themselves as if

01:36:29.480 they're not upper class right they talk about themselves as if they're the biggest victims in

01:36:32.760 the world but the irony of it is that actual victims don't ever have a voice almost definitionally

01:36:36.700 right you were never hearing the stories about you know the homeless woman who survived domestic abuse

01:36:41.680 and her life and her true travels you know where we're hearing about the actors the celebrities that

01:36:47.120 as you said literal monarchs and how hard their life is apparently because they had some family

01:36:51.160 foibles let me tell you as someone who comes from an immigrant background anyone who's in some kind of

01:36:55.840 interracial marriage has a ton of drama around it right particularly minorities particularly

01:37:00.120 minority parents often have a ton of drama they give you if you marry outside the community right

01:37:04.640 that's an extremely normal thing i imagine at the monarch level it's a little bit different maybe but

01:37:09.100 it's probably not going to drive you to suicide she probably was not telling the truth when she said

01:37:13.080 that um it probably was a manufactured press thing but you know the point is that i think that

01:37:18.920 a good society is led by people who are standing up for others i want these people with all this

01:37:24.220 power with all this privilege with this fame this fortune the riches i want them to use that for

01:37:29.340 other people i don't want them spent all day telling us how hard they have it because they don't have it

01:37:33.260 that hard they can afford really good therapists to go and tell about whatever problems they have

01:37:37.400 but i don't want them begging about themselves and crying about themselves and even at my level and

01:37:41.940 i'm a middle class person i'm not not rich or famous i you know i have a decent journalism career

01:37:46.080 i don't spend a whole lot of time complaining about myself because i view it as a facet of narcissism

01:37:50.740 and maybe that's just my cultural background i think where my parents are from pakistan and in the

01:37:55.940 indian subcontinent it's very much looked down upon to do that um so maybe i just inherited that

01:38:00.400 cultural trait but i think it's a very very kind of nasty narcissism that's taken over the american

01:38:05.600 upper class and it's not just left-leaning people i think our former president on the right

01:38:10.160 had a little bit of this bug as well um but i want our leaders to stand up for other people

01:38:14.500 you think trump was a narcissist is that what yeah i know it's a very controversial assertion but

01:38:21.000 you know and yeah in the saddest part about it is that when you engage that mindset you're actually

01:38:26.780 hurting your own happiness a lot like i don't think trump was a very happy person he never struck

01:38:30.660 me as a very happy person which is insane because the guy has like hundreds of millions of dollars and

01:38:35.100 he was the literal president of the united states like if i had that i feel like i'd be kind of happy

01:38:38.700 um but because yeah but i think he had an abusive father i think he i think he had a

01:38:43.020 a pain in the ass father i don't know you know who knows i don't have that he did have a lot he did

01:38:48.680 have a lot of family troubles with his brother as well uh with the alcohol addiction and yeah and

01:38:53.060 honestly a lot of times i looked at him and i felt sorry for him but the thing is like i don't want

01:38:57.220 to feel sorry for our leaders right i want our leaders to be standing up for us i want to feel

01:39:00.460 pride you know pride in them i want them to feel like they're leading people right and i think having a

01:39:05.640 leadership class across the board left and right you know in arts culture celebrity finance politics

01:39:11.720 who are constantly talking about how hard they have it i think that's a really pathetic situation

01:39:15.660 for a country to be in because it shows that those people are self-obsessed and it shows that they

01:39:19.680 aren't thinking about the homeless woman they aren't thinking about the low-income family they

01:39:23.440 aren't thinking about the refugees and the immigrants and the person working at walmart you know 12 hours a

01:39:27.800 day to get by because they're thinking about themselves with their 55 million dollars and i'm like why would

01:39:32.120 you do that that's not that's not right it's not morally no one cares that that you have

01:39:35.520 some social anxiety and going out to speak to the press get over it that's what everybody does i mean

01:39:40.200 i think about myself can you imagine if i if i just didn't want to i just wouldn't speak to people who

01:39:44.840 asked me hard questions or didn't think i was on my a game all the time or might say something mean

01:39:50.320 about me i'd be sitting like a loser on my couch that's what i'd be doing i wouldn't have achieved

01:39:54.280 anything in my life we have to get over these challenges rather than leaning into them and saying

01:39:58.320 for my mental health i'm going to avoid one of my favorite soundbites was serena williams who she was

01:40:03.760 one of the ones to come out and be like i feel for her i get it i was like oh she's supporting her

01:40:07.640 and then you listen to the whole soundbite and she's like some people are thick i'm thick some

01:40:12.420 people are thin you know it's like totally throwing shade at her but she's right toughen up is really i

01:40:17.720 think what she was trying to telegraph and that's what you know america could use as its message all

01:40:22.760 right let me shift gears with you because i do have to ask you about your former uh place of

01:40:28.200 employment from 15 to 18 the intercept as i mentioned this um earlier with andy but these

01:40:34.220 guys they're they're so i just feel like they're a shadow of their former selves it's not like

01:40:39.420 america cares about the intercept but i do think it's interesting that now they're at war with glenn

01:40:44.980 greenwald they're calling out sort of reporters in the street who are doing you know fearless

01:40:51.040 journalism uh you know sort of independent citizen journalists who are trying to get stories at the

01:40:56.240 intercept i i think would normally have celebrated but now will not and um this week there was a big

01:41:02.880 hit piece on the guy who founded the intercept but left it because it changed glenn greenwald

01:41:07.100 saying is he the new master of right wing media and heavens to betsy prepare yourself zed because

01:41:13.900 they talk about how he's been on fox news 72 times he writes a headline and it gets put on fox news

01:41:21.620 and now he's basically the the new assignment editor for right wing media your thoughts on all of it

01:41:28.140 uh well full disclosure i also occasionally go on fox news uh so i i am also tainted in this way

01:41:34.580 apparently um but yeah i think look i when i joined the intercept in 2015 i think a lot of what attracted

01:41:42.400 me to it was that it wasn't super partisan right like i think most people who are associated with

01:41:46.860 were left-leaning for sure um but it didn't you know my editor at the time dan frumkin who no longer

01:41:53.220 works there i think he said something like we're anti-partisan uh he we we had no intention of rooting

01:42:00.340 for a political party of trying to get behind a candidate uh so on and so forth and i think in the years

01:42:06.660 since it had more and more of that attitude the more and more of the people that they were hiring i think

01:42:11.500 were in left-wing social cliques like particularly in like new york city like that brooklyn crowd

01:42:16.720 um gentrified brooklyn crowd i should say uh and i think that they viewed a lot of honestly a lot of

01:42:24.060 what i was writing a lot of what glenn was writing when we were there which was journalism like i was

01:42:28.420 not an opinion guy at the intercept every article i wrote was almost every article i wrote was reporting

01:42:32.940 you know generally i tried to be fair and and and see things down the middle but they viewed a lot of

01:42:38.800 it as just being i think unhelpful to the democratic party and unhelpful to liberals right like as if

01:42:44.920 i had a mission as if i worked for the dnc or as if i should be working for i guess i would say the

01:42:50.260 left wing of the dnc since they don't they don't really like the mod the moderate democrats very much

01:42:54.480 and i think that's just a big mission change over at the intercept and i think glenn felt very

01:42:58.940 uncomfortable with that um of course glenn is a friend of mine so again i'm biased but i think glenn

01:43:03.680 you know he has almost this like constitutional like inability to like lie or like to hide what

01:43:09.340 he thinks and i don't think that he thought that the intercept should try to go soft on one political

01:43:15.420 faction or another in in the service of any kind of political goal whereas i do think the people who

01:43:19.560 work there do think that it should and they do think and they do think that it should serve an

01:43:25.640 explicit like left-wing ideology and even though i'm sympathetic to a lot of left-wing ideology

01:43:29.740 i'm very uncomfortable with news outlets that are trying to serve one ideology over another i

01:43:34.100 i understand that everyone has their own bias their own point of view and i don't think anyone

01:43:38.300 can have zero bias but i don't think you should lean into it right you shouldn't like go out of

01:43:42.340 your way to say to just actively reject storylines that might harm some kind of political objective

01:43:48.760 or political goal and that's a lot of what the intercept was doing it felt almost like a super

01:43:52.300 pact for the left wing of the democratic party and that's a lot of why i ended up leaving so

01:43:57.160 this is where you're different from the average person this is where i think i'm different from

01:44:00.620 the average person is you may have political views on different issues you may you may be

01:44:05.680 consider yourself a liberal but it's not your ideology it's not it's not your identity it's

01:44:10.760 not your identity you're able to befriend people across the aisle you can talk about issues with

01:44:15.440 people who have divergent views from you i've heard you talk about this i heard you on the

01:44:19.660 federalist recently and i know you you went kind of studied how to do this how to bridge

01:44:24.480 differences for a couple of years at all of all places berkeley which confuses me but that's what

01:44:30.540 makes you different and i think a better journalist i actively push myself like if you know we had a

01:44:39.100 round of a very bloody fighting in the middle east recently you know there's a lot of people who i think

01:44:43.620 i would disagree with who i'm friendly with like you know barry weiss is one of them i'm very friendly

01:44:47.660 with barry i think we disagree very hard hard very hard on this issue but i actively push myself to say

01:44:54.120 that if somebody disagrees with me internally within their mind they think they're just as morally

01:44:58.940 justified as i am right they think they're doing the right thing and i can only hold that so much

01:45:05.240 against them right it may be they're misguided maybe they don't have the right facts or whatever

01:45:08.700 or maybe they just have a different value set but they really do think they're doing the right thing

01:45:11.680 if they're a true believer in what they have to say so once i come to that realization even if i have

01:45:15.880 an emotional impulse to really dislike someone for their their point of view i have to check myself and say

01:45:20.620 you know it's not doesn't you know it's not entirely rational to do that right like they

01:45:24.260 their their brain is telling them that this is how the world works and my brain is telling them

01:45:29.220 this is how the world works and maybe maybe they're right maybe i'm wrong i i have changed my mind over

01:45:32.940 uh over the years on a few things so maybe who knows maybe i'll come around to their point of view one

01:45:37.520 day but i do everything i can to actively not dislike the person right even in extreme cases like if i

01:45:44.680 meet someone who i think is really very off base or very extreme i tell myself well they've had certain

01:45:49.400 cultural influences they have certain upbringing they probably have a certain information stream

01:45:52.980 they have uh that's probably why they came to that conclusion i shouldn't try to hate them

01:45:56.820 personally for doing that um you had daryl davis on your show to me he's one of the biggest heroes

01:46:02.020 in america because he came to this conclusion and brought it to some of the most extreme circumstances

01:46:07.360 anyone ever could you know meeting with ku klux klan people as an african-american man right

01:46:11.560 and actually persuading them uh to to leave these racist beliefs and ideologies behind and he's done

01:46:16.920 that with hundreds of people um i aspire to be i aspire to be somebody like him and i don't i don't

01:46:23.140 think i'm anywhere close to it now i don't think i i'm at the point where i can be like him but he is

01:46:28.600 my he is one of my role models in my life and that's what i want to do with politics and there's

01:46:33.120 there's a professor at university of maryland liliana mason she's wrote she wrote a book about

01:46:37.520 this based off some research she did called uh i think something like where politics becomes identity

01:46:41.320 or something like that it actually it turns out that being very left-wing or being very right-wing

01:46:48.160 in your actual like policy beliefs is not what actually polarizes us for the most part right

01:46:51.940 like you can like i can be extremely left-wing in some areas but still not hate people on the right

01:46:56.300 what really polarizes you is when you elevate politics to identity when you personally identify

01:47:01.740 very strongly with the label of like liberal or conservative or democrat or republican or something

01:47:05.940 like that once that becomes a core part of your identity you start seeing disagreements as a threat

01:47:10.420 to your identity as a threat to yourself personally it's the fight or flight you know stuff in your

01:47:14.620 brain starts to activate from our like evolutionary path right once you start doing that that's the

01:47:19.060 most dangerous thing and so what i do is you know i have a lot of hobbies i do i do improv comedy

01:47:23.640 uh i'm in a happy marriage i i play guitar like these these these are my identity right my identity is not

01:47:29.700 some gaggling of political solutions i have in my mind that i you know i i advocate for sometimes

01:47:34.780 or write about uh journalistically like that's not my identity that those are just that that's to me

01:47:40.140 that's like building your identity around how to fix your car you know how to fix your country is a

01:47:43.900 series of things we need to be doing it's very important just like fixing your car is important

01:47:47.560 or going to the doctor is important but it's not the core of who i am as a person right that's a

01:47:51.560 much more i love everything you just said yes i completely relate to all of that my audience has

01:47:56.160 heard me say similar things all the time i just you know the the things that matter to you are

01:47:59.980 generally within what 20 feet of you it's it's not and it's not the internet you know it's the people

01:48:04.520 it's the people who love you and who you love and and the way you choose to spend your time

01:48:08.360 this limited time we have on this earth and that doesn't include obsessing over donald trump

01:48:12.220 you can be interested in politics you can cover it you can get excited about it but it can't be

01:48:16.280 your identity and that's something you said about the ideas that i like that it a long time ago when

01:48:22.900 i was practicing law i had a case for harry winston the jeweler you know the famous fancy jeweler where

01:48:28.400 you get all the diamonds it's on fifth avenue here in manhattan and we were representing harry winston

01:48:33.100 i had to try a case for them and you'd go into harry winston and since we were representing them

01:48:37.640 sometimes they would let me try on one of the beautiful jewels you know i'd put on like the

01:48:42.680 necklace or the earrings which i could never afford but it's like icing you know it's it's a lovely

01:48:48.940 experience and if somebody is espousing an idea who somebody who's not hateful right you don't want

01:48:55.120 to listen to somebody who you know hates you or you're right you know your your ideas but somebody who's

01:49:00.380 a genuine idea broker um even if i don't agree with them right like it could be on anything to me

01:49:08.440 it's like trying on the beautiful diamond necklace you just try it on it it could sparkle if it flows

01:49:14.200 in terms of its logic and its presentation it can be a really pleasant experience doesn't mean you're

01:49:19.860 going to buy the necklace but you can enjoy the experience of different ideas or in my case

01:49:25.660 unattainable ideas just by trying the stuff on every once in a while and seeing how it looks

01:49:31.200 yeah i mean there's all sorts of benefits that come from it one is that you learn to just understand

01:49:36.640 other people right even if you'll never agree with their idea i think you'll get a much better

01:49:40.420 understanding of where the person is coming from and you might even understand like better counter

01:49:45.180 arguments you know you'll you'll be able to what's called steel manning arguments you'll be able

01:49:49.440 to explain someone's argument almost better than they can um so that way you can really yeah that way

01:49:54.920 you can really persuade people um i think that that's very helpful and that can be very useful

01:49:59.140 for you i think that uh so much of social progress is based on just having someone in the room who can

01:50:07.060 say hmm i'm not sure that's quite right here's you know a b and c points that we should consider

01:50:11.800 right so many disasters have happened when someone wasn't in the room to do that right like the bay of

01:50:16.280 pigs was that way right like nobody was around kennedy pointing out any of the many huge kind of

01:50:22.140 logical errors they were making and planning the bay of uh pigs a disaster uh the challenger space

01:50:27.640 shuttle right like there were people who knew that there were problems uh with the shuttle but they

01:50:31.540 were just being shut out because of the the kind of climate of conformity at nasa at that point

01:50:35.480 um there are many examples throughout history i think this is why dictators don't make very good

01:50:39.440 decisions right they often do very stupid things because everyone's too afraid to tell them they

01:50:43.220 disagree right though the the safest thing to say to a dictator is you're absolutely right that sounds

01:50:47.920 great right yeah yeah so you know i think it's very very important even just to have a few people

01:50:53.540 around you who disagree with you even sharply disagree with you or majorly disagree with you

01:50:57.580 because they can help you point out flaws in your own logic if anything else so that's um your point

01:51:02.360 on nasa is well espoused by adam grant who's been on the show and he writes about how that nasa really

01:51:08.180 they had so many no well not so many but they had quite a few uh catastrophes as a result of this

01:51:13.840 culture that was more of a yes man or yes ma'am um that they really made a conscious decision to try

01:51:19.260 to challenge that and started getting better results um and something on trump you know you

01:51:24.340 might think i totally agree with you on the narcissist point but for for people who are

01:51:29.380 thinking he might want be one of those guys who doesn't want feedback i know for a fact it's not

01:51:33.820 true i know for a fact that at least one person who was in a high up position there was demoted

01:51:39.100 because trump was complaining the guy was just a yes man you know that the guy was not bringing

01:51:43.360 fresh ideas he wasn't challenging him um i think that's some of what trump did that was good in

01:51:49.420 terms of policy i think came from his willingness as a businessman to not be too identity driven to

01:51:55.840 listen to the best idea in the room yeah i think there's there's certainly a part of trump i think

01:52:00.680 that was pragmatic that wasn't as ideological as certain parts of the gop um for instance you'll

01:52:05.860 notice that what he did he did on trade was actually popular enough that democrat most democrats

01:52:10.060 and congress supported it or enough to actually to get it through uh through the congress right

01:52:14.380 because i think he took a less ideological look at what the trade issues were and he was able to

01:52:19.280 actually go outside the box and bring in advisors like peter navarro who aren't your typical like gop

01:52:23.500 go-to's and he appointed a trade a trade rep i think who would have been perfectly at home in a

01:52:27.780 democratic administration because again trump was willing to look outside the the normal right-wing

01:52:32.200 bubble um so yeah i do think that's one of his more positive qualities and i think it's a it's a

01:52:36.620 positive quality in any leader right any leader who's just assigning people who agree with them

01:52:41.080 all around themselves they're going to end up making huge mistakes uh i think if you go back

01:52:45.760 to president lincoln i mean lincoln understood this more than anybody right i mean he's the

01:52:49.660 classic example of someone who built a team around him who in many ways were rivals and who had

01:52:55.820 ideas i'm sure he i'm sure ideas that he found at times to be crazy but he's probably glad to have

01:53:01.400 them there to make the counterpoints to him um and yeah i do think i do think that it's it's not

01:53:06.980 only important for presidents right it's important for everybody if you're uh one thing that corporations

01:53:11.560 often do is they build what's called a red team what a red team's job is basically to look at your

01:53:16.260 like plans and projects and proposals and poke holes in them right uh here's everything that could go

01:53:20.960 wrong um and i think that that's something that should all kinds of organizations should host i think uh

01:53:27.460 any any kind of social organization business religious organization uh civic group could have

01:53:34.680 a sort of red team or at least just have people in the room who will tell you honestly when they feel

01:53:39.400 like maybe something could be a little bit different or maybe something something's off so

01:53:43.080 so let me ask you somebody who is and you don't sound particularly ideological but you did work

01:53:49.120 for think progress progressive news website um funded by the center for american progress right

01:53:55.080 is that john podesta who is center for american progress yes so podesta founded it uh for sure

01:54:00.580 he wasn't he he left for a while so he wasn't always the president but yeah he did found it

01:54:04.820 okay so what i mean what made you join that organization what what is it in your own ideology

01:54:12.200 that makes you lean left enough that you would work for think progress yeah so this was um this was

01:54:17.920 actually my first job out of college this was in 2009 it was the first term of the obama administration

01:54:22.160 and yeah at that point i think i was i was definitely a fairly left-leaning guy i i felt

01:54:28.480 strongly that particularly on a few issues like universal health care i still feel pretty strongly

01:54:33.360 about universal health care uh it's just way too expensive in the u.s compared to everywhere else

01:54:37.460 we could probably do it better in some way um and you know i wanted to i guess i wanted to be at an

01:54:45.060 organization where i felt like i could get my start in doing journalism that was designed around

01:54:52.040 kind of promoting certain uh promoting and uncovering certain kind of ideological agendas

01:54:59.260 or causes in a way that honestly is a little bit different than what i didn't have because i think

01:55:03.980 we've spent the last however number of minutes criticizing media for being ideologically slanted or

01:55:08.940 narrative based um but honestly i don't think i think the problem is not so much that think

01:55:14.280 progress existed but that like a big portion of the media turned into think progress right like i don't

01:55:19.040 think that it's a problem for there to be ideological media that does have a certain kind of agenda

01:55:23.340 but you need to make sure that all the media doesn't turn into that right because then you

01:55:27.380 really aren't getting anyone to disconfirm your biases you aren't getting the other side at all

01:55:31.080 and you're not getting like a bigger search for truth so i think at that point in 2009

01:55:34.460 i was a very i was a little bit more activist oriented like i really wanted to do something on

01:55:38.320 health care i i thought that we needed to start moving out of afghanistan i thought we need to do

01:55:42.320 something about income inequality after the great recession and so i think think progress was a good place

01:55:46.460 for that although not a perfect place because something unfortunately um it was unfortunate

01:55:51.900 that was controlled by center for american progress right because center for american progress was a

01:55:55.300 very kind of like you know it's a political it's a political fixture aligned to the democratic party

01:56:00.240 even though it's technically non-partisan and so you know if you wrote something too critical of

01:56:04.600 obama the white house might yell at you for a day which was what happened to my boss one time when

01:56:09.500 i wrote something about afghanistan and how they weren't meeting their commitments there

01:56:12.580 um so like there was a lot of stuff like that and also stuff with corporate donors to cap

01:56:16.760 interfering a lot of think progress and so there were things like that happening which were which

01:56:21.140 was a good introduction to me about how dc politics works and how you know a lot of it is not how we

01:56:26.460 imagine philosopher kings talking to each other about you know what is the most moral or best idea

01:56:30.980 but it's a lot of like politicians protecting their turf and donors protecting their turf and

01:56:34.580 cynicism and horse trading and so it was it was a good education and all of that at the end of the day

01:56:39.740 um but yeah basically i and i think i ended up there because in college i was just a left-leaning

01:56:44.660 activist type who had done some journalism and i wanted to continue that through my career path

01:56:49.260 and that's sort of how i started so i definitely i would say 10 11 years ago i was in a more i was

01:56:55.260 definitely in a more partisan trajectory i think uh than i am today for sure don't leave me now we got

01:57:00.980 more coming up in 60 seconds when i see you into uc berkeley's greater good bridging differences i'm

01:57:11.420 like berkeley who goes to berkeley to to get rid of their bias and figure out a bridge differences but

01:57:17.840 that could be my own bias speaking no it's it's a really good question so i i was at cap and think

01:57:23.800 progress in 2009 up until 2012 i went on i worked for a few other non-profits and political action

01:57:29.340 committees i worked for progressive pack i worked for a few other progressive publications i went to

01:57:33.560 the intercept finally um thinking that it was maybe a little bit less partisan although it became

01:57:38.000 increasingly partisan and honestly i got i got frustrated because i was like i just feel like

01:57:43.920 i can't write super honestly here right i can't report stories out because i feel like i have to be

01:57:47.840 promoting a certain agenda all the time uh it was ironic honestly that i felt that way at an outlet

01:57:52.680 founded by glenn greenwald who's a very independent-minded person uh but that's just how it turned out

01:57:57.900 did you know at the time he was having the same feelings uh i didn't really know because i think

01:58:02.940 one of the one of the things people don't understand about the intercept is that glenn did not like run

01:58:06.620 it with an iron fist right he's actually a very like chill guy like he did not he did not manage

01:58:11.320 the day he did not edit people he kind of let people do what they wanted to do right uh which is kind

01:58:16.400 of the problem honestly because a lot of the editors really ended up sucking so you know they didn't they

01:58:20.440 didn't know what they were doing um but uh yeah so basically what happened was i saw a job opening uh

01:58:27.900 uc berkeley has a center that works on basically psychological wellness and well-being called

01:58:33.020 greater good science center and what they wanted to do is they wanted to hire somebody to come in

01:58:37.320 and write about how uh basically write a series of articles based on interviewing researchers

01:58:44.240 about how we tackle social and political polarization in the united states like the stuff that's tearing us

01:58:49.680 apart um there's i would say a small but growing number of non-profits dedicated to this to this

01:58:55.820 problem like braver angels when america foundation open mind platform um i think that

01:59:01.340 the basically the goal my my goal at berkeley was it was an 18-month fellowship so it was a time

01:59:07.600 limited fellowship funded by by a grant uh was basically to write a series of articles really

01:59:11.600 looking at like what was driving us apart um in terms of a polarization in the united states and

01:59:15.900 also what can we do about it like what people to people skills what skills can communities use

01:59:20.200 faith organizations use schools and universities businesses so on and so forth so i wrote a series of

01:59:24.860 articles i put together a guidebook along with my team about skills we can use it was actually a

01:59:29.440 really great experience i think that yeah berkeley does have a reputation for being a very left-leaning

01:59:33.660 place but my team there was fantastic i think they were all probably left-leaning people but they were

01:59:38.440 all you know they were all kind of a similar mindset right that like okay but that's what i was going

01:59:42.520 to say now if megan kelly showed up there right and i'm not some dyed-in-the-wool conservative but i'm

01:59:46.400 perceived as such given my time at fox and i'm my own thinking is center-right for the most part

01:59:51.500 how would i be treated would they would i have a good experience there uh i think they're they're

01:59:57.240 such nice people and the center is literally based around psychological wellness so like if they were

02:00:01.860 just mean they would be it would be very weird because they know they like know all they know

02:00:06.640 they know all the like mindfulness techniques and they they spend all this time writing about it

02:00:11.080 like you know they it would be weird i think they would treat you well but yeah i do think that

02:00:15.380 that is probably something i would say about the depolarization space like like jonathan

02:00:20.160 height and greg lucianoff are both liberals right like they're both left-leaning liberals

02:00:23.600 but they're also like very open-minded they treat conservative as well so on and so forth

02:00:27.300 um i do think a lot of people in this space do happen to be left-leading i don't really know why

02:00:31.420 that is i think it could use more conservative people there should be more conservative people

02:00:35.180 in the depolarization movement um john wood at braver angels he comes from a republican background

02:00:41.460 he's great um so the people who are is he a trump leader because in my experience you're only allowed

02:00:46.040 in those crowds of you you can be conservative but you can't support trump you know what's what's good

02:00:50.180 about him is i don't think he is actually like i think he he he plays it pretty straight with them

02:00:54.740 he he he does everything he can to engage with people who voted for trump which is which is pretty

02:01:00.240 crazy honestly this is one of my beasts with the media is that like you're absolutely right it does

02:01:04.980 sound like there's a certain segment of like cnn and msnbc approved republicans who just like hate

02:01:11.200 everything about the republican party and almost all republicans and it's just like that's right

02:01:14.640 especially why are you brought on as the republican representative if you're not representative at

02:01:21.040 all of these people right like just as a practical matter you need to bring on someone who probably

02:01:24.960 doesn't agree with trump on everything which i think most republican voters don't agree with him on

02:01:28.040 everything but who probably voted with him because they they on balance they agree with him more than

02:01:32.480 they agree with the democrats that's a representative person right and like for some reason across the

02:01:37.560 media and a big part of the ngo world you have like people who represent maybe five percent of

02:01:42.200 republicans right people who voted for evan mcmullin or so on and so forth um but yeah i do think i do

02:01:48.080 think this depolarization space was really good for me i worked there for 18 months a little bit longer

02:01:53.260 than that and it really helped me i think center myself into a place where yeah i think i still have a

02:01:58.900 lot of left-leaning commitments ideologically but i feel like when i do my journalism i can do it much

02:02:04.700 more objectively much more straight and i can also just orient myself in a way to where i don't feel

02:02:10.480 i i try really hard not to scare any political faction away and sometimes it's hard because sometimes

02:02:14.780 i think that there i sometimes i think i write something and someone will just automatically think

02:02:20.300 oh i'm i'm the most conservative person in the world or vice versa right but if they read my breadth

02:02:25.460 of writing these days if they read the you know sub-second inquiremore.com or they read my columns

02:02:29.660 at newsweek or the reporting i've done elsewhere i think you'll see that i'm kind of doing what i

02:02:35.920 imagine cnn was doing in the 1990s right like they are i'm trying my best to appeal to everyone and

02:02:42.620 actually get at the truth in as many directions as possible because i think it's really very important

02:02:46.660 to get outside of narrative journalism i think narrative journalism taking everything over has been

02:02:50.920 i'll go ahead i'll give you an example to back you up here's here is uh well i'm just looking at a

02:02:55.140 couple american this is you may 27th american journalists shielded china and erased the wuhan

02:03:00.060 lab leak theory may 27th oh you were busy that day um we need to talk about anti-semitism among the west's

02:03:09.180 muslims now that's it i mean you're a muslim and you're talking about anti-semitism among muslims so

02:03:14.120 i'm just i'm just sort of saying like you're not you're not afraid to counter program right to sort of

02:03:20.900 go to the place people don't expect you to go yeah and i think i guess it's just because i don't

02:03:25.400 think anyone has a monopoly on truth right like i think that traditionally speaking i mean

02:03:30.860 yeah they're there i i think that there is just so much information out there that

02:03:36.480 thinking that one political faction can give you everything you need it's just it doesn't make any

02:03:41.460 sense right like they're they're obviously going to be there are going to be so many issues where

02:03:46.060 like if i if i just read left-leaning media i don't even know if i would recognize that there

02:03:51.020 were like riots last year enormous riots thousands of businesses destroyed people some people even

02:03:55.820 killed in them i don't know if i even realize those things even existed because left-leaning media

02:04:00.060 almost never talked about it right like i don't know as a phenomenon i would even like intellectually

02:04:05.860 understand that this happened right uh and if i only read right-leaning media i don't know if i'd

02:04:10.740 get a very good sense about like how does health care work and and uh honestly work in like a

02:04:15.760 country like germany or france or japan or or the uk or taiwan like i think there's some issues the

02:04:21.200 right just doesn't engage enough on now i think it's improving in some regards i think senators like

02:04:25.460 josh holly are getting more interested in kind of using uh you know using government and public policy

02:04:31.740 tools to promote the common good and also i think some challengers like jd vance and some people

02:04:37.040 at the more grassroots level like who write at places like the american conservative or the federalist

02:04:41.820 are i think they're getting more interested in that but i i guess my point is that

02:04:45.260 both the right and the left tend to have a lot of insight in particular areas and if you're only

02:04:50.400 reading one side you're gonna you're gonna end up being blind you know like a bird can't fly with

02:04:54.080 one wing right and like i think it's the same principle here and just a note on how that's going

02:05:00.140 for cnn uh their their hard turn they were lifted up like all the other cable channels during trump

02:05:05.440 by trump the ratings machine uh there was a report out this week cnn's most watched show just take

02:05:11.060 tuesday for example was cuomo prime time which notched 873 873 000 total viewers that's nothing

02:05:21.740 he didn't pull a million in households in america on his prime time show and 162 000 in the demo that's

02:05:31.500 the 25 to 54 year old that's the only number that matters because that's what we look at for advertising

02:05:35.800 revenue 162 000 in the demo in prime time i i said this before it's still true we're crushing that

02:05:43.420 here on my podcast and i think there's a reason that no one's going there and by the way fox is

02:05:48.480 down msnbc is way down they're all down but no one's down as low as cnn um people are finding

02:05:53.840 alternative ways of getting their information that don't constantly pit them against one another that

02:05:58.960 don't assume a team jersey that try to bring actual information in an honest way that's not

02:06:03.880 completely colored by ideology i feel like this alternate system is growing and it's working

02:06:09.620 yeah and honestly like when i see the defensiveness about it like i think many people in mainstream

02:06:15.280 media like they don't like joe rogan's show right they think it's terrible it's just some guy riffing

02:06:20.080 he doesn't have editors or fact checkers and all that's true but like right that piece is true what

02:06:25.800 it reminds me of is that um in the early 2000s we had the same kind of backlash against bloggers right

02:06:31.700 like newspapers i i think i remember when huff post got its first question in the white house

02:06:36.660 press uh room like people were laughing at them like mocking the white house for even calling on

02:06:41.720 them now it's like seen as a fairly like you know respectable left-leaning you know news outlet and i

02:06:46.580 think that a lot of this backlash against podcasts against alternative media it's going to be the same

02:06:51.280 way like people are going to initially have their backs up against it and they're going to throw a lot

02:06:56.540 of criticism at it and you know some of the criticism maybe is merited and it'll help those those

02:07:00.080 platforms and those mediums improve but i think that it's just how people tend to react to change

02:07:06.180 right i think they they they find it to be weird and they find it to be disorienting and yeah like

02:07:12.420 rogan's show is interesting because rogan does not claim to be cnn right like rogan correct he he tells

02:07:18.220 you like i'm not here to tell you the news like don't trust my view on politics i'm not here to tell

02:07:21.980 you exactly what to do on covid and i think it's good that he says that because he's not you know an

02:07:25.700 expert in any of those areas or he's not he's an entertainer he's a commentator and an entertainer

02:07:30.140 but he's he's yes he's admitting to you that he hasn't done the fact checking a fact screening

02:07:35.580 but people should think about why is it this man is getting hundreds of millions of people

02:07:40.000 across the world by the way tuning into him listening to a show watching it i think it's

02:07:46.400 because he's just like an average guy trying to figure things out he's not talking down to you he's

02:07:50.560 not kind of something he's extremely open-minded and it finally feels like there's someone out

02:07:55.300 there who's kind of like on the level of the average person kind of trying to move through

02:07:58.800 the world the same way they are right and i think if people understood that he would get a lot less

02:08:03.720 criticism because they're not he's not trying to be jake capper right i don't i don't agree with you

02:08:07.660 i don't agree with you because there are attacks on his you know when he makes a mistake on the fact

02:08:11.180 on the facts it's not really based on that it's based on the fact that he's anti-woke he's he doesn't

02:08:15.740 believe in all these identity politics which you need to if you want to be covered favorably by the

02:08:19.880 mainstream press and they'll never forgive him for that so they'll jump on all of his mistakes and

02:08:25.180 so on as if he's pretending to be lester holt right but i and it's all just a false game but i think

02:08:33.200 the two things are related right the fact that he's an average guy trying to figure things out is the

02:08:37.020 reason why he's anti-woke in a way because to be woke you know like wokeness is like a narrow

02:08:42.800 ideological niche right that has to be constantly reinforced through basically public shaving and

02:08:48.980 conformity inducing procedures and processes and society right like if you're just an average

02:08:55.300 person like talking to people across the political spectrum talking to celebrities and culture and

02:08:59.540 change makers blah blah you can't really be woke right because woke is like it's like a religious

02:09:05.420 formation right it's like it's like a church or something right you're not allowed to be joe rogan

02:09:10.640 when you're doing that so i think you're correct but it also it also like goes into the into the

02:09:16.220 category of where he is basically talking like an average joe uh trying to figure out the world

02:09:21.220 because an average of figuring out the world can't be a militant in a political movement it's certainly

02:09:26.640 not one as militant as wokeness so well and i also think you know we just had dennis prager on talking

02:09:31.680 about meaning in one's life and how these sort of elitist it tends to be rich you know hollywood

02:09:37.180 people or news people whatever they don't have a lot of meaning they've gotten rid of religion in

02:09:40.200 their lives right they um they don't have to work that hard right it's not like that the woman to your

02:09:44.680 point earlier who suffered domestic violence and is working two jobs to put meals on the table she

02:09:48.640 doesn't have time to worry about this bs she's got real problems to worry about right she doesn't have

02:09:53.020 too much time on her hands and joe rogan lives a full life not only you know in his interests that

02:09:58.240 he talks about all the time mma and all that stuff but he's interviewing really interesting people you

02:10:02.900 know i'm i feel like i have the privilege of doing that now too it keeps you busy keeps your mind in a

02:10:07.540 in a healthy place as opposed to somebody who's got nothing to do other than think about other

02:10:12.620 people's failings and as you as you say uh conduct conformity inducing procedures on others which

02:10:19.040 really captures the unpleasantness of being subjected to the woke yeah i mean i think this this point about

02:10:25.800 religion i i think you know john mcwater makes this point there's other people who make this point

02:10:30.220 um and i don't want to make it disparagingly because you know i come from a religious background

02:10:33.900 myself i i wouldn't say i'm super religious today but i'm also not secular i'm probably more in the

02:10:39.060 middle um but i think that being given that foundation by like my parents by my family by

02:10:46.660 community was really really helpful to prevent something else from sub from subsuming it or

02:10:52.580 something from replacing it that would be similar to something like political fanaticism right because

02:10:57.520 i think political fanaticism is basically there to fill a hole in somebody right if somebody doesn't

02:11:03.200 have a sense of meaning a sense of belonging family ties social ties i think thinking that they are a

02:11:11.100 militant for a cause or even a martyr for a cause can be a very like hopeful or meaningful thing to

02:11:16.080 them i honestly i'm not i'm not saying woke people are isis so no one say i said that but like a lot of

02:11:20.720 the people in the west who are like educated wealthy muslims who went to syria who went to iraq to join

02:11:27.540 isis i think a lot of them just felt like they didn't have meaning in their life otherwise right

02:11:32.460 they felt alienated in some way right so they and i think there's always been particularly young people

02:11:37.460 throughout society who have joined things like cults right or who have joined these kind of mass

02:11:43.260 revivals religious religious movements uh because they felt like they needed something to drive them

02:11:48.960 right and i think that the rapid secularization of the united states particularly among upper class people

02:11:55.380 particularly among probably more white people uh than other people which is why so much of wokeness

02:12:01.320 is upper class white liberals um i think that's that's created a big hole in a lot of people and

02:12:05.820 i understand why people are trying to go and fill it with something i think having this idea that like

02:12:10.400 the united the united states is one long struggle against like white supremacy right like that's and that

02:12:15.260 we need to be part of this struggle and we need to like shed our guilt and we need to be constantly

02:12:19.800 agitating and mobilizing to do something about this problem as it manifests in

02:12:25.380 every single part of our society in our lives i think it really does give someone some drive or

02:12:31.400 some kind of mission in life that maybe in the past maybe going to church or being active in their

02:12:37.320 community in some way could have done and i totally understand it and i'm sympathetic to somebody who's

02:12:42.460 jumped into this because they didn't have anything else right even if i'm not sympathetic to the

02:12:46.840 ideology i find the ideology be very corrosive and sectarian but if i i'm sympathetic to the person i

02:12:51.640 understand why they're doing it i know that you live it because i know you're you're part of this

02:12:57.300 fair uh organization that i am too and i encourage everybody to check out because we need sort of a

02:13:01.880 central repository for fighting back against some of this madness and it's a bipartisan group that i'm

02:13:06.940 very proud to be associated with i think what we're building over there is really special and it's

02:13:11.200 going to have a huge impact and be and while while you're online searching for fair for all.org um you

02:13:17.760 should also go and check out zed's inquire more sub stack uh which i highly recommend to you and read

02:13:24.340 anything that zed jelani writes because whether it's on twitter or it's on your sub stack it's always

02:13:28.100 thoughtful reasonable well informed and i know a lot of our audience is looking for that from the left

02:13:34.260 they want they want different inputs right they don't want to just have all affirming views

02:13:38.240 you're a great guy for it thank you for being here thanks began it was a great time

02:13:42.140 all right don't forget to subscribe to the show go there subscribe and leave a five-star review and

02:13:51.840 leave a comment would you i love to read the comments i am reading them they're so fun and i'd love to know

02:13:56.780 what you think about that crazy ass vanity fair report i'm just like i'm just so fired up about it i

02:14:03.760 just it's such a shameful moment in american journalism anyway go ahead and do that and

02:14:08.240 don't forget our to tune into our next show where we have a jam-packed day of news for you we've got

02:14:13.200 some really smart news people who are going to come on and break down for you what is happening in

02:14:16.560 this country don't miss it five stars see you then thanks for listening to the megan kelly show

02:14:21.880 no bs no agenda and no fear the megan kelly show is a devil may care media production

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02:14:31.380 you

The Megyn Kelly Show - June 07, 2021

Zaid Jilani and Andy Ngo on COVID Truth and Censorship, Antifa's Tactics, and Failings of the Corporate Media ｜ Ep. 112

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