PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Dan defends Chud the Builder (Badly？)
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
19
sentences flagged
Toxicity
42
sentences flagged
Hate speech
50
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of Brokonomics, I was invited to debate Chud the Builder on a US-level show, and I was rather self-critical of myself for my performance. This episode is a self-criticism of how we debate the left on ground that they are very comfortable on, and how we can do better.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Brokonomics. Now in this episode I wanted to be rather self-critical
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because, you see, I recently accepted an invitation to go on to a US-level show
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talking about Chud the Builder, and I mean, I'll play you the clip. I'm quite critical of my
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performance here because I think that if you are already on the right and you're familiar with what
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I'm talking about, you're probably going to think, oh yeah, that was fine. I don't think I run over
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many people who would have started out critical of this or many neutral observers. So actually
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what I wanted to do is I wanted to analyse debate in a hostile environment and I'm going to use my
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case here as an example of it because I wanted to learn from this so I can do better next time
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but also just kind of get into the underlying points but more than anything I think this is
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going to be something about how do you debate the left on ground that they're very comfortable on
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because that's something, us on the right, we must always be holding ourselves to the highest
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standards because we simply don't get the advantages that left-leaning media does.
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They evolve in a world where all of these talking points are just assumed. They're inculcated in
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the education system in the media and so we need to hold ourselves to the highest standard when
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debating with these people. So what I will give you is my editor will put in the actual
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exchange and judge for yourselves and then we come back and we look at what worked and what
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didn't work and and how we can debate with the left better on these things now i i didn't know
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who brad was going into this i i just got the invitation and okay fairly big channel fine um
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i'm really busy at work i'll do my hour and a half drive back to winchester and as soon as i jump on
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the call so i'm kind of tired and i don't really know what i'm walking into but uh but no should
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have done better so uh yeah watch this and then we will uh then we'll analyze it all right joining
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me now we've got the right-wing british commentator dan tubb from the lotus eaters podcast dan thanks
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for coming on the show well thank you for having me brad absolutely i'm this is the point of the
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show is to hash out different perspectives and have dialogue even on uh contentious issues and
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i will say your commentary on this had me scratching my head you on twitter you compared
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chud the builder to our generation's rosa parks absolutely you've said that you back him completely
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i listen i i gotta tell you i find that to be um perplexing but here's so here's where i'd like
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to start before we get into the specifics of this instance for which he's been charged
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with a crime let's just talk about him in general so this is a guy who is a nuisance streamer he
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goes out live streaming in public and causes a scene,
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calls them the N-word, slurs, tries to provoke a reaction.
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To me, that seems like just a despicable thing to do.
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I mean, I'll admit I hadn't seen him until a few days ago
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when the controversy popped up and I looked at some of his stuff.
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And generally, you find he's meeting people where they are.
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If black people are talking to him and they're perfectly respectful,
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what he does is if he sees them acting out of line which for whatever reason i don't know why
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but doesn't seem to take very long you know say they're parking in the wrong place or behaving
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badly he calls it out and then and then the energy that he's met with is what he responds with
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so you so i listen i've seen a fair bit of his content i can't say i watch hours and hours and
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hours of his stream but i have seen him have minor altercations with black people and just
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start dropping the n-word with the hard r and that seems to me wildly antagonistic and
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inappropriate just like a cruel thing to do to random strangers because they parked wrong or
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something um okay so i mean yeah if you're going to be blocking fire exits and just generally
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behaving in a way that you would you you would not yourself i mean the essential question here
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is everybody going to be held to the same standard because i can tell you i would absolutely call
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somebody out if i i do if i see somebody who's perfectly able parking in a disabled bay i call
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it out if i see somebody blocking a fire exit on a building would you call them a slur call it out
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would you call them that word well it's not really an issue in the area that i live because it's
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almost an exclusively white area but yeah i think i if i would call out anyone who who behaves badly
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okay but you're not are you calling out the behavior they're doing wrong like hey asshole
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you're parked in a disabled spot or are you saying why are you parked in a disabled part
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disabled spot slur like that's the i don't understand that why wouldn't you attack the
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thing they're doing rather than just start attacking their identity in racist ways well i
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think i think it does and look if if they are going to act aggressively towards him but you
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have to understand this is not happening in isolation this is this is not uh this is not
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an incident that has come out of nowhere the reason that we're in this situation is because
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there is a massive double standard applied to whites behavior that we would not get away with
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Yeah, I mean, let's look at this particular incident.
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He'd driven for an hour to be there to cause a confrontation.
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There was a lot of assumption that this incident occurred
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because Chud was going around being obnoxious
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No, this guy had driven for an hour to be there
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I mean, we've seen some of the stuff that's come out.
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So you can't tell what happened in the aftermath.
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The arrest warrant says that he escalated the confrontation
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if the stuff that I've seen is completely wrong,
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saying that, yeah, he's got cuts and abusions on his head.
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but that doesn't tell you who started the fight.
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then absolutely, yeah, he should go to jail.
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is that this guy assaulted him, he attacked him.
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Well, because we've seen what this guy has put out.
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And look, if it turns out all of that is an AI fabrication,
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suggests that this guy was there to provoke a confrontation
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and then the other guy pulled a gun and shot him.
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The problem is that we are held to separate standards.
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At a minimum, we should be held to the same standard,
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I don't think we actually know that this guy just started punching him
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and there is surveillance video that will be introduced at trial
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but I get what you're saying about if this guy came and instigated a conflict with Chud
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that would be you know a sign that he was part of the problem so the flip side there though
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is that Chud very clearly was going into these situations looking to antagonize and start a
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fight where he could kill someone so here's a tweet from Chud on May 7th so just a few days
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before this happened the series finale is a dead on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I
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walk free stay tuned so that's going to undercut any claim of self-defense because clearly this
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streamer was going around looking for a fight to escalate so he could kill someone that's not what
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self-defense as a legal mechanism exists to serve yeah look and i agree he's almost certainly going
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to go for jail for a very long time like derek chauvin did even though derek chauvin didn't do
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anything wrong he followed procedures exactly in the court it was emerged that okay even the
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prosecution agreed that he did well okay that's a whole separate issue let's not go down that
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rabbit hole no he's no it is the central issue the central issue is that people are held to a
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different standard across the the first world and if you're white you are held to a simply higher
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standard i mean you can see this in the bail conditions you got you can see it in the fact
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how so well that it's five times larger than the largest fine for a similar case uh do you know
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why that would be though there's actually a totally non-racial reason than the average
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so the reason is that the reason for that has nothing to do with race it's because he was
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already released on bond from another arrest and charged just days before and when you're on bond
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then violate the terms of your release they hit you with an extra large bond to keep you in prison
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it has nothing to do with him being white you're just pushing race identity victim nonsense
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okay and do you do is it your position that white people are treated exactly the same under the
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legal system? I don't think there's systemic discrimination against white people in America.
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Okay, well, I can understand why you're coming from that then, because there clearly is.
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Like, what's okay, based on what? Well, judged on the behavior of the legal system.
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You know, it's not just in your nation, it happens in my nation as well. So, I mean,
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just a few days ago, the video that you referred to earlier when I talked about Chad the Builder,
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there was a guy in Southampton, not far from where I live. He was a young 18-year-old
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university student who was walking home a couple of indian guys aggressed on him uh they stabbed
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him um and then when the police turned up the indian guys who were who were older and bigger
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than him um they told the police that he had been racist so what they did the police did is they put
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him in handcuffs and they watched him drown in his own blood on the floor after having been stabbed
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there is there is this that's horrible but that's an anecdote in the uk doesn't is not
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Yeah, and you get these anecdotes every single day.
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You see quite often black criminals let off
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I mean, there are hundreds of these examples
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But that isn't because they're black that they're let off.
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because what he is doing is he is pushing boundaries.
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and he might have killed the person unjustifiably,
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okay, if a completely different set of events had transpired,
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if it turns out he did something completely different
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I'm not saying that, you know, there are no circumstances
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What I'm saying is that there is a separate legal standard
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and that white people are held to a radically higher standard.
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And the legal system needs to start treating people fairly.
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the reason that I compare him to Rosa Parks,
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She was resisting racial apartheid in America.
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American name's Romeo. We don't get a lot of those around here.
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So he's resisting a non-existent racial apartheid
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by going around calling random black people
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monkeys and chimps and calling them the N-word.
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Okay, but it's not freaking Rosa Parks' civil rights error.
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Even if you think there was some systemic bias against white people in the criminal justice system, which I actually think data indicates the opposite.
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But even if I granted you that, you can't actually seriously suggest it's remotely comparable to a system of Jim Crow segregation we had here in America with separate drinking fountains sitting at the back of the bus.
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You're seriously making a comparison there, not ironically.
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I would rather have to drink out of a separate water fountain
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and therefore they don't need to be treated the same.
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Yeah, and she went out and she did it to provoke people.
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Well, to protest a system of racial apartheid
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think that's comparable to white people calling black people racial slurs them using it for each
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other now so it's fundamentally different is it yes yeah the meaning of insignificance of words
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is different based on context and social relations yeah now look i i don't go around saying that
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because i'm generally quite a polite guy but so you did say you might if somebody's in your parking
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spa or in a disabled parking spot uh well i don't know if i'd go there but the point is i would call
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people and i do i do call out people if i see them misbehaving if i see them doing something
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But don't hide behind the, I'm just quoting him.
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I mean, as long as it's descriptive to the point.
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you talked about the, you pushed back on my idea
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that whites are treated differently in the legal system.
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That's because of a propensity to criminality.
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Well, so even when white and black people are charged with similar crimes or the same crime,
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there's disproportionate sentencing and criminal justice outcomes in a way that is worse for black people.
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In the U.S. criminal justice system, I really can't speak to the U.K., to be clear.
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I'm familiar with the U.S. system of criminal justice.
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And I think it's often overblown by progressives who want to claim America as like an evil, dystopianly racist society.
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But there is some evidence for sure supporting the idea that, if anything, the U.S. criminal justice system treats black people disproportionately worse.
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There's really no statistical evidence that white people get harsher sentences for the same crime or anything like that.
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well look um i i can't speak to the rest of those uh those statistics or the people who compile
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them because quite often this is very agenda driven and it's incredibly easy to manipulate
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statistics all i can tell you is that every day i see examples of um you know and you and you might
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say is anecdote but no it's pattern recognition it's an echo chamber you're on twitter and you
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see the same videos because you engage with them when you see them a black person behaving badly
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I've been podcasting for about four or five years now,
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oh, this left-wing organization has produced these statistics
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But I'm just telling you, I see a pattern here.
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A couple final things I want to get your thoughts on real quick.
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If your mom parks in the disabled parking spot at the grocery store
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because she's just being lazy and I see her behaving badly,
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I can call her a fat s*** and that's fine.
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no i don't think really think that is fine but look my mother but earlier you said
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he could that was justification for calling black people the n-word uh no uh the the cases i'm
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talking about is when you get some you know 20 year old kid turn up and he and he bounces out
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of it with his baseball cap on backwards he's clearly not disabled the direction of the
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I don't know what you're driving at there Brad but no
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look the videos i've seen of him that that is not what's happening he he he which you admit is not
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that much and then and then they get up in his face they get aggressive uh and actually most of
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the time they're using that word that you don't like before he does okay that's not the same so
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let me put this in context right i so i'm i'm a gay person which is obviously not relevant to this
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conversation another one of my good friends who i make content with is also gay if we jokingly
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call each other a f**k, that is obviously very different than if a person corners me in the
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street when I'm with my husband or boyfriend and starts screaming at me, I'm a disgusting
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f**k. You understand the context and the in-group, out-group does make the word use different.
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And that's not some like double standard. It's just how language works.
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Screaming anything at anybody in the street is not a particularly good idea. But, you know,
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To give the example, if you were behaving poorly in public
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and you got up in their face and you're getting aggressive
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and you're screaming and you start screaming that at them
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and they scream it back to you, I mean, this is an argument.
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No, look, let's go back to the Rosa Parks thing.
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She went out in order to provoke a reaction
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There are apparently 10 statues of Rosa Parks across the US.
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You're just being antagonistic, and that's fine,
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but I will support his free speech right to be an asshole,
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and I will support yours to be a contrarian.
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if somebody has jumped on you and is punching you,
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But if somebody jumps on you and starts punching you,
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But we have no reason to believe that's what happened.
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We have no reason to not believe that's what happened,
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Well, I do appreciate the spirited conversation.
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so there you have it that was the uh exchange you know judge for yourselves how you think i did on
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that one honestly i think it did better as as spectacle uh than it did as sort of the the
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technicals of debate so i think i did land my core frame repeatedly that is you know two-tier
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justice and its unequal behavioral standards and chud as a boundary pusher um self-defense not yes
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not yet disproven um but brad what he did do he was able to largely control the the moral camera
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angle you know he kept dragging away from you know systematic double standards into are you
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personally endorsing racist slurs and he he was quite skilled in in getting me to try and defend
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the least defensible surface level version of the argument okay now i think my my my biggest
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technical weakness was not being as extreme it was it was imprecisely using the extremes so you know
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the Rosa Parks comparison it's high impact but I should have defined it more narrowly so you know
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I'm not comparing moral stature or virtue and it would be impossible to do that with a left-wing
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crowd anyway. What I'm comparing is tactics and deliberately breaching taboos or rules that expose
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unequal enforcement. Now without that narrowing Brad was successfully able to make me appear as
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if i was saying you know chud equals rosa parks morally and that is the easier version to ridicule
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if you are on the left especially if you're starting from the left what did work bigging
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myself up a bit what did work is uh no collapse under more pressure you know he he repeated he
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repeatedly tried to get me to you know force me to disavow um you know the despicable racist guy
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say it with your chest. And I just wasn't giving him any ground on any of that.
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My strongest pivot was probably the essential question here, is everybody going to be held to
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the same standard? And that should have been my home base. Every exchange should have returned
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there. What I also did is I created the broader frame. So Brad wanted me to stay trapped in Chud
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as an individual. And I tried to move to what behavior gets tolerated, what behavior gets
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punished who gets the benefit of the doubt who gets made an example of and i think that was the
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right move and to an extent i exposed brad's asymmetry so you know the moment where brad says
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that the you know black in-group preference is is different because of context and social relations
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he did give me a clean opening there and you know he he conceded the entire debate essentially at
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that point because it's not about neutral rules it's about identity weighted language norms now
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if I come into that and said good so you agree that speech is being ranked by group status
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and my argument is that law and media interpretation bait framing and social punishment
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is increasingly operating the same way and instead I let it stay on the narrow point of the
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slur etiquette which which was a tactical mistake now where he boxed me in is is he used he very
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much wanted to focus on the specific case and he wanted to use it as as a trap against my
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systematic frame so i wanted to argue that this case sits within a wider pattern whereas he wanted
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to argue did did this individual say slurs did he provoke people uh and then did he shoot somebody
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so he kept collapsing the system into individual contact and where I gave system claims without
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hard proof ready to hand because you know like I didn't know what I was walking into
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I wasn't going to court or anything you know he labeled it as as anecdotal and I kind of needed
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a clearer bifurcation there I should have said there's two questions one did Chud commit a crime
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in this incident I don't know because I wasn't there you don't know because you weren't there
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on the basis of everything i've seen no that's not the case to two why is he being symbolically
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treated as a civilizational level menace while comparable or as is often the case much much worse
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violent offenders are processed without this moral intensity and that second question is what i'm here
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to discuss and if i'd done that i would have denied his ability to make every answer hinge on whether
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chud personally behaved well like i said i wasn't going into court so you know i i didn't have a
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whole stack of papers with with you know counterpoints and examples you know and and i said
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okay he jumped on top of him and started punching him and and brad immediately pushed to you know
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how do you know that that was a bit of loss of epistemic authority really but i wasn't there
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nor's brad um i i i believe every account of what actually happened i mean is it so hard to believe
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that a uh a um a black criminal um with psychosis who is on the record as saying yeah i'm going to
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go after this guy uh attacked him jumped on top of him and punched him i mean it's not it's not
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really a stretch is it but fine i could have gone with something a bit stronger something like you
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know okay fine the you know the public record is incomplete but my my reading of this is the man's
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appears to have gone there seeking a confrontation and look if there's unreleased footage and i
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believe there is um that is going to be presented to the court at some point if the unreleased
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footage shows that chard initiated deadly force i mean if if chard just went oh look there's a
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black man walked over and shot him sure guy deserves to go to jail for a long time right
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but my point is that the the public moral verdict is being issued before the evidence
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is exactly the double standard problem i'm talking about and that would have sounded stronger because
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it's more conditional the derrick chauvin detour i think that would have only really appealed to
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people who already agreed because actually people on the left probably still do think that derrick
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chauvin um murdered george floyd that he he knelt on his neck that's not true we know we know now
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that i mean even the as i mentioned even the prosecution agreed he did not have the knee on
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the neck he had the knee on the shoulder when you see the second video angle that's actually very
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clear and george floyd died of fentanyl poisoning but i think the rule here because bear in mind
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i'm i'm i'm speaking to the left here is is not to open a second radioactive case unless it
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directly advances what it is that i'm trying to argue so that was probably a bad detail i think
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I have to admit that and the the pattern recognition answer I mean it's true like it could
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have been stronger against a statistical challenge because probably his best bit was the exchange
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where he says well your your examples are anecdotes and and they're possibly algorithmically enforced
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and I'm just saying well look I've I've seen literally hundreds of examples and I'm noticing
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a pattern now every right ringer is going to hear that and be like yeah yeah that's true but i could
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have taken it up a level i could have said look the thing that i'm pointing at is irrespective of
00:28:03.980
you know whatever your statistics maybe they're right maybe they're fine whatever the thing that
00:28:08.020
i'm pointing to is not just sentencing tables it's it's the discretionary leniency you know
00:28:14.860
The charging choices, the media amplification, the bail decisions, the prosecutor's ambition,
00:28:24.480
the institutional fear, and whether the officials are terrified of racial optics.
00:28:32.920
That would have been much harder to swat away, and that would have uprated my point significantly.
00:28:41.380
you know his analogy was effectively because it converted an abstract slur into a you know a
00:28:47.220
personal insult against my mother and i answered you mainly and said i don't think that's fine
0.69
00:28:51.720
but really the premise there is ridiculous because my mother does not chimp out you know she she
00:28:59.780
doesn't i mean for a start she doesn't park blocking fire exits and park in disabled bays
00:29:06.180
and she just doesn't act badly in public so it's it's it's just not an issue and and and i can tell
00:29:13.120
you what would happen if she did park in a disabled bay and somebody pointed it out or or stared at
00:29:17.880
her uh you know as you know a video that i recently saw chud the builder he stands there staring at
00:29:24.500
these group of young black guys because they parked um blocking a fire exit outside a shop
00:29:29.560
in a clearly marked area you know don't park here and he just stares at them and they get out and
00:29:34.560
they start shouting and screaming at him and you know as chad would say uh or i should say my chest
00:29:41.720
um chimping out things my mother wouldn't do that and and if you did and if you did point out that
00:29:47.680
she'd done that she'd be like oh i'm so terribly sorry i'll move it at once so it's not really an
00:29:52.500
issue she just doesn't chimp out i mean that that's the that's the underlying um issue but
00:29:57.740
it would have he his point might have sounded good there because he managed to get me to retreat a
00:30:01.560
it because I was flummoxed by the juxtaposition of poorly behaved individuals who are hyper
00:30:10.700
aggressive to my little old dear mum. Not a comparison that really makes sense.
00:30:18.900
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