Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of gender equality, has died at 87. Her death was announced by the Supreme Court, which said in a statement that she died after a battle with colon cancer. We have a lot to talk about.
00:01:48.000We are less than two months away from one of the most important presidential elections probably ever, I mean at least for us in our lifetime, and this dropped just right now.
00:02:00.000So it's hard to know who this is going to energize more, Republicans or Democrats, but we have a lot to break down and we'll figure it out.
00:02:08.000So we are lucky to be joined by political commentator Drew Holden, the spooler of threads on Twitter.
00:02:14.000You have a bunch of insightful threads talking about various political issues.
00:02:18.000And so we were just going to talk regular news.
00:02:20.000We were like it'd be really great to have Drew.
00:02:23.000I've shared your threads on Twitter before.
00:02:56.000If you think this is a good show, an important stream, please share.
00:02:58.000Of course, we're joined also by At Sour Patch Lids, the producer, and we have I'll just say it for the millionth time, a lot to go through.
00:03:07.000So let me just, we'll do the news first and foremost, and then we're going to start breaking this down.
00:03:11.000From NPR, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, champion of gender equality, dies at 87.
00:03:17.000I'm going to show you her dying wish, that NPR has included, that I was shocked to hear.
00:03:26.000According to NPR, they say just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter, Clara Spera.
00:03:34.000Quote, my most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.
00:04:10.000They say, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural, and feminist icon, has died.
00:04:16.000The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from cancer.
00:04:21.000Architect of the legal fight for women's rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member.
00:04:29.000Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political
00:04:34.000battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight
00:05:01.000Though he has a consistently conservative record on most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones, this year casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to at least temporarily protect the so-called Dreamers from deportation by the Trump administration.
00:05:17.000To uphold a major abortion precedent and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.
00:05:24.000But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.
00:05:28.000Now, the most important thing that needs to be mentioned as we enter an election cycle that will likely be disputed is that the Supreme Court now skews conservative, very likely meaning, if we go to a contested election and the court must decide, I think they're gonna side with Trump.
00:05:50.000Well, I'm a bit... Look, we got 50 billion stories here.
00:06:00.000Let me just ask you right away, just off of your general reaction, both you guys, let's just get into it.
00:06:06.000Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, obviously, prayers are with her family in the repose of her soul, and, you know, she's been battling cancer for a long time, and I think NPR hit the nail on the head when they talked about her being a cultural icon, right?
00:06:17.000And I don't think I'm going to blow anyone's mind when I say that I don't necessarily agree with the sorts of things she stood for to be a cultural icon, but I think it's important to recognize that she is.
00:06:25.000And I mean, I think this is, you know, we chatted about it a little bit before the show, but this is going to be an enormous gut punch to millions and millions of people across the country.
00:06:33.000And I think for a lot of people, that'll be the cultural import.
00:06:37.000I think one of the biggest things that Mike had overlooked here is, if there are people who don't believe in the integrity of the Supreme Court as a result of her leaving, which I think a lot of people wrongfully will, we're going to have to deal with that on Election Day.
00:07:38.000And I mean, I think we, you know, you can come into it to the election and say, hey, even if you even if you're someone who is worried about it, then at least we've got the Supreme Court to be able to moderate this thing.
00:07:46.000And now we don't know that we'll have the numbers.
00:07:48.000And if we do have the numbers, you're right.
00:07:50.000Like we we saw how upset people were in 2016.
00:07:54.000And now imagine all of those people not only are upset, but they're also thinking that the results of the election are illegitimate and that they're not fair.
00:08:00.000And that, of course, it's Donald Trump's fault.
00:08:50.000I don't think it would because they lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:08:54.000But Roberts... Roberts could go liberal.
00:08:57.000And I think conservatives have learned their lesson time and time again that Roberts is not some sort of stalwart conservative that we should put our faith in.
00:09:05.000Could you imagine if it finally goes to the court and they go 4-4 on this?
00:09:35.000So for those that aren't familiar, a group called Adbusters, the magazine, had put out a call for... It was a 50 days of protest called the White House siege in front of the White House.
00:10:58.000What did you say, the writers of 2020 were bold to put this right before the election?
00:11:02.000It's like, you gotta reign in the audience a little bit more, right?
00:11:06.000We've got the election coming up, we're not even into December, and if you're gonna throw something that big out, already knowing you've got a planned election coming up in one of your episodes in the future, the writers are ham-fisted at this point in my book.
00:11:16.000No, I kind of feel like it's Game of Thrones early season-worthy, where you're watching and all of a sudden you're like, no way, they just killed...
00:12:12.000Yeah, she was hospitalized, I think once, maybe a couple times.
00:12:14.000I was impressed with the sheer willpower and as much as, like you mentioned, you know, look, we don't have to agree with her politically.
00:12:19.000In fact, we can very much disagree and be worried about her politics.
00:12:23.000But I think, you know, look, we are Americans first and foremost, and that sheer willpower to try and stand throughout the election was impressive.
00:12:33.000You know, I know a lot of people are probably happy that Trump will not get to make an appointment, but I hope people recognize we can be, you know, sad to see her go and prayers and respect to her family and all that while still being like, Okay, you know, without reveling in that, you know, we're looking to the future and what's going to come next.
00:12:50.000And already we're seeing a lot of photos popping up of who comes next.
00:13:19.000We gotta be careful because we are gonna have a lot of laughter going on here at the expense of many of the people on the left.
00:13:25.000And I want to, you know, just say it's like, you know, it's not at the expense of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in any capacity, but seeing the reaction now, nearly, what, 2.7 million tweets of no, no, no, what did you just say?
00:13:37.000It was like, it's like Hillary Clinton election night all over again.
00:13:39.000Yeah, it's going to be that times a thousand, right?
00:13:42.000It's going to be the, I'm sure you all remember that image of the individual wailing at the sky, right?
00:13:54.000But it's gonna be that, and I mean, you know, we were talking before, like, it feels almost a little bit crass to have to dive into what the political implications of this are, but the political implications are enormous.
00:14:05.000You can't escape them, especially with, what, 46 days to the election?
00:14:09.000Who did Trump—Trump chose a handful of people for his new list, and he included—I know he chose Tom Cotton, because I'm going to mention his quote in a second.
00:14:17.000But do you know who some of the other picks were?
00:14:19.000Yeah, so Comey Barrett, I think, was on the list.
00:14:22.000Mike Lee from Utah, I believe, was on the list.
00:14:24.000There's one other senator, I think, as well.
00:14:28.000It was Cruz, who, in his own respect, is a pretty impressive constitutional law scholar, by all indications.
00:14:35.000It's complicated because they're political, right?
00:14:36.000But they're people with serious, at least legal bona fides, if not judicial bona fides.
00:14:42.000And then there were a number of other people on there who I think are circuit court judges.
00:14:46.000And then there were a few, I think there was a big push among a lot of conservative legal advocates who were fighting for Clarence Thomas clerks.
00:14:53.000Right people like there's there was a big push after especially after you know Gorsuch I think had made a couple of decisions that folks didn't like Kavanaugh's made a couple decisions people didn't like and so there's been a big push by a lot of a lot of the legal talking heads in DC to say you know what the only one we can trust is Clarence Thomas and the only people we should be putting on this list is our people who have clerked for him.
00:15:12.000So, a lot of people think he's going to choose Amy Coney Barrett, and I think—I would have to say so.
00:15:18.000Now, before we get into it, we can actually pull up some information about her because, again, people think it will be her.
00:15:24.000He selected—one of the people on his shortlist was Tom Cotton.
00:15:28.000And then we saw, I think, some of these other people said, I appreciate it, I have no interest in leaving the Senate.
00:16:13.000And they set up a Senate confirmation within a month of the election.
00:16:18.000It's impossible to overstate what that would look like.
00:16:22.000I'm scared to say what I think it would result in.
00:16:25.000And don't forget, Tom Cotton is persona non grata enough to the left that when he wrote an op-ed Voicing an opinion that is shared by almost 60% of Americans you had the guy who runs the op-ed page resign and you had a you had a Staff revolt.
00:16:41.000Yeah, you had a staff revolt not just at the New York Times, but everywhere There are other people who backed him up who lost their jobs, right?
00:16:47.000It's it rolled journalism in an insane way.
00:16:49.000That was over an op-ed Take a look at this from the hill Tom Cotton, after Trump names him potential Supreme Court nominee, quote, it's time for Roe v. Wade to go, 100, I'm estimating, but it's 100, I'm rounding up, 110,000 shares on the Hill from September 9th.
00:17:05.000I gotta say, man, when you make a joke about the 2020 season writers, you mean to tell me that Donald Trump put out a list a week ago where the guy said Roe v. Wade's out, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies a week later, If he picks this dude, and the Supreme Court is split 4-4 with Roberts siding with the Liberals against Trump, and there's no clear winner and no way to resolve this, this is an existential crisis for this country, man.
00:17:30.000And this is an existential crisis if everything goes well between now and then.
00:17:34.000I think one of the things that, unfortunately, we haven't always done a great job of in 2020 is recognizing that it always gets worse, right?
00:17:41.000It only gets worse and deeper in ways we don't understand or expect.
00:17:44.000What if coronavirus comes back worse in the fall and the winter?
00:18:22.000As soon as we wrap up this show, we're hopping in a car, driving for several hours.
00:18:26.000And I'm going to wake up at the new facility.
00:18:28.000We're going to start setting up the new studio because I do not want to be anywhere near these cities.
00:18:33.000And after, look, we can talk about Antifa, we can talk about the Proud Boys, and I lived in New York, people were planting bombs, like, there was just crazy people.
00:18:40.000So I wanted to get away from these cities as the political tensions flared up.
00:18:43.000But this is the sharpest spike in emotional shock we have seen in the entire year.
00:18:50.000Like, everybody knew it was coming, it was a time bomb, and now it's dropped.
00:18:54.000And it dropped a week after Tom Cotton said... It's insane.
00:18:58.000I'm telling you, if you were writing 2020 as a show and all you were trying to do is freak your show watchers out, that's what you would do.
00:19:04.000I mean, I don't know what you would do different.
00:19:06.000And one of the other problems of the two is it comes at a time when people are already emotionally frayed.
00:20:18.000i was i was like a former o c actress from the tv show yeah i have a port of
00:20:23.000And I was like we're gonna have a fun conversation about like walk away and like never Trump or and stuff and but but here check this out this is what's this is what's happened so over on Twitter we have the trending tab Number one is Rip Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:20:49.000And then Puerto Rico, which is still big news, and then it goes to Rosh Hashanah and a bunch of other things, but then it goes back to Murkowski.
00:20:54.000Anyway, the point is, look, Tom Cotton's trending, Roe v. Wade is trending.
00:20:58.000No, no, no, with now nearly 3 million tweets is trending.
00:22:11.000And that's the thing, too, is I think if if it were more normal times, right, and potentially with a more normal president, I think what we would all be saying right, left, center is Oh God, we can't go into this election without a full Supreme Court.
00:22:45.000And a lot of people think that it's going to end up in the courts with lawsuits about various elections and that will ultimately lead to the Supreme Court and we'll have to go fast because there's a deadline.
00:22:54.000So at least according to one of the sources I was reading on Potentials, they say the deadline I think is like December 14th.
00:23:12.000If we do not have a full court, and it could potentially go 4-4, then this country is going to face the worst crisis it's faced in 100 plus years.
00:23:22.000And even if everything goes well, it could be a unanimous court and it would still be a crisis, right?
00:23:26.000And I think one of the important things to keep in mind for the election is it really is 50 different simultaneous elections that go on simultaneously under their own different set of rules, right?
00:23:34.000We're talking about Pennsylvania throwing out the signature verification.
00:23:38.000So you have all of these different kind of minute factors of the law that are all legal challenges that could all get fast-tracked.
00:23:44.000And so just the number of cases that could spin out, the amount of energy that would have to go into this is enormous.
00:23:49.000What if we come out of election day, we're three or four days post, and we don't know because of mail-in irregularities or whatever it is, we don't know who won Florida, we don't know who won Pennsylvania, and I don't know, we don't know who won Wisconsin.
00:24:01.000Could that be... So when we've talked about civil war, and I gotta preface this by saying I know there's a lot of people who are like, they roll their eyes when it's brought up.
00:24:10.000But I'm not the one who first... I didn't come up with this idea.
00:24:13.000I was reading a national security article from I think the Atlantic talking about the violence in the streets, the escalation of tensions following Donald Trump's victory, and the potential for civil war.
00:24:35.000And I said, but that's not a traditional civil war like we've seen with other countries around the world, where there's pockets that are in alignment and then they move around and then slowly try and take over one city, or where they just wage a war on the capital until they win control of the centralized government.
00:24:51.000I wonder if that scenario you just brought up would be that state dividing line.
00:24:55.000Because we have a lot of swing states that have... I shouldn't say a lot, but there's a couple where they have a Democratic governor, but a Republican legislature.
00:25:47.000However, what happens when Joe Biden loses the electoral college but wins the popular vote by 10 points?
00:25:54.000Then you're gonna see these Democrat governors in the swing states be like, well, we did vote for, you know, Trump in our state, but the popular vote of the country is more, you know.
00:26:04.000More important, because the swing is too high, you'll end up with some people saying, we know Trump won the Electoral College, but this is too big of a popular vote swing, we will not be ruled by a minority.
00:26:14.000And then the Republicans and Trump are gonna say, these are the rules, and this is what we all agreed to, and then...
00:26:21.000All of a sudden, you have some kind of civil war.
00:26:24.000But I think, so two thoughts come to me.
00:26:25.000The first is, I think the response from the left will be, yeah, well, we agreed to these rules hundreds of years ago when there was still slavery, right?
00:26:32.000That's always the pushback on the Electoral College.
00:26:34.000And there's a side of me that's like, okay, I get it.
00:26:36.000We have a living, breathing constitutional document.
00:26:38.000It's meant to change, all that kind of stuff.
00:26:39.000But there's a lot of things you have to go through to change things in this country.
00:26:42.000And I think, on the whole, that's probably for the best, Electoral College included.
00:26:46.000But getting back to your Civil War model, I read something the other day that was really, really interesting that looked at it, that talked about it less as a traditional Civil War, even in the sense of two standing armies, even if it's not north-south, but like even look at a place like Libya, right?
00:26:59.000That kind of devolves into a sort of Civil War, and a lot more like the Troubles in Ireland.
00:27:04.000And so it could look a lot more like you have kind of pockets of sectarian violence where you have it's not even one city against another it's you got 60% of one city maybe that's loyal to a cause and 40% the other way and so you start having unfortunately what it ends up looking like is a lot like Portland with more people dead.
00:27:20.000And live ammo. I remember I went to Northern Ireland.
00:28:36.000I mean, there was nothing about it that was science.
00:28:38.000And what ended up happening was all they had to do was cherry pick doctors who have a doctor before their name, throw them on CNN, and then they run the coverage of Trump.
00:28:46.000And like, let's be honest, Trump is not a medical expert.
00:28:48.000And so when he goes up there and talks about it, it's typical Trump speech, trying to explain something very complicated.
00:28:54.000And then all of these doctors, who probably are sound and look a lot more articulate on the ways of medicine, get up there and say, no, he's crazy.
00:29:02.000They're just finding guys who believe a certain thing that doesn't necessarily fit any of the evidence.
00:29:06.000And there were some really bad doctors who came out in an agreement with Trump that made him look really bad.
00:29:13.000However, you also had Dr. Harvey Risch, MD-PhD from Yale, saying the most important thing, whenever we talk about this too, because YouTube likes to strike down anybody who brings it up, is that it's not a cure.
00:29:24.000But this PhD MD from Yale was saying it does help, and we need to start looking into what we can do to help people, but it's not a cure for sure.
00:29:33.000So anyway, I bring that up in context of Northern Ireland because there was like, I think, somebody in Northern Ireland claimed they were a lost tribe of Israel, and they were like literally Irish people.
00:29:44.000This is what I was being told by some of the locals, that you'll look on one side and it's the revolution fist, it's pro-communist, it's pro-left, the other side was pro-right-wing, pro-empire, pro-imperialism, and it was literally just your side bad, our side good.
00:30:00.000Here's what I actually think when it comes to the U.S.
00:30:05.000and the conflict we've seen from the left and the right.
00:30:07.000The right has become a big tent of people who are rational and reasonable and willing to have a conversation and don't just believe that whatever one person says, we must say the other thing.
00:30:18.000But if you look, like, when I look at Trump, I say there's a lot of things I can easily criticize, there's a lot of things I think that are good, you know, hey, it is what it is.
00:30:24.000The left just says literally everything he does is bad.
00:30:27.000The peace agreements, oh, they're actually bad, they undermine Palestine, how dare he?
00:30:30.000It looks like we're headed in that similar direction to what divided, at least what I saw from, you know, look, it's not like I have a history degree in Northern Ireland or anything.
00:30:39.000And I think one of the big things within that, too, is you end up with a situation where it's not just that one side has decided that whatever the other side is doing is bad.
00:30:48.000You have one side who's in power, Donald Trump, and you have the other side who's controlling the narrative and the media.
00:30:52.000And so if they're going to sit back and say, whatever the government of the United States does is bad, in a way that can only be described as propaganda, then of course you're going to inflame tensions, of course you're going to piss people off, and at the end of the day, anyone who agrees with Trump is going to sit back and say, why am I being lied to?
00:31:08.000So what do you think happens when Trump then selects his Supreme Court nominee?
00:31:13.000The media is going to magically create every, every possible, you name it.
00:31:19.000They're going to accuse this person of murder.
00:31:21.000They're going to be like, they kidnapped a puppy and threw it off a bridge.
00:31:50.000I got Wikipedia pulled up of Amy Coney Barrett, and there's really important context here.
00:31:55.000They say, Amy Coney Barrett is a United States Circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
00:32:02.000Barrett is the first and only woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:32:08.000Described as an originalist and textualist, Barrett's judicial philosophy has been likened to that of her late mentor and former boss, Justice Antonin Scalia.
00:32:18.000Barrett's scholarship focused on originalism, statutory interpretation, and I can't pronounce that.
00:32:44.000I don't know if it's a confirmation hearing or what, but she's been asked throughout the years whether or not she believes in Roe v. Wade, whether or not it's settled law.
00:32:55.000I don't think she will reverse Roe v. Wade.
00:32:56.000To be honest with you, I get what Tom Cotton's saying, and Tom Cotton's an elected official, so I think it's a lot easier for him to say that it needs to be overturned.
00:33:03.000I think it would be enormously difficult.
00:33:05.000I think you would probably need a couple more conservative justices to actually overturn Roe v. Wade.
00:33:26.000And they're going to paint her, and they did this the last time I think she was confirmed,
00:33:29.000they're going to paint her as a religious zealot.
00:33:31.000They're gonna, I think she, it might have been her, it might have been someone I'm confusing her with, but she has membership in different Catholic organizations.
00:33:39.000I think Opus Di, maybe a couple of the others.
00:33:40.000You'll remember Opus Di if you've seen The Da Vinci Code.
00:33:43.000That's not actually Opus Di, they just used her name.
00:33:45.000So she's not like hiding secret paintings?
00:34:21.000I can preview it through the Kavanaugh thing.
00:34:24.000I'm not going to go through her entire wiki that points out several interesting things.
00:34:28.000But I will note that right away they say she's a rankly dissent in favor of gun ownership rights, but also Fourth Amendment.
00:34:35.000Interestingly, the first thing they bring up is Barrett wrote the opinion in a case denying summary judgment and qualified immunity to a police detective who knowingly provided false and misleading information in an affidavit.
00:34:45.000The plaintiff, Reinsberger, was arrested for his own mother's murder based upon the defendant's falsified records used to secure a warrant for the plaintiff's arrest.
00:34:53.000The court found the defendant's lies and omissions were material to probably cause a clear violation of the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment rights, to which the defendant is not eligible for qualified immunity.
00:35:04.000So, legally is a little bit there, but she actually was against qualified immunity for a cop?
00:35:14.000You have a lot of courts who have a pretty expansive interpretation of what qualified immunity is and what it means, and so if I'm reading that correctly—again, I don't have a law degree, so I don't want to mislead any of your viewers—but my understanding is that she struck down qualified immunity because of a direct violation of enunciated protection that's in the Constitution, which not all courts do, right?
00:35:35.000I think, unfortunately, it's with— Can you give quick context on qualified immunity?
00:35:40.000Qualified immunity is, for certain people in most cases, it comes up around police officers, is that because of the responsibilities of their job or something that they do, it's a higher burden of proof to be able to hold them legally accountable.
00:35:52.000And so if you get killed by a police officer, it is very, very difficult for your family to then go and sue the government and sue the police bureau.
00:35:59.000So this is something a lot of left-wing activists have been adamant about.
00:36:03.000They want police to lose qualified immunity so that they get treated like regular people, essentially.
00:36:15.000That point, I think, is good for the libertarians.
00:36:17.000That's been a big—that's like Reason, I'm sure, has a podcast on qualified immunity or whatever it is, right?
00:36:23.000That's one of their big sticking points.
00:36:26.000I think there's probably enough there on the rest of the wiki for why Comey Barrett is not going to be someone who's embraced with open arms by any RPG fans.
00:36:34.000Right away the 2A gun ownership rights stuff, of course.
00:36:37.000If she's an originalist and textualist, I mean... It's interesting.
00:36:42.000She's an originalist and textualist, but she's not going to reverse previous rulings.
00:36:52.000I think the two are somewhat in tension, right?
00:36:53.000You've got something... So stare decisis is, yes, you're not overturning previous court decisions.
00:36:57.000I think there is a long legal tradition among originalists to say that you don't want to... The whole point of originalism, particularly as a political manifestation, is we shouldn't be legislating from the bench.
00:37:08.000We shouldn't be making laws and making rules and changing things based on the judicial philosophy of individual courts.
00:37:14.000That's kind of the crux and the heart of it.
00:37:16.000But what I think a lot of originalists and textualists will do is they'll say, that doesn't mean that we can't look at cases that were wrongly decided and go back and say, this was wrong and we need to change it rather than we're looking at all the same facts and figures and it comes out differently.
00:37:30.000So yeah, I think that's about where it nets out.
00:37:34.000There is a section for possible Supreme Court nomination.
00:37:38.000And they say Barrett had been included on President Donald Trump's list of potential Supreme Court nominees since 2017, almost immediately after her Court of Appeals confirmation.
00:37:46.000That's, wow, almost immediately after.
00:37:52.000In July 2018, following the retirement announcement of Anthony Kennedy, she was reportedly one of three finalists and the only woman to be considered by Trump as a possible successor to Kennedy.
00:38:01.000Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the position.
00:38:04.000Reportedly, although the president liked Barrett, he was concerned about her lack of experience on the bench.
00:38:09.000At the time, Barrett had been on the bench for less than a year.
00:38:12.000After Kavanaugh's selection, Barrett was expected to stay in the spotlight as a possible nominee for a future Supreme Court vacancy.
00:38:17.000Trump is reportedly saving Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat for Amy Coney Barrett if Ginsburg retires or dies during the Trump presidency.
00:39:03.000I don't know that that really gets you any blue-collar voters.
00:39:05.000I mean, yeah, I think that's that's probably like how many angels can dance on the head of the pin in terms of the things that yeah, it's a little too in the weeds, but nerdy people like me in DC.
00:39:31.000I mean, I think, you know, we were talking about before, I think what Trump is going to do is he's going to rush to get someone on the bench.
00:39:36.000And if it, again, under more normal times, he would, everyone and their mother would be saying, you know what?
00:39:43.000I don't like his, I don't like who he's going to nominate for this, but it makes sense.
00:39:46.000We're, we're, we're heading towards the rocks and we need to have enough people in the Supreme Court to be able to make whatever decision comes up.
00:40:44.000And this will be a huge talking point of the left, right?
00:40:46.000I think people misconstrue the McConnell rule as Whenever there is a vacancy that comes up on a Supreme Court that we have to wait.
00:40:53.000If there's any presidential election coming up, you have to wait until that's over.
00:40:57.000What McConnell was saying is, hey, there are two components of our government who are in charge of having any say in the decision when it comes to a new Supreme Court justice.
00:41:05.000It's the President and it's the Senate.
00:41:17.000You know, in the sense that, like, if the President chooses someone and the Senate disagrees and then doesn't confirm them, that makes sense.
00:41:22.000The Senate's supposed to be a check on the President, right?
00:41:27.000Yeah, so if the idea then is, well, we've got a Democrat Senate, or we've got a Republican Senate and a Democrat President, so we just won't confirm it, I mean, to be honest, that's what would just happen.
00:41:40.000But I think one of the things particularly that we've seen, at least up until Bork, right, so for a really, really long time, there's this expectation for members of the Supreme Court, I think kind of anecdotally, socially, whatever, That if a president is going to nominate someone to the highest bench in the land, they have to be someone who the entire Senate will agree with.
00:41:58.000You're going to have overwhelming support for this person.
00:42:01.000They should be relatively moderate on the issues.
00:42:40.000The left controls cultural institutions.
00:42:41.000They try to pretend that they're powerless because they don't control the government.
00:42:44.000But Trump only has... Well, the Supreme Court is conservative, especially with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing.
00:42:49.000He got the Senate, you've got the Presidency obviously, the House is in control of the Democrats, but they also control the colleges, the youth institutions, the celebrities, the video games, the movies.
00:43:00.000They control the cultural institutions and politics comes second.
00:43:04.000Was it Breitbart who said politics is downstream from culture?
00:43:09.000So if they're, you know, I was talking to somebody about how the NFL and the NBA are all Black Lives Matter right now.
00:43:16.000And I, you know, I was saying, like, I think it's because the Democrats are trying to force politics to wake, like, shock people so they go vote because they desperately need voter turnout to beat Trump.
00:43:26.000Because Trump's likely going to win and they probably know it.
00:43:29.000I think Biden's seen his internal polling and that's why he panicked on the riots.
00:44:28.000So they decided not to do it and Trump said sure whatever yeah They turned it into the story where it was actually Trump saying the soldiers are losers, and that's that's so comic book villain esque It's like it's almost the way I described it before is like a 15 year old kid was writing anti-trump fanfiction And then the evil Trump said the soldiers are done Like dude come on.
00:44:51.000Yeah, but with You know, the level of conflict we saw with Kavanaugh, the level of conflict we see every day with, like, we liken to Northern Ireland.
00:46:08.000If this hadn't happened, if there wasn't a pandemic sweeping the globe, if Ruth Bader Ginsburg were still alive, if there weren't wildfires, 2020 would be horrible.
00:46:16.000Everything about the 2020 election would be bad, and now it is going to be monstrously worse as a result of every single thing that has happened.
00:46:24.000Well, so this is a really good chance to actually jump into one of the original stories we were going to talk about.
00:46:30.000So before we got started, we were like, oh, here's a really interesting story.
00:46:33.000This actress from the Orange County show used to be on Fox, I think, has come out.
00:46:37.000She says she's an independent voter, but she's voting for Trump.
00:46:40.000This is significant, especially in the context of potential conflict we see arising out of, man, we just described apocalyptic scenarios.
00:46:49.000And just to reiterate real quickly, when all the chaos erupted around Brett Kavanaugh, Everything was kind of chill.
00:46:56.000Sure, you had the negative news cycle, you know, there was the Trump derangement hate and all that stuff, but not mass riots, not pandemic.
00:47:02.000Now we're gonna get Brett Kavanaugh times a thousand plus mass riots, pandemic, wildfires, and all that stuff.
00:47:09.000So there's a real potential for conflict, but there is, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who told me there's no way Trump will win because he's only lost his supporters.
00:47:18.000And I said, what have you been reading?
00:47:46.000That Republicans are closing the gap in new voter registrations in battleground states because Democrats are switching parties, not because they're registering new voters.
00:47:55.000Democrats are switching or abandoning the Democratic Party, going independent.
00:48:30.000I was going to say, whenever I think about polling, the first thing that comes to my mind is, if people aren't comfortable telling their friends and family who they're voting for, what their political status is, if they're hiding it that closely, you really think they're going to tell a random pollster?
00:48:50.000When I think about the people who are going to say, maybe they hold their nose or whatever, but they go and vote for him, it's those people.
00:48:57.000I have plenty of friends in the DC area who are like, dude, I work at a think tank.
00:49:55.000But I tell it for a reason, because the people who were there were like, I've been a lifelong Democrat, I'm voting for Trump.
00:50:02.000And I'm sitting there going, they're talking above me, like working on my tooth.
00:50:07.000And they're saying things like, the district we're in right now I think is Democrat plus 8 according to the Cook Political Report or whatever.
00:50:14.000So it's a Democrat congressman, this is supposed to be a Democrat area, and I'm sitting here talking to this woman and she says that she's been a lifelong Democrat, she doesn't vote Republican, but she is so fed up, the Democrats are so cutthroat, she's sick of the media lies, and they won't shut up, and she's just done with it.
00:50:32.000And I said, but do you think that people in our area, like we're in a Democrat area, and she's like, oh yeah, these people are so fed up.
00:50:50.000But here's the thing, and I think it grinds my gears a lot in D.C. because I think that
00:50:54.000there's this mentality that all of the, every Democrat I know who talks about the Republicans
00:50:59.000who can't vote for Trump, what they imagine in their mind's eye is like they're brunch
00:51:04.000It's their 28-year-old friend who they go to brunch with, who shows up in, like, khakis and a button-down, and is like, I'm so sick of this.
00:51:13.000It's like some kid who's, like, an intern at Cato, right?
00:51:16.000Those are the types of people who are very visible to a lot of people in media and a lot of people on the left side of the aisle who are vocally, at least in their universe, these are the staunch Republicans.
00:51:26.000I can't believe that they're going to go and vote for Biden.
00:51:29.000And the thing that they're not seeing is the far more common other switch, which is a middle-aged person out in the suburbs or in the exurbs or whatever it is saying, you know what?
00:53:31.000I think part of it is there's a lot of journalists and a lot of people who spend too much time in D.C.
00:53:35.000and they look around and they see people like Nancy Pelosi and they're like, oh, she's one of the good ones.
00:53:40.000And what's lost on them is the overwhelming majority of Americans outside of the Beltway and outside of the Acela Quarter look at all of them and they're like, throw the whole bunch out!
00:54:05.000And a bunch of people brought a bowl to the front door.
00:54:08.000And up in the top was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats looking down, laughing and scoffing, sipping their wine.
00:54:13.000And then the right-wing populists let go of the ropes and the bull went, boom, right through the door.
00:54:18.000And they've been screaming for years as the bull rampages around.
00:54:22.000But for the people down below, Everything's getting better. Yeah, and so they're like let
00:54:26.000the way I describe it to like my progressive friends I'm like listen man
00:54:29.000They out that friend I was talking to you about who was telling me that they didn't think Trump could win they hate
00:54:34.000Joe Biden This my friend she hates Joe Biden. Okay. She was saying
00:54:37.000Joe Biden's awful. They're corporate Democrats. They don't care
00:54:40.000They're saying whatever they think people want to hear and I said let Trump
00:54:44.000clear out the ivory tower Don't let the establishment back in, because they will lock the doors up, double barricade them, and you will never have another chance.
00:54:54.000Trump is rampaging around, and they're panicked, freaking out, falling apart.
00:54:58.000Joe Biden is crumbling, and they're losing control.
00:55:02.000Trump does four more years, and there will be no more democratic establishment.
00:55:06.000There will just be the progressive populists and the right-wing populists, and then they won't be standing in your way.
00:55:13.000Yeah, I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of a progressive activist, too.
00:55:16.000That's the other thing that's not lost on the progressives.
00:55:20.000Don't get me wrong, I think a lot's lost on them, but one of the things that's not lost on them is that they're kind of corporatist overlords in Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and people who've been in Washington for 40 years.
00:55:31.000They're really good at acting like they care.
00:55:33.000Joe Biden, I think, is someone who's really, really good at Expressing real like oh fine like I won't assume malice here like I think he's really good at showing individual empathy But I think it's really really hard to look at his voting record and say yeah You know what this guy cares and has been fighting for everyday Americans And I don't know who's been kicking around Washington as long as he has Who you can genuinely look at and say you know what that person has done since day one They've done the hard things they fought the fights They've fought the unpleasant ones other than to be clear Bernie Sanders who I can't stand what it's what he's done He's done it
00:56:02.000So the reason why I want to bring up the story from the OC actress is because I watched the video, and I don't know if they pull up the exact quote, but one of the most interesting things she says, if you think that, you know, she basically said, you've got Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, who have been in politics for decades.
00:56:20.000They created the systemic racism you're complaining about.
00:56:23.000You can't vote for them and let them stay.
00:56:38.000Including Kamala Harris, and it's shocking to me that you have progressives that hate Trump more.
00:56:45.000But they're like, Trump's a fascist, it's the end of the world!
00:56:46.000I'm like, the corporate establishment types are telling you that because they don't want Trump to win.
00:56:51.000Trump is a lot of things, Trump is not a fascist, and Trump, in my opinion, I've often said, if you took a person identical to Trump, and cleaned up the act, they'd win a landslide.
00:57:03.000If you took away all of the things that made him Donald Trump, the reality TV show star, right?
00:57:12.000The Billy Bush video, the marriages, the divorces, the comments about women, the interview.
00:57:17.000If you take him being the type of chummy guy who can go on Howard Stern and say some really vile, awful things and put a little bit of makeup on it, you're right!
00:58:01.000And it's just that, unfortunately what's going to happen to him is the same thing that happened with Hillary Clinton.
00:58:06.000Donald Trump is specifically designed.
00:58:08.000It's like he was, He wasn't made in a lab to appease people like me.
00:58:11.000He wasn't made in a lab to appease a lot of different voters.
00:58:15.000But you know what he was made in a lab to do?
00:58:16.000His true superpower is he is a perfect foil for Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton, or Kamala Harris, or Nancy Pelosi, or anyone who has spent too much time acting like a politician.
00:58:29.000And so the idea of the rock through a window makes so much sense, I think, to millions and millions of Americans, because they look and they're like, you know what?
00:58:36.000Well-dressed, nice-talking Joe Biden, fine.
00:58:39.000I'm sure I would like to sit down and have a fireside chat with him.
00:58:41.000But if I want to get something done, he's got 47 years and hasn't done it.
00:58:45.000There's so many different things about Trump that push him over Joe Biden.
00:58:50.000One way I can describe it is you've got Sleepy Joe and you've got bombastic Trump.
00:58:54.000But if you're talking about foreign policy, defending this country, Then you've got the big bully who pushes everyone around and won't shut up, or the guy who's very, you know, sleepy.
00:59:10.000If you've got people who want just trade deals and trade arrangements, why would they go for Joe Biden, who, you know, the Obama administration was pro-trans-pacific partnership.
01:00:14.000But he's doing enough, while also, I think, you know, the town hall the other day, he was kind of throwing them under the bus, showing that it was a, the whole thing was a lie, right?
01:00:23.000Basically, he was like, we're pro these progressive things, we're going to fight for with Bernie Sanders, and then came out and said, no, screw all that, we're here for Pennsylvania.
01:01:00.000Somebody had asked him a follow-up question, like, well, what does that mean for fracking?
01:01:04.000And he's like, we won't have that in a Biden administration.
01:01:06.000And then he came back, he walked it back again, and said, oh, no, no, like, he was speaking in Pennsylvania or something, and so he's got it.
01:01:11.000And the thing is, the journalists give him cover.
01:01:17.000There's no, there's no four Pinocchios for these sorts of things.
01:01:19.000They're bald-faced, obvious lies that none of the people whose most important job to the American people, which is to call out lies, all of a sudden lose interest in.
01:01:29.000Yeah, and I think about all the people who are watching YouTube.
01:01:32.000When I was talking to those dentists, well, I shouldn't say I was talking, I was going, getting dental work done.
01:02:08.000But yeah, I noticed that most of the people I talk to that have flipped for Trump, they're people who tell me they started to do their own research.
01:02:16.000Every single story I hear from someone who walked away from the Democratic Party, it's very simple.
01:02:21.000They said, I heard all of these things, I believed them, and then one day I decided to do my own research.
01:02:26.000And then I watched, you know, a lot of people are like, I watched one Trump speech and then realized, hey, wait a minute.
01:02:57.000And I bought it, and I remember I peeled back one day, because it was when the story came out that someone had alleged that Trump had been a Russian asset since 1987.
01:03:07.000I was like, alright, this is my moment.
01:03:19.000You have a lot of people who are asking a lot of questions.
01:03:21.000I think there's a lot of good work on the right of people who are submitting FOIA requests and who are asking the right questions.
01:03:26.000And so because of that, you do start to have people who get this information that filters through and starts to break through the lockdown that you have that is mainstream media.
01:03:35.000When I was talking to my progressive friend, you know, she was giving me all of the mainstream media talking points that were devoid of any fact or reason.
01:03:47.000It was really amazing to me, actually, that she could believe a lot of things she did supporting critical race theory, disagreeing with Trump, defending some of the things said by a lot of these far leftists, and we had a discussion and argument about it.
01:04:00.000But one you know she said a couple things like for one she said Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist who traveled across state lines to hunt down peaceful protesters and I was like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa and so I think if you're coming from politics from this point of view based upon The mainstream media's lies.
01:04:17.000And I say mainstream media, it's really hard to break down.
01:04:19.000It's political operatives who work within media.
01:04:53.000And so if you keep repeating the idea that the Steele dossier is credible, or you keep repeating over and over again that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, all you have to do is say it enough times and eventually you get there.
01:05:02.000I can't stop laughing because he's just jamming his face in the jar.
01:05:45.000So one of the things she said to me was, don't you realize that there's like a very serious problem with police targeting minority communities?
01:05:53.000And I said, let me ask you a question.
01:06:01.000And then I said, do you know how many police interactions there were?
01:06:04.000My understanding is there was 375 million.
01:06:09.000So out of all of those interactions, 13 unarmed people dead, I will tell you this.
01:06:14.000Those are individual cases that need to be explored to make sure there was no wrongdoing because a loss of life is one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties and civil rights.
01:06:22.000But it doesn't sound to me like there is this massive widespread problem.
01:06:25.000Right, or like, I think it was LeBron James was the one who had the great quote where he said, it's open season on black men in America, right?
01:06:32.000And there's this narrative of, you know, not only is there, it's open season on black men in America and police and white people can kill black people without consequence and without issue.
01:06:43.000true right now there's no there's no reading of the literature that can make that something a point that can
01:06:47.000be justified and stand on its own like it's an absurd thing it's a conspiracy theory but beyond the kids it
01:06:52.000just gets repeated so many times that people like oh yeah like there of course there are because the numbers
01:06:58.000don't matter you know and and one of the one of the things I like to bring up all the time even
01:07:02.000though it feels fruitless like pointless is that they complain all day and night about Q and on and you
01:07:08.000know Alex Jones he gets banned from the Internet all these things, yet they screech.
01:07:12.000So you were referring to Jonathan Chait on MSNBC when he said, Chris Hayes, The famous Chris Hayes, millions of followers, has a guy in his show who says, now this, we can't prove this, but Donald Trump may have been a Russian asset since the 1980s.
01:07:40.000But to start from, like to, In order to get that far, I gotta tell you, man, 9-11 as an inside job sounds much more plausible than Donald Trump secretly working as a Russian agent to subvert America.
01:07:54.000The premise of what Jonathan Shade is saying is that we live in a universe where for the last, what is that, 33 years?
01:08:01.000The Russians, the Soviets, whose entire country then disbanded, and they kept this act up, and they managed to move along this Manchurian candidate through the New York City celebrity scene, and then eventually run him for president and have him win the presidency almost 40 years later.
01:08:22.000Dude, these people hear themselves, even a little bit.
01:08:26.000It's so far beyond the realm of possibility that, and here, and if you want to make the QAnon comparison too, the idea that there is a global cabal of people, wealthy people, particularly liberal donors, who are raping and assaulting children is a lot more believable, I think.
01:08:42.000There's a lot more evidence on the books that that is something that exists than trumping Russia.
01:08:46.000Now, to go to the more extreme elements of some of these conspiracies about, like, the Satanist and, like, weird occult stuff, it does get into the crazy realm, for sure.
01:08:56.000But, look, we've got a dude who had an island.
01:08:59.000And he had a lot of friends in a lot of high places who traveled to that island.
01:09:05.000A witness claimed Bill Clinton had visited the island.
01:09:08.000So, there actually is court documents and witness testimony saying, hey, this stuff might be happening.
01:09:13.000Now, of course, you might get conspiracy theorists who take that and turn it into this ridiculous and more extreme conspiracy about, you know, superhero Trump fighting an evil globalist cabal or whatever.
01:09:39.000And it's still, Adam Schiff just tweeted, we got a new whistleblower complaint about Russian interference and blah blah blah, and it's like here we go again.
01:11:21.000But the left is now, you know, adhering to... I kind of lost my train of thought because I started getting into the whole right... What were you talking about before this?
01:11:51.000But, pre-epiphany, I think you made a really good point when you talked about the fact that people on the left can push conspiracy theories and other really bad ideas with impunity.
01:11:59.000And I think it's true and it's accurate and it's fair to say that we have a crisis in this country of, call it fake news, call it whatever you want, but of disinformation.
01:12:08.000Of people believing facts that just aren't so, and an inability for our current systems to keep up with those facts that aren't true.
01:12:19.000And so what I was saying is, because the left isn't talking about policy so much as whatever you say we disagree with, it's turned into this weird thing where the media and our cultural institutions always side with the left.
01:12:31.000There was a study a few years ago I covered where they mapped out Twitter and they found that brand marketing existed overlapping with the resistance, the anti-Trump resistance on Twitter.
01:12:43.000Probably because the same people who work in marketing live in the same areas and are friends with the same people who work in journalism.
01:12:50.000So when they see their friends tweet something like Orange Man Bad, they think, I know, let's put on an ad campaign for our soda company called Orange Man Bad.
01:12:56.000Or the soda company goes to them and says, what sells Orange Man Bad?
01:15:18.000You're allowed to say things in favor of leftist orthodoxy even if everyone disagrees with it.
01:15:24.000So I'll tell you the craziest thing that I was told.
01:15:26.000I had a friend tell me that they're, you know, kind of a liberal, but that they are scared of how the left is going in terms of abortion because they think it's wrong.
01:15:41.000And I said, what if it's true that every one of your friends agrees with you, but the only reason you think this is because none of you will say it?
01:16:03.000And I think that's the key of the lurch is that the only person who's never going to be problematically offensive within that world view is the person who pushes it a little
01:16:22.000It's this drift and you get all of these kind of like you get these people who
01:16:25.000are dragged along with it who don't like like your friend who don't like doing
01:16:28.000it. That's the Cato study we talked about. It's 60 percent of people who like
01:16:32.000there are probably lots and lots of people who I know in D.C.
01:16:34.000who work for liberal organizations who just aren't quite liberal enough, and they're a little bit worried that, like, that guy who lost his job for retweeting a link that said that destructive riots aren't politically beneficial, right?
01:17:48.000Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, and part of it too is, you know, you've... It's also like, who are the types of people who tend to be teachers?
01:17:56.000Like, the political bent of a lot of very important, informative organizations happen to lean left.
01:18:01.000Journalists, teachers, all these other individuals.
01:18:03.000And so, because of that, you do have this kind of surround sound of a certain perspective that a bunch of young, impressionable people, and even not young, but generally impressionable people, Take as a given, take as a fact, take as a reality that's going on around them, and they don't know any better.
01:18:18.000And I think it's particularly true if you don't have people who are super into politics.
01:18:21.000Yeah, I think the one thing that people are missing is the schools.
01:18:25.000And it's amazing to me that conservatives are fighting so hard to get their kids back into them, when we're seeing these leaked curriculums showing that it's all like a crazy indoctrination.
01:18:36.000They're telling the kids all of these insane things, like weird dogma.
01:18:40.000And there's some, I think Twitter honestly is probably what opened my eyes to it, but there's some really good people who make a really good push for, don't send your kids to government schools.
01:18:48.000You can homeschool if you can't homeschool.
01:18:51.000If you can't afford private schools, find a charter that'll take you in.
01:18:53.000There are a lot of other options and I think that's what you gotta do.
01:18:56.000You know, I think you've got to start finding models to break it because it's not going away on its own, right?
01:19:00.000You look at something like the LA Unified School District.
01:19:02.000There's no amount of reform or tweaks or change or God forbid money that's going to fix that thing, right?
01:19:07.000And so I wonder if you don't just have to let it go on its own or if nothing else, you got to kind of say, hey, It sucks, it's a shame, but my kids aren't going to have to suffer the consequences of this thing.
01:19:28.000We had him on, I think earlier this week, and he talks a lot about gender and stuff.
01:19:32.000And he mentioned how he used to be opposed to it, you know, because he thought it was going to be used to teach evolution and creationism.
01:19:38.000But now that he sees what the intersectional, the identitarian left is doing, he's like, school choice, voucher program, get the kids, put them where you want, because this has gone too far.
01:20:58.000gun laws to know that they're pretty awful, I think you're also going to see a lot of people leaving the cities for those sorts of reasons, too, right?
01:21:04.000And I think you make a really, really good point on the school choice stuff, because I think that People were fed up with their schools already, but now, the way that they're handling the coronavirus stuff, I think is going to be what puts a lot of people over the edge, and they say, you know what?
01:21:17.000My children's education is too important for me to screw up, particularly in a hyper-competitive world, that I can't just let them walk down the road to school, even if that's the closest, easiest option, even if their friends are there, whatever, because it's too great a sacrifice.
01:21:33.000So parents, their kids aren't in school, so they're teaming up and putting all the kids under, like they're all pitching in for a tutor and the tutor teaches all the kids.
01:21:47.000So now you've got parents who are saying, if I'm going to be paying this tutor by pitching in with all my friends, why are my taxes going to a school I don't use?
01:22:01.000I mean, I think, you know, you're right.
01:22:03.000And the other thing, too, is it solves for the socialization problem caused by the pandemic, right?
01:22:09.000Obviously, it helps the parents out tremendously and they get a better experience having a tutor than having their parents teach them.
01:22:13.000But it also lets kids be kids and allows them to play with their friends and go out and do all the sorts of things that they can't do right now in the pandemic.
01:22:19.000And I think they are going to sit back and say, hey, you know what?
01:22:22.000I think if this continues to happen with schools, you're going to have a lot of people who go through half of a school year or a whole school year, and you have these disaffected parents who are like, I don't know, they're maybe like crunchy, granola-y, like pretty leftward leaning people who are like, this isn't terrible.
01:22:36.000And I think actually it's a lot better than this now scary alternative that I haven't seen before.
01:22:40.000I think the most important thing is that kids spend too much time socializing with each other.
01:22:56.000Well, they're going to a place they hate.
01:22:58.000They're under the command or authority of someone they don't like.
01:23:02.000They can't even go to the bathroom if they need to unless they get permission.
01:23:06.000That's a horribly authoritarian system.
01:23:08.000And then they're getting their social cues from other people who have no understanding of social cues outside of So, it's like, you take two people who can't speak any languages and put them in a room and they start making up weird gibberish words.
01:23:18.000They're not gonna function properly in the greater society.
01:23:21.000So that's why I say kids are socializing too much.
01:23:24.000What we need is kids to be around their parents.
01:23:26.000That's why I'm a big fan of homeschooling, but with these pods.
01:23:30.000So you have regular adults the kids can be around, and I also think it's very important that parents spend a lot of time teaching their own kids.
01:23:37.000So I think, you know, if you go back to where, you know, how humanity essentially was developing, At a certain point, because I'm not going to speak, I'm not an anthropologist.
01:23:46.000But the dad would be a blacksmith, and the kid would grow up, and his dad would be showing him what he did.
01:23:52.000But more importantly, the dad would be like, yo, go grab a bale of water, I need it for, you know, whatever.
01:25:25.000And that's just, that's, that's, it's a, it's a, it's a failed worldview, and it's our fault for not teaching our kids better.
01:25:31.000Yeah, and I think... And it's schools.
01:25:32.000It is, and I think bound up within that is also a lack of teaching of morality, and I think this is probably particularly bad as we get into a society where morality is less assumed, right?
01:25:43.000There's plenty of benefits to that, but I think one of the consequences is that if we don't have a relatively fixed or understood morality, then kids grow up in an absence of morality as people who aren't moral actors themselves, right?
01:25:53.000They're too young, they can't possibly understand, and so for a really long time, getting back to the, you know, the anthropological model, I'll tell you what's really amazing.
01:25:59.000the family or the community or the culture or the religion or whatever it is.
01:26:02.000And now we've kind of, we've hoisted that onto a public school system that has no idea
01:26:07.000how to do it, but unfortunately more and more is attempting to do it.
01:26:10.000And I think that's where the real danger comes in.
01:26:16.000So I grew up Catholic and my family left the church when I was real young and I became
01:26:20.000a disillusioned young person, like very anti-church and everything.
01:26:25.000And then I had an epiphany when I met someone and he just gave me some insight at a couple different moments in my life.
01:26:31.000And then I became, I don't necessarily want to say agnostic, I do believe in God, but I think it's not like a theistic, it's more of an Einsteinian or it's hard to explain.
01:26:42.000But I was thinking about something really interesting because my buddy Adam, who I don't know if you met him, he's doing his own show, he has a song he wrote and we used to jam on Friday nights and one of his lines is that it's time to confess our sins.
01:26:58.000And I thought about this and I said, the idea that a secular, urban, liberal type would understand the concept of confessing your sins means that he does have some understanding of confession.
01:28:13.000What I explain to people is, you might not like the Bible, and maybe like the originalists who view it as verbatim, but the way I see it is, we started somewhere, and maybe there's some things in here that were bad, but we kept the good.
01:28:28.000And we carried the good with us, slowly refining it and making it better.
01:28:32.000And now, when you come out and say, I don't need a religion to tell me why I'm moral, Then I say, but there are countries that don't have the presumption of innocence.
01:28:49.000It's a shared morality from, you know, the similar values.
01:28:52.000So the reason I bring that up is even if, you know, I think this more relates to the 90s when I was growing up, when you had the Democrats and a lot of secular liberal types who still had similar moral foundations.
01:29:52.000And I think it's right to say that they are in opposition.
01:29:56.000And I think one of the things that a lot of people, particularly a lot of people, I think BLM kind of forget is the idea of all people, like, I don't want to say all lives matter, right?
01:30:16.000This is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free.
01:30:20.000These were incredibly unfamiliar at the time.
01:30:22.000And so you're right, there's so much of this that then gets passed down to culture, it gets passed down to common law, it gets passed down to the sort of values that we share as a people.
01:30:31.000And you're right, for a really long time, we could fight about what those values were.
01:30:34.000And for a long time, obviously, there's meaningful, meaningful problems in how those values existed.
01:30:38.000Particularly before the 1960s, there were There were enormous, enormous problems with the way that we reflected these values, but I do think that probably from, I don't know, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, there was a really valuable shared framework with which we discussed moral issues, and we're very rapidly moving to a point where we are throwing out the idea that even having that confined conversation is valuable.
01:30:59.000So here's kind of what I think, in that context where I said the morality has shifted, the base of it.
01:31:19.000But a lot of the moral foundations I think that's what it is.
01:31:23.000I think even secular liberals don't realize they were raised in a sort of a Judeo-Christian framework.
01:31:30.000Whether it's good or bad is not the point.
01:31:31.000I'm just saying we shared a lot of these same values.
01:31:34.000I mean the Ten Commandments or Blackstone's formulation.
01:31:37.000But now we have a new idea of a new world.
01:31:41.000Where we're colonizers, we're evil, where white people, they say, you know, are evil and have all these whiteness traits like hard work and planning for the future.
01:32:15.000And again, you can quibble on so many of the details, and I think that one of the big important things here is What we're seeing in the streets in places like Portland, those aren't quibbles, those aren't splitting hairs about a 25% effective tax rate versus a 27% effective tax rate.
01:32:30.000It is a bunch of people who fundamentally do not believe in the rules that have governed our entire system since, like, I don't know, we became an agricultural civilization.
01:32:43.000It's also in the nitty gritty of our current society.
01:32:47.000They believe they have a right to use violence against you.
01:32:50.000We typically, you know, like for the longest time, most Americans were not in agreement.
01:32:55.000And I love it when people bring up the weather underground.
01:32:57.000They're like, yeah, but what, you know, if you want to talk about how bad things are, the weather underground.
01:33:00.000And I was like, I could be wrong, but didn't they do shock and awe campaigns in the middle of the night when no one was around because they didn't want to hurt people?
01:33:06.000Yeah, and they ended up killing someone I think because they were they were like they didn't know they were gonna be in there.
01:33:26.000The security guards unloaded, according to witnesses, for like a minute just round after round into a vehicle with some teenagers in it because they thought the teenagers were like white supremacists, but they weren't.
01:33:40.000And I think one, my biggest, I think my biggest problem, biggest problem with all of this is they're reframing and rephrasing the way violence works and is defined.
01:33:46.000And so if you can say words are violence and you really fundamentally believe words are violence and using the wrong pronoun is a threat against someone the way that lots of, lots of blue check Twitter activists will tell you these things are literal violence.
01:34:00.000Then it doesn't surprise me when those same people look at Rand Paul getting assaulted and say, Like, how is that worse than messing up someone's pronouns?
01:34:07.000How is that worse than the drinking from the Kool-Aid of white supremacy or whatever Lady Gaga said the other day?
01:35:08.000And they don't see what's going on around them and the radical, truly radical shifts that we're seeing in the way that the discourse just takes place.
01:35:15.000I wonder, you know, elaborating on this shared moral framework idea, I wonder if the reason why we kind of have default liberals, you know, people who just kind of vote Democrat and don't really pay attention, is because they don't really have any kind of moral framework.
01:35:30.000So they just default to the left and they say, sure, whatever.
01:35:33.000Then you have the far leftists who have a radically different moral framework where their power is paramount and the health of the tribe and the survival of the tribe is more important than individual rights.
01:35:43.000Then you have the traditional American faction, which includes liberals and conservatives, and that is a shared moral framework on specific... I guess it's fair to say Judeo-Christian values, kind of.
01:35:54.000We were founded as a Christian nation.
01:35:56.000But it's become something a bit broader than that, but there is a rooted shared moral framework.
01:36:02.000So I wonder if the reason why, basically what I'm saying is, there are people who are just not paying attention, who will go out and vote for Joe Biden without knowing anything about what's going on, and it could be because their moral framework is absent.
01:36:15.000They're just, I want to feed my family, I don't care about anything else.
01:36:18.000And I think that's a good way to look at it.
01:36:20.000And I think part of it, too, is there's a lot of people who, in the absence of having a particularly firm moral framework, it's really easy to adopt.
01:36:29.000My Catholic is really showing here, but it can be really easy to adopt a worldly moral framework.
01:36:34.000And so if your moral framework is basically, I don't know, Twitter and Facebook and whatever video you find on YouTube and the movies that you watch and the video games you play, then that can be super, super problematic for a lot of different reasons.
01:36:48.000And so I think it can be easy to adopt that instead and that that is destined to fail.
01:36:53.000But that's almost that passive sort of framework that ends up resulting.
01:36:56.000You know, I've had a video on my main channel about Jordan Peterson for a long time.
01:37:01.000It's like my default video from years ago, and I basically talk about how we're experiencing a crisis of purpose, where you have a lot of far leftists who, they don't know what their purpose is, so they've created one.
01:37:14.000It's challenging the empire and white supremacy.
01:37:17.000But then you have a lot of other people who have no purpose, so they just sit around playing
01:37:35.000Like, I think at the end of the day, you know, I think Peterson really struck a chord, I think, with a lot of people for exactly that reason.
01:37:41.000He understands that people fundamentally, and in a lot of cases, particularly young men, are striving for some level of meaning in a world that has very, very little meaning.
01:37:49.000And outside of the more traditional, like, I need to go be a blacksmith because I need to keep growing the family
01:37:54.000blacksmith building, or outside the confines of traditional faith, it can be
01:37:58.000really, really hard to find something.
01:38:00.000And so if you've got this quasi-religion and leftism, it's a really, really easy thing to glam onto.
01:38:19.000They sit in their bedrooms, bored and scared, but they found a new meeting in this, in this new dogma.
01:38:23.000Right, because at the end of the day, what Critical Race Theory, I think, gives a lot of people a really great excuse to do is it gives them easy bad guys.
01:38:30.000They can go out and slay the monsters that are very obviously in front of them and, I don't know, maybe behind them in line at the supermarket, too.
01:38:37.000This awful, terrible thing that is toxic whiteness or toxic masculinity or toxic whatever you want to get mad about, if it's everywhere, then every day of your life can have meaning.
01:38:46.000It's like you're on a giant, open-ended RPG video game.
01:38:50.000Where you're going on an adventure and there's always going to be some monster that crawls out of the forest that you get to be the righteous one to destroy.
01:38:57.000And the problem is the people that they always happen to find and the issues they keep finding aren't monsters.
01:39:55.000Joe got called out by Media Matters for America, which is a left-wing conspiracy theory organization that just, like, makeup smears against people.
01:40:03.000You know my favorite thing Media Matters ever did was?
01:40:05.000They accused me of pushing a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar may have married her brother, and the image they used was a picture of me quite literally reading the Star Tribune that said it verbatim.
01:40:35.000And it's got a checkmark from NewsGuard.
01:40:37.000So anyway, Joe Rogan said on his show that there was a bunch of crazy people starting fires.
01:40:45.000This is 100% factually true, and I think I have the source, and I think it would be wise to actually pull that up because they're gonna try and drag me for it.
01:40:58.000So we'll just leave it on the screen while I talk about this.
01:41:01.000So, uh, he said, what's going on in the West Coast with these, like, wildfires, something is crazy, got these crazy people, it's all, it's nuts, they're starting fires.
01:41:09.000And then he said they've actually arrested, like, some activists, like, some leftists for starting these fires.
01:41:13.000He said forest fires, that was wrong, that's nitpicking, but they're wildfires.
01:41:17.000He said activists and people, when in fact it was one leftist, it was a guy named Jeffrey Accord, who was a known Black Lives Matter Defund the Police activist, who got arrested, according to the police, trying to start a fire in the brush.
01:41:29.000He did start a fire, they put it out, I believe.
01:41:32.000Then you had, according to, we have Oregon Catalyst, they track 14 different arsons identified on the West Coast.
01:41:39.000So yes, there are more than a dozen people, and here are all the stories and all the links, you got San Francisco Chronicle, you got KHQ.
01:41:46.000So anyway, Joe, because Media Matters came after him, I don't know why, I guess he felt like he should make a correction, and his correction was wrong in the other direction.
01:41:55.000And so, man, bummer when you try and play this game, and you don't have a fact checker or anything like that.
01:42:01.000So Joe ended up making an Instagram video that got like a million plus views where he said, Hey, I was wrong.
01:42:19.000You know, look, I think it's crazy that like people go after Joe this hard on this stuff because he's like he's a podcast of hanging out with his buddies and it's turned into what like Larry King, Walter Cronkite.
01:42:31.000And I'm like, dude, the comedian hanging out with his buddies is not supposed to be the most rigorous fact check, but people pile on him and they're like, he's got to know everything.
01:42:39.000And it's like, How do you do a podcast where you're just a comedian hanging out with your friends and interesting people?
01:42:49.000And also like, what a great way to rob the fun of a fun podcast to say, Hey, not only do you have to be on all the time, all of your guests have to be on all the time.
01:43:37.000Because, I'll tell you what, I bet if Joe came out and said, look, I found this link showing all these different stories of all this different arson, Then he's gonna get media matters again saying Rogan doubles down and lies again.
01:44:34.000I think the reason why that has happened to him is that so many people don't trust the people who are supposed to be giving them the right news that they go to him and he becomes a de facto, by default, news provider.
01:44:46.000And so they're like, okay, well, it's an institutional failure and he is unfortunately facing the ramifications of an institutional failure for which he's not responsible.
01:44:54.000How amazing is it that, you know, whether people want to accept it or not, even Joe, he is a top news source for people.
01:45:03.000And it's, it's crazy in an era where like we've all got supercomputers in our pockets and we are beamed constantly with an enormous amount of information.
01:45:10.000All you have to do is, like, tell it decent and tell it straight and, like, the eyes will come.
01:45:15.000They will follow you to the truth, I think, in most cases.
01:45:18.000And it's amazing what so many people have done to light their own and their own institution's credibility on fire to get to a point where there are millions and millions of people who are going to Joe Rogan to say, hey, tell me what happened today in the world.
01:45:32.000No, so he's not he's like a regular dude is like don't look at me I don't know and but I think that's why I'm you know People come to my show a lot because I quite literally will have the source on the screen I don't say unless I can fact-check it.
01:45:44.000Otherwise, I tell you Google it now you fact-check me I could be wrong about this and I that's like the best I can do and it's funny when I get it when I get attacked by a lot of people and I'm Like dude, I know I'm wrong Yeah, like I do my best.
01:45:58.000I use a third-party fact-checking and rating agency.
01:46:01.000That is the best any person could probably do and I'm trying man, but they don't like it.
01:46:04.000Yeah, because they don't like the truth and it's it's amazing too because I think part of it is so many people have kind of thrown their hands up with a lot of media now to say, you know what?
01:46:14.000I know, like even, I think even the true believers, even the real anti-Trump people are still kind of like, yeah, you're right.
01:46:21.000And so I think they have this kind of, this miscast anxiety and frustration and desire to hold someone accountable.
01:46:27.000And it's not going to be, you know, they're not going to go on and complain about Sanjay Gupta or Anderson Cooper or Jake Tapper or something like that.
01:46:33.000Cause it's, it's too far away from them, but they see someone with a podcast.
01:46:43.000It's this miscast aggression and frustration because what they're really probably mad about is the failed institutions who have let them down.
01:46:49.000Well, when it comes to the media, like Media Matters for instance, they're just going after Joe politically because Joe is a political obstacle.
01:47:32.000As much as a lot of people watch my content, I'm just so tepid and milquetoast for the political world that it's like, even when someone does pull something out of context, no one cares.
01:47:43.000Somebody commented that I was critical of some guy on Twitter and said something offensive, and the guy was like, why should I care?
01:48:30.000That's the sort of thing that unfortunately I think plays really well for people in the media because, again, I think when you peel back a lot of the layers of the white supremacist toxic culture we live in to a lot of people is the people around you are bad.
01:48:44.000That's really to me what it boils down to more than anything and like it's kind of like the get-out mentality as you walk around the world.
01:48:50.000It's you look around people everywhere and these are monsters.
01:48:54.000And so it's really really easy when you buy into a narrative like that to get just as bad at someone like AOC or someone like Trump or someone like Biden as it is the guy down the supermarket who you knew all along was always a bad person, right?
01:49:05.000So when you're able to paint Wide wide swaths of this country as wrong and irredeemable Then it becomes really really easy when they do the tiniest thing wrong to watch them get destroyed because it's not them who's being destroyed Right.
01:49:17.000Yeah, because if you're if you believe the stuff, it's never the individual who's destroyed It's always another domino of white supremacy that has fallen and who cares if it's some guy who lost his $40,000 a year job support his family in rural, Iowa So, we're going to read some more Super Chats, so make sure you smash that like button, or give it a little tiny tap.
01:49:37.000Do you want to shout out your Twitter or anything?
01:49:40.000Yeah, I'm always on Twitter, so if you think, or even if you don't think anything I'm saying has value and you just want to hate on it, I get lots of hate.
01:52:07.000With tremendous respect to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you know, her family and everything, but I do think there's an interesting question about if Right.
01:52:15.000Republicans will be galvanized versus Democrats.
01:52:18.000And there's a good argument for both sides.
01:52:21.000Democrats are seeing the apocalypse before their eyes.
01:52:23.000But Trump is going to appoint someone.
01:52:31.000I mean, if Trump appoints someone now, then the Republicans are going to be like, we won.
01:52:35.000So if they get through, but I mean, that's the thing.
01:52:37.000Like, do they even have enough time between now and the election to get somebody through?
01:52:40.000And so I think if it becomes an issue, and we were talking about this before, like if it becomes an issue that people are voting on, then I think it probably does galvanize Republicans more because there are a lot of like ever anyone who's got the, the RBG t-shirts.
01:52:55.000But I think there are a lot of like, I don't know, mild-mannered dudes outside of Salt Lake who don't like Trump and don't like the way he talks, who maybe held their nose and voted for him in 2016, who are now like, oh man, I don't want Biden to put someone on the bench and I can't stand Trump, but I'll take another conservative justice.
01:54:04.000I mean, I don't know enough about it to know if it had anything to do with politics or, you know, unfortunately, he lives in a really awful area as we've seen recently in Minneapolis in terms of crime and violence and it could be tied to that.
01:54:16.000Obviously, he's a 17-year-old kid who lost his life and, you know, somebody made a good point when they're talking about it too and they said, Where's Black Lives Matter on this one?
01:54:24.000I mean, where were they for David Dorn?
01:54:27.000It's what they can use politically, I guess.
01:54:31.000It's only when they can target an institution.
01:54:33.000Vsidious says, Are the Democrats going to filibuster now that they just said it was racist?
01:54:53.000Jacob Hawley says, Hey Tim, I have friends and family and they are stuck in New York and they're trying to make the best of what they have now.
01:55:23.000I mean, I think, but I want to be careful because I'm not going to act like it's 50 billion, you know, it's like a grand cabal of like super secret, crazy, evil, whatever.
01:56:41.000Let's see, I want to make sure I get to some of the earlier superchats so people don't miss out.
01:56:43.000The first superchat of the night was Matthew Hammond who said, why does the media downplay COVID originating from a Chinese lab and always add a qualifier that it is not man-made like the faked fact checks you talk about?
01:56:54.000It can come from a lab and be from nature.
01:56:56.000Right, so early on, there was concern that COVID was an accidental breach because they were doing research.
01:57:02.000But Tucker Carlson just had an expert who claimed to be a whistleblower.
01:57:05.000Now, I just think it's easier to, it is simple enough to say that China has its issues with sanitation, and if you told me that there were unsanitary conditions in a wet market that resulted in COVID, I'd be like, it's a simple solution, it is.
01:57:21.000But I do think it's fair to point out that you can have a researcher, an actual doctor, who worked in a university say, here's what I know, and they'll say, this expert doesn't count.
01:58:18.000And the last thought I have on that is the other thing that you've got to throw in this equation is how it's going to be covered in the media.
01:58:24.000And so if you've got all of these crazed liberals out there pounding on doors of the Senate or whatever it is, and you've got the media making them out to be heroes, I worry that that maybe does sway some votes.
01:58:32.000Yeah, I have no idea what's going to happen.
01:58:40.000And you know, it was really good that I had this conversation with my progressive friend the other day, because I was like, it's really interesting.
01:58:45.000You know, she has her sources, I have mine.
01:58:48.000And I'm fairly confident I know more than she does, because I read the news all day, every day.
01:58:53.000She does as well, because she also works in the industry in some capacity.
01:58:58.000But I'm thinking like, it was a healthy conversation for me especially.
01:59:01.000Because it challenged some of my biases.
01:59:04.000I got to see, yeah, so that's why I think the conversations are really important.
01:59:08.000And that's why I have a lot of respect for, you know, there are a couple progressives, a couple leftist YouTubers that I do pop in time to time to watch, notably like David Pakman and Kyle Kalinske.
01:59:44.000I'm actually more interested in pre-ordering the RTX 3080, you know, the graphics card, than in the PlayStation 5, but they're all sold out.
02:00:52.000Rioters, like there's been so much good literature about how like violent riots turn off normal people, which again, like one plus one is two.
02:00:59.000Like these are the sort of really, really simple nonpolitical things that like, Hey, if you're, if you live in the suburbs and you're like, Hey, my favorite restaurant in the city that we go to a couple times a month, just got its windows broken in.
02:01:15.000I think when Trump enters that debate and he looks at Joe Biden and says, your staff bailed these people out, what's Joe Biden going to say?
02:04:02.000If we reduce the number of people who went to those schools, we would also decrease the number of people looking for those jobs, which would raise the wages of everyone and balance out the way it should have been before.
02:04:11.000And bring down the cost they can possibly charge people.