Vosh V. is a libertarian, socialist, anti-facist, and anti-fascist. He's also a member of the Proud Boys and a regular contributor to the New York Times. In this episode, Vosh joins us to talk about the recent riots in Philadelphia, the Trump campaign website getting hacked, and much, much more.
00:00:57.000so as we are getting ready to go live where we're initially planning on
00:01:12.000starting by talking about the riots that erupted in Philadelphia last night
00:01:16.000because I covered this earlier And as you know, I still live there.
00:01:20.000We've been setting up the new studio in the new space, but I was literally just back in the Philly area, in the Philly burbs, the other day.
00:01:27.000And so chaos, riots, looting, it erupted.
00:01:30.000There was a pickup truck rammed into, was driving at a high rate of speed, went through a row of cops.
00:01:35.000A bunch of the cops jumped out of the way, but one got run over, broke her leg, got taken to the hospital.
00:03:20.000Probably Hassan's the... I know we look so similar, but... Yeah, well, I'm terrified of flying, so we'll pace him out one at a time, but I'm not principally opposed.
00:03:30.000Try and have your mic, like, right in your mouth and... Gotcha, right.
00:03:36.000So, so, just, like, because the story just broke, I don't want to, I don't want to just ignore it, but apparently it's like a big nothing burger.
00:03:42.000But I do want to show this real quick.
00:03:44.000Before we do, Welcome to the show, everybody.
00:04:48.000Well, let's, let's, let's, let's first do this.
00:04:50.000Uh, you know, this is a breaking story.
00:04:52.000Uh, Trump's campaign website is seized by hackers who claim to have evidence that proves his criminal involvement with foreign actors to manipulate the 2020 election.
00:05:01.000Of course, as of right now, his website is back to normal, we checked.
00:05:04.000And so I saw this and I was like, whoa, this is like, you know, something's gonna come, let's launch with this, and then it's just a big nothing burger, these things happen.
00:05:12.000But the gist of the story is, his campaign website was seized by Hackers Tuesday.
00:05:17.000A message reading, this site was seized appeared briefly on the homepage of DonaldJTrump.com before the website was taken offline completely just after 7.20pm.
00:05:25.000The message continued that the world has had enough of fake news spreaded daily by the president.
00:05:31.000It is time to allow the world to know the truth.
00:05:34.000The hackers behind the stunt claimed to have compromised multiple of the president's devices.
00:05:39.000Seems like grammatical errors aren't unique to the hackers.
00:05:42.000Daily Mail, come on, get a copy of it.
00:05:43.000That gave them full access to Trump and his relatives, along with access to confidential information.
00:05:48.000Strictly classified information is exposed, proving that the Trump government is involved in the origins of the coronavirus, the Post read.
00:05:54.000We have evidence that completely discredits Mr. Trump as president, proving his criminal involvement in cooperation with foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections.
00:06:07.000I almost feel kind of dumb that we even decided to bring it up because I was like, it was like breaking news and I'm like, oh wow, we got, we got what's going on.
00:06:49.000government and the Chinese government, are all these governments working together to create a bioweapon in a Chinese lab that then got out?
00:07:52.000I think, I mean, one of the problems is we don't actually have a metric for knowing what success looks like.
00:07:56.000Every pandemic response is unique, you know?
00:07:59.000Would Hillary Clinton have done better or worse?
00:08:01.000The fact of the matter is, America is its own country.
00:08:04.000No other country is a perfect comparison.
00:08:06.000We also have a very decentralized government.
00:08:08.000States are given a lot of autonomy when it comes to responses.
00:08:10.000Which can be a downside when it comes to stuff like this.
00:08:13.000I think there were a lot of things that he did wrong, from a sort of habitual tendency to downplay the severity of the virus.
00:08:19.000We know, of course, that he was informed of its severity but didn't want people to panic, which seems like it was an effort to keep stock investors from sort of, you know, hard-selling, which may or may not have worked.
00:08:29.000We know, of course, there was a crash later anyway.
00:08:31.000But the thing that bothers me the most about the whole response is that I don't actually think there's a metric that Republicans would, like a line, where they would say, that's too many deaths.
00:08:42.000Because right now it's at 225,000-ish.
00:08:45.000And I feel like, and Trump's saying, well, you know, they said it was going to be 2 million, which was the estimate if nothing was done.
00:09:58.000So with Trump, when it comes to stuff like, for example, downplaying the severity of the virus, I feel like Democrats would have done that to an extent.
00:10:06.000But when it comes to stuff like habitually like ignoring masks or like sort of arguing with Fauci back and forth to the point where Fauci now needs a security detail to go in his runs because there are a lot of far-right groups who think that he's trying to lock down the whole country with him sort of
00:10:20.000promoting the anti-lockdown protests, saying they were taking back their respective states, which
00:10:25.000has led to additional threats of violence.
00:10:27.000I feel like stuff like that refers to a particular kind of far-right populism that the Democrats
00:10:31.000don't have the ability to tap into, you know?
00:11:10.000Like what right-wing groups are engaging in this kind of violence and going after people?
00:11:15.000Well, the violence is fairly... I mean, violence, like political violence, is always going to be a fairly small percentage of the actual harm done here.
00:11:22.000No political group could ever do harm to rival the 225,000 dead, you know?
00:11:38.000But, at the same time, you know, Pharmaceutical companies are pushing doctors to give unneeded opiates to people, and in the same period of time, 13,000 people might die.
00:12:11.000And Mike Pence has said, I think he said during the debate, he tweeted it and deleted the tweet, that Trump locked everything down, which is not the case.
00:12:19.000There's a lot of complicated stuff here, because we're going now from COVID, we're getting into political violence.
00:12:22.000So I think the simple point I can make, which I did, I guess, is when it comes to the COVID response, there's nothing to base it off of.
00:12:31.000For me, I'm kind of like, OK, well, early on, Trump took action, very early on, like it was in January, to form the task force to suspend most, to restrict most travel.
00:12:41.000There were some cases in which people could travel from China eventually to Europe.
00:12:44.000And Anthony Fauci in March said no one could have done it better.
00:12:56.000Fauci is now saying it was a mistake for him to say not to wear masks.
00:12:59.000There's a video that the Republicans put out where you've got Kamala Harris and Joe Biden criticizing things Trump has said, and then they show that was Fauci was the one advising, like Fauci was the one saying it publicly.
00:13:09.000So, in this capacity, I've been covering this since it started, and I remember Anthony Fauci saying, Trump is doing the best, I don't think anyone could do anything better.
00:13:18.000Now we're several months on, we're getting close to election, and all of a sudden everyone's saying Trump has
00:13:40.000And I think it's irresponsible to put that out saying masks aren't effective or we don't know masks are effective
00:13:44.000I think a more responsible way would have been to sort of implore Americans to be responsible with their consumerism
00:13:49.000You know the weird you the weirdest thing about it is though early on conservatives are the ones like I'm gonna
00:13:54.000go buy masks I was getting messaged by people like it don't listen to
00:13:57.000Fauci go buy your mask Trarians yeah, but it's but it's both like you had you had
00:14:03.000Democrats saying don't wear masks and the conservatives saying wear masks
00:14:06.000Then it flipped at some point and now it's the Democrats or I should say the left or whatever it is
00:14:10.000I don't think it was that unanimous I think that for the most part people were on board with
00:14:13.000wearing masks and there was a brief period where we were very
00:14:15.000Concerned about making sure there was enough materials available for the for the you know for the hospitals and
00:14:20.000for the nurses and what-have-you But even early on, and Fauci's in a difficult position here, because I have a strong feeling that if Fauci was too critical of the president, he would be replaced for somebody less so.
00:14:33.000So if Fauci praises the president, there's kind of like that, okay, how much of this is like the kid getting patted on the shoulder by the teacher, and how much of this is like a real political assessment, you know?
00:14:43.000I don't know, I just think it's a degree of skepticism that we have to apply.
00:14:47.000With regards to the early response though, with Trump though, we know that he defunded the CDC, he eliminated Obama's pandemic response team, he pulled the 44 researchers out of Wuhan who were supposed to investigate the origins of that virus, and while he did stop travel from China quickly, he did basically nothing for the next month before stopping it from Europe, by which point I think we now know it was pretty much too late.
00:15:35.000I think obviously a lockdown from Europe faster would have been preferable.
00:15:39.000I think, regardless of what Fauci said, you know, once it was known that masks were available for everyone, that the PPE line was secure, he should have been very on board with promoting their use.
00:15:49.000Instead of like, Tacitly supporting the anti-lockdown, anti-masker protests with his tweets.
00:15:54.000And most importantly, I think he should have laid out a national plan to help states, to guide states, to give them money necessary.
00:16:19.000Like, you can do a national mandate, you can order national distribution of resources, and it feels like, and if we get down to the dates it gets particular here, but there were times when it felt like he was like blackmailing states with support, like, oh yeah, I'll give you this, I'll give you this, your hospital's need, I'll give you these resources, you know, but you're doing so terribly lately.
00:16:38.000Just recently he said, I think this is one of the debates, you'll have to forgive me if I don't remember the exact source, he said that He didn't care so much about aid for some of the stimulus deals because they would have gone to high-crime Democrat cities.
00:16:52.000And what this suggests to me is the partisanship of a president who is going to give preferential treatment to bases of support that he knows will vote for him doesn't really care so much about other groups.
00:17:05.000In terms of Trump's ability to accurately and charismatically convey an idea, I would say he lacks that substantially.
00:17:12.000But one of the issues with giving money to a lot of these states, whether he's legally allowed to do it, there's going to be a lawsuit.
00:17:18.000You've got these jurisdictions, because we'll now move into sort of the political violence stuff, and we can get into what's going on in Philadelphia.
00:17:23.000You've got these jurisdictions that are cutting people loose over and over and over again, and the riots keep going.
00:17:28.000So why should I, as somebody who is, you know, I pay taxes in a state not having these problems, why should I have those federal tax dollars go to a state that's just dumping it into a sinkhole?
00:17:39.000So now what we have is we have states that have a budget crisis, notably New York is a really good example.
00:17:44.000Cuomo said, I believe it was last year, God help us if the rich leave.
00:17:48.000Then you get Ocasio-Cortez leading a protest in the financial district, which triggers, I guess it was a catalyst for Amazon saying we don't want to bring our 20,000 to 40,000 jobs here, which is $30 billion over a decade.
00:18:02.000So now you've got New York City in a budget crisis and then they go to Trump and say bail us out.
00:18:08.000And particularly because you've defunded a billion dollars from your police.
00:18:12.000You had widespread rioting and looting that wasn't taken care of.
00:18:15.000You've used taxpayer dollars to put a political message in the street.
00:18:18.000Why should federal tax dollars go towards what New York is doing when they're acting extremely irresponsibly?
00:18:23.000I think there are a lot of issues being conflated here.
00:18:26.000First of all, if we just look broadly at like a state level, we know it's generally red states who underperform when it comes to the investment they need from the federal government as opposed to what they pay in taxes.
00:18:34.000In large part because red states tend to have a smaller portion of their population in big cities, which tend to be more efficient economically.
00:18:41.000But then like you say, so New York's in a tiff, as it is, undeniably.
00:18:46.000And like Ocasio-Cortez and the marches and the protests, the BLM protests have caused an amount of damage which is infinitesimal compared to like Say, for example, the amount of money that the New York
00:18:56.000City Police Department spends every year on settlements from police brutality or other
00:18:59.000mis- about a billion, a quarter billion a year, which exceeds the damage done by any of the
00:19:19.000New York is a massive city, which means that its supply lines and its industries are going to be more on the razor's edge when it comes to their ability to support the population.
00:19:27.000Like, a farm in a bad economy can hold itself for a while, but 8 million people in a dense urban network.
00:19:35.000Needs a lot of support and I just when it comes to like how why should I help these people?
00:19:40.000I mean, I understand the frustration I guess I mean I grew up in California Hold on not not so much.
00:19:47.000I totally understand people of New York need help for sure It's more of if I give money to the city to the government Are they going to light it on fire?
00:19:54.000Is it actually going to go to help the people or are they just burning money?
00:19:58.000Well, I mean, I haven't looked at their budget registry for the past... I imagine that most of it goes to people, but I mean, when it comes to... You said defunding the police.
00:20:04.000I mean, that would mean there's less money going towards very high, you know, powerful institutions in that city.
00:20:10.000So I feel like, if anything, that would aid in the responsible allocation of those funds.
00:20:13.000What we're talking about right now, ultimately, is how much do you trust city governments to support their people and my answer unequivocally would be I absolutely do not but I don't think the solution to that is denying them funds.
00:20:24.000I think that's the solution to that is a grassroots organization or network or uprising that tries to make our government more accountable to its own people.
00:20:33.000Yeah, like a blockchain or some sort of database that shows where the money went.
00:20:36.000I, I, it's the transparency in our cities, like absolute 100%. Everyone should believe in that.
00:20:42.000I'm, I, I don't think these cities have done a good job at all.
00:20:45.000I think we are seeing a lot of problems with gross mismanagement, and even before COVID and before the riots, New York was in trouble.
00:20:52.000That's why I brought up Cuomo saying, you know, God help us if the rich leave.
00:21:14.000But it feels very often that politicians are more interested in levying the money that they get to suck up to these corporations than they are using it for people.
00:21:21.000Stadiums being a big, big, big part of that, you know?
00:21:30.000Politicians sucking up to corporations is a problem.
00:21:32.000It's a lot of what we're seeing now and we've seen over the past several decades, which has led to the erosion of the manufacturing base in this country, but I digress.
00:22:12.000You're talking about the federal government?
00:22:13.000What I'm saying is like, if Amazon comes into New York, they're bringing currency in that people then trade with Amazon, and then the government takes pieces of that.
00:22:22.000And then it says, we're going to allocate, we're going to take this much, and then we're going to allocate it to fixing certain things.
00:22:47.000And yet, teachers unions, while powerful in slim areas, teachers are constantly getting their budgets cut, schools are constantly getting defunded.
00:22:55.000Despite this essential element of a functioning society being something that we need to function in a modern tech-based economy, they get like no relative power.
00:23:04.000Corporations get everything when it comes to the delegation of interest from politicians, you know?
00:23:10.000I think you're right, but I think we need... One of the problems with government is that, what do you do when it goes bad?
00:23:17.000When the government programs are no longer working properly?
00:23:19.000When the teachers are no longer teaching?
00:23:38.000I think that, and also just from a functional perspective, it also bolsters democratic political will.
00:23:43.000If you're not interested in seeing that happen, seeing the president, like, hold his hands up and let cities, like, wilt because of some presumption of, you know, poor city management.
00:23:53.000It's certainly not just New York, you know.
00:23:55.000In fact, when it comes to actual, like, percentage of wealth that goes back to its citizenry in a meaningful way, I think New York is fairly in line with a lot of other large cities, including some Republican-run ones.
00:24:05.000We don't have those discussions about those cities.
00:24:08.000How are they comparable to Republicans?
00:24:09.000With regards to these cities, like, in terms of the proportion of the money that goes into the city and how it's used, how it's distributed, New York isn't like some magic sinkhole.
00:24:18.000It's a very large city, but there are other cities that are in comparable spots.
00:24:21.000I think the big challenge, I guess, is Trump is looking at it from the perspective of—and I can only assume, I don't know—why is a citizen of Wyoming going to pay for what New York is doing?
00:24:33.000Do you know what happened with Cuomo and the nursing homes?
00:24:36.000Yeah, but we've been paying for Wyoming for like a century, though.
00:24:39.000Yeah, but there's like, it's way, way, way less.
00:24:42.000Because there's less people in Wyoming, I mean... Right, right, right.
00:24:45.000So the issue is, Andrew Cuomo puts sick people in nursing homes.
00:24:59.000I'll be honest Wyoming right you could say the same thing like well
00:25:02.000Why is Wyoming as a state so poor like why is does it have to take so much federal money compared to what earns in?
00:25:07.000Taxes well, what are those governor's doing? What are those city mayor is doing?
00:25:10.000We just never have those conversations every time it comes to talk about like the responsibility of city government
00:25:16.000We always focus it on Well on Democratic run strongholds, which is in part
00:25:20.000because cities tend to be more Democratic for a number of really complicated sociological reasons
00:25:24.000But also because I don't think we want to acknowledge the fact that this poor city management thing isn't a Democrat
00:25:30.000problem There's a functional rot in the way this country treats its citizens, and that operates everything from county all up to the national level.
00:25:38.000And I wish when we had that conversation it was less Less partisan, less about getting owns for one or the other.
00:25:46.000Because I can tell you, if Biden wins, and I hope he does, I hope to spend the next four years ruthlessly criticizing him and everyone who supports him on these same fundamental points.
00:25:57.000And I agree, New York City is in a lot of ways a I want to ask you about Biden, but I feel like we kind of glossed over before.
00:26:05.000You mentioned Fauci and threats of violence from the right and things like that.
00:26:10.000So correct me if I'm wrong, the general idea you're saying is that Trump and the right have like fervent supporters of them that are ultra-nationalists and willing to be violent?
00:26:20.000Yeah, I would say more so than the left, at least if we look at like FBI data and crime statistics and such.
00:26:25.000So this past year, how many pro-Trump things have happened where pro-Trump groups have gone out and committed mass acts of violence or targeted people or killed people or anything like that?
00:26:37.000I can't tell you if I remember the number.
00:26:39.000I will say, though, it's not... I mean, the most thing that immediately comes to mind would probably be the Michigan governor kidnapping.
00:26:49.000I mean, that one guy was... They said he was an anarchist, but he was posting memes about killing commies on Facebook, so he definitely wasn't left-wing.
00:26:57.000Some of them were... I think this is one of the things where it gets really complicated.
00:27:01.000But these guys are clearly just anti-government.
00:27:03.000I mean... Sure, I will, but I mean... And then they went after a Democratic governor who was being very heavily targeted by the right, and they seemed to reflect... Doesn't mean they're right-wing.
00:27:12.000Well, they were reflecting a lot of the rhetoric that was being used, and some of the people up there, I'm pretty sure they were MAGA hats.
00:27:17.000I would need to look back They were at Black Lives Matter protests, actually, two of the guys.
00:27:20.000So I'm not going to pretend those guys were left-wing.
00:27:48.000The people in Trump rallies aren't going around attacking people.
00:27:51.000Well, that's a little bit simplistic though, isn't it?
00:27:53.000I mean, again, political violence, terrorist attacks, these always represent a very small fraction of actual deaths in a country at any given point in time.
00:28:00.000Like, but since we started talking right now, probably you could chalk up 50, 100 people who've died in this country to some sort of pharmaceutical or military or something like that.
00:28:10.000But I'll be waiting a while until I get to see the next news story about like a terrorist attack.
00:28:14.000I just, when I'm concerned about far-right violence, I'm less concerned with like the individual terror attacks and more concerned with the fact that their actions seem to reflect a disposition prominent in the Republican Party.
00:28:29.000Whereas with Antifa, for example, nobody in the Democratic Party is going to defend Antifa.
00:29:45.000I think it's fair to say that if you look at Ilhan Omar or AOC, they're probably not
00:29:49.000on the revolutionary side of the argument, just judging by the career path they've chosen.
00:29:52.000But the Antifa people are almost to a man going to be very far left, very anti-establishment
00:30:00.000types who are probably as disgusted by the Democrats as they are the Republicans.
00:30:04.000So, a lot of people like to bring up Antifa all the time, and like a lot of the stuff we saw in Portland, I've actually said repeatedly, stop calling them Antifa.
00:30:13.000They're wearing Black Lives Matter sweaters.
00:30:15.000They're flying flags that say Black Lives Matter.
00:30:17.000They have plastic shields that say Black Lives Matter on it.
00:30:19.000The way I explain it to people is, if you go to a large group of people and say, how many of you want to protest in the name of Antifa, or anti-fascism, whatever, you'll get a decent people saying yes.
00:30:29.000If you go to the average person, a group of people, and say, how many of you want to go protest for Black Lives Matter, more of them will say yes.
00:30:35.000So I definitely think you have people who were previously flying the Antifa flag, now flying Black Lives Matter.
00:30:41.000But you have way more people joining in the ranks of that violence in the name of Black Lives Matter, which is funded through ActBlue, which is the Democrats' fundraising platform, has been routinely supported by almost every, I would say every national Democratic politician.
00:30:58.000My problem is that this is the exact same logic that people use to condemn the civil rights protesters of the 1960s.
00:31:04.000Anytime you have a lot of civil unrest, there are going to be groups at different levels of radicalization that get involved.
00:31:09.000Most of the civil rights protesters, ye back in day 50, 60 years ago, Probably boomers, you know, just like middle class, fairly progressive black or non-black people who just wanted to see their rights achieved.
00:31:20.000And amongst those people, there have always been socialists and anarchists and much more left-leaning people.
00:31:26.000And sometimes those groups, or sometimes even the regular moderate folk, will clash with the police.
00:31:30.000And the problem is that when we focus on this violence, especially with a movement as large as Black Lives Matter, which if judging by the number of people who participate in these rallies goes, the largest civil rights protest in all of American history.
00:31:41.000When we start saying, like, well, these few people threw rocks at cops here and there.
00:31:46.000We're talking about fractions of millions of people.
00:31:49.000So I'd like to say Black Lives Matter as a movement is, with Biden, reformist and generally quite nonviolent as protests go.
00:31:59.000And then amongst them, are there more radical people?
00:32:21.000I want to be clear, it's unarmed black men shot and killed.
00:32:25.000There are instances, you know, like George Floyd was not shot and killed.
00:32:28.000But it seems like if you have an estimated 375 million interactions with police, if we're having double digits of unjust killings, it's not so much a widespread problem, but just areas where we need to hold people accountable.
00:32:41.000And I definitely think police are often not held accountable for sure.
00:32:44.000Which does that warrant millions of people, you know, protesting?
00:32:47.000Does that warrant, like, changing banners at every single park?
00:32:51.000Every major corporation adopting these slogans?
00:32:54.000Does it warrant street paintings with taxpayer dollars and then using police to protect it?
00:32:58.000Does it warrant those who would commit violent in their name for 140 plus days?
00:33:03.000And will any of the Democrats call them out?
00:33:05.000Well, the corporations and the politicians doing all of that is just... I'm trying not to use the term virtue signaling.
00:33:11.000They're doing it because it makes them mad.
00:33:29.000When it comes to the protest itself, you have to recognize that the police killings of unarmed black men are very much the tip of an iceberg, even a glacier here.
00:33:39.000Where that is the most easily and objectively verifiable injustice.
00:33:44.000Like, George Floyd, I think a lot of people recognize.
00:33:49.000But underneath all of that, those... Do you mean when you say not great, like, those stories were not clear-cut acts of... Like, what do you mean by that?
00:33:58.000No, I mean that they're very easy things to protest against.
00:34:20.000But I don't think any info came out that made that any less horrible.
00:34:23.000That he had fentanyl in his system, a lethal dose of fentanyl, and that when the body camera footage got released, he's actually kicking his way out of the car saying, please hold me on the ground, hold me on the ground.
00:34:40.000The degree to which fentanyl was in his system is something of a matter of contention.
00:34:45.000There are people who say there was a lethal amount.
00:34:46.000There are people who say that it was, while a substantial amount, something that was decreasing or indicative of a previous dose and that his death was directly caused from constriction of his airflow.
00:35:19.000And I, and, so what I see with Breonna Taylor and with the George Floyd incident is not massive systemic injustice, but, well actually I'll take that back.
00:35:28.000I think it's a broken system that needs to be amended.
00:35:32.000These are the tips of the iceberg with these two, you know.
00:35:35.000But if you actually look at the history of black people in this country, and this is what people are fundamentally angry about, because people don't go out and protest because one thing happened.
00:35:43.000It's always the accumulation of a large number of unfortunate events.
00:35:46.000And when you look at black people in this country, if you take a look at average household income, or average like schooling quality in your neighborhood, or the continued presence of redlining, which hasn't changed in 70 years, and all these things building up, and it's actually the product of like this incredibly complicated network of interconnected systems that a lot of which aren't even being managed by racist people.
00:36:06.000A lot of it is just the system is stacked in a way Here's the issue.
00:36:50.000So what ends up happening now is you get the likes... This is what really bothers me about You create Black Lives Matter, I think it was created from Trayvon Martin, and then people counter with All Lives Matter, which instead of being a unifying thing, becomes an adversarial thing.
00:37:10.000Then you get All Black Lives Matter, and then you get Blue Lives Matter, I think Blue Lives Matter probably came second, and instead of people saying like, Let's work together to solve all these problems as friends.
00:37:22.000We get, my issue is the issue, and you're wrong, and how dare you?
00:37:25.000And everyone just points the finger at each other saying, how dare you?
00:37:27.000The issue is that All Lives Matter types don't really have an issue.
00:37:31.000They're just counter-protesting Black Lives Matter.
00:37:33.000If the All Lives Matter thing was a legitimate effort to try to de-racialize a broader class issue, I think that it would have turned out very differently.
00:37:40.000We have to be clear, that's not what it was being used for.
00:37:43.000It was being used to say, like, oh, you say black lives matter.
00:37:45.000Well, you're implicitly suggesting mine doesn't, so all lives matter.
00:37:50.000If you have an area, say, like Ferguson, where it's predominantly black, but there are white people who live there, you're cutting out people based on race, and it makes people angry.
00:38:00.000What policy are you referring to here?
00:38:03.000So, for me, growing up on the South Side, it was a very mixed race area.
00:38:08.000You had white people, black people, but there was a segregating line, 47th Street.
00:38:14.000I watched the cops brutalize everybody.
00:38:16.000I watched the cops plant drugs on whoever.
00:38:18.000I watched white people die of heroin overdoses.
00:38:20.000Well, I shouldn't say watch, but I've had friends who died of heroin.
00:38:22.000And so you then start, you know, you start talking about Black Lives Matter because of brutality, and then you're going to get a bunch of poor people.
00:38:31.000And of course, there are more poor white people in the United States than poor black people.
00:38:34.000I'm not saying proportionally, I'm just saying the hard number.
00:39:13.000But I can tell you, even if that wasn't the case, though, even if that wasn't the case, even if I were to accept your premise, back in the civil rights protests, the original ones, you know, there was a slogan that was used pretty frequently amongst the black folk marching.
00:39:26.000And to me, when we're saying like, well, black lives matter, you're leaving out the white people who are poor.
00:39:30.000This sounds to me like if a woman of that era was to walk up to a man with that sandwich board over his chest and say, well, I'm not a man.
00:39:38.000I recognize that the language can seem exclusionary, but if you pull back, you recognize the Black Lives Matter movement is not exclusionary.
00:39:48.000Even if the language may suggest some sort of exclusionary focus on black people, the people marching out there and the policies proposed by
00:39:56.000BLM advocates are generally very very progressive when it comes to class-based
00:40:07.000Your analogy, I don't believe fits what we're talking about right now.
00:40:11.000If you had black people in the civil rights era saying segregation is wrong, we need equality under the law, and we're also talking about getting rid of miscegenation laws, those were actual laws in place.
00:40:23.000What we're talking about right now is, are people facing injustice at the hands of police?
00:40:29.000and are people facing disadvantages in life based on class and wealth issues?
00:40:33.000The answer is yes, it affects everybody.
00:40:35.000So why would you choose to exclude somebody?
00:40:38.000If we go back in time, we're talking about civil rights and a woman went up to,
00:40:41.000you know, a civil rights activist who was black and said, well, what about me?
00:40:44.000It's like, I'm actually fighting for something that has nothing to do with you.
00:40:47.000Whereas today, you do have white people, Latinos, Asians, and everybody who have faced injustice in the hands of cops.
00:40:54.000If a black woman went up and said like, oh, I'm not a man.
00:40:57.000But, like, with the exclusionary thing, I just, I guess from what I've seen from BLM advocates that protest the movement, and even the organization, which is far to the left of what the general BLM actual marcher believes, I just, I guess I just don't see these exclusionary tendencies.
00:41:12.000Even if we were to believe there was an exclusionary element here, outside of the mere language of the movement, There are racialized elements of this disparity that can't be solved just with class solutions.
00:41:23.000It's like if a hundred years ago you put all the black folk in Section A and all the white folk in Section B, and then a hundred years later you're like, oh, I'm really sorry about that.
00:41:32.000So anyway, people in Section A make half as much as people in Section B. I'm sorry, that's the law.
00:41:40.000And the breadlining and the distribution of wealth has reflected a distinct racialized oppression in this country that I think we can solve with race-neutral policies, but we must acknowledge that it exists.
00:41:54.000But Black Lives Matter isn't advocating for race-neutral policies, they're advocating for racial policies, racialization.
00:42:02.000For instance, in Seattle, they're doing POC and non-POC separate events.
00:42:06.000At the University of Michigan, we saw the non-POC and the POC, like literal neo-segregation popping up in response to this movement.
00:42:12.000I want to be specific about those two.
00:42:13.000notable thing and shocking thing to me was California's proposition I believe
00:42:18.000it's prop 16 repeal prop 209 which would strike the civil rights language from
00:42:22.000their Constitution. I want to be specific about those two so the POC non POC
00:42:27.000separate thing this is I don't really think that this is like an official BLM
00:42:34.000I think that's woke crap as well, by the way.
00:42:37.000I don't think that... You can make an argument for it, provide a safe space, whatever.
00:42:41.000I don't think it does what it's supposed to.
00:42:42.000But the organizers of Black Lives Matter say these things.
00:42:44.000Sure, yeah, but when we're talking about, like, what BLM wants, I don't mean, like, these little events or soirees which may have, like, these weird elements that are kind of, like, misappropriated woke culture.
00:42:54.000What I mean is, like, broadly, how are we fixing this multi-trillion dollar economic gap that we have?
00:42:59.000And when it comes to the California thing, I'm mixed on this.
00:43:02.000The reason they're doing that is because the language of their law prevents them from implementing affirmative action the same way other states in this country do.
00:43:12.000It's just, optically, it looks terrible.
00:43:14.000Like, wow, you know, a California gone so woke that they're getting rid of civil rights, and it looks terrible, and I recognize that.
00:43:23.000If it was an affirmative action amendment, as they claim it was, then they would have amended it to add language protecting affirmative action instead of stripping all civil rights from the Constitution.
00:43:33.000Well, I mean, they still are, they have to adhere, of course, to national law regarding
00:43:39.000That would require federal intervention.
00:43:40.000So California is paving the way for internally, so for instance, California legalized medicinal
00:43:45.000marijuana when it was federally illegal and then complained when the DEA would go in and
00:43:51.000If California strips away the civil rights language, thanks to unanimous support from Democrats and federal Democrats, then they're going to start implementing racist and racial segregation policies statewide.
00:44:18.000And that's because I come from a mixed-race family.
00:44:21.000So I've already experienced being a second-class citizen from groups aligned with, whatever you want to call it, intersectionality or whatever.
00:45:02.000I really, given the reasons and the multilateral support that this proposition have received, the idea to me that they're removing a specific California set of policies to then become the most racist state in the nation Even though they're equally beholden?
00:45:24.000Because let's be clear, once California removes these laws, they're going to be at the same point a lot of other states in this country are.
00:45:30.000Other states in this country also rely on a set of federal protections when it comes to discrimination in workplaces and what have you.
00:45:37.000California is going to be in equal standing with them.
00:45:38.000I think we're being really uncharitable when we assume that they're doing this as part of a step one to bring back racism in this country.
00:45:54.000Sure, but if that's the case, then let's not pretend that California is, like, backsliding past the civil rights movement.
00:46:00.000Let's just acknowledge that they're, I guess, awkwardly moving towards the implementation of policies that a bunch of other states already have.
00:46:06.000I think I'm 50 50 on affirmative action.
00:46:08.000I think that's like, conceptually, it disgusts me, you know, but on the other hand, like, if you think about it in certain neighborhoods of like, Los Angeles, for example, where I grew up, if you get like, a college admission, or college, yeah, like, application, sorry, from a black person, a white person, you don't know anything about these two people apart from what they send you.
00:46:28.000Statistically, the black person has had to work harder because their neighborhoods on average are way worse.
00:46:49.000It was leftists saying, we should get rid of your names and your address and let people choose based on what their merit is and blah blah blah.
00:46:58.000Well, they didn't say merit, but that was the general idea.
00:47:02.000Their concern is that white culture, or mainstream American culture, favors anglicized names.
00:47:07.000Therefore, people have a disadvantage.
00:47:09.000They actually found, there was a study that found the opposite.
00:47:12.000And it's actually exactly what you said.
00:47:14.000If you take a person, statistically on average, a white person's more likely to have family wealth, more likely to grow up in a wealthier suburb, less likely to have encounters with police for a variety of reasons.
00:47:27.000And then they're going to have a resume that says, I went to this school, I went to this school, I went to this college.
00:47:31.000Whereas people in the black community, Latino community, are going to have less... On average, yeah, because they've had to put up with more historical... And so you end up with a racial disparity.
00:47:41.000But I don't see how, that being said...
00:47:44.000I don't see how the solution is affirmative action or racializing.
00:47:56.000Well, you could argue in a consequential sense because personally when I think who deserves to get this spot in a college, who deserves to get that job, I think of how hard they've worked, what effort has been put in, what is the, in a consequential sense, what is the income to outcome there.
00:48:12.000And affirmative action, in some cases, helps.
00:48:15.000In some cases, it actually quite hurts people when it comes to that, especially with the treatment of, say, for example, Asian immigrants in Los Angeles, UCLA.
00:48:22.000The negative affirmative action points they get, because a lot of those students are sent over here from wealthy families in China, and you get this really complicated situation.
00:48:30.000And ultimately, we can avoid all of this, all of this, and I'd love to avoid all of this, if we just put more effort into addressing the underlying racial disparities in this country.
00:48:48.000And reparations, not on race, it gets messy, but on class.
00:48:52.000Because if you were poor 100 years ago and white, you had it better than if you were poor 100 years ago and black, for sure.
00:48:58.000But there are still issues you can fix across the board, and that way you don't get a lot of really Messy racial politics that might otherwise it felt like what do you do like you test people's blood, you know, exactly Yeah, that gets really really messy, but nobody wants to do this.
00:49:11.000I mean Republicans Democrats neither of them want to do this How do you feel about oh, sorry interrupt man?
00:49:15.000How do you about universal basic income?
00:49:17.000Yeah, I think so as a socialist my one contention is my concern would be that universal basic income would Assist in perpetually commodifying the standards of life.
00:49:29.000I don't want people to have the money, necessarily, to afford medical care or food.
00:49:34.000I want those things to just be available to people, with that wealth maybe being divested to, or diverted to, like, luxury goods, that sort of stuff.
00:49:43.000But I think that, like, right now in this country, this is me, like, picking which two beautiful, delectable fruits I want to eat from a tree.
00:49:49.000If we could get UBI in this country done properly, like a good UBI, absolutely.
00:49:53.000And that would go a long way, too, to fixing the situation poor folk are in.
00:49:57.000I definitely want to talk about UBI, socialism, etc.
00:50:01.000But I want to make sure, because we were originally talking about Antifa and right-wing violence.
00:50:05.000So going back to what we were talking about before, with Antifa on the far left, we have people engaged in violence consistently.
00:50:15.000I mean, I mean, if we look at the death count... But what is death?
00:50:22.000I mean, death doesn't change the fact that someone gets bashed over the head with a brick.
00:50:25.000Sure, but I think that generally speaking, if we're looking to quantify the amount of violence done by any given number of groups, the fact that we've had historic racial protests in this country, with Antifa involvement at some of these protests, and I think we have one death, and it was that 100% Antifa guy who was in Portland.
00:50:43.000Well, you had the security guard who shot the guy in the face.
00:50:47.000No, no, no, he was just the Bernie bro, but he was there as an unofficial security guard.
00:50:51.000Sure, but he wasn't operating in the capacity of like a revolutionary protest, or he was there, and I don't know the circumstance of the death, but he wasn't like Black Bloc.
00:51:02.000The fact that there's only been so and so much death from these groups, I think, when we're looking at, over the past 10 years, hundreds of deaths from the far-right groups, indicates something.
00:51:11.000Whether that indicates the far-right group uses more lethal methods, you know, guns opposed to bricks, I'd be willing to bet that, and Tifa don't carry guns for the most part.
00:51:26.000But I think that, ultimately, discussions on stochastic violence are distractions from greater systemic violence that I think that we all need to pay a greater level of attention to.
00:51:39.000I think if you got the left and the right in a room and talked about the opioid crisis in pharmaceutical companies, they're gonna agree.
00:51:56.000They're plotting a kidnapping, whatever it is, they're staking out some governor's house.
00:52:00.000The courts had already won in Michigan.
00:52:02.000The legislation ruled, they stripped her powers from her, the courts ruled unconstitutional, and then the AG said, I will not enforce any of her laws, and these guys were plotting for what reason?
00:52:20.000But when we look at Portland, when we look at Seattle, when we look at what happened in Chicago, in the Pacific Northwest, we get, what is it, 140 nights now?
00:52:28.000That's a bit unfair because it's simmered down quite a bit, but we had a sustained period of about 90 or so days where it was just riot every single night, explosives being thrown.
00:52:38.000And when these people would get arrested for doing things that were, like, serious, You know, like, you had cops who had, like, burns, cuts, lesions.
00:52:47.000There were a lot of protesters who did, too.
00:52:49.000Well, for sure, but I mean, if you're... So, I'll get to that.
00:52:53.000You have these people getting arrested, and then the DA, Mike Schmidt, says, you're free to go.
00:52:57.000So it was so bad, the state police said, what's the point of being here if they're getting released as soon as we arrest them?
00:53:37.000And that's something that the right doesn't really experience, by the way, too.
00:53:41.000Like Fort Hood, for example, you treat these people with kid gloves.
00:53:44.000But that guy, That guy outside the house, apparently, according to a bunch of eyewitness testimony and the conflicting narratives of the police who were there, he didn't draw a gun.
00:54:35.000We want that guy on trial so we can hear everything about him and make sure we know who he is, we know what he's doing, we know why he's doing it.
00:54:41.000To me it shows, to an extent, fear as well.
00:54:44.000If you are confident in your case, legally speaking, you want them to stand trial because a trial is a years-long prolonged shaming Of them and everything they represent.
00:54:53.000Whereas them being murdered, martyrized, the only reason you wouldn't want that is if you were concerned that a trial would bring out information or would be inconvenient to you in some way.
00:55:02.000That's why, look, I think I'm not a big fan of trusting the government, but we got a couple statements and it just seems like inconclusive.
00:55:12.000I'm not inherently going to distrust the cops who are there.
00:55:14.000I'm not inherently going to trust them either.
00:55:16.000Inconclusive is the best you can ever get when it comes to conflicting witness testimonies.
00:55:20.000So, to my point, just because sometimes one group of extremists kills people doesn't mean we ignore the other group of extremists.
00:55:31.000Though I will defend a lot of the protest violence that's been taking place.
00:55:36.000I know, and this is contended among a lot of conservative circles, but I think an economist recently estimated that the damage done to the black community in this country could be monetarily represented by a figure of like 14 trillion.
00:56:00.000In the United States of America, for the longest time, the western reaches of this country, they didn't have roads, and they didn't have electricity, and they didn't have phone lines.
00:56:07.000And through an enormous expenditure of federal wealth, we put effort into bringing that infrastructure westward.
00:56:14.000Because the investment brings about more educated people, encourages the development of more land, which allows for more people to live there, which means more money.
00:56:22.000And we're facing now the same issue, albeit in a much more sophisticated way, with a lot of poor communities in this country, a lot of which are black or Latino, where we now know these communities are black holes of wealth.
00:56:53.000There are some elements that are heavily racialized.
00:56:55.000There are studies, for example, about the criminal justice system that are non-sensationalized, like just flat out the likelihood of given charges or what your sentence will be, even if every other factor is accounted for, just race is left.
00:57:07.000And then you have things like implicit bias.
00:58:26.000Well, that's always the way- I mean, you were at Occupy Wall Street, you know there's- But there were a few general asks Occupy Wall Street had.
00:58:33.000And it was a lot of leftist stuff, like healthcare, transit, schools.
00:58:37.000But that was a big problem with Occupy, for sure.
01:00:13.000He'd be like, see how easy it is, you know?
01:00:15.000And he'd clean up and he'd get like the picture, you know, and and to me and to me it would it would feel almost like a more patronizing, you know, like when the white evangelicals go to Africa to help build one house over three months or something like that.
01:00:30.000I don't think so, but I think you absolutely could make that argument, and you could make the exact same argument for the fact that Black Lives Matter is overwhelmingly white.
01:00:38.000To have a bunch of white people claiming they're representing the minorities.
01:00:42.000There's one viral video where it's like two white Antifa women are spray-painting, and two black women are yelling at them to stop, and they're like, no, we're doing this for you.
01:00:51.000But the white participation at these rallies, I think, is a good thing.
01:00:54.000I think it supports my argument that, broadly speaking, this is a fight for a sort of plurality of social justice rather than a hyper-specific race war.
01:01:14.000That's better than the Civil Rights Movement was at the time.
01:01:17.000So Black Lives Matter as a general movement, when you don't get into the specifics, you don't talk about the protests, regular people just say, oh, I like that idea.
01:02:38.000If you convince someone to exchange something for whatever, that's their choice, and I was like, I'm talking about the media lying to everybody all the time, and they're allowed to do it.
01:02:47.000So the problem is, I believe in free speech.
01:02:51.000I just don't think it's ethical, the way our media machines function like this, and I don't think there's a way to solve for that problem, because you can't put someone in charge of what's acceptable speech.
01:03:02.000You end up with media machines designed to make people go crazy.
01:03:07.000And I gotta be fair, I think there's criticism you can point towards me for that, absolutely, because I have my personal biases and the things I don't like.
01:03:14.000And I think if you look at... This is why I'm actually okay with YouTubers.
01:03:18.000Like, whether you're left, right, or whatever.
01:03:26.000By all means, make all the videos you want saying, you know, Trump is awful and, you know, all the Republicans.
01:03:32.000And I'll talk about what I don't like, and I don't like, you know, intersectionality and Democrats, the current iteration of the Democrats, for sure.
01:03:39.000I want to talk to you about that intersectionality thing, by the way.
01:03:44.000I think YouTube creates a space where individuals will be like, here's my world as I see it, here are the things I have problems with.
01:03:50.000The thing about these companies is that they editorially choose to hyper-target and ignore things.
01:03:57.000So, to go back to your point, They'll never talk about the opioid crisis.
01:04:02.000I mean, they will, like, a little bit.
01:04:03.000But they're not gonna be like, today, another X amount of people.
01:04:06.000It's just whenever it's convenient and shocking and politically advantageous for, like, an election cycle, for instance.
01:04:11.000So, to basically say, yes, the media is trash, I think when it comes to what we saw with the riots, they kept calling it peaceful and they kept making excuses for everything.
01:05:00.000But have you seen all these small towns that had those problems that are struggling to recover because the rot?
01:05:05.000Like, when you have a small town, Michael Tracy traveled to these places, journalist, he went around to a bunch of small towns that people didn't care about or know about because they're not going to get national coverage.
01:05:16.000And they had widespread lootings and were putting things on their doors like, we support Black Lives Matter, please don't hurt us.
01:06:20.000It was written by a trans activist, Black Lives Matter, and this is coming from an article that may have been... I don't think it's the New Republic.
01:06:31.000All stems from where I started getting more upset with this level of activism, because I've been covering civil unrest.
01:06:37.000But that's not broadly representative, you know?
01:06:39.000You said it yourself, those two black women trying to keep the two white people from spray painting.
01:06:44.000When I see videos of these protests, one of the first things they teach you, if you protest consistently, and I used to protest more, before I decided I hated going outside and that I didn't
01:06:52.000like being, you know, sunburned, was that you want to minimize
01:06:57.000negative engagement with the community that you're in. Looting, arson, tagging, these things, the definition of negatively
01:07:04.000affecting the community. But they defend it. Well, who...
01:07:07.000Because people keep saying they defended a book or a columnist.
01:07:34.000You know cops will regularly initiate violence against protesters, either by putting one of their own amongst their rank, throwing a rock, and then using it as justification, or by just starting themselves.
01:07:44.000We have plenty of video and data-based evidence to defend that.
01:07:47.000But that's not enough to indict the officers in specific places.
01:08:15.000I see that all the time amongst the left.
01:08:17.000Usually you have these hyper woke 18 year olds who have never been to a protest in their life who will say, Yeah, you're showing the system!
01:08:24.000And there was more of that at the very beginning with Minneapolis because people were very angry right after George Floyd.
01:08:30.000You know, that leads people to make perhaps dumb decisions.
01:08:32.000But in terms of the broader movement, and I guess we don't have data because we're talking about people's perceptions, I don't think people are all out here defending, rioting, looting.
01:08:41.000What they are saying is hyperfixating on those things is a distraction from the real issues the protests are about.
01:08:47.000So, I've had many discussions with people, and I'm sure people in the audience who are watching can absolutely understand this.
01:08:55.000How many conversations have you had where someone says, it's righteous anger, or you don't understand their anger?
01:09:02.000I recently had a conversation with someone where I was talking about, they said something like, if you are against Antifa, that means you are pro-fa, which means you're pro-fascist.
01:09:12.000And my response was, if I don't like, say, Islamophobes, does that make me pro-Islam?
01:09:21.000It means I don't like it when you go and beat random people.
01:09:24.000So if you've got people wearing masks going around, look, I can't go out.
01:09:28.000There's a viral video of, there's like a black dude, and this InfoWars reporter is like, come with me to this line of Trump people coming to a Trump rally.
01:09:37.000And he was like, oh, okay, I guess, you know, I was kind of worried.
01:09:40.000And everyone there is like, he says, I don't, I don't like Trump.
01:10:24.000Shouting at people you don't like is fine.
01:10:26.000No, but I'm just giving that as an example to talk about if I were to go out right now to a Trump rally, there's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna, if I said, I don't like Trump, that's fine.
01:10:37.000In fact, I called Trump a very disparaging term on Twitter laughing about it, and I've done it like 10 times in the past two weeks.
01:10:44.000And people are just like, I disagree with you, Tim, but I respect that you're giving us your thoughts on this one and you're treating the news seriously.
01:10:51.000If I... I went out in 20... I think it was 2017 or 2018.
01:10:57.000Antifa was posting pictures of my mom, like, and me, and threatening me, and I went to a skate park, minding my own business, and I had guys come to me and start threatening me for no reason!
01:11:06.000So, I can't defend all these individual... Obviously, I think going after people's family members is unconscionable, regardless of the people you're targeting, you know?
01:11:16.000The broad argument that I'm making is I genuinely do believe that the sentiment behind Black Lives Matter is about the things they're protesting for, and not the defense of the most violent, extreme, hyperbolized actions that take place in a movement that tens of millions have participated in.
01:11:45.000But people, but I guess I mean, I'm in some pretty far left circles.
01:11:49.000I think that when I what I remember is this after George Floyd and after the Minneapolis riots, there were a lot of people who were very gung ho about the rioting.
01:11:59.000And just a couple of weeks later, I remember there was a livestream segment from a far right, I don't know if it was a YouTuber, Twitch streamer, I think he was a neo-Nazi, the chat on screen had a lot of wacky stuff in it, and he was there at a BLM protest, and he was saying, hey, hey you guys, can you flip that truck?
01:12:16.000And he was trying to get other people to flip, and the people who were there, who were BLM protesters, all turned on him, they were like, No.
01:12:25.000And they started trying to chase him out.
01:12:26.000The guy ran away and chat was like, oh, gotta run.
01:12:28.000And when I saw that clip, that made its way around the Twitter, the YouTubes, and people were celebrating it because the goal of protests should always be to affect positive change.
01:12:38.000And you aren't going to affect positive change with the looting, the burning, the rioting.
01:12:41.000Those things do happen, but an over-fixation can be detrimental to the actual message being made by the vast majority.
01:12:48.000There's a video of some guy with a hammer and he's smashing up the sidewalk and pulling bricks.
01:12:54.000They run up, they grab the guy, and they throw him to the cops.
01:12:57.000And then the cops grab two guys, and one of the guys was actually helping, and then they cut the good guy out, and they arrest the guy who was vandalizing the street.
01:13:06.000By all means, peaceful protest is the foundation of this country.
01:13:10.000We have the First Amendment right to do so, and it's amazing when we do.
01:13:13.000Violent protest is the foundation of this country.
01:13:16.000Technically, but when we told the Crown, the American colonists, stop oppressing us, stop sleeping in our homes, stop murdering our people, And they didn't live here, they were from, you know, like, you had people who were born and raised in the colonies, and what did they say?
01:13:34.000They said, we're severing ties from you.
01:13:37.000They sent the regulars to the states, and then we said, F off.
01:13:41.000So it's a bit different than a bunch of people showing up, you know, an extreme minority of a community that is at odds with what the community wants, burning it down, getting defended by the press, and then just only getting like, well, let's not focus on the extremists.
01:13:53.000I think that's a really sensationalized narrative, because we are focusing on the extremes here.
01:13:59.000So we have to remember, we're focusing on a very slim minority, probably exclusively, you know, stuff that's going on in New York, Portland.
01:14:04.000There are cities, of course, that have greater levels of agitation just based on the demographic.
01:14:08.000But there are actions like that that take place otherwise, but when we talk about persistent media coverage, you know, Say Portland, for example, you know?
01:14:16.000I would be willing to bet that, for the most part, the people in the city of Portland are largely behind what goes on there, for the most part.
01:14:25.000But even if they are not, I still just... I guess I just don't understand why this is as much of a talking point as it should be.
01:14:31.000Like, if we want to fix this... I think you should check out... We don't have it, but Michael Tracy drove to small towns that never made the press.
01:14:41.000I was very critical of him for his work in that bit.
01:14:45.000He went to all these small towns and showed that the riots reached places that didn't make the news.
01:14:50.000Let me tell you, I have family members who live 60 miles outside of Chicago, and for some reason, Black Lives Matter activists showed up to these towns of a couple thousand people, demanded that the mayors allow them to march, and when they did, they started trashing the place.
01:15:05.000This is directly from a family member of mine saying, I don't understand why this is happening.
01:15:09.000We're a small, sleepy suburb, 60 miles outside of the city, And then here's the issue.
01:15:15.000In Minneapolis, you keep hearing things like they have insurance.
01:15:19.000And we've heard that from prominent activists in Black Lives Matter.
01:15:24.000So in Minneapolis, for example, there were several stories covered by the Star Tribune that insurance only covers up to $25,000 for hauling away debris, which the cost of hauling away totally demolished buildings was five times that, which meant they just said goodbye and they walked away.
01:15:39.000Well, you won't find me defending insurance companies.
01:15:41.000Well, for sure, but the issue is... But what do you want to do about it?
01:15:45.000So, what I'm looking for specifically is the prosecutors in Chicago, New York, Fort Worth, Seattle, and Portland to actually start prosecuting these people.
01:15:57.000I have not seen many claims to indicate, or I have not seen much evidence to indicate that there are legitimately people just being let out.
01:16:04.000What often happens is that police will gather up big batches of people that are even associated with an area surrounding a crime that took place, and then because there isn't enough evidence to find out which one of them actually did it, the whole group of them gets let go.
01:16:16.000There's a video- But that's due process, right?
01:16:18.000There's a video of a guy fighting with cops and grabbing his baton.
01:16:22.000It's something Andy No posted, I know a lot of people on the left don't like him.
01:16:25.000It's a guy fighting with the cops, he grabs their baton, a bunch of cops grab him, throw him to the ground, he got cut loose.
01:16:30.000I don't know any of the circumstances.
01:16:32.000But again, why are we arguing about individual statistics when we're talking about a civilization-wide problem in a country with a population of a third of a billion?
01:16:40.000I'm okay with Black Lives Matter, rioters, or Antifa, or whatever, have done damage.
01:16:47.000But when people say this, they don't stop there.
01:16:50.000They then go on to say, and this is why I don't support Black Lives Matter.
01:16:52.000And that's the association I can't abide.
01:16:55.000Because if you do care about fixing these problems, you should care about addressing the underlying sociological disparities that have created them.
01:17:01.000This wasn't created by far-left DAs who are letting them get off easy.
01:17:07.000This was all created by class and race-based issues, and it's going to boil up again in 5 or 10 or 15 years if we don't do something about it.
01:17:14.000It's an inevitable product of historic inequality.
01:17:17.000And if you want to condemn those people, I have no issue with that.
01:17:22.000What do we do to stop it when we have district attorneys and county attorneys being elected
01:17:28.000That will let these people go but now we have actual stories where people who would defend their property are
01:17:34.000the ones getting charged Right. We're seeing this when?
01:17:37.000The mccloskeys they brandish illegally on their own private property legally in missouri. I am so I am
01:17:43.000Not familiar with missouri specific law Are you telling me that brandishing firearms at people without provocation is okay as long as you're on your property?
01:17:52.000According to the Attorney General of Missouri, yes.
01:17:56.000Look, you can say the Attorney General is wrong and biased and all that stuff, but they're being charged with felonies.
01:18:02.000Now they're being charged with evidence tampering because they claimed And it was reported that the government, the prosecutor, actually took the gun and dismantled it and reassembled it and then accused them of tampering.
01:18:13.000I can't speak to the specificity of these claims.
01:18:15.000I don't know if this borders on conspiracy, but I'd have to look more into it.
01:18:19.000If they're innocent, the courts will find in their favor.
01:22:11.000So I really wanted to ask you, one of the things that you mentioned was that you did not like Michael Tracy's coverage of these small cities.
01:22:17.000And I kind of wanted to loop back a little bit because we are still talking about riots, and we're going to go to super chats, maybe eventually.
01:22:22.000And I wanted to ask, what was your issue with Michael Tracy's coverage?
01:22:25.000And why did you think that he was unfair in his representation of talking about these small towns?
01:22:29.000I think we have a really bad issue, especially with commentary on YouTube, of people who will try to amass a series of descriptive positions and then use them to imply a prescriptive one without actually ever making that argument.
01:22:42.000So for example, if your argument is that Black Lives Matter That's so interesting.
01:23:50.000First of all, bad things have happened to people on the left and the right.
01:23:53.000Second of all, this has nothing to do with Biden winning.
01:23:55.000This all happened under Trump, under protest that Trump has exacerbated with his poor response.
01:23:59.000And third of all, don't you think it's a little bit disingenuous of you to imply that just because something has happened at some point in this country, that means that it's the product of an upcoming presidential election?
01:24:08.000Like, at some point over the past four years, you know, there's probably been like a sewer explosion in somebody's toilet in an apartment.
01:24:14.000But if I said, if Trump wins again, there will be toilets exploding in your home, I feel like it would be a disingenuous presentation.
01:24:19.000Do you think Joe Biden would reinstate critical race theory trainings at the government level?
01:24:23.000I think that your opposition... Before Trump banned it, I guess.
01:24:26.000I think your opposition to it is one of the most anti-free speech positions that you have.
01:24:39.000When I said that if Biden wins, and I don't know the exact quote that you're referring to, they're changing the definitions, which they've already been doing.
01:24:49.000Definitions have changed dramatically to the point where Wikipedia makes no sense anymore.
01:24:52.000Wait, it makes perfect sense, and definitions change all the time.
01:24:56.000If you go to Wikipedia right now, and I brought this up before, and look up the word woman, it has nothing to do with the word trans woman, and they both disagree with each other on reality.
01:25:10.000The point is, you have Donald Trump, who just recently banned critical race theory, and any company that does critical race theory trainings is banned from contracting with the government, and it's actually reversing this.
01:25:22.000Critical race theory is neo-segregationist.
01:25:25.000Wait, can you describe to me what critical race theory is?
01:25:28.000So in layman's terms, I don't have the academic definition pulled up for you, but specifically like privilege plus power, whiteness, minorities, traits of whiteness would be specifically like hard work, scheduling.
01:25:44.000I'll tell you this, the tenets of critical race theory, though I've definitely done segments on the overt academic definition of it, I don't have it pulled up.
01:25:52.000But when they put out a list that says whiteness, they say things like, down with whiteness.
01:25:58.000Traits of whiteness include schedules, hard work, planning for the future, 2.5 kids, and all of those things.
01:26:03.000You're just listing the one Smithsonian Museum pamphlet that was passed out and largely criticized.
01:26:11.000It was it was in the Smithsonian for decades.
01:26:13.000That specific pamphlet, no, it was not.
01:26:15.000This pamphlet you're referring to right now, I know because I covered on my stream and made fun of it as well.
01:26:19.000No, it was made specifically probably some new in student or somebody who was in their 20s made it got taken away almost immediately afterwards following bad reception to pretend that this is indicative of an entire academic theories.
01:26:36.000Critical race theory is just the racialized element of critical theory.
01:26:38.000That is to say, you analyze racial relations based on distinctive power relationships between different groups.
01:26:44.000So how about instead, I guess, the application of?
01:26:47.000That's probably the best way to put it.
01:26:49.000There is something terrifyingly despotic about banning the teaching of a certain idea because it leads people to conclusions that are unfavorable to the President of the United States of America.
01:27:00.000But I think you're now ascribing an assumption on the intent.
01:27:04.000What I'm saying is... Why is it good that it's banned then?
01:27:08.000Well, so the first assumption you made was you know exactly why Trump did it and made him look bad.
01:27:13.000I think, actually, Trump doesn't know anything about it.
01:27:15.000No, Trump specifically said that it promoted anti-American values, which is the same tinpot dictator excuse that every authoritarian is ever given for their excuse to... And so the context here is that Christopher Ruffo appeared on, I think, Tucker Carlson and said that, and then Trump just parroted it and didn't actually know what he was talking about.
01:27:30.000So when it came to the debate, he had no idea what he was talking about.
01:28:06.000You have to prove what the specific academic... What I'm telling you is, when they say things like, I worked for Fusion, for example, and the editor-in-chief changes Twitter by a down with whiteness, like overtly racist.
01:28:17.000They use it to justify racial segregation, neo-segregation.
01:28:27.000I've only heard that from non-academics.
01:28:29.000Right, so what I'm saying is you have a colloquial understanding of what's happening versus you demanding I make a specific definition and then attack it, which is not a fair argument.
01:28:38.000The colloquial understanding you have is as much an ideological mishmash as the anti-SJW compilations of 2015.
01:29:29.000Christopher Rufo went on Tucker Carlson, gave a list of all these things that were happening, Trump saw it, reacted, didn't know what he was talking about.
01:29:35.000But do we have information outside of Christopher Rufo's testimony?
01:29:38.000We have the articles and the documents and everything, all the research he's done.
01:29:41.000So, look, this is just one individual I'm citing right now.
01:29:44.000This is like, white people are bad, black people are good?
01:29:48.000No, we have down with whiteness, we have Racism can only be—only white people can be racist.
01:29:56.000We have these components that make up some mishmash of intersectionality, leftist identitarianism, critical race theory, which form a nightmarish ideology.
01:30:05.000And it's very, very simple, actually, when Trump bans this.
01:30:07.000It's a violation of Title—I believe Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to do trainings where you say, white people this, white people that.
01:30:17.000So Trump is actually just enforcing existing law when he says you can't do this?
01:30:20.000Those policies aren't against the law.
01:30:22.000The critical race theory is nothing more than a tool that helps us understand the reason why things are the way they are in this country when it comes to people's racial divides.
01:30:31.000The application of this tool is completely ideologically neutral.
01:30:35.000You can arrive at right-leaning conclusions through it.
01:30:38.000The only reason this is being discussed now is because it is being used as an academic scapegoat for the ideology that has led to Black Lives Matter.
01:30:46.000I think, I think the issue is, you haven't, you haven't read any of this.
01:30:52.000The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that quote, virtually all white people contribute to racism and demanding that white staff members struggle to own their racism and accept their, this is Christopher Ruffo's cited research on, where did this happen?
01:31:09.000We also have the National Credit Union Administration, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI all cited, and these are overt violations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
01:31:20.000So all of those departments said that exact thing?
01:31:23.000So, National Credit Union Administration says they held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was founded on racism and built on the backs of people who are enslaved.
01:32:36.000What does this have to do with critical race theory, though?
01:32:39.000So, what I'm saying is, when I say things like critical race theory, I'm referring to one particular component that's used in these trainings that are being banned.
01:32:48.000The point I'm making is, there's a general understanding of what's happening in this country, and every time I bring this up to someone on the left, they use a semantic or academic argument to confuse the situation.
01:32:56.000Because he's banning it, even so far as to go to universities and funding for them.
01:33:01.000This is a tremendous violation of our First Amendment rights.
01:33:08.000You have to understand that when it comes to, listen, I'm not defending white male training, whatever, okay?
01:33:13.000We're talking about you would need to meet the highest conceivable threshold of harm done to this country for me to even begin to believe it's acceptable for a president to unilaterally decide that a given type of academic analysis is no longer something that they will be permitting.
01:33:30.000This is, like, it is insane to me that a person who considers themselves anti-authoritarian could ever even begin to to condone this.
01:33:40.000If there are problems with those individual things, and I have no doubt, by the way, corporations have been doing cringe, cringey, terrible diversity training for decades now, So hold on.
01:34:24.000He's going to do unilateral executive action which restrict the First Amendment rights of federal institutions because he heard it from the like.
01:34:58.000Did Trump, you know, blanket banning critical race theory?
01:35:01.000I guess it depends on what the actual executive order is, and to what extent critical race theory is banned, but insofar as it pertains to the training specified by Christopher Rufo, then brought up by Trump, that should be banned.
01:35:30.000So in either case, there's a quote that I'm wonderfully fond of, and it's, if one considers himself a defender of human freedom, he must regrettably spend his time defending scoundrels, because it is against scoundrels which authoritarianism is first aimed, and if it is to be stopped, it must be stopped at its beginning.
01:35:50.000When it even came to Nazi Germany, I understand this is a hyperbolic argument, I'm just using it because it's a clear-cut example.
01:35:55.000When it came to the types of literature they decided to burn, they didn't just say, oh, everything progressive, anti-racist, everything Jewish, let's burn that.
01:36:01.000They would say, oh, well this, this is child abuse, but it was everything research about gay people.
01:36:06.000And if you use very specific problems to defend the dissolution of information on a broader topic, you're participating in authoritarian apology.
01:36:18.000So yes, but I think you're talking about something else.
01:36:24.000First, if Trump went so far as to ban universities teaching critical race theory, then that's a serious, serious problem.
01:36:31.000I've seen people complain, there was like a, I can't remember what it was, I think it was West Point, did a class on like queer theory, and people complained about it, and I'm like, why are you complaining about a class on something?
01:36:42.000If people want to go and learn about it, they should learn about it and they go to university for it.
01:36:46.000The actions being taken that I have issue with, that I can only specifically cite, was Trump saying these specific trainings violate the law.
01:36:54.000Now, I think it's fair to say Trump didn't know what he was talking about.
01:37:12.000They took critical race theory and used it as an excuse to create ridiculously racist functions.
01:37:18.000And then they're just, so instead of Trump saying, hey, get rid of those functions, don't do that again, he's getting rid of the theory that was used.
01:37:26.000So that part of the argument is well beyond what we're actually talking about.
01:37:29.000That's why I'm saying if Trump went so far and that we'd have to pull up, I would agree with you.
01:37:34.000Trump should not ban knowledge or theory.
01:37:36.000But if Trump is saying the government is engaging in trainings that teach this thing to employees, and those things are violations of Title VII, we can't legally do those things.
01:37:47.000Is the idea that white people are inherently racist a critical race theory idea?
01:37:53.000I think that most critical race theorists would argue that everybody carries with them racial biases, whether you're black or white.
01:37:59.000I think any academic who would say that only white people carry with them internalized biases is absolutely ridiculous.
01:38:05.000Well, we used to talk about, we have comfort biases.
01:38:08.000So whatever you're comfortable with is what you're, if you're not familiar, like familiarity biases.
01:38:13.000So if a white person was born in a black neighborhood, they'd be familiar with the black people and not the white people.
01:38:19.000White people, by the way, who are born in inner city, kind of like black areas, tend to develop the same cultural affectations as black people when it comes to relationships with the police or other institutions like that.
01:38:29.000It's not about white people bad, black people good, or anything like that.
01:38:33.000Even though some of these sessions, I've seen them, some of them seem horribly cringey and ham-fisted attempts by managers to try to fit some sort of nouveau standard of,
01:39:28.000However, for what it's worth, I'm not going to pretend like Wikipedia is a fantastic source.
01:39:33.000I'm just not capable of pulling up the actual article which goes back to 1999 from Harris, 1993, Ladson-Billing's Critical Race Theory, which views white skin that some Americans possess as akin to owning a piece of property.
01:39:48.000In that, it grants privileges to the owner that a renter, in this case a person of color, would not be afforded.
01:39:53.000Cheryl L. Harris and Gloria Ladson Billings describe this notion of whiteness as property, whereby whiteness is the ultimate property that whites alone can possess.
01:40:01.000Valuable just like property, the property functions of whiteness, rights to disposition, rights to use and enjoyment, reputation and status property, and the absolute right to exclude, make the American dream more likely and attainable for whites as citizens.
01:40:14.000Yes, that would violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act if you told people that in a government setting.
01:40:40.000Wait, do you think it's a violation of the law in a sort of diversity training class to say that white privilege exists?
01:40:48.000Yeah, well, in this context, it would be yes.
01:40:50.000I genuinely don't think that is the case.
01:40:53.000I mean, there is a big difference between treating people differently based off their race and recognizing that society treats people differently based off their race.
01:41:00.000You can't discriminate on the basis of race.
01:41:15.000Your argument about white privilege, the problem I have with it is, first of all, I recognize the concept of a majority privilege.
01:41:20.000In the United States, there is a dominant, a much larger portion of white people than any other race, thus creating a familiarity bias that we mentioned.
01:41:29.000This is something... I'm not trying to say that everything I'm saying is what Brett Weinstein believes, but Brett Weinstein has talked about things like this.
01:41:36.000If you go to China, for instance, there's no white privilege.
01:41:41.000In fact, you know, when I go to a country like Korea, they're extremely ethno-nationalist, and they think they're better than everyone else in the world.
01:41:48.000You could treat it better if there was a white person than a black person, though.
01:42:21.000Vox.com wrote this, actually arguing you're wrong, and it was a professor who made the same argument, and it was the weirdest thing I ever read.
01:42:29.000And when I quoted it, a bunch of leftists tried ascribing that quote to me.
01:42:33.000The problem I have with it is I've heard the exact same thing about white privilege to Asian privilege.
01:42:38.000And I've been told that Asians are the true bearers of privilege.
01:42:42.000Then you get books like In Defense of Looting that straight up say that Jews and their opinion, and Asians, again, their opinion, represent capital.
01:42:53.000I can't believe you would say that of your own opinion, Tim.
01:43:01.000Listen, first of all, it's not just a majority bias.
01:43:04.000A country which, by the way, has a very pernicious history of white supremacy and white privilege is Bolivia, a country recently that had a socialist victory in an election.
01:43:12.000Two-thirds of that country is indigenous.
01:43:14.000The one-third that is white has historically held a great deal of power because of course they are the descendants from the conquistadors who came over there and just just made a mess of things and they've held power for for centuries since.
01:43:29.000If we are to defer to legal arguments, I am not a lawyer.
01:43:32.000I am of the utmost confidence that saying that there is white privilege in this country does not violate any discrimination practices with regards to federal training or employment.
01:43:42.000I think it is a very true and very real thing that people should know.
01:43:45.000Not because white people should feel ashamed.
01:43:47.000I have never once, for a moment in my life, Apologize to anyone for being white or for a man or being a dashing six foot two.
01:43:54.000I think it's just a piece of information that is helpful to contextualize other pieces of information.
01:43:59.000So I disagree on racializing it, but I will say this.
01:44:03.000If we agree on that point, Then it sounds like what Trump did isn't terrifying, in fact, would just be a matter for the courts.
01:44:11.000So, if Trump wants to say, this is illegal because I believe it is and you believe it isn't, then the real issue is not despotism, the real issue is, okay, you file your lawsuit, it'll go to the courts, we'll interpret, determine whether or not it is a violation of Title VII.
01:44:26.000Because, first of all, if it's already illegal, then they should be able to file court cases just based on the evidence they already have.
01:44:31.000They wouldn't need an executive order to give them the additional justification.
01:44:35.000Additionally, when he talks about critical race theory, when Trump, when the Republicans, whatever, They aren't talking about this very narrow set of cringey diversity training practices.
01:44:46.000They're talking about a broad ideology that is infesting and de-Americanizing people to make them hate whiteness, to hate this country, to hate their race, whatever.
01:44:55.000And these things, frankly, we should call them what they are, blatant authoritarian
01:45:31.000But this is within the confines of our existing government, what the President has the authority to do, and there are means of rectifying it if it is a violation of the law.
01:45:38.000Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean it's not authoritarian.
01:45:39.000Yeah, it's some bad authority with the Patriot Act and stuff.
01:45:43.000Just because he has the authority doesn't mean it's right.
01:45:45.000It means that we have a system that, for one, is imperfect, but it's good in the sense that if Trump does something, he gets sued all the time and he's lost several times.
01:45:55.000And in my opinion, I do not like the idea that there would be a government program, a government training program, telling people that whiteness is inherently this, that, or I wonder what's white.
01:46:45.000I know you wouldn't, but this is what's happening in practice.
01:46:49.000I have personally met many white nationalist authoritarians, but I can't say just by way of you existing, voting for Trump, aligning with them in that respect, that your ideas are exactly their ideas.
01:47:15.000No, first of all, we're not talking about policy.
01:47:17.000We're talking about the individual practices of individual government departments that maybe are worthy of criticism.
01:47:22.000Again, I haven't gone to these, and I have very perfect reasons to distrust sometimes right-leaning media's portrayal of these events.
01:47:28.000But even saying everything there, cringey as it seems, these are not, this is not identitarianism.
01:47:33.000These are, at worst, poor ways of describing the concept of white privilege, which I think is a perfectly defensible concept.
01:47:39.000You can believe in white privilege, you can believe in Asian privilege, that bears no, absolutely nothing, on your character as an individual, and anybody who would use these concepts as a hammer To dismiss you?
01:47:52.000Or to say your ideas aren't worthwhile?
01:48:06.000By way of your privilege, and I acknowledge I have privilege, your ideas on this aren't worthwhile.
01:48:10.000And I say to that, as I always have, idiotic!
01:48:13.000Ideas are valuable, people are valuable, by their own merits and none else.
01:48:17.000When we talk about concepts like privilege, we're talking about lofty statistical biases.
01:48:23.000Some black people will literally live their entire lives without really meaningfully getting racially discriminated against, and some white people will get frequently uh, uh, um, messed up because they're white. It's all about
01:48:35.000averages and statistics. And anybody who uses that as an individual condemnation, I have
01:48:39.000to tell you, this is not anything that I support. And I don't think it's representative of
01:48:53.000So if you create a platform, a training program that says, and I know you said it wasn't,
01:48:57.000you didn't like it. When you take, you know, 8,900 white males or whatever, and you know
01:49:02.000you, I think that was actually a different circumstance, but when you bring white males
01:49:05.000to a special training camp to tell them to address their privilege,
01:49:09.000Those people are having their rights violated based on, if you want to call it a distorted or corrupted view of whatever the theory actually is, then it's being used to oppress individuals.
01:49:22.000It's like corporations, you know, like corporations.
01:49:34.000Uh, well, I, um... In what capacity were you there?
01:49:40.000So I worked for this company as a senior correspondent and they were doing a presidential forum where they were going to be asking questions of presidential candidates.
01:49:46.000And I went to the president and I said, I'm just wondering why I wasn't notified as a senior correspondent and somebody who's supposed to be hosting things for you.
01:49:54.000And they said, they brought in someone else who was black.
01:49:57.000And he said, well, he's like, you're too white.
01:50:01.000And I was like, I'm second generation mixed race.
01:50:04.000I was like, I've dealt with violence and racism.
01:50:07.000And he was like, yeah, but come on, man.
01:50:09.000He's like, look, man, these people are extremely racist, you know, so you can't, you can't do it.
01:50:13.000I think we're... Wait, I just want to say, I mean, you know, I'm not going to come in favor of that, but that has nothing to do with critical race theory.
01:50:26.000But I have to say, that has, again, nothing to do with critical race theory.
01:50:29.000Often the people who are making these decisions are people who are, let me tell you, quite in need of understanding critical race theory.
01:50:34.000If according to long-standing critical race theorists, whiteness as a skin color is something you can hold that grants you access and reputation and privilege, and it is a component of critical race theory.
01:50:47.000Being applied by people who, I think to be fair, we can say people who are dumb.
01:50:52.000But if people are taking these ideologies and saying whiteness is a special thing that applies to your skin color and negates who you are, in the fact that an individual will then be oppressed or denied rights, it's a violation of civil rights law.
01:51:04.000The way it comes off to me, I mean, I can't speak to these individually, again, regardless of how bad they are.
01:51:09.000I will say, though, they, I mean, you've heard of the book White Fragility, I assume?
01:51:12.000This is a big popular, leftists hate this book.
01:51:16.000Because the person who wrote it is, if I may, A cynical corporate sellout whose primary interest is, as a diversity trainer, encouraging other corporations to get more diversity training.
01:51:33.000Maybe you get some marginal benefits, but in terms of the money invested, it turns out that if a person has racial biases, sitting them in a one-week seminar is not going to do anything about it.
01:51:43.000So, with that being said, when I hear about these government industries, I don't think these are being done by far-left critical race theorists.
01:51:49.000I think these are people who are functionally working off the same set of misguided principles that have been dictating corporate policy for decades now, in an attempt to overstate how hip and cool and totally not bigoted they are.
01:52:03.000But with regards to the executive order, if one ideology begets another, and if you want to believe critical race theory leads to stuff like that... We agree on that point.
01:52:20.000If critical race theory leads to that, and again, I contest because I feel like corporations have been doing basically that for ages, but then we must acknowledge then, of course, that there are elements of Trump's language, like the way he presents himself, the stuff that he says, that do lead to the creation of far-right militias and violence in the same way that any political sort of extreme group will form from any type of speech.
01:52:40.000But to then executively ban conservatism in an attempt to target the extremism?
01:52:46.000I think we would recognize then, okay, maybe we should have painted with a finer brush here.
01:52:53.000I guess the question then is, did Trump outright ban the ideology across the board, even at universities, or did he ban the specific trainings?
01:53:35.000Race theory is talking about class and race combined because we come from a country where our ancestors were white, if you want to call us white, which I still don't think we are.
01:54:43.000Well, there are racial disparities that'll need to be addressed as well.
01:54:46.000If you have black folk on average in a certain place and white folks on average in a better place, lifting people out of poverty won't fix the respective divide between black and white people.
01:55:00.000I mean, we're not even getting that in this country, so honestly, at this point, I mean, I'll take that.
01:55:04.000But I just, I need to say, because I think I found a comparison, maybe perhaps a more effective one, with regards to this.
01:55:10.000You're aware, of course, that back in the 1980s, even the 90s, the promotion of homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle, saying it's okay to be gay, this was called child abuse in many, many circles.
01:55:20.000This was in fact a mainstream Republican position for a very long time, and we all know the propaganda that they used.
01:55:26.000If there was an executive action that was taken to ban federal governments that told the people there that it was okay to be gay or that you shouldn't discriminate.
01:55:36.000Because the accusation that it abetted child abuse, I would be equally skeptical of that tendency.
01:55:43.000We have to be, when it comes to banning certain types of ideas in federal government, we have to be very careful.
01:55:47.000How would you feel if, in the 80s, there were government training saying that being gay was wrong, And they told people who were gay to go on retreats to address their gayness.
01:55:59.000You would want that banned, wouldn't you?
01:56:01.000Yeah, but there wasn't, uh, what broader idea would I be banning along with it?
01:56:05.000I would be fine with that specifically being banned.
01:56:27.000I don't think they're effective anyway, you know?
01:56:29.000I think, I mean, you'll find most critical race theories don't agree with that.
01:56:31.000Critical race theory, along with critical theory, are derivatives of the Frankfurt School and a generally Marxist perspective on social events.
01:56:38.000That is to say, a sort of agitative, discursive process of different classes interacting with one another.
01:56:43.000Leftists don't like corporate diversity training.
01:57:09.000Well, affirmative action was implemented off of reasons that had nothing to do with critical race theory.
01:57:15.000Critical race theory is just about the respective antagonisms.
01:57:18.000In fact, I think most critical race theorists, or at least most orthodox ones, you know, like leftist ones, would actually be quite critical of the idea that you could emancipate black people by giving them Something that's interesting is how races are actually genetically different.
01:57:31.000only further cementing them in a system that has caused them to fall to the place they're
01:57:58.000I mean, modern biology is very interesting.
01:58:02.000Again, I said I argue with a lot of Nazis.
01:58:04.000Nowadays, biologists don't even use race.
01:58:06.000They use clines as an idea, which have intersecting lines of parallel DNA similarities that can vary based on race, ethnicity, geography.
01:58:18.000The interesting stuff is when you look at how all these intersect, there's more genetic diversity in the continent of Africa than there is between the average black and white person.
01:58:26.000Meaning that if you took one African, not like Black American, but African, and found another random African, and then DNA tested whatever, the difference between them would be greater than if you took a random African and a random European.
01:58:37.000Oh, so it's not the color of their skin necessarily, even though they're different races within the Africans.
01:58:42.000So the issue is, people use race as a colloquial term for saying, like, The color of your skin and the certain features that exist within your, you know, typically your face or your body.
01:58:52.000So they'll use that to describe like, you know, Asian eyes or whatever, or, you know, black people's noses or whatever, whether they're racial stereotypes, which I think to an extent, yes, because just because the color of your skin is one way doesn't imply.
01:59:03.000But I bring that up to point out that some people don't get, I guess this might, you might agree with this, I don't know, that white privilege doesn't necessarily mean white skin.
01:59:14.000Yeah, there are ways that you can evoke white privilege while actually being quite non-white.
01:59:18.000What I mean is like somebody who's perhaps albino, but visually distinct.
01:59:23.000Oh yeah, of course, because even people who, like black people or albino, there's a skin condition some black people have that leads to them having patches of white skin.
01:59:30.000Michael Jackson claimed that he had it, but he obviously didn't because it was... Was it vitiligo?
02:00:03.000And I think there are a lot of deep seated problems in this country.
02:00:06.000And I guess my frustration here stems largely from the fact that I wish I could say, like with great confidence that, you know, vote blue and this'll get fixed.
02:00:16.000But while I do believe that Biden would be better for race relations than Trump, as do many Americans.
02:00:23.000A lot of these cities with these deeply held racial disparities are Democrat-run cities.
02:00:28.000I don't think Republicans would necessarily do better, but it does indicate that the system we have right now is not really fixing this problem.
02:00:34.000It's made us debt slaves, man, to the banking system that wants interest.
02:00:41.000These cities that have the problems of police brutality, the places where these individuals have lost their lives that sparked these protests, Well, it's the same problem with COVID in America, right?
02:00:55.000No two cities are alike, no one country is alike.
02:00:57.000would do any better. I think we have San Diego, which is a Democrat, Republican mayor and didn't see, I guess, high
02:01:04.000credits, not on the high coast. They're all stone man.
02:01:06.000Well, it's the same problem with COVID in America, right?
02:01:10.000No two cities are alike. No one country is alike. The best
02:01:12.000argument I've heard is that a lot of the cities that have high
02:01:15.000degrees of racial disparity are also run by Democrats, because
02:01:19.000multi racial multi ethnic city is more likely to vote in Democrats just based on demographic trends. San Diego
02:01:25.000has a lot of white and Hispanic people doesn't have as many black people so it might contribute to the trend. I don't
02:01:31.000really know. So this this was a post I think it was Washington
02:01:33.000Post, they mapped out the highest crime cities because I think Trump said they're all run by Democrats, and they
02:02:34.000And unless, I don't know how do you change that, because what happens in these cities, people just go in and say, Democrat, all across the board, and then nothing changes, because nothing has to change.
02:02:42.000We need, absolutely, we need ranked choice voting in this country.
02:02:46.000We live in a shockingly undemocratic country.
02:02:49.000Nobody feels represented by either party.
02:02:51.000Well, we're not supposed to be overtly democratic.
02:02:53.000No, no, of course we have the Republicans, but we need at least, I mean, even the Founding Fathers said that a two-party system, or even parties in general, would lead to the downfall of this country, because, and there are a lot of problems with them, but if we're going to keep parties, man, ranked choice voting would allow third parties to actually exist and flourish.
02:04:47.000And I think that, like, fundamentally, the Democratic Party is ready to move on to a different set of ideas, a more true fulfillment, maybe, of what it could mean for its citizens and the party by the citizenry.
02:04:58.000The actual elected officials, though, They have every trick in the book that they can pull out to maintain themselves in power for as long as is humanly possible.
02:05:07.000And this is my argument for why Trump needs to win.
02:05:10.000Joe Biden is a 47-year establishment crony who wants control of the executive branch to seal the doors and never allow any challenge ever again.
02:05:18.000They are upset that they lost in 2016.
02:05:49.000The elites did not like either of them.
02:05:51.000The establishment Republicans hate Trump, and that's exemplified by the Lincoln Project and the cronies who are now just espousing whatever the Democrats want them to say.
02:06:28.000If Joe Biden gets in and Kamala Harris then ends up being that person in charge, there will never be a Bernie Sanders.
02:06:33.000There will never be a leftist populist.
02:06:35.000But if Trump gets in and the establishment withers and dies over the next four years because Trump's going nuts, he's going to fire everybody.
02:06:41.000He's stripping all these government protections from these employees.
02:06:56.000But if Donald Trump gets rid of the bureaucrats and he strips the establishment of its power, then I believe in 2024, you're going to see something new and wild, whatever it is.
02:07:05.000I don't think it's going to be Trump 12 years.
02:07:08.000I think Joe Biden is the best they could muster up to try and save the crony establishment.
02:07:13.000And the Republicans like Rick Wilson and the other Lincoln Project people, Joined forces with them, showing us who they really are.
02:07:20.000Joe Biden is getting more money from Wall Street than Trump is.
02:07:23.000He gets more money from the wealthy than Trump does.
02:07:25.000He is the establishment billionaire candidate who is being protected by big tech and billionaires who are censoring stories that might hurt him.
02:08:32.000Yeah, fascism is an ultra-nationalist, far-right form of government which relies on the assembly of the common will, the unification of a national narrative against enemies from both within and from without.
02:08:44.000It usually has to focus on things like michismo or perhaps on the belief in a type of ethnic or racial supremacy.
02:08:50.000So how would you define right-wing libertarians?
02:08:52.000I don't think there is such a thing as a right-wing libertarian.
02:08:57.000I keep talking to people who say they are, and then they stop being libertarian the moment it comes to literally any issue other than taxes and weed.
02:09:03.000There was a dude who took his clothes off on the stage of the libertarian debate to argue about freedom, and they had a debate over whether or not you should be allowed to sell heroin to kids.
02:09:11.000Yeah, well, they are some amazing people.
02:09:27.000I'm not even going to waste time defending that.
02:09:29.000When it comes to the means for populism to interfere with the government after Joe Biden wins, I am optimistic.
02:09:37.000Bernie Sanders has extracted an enormous number of concessions from Joe Biden, and what's more, there are increasing signs That the popularity of the squad and other more populist, left-leaning, progressive, sometimes even socialist candidates, they are starting to wean in on the Democratic Party.
02:09:56.000The constant conflict between Pelosi and AOC, and the fact that at certain points Pelosi has had to defer public opinion to AOC in those respects, is an indication that within that party there is a real chance at these dinosaurs.
02:10:10.000I think the average age of the Democratic politician is like 71 or something.
02:10:18.000I don't think AOC is radical enough, but I recognize that progressive change in a given direction is preferable, especially when we recognize what we're gambling with here.
02:10:26.000Even if I were to believe that Donald Trump was some sort of anti-establishment bull, and I don't, consolidated heavy amounts of federal power, defunded institutions.
02:10:35.000Well, the constant use of executive action, the fact that he has normalized attacks on institutions which attack him.
02:10:43.000Like, for example, his attempt to try and get the FBI director fired during the Russiagate investigation, or the constant attacks on the press and the media, or the fact that he seems to be contemptuous of the very idea of losing an election itself.
02:10:59.000He's consolidating federal power but trying to also fire the heads of these organizations.
02:11:29.000I can tell you that does Trump use his authority and push really hard and then get challenged in the courts and lose sometimes and win sometimes?
02:11:36.000Sure, so we can talk about the administration.
02:11:37.000First of all, the Russiagate investigation led to literally dozens of credible indictments and arrests with regards to their misappropriation of funds or with their collaboration with foreign governments.
02:11:49.000We have the Ukraine scandal, of course, with regards to him bartering aid with their willingness to help him.
02:12:39.000The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have both now written that there was a big effort to not cover the Biden scandal.
02:12:45.000I would need to look into the specifics of it.
02:12:47.000One of the things that I don't like when we talk about the badness of these characteristics is when we start playing defense for them on the assumption that the media is going after them or not going after them.
02:12:59.000Left-leaning media will go after left-leaning aims.
02:13:01.000Right-leaning media will go after right-leaning aims.
02:13:03.000There is no such thing as journalistic integrity or objectivity.
02:13:07.000There are only people in power and money.
02:13:09.000Well, the establishment media I don't know what the establishment media is.
02:13:15.000Fox News is the most viewed news station in the country.
02:13:37.000But when you combine CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, it's tenfold.
02:13:42.000Because you're combining all of the left-wing media, and arguably some of these are barely left-leaning, with one partisan right media.
02:13:50.000If you take a look at all of talk radio, if you take a look at Fox News, if you take a look at OAN, for example, No, it's not.
02:14:00.000It's not great, but it does have a lot of influence within the government because we know that Trump watches it and Trump is himself a form of media.
02:14:06.000When he talks about things with the broadcasts that he gives, he reflects essentially far-right partisan talking points.
02:14:11.000These are in many ways reflective of the political opinions that right-leaning people have forthcoming.
02:15:14.000I think he's very pro-government as long as it's his government.
02:15:17.000I think that his persistent refusal to acknowledge that if he loses in the election that he should actually step down peacefully is terrifying.
02:15:27.000And I think that while Joe Biden is a haughty institutionalist crony who probably has as many original thoughts in his head that weren't given to him by like focus groups, as like your average chipmunk.
02:15:39.000I think that he is a- That's me to chipmunks.
02:16:10.000I- You mean the thing where he spied on Trump?
02:16:13.000So the meeting with Sally Yates and Comey and Biden and Obama where Joe Biden suggested using the Logan Act against Michael Flynn to falsely prosecute him, where they then threatened his son with imprisonment unless he agreed to testify against Trump.
02:16:33.000So so to clarify, though, the notes that were released in the investigation by the FBI show that there was a note scrawled that ascribed Logan Act to Joe Biden in a meeting with Sally Yates immediately afterwards.
02:16:47.000I think it was Sally Yates who then wrote an email to herself explaining everything that happened and sent it to her.
02:16:51.000And then several government employees in the FBI took out liability insurance, saying in like I'm paraphrasing that we're in serious trouble.
02:16:58.000We better buy insurance because we're going to get sued over this.
02:17:01.000I can't speak to the specifics of this.
02:17:03.000I know that Trump has vaguely alluded at some sort of left conspiracy to deny him the presidency, which has always come off very fascist to me.
02:17:14.000Do you know about the Peter Strzok and Lisa Page things?
02:17:16.000I have to say, and I apologize if this comes off like, I guess, disinterested, but having followed, I guess, the events leading up to and I've explored this Obamagate thing pretty extensively, from what I've seen and from the media sources that I've looked at and the information, the analysis, I haven't seen anything that even remotely justifies the claims that Trump has made about this.
02:17:34.000Do you know about the text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok?
02:17:44.000I think the issue is when you talk about Russiagate and Trump's actions, it's coming from a place of you not actually looking at the evidence.
02:17:50.000No, I assure you I have the issue is that... Well, if you didn't know about the meeting with Comey and Yates and Obama and the Logan Act and what Michael Flynn was threatened with, and like, do you know about the ongoing court case where Judge Sullivan is blocking the government from dropping its own case?
02:18:04.000Now, I'm familiar with the things that you referred to here.
02:18:06.000The issue is that what usually happens with this is that there are a lot of nuances to these cases that need to be looked over thoroughly, and usually the way they're presented is extremely hyperbolic.
02:18:16.000Well, Russiagate provide... Well, again, keep in mind, this is the big difference between right-leaning claims and Russiagate.
02:18:22.000Russiagate was investigated dozens of indictments and arrests.
02:18:25.000All these accusations... Not related to Russiagate, though.
02:18:27.000Well, they were brought about by the investigation into Russiagate involving the misappropriation of campaign funds.
02:18:32.000And we have an FBI lawyer who was recently indicted on altering evidence to frame Carter Page and get false FISA warrants to investigate in the Russiagate.
02:18:40.000So some of these may have been, may be, what's it saying?
02:21:03.000Look, look, look, look, look, I'm not bringing this up to be like everything's perfect.
02:21:06.000Yeah, I just feel, well, no, no, but it's just, it's, it's interesting to me, because again, it's just, it falls, like, on this vague conspiracism, like, with regards to- It's not, it's not vague, I mean, look, if you read the news on these things, you'd know what I'm talking about.
02:21:17.000No, but I have, it's just, a lot of these claims get jumbled up, and to be honest, I forget which narrative or which universe that I'm operating in at any given point.
02:21:58.000A next FBI lawyer has been indicted and charged for altering evidence to imply that Carter Page was not an was not.
02:22:06.000An asset of the CIA when he was having these meetings when in fact he was doing it for the US government
02:22:10.000Yeah, I'd have to look so they essentially got bunk FISA warrants
02:22:14.000Then we ended up with before Trump got it got inaugurated You have these notes released that to the best of our
02:22:20.000understanding It's it's a meeting between several individuals in the
02:22:23.000Obama administration To try and find a way to go after Michael Flynn to get him
02:22:28.000to I guess The FBI notes actually read what's our goal? I think it's a
02:22:33.000text message What's our goal to prosecute or get him fired? My question
02:22:37.000when that came out was Why why is the FBI trying to get a guy fired from his job?
02:22:41.000Why were they Obama told Trump not to hire Michael Flynn?
02:22:44.000Trump hired him. Anyway, I guess Trump did it as an F you to Obama. So for some reason then Obama has a meeting
02:22:51.000They take notes on Logan Act, maybe, for Michael Flynn, then Michael Flynn gets accused of breaking the Logan Act, or this was what launched the investigation, even though no one's ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act.
02:23:04.000individuals can't represent themselves as agents of a government, because as acting National Security Advisor, he had a conversation with the Russian ambassador asking him not to escalate tensions between the countries.
02:23:14.000That was the justification for launching this It was insane.
02:23:19.000Then you have text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, where they're saying, we have an insurance policy, we'll stop him.
02:23:45.000So when Trump says, I'll put it this way.
02:23:48.000Do you agree with Trump then when he says that they're spying on me, I didn't even get my first term, frankly I should be allowed a third term?
02:23:59.000He says a lot of really weird stuff sometimes.
02:24:02.000Now, I'm at something of a disadvantage here and I apologize for that because with regards to the Russiagate investigation thing, it's been a while since I've brushed up on this respective information.
02:24:11.000I do know that the investigation that did lead to a number of legitimate investigations and arrests and indictments And I think there's something to be said about that.
02:24:21.000I feel it's often very difficult to understand the totality of like a government conspiracy, or like something going on behind the scenes, until everything is sussed out through a proper investigation.
02:24:30.000And for that reason, sometimes it can be really difficult to understand not only the specificity of events that have taken place, but the severity of them as well.
02:24:38.000Because if you want to, and I'm not saying you're doing this, because everyone does this to some extent, if you want to, a disparate set of pieces of information that can be assessed and collected and presented in such a way as to
02:24:52.000give a narrative and then once you have that narrative you can run with it and
02:24:56.000that's what Trump has done very often with this Obamagate thing for example
02:24:59.000like I remember when a reporter asked him what Obamagate was and he was like you
02:25:02.000know and then he walked away which I think was fair I think it was Trump not
02:25:06.000knowing well well then I mean but that's the thing and that's one of the
02:25:12.000I think that there has probably been more confused information put out from our government over the past four years than possibly any other single presidential administration, in large part because there doesn't seem to be any sort of cohesive narrative.
02:25:24.000It's just scraps of information being used whenever they're politically convenient and discarded when they're not.
02:25:31.000And this is, if I may bring this back around to what we were talking about earlier, one of the things that really concerns me about Trump.
02:25:37.000This is an anti-establishment tendency.
02:25:42.000This doesn't break the government in a way that makes it more fair or more representative or more kind or more decent or more efficient.
02:25:48.000This is a type of governance which just makes it worse.
02:25:50.000So do you want a competent establishment or an incompetent one?
02:25:53.000I mean competent in certain ways when it comes to coronavirus handling, when it comes to the dissemination of healthcare, when it comes to proper schooling, all areas I think Trump has been woefully inadequate in.
02:26:02.000I would absolutely prefer a competent establishment because education, handled properly, empowers us.
02:26:08.000Not keeping us in our homes to be sick and die from coronavirus, that empowers us.
02:26:12.000There are ways the government, when managed properly, even in an establishment sense, even like someone like Obama, and I hate Obama, Um, can give us tools that we need to become stronger.
02:26:23.000The best example of this that I use, and I use this when arguing with Bernie or Buster's all the time, is, um, they say Obama stopped the wheels of history.
02:26:30.000His, his corporate neoliberalism prevented the American people from waking up and recognizing what was wrong with the system.
02:26:36.000And I say to them, okay, I don't like Obama either.
02:26:39.000After Obama had two terms, guess who ended up coming in second, narrow second?
02:26:44.000under Hillary Clinton, the next Democratic primaries, some nobody, independent senator,
02:26:51.000who then, in large part because people were disillusioned with Obama, but nonetheless given
02:26:55.000the tools to think and to act. That's the internet. The internet, yeah, but also people weren't
02:27:01.000terrified of a pandemic or of global warming, at least not as much as they are today.
02:27:06.000People weren't dealing with substandard schooling.
02:27:10.000The more people are terrified and confined and weakened by their circumstances, the less politically emancipated they are.
02:27:16.000You know what makes it a real challenge, having conversations like this, is just that there's a lot of things you've read that I haven't, a lot of things I've read you haven't, and there are a lot of people who have read things that neither of us have or haven't, but everybody expects us to, like, come to a definitive understanding and solution within the span of a couple hours.
02:27:32.000I'm just bringing it up because I know that no one's going to be satisfied.
02:27:35.000Oh, I have never come to a definitive solution on anything over any length of time in a conversation.
02:27:39.000The reason I say this is because when you bring up global warming, when you bring up the far right, when you bring up Russiagate, I'm like, wow, to like have a conversation on each of those subjects would take an hour to three or four hours.
02:27:53.000Like, so just to briefly mention this.
02:27:56.000In your opinion, you said there's no actual right-wing libertarians.
02:28:01.000Because whenever it comes to it, they actually end up, you know, being more authoritarian.
02:28:05.000Libertarianism was originally a leftist ideology, and it was appropriated.
02:28:10.000Not to get into it, just to mention that.
02:28:13.000Then there's also like Russiagate, where you're like, oh, it's been a while since I've talked to this.
02:28:16.000And then I, like, the reason I brought that up was like, oh, we got to really break that down to address one point.
02:28:35.000Even if you have a very specific policy-focused discussion on one issue, say school choice, that's a big one for Republicans these days, that's easily a three-hour discussion.
02:28:44.000Depending on how many sources you bring, that can go the whole day.
02:29:02.000We are agents capable of making our own decisions.
02:29:05.000But when it comes to systemic issues, like neighborhoods with poor schooling, these people don't get bad educations because of poor decision making.
02:29:12.000They get it because their neighborhoods have been wastelands that the government hasn't invested in for decades.
02:29:17.000My concern, and this is what I fear, I wake up at night in a sweat thinking about this, It's, imagine some single black lady, you know, two kids, two jobs, and now all of a sudden, school choice happens.
02:29:49.000writes online or writes an article or appears at a town hall and she says,
02:29:54.000what can I do? I am struggling. The answer is you should have took them to a better school.
02:29:59.000Sure. That worries me. Why take away the option?
02:30:02.000Because I think there's a better solution to the same problem. We just invest in these communities.
02:30:07.000Also, we have to keep in mind, if a lot of people choose to move to different school districts, or like take their kids there, whatever, you know, the school district that's already there is going to be even worse, because these schools get funding based on, you know, participation.
02:30:22.000They're going to get cut more and more, meaning it'll be even worse for the people who don't have the option to go to the other ones.
02:30:27.000I say, why enable people to leave their wasteland and blame them if they don't when we could just fix the wasteland?
02:30:36.000So this gets into the bigger question about socialism, I suppose.
02:30:46.000Mixed economy, I think we need regulation, but I think we need people to freely trade.
02:30:52.000And the issue I take with schools, for instance, is that when they have problems, we just dump more money into it as if a general investment fixes it.
02:31:00.000The problem, though, is we say, okay, what about review boards?
02:31:03.000What if we have like a review of the expenditures?
02:31:06.000Nobody wants to be the person to cut the job or to gut the schools.
02:31:10.000And then when people actually do, they complain the schools are being gutted.
02:31:14.000If the school isn't functioning properly, and I shouldn't say school, just government spending in general, what we tend to see, like in Chicago, for instance, is you get a wound.
02:32:15.000What I'd like to see, the pipe dreaming here, is a proper public works program instituted in certain districts in this country.
02:32:22.000A lot of the big issue that we have here is that the reason these kids don't care about school is because they know nothing's going to come from it.
02:32:29.000A lot of the people in their neighborhoods end up burnt out druggies anyway with absolutely nothing to do with their lives because there's just no opportunity.
02:32:36.000Public works programs, you have to invest in the community not by paying private contractors to do it, but by paying the inhabitants of that community.
02:33:00.000I don't want this to be like a black or a white thing.
02:33:02.000There are white communities in this country that are struggling.
02:33:04.000And I think that if, with these steps, we can We can, I don't know man, just the idea of an America where it's like, here's a quarter of the country, we just don't go there.
02:33:14.000You can invest in new kinds of roads made out of bitumen which will last for like decades, but they like planned obsolescence.
02:33:20.000They want to build things that will break so that they can spend more money on it again.
02:33:27.000And they want to be friends of the corporation, so.
02:33:30.000So, I mean look, there's a lot of problems.
02:33:32.000I want to say, can I say one thing quickly about socialism?
02:33:34.000I don't mean to interrupt, I apologize.
02:33:36.000I was going to say it's great, it's fantastic.
02:33:38.000Yeah, so let me just talk about that for five.
02:33:40.000What I'm in favor of is something called a worker's state.
02:33:43.000This is called by some people a dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a horrible term because it was termed before the term dictatorship meant what it currently means.
02:33:51.000But it essentially means I just want to state where the workers have power.
02:33:54.000That doesn't mean bring out the guillotines or anything.
02:33:56.000It just means that when I think of like, what is a good country?
02:34:00.000Like what is a good democracy or good republic look like to me?
02:34:03.000I imagine one where the people inside of it have a lot of control over what goes on in a way that's responsibly
02:34:09.000channeled It's not just like crazy, you know will of the masses stuff
02:34:12.000and one of the big issues to me Is that as you just pointed out?
02:34:16.000Corporations have a lot of power in this country and we defer to them quite a bit of government power as well
02:34:21.000Much in the way that the old monarchies did with with mercantilism, you know
02:34:25.000You want to do an East India Trading Company spice run, you know
02:34:31.000Because the state is invested in the corporation succeeding, and the corporation makes a lot of money off that mutual partnership.
02:34:37.000But if these corporations, or these construction companies, or even these schools, frankly, are being run by people from the community who have a lot
02:34:46.000of internal democratic control within it.
02:34:49.000I think that could go a long way towards fixing this problem we see where we just put money
02:34:53.000into these problems and it just burns through it falls through.
02:34:56.000I think one of the problems we have with with all government spending is that we don't know
02:35:00.000how they've had to fail them whereas with businesses they mostly just fail.
02:35:05.000The big problem I see with the way things are going right now, for one, I think a lot of the critiques of capitalism are more about the massive corporate structure and the imbalance of power.
02:35:14.000That once you reach a certain threshold of capital or wealth, you just own the system.
02:35:29.000But if you're an ultra-wealthy person, you keep pumping money in until you figure it out.
02:35:33.000Or lobby to get subsidies, or tax breaks, and then you just forever.
02:35:38.000So these are the two issues I see, and it's interesting because this argument is actually more of a classical, I guess, left and right argument of the days of yesteryear, ten years ago, when it was like government versus corporations.
02:35:50.000you know, during like Occupy, you had a lot of people on the left saying the government can help
02:35:54.000us, we need these programs, and the right was like we need the free market, we need the corporate
02:35:58.000solutions, and I'm like both are problems in different ways.
02:36:05.000Right, you're both just so awful. Government and massive corporations.
02:36:09.000We want small government and small business. So I like a mixed economy.
02:36:14.000I think we need to figure out how we do government programs in a way that if they fail, they fail, and we need to make sure we don't have massive multinational corporations with no interest in helping the people, but selling them out because they can get better laws to violate human rights in other countries, where they can just hire people for a quarter, and then have them do, you know, essentially slave labor, and then sell garbage to the American people at a marked-up price, and then become...
02:37:48.000Socialism is an economic system where the workers control the means of production, so you have democratic worker control of the businesses, and you've decommodified at least a significant portion of society.
02:38:00.000So, like, you no longer produce a given commodity or service for the purpose of selling it.
02:38:05.000It's provided free of cost, essentially.
02:38:10.000I would say that laissez-faire capitalism, at least, is a free market system whereby private ownership of capital is afforded to essentially every citizen, and that the civic structuring of the society is done in such a way as to maximize the economic benefit of the proliferation of the free market.
02:38:34.000Where on, uh, well actually, so how would you define left and right?
02:38:37.000I'm trying to, I'm trying to just create... Like economically, or socially, or?
02:38:44.000To be honest, I've thought about this more and more.
02:38:46.000I don't know if there is an economic left and right.
02:38:49.000I think most people who care about economics want the same basic thing, which is good life for as many people as possible.
02:38:54.000And I feel like we just have different ideas on how to achieve that.
02:38:57.000And maybe that, the implementation, is the left-right element.
02:39:01.000But I don't think the left is like more government, the right is less government.
02:39:04.000I think that generally speaking, left-leaning people want as much power in the hands of as many people as possible, and right-leaning people believe certain individuals are deserving of higher levels of power that they use to adjudicate.
02:39:17.000The reason I bring this up is because, you know, you mentioning far-right early on.
02:39:21.000I don't think anybody knows what far-left or right actually means.
02:39:27.000I try, I should say, I was lazy of me to use that.
02:39:30.000I try not to use that very often because they are necessarily definitions which require sort of like immediate codification and it changes depending on the context of the conversation.
02:39:39.000I think defining far left is actually kind of easy.
02:39:43.000Because you tend to have tendency, not absolute.
02:39:46.000You have leftists who are adamant in socialism, communism, and alongside that typically fall some kind of social progressivism.
02:40:43.000This could be my partisanship showing, possibly, but I think one of the reasons for this is because the right is a lot more idiosyncratic than the left is in a lot of ways.
02:40:51.000Most left-leaning values were hammered into books 150 years ago, you know?
02:40:56.000Like, if you talk to, like, your average socialist or communist online, You're probably going to find that a lot of them have an investment in some type of theory or literature that is very specific and very laid out, and you can agree or disagree, but it was written there, you know?
02:41:09.000And a lot of right-leaning ideas, I feel, are more of, again, I understand this is a product of my partisanship, but sort of an emotive response to a given set of material conditions.
02:41:18.000Same argument goes the other way, man.
02:41:20.000I know, and it really depends on perspective.
02:41:24.000Very few people subscribe to the intellectual tradition of nationalism.
02:41:28.000Yet, we have a lot of nationalists in this country.
02:41:31.000What do you mean by the intellectual tradition?
02:41:32.000Well, the intellectual tradition of nationalism came along with the codification of the nation-state, and the idea was that the individual will should be subservient to that of the nation, because the nation was the sort of amalgamation of the people's will.
02:41:45.000The individual dies, the nation lives.
02:41:47.000Really weird Orwellian stuff, you know?
02:42:35.000I think there are a lot of people in this country who are just, let's be real, just don't like black people very much and that it forms a lot of their political opinions.
02:42:42.000And I don't think there's anything I can do about that with policy or with my channel or anything like that.
02:42:46.000But there is something the vast, vast, vast majority of the people in this country want and care about, and that is a good life for their children.
02:43:42.000I think that Hillary Clinton is an odious person, but when it comes to basic policy issues like climate change or like what economically you're going to do for the country, I think the Democrats just generally have a better plan for this country than the Republicans.
02:43:53.000But we had the best economy in generations.
02:43:56.000It's a continuation of Obama-era policies.
02:44:11.000One at a time, the tariffs were maligned by virtually every economist in the country, and he has had to spend an enormous amount of money with subsidies.
02:45:03.000If so, Obama did inherit a mess from George W. Bush.
02:45:06.000This isn't just like, oh, it was because he came after Bush.
02:45:09.000It was a objective thing that had happened under Bush's presidency.
02:45:13.000And Obama's policies allowed the economy to get back on track in a straight line trend that continued into Trump's years.
02:45:20.000I haven't seen any evidence that Trump's policies meaningfully affected that trend, with the exception of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which did end up spiking everything back into the into the touchdown zone.
02:45:36.000But recovery has been in large part hampered by a non-existent federal response and the tone-deafness of, again, like, we have conquered coronavirus the day after the worst record number of cases since it all started.
02:45:50.000I just, this type of leadership, even if we're to leave aside populism and whatever, I think populism flourishes when people are happy and healthy because it gives them time to think and it gives them room to breathe.
02:46:02.000And for that reason, I think we need four years of Competent, milquetoast, neoliberal, centrist governance under Biden.
02:46:26.000Neither of them are competent, that's the problem.
02:46:28.000Well, they're certainly more competent than Trump.
02:46:31.000Wait, wait, wait, I just want to say, again, I'm not defending the moral character of any of these politicians, but if we want to go back-to-back, policy-by-policy, promise-by-promise, absolutely, I'll wrap...
02:46:39.000It's an abusive relationship you keep going back to, man.
02:47:18.000A quarter of the deaths from COVID worldwide in a country with four percent... Nursing homes where the governors of Democrat-controlled states put sick people, killing... That's not, wait, wait, wait, again, that's not good.
02:47:27.000I feel like we're engaging in whataboutism right now.
02:47:30.000The fact of the matter remains that this country has more federal power and more wealth than literally any other country in the history of this planet.
02:47:53.000You say that you, like, don't like either candidate, but the Tenth Amendment doesn't prevent a national response to the COVID crisis.
02:47:59.000Trump would have to invoke serious powers.
02:48:01.000Yes, people were encouraging him to evoke the war powers because this is a time more people have died during this than they've died over the past 50 years.
02:48:09.000You're making a political statement about whether the Republicans who wanted it or who didn't want it, the Democrats who did, one side was right or wrong.
02:49:18.000Do you think a panic would have been better?
02:49:20.000I think being honest would have been preferable.
02:49:22.000Wait, you earlier on Twitter, you were criticizing Fauci for saying that masks weren't effective when we know now that they are, but you'll defend the President of the United States of America lying to the population?
02:50:04.000Wait, I understand there was a lot of complexity here when it comes to the information that was disseminated and who did it, but that doesn't change the fact we know Trump was given information and then lied about it.
02:50:14.000And your opinion is- That's not an opinion.
02:50:16.000Yes, and your opinion is, he shouldn't have, and mine is, I don't know, maybe there would have been a panic, maybe there wouldn't.
02:50:25.000Trump made a call, and you're criticizing him, and we don't know what the result would have been.
02:50:28.000You've criticized Fauci for what he said about the masks.
02:50:31.000How can you say, Trump, well, maybe it would have caused a panic, but then not say the same thing about Fauci when he said that masks weren't effective sometime in March.
02:50:41.000We should have worn masks the entire time.
02:50:46.000We don't know if a panic would have destroyed everything and killed 10 times the people.
02:50:50.000How would that, being honest about the extent, first of all hundreds of thousands are dead and they're dying in large part because we don't have a consistent national policy about social distancing and about mask wearing.
02:51:55.000The existing CDC that he defunded by like a massive percentage?
02:51:58.000So, factcheck.org, the way they put it was Trump was trying to streamline the process early on, and that it's been weaponized by partisans to make it seem like he just straight up got rid of it.
02:52:08.000So he got rid of it, then took its functions and put it into the CDC, and he's cut the CDC's budget.
02:52:13.000No, no, no, we gotta pull up, no, it's factcheck.org, it's trumpdismanned.
02:52:17.000I'm familiar with the site factcheck.org.
02:52:21.000I mean, do we want to look at, like, CDC cuts or what he did with the people in Wuhan that he pulled out?
02:52:29.000What I'm trying to talk about is the totality of evidence that he's mishandled this pandemic.
02:52:33.000And it's interesting to me that you were extremely unwilling to criticize him for that.
02:52:53.000Wait, so you could have led a million?
02:52:55.000So what you're telling me is that we have no idea what would have happened if Trump did anything else, and now we're supposed to make a determination?
02:53:02.000You're making a tautological statement.
02:53:04.000We don't ever know what would happen if other things didn't.
02:53:06.000So what am I supposed to say when Fauci early on praised him, when governors early on praised him, now they're critical of him in an election year?
02:53:12.000First of all, the praise of governors is irrelevant.
02:53:49.000Yeah, I can say this is objectively very bad.
02:53:51.000We should be doing something different.
02:53:52.000And I can say Trump should have done these things, but I can't get overly angry about making assumptions on what I think would or wouldn't have happened.
02:53:58.000So you are of the opinion that you should not be able to criticize a sitting president as long as you don't have... I think you're using semantic arguments.
02:54:25.000If you actually are anti-establishment, as you claim to be, you are shockingly unwilling to criticize Trump on some of the most objectively... That's not... That's ridiculous.
02:54:32.000Wait, you listed the tariffs that he did, even though it destroyed American farming for essentially no benefit, as a positive... As a policy he did... To the economy, as a positive... And then we ended up with a good economy.
02:54:42.000As the... No, we had the good economy.
02:54:46.000You mentioned that as a positive, even though all that did was hurt American workers.
02:54:49.000You are willing to defend him... How did that hurt American workers?
02:54:51.000The subsidies that we needed to provide farmers because they were being destroyed, the manufacturing that was being hurt from our inability to import- But the manufacturing came back.
02:55:00.000So Trump threatened the auto industry to put tariffs on their vehicles manufactured overseas, and then they brought their factories back.
02:55:06.000We brought back a shockingly low number of jobs that don't- The point I was making about panic was I don't know what would have happened if Trump caused a panic by coming out and saying, you know, America, there's a dangerous pandemic coming.
02:55:29.000I'm saying there are presidents, and there is a decision to make, and sometimes they're hard, and we don't know what would have happened if they panicked or otherwise.
02:55:38.000This is the fundamental issue that I have.
02:55:40.000You're coming out and saying, Trump should have told everyone.
02:55:44.000If you actually consistently held to this, then you would never be able to criticize anything a president does because you don't know what would have happened if they hadn't done it.
02:56:05.000Why not say, hey, why not say we need to buckle down as a nation and we need to recognize that we need to be wearing masks and socially distancing?
02:56:27.000I think it's like you're purposefully misunderstanding to make an argument.
02:56:31.000No, the argument that I'm making, fundamentally— You can't criticize Trump over masks and then act like Fauci was a saint the entire time.
02:56:44.000If people are going to look at Trump and say, Trump said all these things, and then I can go back and see that Fauci was the one who said them to Trump and Trump repeated them, then my issue is maybe we could have done better.
02:56:59.000He brought Fauci on in the first place.
02:57:01.000And the New York Times is estimating if the infection rate reached a certain level, it could even be as high as 6 million.
02:57:05.000First of all, nobody ever knows that we don't have vision into alternate futures.
02:57:12.000We have to make reasonable assessments based on the fact that we are doing terribly.
02:57:15.000This is exactly what I mean, and this is the issue that I have.
02:57:22.000You claim to have a disaffected, anti-establishment view of all of this, but your channel is hyper-partisan against the left, and then when anyone criticizes Trump, you'll either defend him harshly or you'll back up and say, well, they're all bad.
02:57:37.000You are taking the choice to defend Trump.
02:59:40.000And I think you are partisan biased pro-Biden and you don't even know about half the things that have happened that you're criticizing Trump for.
02:59:47.000Oh wait, I'm talking about Trump's handling of the coronavirus.
02:59:50.000And so don't come to me and say you're hyper-partisan because you're saying I don't know about Trump when I also said I didn't know about Nancy Pelosi.
03:01:19.000Every rally of his is a treatise on how America is about to be destroyed by far-left lunatics.
03:01:23.000I don't think he has a problem with panic.
03:01:25.000I think he had a problem with panic being tied to his name.
03:01:27.000Whether that be a product of the stock market dipping, which ended up happening anyway, that was pretty much inevitable given the consequences of the action.
03:01:35.000Or whether that just be a matter of his personal image, which is also something presidents have to be concerned about, I think this is worthy of criticism.
03:02:33.000And I think most people know he's got a mouth that he couldn't stop blabbing to save his own campaign.
03:02:38.000I think he caused a lot of his own problems.
03:02:41.000And there is an actual really great argument that he should have been honest with the American people.
03:02:45.000This stemmed from me saying, I don't know.
03:02:48.000And then you turned into, why won't you criticize the president?
03:02:50.000Because I don't know what would have happened.
03:02:52.000Well, first of all, the statement, I don't know, and the statement, I think there's an excellent argument for your point, are not the same statements even remotely.
03:02:58.000You said there was no standard by which we could... There's no control group for what could have been done.
03:03:04.000As I have clarified, there's no control group for anything like this, but we still have to be able to criticize.
03:03:09.000So when I say stuff like, he lied, and he has downplayed relentlessly, even though he had information which suggested that would not be the case, and he has constantly scapegoated this onto China in a pathetic attempt, to avoid any responsibility or culpability for his actions or those of his administration, or the fact that he has done absolutely nothing to invoke war powers, and one of the few instances where even I, a left-leaning person, a socialist, would say is perfectly acceptable.
03:04:14.000Do you want to look at the language of the executive order?
03:04:16.000Because I guarantee you it doesn't specifically say these trainings.
03:04:19.000We both agree the trainings would be bad, but you brought it to a speech argument and then went off on First Amendment rights and everything.
03:04:25.000Because the language of the executive order was not specifically targeting those training seminars.
03:04:29.000You said earlier that Trump's use of executive orders was him expanding federal authority.
03:06:07.000It was, it was the, the, the, the slider bar they had for their analysis was the worst case scenario was like six plus million.
03:06:13.000But we can, yes, but the best that we can do at this point is see how other countries have done.
03:06:18.000And we can tell, just from the responses they've taken, that ours has been woefully inadequate.
03:06:23.000But you already said no two countries are the same and we can't compare them.
03:06:26.000Wait, we can't compare them exactly, but of course we can take info- How can we compare a federal system with 50 states to a single state of 10 million people?
03:06:33.000Well, maybe we could find a single state with 10 million people and then compare what it did to a single one of our states.
03:06:53.000Meanwhile, the UN has said the economic lockdowns will lead to mass starvation and that now they've said we advise against them, they must be avoided at all costs.
03:07:01.000It's fair to say everyone screwed this up royally.
03:07:19.000Europe isn't beholden to a single executive power.
03:07:21.000The EU can't tell every country to adopt.
03:07:24.000It doesn't have war powers over the entire continent of Europe.
03:07:26.000So it's an opinion on whether or not Trump should or shouldn't have... What I'm saying is, it's not an issue of, we know what could or would have happened.
03:07:34.000It's just an issue of, I believe things would have been better had Trump used these powers.
03:07:37.000Yeah, but that's the case with literally all public policy.
03:07:40.000We have to be able to assess these things from inferring data examples that we already have and applying to them to the different situations.
03:07:46.000We can't say... So your issue is I'm not criticizing him saying, I don't know, whereas you're taking a position.
03:07:52.000Well, you don't know that, but what about all of the other things I mentioned?
03:07:56.000Like him repeatedly saying that it was going to be away anytime now, him making fun of people for wearing masks, him not publicly appearing.
03:09:10.000And many of the people who are dying, or I guess not dead themselves, because that'd be voter fraud, are then going to go out there and affirm the practices of a candidate who has lied to them.
03:09:21.000I just read it was a 97 to 99.4% recovery rate for the virus.
03:09:41.000The flu is also not as transmittable and also it's not as... Another thing people don't talk about with COVID, this is what scares me personally.
03:09:49.000Like coming out here for example, I flew across.
03:10:22.000If you mix it with other diseases, it can really, the flu can mess you up.
03:10:25.000If we were going to make any determination, I think we can look at, if we were going to go country by country, I think we should look at Sweden and say, we really screwed this one up.
03:12:37.000And I think there's a big difference between the way that America handles things, the way Americans will respond to things, and travel suspension.
03:12:56.000But then, as you mentioned later, he started, you know, playing games with federal assistance, which I guess, you know, there's a conversation about the riots, but perhaps the issue is a difference between a view of America as a single nation or as a union of states and a balance of authorities.
03:13:53.000Well, China has the ability and the authority to do well, they can do stuff we can't do.
03:13:59.000And I wonder, I mean, to what extent is that effective?
03:14:02.000Like hypothetically, imagine money's not an issue, you know, if you could do a month lockdown
03:14:07.000where you suspend all rent, mortgage, everything, like suspend all forms of systemic, you know,
03:14:12.000debt payment, and provide people a base stipend, and then have like, local officials who are
03:14:18.000tasked to provide like groceries or rations to every house, if you could do that without
03:14:22.000That would do a really, really, really good job.
03:14:24.000But that in America, in a country this huge, with this many different people, with this many different ideologies, that would be a Well, it's authoritarianism versus libertarianism.
03:14:36.000And so I've had this argument with many libertarians who don't want to accept it, but there is a strong efficiency in serious authoritarian regimes, notably China.
03:14:45.000When a pandemic hit, they welded people into their homes and sacrificed the individual for the sake of the collective.
03:14:50.000They glued everyone to their seats in their house.
03:15:41.000I will butcher it if I attempt to recite it verbatim, so I'll simply say this.
03:15:45.000I think there is a freedom in not living in a country with a pandemic.
03:15:49.000Because there are implicit threats to my safety that come not from the autonomy or agency of any individual, but simply now from the process of participating in society.
03:16:25.000Yeah, you go out to Wyoming or something.
03:16:27.000These people are never, ever... Because we have such a diverse country.
03:16:29.000That's one of the things I love so much about this place.
03:16:31.000That's why a national mask mandate would not even be enforced.
03:16:35.000Because in, I would say, more than half the states, and I would say probably 95% of the country, you know, outside of the blue counties, they wouldn't even enforce it.
03:16:43.000Well, 95% of the country by landmass, maybe.
03:16:50.000I think the best thing they probably could have done was set up a system of incentivizations for all the cities and governors and what have you, with like relative levels of coverage.
03:16:57.000Get paid to wear your mask, now we're talking.
03:17:00.000Or like a piece of crypto every time you're seen in public with a mask on.
03:17:03.000Like a state gets an extra so-and-so much if they can report a certain number, but then you have toxic incentives too, like what if they under-report cases because they want to meet a federal quota or something.
03:17:11.000Terrible like that. Um, yeah, it's I had a question you said you were libertarian socialist, but you don't like the
03:17:17.000government You said that in quick succession, but I always think
03:17:20.000socialism is using the government to do things So, what do you how do you rectify that socialism should be
03:17:25.000about the people controlling the systems?
03:17:27.000They live within the state, uh if it's functioning properly And I don't think it is right now in america should be an
03:17:33.000apparatus of the will of the people And so far, such a thing exists.
03:17:36.000Right now, we're like... You're like authoritarian statehood.
03:17:39.000Yeah, well, that's the authoritarianism, the non-populist element, you know.
03:17:44.000When corporations get involved, or when long-standing career politicians start solidifying their power in a way that's really, really hard to remove them, then the will of the people matters less and less.
03:17:52.000I want the government, to whatever extent it does exist, to be beholden entirely to the will of the people, a perfectly democratic society.
03:17:58.000And then I want corporations to do the same thing, too.
03:18:00.000I think corporations should treat every single employee like a little citizen.
03:18:03.000Yeah, I was thinking you should give stock to employees, like a scaling mechanism.
03:18:17.000I was getting hot under my collar just imagining that.
03:18:20.000That'd be nice, because I've worked for startups, and when you have a percent, when you have some part of the company, you have such more incentive to make it great.
03:18:35.000Because I've worked on a bunch of companies where giving up equity to people is really, really difficult because you'll find a lot of people immediately go, I got equity, later.
03:18:45.000Oh no, but you have to put them on like a five year plan where they earn only a percentage of the equity every year.
03:18:49.000So they're incentivized to stay to make the equity.
03:18:52.000I think you should just split the revenue from the company fairways.
03:18:58.000It's not so easy how to determine how you do that.
03:19:01.000Well, there are a lot of different, this is a worker co-op, it's just a lot of different ways that you can do it.
03:19:04.000There's actually a lot of really interesting data in worker cooperatives that's come out from Latin America over the past 20 years that indicate that in certain fields it's an extremely efficient form of corporate structuring.
03:19:14.000Because, you know, one of the big problems that we have with your average company, you know, maybe not the very high-end tech ones where the big brainy folks work at, but Even just in the lower end of things.
03:19:29.000You're not really respected that much because your work is pretty interchangeable.
03:19:32.000It's that creative investment in the work process, I think, that sparks the ingenuity, the investment, the work ethic in a lot of people.
03:19:39.000I had a conversation with an accountant in New Jersey, I think it was like a year and a half or two years ago, and they were complaining about the $15 an hour wage hike that was coming or whatever, and how he lost like 30% of his clients.
03:19:56.000Because what people don't realize is many of these small businesses, and most businesses are small businesses, the people who own them aren't wealthy and making tons of money.
03:20:05.000Like the guy who owns a hardware shop might make $40,000 a year, and he might pay his employees $12,000 or $13,000 an hour.
03:20:10.000Then they come and they say, we're doing a 30% hike on all of your costs.
03:20:15.000And he goes, then I won't make any money for my family.
03:20:19.000Well, the goal would be that if things are parted out equally, or fairly, I shouldn't say equally, because sometimes people are deserving, I think, of more compensation, that stuff like that wouldn't happen.
03:20:29.000A model that I've seen that looks really, really nice is you have a type of payback investment on the part of anybody who's founded a given company, where they get a proportional wage in addition to a higher percentage.
03:20:43.000that they pay back until they've made back a certain percentage of whatever they initially
03:20:47.000invested. And then after that, they're just kept in a higher tier. And that way you have like the,
03:20:51.000because a lot of people say, you know, what about rewarding ingenuity? Great. Ingenuity
03:20:55.000is phenomenal. You know, just got to find a way to set it up properly. I wish we, I wish we,
03:20:58.000I don't know, experimented more with different ways of running governments, companies.
03:21:32.000I mean, like, for example, if the working class and Jewish and queer people of Nazi Germany had risen up sometime immediately after Hitler was appointed chancellor, I think most of us would agree that's probably... Like, I mean, things get messy, sure, but like, now, in hindsight, like, we know.
03:21:47.000And I think that, like, right now in the United States of America, the idea of, like, political violence for a revolution is It's like a comedy.
03:21:57.000Who's to say that the Jewish violent leader wouldn't have been worse than Hitler?
03:22:01.000Because that stemmed from the communists being violent, then the Nazis were violent in response, and then if the Jews had been violent in response, you'd have three groups of violence.
03:22:40.000Take, for example, like, again, with the police, you know?
03:22:43.000Imagine you've never heard of police, never heard of prisons, foreign concept to you, you know?
03:22:46.000And somebody says, hey, what if the state had the ability to lock a person up in a steel cell for an indefinite length of time if they make a mistake?
03:23:07.000Different countries consider different things.
03:23:09.000In Singapore, if you spit gum on the street, you can get to jail for that.
03:23:11.000There are states where pornography can get you in jail.
03:23:14.000And I certainly don't agree with those things, but I'm sure if I argued with them, they would
03:23:17.000say, well, you have a civic duty to not pollute your streets or whatever.
03:23:21.000But with regards to like violent revolution, it's just a tool, same as any other type of political violence, like policing, absolutely a form of political violence.
03:23:30.000Laws are codified by people in power to enforce a certain set of principles, and police are charged to enforce it.
03:23:35.000It's legitimized political violence, but it is nonetheless that.
03:23:39.000And with regards to this violent revolution thing, there have been many tyrannical, despotic governments in human history, and the reason at any point in time why a revolution would be justified is the promise that it would make life better.
03:23:51.000Often it doesn't, and that's the issue.
03:23:53.000If there was ever a point where I felt it would in America, then I would support it.
03:24:50.000If you go very far left, like very, very, very far left, there are some anarchists who will say that even democracy is a metric of oppression, because democracy is a system by which you put people on top of you.
03:25:01.000So you must necessarily as an anarchist, you must rid yourself of these political structures, because all you're doing is choosing who will next stomp on you.
03:25:09.000Now, I think that's perhaps a little bit hypothetical, but Vosh, I'm really glad you came on.
03:25:33.000You probably got me a bunch of things people are gonna highlight.
03:25:35.000I'd like to think that there were a few things I threw at you and I don't think it's, my intention was not ever to be that.
03:25:42.000I think it was awesome to have a conversation and I think it was interesting hearing your perspectives.
03:25:46.000So I am really grateful you came on and I'm gonna, I'm looking at the comments and there's like somewhere like Tim sucks and somewhere like Vosh sucks.
03:25:52.000If I don't tweet after this it's because Tim had me shot outside of the studio on my way back to my hotel.
03:25:57.000You were mentioning earlier like I'm your way here.
03:25:59.000The driver is like Oh, yeah, the the Uber driver was because this, you know, the right the studios in the middle of nowhere, the Uber driver was telling me and I'm, you know, I'm on the other side of the country.
03:26:29.000I am excited for anybody who wants to make those clips and be like... You know, it's really funny because it always happens where both sides will think that their person won.
03:26:38.000And I'm more than happy to provide that entertainment.
03:26:41.000Let's read some superchats because I already see, like...
03:30:51.000Like, I'm sorry if you come here, and I mean this sincerely, like, thinking that I prepared a big list and, like, I'm preparing a takedown.
03:33:20.000A lot of hotels call it water gate, like let it go.
03:33:22.000Use a different word to describe these different situations.
03:33:24.000A lot of it really does come to the media that you consume, because even with all the complexities, you get different types of complexities depending on what you consume.
03:33:32.000Because what I've read in Obamagate has largely been a denunciation of certain perhaps hyperbolized claims.
03:33:36.000Though, as is the case for many situations like this, there usually are bits of legitimately worrying information underneath anything.
03:33:44.000And I think that's totally valid and I'm happy to look more into that.
03:34:17.000They usually have the most comprehensive take on a story.
03:34:20.000If I go to The Hill, like I go to The Hill often because they're considered center and they talk politics, I'll read a story about Amy Coney Barrett that'll have like one paragraph, and then I'll search for it and find several other articles, Fox News will have two, Daily Mail will have like 15.
03:34:34.000And it'll be breaking down the nuances and getting into depth on it.
03:34:37.000You know what actually does really good reporting?
03:36:11.000Well, I think left populism can go in a lot of directions.
03:36:14.000I think that societies become potentially more complex the further you go to the left, in large part because there are so many different ideas on how to achieve the basic underlying goal.
03:36:26.000I feel like the farther right you go, it's pretty much just absolute power of the state or absolute power of corporations.
03:36:33.000I guess it's conceivable to be a right-leaning populist and not be a fascist.
03:36:37.000I admit I'm struggling to find them at times.
03:37:11.000Well, populism usually is about, like, the manifestation of the popular will, you know, the idea that the establishment is something.
03:37:17.000But usually, the way the establishment gets codified in right-leaning narratives means that, like, in addition to the establishment, you have other threats from without.
03:38:08.000In fact, I would argue there are elements of Lenin's government that were distinctly right-leaning in spite of all the aesthetics and sort of performative socialism.
03:39:03.000The government telling you you must at gunpoint.
03:39:05.000But again, what's the quote, you know?
03:39:07.000The poor man and the free man are both equally disallowed from sleeping beneath the bridge.
03:39:11.000Freedom, in a legal sense, means very little if you're starving.
03:39:15.000So if the government, say for example, uses its authority to provide everybody a base stipend of food and education, you may technically be removing freedoms in a certain way because now people have to do this or whatever, but on the other hand, you've given an entire population of people a different, more essential kind of freedom.
03:41:37.000What it reminds me of is I remember I had a hosted or like a moderated debate with anti-climate change guy fairly recently, like full-on anti, like it's all a hoax, you know, flat earth, whatever.
03:41:47.000And afterwards, you know, the Super Chats roll and the moderator reads them and it's like, you know, the 50-50.
03:41:51.000It's like, Vosch, you did really good there.
03:41:52.000And then the next one's like, Vosch clearly lives in the globehead bubble if he actually believes that temperatures are rising.
03:42:17.000In Japan, first of all, even though high school is not compulsory, you'll find that if you want to get ahead in Japan, you absolutely need to get to a good high school.
03:42:25.000That is a culturally obligatory thing.
03:42:29.000Additionally, middle school goes up to ninth grade in Japan.
03:42:32.000Also, with schools like Sweden, School choice to me is acceptable in concept as long as it's not being used as a way to demonize people who are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to where they're taking their kids.
03:42:43.000And a school choice would be something I would 100% support as long as I felt like it was going along with a genuine effort to revitalize all of these communities.
03:43:07.000I think we should start implementing programs where we're like, we're gonna do a public education thing, maybe it's school choice, maybe it's something else, and then we gotta wean ourselves off these addictions.
03:43:20.000I think you're right about public schools.
03:43:22.000Uh, in that if we just shut them down overnight or they went away, it would hurt a lot of people.
03:43:28.000This is why Trump's been so adamant, like, we gotta get the schools open because people want to go to work and their kids, they need, you know, their kids need to go somewhere, be occupied.
03:43:45.000The same thing is true with, with, with our healthcare system.
03:43:48.000So my thing is, I've said over and over again, I would love universal healthcare.
03:43:52.000The difference between us and many European countries is that universal healthcare in Europe was born out of World War II.
03:43:57.000A necessity, a mandate, and it had to exist.
03:44:00.000In the U.S., we've tied our economy up to it to an extreme degree, where I think it's wonderful to want a system where we can guarantee, what did we call it?
03:44:22.000If you eat poorly and then you get chronic disease, I find that that's usually dietary and I don't want to fund other people's chronic diseases.
03:44:30.000But acute problems, like they fell down the brick, their leg, there's an emergency, I like funding that stuff.
03:44:37.000You have it's hard to quantify where we draw that line on what would qualify as a chronic thing caused by you or whatever but I think ultimately my point is Flipping that over to get off the addiction of this like... I'll tell you a story, man.
03:44:52.000I got a kidney stone in 2014, and the bill was like $20,000 for going to the hospital and being given water and painkillers.
03:45:57.000With the hospital, though, they inflate this so high that the actual relationship between the cost of care and what you have to pay is... it's like fantasy.
03:46:07.000I think we could start with covering basic acute treatment, broken bones, really simple place, and like flu and immediate sicknesses, so we can make sure kids aren't dying of, you know, because their parents couldn't afford Tamiflu, like that one story.
03:46:20.000Getting to the point where we can cover chronic treatments and severe treatments could be really, really difficult.
03:46:24.000But my main point is I would love to live in a world where it's like you could walk in and there's no bill.
03:46:29.000The problem is we have two very different circumstances for how some countries emerged in their national health systems versus how we developed ours.
03:46:37.000So I think it's like, what, 20% of our economy is tied to health care.
03:46:40.000And I think Bernie Sanders said, was it 2 to 4 million jobs, I think, would be lost if we abolished.
03:46:45.000I like the idea of acute treatment plus private healthcare for supplemental.
03:46:51.000Ultimately, getting to a point where we have a functioning system would be very, very difficult, but I'm for it.
03:46:54.000I don't want to rant too much on that stuff.
03:46:55.000I'm already angry that you can buy Pepsi with food stamps and then go into the doctor because you have the flu because of the Pepsi, and then I'm not going to pay for it.
03:47:04.000Well, I do want to say, though, if we do want to drop the cost of healthcare in this country, we also need to start regulating food companies way, way harder.
03:47:13.000One of the reasons why we have this obesity epidemic, it's not because people got less responsible or whatever.
03:47:19.000The chemicals they put in food are designed to make them addictive, and they use whatever chemicals make them addictive, and those chemicals tend to be really, really bad for you.
03:47:27.000And I think that, listen, you're an American.
03:47:29.000You have a God-given right to eat as many Twinkies as you want on any given day.
03:47:34.000But I think we also have to recognize, just as a matter of public policy, that it'd maybe be good to make it easier for the average person to get a hold of quick, cheap, easy food items that weren't made, you know, out of kerosene and toothpicks.
03:47:48.000Don't pollute the environment with your body.
03:47:50.000We have a lot of anti-Vosh comments, but Zeffan says, I disagree with Vosh a lot, but I'm glad you've had him on and would like to see it again or someone similar.
03:49:30.000Fundamentally, I am and always have been of the belief that given the right conditions, and realistically speaking, the right media exposure, because we do live in two different worlds these days, because of what's recommended to us, at least two, at minimum two, I think functionally most people would want the same basic things.
03:49:46.000And I think we can find those, I think, and we can work towards them, and it's just a matter of agreeing or disagreeing on the Pragmatic implementation.
03:49:53.000Yeah, the Founding Fathers would go at it.
03:49:56.000A lot of these comments are like, Tim is really dumb.
03:50:42.000Whatever the case may be, together they were doing a phenomenal job against ISIS, and Rojava was a burgeoning anarchist project that was one of the, and still is to this day, one of the most legitimate examples of, like, a democratic anarchist society.
03:50:57.000By pulling out, we ended up endangering them, and we still have because of Turkey, and in that instance, I am in favor of military intervention.
03:51:04.000It's just a matter of how it's applied.
03:51:06.000You know the problem with, like, these democratic anarchic states is?
03:51:10.000Well, they usually get destroyed by larger, more military.
03:53:22.000And it wasn't because people didn't get COVID at the riots.
03:53:24.000It was actually because the existing... By the way, by riots, we mean protests.
03:53:27.000I'm sorry, I shouldn't adopt this narrative.
03:53:29.000The vast majority of these gatherings are protests without violence.
03:53:32.000These protests Well, to be fair, we definitely need to draw a distinction between riots and protests in this regard.
03:53:38.000during protests. I think, well, to be fair, we definitely need to draw a
03:53:41.000distinction between riots and protests in this regard. Well, some protests are riots.
03:53:45.000Well, no, the protests that we're referring to are large gatherings of
03:53:49.000people marching down the street. The protests would be way more at risk for
03:53:53.000Because people don't march right next to each other during riots.
03:53:57.000The riots are people running around randomly.
03:53:59.000So that's an important distinction when we're talking about COVID.
03:54:01.000So with regard to the protests, it doesn't seem like it's increased COVID-19 spread because people stay inside when there are protests because they don't want to get caught out in any of the mess.
03:54:08.000And maybe you can say that's a toxic disincentivization.
03:54:11.000But whatever the case may be, of course there are governors who bungle this.
03:54:16.000And one of the unfortunate downsides of the way our system works is that we have to accept the fact that decentralization will lead to decentralized failures.
03:54:24.000That being said, I do think there were stronger federal steps that could have been taken, generally speaking.
03:54:54.000Well, I think what they're saying, the first part, at least you're discounting the public response to the COVID lockdown measures when people view them as authoritarian.
03:55:02.000So in, in Spain, Italy and Prague, there's rioting over the lockdown has been going on for several days.
03:55:07.000And in London, there's been clashes with police.
03:55:09.000I won't call it rioting, but it's, it's overt rioting in, in, in like Italy, for instance, Molotovs and.
03:55:14.000I'm honestly mixed on the effectiveness of lockdowns, just generally speaking.
03:55:17.000I think that maybe if they had been done very early, it would have been possible for us to contact trace.
03:55:25.000Like very, very early, you know, but that would have required a response so immediate that it's almost impractical for a government of this size.
03:55:30.000At this point, I really do think it's just about really, really, really promoting the mask wearing, the social distancing.
03:55:36.000And then additionally, I think we need to divert funds towards providing businesses and schools materials that they need to Yeah.
03:55:43.000Vitamin D, I hear, is really good for you.
03:56:51.000I don't know what you're talking about.
03:56:52.000Stephanie B says, Now 27, back in uni, had had to take ethnic class, learned colorism, was told because I'm pale, I'm less Mexican than someone darker.
03:57:01.000Even if they didn't speak Spanish, lived in Mexico, I did.
03:57:12.000I obviously don't think, again, judging from the characterization, because you never know how accurate people are telling anything, that's obviously not very good.
03:57:18.000The difference, though, distinctly, is that a Mexican is an ethnicity, not a race, of course.
03:57:23.000When it comes to race, race is a social construct.
03:57:25.000Like, we were all talking earlier, what makes a race?
03:58:24.000More diverse genetics results in more robust certain features or whatever.
03:58:28.000And so I was making a joke about it, and I was kind of poking fun at ethnonationalism, and a bunch of leftists screenshotted it to make it look like I was actually against myself It was the weirdest thing people have tried to smear me with.
03:58:41.000I unironically believe that, by the way.
03:58:43.000I mean, eventually, assuming we don't do some really weird international ethno-national stuff, eventually we're all going to be a light shade of mocha.
03:59:01.000And then, of course, eventually, I mean, even if everyone's a light mocha brown, eventually the people who have settled in Africa are going to get darker and the people who have settled in Scandinavia are going to get lighter.
03:59:09.000But whatever the case is, I'm just glad we can travel around the planet.
03:59:13.000There's, like, I was reading this article about a place in China where the people there are very white, but with Asian features, and there's a legend of a Roman legion that was making its way, that never came back, and they think it settled and then had a big family and created this area where all these people have, like, white Mediterranean.
03:59:43.000There's a lot of people in eastern Russia who have Asian features.
03:59:47.000There's a lot of that with Polynesian features as well.
03:59:51.000There are places all from, like, South Africa all the way up to Japan and Russia and even parts of Africa, apparently, where there's genetic clusters of people who the old, like, seafaring Polynesian cultures would go to.
04:00:02.000It's actually pretty crazy how much diversity there was even before we were really an international species.
04:00:08.000I think we need to clarify too when you said race is a social construct, because this is something that I think is missed.
04:00:15.000There's a semantic difference between left and right on this one.
04:00:18.000We're talking about... There's a phenomenon where, like, you might see someone who is an albino black person, and people will say that person is black, regardless.
04:00:27.000And there are people who are, who identify as black, even though their skin is clearly white.
04:00:32.000Which shows that, you know, what features define what we qualify as, like, a race or whatever.
04:02:26.000Dude, so the position that I'm in right here is that I'm totally fine to have Nick on the channel if he wants to come on, and he keeps posturing on his own.
04:02:43.000I know there are a lot of people on the left who are going to insult me and tell you I brought up a million times, but I've been reaching out to a bunch of lefties, and Vosh was like, I'm totally down.
04:03:08.000No, uh, yeah, the, uh, it's, it's, it's actually a little bit like kind of annoying though, because I've said like 80 times, like, just email me, please.
04:03:49.000Well, I think a lot of the conversations that we typically have are with people that we've either heard from or ideas we've heard.
04:03:56.000And so with you, it's like we're getting into a lot of things and challenging having a back-and-forth, which is good.
04:04:02.000And, you know, everybody thinks they're the smartest person in the universe, and we want to have real conversations with people, and that's what we did.