Red Scare - Podcast of Our Discontent w/ Thomas Chatterton Williams

Episode Date: October 4, 2025

Thomas Chatterton Williams returns to the pod to talk about his new book Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.

We're back, all the things are you said, all the things you said, running through my head, y'all be talking talking. We're just talking with our guests, we're talking with our guests about how we're just talking with our guests about how much we talk on this show. Y'all be talking. I'm happy to be back in the studio with Waman. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Our return guest, Thomas Chatterton Williams is here to...

We be chatter. To chattering a ton. But you kind of talk a lot too. I'm trying to get... I think I said this last time. I'm trying to get on your level. Be, you know, be chattering, be podcasting. Your media trained, I feel.

Yeah, it takes a while, I think. Do you enjoy or loathe doing all the press stuff every time you come out with a new book? I do. I think it's a little bit of like a miracle when you go in a room and, I don't know, 50 people in some place actually come because they earnestly want to hear you talk about something that you thought about for a few years. that's like a beautiful thing and you know everything is digital now but actually like going out

with a book and going into rooms and talking to people is amazing people still care that is lovely is there any part of you that well because you so Thomas has a new book

it's called Summer of Our Discontent the Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse about basically about the summer of Floyd and COVID and sort of it's kind of like a brief genealogy with some focus

I guess specifically on race relations and how the country and the state of discourse has changed from the Obama era to where we are now and you wrote this in the afterword you make reference to Trump's third bid for presidency

yeah I delivered the book late I think that was actually a good thing because I was able to see that he was coming back to power and I didn't like turn the book in when it was supposed to be due and think that. But you wrote the majority of it in 2021? I started in 2021, yeah. I remember you telling me about that. Yeah. And honestly, I was kind of worried.

There was too soon. No, that it was too late because I figured that by the time like all the editing and the production had been done, it would be like 2024, 2025, and who would want to revisit that era? Because I think people got really sick of, like, the, what you call in like scare quotes, anti-racism or wokeness or whatever. But it turns out that it's back in a big way or it never really left us, like Ezra Klein and Taunahisi Coats most recently. I watched some clips. I wanted Well, I wanted to ask you about that. What's your beef with Tonehisi?

I don't even, I don't have, for years, I have, you know, he's a really interesting guy. I, I've met him a couple times, but like way back when he was, before, between the world and me, when he was writing at the Atlantic. Yeah. He's a nice, I find him to be a nice person, interpersonally, unlike a lot of people that you meet in the industry, he's actually like, He's a nice guy. I think he's a smart, curious person who, in his writing, you can see, is really, like, wrestling with ideas, which I think is the highest thing you can do. I have, for years now, like, had disagreements with aspects of his conclusions or where he goes with his critiques of culture and politics. but I think he's a really interesting person to engage with.

I was really intrigued by this conversation with Ezra Klein that he had because it seemed like just nobody was happy with this conversation. Everybody was mad about something. And if you go on like blue sky, they think Ezra Klein is really bad and they hate Ezra Klein. They think he's a racist monster. Yeah. And then if you go on on X,

Ta-Nehisi Coates is, I mean, people, they're so they're so angry at him. I mean, this conversation was really like a Rorschach test or something. It was interesting to see people's reactions to it. I didn't even realize that they were at odds. I thought they were having a, well, they slightly were. It was just like two people who are both on the left, like slightly disagree with us, and no one is satisfied.

And, um, as her Klein, basically. basically having to kowtow to or humor Tanahisi Coates because like a good like white Jewish liberal he's scared not so much of the man himself but of the reaction you can see that he's calculated that like yeah that he's going to get some pushback or whatever but I was really like perplexed baffled by it because like somebody called it KFAB if I'm pronouncing it correctly but yeah it's like KFAB whatever like these guys are both invested in main containing the illusion of progress or the myth of progress, even as all of the progressive institutions have been like exposed as like corrupt or captured or inadequate. And I think as recline is probably a little wiser than Tanahisi Coates on this count because he can see that they've been like emptied of their content and credibility. But he can't lean to heavily on that because he so dearly wants to believe in progressivism. I would think that Klein would still believe in institutions in Tana Heise Coates is

kind of saying that it's pointless to believe in that you can't even do anything but just struggle in a Sisyphian way, knowing that your defeat is preordained. Yeah, well, that's sort of like, I think the big difference between you and Tanahisi and I would preface this by saying that like of course everybody on the right really hates him I mean they hate him more than I had realized until a few days ago

and think that he's a hate monger and I don't really get that from him I don't really feel like his hate is particularly I mean it is personalized and it is overinvested but it's almost like he's like repeating progressive shibbolists like I don't think he's really thought

through where he stands because it would be like ego obliterating for him. What do you think he got wrong? What do you mean in that conversation or in general? I mean, I think... In that conversation because that conversation was really about Ezra Klein wrote this piece that said Charlie Kirk is doing politics the right way. And that drove people on Ezra Klein's side ostensibly crazy. And Coates basically said like, why

of course you don't have to like is horrific that the man was killed obviously everybody thinks is horrific the way he was killed or that he was killed at all but that you could just not say anything he said couldn't you have just chosen to be silent rather than say that he was doing politics the right way and Ezra was saying well but he was he was engaged in debate

and so that was where the real difference of opinion between the two of them Well, I think the attack on Ezra Klein is like somewhat opportunistic coming from the left because they're kind of saddling it with moral value. And when they say that he said that Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way, they mean that he thinks that Charlie Kirk was good or positive. And he's merely saying that he was effective, which he was, whatever you think of the guy. I'm personally, like, pro-Charlie Kirk. I understand how people are anti-Charlie Kirk, but I don't think he was imbueing that, excuse me, with a value judgment.

And Taunahisi, Coates, is, he's, he said that Ezra Klein was a hate monger, and in response, somebody called him a hate monger. No, he said Charlie, sorry, excuse me, that Charlie Kirk was a hate monger, and in response, somebody was like, you're a hate monger, yeah, I don't, were you like a really up on turning point USA before yeah yeah not at all and I'm a fan of like internet debate yeah but it kind of passed me by just because it was a little too honestly a little too moderate a little too like too moderate yeah yeah yeah yeah that's the big yeah yeah because I'm gonna seek out kind of political content I wanted to have like a little bit

of an edge of some extra you know a little more well now a lot of people more of a point of view. Like, who would you say is doing debate with more of an edge than Charlie Kirk? I mean, I mean, Nick Fuentes. He didn't like Charlie Kirk. Yeah, he was criticizing Charlie Kirk. And he's not alone in this. I can't even single him out for this because a lot of guys on the right,

a lot of their pundits and commentators and thought leaders, thought Charlie Kirk was kind of a pussy and a cuck. and Normie Kahn. And they really didn't like him. He was. And in the days... He was a standard fair, like evangelical, Zionists, like, Republican, you know.

And, yeah. But, I mean, Donald Trump said he was one of like the foremost effective people in getting him reelected. So he was not like your Mitt Romney type of... No, no. He was incredibly effective. But in the days after his murder, I think, what emerged was that people had...

didn't fully appreciated his influence and impact. I took him for granted, for sure. And they also didn't fully appreciate how savvy and in the know he was and how he was being intentionally moderate to not scare away the base, the constituency, to maintain some level of what you would call, like liberal discourse. And so you have this strange phenomenon of a lot of people on the right now, maybe pivoting or backpedaling or being like really kind of honest

and self-aware and saying like man I really didn't appreciate him I didn't give him a chance for like what an effective player he was. He was engaged in very I mean part of the reason he was so effective and part of the reason I didn't really like you know wasn't a turning

point USA chapter member oh you weren't no just that it was like a very like low level of discourse of like debating college kids, which is like amusing, makes for good, like, content. About abortion and things like that, yeah. Yeah, but it's like, it's pretty low-hanging fruit.

It's, like, inviting kind of, like, young people. It's virtuous, I think. Yeah. From his perspective. Virtuous and lucrative. And lucrative, definitely. Yeah, yeah. But, like, if you hold that Charlie Kirk was a hate monger,

I think it's also fair to say that all the people. people coming out and accusing him of mongering hate like Tonehisi Coates like Ilhani Omar like Madi Hassan are also hate mongers for the other side because they are engaged in basically a subversive and anti-white rhetorical argument I would separate those people I mean Medi Hassan I just find to be so noxious he's the worst he's the worst and I would say someone like Santa Housie Coates is a real, is a serious person. Medi Hassan is not. Ilan Omar is in a different category.

Yeah. But I, yeah, no, I understand what you're saying. But it's interesting to see the kind of, I don't think we have a way of talking to each other anymore, which is really kind of. Well, what I thought was I read the New York Times review of your book. Oh, my God. which was a little scathing by like a Yale law guy guy they only really let black people

review your book I noticed see that was the right no that was the best thing why won't they let a white person review this book was reviewed at the my last book self-portured black and white was reviewed when pamela paul was editing the book review by Andrew Solomon and it was interesting because, you know, I write about race a lot. Yeah. But I also was writing in that book about having a child that is different than you. And so Pamela Paul, as the editor of the book review, didn't say, this is a black guy writing about race. I have to assign it to a black reviewer. She said, this is a parent writing about a child that's different than them. So she assigned it to Andrew Solomon, who had this, you know, he had this wonderful book, far from the tree,

which was about parents who have children that are different than them in different ways, like parents who are the, you know, the parent of a genius or of a child with, you know, a disability or something. And so that was the, there's different ways you can think about how to frame a book. And oftentimes when you assign a review, who you choose to review a book is already making the judgment by who you give the book to. So this book was given to somebody who essentially I don't think even read the book, you know. He had a point of view that was going to be expressed irrespective of the content of the book. Well, his critique was, I bring this up with you saying we don't know how to talk to each other because I read it and his critique is that you are like punching too far left where there's only

minor blemishes and further right there's like horrible injustice happening and that you're like somehow making excuses for, he says the black lives. matter protests were mostly nonviolent which you like is like a direct contradiction to points that you make in your book that he doesn't even know that I'm trying to cite evidence but reading the review I was like wow it's like so different you know I'm reading the book being like damn he's going a little hard on Trump like he's being a little alarmist about the Trumpism and I'm like oh like me and this guy writing this review I've just like had a vastly different experience I'm like reading this book yeah it's like literally like

two kids who grow up in the same family who have like vastly different impressions of their parents and me and my brother thinks that the parents were too authoritarian and the other thinks that the parents were too lax but like at some point in the book you characterized left wing ID poll as merely

ill-conceived but right-wing populism is openly spiteful and I think like if I had any criticism of the book it's that ultimately even though you're very open and comfortable about critiquing the excesses of the left you are, I guess, for lack of a better term, unwilling to delve deeper into why the right

reacts like it does to the left. It's a thankless task when you, like, I guess when you operate in the space that I do and you do all these things to try to be even-handed. or you know no one can be completely objective but you try to be even handed and you get absolutely zero like I get no credit for any critique of the left it's just like anything that I would say that would be critical of the left is considered like invalidating of everything else I say so you don't ingratiate yourself on the left whatsoever well even I watch but then you're also like reading it and you know and the review in the Wall Street Journal was like well he was pretty hard on Trump he doesn't He doesn't give the president any credit, does he? You know, it's just, it's a weird place to be. It's like, well, I watched your daily show appearance, and you are discussing with that man, I've never seen before in my whole life. Jordan Clepper, I like this.

This guy is cool. I just haven't watched the daily show in so long. I was like, who even, you know, I was like, I thought John Stewart was on this show. On Mondays, on Mondays, John Stewart's there. But, yeah, you're talking about how. credibility and trust was lost in the COVID pandemic and then he's really quick to be like so you're saying you understand where MAG is coming from and then you're put in this position where you have to like so my yeah my question I have related to that is like when you were writing the book

and I don't know if you write this way but who is your like idealized imagined audience it's a great question Dasha it's I just want to imagine somebody um who's open minded and I don't imagine a political position. I'm not writing for a liberal audience or a conservative audience. I'm trying to write for an adult or a reader mature enough just to say I want to try to engage with these ideas and think through them and come to my own conclusions and potentially be persuaded. So the reader would be someone of good faith, of open-mindedness, but it could follow. anywhere. I mean, I teach at Bard College, and I'm a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I'm comfortable around progressives and conservatives, and in all of these spaces, you find people

that are really smart and really open, and you hope that you can have these kind of conversations where you bridge divides. That sounds really corny on Red Scare. I know. You really do meet lots of people who don't neatly get categorized. biologically and can actually surprise you. And so the ideal reader is somebody who's just approaching it with an open mind, the exact opposite of the New York Times reviewer who didn't read the book with an open mind. He had a point of view, and he just picked and chose quotes and things that would buttress his point of view, but was never open to being persuaded.

Which, again, is exactly the wrong way to approach. approach writing a book review. I mean, I think so. Definitely. But being, you know, sort of who you are and connected to these institutions, don't you think the audience for the book would skew? Like we said, someone who's open to being dissuaded. So meaning that they would hold, what position would you imagine?

What are you trying to dissuade them from? I think that readers, of the journalism that I write and most readers that would be reached, I think, and I might be wrong, most readers that would be reached by a book like this would probably be center-to-center left with some center-right. But I'm trying to convince, I think, people who consider themselves to be liberals to be self-reflective and self-critical. And I think that's why the emphasis lies on pointing out the flaws of the left. I mean, maybe 20% of the book is critical of Trump and 80% is critical of all of the ways in which I think that the left

overplayed its hand and in some ways set the table for the kind of reaction that we're experiencing now. And one of the really frustrating responses was this kind of response that was in the New York Times, which is like, when this is happening with Donald Trump, who even has time to think about what the left did wrong. It's like, well, if you would like to understand why Trump came back to power and why, you know, a surprising amount of black male voters and Latinos and Asians and all types of people you didn't think would be interested in Donald Trump's vision for America came over to him, you should probably take some time to think about what you did

or what we did that was so unattractive that it made Trump not just plausible, but appealing. vast swaths of people and turn them to the other side. I have a question about that because you, you know, as I guess you're a late Gen X or... I'm a young millennial. Young millennial, yeah. Elver. Don't miss categories. I'm confused about where I stand on this too.

You're definitely a millennial. Yeah, but like you characterize the Obama era as this kind of post-racial utopia. And in my mind, yes. I think you've got a lot. a little bit of nostalgia. Yes, the Obama administration really set the table for the Trump. I know. I feel like the Obama administration really set the table for the Trump administration to use your phrase

because you had this guy who was supposedly post-racial and unifying, but actually you know, ended up like sewing quite a bit of racial discontent. and racial acrimony. I mean, he brought up the question of race a lot. I think at some point he threw his white grandmother and

white mother under the bus. Well, you made this point on the daily show about him saying that Trayvon Martin could have been his son. And you drew a very intelligent parallel. I thought of it'd be like Trump saying if Lake and Riley could have been his daughter. It would have been excited. You understand how that would strike

people is... Yeah. people, a lot of people would feel like, why did you, why did you insert that? Yeah. And especially for the person that was supposed to deliver a post-racial future. But it didn't feel that way at the time. It felt very normal. And like, we were all on board with. I think it felt, yeah.

The vibes were maybe right for. Yeah. I don't think he would have said that now. But at the time, I mean, maybe. I also think that he just didn't have much latitude for any types of errors. And so I think he was in a kind of. of very difficult, if not impossible, situation. But it's true that if you look at it in retrospect,

you know, if the point was that a lot of Americans were trusting him with bringing us to a post-racial future that we all wanted, then if the first post-racial president is supposed to not actually do things the way that they were done in the past and insert identity politics, right? So that was a kind of, it was a kind of violation of an implicit agreement. You know, at minimum, he threw his lot in with, like, the plight of African-Americans, which is bullshit, because he is not really your stereotypical African-American. As he's not a son of a white American mother and, like, a Nigerian father, he's...

He's not descended from slaves. Yeah, and he's one of these kind of, like, rootless global... Kenyan father. Kenyan. Rooteless, like, global intellectuals? Well, I remember when I was, yeah, I remember, like, my late great friend, Stanley Crouch, who was a brilliant critic and author. At the time when Barack Obama was coming on the scene,

a lot of black writers like Stanley didn't necessarily consider him black. They were saying that he wasn't black American, you know, he was, they were drawing those distinctions that his father didn't descend from slaves and his mother was white and, and they were supporting Clinton at the time. It was kind of, in victory, he became more African American and became part of that community or part of that kind of tradition. Yeah, and I mean, you see this a lot with, you know, virtually every prominent black intellectual or pundit or commentator. I think we've talked about this before. being like a black nerd is hard because on the one hand you're alienated from white people

because you're not too black and you're alienated from black people because you're not black enough and you have to like straddle these two worlds and it's yeah like a pretty unenviable and thankless position and one through line that I've noticed with a lot of the people that I've mentioned like Tanahisi Coates, like Kianaga, Yamada Taylor, Roxanne Gay, Don Lemon, most recently Nicole Hannah-Jones, Mark Lamont Hill. Don Lemon? Got up in that? He was talking about the violence of white men as a guy who's, like, married to or dating,

a white guy, always without fail. You've, yeah, that's a... That's a thing. Like, Ilhan, AOC, whatever. And also, like, knowing, you know, the full fact. of it that like you can talk about this kind of ambient diffuse like white supremacist colonialist or imperialist violence but in the United States there's obviously a kind of like statistically provable issue that young black males commit most of the violent serious crime so it's a bit

ironic when somebody like Don Lemon is making this point I don't know what he said just he recently said like on a podcast or a stream or an interview somewhere like he mentioned like the violence of white men well what you a point you make in your book which i think the the afterward really hits because you kind of contextualize this like history in light of october 7th and how like the palestine gaza stuff um has added like an additional layer of kind of incoherence to this dichotomy that's been that's shaped basically yeah the summer of our discontent is the like oppressor oppressed colonizer colonized what did you think decolonization look like you know and it's papers essays losers and it's at some at some point yeah I feel like

violence became something in discourse that only referred to structural violence And then very real violence was justifiable because it wasn't even violence at all. Yeah, it wasn't even worth mentioning. It could not be like ontologically violent because it was like, rebelling against an oppressive superstructure that was the real violence. Yeah, and you saw this in the aftermath. And that's nuts. That's actually like now we, I think we have enough distance where we can say that that's insane.

That's crazy. And you have this, I said this on one of the previous episodes, I'm quoting somebody else, but it's like the, you know, the left thinks that your speech is violence and their violence is speech. Yeah, that's true. You said that that's crazy. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination, you had a lot of people coming out and comparing him opportunistically to George Floyd. but the reality is that those are apples and oranges, right, to the extent that, like, Charlie Kirk's murder did not incite

massive, like, violent protests and looting and arson. No, I didn't. But I wonder, I don't mean to cut you off, but would you, what do you think would have been the result if the shooter were, A trans woman, an illegal immigrant or a black trans woman or something like that. What would, would there have been? Well, it took a while to find out who the shooter was and there was a ton of speculation.

I mean, peg it on MAGA and groipers and whatever. I don't think it would have made a difference because the reaction was, when we still didn't know who the shooter was, people were already like acting as if that was the case. Yeah. You think? I don't know. I think, yeah. It is interesting. I mean, I've tried to think through this, excuse me, I try to think through this honestly, like, and I really want to be, I really want to be open to changing my mind and my biases and my priors with new evidence.

It is interesting that there has not been violence in the streets at all. And, you know, when you look at a place like Portland, Oregon, or some of these places, there was just such a kind of license to do anything you want. Autonomous zone, baby. Because George Floyd died, I can go in the Apple store. It's just a crazy, yeah, it's interesting to think of what triggers a kind of license to do violence that's not even connected to addressing the initial harm. I have a question about that, yeah, because, so, I know this. She knows this one. So, like, basically the thesis of your book is that abandoning liberal principles,

even for, like, ostensibly positive progressive goals, strengthens these authoritarian forces that are coming out on the left and the right. You say that free speech specifically is the bedrock for all subsequent rights and assurances. And also there's this point where, kind of in an apparent nod to the excesses of BLM and D.I. You write, it's no victory at all simply to lose together in a more equitable fashion. A really beautiful, profound line. And I've been spinning my wheels in the last few episodes about this very topic

in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk. So it's good that you're here and you wrote a book about it. And I, you know, I think we're all in agreement just like in a vacuum that, like, defending liberal values, like free speech is a noble fight and a worthy because, but all of this, all this really presumes that there is like a level playing field between the left and the right, that it's like a game of hot tamale where they trade off for power every term or two and, um, that you don't think the field is level to begin with. And like, my question is like, yeah, what happens if there is no level playing field and the

left actually does have like a monopoly on the levers of power? Um, is free speech even possible in that context, like, what are we even talking about? Like, when you think about anti-racism is a progressive invention that turned out to be, like, a narrative fiction, which I think you would agree with. Well, if you talk, it depends if you're talking about anti-racism, or you're talking about anti-racism in quotes, like, TM. Yeah, yeah, I'm not talking about, like, not being racist.

Right, but, like, the anti-racism industry, like the Holocaust industry, yeah, where, everything is either racist or anti-racist. Yeah, like, and you, you know, as you yourself pointed out, this had an institutional mandate. It had global reach. It had, even in places where it had no, like, historical context or precedent, it was enforced through cancel culture. Right.

And, you know, I've said this a million times already, but, like, the left really has been maybe not directly, but indirectly in power, not only for years, but for years, but for decades. I mean, you... In institutions, right? The right really does seem to do better with government authority. But there's a kind of... Cultural soft power.

Yes, but even like the question of... Clearly matters, yeah. Of why there was no organized violence in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Well, you could make the Wrightling case that those people are, you know, of a better ilk or a better character, you could make that case, but also because the right has very scant organizational power.

Like, they're really, like, rounded up and prosecuted every turn. You can't have freedom of speech or freedom of association. The way that... They could definitely... They seized on the occasion of Kirk's death seems to me like there's a lot of organization there. And I think that has less to do, like, Kirk being right-wing is incidental, I think, to him being Christian, to his fans, like, you know, people who were really devastated about Charlie Kirk's murder were predominantly Christian, and they had a, so they had a coherent

worldview that they, that he reflected back to them, which is why they responded positively to him. Whereas, which is why, again, it's such an apples and order. in the situation of George Floyd, he was not, no one knew who he was until he was killed. But the response was very organic. It wasn't like Elon Musk was offering a million dollars

to paint murals. But they didn't have a coherent worldview besides being oppressed. Or like, you know, there being structural racism that George Floyd was like a metaphor. I mean, there was because I was even in France at the time and it was worldwide

this response. There was a kind of organic response to the spectacle of his death that, like, you know, it was crazy. People, tens of thousands of people gathered in Paris, Amsterdam, London. People marched against racism in Helsinki, Finland, in Seoul, South Korea. There was an organic response. But how much of this is due to the fact that the kind of, like, progressive mythology is so conditioned in people? this point does they see yeah for sure they see like racism everywhere even where it doesn't exist you know there was you mentioned in the book that you

know correctly like indisputably that George Floyd's death struck a chord and made people come out and like march and loot and whatever and you also mention all these other public atrocities that failed to gain steam like all of the black men previously killed by cops right Syria the Uyghur genocide, the actual Uyghur genocide of like poor whites and America that nobody really wants to talk about except to like, you know, describe these people as like chuds and monsters. I was always wondering why did nobody come out in March for Tamir Rice?

Oh, that would be a much more, I think, scandalous killing. But part of the reason that I try to make sense of in the book is this confluence of the pandemic. It's the mixture of the pandemic, this very slow killing. You know, it's also, it wasn't a gunshot. It was nine minutes, I think was very visually striking. Right. And then also you had hanging over the stakes of this election where democracy was on the ballot. And, you know, people were at home.

home all looking at their screens and there was this kind of urge to rebel against something and on the right that had manifested as a rebellion against stay-at-home orders and that was considered disreputable and and maga-coded and so people on the left wouldn't engage with that kind of way of of of letting off steam but there was an urge to rebel because of the pandemic but then as soon as there was a kind of racial injustice then you could be out in the streets and people had this urge to rebel. You can suspend these arbitrar protocols all of a sudden, yeah. The first night of like really rioting in New York, we went out.

You were in Soho? Yeah, we went out. We went out. We went out. We like met up. Yeah, I like came back. What did you get that night? You got some shoes?

What did you get? I wish. Dasha got a toaster. I wish I thought to loot the Balenciaga store. We ended up hanging out with like some people who had looted like North Face. something they had all like this i was talking to some girl i like a new jacket but i yeah i remember returning home to that that night to my like tenement apartment seeing all the like that there was something going on and i was like let's go like i was it felt like people were protesting like not

having fun for a long time exactly and then we were drinking margaritas and people were setting stuff on fire and it was like it felt chaotic for sure but like in a way that was it didn't really matter why people were out there. It mattered, you know. It felt like really what it comes down to is that people weren't exactly mourning George Floyd, specifically, or racial injustice, generally, they were mourning the loss of their own lives. Exactly.

Due to this completely, we now know, though you could have seen it then, arbitrary and corrupt enforcement of rules and norms and laws. 100%. But also what did you feel when you saw that video the first time?

Of the... I haven't watched it. You never watched it? I don't watch any sort of... Oh, really? I haven't watched the Charlie Kirk video. I haven't watched the Irina Zerutska video.

Oh, man. I don't watch videos of the sound on when I watch them. I just... You didn't see any of those news? I minimized my screen time. I'm the most not online, extremely online person ever, like for real because it like fucks me up and I can't handle like that. And by the way, like much like I can grant contrary to what the right says that Tanahisi Coates is a more like complex individual than people give them credit for and is not exactly like intentionally a hate monger so much as frankly confused. I can grant that George Floyd, in spite of his pretty damning, rapchy life of crime and poverty,

this whole story about him, like, punching a pregnant woman during the robbery. No, he was an accomplice to a terrible, but he wasn't the one who actually assaulted. I did see a video recently of George Floyd that he, like, filmed himself where he was talking about how, like, society at large in the black community or something had failed young boys and men and da-da-da, whatever, like, and I agree with your characterization of there being, like, two Floyds, like the real Floyd and the meme Floyd, obviously, but... Oh, I was just asking you if you had seen, because I was just saying that there was the opportunism and the... You said something very poignant. I think you said that people were mourning their own loss of freedom. But I think that also anybody who saw that video, it was a very, it was a very disturbing video.

Yeah, I know. I really shocked me. I've seen clips. I've seen stills. Well, you say this in the prologue, you say, has enough time passed now to begin to ask ourselves some questions. What exactly did we see in that video? Or perhaps more to the point, what is the seminal meme in the Western tradition that this video is so. powerfully tapped into and yeah I think at the time even I who I'm like naturally skeptical and

you know try to immunize myself against propaganda as much as I can um yeah it felt like it was like a metaphor for race relations police brutality whatever that felt very like emotionally true because of how disturbing it was. Yeah, and like setting aside the complexity and reality of the actual George Floyd's life, to me it's like a meme, a testament to the moral inversion of the left, that they would elevate this guy who on paper at least is like a troubled man, a career criminal to kind of almost like a Jesus-like status. So when people are making this equivalence between him and Charlie Kirk, it's like, well, at the end of the day, Charlie Kirk was like a normie Christian family man.

Right. Those things are different in that Charlie Kirk was very successful. He was working. He wasn't down and out the way that George Floyd was. But there's a kind of similarity in the way that there is the man. And then after death posthumously, there's the meme that is used for purposes and that it kind of becomes sanctified. What the death represents. Yeah. Yes. And for like Kirk acolytes, the death represents, yeah, kind of like. actual violence of the left against the civil discourse of conservatives. And the main kind of like inconsistency or disparity, the main like apples and oranges thing, is that basically the narrative that the meme of George Floyd was used to prop up,

this narrative that the original sin of America is racism that we live in a profoundly white supremacist society characterized by systemic racism proved to be false on its face, whereas the narrative surrounding Charlie Kirk... How has it proved to be false, like, based on Floyd? Well, that white supremacy is the real pandemic that we all have a duty to, like, take a principled stance against. I mean, I think you said so yourself,

and, like, there is a point in the book, where you go through all the figures and statistics. Like everyone from Steve Saylor to Adolf Reed to now you has pointed out that if you actually crunch the numbers. Yeah, things have been getting much better. It's been looking pretty good for black people in America. Up until recently, like, you know, you talk about how there's like no really discernible statistical trend of white cops brutalizing black people in this country.

The number of blacks killed by police is statistically small and decreasing. on the other hand, black Americans fortunes have improved significantly across like every important metric from household income to intellectual attainment to life expectancy. I'm not going to give the direct quote,

but there's one on page 15, page 24, you guys can buy the book. And as your favorite person ever, Steve Saylor showed, their fortunes took quite a dip after the racial reckoning to the tune of like 40% more. run and traffic fatalities

because the policing stopped and they were left to their own devices and like we just know that the anti-racist narrative like doesn't line up with the reality on the ground you even say yourself that like this whole story of like white supremacy and black victimization is like a myth that has become a meme

yeah it's a meme yeah it's oversimplified and I guess a question I have for you on that note is like, why do you think it persists? Why is it so sticky? I'm glad you said that because I think that, and I've become increasingly convinced of this, that people really struggle with like incremental progress and that, you know, something that Alexei de Tocqueville said

in 1856 when he was talking about why the most... You love this guy. I love this guy. You're always talking about this guy. Yeah, because he really got America. early and he got it right early and he was talking when he was looking at the

the French Revolution why was the strongholds of the French Revolution in the parts of society that were doing the best and that we're not actually experiencing setbacks is because people that have suffered the most egregious oppressions

without any type of dissent as soon as the boot is lifted off of them even a little bit can rise up with a kind of force that you would never imagine. Like this is the same reason why my father who grew up in the segregated South

he wouldn't understand what it means if you talk about a microaggression. But as soon as people start to live on much more egalitarian terms then the slightest kind of inequality becomes unbearable. Yeah, they start to see, they start to notice. Microaggressions are only possible

when things are much, much more equal. But to put a more cynical, spin on that. That's actually not that cynical at all. It's like because people have the luxury, the privilege to make their voices heard. The voices of the unheard are not so unheard after

all. And part of this is not an ideological or political issue. It's the technological issue. Exactly. The organizing of social media. You have video of Derek Chauvin putting his knee on George Floyd's neck. You always, you insist on the French pronunciation.

It's also so funny that his name is Chauvin that's like so perfect and like symbolic and like Dostoevsky and it's like that all of these like big viral stories have something beautiful and poetic about them like as horrific and tragic as the murder of Irina Zerutska was

there is some symbolic value to the fact that this girl fled a war zone to get killed by a black guy in America on public transportation. I just find this to be be so upsetting that video I couldn't watch the I just could never

and I think there's a real violence that like the algorithms do when they just on X when they force the video well I deleted it off my phone you know but I don't want to see these videos just start to load immediately yeah there's something that's actually

you can turn auto play off so they don't just but it's still like the whole feed it's crazy I deleted X after or off my phone at least after that because I just was like I'm going nuts. We shouldn't be constantly exposed to like these horrific snuff films at all times, you know? You realize that like life on the whole is relatively like safe and comfortable. It's more comfortable and safe than it's ever been for a lot of vast laws of the population. He said you

just see ISIS more. But ISIS was always there. You just see it more now. That's what I'm That was Obama's point. Yeah. But even like the fact that the... Do we have more wine in that? Yeah. I'll grab it. Like the fact that like...

Y'all stay with the children. That there was like an Asian officer and a black officer who were responding alongside Derek Chauvin to the George Floyd incident and they both got lighter jail sentences and they've both been memory hold because they don't fit conveniently into the narrative. American life is always more complicated. and interesting than the kind of oversimplified narratives that take hold and the imagination allow for. That's for sure.

It was much more there were other, yeah, there were multiple cops. Chauvin was the one who was kneeling on them, so that is different, but you know, to reduce every question to a binary of black, white, I think doesn't serve as well. And it actually, it inspires this kind of, I think, I would say,

ungenerous kind of reaction and backlash. Uncharitable. Uncharitable. That is rooted in a kind of justified frustration. Well, that's a premise you sort of don't question in your book, is that there was need for police reform. And that's something I'm not so sure. I mean...

Well, I think that in... I don't think that when I think about how... the police. How white people are treated by the police. You know, if you live in Europe, you realize... But the response after Floyd was to defund the police. Right, that was stupid. I go to links in the book to say how stupid that is.

And that it's actually black citizens who insisted that the white liberals who were pushing this on them get a grip and refund the police because they were the ones. Yeah, who were like bearing the brunt

of the violence. Who were dealing with the violence that wasn't just abstract and theoretical. And there's also the fact that like if you actually look at the demographic makeup of like police forces across the nation like very very often the people serving the community are of the race or ethnic group of the community. Especially in New York. I think of course leftists will say that well they're still operating under this like white supremacist structure. There was the story that you brought up of Tony Timpa the white man killed in Florida under very similar

circumstances. People don't like to talk about Tony Timpa. He only he only got That only got known after George Floyd because it was so similar. Yes. And then there's also a story that we've brought up on the podcast multiple times that after, like during the summer of Floyd when all these chases started popping up across the Pacific Northwest specifically to Antifa guys who happened to be former snipers who were like volunteering in Syria gunned down to black teens who stole. a car and we're doing donuts

in a parking lot. Yeah. That was in the Chaz in Seattle I think. Two Antifa guys sniped. Mm-hmm. What? Oh, yeah. This is facts. I'm not making this up. One of the kids was killed and the other one survived with injury. Yeah.

But the point is what police reform I guess would have been, would you have preferred? So I just start from the premise that like American police are extremely violent and part of that has to do of course with the fact that Americans are very armed and a police officer goes into a situation never knowing if the person they're encountering when they stop a car is armed but if you look at like

the the numbers it's astonishing you know like over 500 white people are killed per year in America by police and that's like greater than the combination of all people killed in the whole European Union, all these countries. Like, American police kill more white people than is acceptable in any developed nation. There is no, there is no epidemic of

anti-black police brutality in America. It doesn't exist. Black people are killed disproportionately. They also are represented disproportionately as people who commit crimes. But the actual, the group that, oh, sorry. The group who gets killed the most

disproportionately is actually Native Americans, but no even talks about that. Yeah. I mean, there is a... But in sheer numbers, white people by far get killed by police more than anybody.

Yeah, because there's so many white people in this country. But that's my whole frustration with how these things get done. When it's filtered through the lens of race, you miss an opportunity to talk about, you know, why everybody should be concerned

about unarmed people being killed by police irrespective of color. Well... And Tony Temple should have shocked them... Should have shocked our consciousness. That was actually even crazier because

the cops were laughing when he was dying he were making jokes why didn't you mention Tony Timp in your book I did he's in oh yeah I did skip over the footnotes I did

I have low light in my apartment a lot of really good material in the footnotes I like he's like the last psychiatrist it's like all in the footnotes you know I love a Foster Wallacean

footnote but it's I have low light in my apartment and I whatever I didn't I'm sorry it's okay but there wasn't a chapter you give this quote from this woman called Janelle Austin who was the leader of the George Floyd global memorial who said to you specifically she gave this quote directly to you I don't think there's more violence in the black community than there is in the white community I just think we're counted more than white folks are counted which is like an insane thing to say I mean you have to you I mean, the only way we can make progress is to name things, to face things, to speak clearly.

And no one is served by those kinds of obfuscations. Yeah, and, you know, maybe I'll be charitable to this woman. Maybe she didn't really, you know, know, know the facts and didn't know what she was saying. But this is not only permitted and not only tolerated, but, like, enforced at the highest levels of, like, academia and the media, which is the point I'm trying to make. And then on the, you know, to give a counter example, I was just thinking of that Helen Andrews tweet that you quote tweeted disapprovingly. This tweet just set my day off. Because you felt that the analogy that she made between

disposition of the Palestinians by the Israelis and Gaza and white flight in American cities, i.e. the disposition of, of whites by blacks in the USA. It was maybe like too vulgar, too dramatic. Well, just there's a difference. We could just, I would hope we could just say there's a difference between voluntarily leaving, because you don't like the people moving in and having a government or armed citizens forcing you out, right? Yes, but the point that she's trying to make with regard to Tanehisi Coates specifically is that he never stops to ask himself whether, you know, what role he's had in the dispossession of other people.

Well, blacks aren't responsible for real. No, life. So what it didn't benefit from white flight at all. But the point is Jews are responsible for all of it. Yes. Well, and the absurdity of the Jews turn the racism machine on. They turn the racism machine on again. And now we're doing George Floyd.

I got to go. Well, I have a question about that. I have a question about that because I watched a clip of Nick Fuentes on Glenn Greenwald. And he was, he made a point that was like, you know, I guess, perfectly reasonable and sane and that would be considered completely like monstrous and racist which was like I'm a white guy

and therefore I feel more comfortable and familiar around my own ill. Glenn said it? No, Fuentes, please Glenn would never. Glenn? Glenn likes to be around different colored people. I'm not endorsing him but what I'm saying

is that he makes this point but the, the, wait, who makes this point? I'm sorry. Quentes. But the corollary to that point, which no one seems to be willing to make is that you can call it like white supremacy or white dominance or whatever but obviously everybody including minorities and non-white people benefit from the so-called

white society and no one really wants to live in like you know there's a reason like ilhan Omar is here and not in Somalia even though she takes every opportunity to talk about how she's like a Somalian girl who would love to move back and raise children and make a difference there. I'm not a fan of hers. I don't know what she says as well as I think you do. But I mean, there's a whole long conversation to get into about why societies that were colonized are still behind, right? And why societies that... Well, in her case, her father was aiding and abetting the colonizers. I have no idea. What her background is, I was astonished to see recently that she filed, she and her husband filed that the net worth was $30 million. And her husband's her brother?

No, her husband's a white lobbyist guy. But she married her brother before. For immigration purposes, not for incest purposes, which actually would have made it more romantic and wholesome, honestly. She married her gay brother because she was in love with him. But I do think that, you know, I don't like, you know, I don't call these white societies, but these societies that, you know, came out of Europe and are, in fact, they're white European societies that budget for multi-ethnic assimilation

because they're actually like fairly tolerant and anti-racist by default because they're individualistic versus collectivist in nature. The only societies I'm aware of that ever tried to correct themselves for having enslaved and colonized are societies, that came out of, out of Europe, that doesn't happen in the Middle East. Yes. So it doesn't happen in Africa. They don't soul search in that way and rectify.

That's for sure. Well, yeah. And one of, I think one of the big differences, like, between you and Tonehisi, for example, is that he's very, like, I also still have slaves in the Middle East. Yes, they do. Yeah. People act like, yeah. But people enslaved in Ghana today.

Yes, by other black people or by Middle Eastern people or by Chinese people. We have slavery here. He's very like essentializing and deterministic or Afro-pessimistic. He's Afro-pessimistic and fatalistic and, you know, in part because he has to be because his livelihood and his ego depend on it. And you're not that kind of guy. I guess I have a personal question for you as a segue because, you know, I mentioned all these like prominent black pundits and intellectuals who at least the surface seem very aggrieved and resentful and I'm curious why you have largely evaded that fate. Well, I just never felt aggrieved. I felt like, I mean, it's kind of what you were

saying before. I mean, I don't think that I'm naive about any society or especially this society, but, you know, this society really worked for me and for people that I grew. up with and know and love and you know I my father like I said grew up in segregation he was he was literally a second-class citizen in Texas he was born in the 1930s you know and I've experienced a different country this country has improved and this country has looked at its sins and has in many ways come together to try to rectify those yeah those wrong And I think to say that things are static and never change, there's a kind of comfort in fetishizing the wound. But it takes some type of, I think, it takes some courage to acknowledge progress and to accept it.

And I feel like this country has provided. I wouldn't go as far as Kanye, but I would say that this country has, you know, I don't see how I could. be pessimistic, seeing what this country provides and how people risk their lives to be here. And I've also lived for a lot of my adult life. I've lived for 15 years in France, and that is a society that's much harder. Like, look, if you're in France and you're black or Arab and you're trying to make an intergenerational come up, it's just so hard. You know, America provides opportunities that you're.

you would be insane to think. Yeah, there's more social. This is a blackest thing I've ever heard you say. And her generational come up. It's so true. It's true. If you live in other societies, I mean, America clearly does so many things right. It does.

It does. Yeah. And the fact that there's so much. And to be Tadazzi Coates, who's a multi-millionaire and who every institution has actually served so well. What are you so mad about? Like, and he would say because it's not about me as an individual. But that's a cop-out. every single institution has worked so well

He as an individual has profited immensely. Yeah, for you, for us. For me, but also for plenty of people who aren't famous. Like, I have so many friends who got fantastic educations and are in a different class position than they were born into. We're a first genetic that really... I mean, look at you. Look at me.

You're straight out of bottom. I'm from Belarus. Yes, people only listen to us because we're women. We are affirmative action. hires up in here. Nobody would listen to this podcast if it was a bunch of guys. Now they'd be like, these guys are pretty low. They would if they

could replicate that chemistry. You just have a special chemistry together. But one of the statistics that you mentioned that really stuck out to me was that the wealth gap has actually closed more for black Americans than it has for white Americans in recent years. Well, one of the

statistics that's really fascinating, that Adolf Reed and Walter Ben Michaels point out and that Matt Brinig wrote about is that almost all of the wealth gap exists in the top 10% of blacks and whites. So rich blacks are way behind... Rich blacks are just way less rich than rich whites. Like rich blacks are like Jay-Z and rich whites are like Bill Gates.

Yeah. And that's like basically all of the wealth gap. New slaves. But like everybody else is basically more or less like without wealth. Right. In any kind of considerable degree. And so actually like class-based kind of. politics makes more sense than filtering everything through the lens of race and saying

that, you know, a daughter of Nigeria and immigrants, both of whom are professionals, should get a leg up and applying to Harvard, that makes no sense, as opposed to somebody who's actually impoverished getting a leg up. Well, something you say in your book that I have a question about, and you've reiterated on The Daily Show, is that more than, that George Floyd more so was killed because he he was poor, than because he was black. I mean, when's the last time you heard of a black Harvard? No, no, I agree with that.

Well, that's why Tonehisi Coates is so outrageous because he's like, well, you know, the whole book that he wrote about being like racially profiled with his son by an old white lady who was clearly just a pushy Jewish broad. I know, like, yeah. But I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. Which is.

And this is like, I'm not saying that this is the most significant thing about George Floyd and that he was, you know, his humanness is intact. His humanness is intact. It's valid. But I think more so than he was poor, he was a criminal. Yes. And not all poor. Obviously poverty and crime are related, but I think George Floyd was in the situation he was in.

not merely because he was poor though that was a factor that contributed to him being a criminal, but because he was chiefly... He was passing a counterfeit a criminal. Most black people don't have counterfeit bills. Yes. That's just a fact. Yes. And that's like

the left comes up with all these elaborate rationalizations for why black people commit the vast majority of street crime, why leftist and or transgender individuals seem to commit a lot of the mass shootings lately and it's like, well, the Occam's Razor explanation

would suffice, right? Like, you go for the simplest explanation that's available to you. Which is what? What? What is what? That there is a problem in these kinds of, communities and you can make the left-wing argument and say that it's a problem of like structural and social constructivism. You can make the right-wing argument and say that it's

a problem of genetics and biology. That I fully reject. And I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but you have to deal with the problem as it is, right? And alleviating poverty will not necessarily alleviate crime. That's, I mean, my first book was about how much culture matters. So I don't, I think, and that, it was surprising to me when I started out writing that that was such a controversial thing to say, of course, culture must matter, communities and groups of people decide what matters to them and pursue certain goals. And some people really, like, I live part of the year in Paris, and that's a place.

where, you know, lots of people really emphasize being good, especially when they're young at soccer. And it's like the best place in the world if you want to be good at soccer to grow up. And other communities emphasize being really good at standardized tests. And there's, you know, those are cultural norms. This is a crazy footnote because I've been looking at schools for the baby because he's aging out of preschool and going to kindergarten. And surprisingly enough, there's a government website

where all of this stuff is broken down by demographics. I live in Chinatown. I'm fully doxing my location. You can see, like, for example, like in Chinatown, the Asian test scores rival the best schools in the nation, and the black test scores are horribly lagging behind. And when you make that comparison,

and it's a very interesting one because blacks and Asians in downtown New York both live well below the poverty line. We're talking about two very poor communities. These are cultural differences. I mean, Thomas Sol has really fascinating writing on how that wasn't always the case. You know, blacks last century in the 1940s or so had the same kind of test scores as Lower East Side Jews. Yeah, they were catching up.

Well, they were all just kind of... And Jews used to play basketball, too. These things... They did. Yeah, Jews used to box. Now they're a big fan of basketball, yeah. That's true. Now they just run the basketball.

Every Jewish guy in New York has like a tall tale about how his grandpa or great-uncle was played on a team with Babe Ruth before he hit the majors, yeah. For real. You know, culture really matters. And I think the left made a huge mistake when they made that a taboo to be able to be discussed, honestly, culture matters. And I know that growing up that, you know, there were things that were not prioritized in your social circle.

And one of those things for me growing up, and for my best friend Carlos, who ended up coming over to my house and secretly studying with me and my dad and ended up going to Harvard Law. like the things we couldn't tell our friends that that's what we were doing when we were together why because that was gay super gay super just it would be unthinkable to tell my girlfriend that that's what we're doing right you know it was

so like we're doing hood rat stuff we're just chill it we're just chill it we snatching some ropes no but but that's not there's nothing about your blood or skin or genome it's just about what is valued in your community but I don't think that's true but Thomas I think like culture is race and ethnicity.

Well, it is because when you in your book you describe you say that race is like a lie or a construct and like that goes against what guys like Tanahisi Coates or Ibram Kendi would argue

because they want to have it both ways. They want to have their cake and eat it too, right? They want to invoke race to like redress historical grievances. but then race magically disappears when they have to take any responsibility in the matter. But this is why Coates is more interesting than Kennedy. This is why Coates is more interesting than Candy?

My question is why emphasize the poverty? Oh, about Floyd? Yeah, as opposed to the cultural factors that contribute to his criminality. It's both because, well, you know, you could say he's in a culture of poverty. And, you know, his, his girlfriend was white. Yes.

And she was also a drug addict. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, Coates. I'm not saying race. I'm saying criminality. Well,

drug addiction is amazing because it is the one like leveling force. Drug addiction? Oh yeah. It's, it, drug addiction is the most anti-racist.

Hunter Biden's a drug at it. Hunter Biden smokes crack. And I would say like, he says it's not worse than alcohol. Well, he's right. He's probably right. When you burn the impurities out of the crack.

But. it's true. I think I have a recollection of Dasha speaking very positively of Hunter Biden on this podcast. But when you actually log off and touch grass and go outside and see, look at the people who are like in the throes of drug addiction,

like street homeless, whatever, people who like refuse to enter the shelter system, it is like actually a very multicultural, multiracial demographic. And they all break bread together. They have their own parallel. all society. They have their own norms and values. They look out for each other in a weird way when there isn't like a crisis. It's kind of multi-ethnic utopia. And poverty is part of it,

but it's not, I feel like it's... Well, you're right to make the distinction that... Poverty doesn't mean you... Yeah, most... This is important to emphasize. Most poor people don't actually commit crimes. Yeah. You're right. Yeah, they're the victims of crimes. There's, there's you can be poor in dignity for sure. So more so the reason George Floyd found himself in the situation he was in though there were contributing structural factors was because he was in contact with the police

due to him committing crimes. And it was not his first contact even with that same officer, I believe. And that's, well, they used to work at a club together as you pointed out. They were bouncers together. That's, whoa, okay, I can't, we can't. They were bouncers. It really is something like out of rest of literature.

somebody needs to write a book about that. Russian people had it figure it out. Hundreds of years ago. Every time I see you, we can talk about blacks and Russians forever. But I would say that there's a confluence of factors, right? Like, you could even say that how can you extricate, and if I'm making, you know, if I'm steel a manning the other side, how can you make a case about George Floyd's poverty

without talking about how, you know, his racial ancestry is part of why he was impoverished. his grandfather was a landowner. And, you know, there was a very good biography of Floyd that came out. No, but his grandfather, his grandfather owned land and that land was taken from him in the South in a way that happened in this country where black landowners simply had too much land and white neighbors said that that was intolerable and took the land. But he didn't inherit land.

I mean, I've got, I haven't known. I know. I know. I'm not like a, I obviously. have spent very little time in the South, so don't, this isn't my beat, but there is a, it's a very taboo subject in America's reconstruction era

where land was also taken from whites, which caused exorbitant amounts of white poverty. Yeah, this is like, after those South lost the war. I mean, they lost everything. So there's always a way to look back and see why is someone poor, is my point. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. Why is someone poor is not always just because of individual decisions they made in their own life, lifetime. Of course. Why do some people inherit and some people don't? Yeah, yeah.

No one's denying that. Yeah. Most people are born into poverty unless they mismanaged their finances like I have. But I was born into poverty too so maybe I'm worried.

I think you had a quote in your book that was like, who are you quoting poverty as gradual until it's sudden? Oh, Hemingway. Yeah, Hemingway. I've always heard that about. I've always heard that about.

The show broke gradually, and then all of a sudden. I've always heard about a cancer. A cancer? I didn't realize that was a hemming way, quite about resources. I thought it was always about, like, cancer develops gradually and all of a sudden. To me, because that's where I'm headed. We're going to be bag ladies on the street. No, you're going to be good.

I don't think, like, certainly not in this part of New York, you can't go out without someone buying you a drink. Anna, catch it. Yeah. Where do you drink? yeah it's true we're saving money on drinks and drugs probably not that I do those anymore

I just my memory with you this was a great New York memory it was just like stepping out of this place with the downstairs what's this place in Diceborough? Yes stepping out and some guy goes we're just standing on the street

smoking cigarette with Eleanor and some guy goes Anna Kachian love you in Denmark that was amazing crazy white boys I just kept walking Love you from Denmark Yeah they were nice because they didn't linger You're a pillar of your community

You're a pillar of your city It's nice when they keep a brief Yeah They keep it well Why That I have to give Thomas some credit Because When we rolled up to his book launch

My friends were like Oh this is going to be a reading Or a panel I'm not down with the show and a drink and then he got up on like stage

and was like hey here's a toast to all you guys have a drink on me it's all good got off the mic really quick yeah you really read the room

I like that you're I like that you're recognized by the Danes on the street downtown you get recognized too you must yeah but you keep it low key well she lives in it

in a zip code that's not yeah I live in a more discrete neighborhood but even then yeah some guys stopped me and said just want to say I'm a big fan very like autistically like kept on his eye I said thank you sir I suffer from learned helplessness in structural poverty

so I can't leave this apartment without taking a massive financial L moving is too tough it's way too hard so we're trapped yeah circling back to my original point I'm sorry I derailed y'all No, but when you talk about, like, race being a lie and a construct, I don't really agree with that because, like, in my mind, like, race, ethnicity, like, is very obviously, like, an extended family or clan that has a genetic basis. And I think, like, you can, like, obviously transcend your race. And I'm sympathetic to your position because I think what you're arguing for is this very, like, classical, liberal ideal where people are treated as individuals versus as part of a collective.

the only way that they can be even seen or like conceptualized as individuals if it is if they are viewed in reference to their tribe or their clan right like we're talking about generalization one of the things that people get really mad at me for is when I like make these gross generalizations and I get that I'm very like sympathetic to that but it's like not seem Nichols-Talab said this. He still has me blocked. Obviously, generalizations include, involve their own exceptions, right? That's the nature of a generalization.

Sure. I see your point. But I would say that if you have the experience of being in a family where racial borders dissolve, Yeah. And they dissolve very easily in even one generation. Yeah. Which is your experience? Which is my experience twice over as a child and as a parent.

Like as a biracial child first. And then as a parent. And then as a parent of children who, what was the phrase, who are like white appearing or white passing? Yeah, they're white presenting. Yes. But they also are, you know, if you go on 23 and me, they're almost a quarter Senegambian.

Yeah. And nobody can see that by looking at. them and I doubt that people can understand. I can't see it. I can't. I'm noticing. Thomas, your children, do you look more white than my child, which is hilarious. I know, especially my son.

But like, but think about it. I'm just saying the hold that whatever group you're in is that whatever hold that group has on you is actually quite tenuous. because as soon as you that's why I thought it was always so strange that Barack Obama said if I had a son he'd look like Trayvon it's like depending on who the mother is

Right well you know that famous That's so true You know the famous It's not that famous But there was like an iconic legendary sailorism where he was like well Barack Obama dropped his Japanese GF for a black

wife because he thought it would be politically expedient which is a little bit I thought he got to his white girlfriend for, because he said, I can't, I can't rise up with you. Wow. I think she was part Japanese.

Yeah. Oh, a Hapa. Yeah. He let a Hapa go. But that's, I think we talked about this on the last podcast. You,

I think maybe you even brought it up, like, when MC Hammer was like, you know, my son at any point could be the victim of, like, targeted white supremacist violence. It's like, that's not true.

Not true at all. And then there's also, like, the converse reality that if you actually, like, again, crunch the numbers, look at the statistics. like even if you adjust for income young black men are still more prone to criminality

that's what my first book is about it's also it's like what sociologists call cool post culture where you get so much social validation for certain behaviors that are prioritizing the community like whereas you know like if you look at wise divisant high school is so lopsided Asian and Indian, that's not because of genetics. If the kids talk about why they're there, it's because they couldn't dishonor their family and that certain expectations about how you approached mathematics and testing were the norm in their community.

And, you know, if you're, well, I grew up around some kids like this. If you're a black kid whose dad happens to be a lawyer, you still have to present yourself with certain behaviors. Yes, but doesn't that, like, refute your point that there is no race as such, because, like, in as much as, like, culture, but culture is a proxy for. I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think it is.

You can assimilate different cultures. You can, yeah. Don't you think, like, African Americans, descendants of slaves, right? Have been shaped more distinctly by their experience of having, have being, ancestral slaves than like whatever country in Africa they're from like what those people are and that is called that's culture that's history that's culture that's not like but also if you look at Africa it is a continent that's riddled with crime and corruption and again you can make you can make I noticed like there's all kinds of people in recent podcast you can make it

the last time of the podcast was like colonialish is the real imperialist whatever real based one but but in reason that's just more like a liberal now well no okay but I just I want to point out that I'm not I'm not like a rage baiter or like a race baiter it gives me no pleasure to say this and I actually fundamentally at the end of the day agree with you and I think that all of these like categories and labels can be transcended well the other part of what I'm saying also that's a little less politically correct maybe is that those the um Africans who were selected to be slaves were selected for like brute physical strength and not necessarily like other traits that you think I mean I thought that they were the ones that were captured by their I mean their tribal rivals yeah tribal rivals just captured them I've been the whole thing is so ridiculous I mean I mean when you but they were no one that Taunahisi Coates isn't getting there he's on the slave market we're not buying him we're not you know he has that man he's skinny fat he doesn't look like he's worked a day in his life I get you know he's not going to be I'm not

going to make if I'm a slave trader which I would never be that's really his core anxiety but I have a limited amount on my ship he's not he's not he's not getting on the show but that's not going to get a good price core anxiety because he knows this is such like a Kanye thing it's like his whole thing of like new versus old slaves I think tani he says Coates' like core anxiety obviously is that he is his audience is primarily white and he's not exactly accepted by blacks who don't openly actively reject him they just don't know who he is and they don't care. Kanye West? No, TNC. Oh, I see. I see. No, everybody knows who Kanye is. I see. Um, Tanaasi Coates is interesting

because he really is different than someone like Ibramax Candy and Tana Hasi Coates actually is a book that really blew my mind is a book that he also said changed the way he saw the world which is racecraft and he said that you know he became aware

reading this book Barbara and Karen Fields in 2012 wrote this book racecraft about how race functions in societies like ours in the way that witchcraft functioned in, you know, the Massachusetts colonies

or like, you know, and it still functions in parts of Africa. Yeah, where you, you know, there's not just a thing as being a witch, but you could be killed for being a witch because the society believes that witches exist and so that... Because you're albino and they harvest you for parts. It doesn't make being a witch

real. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, takes on a social reality. And he said that changed his view of everything and that actually he didn't believe that race was real. He's an interesting thinker. I think that since the book he published on Israel, Palestine, and then more recently in this conversation with Ezra Klein, I'm noticing a reaction on the right that gives him no credit for anything.

And, you know, I've criticized him for a decade based on things I think I see differently. but it's kind of frustrating I think in the larger conversation around him on the right that he gets no credit for anything because I think he's much more interesting than that even when he's wrong he's much more interesting than someone like Kendi

I would agree with that I would actually like to meet him and talk to him you should have him on the pod I don't know you should have on the pod well no I will I mean I was actually going to say

I think it's I mean I know we have we're friends but it's nice. I think it's really, I was excited for you to come on and think it's cool that you did. Because a lot of people don't want to come on this show.

Is that true? I mean, a lot of people do, but like people who are more like towards the center. Really? I mean, sort of see us as like, what I like so much about both of y'all is that y'all are serious

and you talk about things honestly with Canada because you don't actually, you have a freedom where you can actually speak your mind, which many people don't have. I thought that when you listen to like Ezra Klein talking to Taana Hasie Coates,

probably Ezrae Klein can't even say everything that he thinks. Yeah, you know? He probably can't actually. He's too curbed by like this kind of ambient social pressure. He's bought and sold. He's got an agenda. Yeah, all of these like centrist pundits are like him, Matt Glacisus,

Matt Brueing, Matt Stoller. They're all named Matt somehow magically. Like they all do this thing where they're like, I'm objective and impartial because I'm a. statistician and then they like cave to these kind of liberal shibbleuffs like I said but okay I have a question about the nature of free speech yeah because I've been it's interesting I've saw I've seen some of the things you've tweeted about free speech since Charlie Kirk yeah I understand this book which deals with cancel culture extensively we're now seeing

yeah like a the woke right a different a different discreet course. Yes. James Lindsay was right. The woke right is real. Oh, no, no. You need to have James Lindsay on. No, no, no.

It's like a head case. Okay. What do you think the limits of free speech are or like in your mind, what should they be? Like obviously like you look at somebody again like Ilhan Omar or Mehdi Hassan. They're entitled to exercise their speech. They're protected by the Constitution. But what happens if like what they're saying is,

fundamentally, like, subversive and against the national interests of the country? Or what about somebody like Barry Weiss, who we all know in love. She's our girl. I love Barry. She's cool. We chill with her sometimes. Love her to death. But she's a free speech absolutist right until it comes to any criticism of Israel.

And then the whole thing is, like, shut down. And how do you solve this problem without resorting to some kind of authoritarianism? Well, I would say that, you know, you want. a society that's maximally tolerant for speech and for different viewpoints. And you want to always err on tolerance. You know, that should just be the basic framework. And I think that one thing you should do is to make sure that you're able to allow speech that criticizes the group that you're a part of.

That's just, I think that, you know, whenever you get yourself in a situation where you think that the one group that you're a part of is the one that must be protected. You have to question. You've lost the mandate. I think so. Even though you're still technically protected by the Constitution. You're certainly protected by the Constitution. I mean, America is very different. France is not the same kind of society. Germany and England are not the same. They don't have something like the First Amendment. Well, I'm going to circle. I have a whole idea about France that I'll circle back. Oh yeah I want to get into that with you but I just want to say to just to answer your question you know I think someone like Medi Hassan I think is one of the nastiest people

who's been able to somehow find an audience because most of his audience has no idea how noxious he actually has always been he's like a sane and reasonable liberal but he's not he was like an Islamist and he's probably a kind of like psychopath who would say anything and at one point in his life he was saying that like non-Muslims are cattle and you can say anything to them and treat them anyway. But he has the right to say that. I would never, I would never, you know, I think one of the most hair-raising and appalling things I've ever heard

to politicians say was when J.D. Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast and encouraged people to inform on each other to their employers if they heard people engaging in wrong speak. What kind of wrong speak are we talking about, celebrating? said tell people's employers if you hear them saying anything bad if celebrating Charlie Kirk's death that's insane. I mean you can

can we not just be offended. Well this reminds me of the Home Depot lady right who was like gloating over the back of TikTok on her fire. She's an anxious person as well. I wish the bullet hadn't missed or whatever with regard to Trump this is speech there was a level of yeah

there was a level of tolerance I think with the Trump attempted assassination where people said, whatever. You can say you wish the bullet. That's the beauty of living in America. Yeah, you're allowed to say that you wish the bullet hadn't missed. You're allowed to say that Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. I don't agree with either of those things, but you're allowed to say it.

As some post-Soviet shorties, you cannot be comfortable with people informing and condemning. As a random civilian, sure. D.D. Vance is that they're telling you to condemn people to their employer that's crazy but I make a special carve out for people who are part of like the academic and media

complex because they are effectively political influencers I that shouldn't matter though well no if you're defending the principle of the thing hate and violence it is not the same thing the left says right to prohibit speech on the right is that it's

incites hate and violence We're in a moment of a, this is, this is the woke right. I mean, I, we're at a moment where we have to figure out how we're going to handle this. We're like relitigating. We've always handled it very well by having a first amendment and having a maximum intolerant free speech culture. But you even say in your book or maybe I think you're quoting someone maybe, but you talk about how, yes, even though we have legal protections for free speech, you're not exempt from consequence. You can't just say morally important things and not expect there to be consequences, I. You raise a good point.

I think that there is a distinction between things that have achieved a kind of consensus, right? So, like, I think that actually Holocaust denial is something that you're probably going to get fired from your employer if you just go and say, like, the Holocaust was fake. And not even because you're besmirching the memory of all these murdered Jews, but because you're infringing upon the current status quo of, Jews being a special interest group. Well, in Paris, in France, it's a literal memory law. It's a codified law in Germany and England. So, like, when you talk about in your book and elsewhere about how, like, we're slowly sliding into authoritarianism and we're at equal risk from the right and the left, like, I have a

hard time really grappling with that because it's clear that, like, in Europe, the left, prosecutes persecutes people who are guilty of like wrong think and wrong speech like there was like the famous incident of like the rape the Pakistani and Indian rape gangs right and how like in the UK and how like mothers and fathers who made like racist or Islamophobic Facebook posts or given like jail sentences well yeah but for sounding all we're lucky to be in America when it comes to speech. We have been lucky. I mean, this is really new to have the kind of stance towards speech that Trump and Vance and this administration have. What I'm saying is like arguably your adopted country, France is much more authoritarian. Pambandi said that she wants to, and this is

actually when like fools like Lomas and these fools on on Twitter actually started to care about speech is when Pam Bondi said that they were going to prosecute hate speech and that you don't have the freedom to of course the first amendment does protect hate speech actually critique of Israel no no no Pam Bondi was saying that hate speech is to say anything negative about Charlie Kirk and then the government and then you finally had like Ted Cruz and like these fools like Lomas say that that actually was like a bridge too far because they want to protect the right to have hate speech but of course hate speech actually is But there is no such thing as like a distinction between speech and hate speech under the First Amendment.

It's all protected speech. So this administration is pushing into a kind of, it's interesting. J.D. Vance went to Munich, went to the United Kingdom and lectured Europeans on how they didn't have a free speech culture. And then comes home, guests hosts Charlie Kirk's podcast and tells Americans to inform on each other to their employers and contradicts himself royally. it's actually, this is the kind of insanity of a woke right that Christopher Rufo, I actually don't have principles. I simply want to use power when it's available to me. I mean, he's pretty open about that, I think. But I think they're grappling with a core problem, which is like, like hate speech also is like one of these things that like muddles the, the, the,

field it makes no sense because what we're really talking about is um one side having again like institutional backing institutional power and the other side being disempowered and one of the criticisms like that like well truff vice president they're politically empowered they're not but they're not they're not really because we're talking about a relatively new administration that is putting down roots, right? And they have to figure out in real time how to deal with these problems without violating any kind of

democratic or constitutional principles. Would you be comfortable with President AOC taking these precedents and deciding what you can say? No, but again, but that's implying that the right and the left are evenly

matched, not only in terms of power but in terms of ideological content, that they're like, ideologies are parallel to each other. And I've always thought that the, like, ideological principles of the left were just like a moral inversion. They're evil. They're hateful. And that, I mean, you say, okay, there's a point. No, I am really critical on the left, but, like, I think we have to be, we have to be able to also criticize the right. I mean, I said this on the last episode that, like, okay, like, what happens if the, the right is actually able to

seize and consolidate power semi-permanently. That's also scary because any system of governance is a man-made system that is liable to make errors and to opportunistically

persecute like foes and enemies or whatever but there's a point in your book where you talk about how we have to return to the fundamental political unit that we have, which is the family, and my question is, like, is that even possible when the left has, like, institutional dominance and control?

Like, you know, two of their leading issues are transgenderism and abortion. That's been getting defeated left and right. Well, they don't have. All of their leading intellectuals, people like Amia Serena Vossin and Andrea Longchew and Sophie Lewis literally wrote a book called Abolish the Family. I don't think, I hope to guide on Andre. But those are, like, relatively fringe opinions that are amplified, as you say, by like, an ideological capture of the institution. Yes.

And so things are being slowly pushed. But the left has lost control, not because the right has gained control, but because the institutions are falling apart. Yes. And also, and also their, like, ideology has been revealed as, like, a monster. I don't think Andrea Longchue has the people behind them. No, no, I'm not saying. saying that these specific people are like bedrocks of like power but they definitely like do enjoy like tolerance and even endorsement in the mainstream media in a way that they use indulgence

I would even say indulgence yeah and like some someone I don't remember who now made this really great point that trying to appeal to the left to take it easy on their like gloating and bloodlust on the grounds that Charlie Kirk was like a husband and a father is retarded because it's not going to get any sympathy from them and would even make matters worse because they literally hate husbands and fathers. They hate everybody. They think abortion is rad.

Think about the person that hates as a client. They can't exist in society. Yeah. If you hate Ezra Klein, how do you walk out into the street? I didn't even realize. I kind of hate. I kind of hate as a client.

I don't hate anybody. If you think he's dangerous and has bad ideas, how do you walk in this street? I think he's dangerous and has bad ideas. How do you walk out of it? Not because he's too centrist, but because he's two left-wing. Because he'll capitulate to guys like Tonehisi-Codes, who don't really know what they're- What is clear is that he will capitulate to the guys like Tana-Haw-Sikos.

I don't want that. That is clear. That is clear. And I don't want, like, you know, it's like the outrageous thing about a guy like Medi Hassan is not even that he's like... That he thinks you're cattle? No, it's not even that he's an Indian Muslim. It's that he's also...

He's not an Indian Muslim. He's not a Pakistani. it's that he is also a former British citizen who sought citizenship in the United States just so he could be a subversive hate monger like why does a person like that have no defense and like how do you deal with a guy like that without suspending democratic principles

and constitutional controls that is the problem that the right is trying to grapple with in real time no but you can't abolish this is a very serious problem I just start well okay I agree that yeah I didn't watch you're the only person I know that watched Vance of Zincirk show I heard that I did even less numbers than Jimmy Kimmel

Oh way less, way less. I mean, yeah, it's, I don't, I didn't tune in and I was kind of like invested. But I agree that it's wrong. I don't believe in informing on people personally. There's no way you can believe in that.

Of course, obviously. I don't, but he's not talking, he's not jailing people for speech. she's simply not simply obviously it's more to various enough but he's advocating for a kind of like civic model of accountability for that same week was saying he's saying there are consequences to your words consequence culture that sounds like wokeness to me

that was the same thing that the woke left was saying it's insane like this not cancel culture this consequence culture what are you talking about yeah but that is not true because again You publish, like, Senator Tom Penn is not a consequence culture. No, it's not true because it presumes a power parity and it presumes an ideological parody and those things don't exist. I'm interested in how you, I think it is true. I think it was bad on the left. It anything is bad for the right to do.

No, I have, I'm not delusional. I'm not like a magatard. I think that the. You're too smart for that. I think that like the, the right. being in permanent power will create its own monsters of course it has already Donald Trump is a monster oh but he's you know he's interesting and he's better in many ways than the JD vans is and people under him because he's funny and he's an individual

and he's not homophobic or racist no he's an original he's not he's not a Stephen Miller or JD Vance I don't think J.D. Vance is even that bad either like all these he's not he's not authentic well yes that's the biggest thing that people wield against him but it's true it's true he was a never trump or

until he was a cultural heroine yeah and he's he's kind of a striver I said this before and I'll say it again like I think that his history is a little bit embellished totally but me ma and pee pa or whatever and all this crap like

I'm sorry but why is Trump a monster Trump is a moral monster well because you know that was one of my questions I wanted to ask early on actually yeah I'm curious I have to pee so bad but I want to you're like Joe Rogan at this stage in your life you can you can take a break no I want to hear your answer as to why Trump is a monster well yeah

per year after word but I don't think you really believe that in a bubble I am where that just that comment would never be like asked for a follow-up. Everybody would be, of course he's a monster. No, I mean, he's a monster because he's a kleptocrat. He's robbing the country blind and lining his pockets and his family's pockets.

Is that really true? More than a doubt. More than a Democrat? More than Biden with them paintings. More than, more than Biden? Yeah, well, clearly he's made more money than them. He has like since taking office. Yeah, but in his pre-political career.

He's made more money. Post-political career. Like the meme coin. alone would have been the most important story of any president's life. Well, that's an unregulated market that is, well, it's the, it's called the free market.

It's the biggest scandal in American history. I'm a liberal, so I believe in the free market, and I think shit coin should stay unregulated. I'd like to say that and to buy Dasha coin. How is Dasha coin doing? It's flopped. Everyone let me down. Did you cash out at the right time? I mean, I made some money, not as much as I

could have if I was tech savvy. waiting to release hers. No, I have a coin. Oh, you have a coin. Yeah, yeah. I paid my run. We did a hole. We had Schrelli on a ex-space.

We're going to be arrested for financial crimes. Don't you worry. No, no. None of this is criminal because it's unregulated. It's all good. But that a monster, a meme coin makes you a monster? Come on.

A monster before he was in power, but he's a kind of endearing monster. But why? Why? What is actually monstrous about him? That differentiates him from your standard fair democrat liberal from this man has multiple baby moms he has multiple children nobody in his family and his clan has come out against him you look at the kennedy's and the body nobody is family

they're always they're always that's true that's true that's true that's true that's a testament to someone's character if you believe in the family as the political unit or excellent i don't really to say rfk is more of a monster by that no but that okay the kennedy's and the biden's are always like logging onto twitter or substack to like complain about the relatives and like that's never happened with Trump and he's like he keeps a tight he runs a tight show how is that monstrous that's like wait what was the question I was how is he a monster I mean I think Donald Trump has conducted himself as a monster but I also see how that guy is funny like when he said you still believe in Santa Claus no he's had a ton of bangers he is of course you know them but I also don't find him

to be uniquely like evil or monstrous more than any politician basically. Yeah, we're not also saying that he's uniquely unimpeachable and innocent and we stand him or ship him like no matter what. Like, I'm sure he's done things wrong. I think you find him

vulgar. Yes, yes. I do. Aesthetically, he is hard. In this book, I think you respectfully, I think you have nostalgia for the Obama era. For the Bush era, I have nostalgia.

Wow. That man was eloquent in comparison. But if you look at, who's encouraging a crowd to hang your vice president, not intervening when they were trying to hang your vice president, I'll clarify, is monstrous. Wait, what? Pence? Yeah, when Ivanka Trump was begging Donald Trump to intervene and stop Jan 6th, and he sat for hours without telling people to stand down, they were erecting a gallows, a hangman's gallows to

Mike Pence. It's insane. No, but you say so yourself, they were all dead-eyed. They just were copying what they saw was like socially permissible behavior in the summer prior. You say this in your book. I definitely think that it exists in a continuum that was going on with the summer prior, but I think Donald Trump, his own daughter, was saying you've got to intervene

and he didn't do it. Wait, by the way, I'm a Jan 6 realist. You're a Tucker Carlson, Jan 6, truth? No, I think the truth is that, like, those people did do something, like, bad by storming the Capitol. I get it. But, like, at the end of the day, it was, like, a drop in the bucket compared to the reaction, like, the orchestrated, organized reaction, whether people know it or not to the Summer of Floyd, where people, again, like. I think the summer of Floyd was very bad, but you admit that, like, attacking the seat of American political power is really bad. and threatening the vice president is it's bad but it's crazy it's more coherent as a political act

as a gesture as a gesture to go to the capital to put your feet on nancy felosi's desk and pick up the phone and pretend to make a phone call on it is that makes way more sense to me than like burning down some black owned or chinese pharmacy and yeah like shooting two black teens and they car I'm not going to defend that Or taking a washing machine George Floyd died so I'm taking this washing machine What I was going to say was yeah I think that you have some probably

Well probably well placed nostalgia for George W. Bush Well okay In the book at least Even for Obama but like honestly I think you're too smart To buy into the myth of Obama I think you have instincts Against the incoherence of progressive politics

That you are I do you explain very thoroughly in your book, but you find the right wing to be vulgar and you want a return to a kind of like polite liberal society of yesteryear that's just impossible. And you correctly can't throw your chips in with the right

because you're aware of like... I'm very comfortable like with conservatives. But I don't think what is happening on... To use a famous urbanism, you're not exactly allergic to conservatives. Not at all. You want a polite liberal. order that's like refined and kind of French maybe but but that's based in some

principles damage to that liberal order it's liberals themselves certainly by getting in bad with the left it's so obvious they bear much responsibility yes it's not Donald Trump like I don't think that yeah Donald Trump is a symptom yes of other things but when you look back at the way that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama debated is it's a astonishing from this vantage point to look at how they spoke to each other and what the political stakes were and how Romney conducted himself. When you look at how George W. Bush conducted himself after 9-11, and he immediately went to a mosque and said, you know, we're not at a war with Islam. And the way he spoke, I think he said it was a beautiful religion. Yeah, the way he spoke in complete sentences and the way he didn't tweet in all caps. Oh, come on, come on. And mistakenly, like, publish a DM. Donald Trump is a contemporary person. But also what did 9-11 lead to

it led to the terrible abuse of like civil liberties and it led to untrammeled, unchecked Islamic immigration to the United States. I am evoking like a polite liberal order where you say Islam's beautiful, I love this mosque then you wage war on the Middle East and like make the lives of Muslim America

like highly surveilled and policed and there's just like a disconnect and what and I agree because yeah I think we do need like a nice noble lie that we can all hang our hat on but all this comes down to like the core problem which is that this is but the veil's been lifted a question of like racial and ethnic incompatibility and what you're going to do about it well the toothpaste is out the container yeah you take that red pill you can't think society so what you i mean Stephen Miller's fantasy he's got we're gonna you're not going to make this

an all white society so what is nobody wants to make it an all white society because you look at guys like Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance and you know like Stephen Miller's a Jew and J.D. Vance is married to an Indian woman they're not like anti-immigration and that's with Gavin Newsom's

family compared to J.D. Vance's family. Well that's the big hard right criticism against these guys is that they're like ethnically impure or race traitors or whatever. Well, that they're not white nationalists. Yes, yeah. And what everybody is like dog whistling to at the end of the day,

which is like an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth, is that in America, we like our society to be like basically modeled on a white Anglo-Saxon European society because that's what benefits the vast majority of people including...

The private work ethic? Yeah, I mean, not know. Which is what makes a very... different from France it does I agree with you which has a more Baroque

that's why I work here Catholic yeah because you can't work over there that society is too Latin Thomas I feel like you don't work there because you probably don't can't write in French

oh but they I write in the world they can translate you but I yeah no I want to work in a Protestant culture not a Catholic culture

for sure see I'm the other way I'm different I've got more of a Catholic or Catholic that is to say not. No, but you're you're getting paid the Protestant way. You're a self-made entrepreneur. You don't want to actually live in a Latin country.

I don't think you want to be in a Protestant marketplace. I think I want to be in a free marketplace. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But more the kind of, there's an essay. I forget who wrote it. I think it's from the 70s. It's called the Protest.

The boot. well mind in the Catholic spirit or something like that it's like about it's about no no how it's about how the Protestant work ethic is actually like because it prioritizes like efficiency and materiality is like almost diametrically opposed to a Catholic I wouldn't even call it a work ethic because it's more kind of baroque and passionate and like it's not about this earth because they're more and that resonates you are a little bit more. of a francofile I yeah

I mean I am but I have okay so one of I cooked up a hot take because I saw you on the daily show sort of advocating for a model that is a mix of

American and French liberalism you said what did you said the French maybe take it a little too far they can yeah

um but my take that I want your counter take on is that France is kind of originally fundamentally woke. Because the French Revolution was so ideological and that's formed the basis of their recent culture, which has been about creating these like secular like citizens. And then you have things like, you know, the memory laws about the Holocaust and slavery, the Armenian genocide. Never mind they take that one back. Oh, yeah. Dasha mentioned that they like instituted law against denying the Armenian genocide and then rolled it back.

Because clearly like the the new axis of evil, which was like Israel, Turkey, Azerbaijan, pressured them to like take it back. I mean, it's a very interesting footnote, right? But so, right, the woke thought policing is kind of like embedded into French society. In America, it's more diffused and corporate. In France, it's more state. Yeah, state-en-forced. And yet the French are more chauvinistic on the old. You can't wear your hijab at there.

They are, they are. Can't wear your hijab at the beach. You can be woken up on the beach to be made to strip. they make you put on the bikini in France they make you strip um that's an incredible society yeah it's insane because there's such sex perverts they're like you have to take off the hijab

and the rest of your pants and your panties too and give me a kiss or you have to go home they're like this is our purple magazine are you a pervert like me the France is an interesting society but I think there's a middle ground you know between fetishizing identity and this French thing

which is that you if you're a Jew you keep that private in your house and you can't be a Jew outside you can't be a Muslim outside well that would be the ideal right it's like well that's a whole lot in theory the French society is the one I think

you would have to embrace but in practice they haven't solved all the human life is complex right you know you have to actually even no matter what the law says you have to stop yourself if you're waking up a 55-year-old woman on the beach and telling her that she has to remove clothing.

You know, there's something, you must feel that there's something gone wrong with that. But don't you almost feel like American wokeism, and you say something to this effect in your book, that it is almost downstream of like French thought because they had a little too much libertay and then came up with critical race theory, whatever you want to call it. So they're kind of like the original

operational system for wokeness. And then America just put like a more like puritanical corporate spin on it. Very, yeah, that's true. Somebody made this point that I thought was really interesting where it's like the way that the ideas went back and forth started in France, came over to America

and then, you know, France is combating the wokeness that comes from America that was rooted in a French kind of critical theory. That's a fantastic chapter. They compared it to Pets. Like pizza started in Italy At some point You get a pizza hut back in Rome

After a pizza was in America It's like what the fuck is What is this? This has nothing to do with the pizza That we were doing in Naples But you can also make the case That like the real like source of this like Anglo tolerance and individualism

Because they kind of did it to themselves by Well they're not Anglos that's the difference No I know but I'm talking about like in America specifically, which was like traditionally in Anglo society up until like the, you know, the 60s like heart seller right? Well, it's interesting. Like Albert Murray would

say that America was always fundamentally white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, African, Native American. Yes, those are like the three spokes. They are. Yes. It was. And they're you know, the, the whitest, most blue-blood Americans

always like took pride in having a drop of Native American blood in. Yeah, but even the most inveterate racists will admit that we have a moral obligation to the

African descendants of slaves in America, which is why they're so, like, against... Most of whom have been here longer than most whites. Yeah, which is why they're so against, like, the Ilhan Omar's and Medi Hassans of the world, who again, like, throw their law in with the plight of

the oppressed blacks in America Well, that's why they came up with BIPAC Yeah, because POC wasn't cutting at the head They'd say, no, no, black indigenous. Yeah, exactly. But you, you, sorry stop Asian hate. Well, I mean, that's why I'm more sympathetic to Aidos than, you know, than...

Well, you have a core problem, which is that, like, you are the descendant of America. and descendants of slaves. Yeah. And on my mother's side, old white Anglo-Saxon pride. Yes, yeah. Slave owners? No.

No, no. In Massachusetts. Nice. Well, they have those in Massachusetts. Yankees. Eli told me a funny story about how his elementary school was renamed. From some white guy who, like, own the place to, like, a gay black opera singer who never attended the school because it turned out that the American's insane yeah it turned

out that the guy the original guy was a slave owner meaning he owned two slaves in Massachusetts and freed them oh really he was like a nice one of the good one like he didn't have like a plantation or an industry or whatever I'm not really in favor of just looking back indefinitely into the past and judging and castigating and punishing the past based on contemporary sensibilities. I really don't think that's fruitful. But yeah, but that's what like

wokeness is all about, which is applying contemporary I'm going to quote you in your book in my favorite chapter, which is about like the globalization of anti-racism where you are you're doing

some panel on wokeness, awokeness or whatever they call it of le bochism le bochism uh i forget where it is it's at the chateau de toqueville yes that guy you love exactly this chateau is crazy the the descendants of toqueville are still there and they're like our original ancestor in the year 100 or whatever was like best friends with this guy William and it's right on the channel and you're like William let's go across there and that's William the Conqueror and that's the Norman invasion into England like that's how old that's how long they've been in that house that's crazy they're still in the house

and so yeah you're there with like a panel of people discussing I was in the audience for this panel yeah okay and he's finally answered the question of whether you can dismantle the master's house apparently not no we still know one of the most interesting things about that is that they've done studies that actually the like 75% or more of the last names of Oxford

and Cambridge are the names of the descendants of the Norman conquerors and not of the native Britons that were so you see what I'm saying it's hard to actually over like once it gets going it's very difficult. They still are on top.

Yeah, but the the Normans that came over a thousand years ago are still mostly the ones at Oxford and Cambridge. Yeah, yeah. But you have to, you have to like budget for the fact that like all premier black intellectuals in the United States are equally the descendants of like prominent Anglo-Sax and houses.

You've probably looked into that more than I have. I mean, I have. I know some like, well, dude named Williams had a lot. There's a lot of Williams. They're not like down market ethnic white names.

They're not Polish. Well, you get into this. I wish I'm not. They're not Slovak. I was looking up Tanahisi Coats on Wikipedia and his dad. Paul Coates is interesting.

It was William Paul Coates and he named his son Tanahisi Paul Coates. Yeah, I wonder. Yeah. And Tonehisi is some Egyptian term. Yeah. It's not even Swahili.

Rasta vibe. But Paul Coats sounds very grand and fine. There are videos of him like disaggregated. I would go by Paul Coates. How come black people don't name their kids Haley? After Celasi. They do. They do.

They do. They do. Okay. Okay. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to read. I would if I was thinking more strategically I would have had I would have hired you to do the audio book

it would have sold more yeah did you do the audio book oh no you have a nice voice you have a nice voice yeah um but yeah so you're um discussing kind of these like incongruent and inconvenient feelings you have about this woman rocaya diallo um and she's cool You should have her on the pot. She's amazing. She's French Senegalese, and she's kind of, she's Muslim. She is, yeah. And so she's sort of this lone voice.

She gets kind of like ganged up on in this town square. It's amazing. I've never seen something. Yeah, it's really, it's actually very interesting. But you say, it is no exaggeration to say that wokeness is also a destroyer of virtue and beauty. It makes a slogan of the ineffable, betrays every secret, spoils the ending of every tale. The politics of identity that undergrids the abhorreds the epit's. obsession with social justice obliterates every marker of individuality and subordinates

every psychological ambiguity to the stark and inflexible dictates of abstraction. It smacks of deterrentism, blah, blah. Later on, you have a good Churchill quote about liberalism that says you have no head if you wholly embrace it, but if you categorically reject it, you have no heart either. I really feel that. Yeah, that seems like kind of the... Yeah, I would agree with that, yeah. And that seems to be like...

I know you. You, of course you would. That's like a central idea, I feel, in your book. But I was wondering if you could say more about, um, wokeness as like a destructive idea. Oh, yeah. Well, I think it reduces every question to things that don't always matter the most. You know, it reduces every question to what is the group identity here and what is the power imbalance? and we have to rectify every abstract grievance and individual rights get trampled in the

process, you know, if you think about like the way that people cavalierly accepted that some innocent men, we just have their lives ruined because we're making an omelette in Me Too. You know, that that's actually monstrous, you know? It was so cavalier that's like, whatever if somebody gets like fired, like men have been getting jobs they didn't deserve for decades, or centuries. You know, like, it was so cavalier the way that Wokness treated the kind of, uh, uh, casualties, the destruction of real people's lives. You know, and, well, that's, like, really did a disservice to the gravity of the actual

crime of rape. Yeah, exactly. And, but by like, lumping all these random, Aziz Ansari, infractions, yeah, like, whatever misdemeanors infractions. it's crazy and you know in every way it's like um just this kind of inability to see the complexity of of human life and relations and the idea that also just this idea that um that the wound is everything and that the wound that you didn't even experience yourself but are in somehow proximity to matters more than everything uh because a lot of it is like not firsthand experience

But don't, do you think that wokeness is not a kind of like a slippery slope symptom of liberalism? Oh, oh, um, of neoliberalism. Okay. Well, whatever you want to call it. Like, you know, I think that this is where this is where the racial and ethnic component comes in because it seems like, you've been reading Christopher Caldwell. No clue. Never heard of him. I came up with these ideas all by myself.

Any human being system works in a high trust ethnically homogenous society. So leftists are very fond of bringing up the example of Scandinavian countries. Which are historically, like, you know, socially democratic. They're like socialist leaning. And why is that? It's like the determining operative factor is not that they're socialists. It's that they're homogenous, right? But they're also going up.

in the euthanasia pods. So different. Sweden, which was one of the poster nations for this, has recently, since 2015 or so, experienced enormous instability

from having like an enormous million, a country of nine million bringing in a million immigrants from mostly Muslim. And that's another... And the high trust society is really straining. It's falling apart.

because any human system doing that socialism, liberalism, fascism can work in a high trust ethnically homogenous society I'm serious Why did they did well Why? Why? Why let in a million people

from Islamic countries? Why in France as Islamophobic as it is with the hijabi laws? It's different between Sweden and France All these countries have different stories France has former colonies. Sweden did not Sweden was, from what I understand, was, you know, there was enormous upheaval in the Middle East and Syria and places like this. Under the Civil War, where, you know, immigrants were flooding into Germany and other, some European countries, I think we're trying to do something quite high-minded and was to give amnesty to quite a lot of refugees. Denmark decided not to. Sweden decided to do. it. And Sweden's society has really been

strained by this. But no one forced law. France is the most multi-ethnic society on continental Europe because of the scope of France's former colonial empire. The holdings, yeah. People are coming to the metropole back from the colonies and they have a claim on France in certain ways that other people don't have on Sweden. Yes. Okay. I understand. If you're in Algeria, you have a claim on

France. You have a claim on France. Yes. You were colonized. Yes. And now you're, you have a different relationship with the society that had colonized. You're the same reason why Pakistanis go to the UK. Of course. And you know, but the Scandinavian countries have no such precedent, no such history of colonialism. No such history. And so you think they just out of like a good faith, high-minded gesture, they let in a million in a society of nine million. And now they're, and now you see this with like the Israel-Palestine conflict where people will be like, well, why don't the neighboring Muslim countries absorb the Palestinians? It would be a demographic disaster for them

because they can't afford millions of new migrants flooding into their countries. So why would they do that? Of course, a society can't take an unlimited amount of immigrants in a very short amount of time. Yeah, and people don't seem to understand that this, like, fundamentally changes the cultural fabric, the financial incentives, the capacity of the state to provide for people. Like, people talk about a welfare state. It's like, well, okay, welfare state is only possible with trust. If there are limits. Limits and with trust. In France, even, this is a society that believes in the social safety net, but it, it weakens when the society too quickly changes.

People don't want to actually fund generous welfare states when they believe that they're funding strangers. That's just a fact. Yeah, why would they? And it almost like, like it obviates the whole like racial and ethnic angle because basically like you can set that aside

and say like, okay, like different strange people or coming into my country and I feel like a stranger in my homeland and I no longer have the safety net that I originally enjoyed like this doesn't have to even be like a racial do you see what I'm saying? It does not have to be racial or ethnic conflict.

I don't think it has to be racial. I would say that America is a fundamentally different society than these European nations that we're talking about. And in America like historically people from different demographics assimilate better than they do in like the European countries.

where they're, like, siloed into ghettos, yeah. Where it was a nation. Yeah. It was Spanish. But all this rests on the fact of the matter that, like, by the way, like, okay, like, I'm, like, a slovoid trash immigrant to America. To New Jersey. To New Jersey. I have no claim upon the Anglo-Saxon birthright.

But, like, come on, I've been hammering on this, like, for years. But me, a black man here, descendant of slaves, I have a claim. You do, you do. But there is going to come a point. There's going to be a tipping point who wrote that book, Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome Gladwell. There's going to be a tipping point where like the culture that you came here for no longer resembles itself. I don't understand why people don't understand this. There is, but I would say that's much more the case in a in a, in a real like ethnic, ethno-nationalist nation state in Europe than in America. America has always been in flux. There have always been Chinese people here. in the colonies, there have always been

specifically, well, okay, no, no, but because I was like, Manifest Destiny America is included in a very different society. Well, no, I, like, I had this thought recently because I was like in Berkeley and San Francisco like a couple of days ago. What were you doing that? You were lecturing?

No. I was like, we went to a party. We went to some, we did some gay bullshit. But, okay, we don't want to get into that. But I walked outside. And I saw, like, Chinese men in, like, Carhart, like, painter jumpsuits blasting sigs. Different culture out there than here, yeah. It is, but, like, any Chinatown, like, Chinatown is, like, a state of mind.

You run up in there, and there's, like, a Chinese guy ripping a sig and, like, cursing at full volume, anywhere you go. Yeah, Riley and I were walking around Chinatown in San Francisco. Yeah, he was like, is this, he was like, is this a desirable name? The way I was like, it's not the same in New York. In San Francisco, the Chinese have more of a stronghold, I feel. Yeah, yeah. Whereas, like, in New York, it's like a cool, trendy neighborhood to live in, whereas in San Francisco, not so much because it still is, like, very predominantly Chinese.

But even here, it's that, like... I guess you're... It can be working class in parts of here. But I was going to say, like, in San Francisco, like, you'll have, like, a Chinese cab driver and things like this. I feel like it seems different than... In L.A, you have an Armenian cab driver. Yes, so they look upon me...

Y.A.N or L. IAN. IAN. I have a problem with this like dichotomy. IAN is higher. IAN is the higher, more assimilated chicklet. Kardashian. Yeah.

They're like the Watertown slash Glendale Armenians. YAN is like the former Soviet bloc Armenian. I got you. And I wanted to ask you a question. Why are you so mad these days online? I'm not mad. people think I'm mad. Why are you so mad?

Because you're so nice and lovely. Why are you so mad? I'm not that mad. People have a problem with this. I'm not actually mad. I'm actually a mild-mannered conflict-averse. But online. Online.

You have a persona. It's not even a persona. I just feel more comfortable because I don't have like people actively glaring at me or trying to talk to me to like air my opinion. I'm a fundamentally shy person. and obviously I'm a gay nerd. And I'm not mad. I'm just righteous.

You are righteous. You have a moral indignation that I respect. I am the birthday twin of Stephen Miller. Oh, my God. This is Leo Virgo Cusp. We are attention horrors and moral fags at the same time. And we're just, I'm autistic for the truth. I want the truth to come out.

I have, like, I have no particular, like, racial or social or gender animosity. I just like don't like lies and I don't like being forced to bear witness to them. I think we can all agree with that. I can definitely agree with that. I find that's probably why I'm a writer. And I was thinking about this because people are always like

oh like something horrible must be going on in her personal life or she's like personally unhappy and it's like that's not true. Like since we've been doing the pod, which is like seven years. going on eight 423 episodes yeah there's been ups and flows

I've been happy and unhappy I'm currently pretty happy but like no I just feel I feel angry you don't think righteous

I just I feel like there this is a pivotal moment and the assassination of Charlie Kirk really brought it to the four

were you paying attention to him before that not really but he did follow me randomly on Twitter like maybe a year or two ago

and I was like oh that's weird and interesting and I kind of looked into him and like had a vague impression Did you follow back? I don't remember I'm too late now

I'm going to follow him back right now. That like Bart Simpson avie leftist that got stabbed by the Oh my God remember another horrible snuff video we got to see He followed me, I realized. He followed you?

Dash eats or the other one? I don't remember. Probably the other one. But I, yeah, and then after he died, I said, oh, damn. Can't follow him back now? No, that would be wrong. I think he was a private account, too, so just gone. Gone to sands of time.

So you don't think there's any correlary between how you feel and how you behave online? Because I sometimes I get mad, I go. No, no, no, hold on. There definitely is. Okay. So that was you what? I get mad. I act out.

online. Yes. When I'm, when I'm, uh, hungover or PMS thing, bad time to be tweeting. I go online and stir shit up for real.

Like obviously I antagonize and alienate people. But it's like truly never that deep. And I'm literally just like seeking understanding and, uh, relation, whatever. I feel like you really understand the psychology of posting very well. you understand why people do things

I don't even understand sometimes tweets take on a life of their own and you don't understand why but I posted something about how I really felt you know not even I know you're going to say yes people really piled on you

like what this memorial service looked like it just I felt very foreign from it and people were like they took such a Christian angle and I wasn't even talking about the Christian. No the Christian angle is actually actually major.

Apparently. I mean like my exan father is a Baptist minister. It's not like it's not like it's not it's not the same. People have this is like a classic you have to understand that people have a perception of you as being like one in the same with like a Nicole Hannah Jones or a ton of hasty coach. They see you as like a subversive mulatto right who's like going online.

I like that. No for real. I think it's going online and like uh trying to like. undermine the core construct of the United States of America, they don't understand that you're like a thinking and feeling and sensitive individual. This is understandable. It goes for all of us here. People like like truly misunderstand you. That's what social media is for. That's what social media is for. Yeah. I forgot where I was going with this. But they they do not understand like I think we all felt the same way. This is like us here.

Are we, yeah, we all thought it was weird. Fireworks at the memorial? Yeah, like, fundraising at the memorial. Fundraising at the memorial? Like nakedly, not even like in a covert way, like straight up being like text this number, any donation will get you a Charlie Kirk wristband if you do this and that. Fireworks too, by the way. My husband wasn't raised evangelical, but did spend, was became like a Pentecostal.

Okay. in his teenage years. Where? In the Pacific Northwest, where there was a kind of, he's a little older than me, but there was like a kind of like Bush era revivalism. That people are now saying that Kirk's death is ushering in a new revivalism.

That's what they mean is a revival of like evangelicalism. And for a lot of Americans, they do, they are at the worship concert. They are like, this is not, it's not, it doesn't.

feel weird to them at all because this is like a reverent this is that their equivalent of like a reverent religious service is already at this kind of like mega church yeah like rockified concert but it wasn't even for me the Christian angle it was Donald Trump's talking about tariffs on stage well he his remarks were a little off beat well people misunderstood what he trying to say because it was like Eric Kirk going on stage and being like I forgive the killer of my husband and then him being like I actually don't and Eric is a better person to me and I hate my enemies and I actually like thought I thought that that was a sweet and self deprecating comment because he was kind of doing 40 chess and making fun of himself. Do you think so? Yes. Yeah he's obviously

capable of self deprecation which people don't really get about him because he's so braggadocious and like seemingly egomaniacal. But he actually just like makes fun of himself at every single turn, which I find relatable because I do too. I'm like I'm annoying and Jewish and a moral fag and like whatever. And people really don't get that.

I mean Trump's, yeah, his, also the memorial was like seven hours long. Exactly. I had been kind of like vague. I had it on the background for like hours before Trump even took the stage and prior to that it was like this very you know we're putting on the armor of God

yeah we've got the hedge of protection these very like Protestant evangelical talking points that were very Christian I mean as a Catholic that's very foreign I went to Catholic school my whole life is a different aesthetic experience

but as an American I can you know I it's from it is familiar though it's not my aesthetic preference and for a lot of Americans that is their like experience of sure I'm really not second guess that and not counter signal it because it's like fair and I get it and fundamentally I think like Charlie Kirk at the end of the day it was a force for good Israel well that's a separate that's my big issue that's the issue for you no that's my big issue with Nick Fuentes because like okay but that's a

big turning point as gender that's not like a new it's not like that it's not like there's not a minor detail yeah they're not like remixing his legacy to be in our continuing you're saying Nick Fuentes is making the better points than Charlie Kirk on this issue yeah yes

supposedly but I think that he's also ultimately at the end of the day he's not going to like me for this he's mixing metaphors and comparing apples to oranges because as I've said many times the biggest threat facing America in this day and age is the cultural and institutional dominance of the left

and the biggest challenge is the permanent and definitive defeat of that dominance hegemony. And Israel is its own separate problem that we all agree on and that we can tackle later. We don't all agree on it. It's clearly the country doesn't all agree on it. Well, the people who get it, get it. Real heads, no.

But all I'm saying is Turning Point USA is a like a pro-Zionist organization. It's, you know, it's Israeli lobbying body. Is it for real? I mean, fundamentally because even because evangelicals are Zionists, it's like in lockstep with that, it's not. They, there is no, uh, dissenting opinion within that body politic. Sure. But I think the strategy has to be stepwise. It's like you tick one box and you take another. And like, obviously like the problem of Israel transcends the geography and like comes down to like prominent influential Jews in America and Europe. It's a larger separate issue. But when you say,

Charlie Garg because I force for good. Well, I think he was to the degree that he was like challenging the left. Yeah. And was saying like, hey, like abortion isn't rad. Immigration isn't cool. We want like. Well, of course, you, you think immigration isn't cool, period, like as a daughter of immigrants?

Well, this is like. like a thing that people like to lob at any immigrant where they're like oh like don't you owe your loyalty to other immigrants like tacitly implicitly versus like you want to shut the door do you blah blah and my mom actually gave me my mom was like drunk when I

shout out to her she was like yeah I want to shut the door yeah because these people who are coming in are fundamentally culturally different from me and she's right she's not wrong she said that she's so based for that yeah of course because if you have too many immigrants the idea the ideal of america ceases to be and you you have to have very strict controls and vetting mechanisms i don't even think they have to be that strict i just don't think the faucet should be like

full throttle like we just need like very i'm a moderate i just want like a very i'm not like point blank like blanket sing. Love it. Love to see it. But like I'll eat some halal food. I live by the U.N. I love multicultural. I live by the U.N.

I live by the U.N. Okay. I love nations, all kinds. For the sake of all the immigrants flooding into this country, you do not want to tip the demographic balance too much because then it ceases to

have borders. I agree. It ceases to resemble the country that you're, originally moved here for it. Come on, guys. No, I think a obvious comment. But all nations are always in flux. Of course. They're not. And I don't blame them. Except for Japan.

They're not thinking about the demographics. They're thinking, I got to get out of the shithole country. I got to go to America so I can achieve generational. What did you say? Land tweet that was like never, never get so racist that you forget that white libs are the problem. He's right about that. Because at the end of the day, it's like you can't blame people like Ilhan Omar and Mehdi Hassan for doing what they do. They're only doing what comes natural to them. You have to blame the people that not only tolerate but endorse them.

Well, yeah. More rich white lips. Yeah, I can't imagine who Medi Hassan's audience is if it's not. Like who is his audience? Who is his audience? Apparently there's a lot of them. But who is, yeah, Omar's I don't, yeah, I'm with you on that. And I'm with you on the idea that a nation has to have borders.

It has to have, like, checks and balances vetting mechanisms. It's very simple. Everything is. Enough is enough. Everything, no, but everything in reason and moderation. I mean, immigration is also, you know, I'm glad that your parents came here. You make New Jersey a richer place to be friends. So true.

You do. And you make Nevada so much more interesting. No, I mean. I'm really glad I'm in America. I love America really good. I'm here. I want some immigrants here for sure. No one's,

I'm not, you know, I'm not like, I don't want to lock it down. I don't even like Anglos. I've got a different. Too many Anglos? You're just,

you're like Bristol or something. No, that's why. And yeah, even, you know, prior to like, you know,

mass subcontinental immigration when America was more of a melting pot of like, you know, different kinds of your, ethnic whites that's pretty interesting you know I don't want all Protestants get some Catholics in there Southern Europeans Irish Italians

Eastern Europeans that used to be considered a different race Even some Muslim people I like a while They say this but that's not entirely true You should read the Anglo-Saxons Take on it They don't they're yeah They're not they're not fans

They were not always fans Well the other crazy thing that bear is repeating, which I'm sure you're aware of as like a biracial person, is that like every like serious, prominent black intellectual or pundit in America is like at least 30% white. Oh, for sure. Well, the the the average is 80% African, 20% mostly white Anglo-Sex and Protestant. But of course, many people are on the other side of that, which is much more. yeah

I want to see like Tanahisi Coats is 23 and me I'm sure he's not he's 30% white easily yeah I mean his father's quite like

for sure but you know that's the beauty of America you know it is it is I'm not like anti immigration or anti multiculturalism

I'm just like anti the idea that society will be better if you like import everybody here you're realistic

about demographics change. No? I think so. It's like very obvious. So you subscribe to the Great Replacement? Do you not? I mean.

Well, I guess I should say what do you mean by subscribe to the Great Well, I love when they questioned well back and they were like, oh, what do you think of the Great Replacement Theory? And he's like, what? This is not a theory. Yeah. My parents are liberals. um, love them to death, but I, but I, they came to visit me recently. That's why I was not at your book launch party. I was having dinner with my parents. And we had been avoiding kind of

like political because we, you know, are like hot-headed, Slavic people who, you know, when we tread into some territory, we'll start like screaming in Russian in front of my non-Russian speaking husband, which we try not to do for his benefit. But eventually, yeah, we did kind of get into it. my mom said something where she was like there's you know um we're not at uh people aren't reproducing enough um we're not you know so we have to import people from another from other places to tip the scales because we're not at like uh mom is woke yeah both my parents whoa yeah that's actually yeah that's like actually technically right but no i'm like i'm like oh so you do believe in the great replacement but you think it's actually great

you think for you it's a great good replacement and but that's exactly what people don't want is to like not be reproducing enough and then be replaced by people from that place but that's like my thing with like you know like you've heard this phrase the woke or more correct oh I actually no I hadn't who says this I think it originates with a Twitter user Kofi Fianon but it's become like a I don't know I think maybe he coined it, but I'm not 100% sure. But it's when they say something like, what do you think the decolonialization means?

Yes. And they, you know, they're like speaking to a specific audience, but then they're actually articulating a truth, which is that people that do want to decolonize are like calling for violent action. Tanjee Cote and Ibram X. Kendi, who are basically race segregationists, like they believe in the fact of like race being a real thing race being the operative factor they're kind of saying the quiet part loud but they're coming up

with like the opposite insights that you would want how so you meaning Thomas like one like a classical liberal would want which is like a seamless raceless multicultural society where everybody gets ahead on the merits of their own individual capabilities. It's a long time ago now. In 2017, I profiled this French writer Renaud Camus

who coined the term the Great Replacement. I wrote this long piece in the New Yorker about it. And I was actually critical of aspects of it, but in other ways sympathetic to it because there is a truth in that

a society can't actually completely have poorest borders and allow a new population it doesn't matter it's not a it doesn't even matter his point was that it's actually not about race it doesn't it cannot completely allow

yeah the specific ethnic or racial makeup doesn't matter if the society is being demographically overpowered by foreign entities like the change itself is what is at stake and of course there is truth in that but it's always about like

how do you how do these questions get addressed in ways that are actually humane and they're not like scapegoating people or or stereotyping or well you can say that the change is inevitable but

the fact is when people used to come to America they access I mean the Chinese don't assume haven't assimilated so well they've kind of ghetto eyes I was going to say that people used to come and they used to simulate to America and now they come and they have a more hostile. The question

I mean, New York is such an incredible place. You see it every day. It's astonishing how people melt into New York. Yeah, it is actually like very beautiful and like it's fulfilling, sorry to sound like a gay. Your neighborhood is insane. It's amazing. Yes. Actually.

You should come up by the UN. We got diplomats all from all different countries. My neighborhood is specifically interesting because it's like black poverty colliding with Chinese poverty and Armenian hustle and everybody

one Armenian hustling one random Armenian husband who doesn't even see herself as Armenian but the question is like how do you assimilate people should you assimilate people

and what happens if you let in too many though if the rate of change is too high you cannot assimilate people that's the problem we're talking out like the rate of change but the problem is that actually I think this is actually a key point. The problem is that we never have

conversations that are measured and about balance. It's these extremes where online is like people are railing against immigration. We're going to get them all out. And that's both of those positions are absurd. And nobody wants to hear a kind of compromise in between the two. That's like something that doesn't work well online. Like actually they have a point that actually you can't have open borders, but that's also a point that, you know, individuals can come and that's great, and you can assimilate people.

I mean, Bernie tried to say that, and they crucify it. Is this kind of... But then, yeah, with, like, the arena Zakutska murder, I saw people talking about remigration, and I was like, uh, she was killed by a heritage American,

and I don't think we got to send the Ukrainians back. Like, what are you talking? They all up to go back. It's like, who are you talking about? Because this was an immigrant that was killed by African American. And I understand, like, the directional point that they're making, but it still is, like, there is, like, a ton of incoherence. There's a ton of incoherence.

And it's very difficult to have a measured middle position that respects the kind of truth that exists on both sides, which is no one likes centrist, no one likes liberals in this moment. Well, okay, so we're, we've done, we've done some time. We've done some time and I have, and I want, my last question is towards the end of your book, you sort of boil all this down to and say genuine liberals as well as their moderate and center right partners have no choice but to reclaim the abandoned moral high ground. We must identify and disown the means of extremism. Even when they manifest themselves in pursuit of ends, we may agree with. That is the most basic prerequisite for democracy.

So my question is two parts. What do you mean by genuine liberals and what do you mean by the means of extremism? Yeah. Thank you for, I'm appreciating your questions. Thank you. Genuine liberals are people that don't believe that everything is a zero-sum game and that any time my opponent gets any kind of advantage, it means that I have suffered a permanent loss.

and, you know, liberals trust in process, in norms, and the idea that... Progress? Yeah, progress. And that, you know, even if I lose now, that power will change again in the future, and I will just try to persuade people to my point of view, but it's not a catastrophic loss. And, you know, giving up on the kind of extremes means that I really think that when you get in power, you can't do what Chris Rufo said. and write a piece saying that for the past 10 years I was pretty much against cancel

culture but now actually I see that we have like a majority and I think that actually fuck what I had said but like this cancel culture shit makes some sense now we should do it that's that's the worst possible politics you can pursue and I think it's really short-sighted because I think he's young enough that he's going to see it swing back in a way he doesn't like and I would advocate for the people on the left who will at some point regain power that they would try to steady the pendulum in the middle. But that's what Barry said when she was like, well, aren't you right-wingers concerned that when the left regains power, they're going to use the might of your mechanisms against you?

Yeah, sure. But to push back on that, it's like they've already defaulted on the norms and virtues of liberal culture. They already don't respect. Well, that's why. But somebody's got to make the first move. and somebody's got to, you know, some.

And also you have to keep in mind that Chris Rufo is married to like a Thai woman, so he's not like a race essentialist or an authoritarian. No, he's power hungry. I think he, no, I think what he actually is

is a failed elite. Like, motivated by resentment, going to fake Harvard and people who have real Harvard let him know. And he devoted his life. to trying to sabotage

and he's very good at he's very ambitious there's a classic Russian type in these novels you know like the superfluous man and then he wants to he wants to sabotage

and you know he's very good at that but it all comes down to real people at Harvard didn't acknowledge him and now we're all living in his kind of world but you have to ask

this is a classic well that's yeah you have have to ask like Chris Rupert's whoever you have to ask like what are these Nick Fuentes what did these people want to really ill sure but what do you ask like what do these people

want are they capable of you're such a credential high ground that's above their own personal self-interest I don't think that that's going on a lot Rupo doesn't seem to be I think it's resentment I really think it's like a Bologna character you know the failed elite

is a powerful force in history but no but I think that some Somebody has to come along that wins power and doesn't decide to exert it to its full extent on his opponent. Well, that's why I ask about the means of extremism, because I do think that for democracy to function, you do need polarity. You do need extremes. And the idea, right, is that we'll meet somewhere in the middle, but you need kind of people on the fringes to push, to create the ideal. ideological pressure to create like a meaningfully democratic consensus. In a two-party system, I guess you do have this polarity.

But the means of extremism is different from extremism on its fate. Like, I don't think we need to eradicate like extremism per se. What do you mean? Well, like what I said is that you want people to be to have the freedom. As a liberal, I want people to have the freedom to exercise their freedom of speech. Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of, you know, that they... You don't want like a dull, non-dynamic culture.

Because that's not democracy. Right, you don't want people self-sensoring. But the means of extremism is something else. Well, the means of extremism are just what we're seeing now, which is a kind of like no court are given to your opponents, just a complete, like... Like an authoritarian... demolition of, yeah.

To play devil's advocate, these people are kind of not, they're not exactly in permanent power and they're just reacting to the circumstances that they were dealt. That's what they say. But it's true. And I'm not, like, I have a hard time, like, articulating this because I'm not exactly behind all of the specific, like, personages and figures who are leading the new right but I am behind their core mission

but they all have different yeah that's a scary thing that nobody will acknowledge or deal with that they they also have like very personal goals and agendas and some of them are motivated by yeah grievances grievances from their 20s some shit like that but you know somebody's got to be mature

and move beyond this stuff. We are governed by people that are some of the most immature leaders we've ever seen. I mean, J.D. Vance is essentially governing for a kind of niche audience on X. It's actually crazy. We don't have leaders that are putting the country first. That's really a problem.

Well, he wasn't elected. That's true. But one of the things that I thought was interesting about the Ezra Clienton, Housey Coates debate is that, and I don't even think that Coates is necessarily right. I think Klein is probably more right that you have to actually think about what gets you elected because it doesn't do you much good to have these ideals and principles if you can't use them. But Coates was quite clear that some principles really matter. And right now we're in a kind of,

I think we're in a very disastrous space where it seems like nobody actually has the moral high Well, I wanted to ask you about this question of moral clarity that you bring up. Yeah. Because it's become like a buzzword among liberals. We're like, oh, you should leave with moral clarity. Yeah, it's terrible. And that seems to like subvert the original goals of journalism, which are like transparency and objectivity. What does moral clarity mean?

Where did this term come about? Who coined it? It feels like. Wesley Lowry. It feels like empathy where they're like, oh, like, yeah, you should have more empathy and compassion. And every time I hear empathy and compassion, I run for the hills because I'm like, okay, you're just trying to, like, strong-arm people into, like, agreeing with what you believe, which is something that you had handed down to by other, like, progressives. Like, what the fuck is moral clarity? I mean, we all know in our daily lives where we stand morally, I would hope.

But when liberals use that term... This was an enormous mistake in the summer. of 2020, you know, and after James Bennett was fired at the New York Times, you know, Wesley Lowry wrote this op-ed in the Times saying that for too long, journalism had tried to do this kind of fake neutrality and objectivity. That was always a lie and what we need is a journalism grounded in moral clarity. By the way, Wesley Lowry has multiple, like, credible allegations of being like the Pill Cosby of journalism after this that have come out in the past year.

So he's the last guy you want to listen to about moral clarity. But he had this op-ed, this phrase caught on, and, you know, this idea that there was a view that was clear. And I think that there's a huge mistake. Because, you know, if you think about it for even a second, this is a juvenile way of thinking about the reason why you want neutrality is because people dispute what's the moral clear position, the morally clear position. But the idea is that it's clear because there's an inherent.

like white supremacist, whatever, buy it. Which is already a mistake. And, you know, you can think that... So it's based on a false premise and the clarity. The people that storm the Capitol believe they were operating from a position of moral clarity. ISIS believes they're operating from a position of moral clarity. It's so juvenile to think that there is a morally clear position

and you can then impose it and that would be better than restraining yourself. That's what I'm saying. Like, liberalism is the only way that safeguards everybody. everybody's interests because everybody feels they're operating from a position of moral clarity. You don't, the only way that you can impose that is through a kind of authoritarian imposition. And of course, that only works as long as you're in power. Which negates the whole idea of moral clarity. Exactly. And it's so immature and it was a huge mistake.

But I think that there is a real movement on the right, a woke right kind of desire to have a moral clarity of their own that is going. to disappoint people just as much. How do you define the woke right? This is like a James Lindsayism and he's a basket case and a subversive. You reject the idea of her work right? I think James Lindsay based on what little I know of him is an evil retard. Yeah. I don't know.

Like I don't understand what woke right means in the sense like, okay, they're using it. Can I? Yes, go. I think it refers to the right that is empowered to use, as Thomas says, the means of extremism, meaning like cancel culture. The means of the left. Yeah. Against its opponents of the left.

Exactly. Yes. That that's what it is. Because there's a kind of state of exception where they get to, they have a grievance and, you know, the normal kind of ways of doing business have to be suspended. the parity of power and a neutrality of content. It presumes that the... You're big on the unlevel playing field.

Yes, it presumes that the left and the right are equally matched, and it presumes that the left and the right have equally valid arguments, and they, like, don't. Do you think there should be affirmative action for conservatives? What does that mean? To level the playing field? No. No?

No, but I think that I think affirmative... Should we have more talk shows for conservative? They should put Dasha in more movie. Should we put, should Dasha get in more movies? I think I should get cast a little more. To correct some of the, there's something DEI, we all know is unjust. There were some people who got some parts that maybe could have gone to me, but.

But all jokes aside. It's okay, we can make that all right now. Like, obviously, the ideas that are coming out of the so-called presumptive right are more organically popular than the ideas that are coming out of the left. Wait, what? You think that? Yes, because, like, at base, the right, which is everybody who's not an open leftist,

it's, it's, like, guys like Steve Saylor who are, like, pro-Ukraine and pro-vax and or classical liberals at the end of the day being, like, Steve Saylor is pro-vax? He's not a right-winger. He got adopted by the right because he had no, he was, like, politically homeless. Okay, I get you. like obviously like the ideas that are coming out of the so called right which again is anybody who is not left are much more reasonable in common sense i mean i they like literally are and

there are a lot of people on the right who are like the right is more diverse it's diverse yes because there's people on the right who don't want things that are common sense because it involves people who are just like not leftists it literally is like a basket and umbrella holding term for anybody who's not on the left like i'm sure people think that you're right wing. Oh my God. You read the New York Times, it would seem that way. People think Aswer Klein is right wing. They think he's a fascist. Yeah.

They think anybody who's not like Sophie Lewis or Toneheesey Coates is right wing. So you start saying the barometer just shifted so much. Well, no, it's always about which side gets to persuade the kind of vast,

sensible middle to align with it. Because you're talking about a lot of people getting coded right who are actually centrist just like not right at all I mean knowing you person I don't think you are

I'm a liberal yeah but we're I think Dash has gotten kind of woke recently what yeah I think we're like

I think we're like I'm like I mean not woke in a pejorative sense I mean like I feel like you're you've moved a little bit left no no I've always been slightly right of center I would say

yeah we are we're pushing back against Anna on the last episode about no we never disagre well I took a I had to take

a hard line stance because I've constantly referred to myself as a free speech absoluted yeah you did so I can't like roll it back

yeah she was that's that's one of the points she was going to restrict speech but it's not a free speech absolutist I'm not so you're more of a liberal no no I am a free speech

absolutist in a vacuum you guys don't understand I am a free speech absoluteist in a vacuum but we don't live in a vacuum we live in a reality where one side holds more power historically than the other side and has inflicted a bunch of like harm and damage on society by i agree with that promoting ideas such as like gender and race aren't real when they really patently are like on i think gender and race are very different or sex and race are very different. I don't know about gender. See, I'm like even caving to their horrible word gender. But yeah, sex, sex and race are obviously both real. Are they like a determining force? Are they a death sentence? No, it's like when it's like when you do the 23 and me and they're like, well, you're prone to like cancer or like blindness or osteoporosis. Is that a hard and fast truth? No, but it's like a guideline that you have to live by.

I believe in generalization stereotypes. Generalization stereotypes generally are true and real. Do you believe that Slavs are white? No. They're not white in the same way that like wasps are white, but they are within the commonwealth of like the European tradition. Or Asiatic too. Yeah, they're like, we're a liminal case.

I think like Armenians are a liminal case. They're like literally between being white. and non-white and like the like Russia's East the East yeah this is like an ongoing like literary and

sociological trope like what are Slavs what position do they occupy they're like a secret third thing do you think Jews are white I don't like no I don't actually and I like a lot of my close Jewish friends

don't necessarily feel themselves to be exactly white. I mean, there's affinity between Slavs and Jews, I feel. But the non-white people voted and they said Jews are white and the Jews took umbrage to this because they wanted to be a special interest group,

a special category. Because if you're just under the umbrella of monolithic whiteness, why are you being persecuted and attacked in certain ways? Well, that's why I think the Israel-Palestine thing is a great addendom. to the kind of narrative in your book because it is something that kind of like remixed a lot of it yeah yeah totally and the oppressor oppressed that there is amongst

like very vocal American you actually put it very well when you talk about the Columbia protests the way they like barricaded themselves in the building and then said they were being starved as if they were they were in Gaza in at Harvard they're in the Gaza of Harvard. Yeah, it's like the way that people map their like proxy oppression complexes onto like global conflicts. Yeah. And the way that it's played out in the aftermath of like America's racial reckoning. I think a lot.

The Jews are also weird because they claim to be a religious category for like polite civic purposes. but they have essentially manifested their chosenness by becoming a racial ethnic category. Like, it used to be that, like, if you were, if you called yourself a Jew in, like, biblical times, you were, like, under the umbrella of a religion. But in recent times, they interbred so much, there was, like, this, like, genetic bottleneck, right?

They created their own race of Ashkenazi, people who now purport to speak for all Jews. across the world because they are the majority population of the Jews so they literally are they the majority? Yeah by far I think like Ashkenazi are like 90% of worldwide jury

like Sephardi or Mizrahis are a small percentage of that but like Ashkenazis and Sephardic are like ethnically different like you know as Eleanor is fond of saying I'm an Arab she's ethnically an Arab right she's like Egyptian and Syrian shout out to Eleanor

yeah and for Nando. I forgot to shout them about that. Yeah, but like they really create and there are more like sophisticated, less vulgar anti-Semites on the right, such as like Second City bureaucrat who

like to do the thing of like denying Jews the ethnic basis of their victimhood. But actually at this point they do have an ethnic basis. No, it's an interesting. I mean it's like human life is complicated and complex and can't be reduced to these

these abstract categories. And like, you know, it's like when I was pregnant, like Eli is 97% Jewish, 3% West Africa randomly.

Oh, that's right. Eli is jazz. Jazz. And he's good at jazz. And I'm, he's good. He's good. I'm one eighth Jewish,

but they tried to submit us to specifically on my maternal side, but through her father. So I'm actually like a, are you more Jewish than Elizabeth Warren is Native American. I don't know what her breakdown is. I think you probably are as very,

it's not one-eighth. Yeah, but like one-eighth doesn't mean anything. It means that you like know the people enough but are distant enough from them to be fully anti-Semitic. I mean, you could become a citizen of Israel. I wouldn't like, in a way that I don't, I cannot. I don't pass supporting to Nazi statutes,

but because the father of the child is fully Jewish, they submit you to Jewish genetic testing in any prenatal care. So there's a genet like there is like an like ethnological genetic basis for Jewishness. No I mean I knew but like he

he's Jewish. She means testing for like genetic disorders. When that's when you found out that you had the ancestry. No I mean I knew I knew I had the I done been known that I have the ancestry. This was like

like one of Cudahy's great points that he was he made the point that like you know they like to hide behind this kind of tolerant religious civic basis of their special group interest but really they are an ethnic block they are yeah they are like a category a separate category of white people of white people I mean they are white because they're mostly like European I mean but then this is so strange because everything is a bureaucratic kind of decision. If whiteness is about power. But Arabs are considered Caucasian on the census. Well, Levinan Arabs, but not Gulf Arabs.

And everybody like law also like, do you not think that in the sense of like American racial discourse that when we talk about white and black, we talk about brown bodies, white, whiteness, white supremacy is about power? That's why I, that's why I'm frustrated with the anti-racist. Right. Because, you know, American, like, Western leftists like to view the Israel-Palestine conflict as a conflict of, like, white. Brown versus white people. But the fact of the matter is that Israel is probably more ethnically brown than Palestine, if you break it down, because the Palestinians are ethnically Lebanese Arabs. they're white for the most part

they're Caucasian on the American census they're yeah they're probably roughly the same thing as like Armenians or Turks or Iranians or they're like kind of liminally white for the most part but then you have like

Gulf Arabs Yemenis Emirates who are like more brown yeah and you have African Jews yes Ethiopian Jews yeah 12 tribes I've heard.

We've done it. We've done guys. Should we wrap it up? We can wrap it all. And it's just breaking down. The ancestry of them. This was, I love talking to you all. This was great.

This is so much fun. I always love talking to you guys. I'm going to, yeah, refrain from making any more. Not even. Just to circle back really quickly to moral clarity. Christians. moral clarity. Yeah, that's true.

And like Charlie, someone like Charlie Kirk had moral clarity because he had a, you know, coherent worldview based in Christianity. That's why I would say that we need to have a realm of neutrality. Mm-hmm. I mean, I...

Because everybody, Tana Hussi Coates is operating for moral clarity too. We have to get back... Is he Christian? No. No. Well, then where does he get? But that's not, it's not just about,

like, a random person's vision based on their experience. It's based on, like, a moral law. The word. That is, like, biblical. Yeah, the word, brother. Well, when people kind of like, in the beginning was the word. Well, when people are like, oh, like, when they come down on Charlie Kirk and he was,

and they're like, oh, he's anti this and anti that. And it's like, well, he's operating within a consistent, coherent Christian framework. Well, not the Christian framework. My mom would recognize. Judging by his own comments, like, there are like plenty of receipts. where he's like on podcasts and doing interviews and he's like, yeah, like I don't have a problem with like gay people or like Muslim people

specifically as individuals. I just don't think that this is what America stands for. He's making like a broader case. It's like thoroughly consistent and in line with what he believes. And the problem with liberalism as your book kind of describes is, that it is, it's incoherent. It claims to, like, reclaiming a moral high ground that's not based in anything except for liberalism is going to...

It's based on certain principles, but that can be subverted by the very fact of its tolerance, right? But I would say that, you know, someone like Charlie Kirk, he has a vision of Christianity that is not everybody's vision of Christianity. They're devout Christians who would say they don't recognize their Christianity or their faith in the way that he was going about his faith. And so

I think that there's always there's a danger in saying that one person represents the Christian view or something like that. I mean there's a lot of things even theological that I disagree with Charlie Kirk about, but I'm just talking about like the internal coherence

of his world. Yeah, the clarity of, yeah. I mean I really don't know, I never really thought about him very much. He was somebody that It was like a Twitter figure to me before he died, and I don't think that anybody who talks about ideas publicly and saw that could feel anything but horror that you could... I mean, it was horrific.

It's insane. Yeah, but that's what freaks me out when, like, these political and media figures try to qualify it, and they're like, oh, what happened to him is, like, horrific, but, dot, dot, dot, dot. No, and if that happened to Medi Hassan, I wouldn't qualify it. It's like there's no qualification for that. Yes, it's not necessary. And that's a kind of moral clarity we can all agree.

Yes, so true, Queen. Yeah, there we go. I didn't mean to, nobody, nobody should, no. No, I actually just, like, we've done it to re-out, we've done a three-hour show. You should not morally clarify or qualify. You should not morally qualify that. Their assassination.

Well, thank you. Rescue is for the children. It is. Right. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Thomas. For this wonderful three hour long. We did three hours. Wait, what? That's so crazy. It's so fun.

I can talk to y'all. I know. Y'all are amazing. I'm a huge fan. Thank you for having me back. Likewise, thank you for coming on the show. We will see you in hell. We'll see you in. Oh,