The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Bret Stephens & Nimesh Patel

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

Bret Stephens is an American journalist, editor, and political commentator. Stephens began working as a contributing columnist at The New York Times in late April 2017. He previously wrote for the Wall Street Journal as a foreign affairs columnist.   Nimesh Patel is a New York City-based standup comedian and writer for Saturday Night Live. He may be seen performing regularly at the Comedy Cellar.  

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to The Comedy Cellar show here on Sirius XM Channel 99. We're here with Nimesh Patel. What up? Oh, first of all, with my co-host, Mr. Dan Natterman, who's always here. Hi, Dan. How you doing? How do you do? Nimesh Patel is a New York-based stand-up comedian writer for Saturday Night Live. He has been seen performing

regularly at the Comedy Cellar and our kind of special guest of honor today. Brett Stevens is an American journalist, editor, and political commentator. Stevens began working as a contributing columnist at the New York Times in late April 2017. And before that, you were editor of the Jerusalem Post, right?

That was my... Wait, wait. And then the Wall Street Journal. And then the Wall Street Journal. And I see you on the Wall Street, on the WSJ... On the editorial report. I'm now on MSNBC. You're on MSNBC now?

Yeah. They're accepting? You're going right into the lion's den, huh? Well, it's a little switcheroo on account of new management in the White House. And you're a never-Trumper. I don't mean that as a... No, it's about right. And the last time you were here, I don't know if you remember, I asked you whether if Trump ticked off ABCD and E conservative policies and we made it through the administration, would it have been all worth it?

And I don't know if you remember that. And we kind of went back and forth. At first you said yes, then you said no because he convinced you no. And then recently, you wrote a column about Kavanaugh where I felt you kind of veered towards my position. No, not really. So go ahead. Look, I mean, the question about the Trump presidency for right of center people like me is whether we care more about the policies than we do the values. And I think the only real conservative answer is that you ought to care more about the values, which is to say, you know,

sure. In theory, do I like tax cuts? Yes, I do. More defense spending, I'm in favor of it. I'm glad he got out of the Iran deal. I can cite any number of policies where I agree with the administration. I'll say the administration because what the president thinks and what the administration does are two different things. On the other hand, what I think is going to endure is massive damage to American institutions, to faith in government, to the office of the presidency, to our idea of how a president ought to comport himself or hopefully one day herself. And those things will last much longer than a Supreme Court nominee or a few billion dollars more for this or that naval ship. So on the whole, I haven't really changed my view about the president. Every time he tweets, pretty much opens his mouth. It sort of confirms that my judgment back in 2016 was right, even if I'm happy

to acknowledge their areas of policy agreement. But you said something in the Kavanaugh column, which was pretty like, thank goodness for Trump. Yeah, I said, I wrote a column for once, I'm grateful for Trump. I mean, look, I write 100 columns a year, and... Humble brag. I write more, honestly.

I write 100 columns a year, and then I do 25 conversations with my colleague, Gail Collins, which are always a lot of fun. And so you have to read my work in its totality. I mean, there have been areas where, yeah, I thought the treatment of Kavanaugh was in many ways really disturbing for anyone who cares about a concept like presumption of innocence.

And anyone who cares about certain standards in terms of the way the media reports stories. So I came out swinging in Kavanaugh's defense in that instance. But if you've read my column recently... I didn't read the column. Do you think he did it? Or is it whatever he's accused of? I think the answer is we don't know. And when the answer is you don't know,

there is a presumption of innocence. Unless you have corroborated, solidly corroborated evidence for an accusation, I don't want to live in a society where accusation equals guilt. I think that is the road to a totalitarian system. Sure, but we're not talking about just any other job. We're talking about one of the highest courts in the office. You don't think there should be an almost stainless guy

at the highest seat, highest court in the country? I mean, if like I mean, your institute, the Times published one of the accusations. Well, the New Yorker published one of the accusations which I think they never should have published, which was the Ramirez accusation.

The Swetnick accusation defies belief. Other accusations turned out to be false. But just apply it to your own life, okay? Any one of you has some next job you're up for. And if your ability to get that job hinges on an uncorroborated accusation about something you did in high school, you're going to be living in a society that you don't like, and it is going to quickly turn on the people who are making this accusation. One of the things I noticed, you know, I was in favor of Clinton's impeachment back in 1998

because I thought lying under oath was an impeachable offense. And back then, liberals came out swinging in Clinton's defense, saying that it was absolutely ludicrous. That puts them in a very poor position now from a standpoint of intellectual consistency for demanding the impeachment of Donald Trump. In fact, Trump's defenders now are using the Clinton standards from 20 years ago. So I say that only to say that people should be careful about coming out in favor of a certain judgment because it fits their preconceived desire for an outcome, only to find that 10 or 15 years later, it is being used in a somewhat different context against someone who's on their side. Let me just say that I think that, you know, where Clinton,

not only did he lie under oath, but he lied under the oath in the plot or whatever it is to try to get away with the kind of assault of Paula Jones. So it wasn't just a benign lie. It was a lie to try to cover, to try to win a lawsuit where he was accused of something bad. Right. Where Trump, at worst, is accused of some sort of, so far, we don't know what the hell is actually going to come out,

of some sort of lie in order to cover up a consensual affair with a woman that's extorting him. So the Clinton case is much worse in terms of, if you want to say that a lie about sex is innocuous. Clinton was involved in stuff which he was trying to cover up that was not consensual. And Clinton was using the office and the powers of the presidency to cover it up. That's right. It was while he was in office.

In so many ways, the Clinton case is much worse. But by the way, all of the liberals who lament that a sexual predator like Donald Trump, or a guy who spoke of women the way Donald Trump did before he was elected president. When those liberals lament, how can such a man be elected president?

Well, take a look in the mirror at just who you were defending back in 1998. I was 12, man. I wasn't defending nobody. So let me just go back to the beginning of the day. So my position on Trump wasn't that it's all worth. My position was always that he was too risky to elect because he seemed unhinged to me. I mean, just like to give a little example, right after he gets the nomination, he came out swinging against Ted Cruz's father for killing Kennedy. It just seemed like a guy who couldn't even comport to his own obvious self-interest

and continues, and you don't want that guy as president. However, I felt like I wouldn't know the answer to whether it would have been all worth it till after he's out of office. Going into it is too risky. I would have to say, no, the odds are we shouldn't elect him. But all the things you're talking about, damaged institutions, all these things. Well, there's an opportunity cost on the other side, too. Damage to the First side to damage the first amendment damage to the presumption of innocence

all all the kind of momentum towards things that us in the center right object to the political correctness the mob mentality all of it that he's pushing back against moving the embassy to drew some all these the there's a lot of wreckage that could come from a far-left Supreme Court in terms of real people's lives.

And you just don't know. So I kind of feel like if we survive this presidency, I mean, we recovered pretty quickly after Nixon. Or maybe we didn't. I don't know what your opinion is about that, the institutions and everything. I don't know. The country went into a tailspin after Nixon. The late 1970s were very hard years in the United States. You attribute that to Nixon, the Carter? I think I attribute it to the general collapse of faith in American institutions that Watergate

engendered. And I think we were fairly lucky with Ronald Reagan and being able to bounce back less than a decade later. But look, I grew up in Latin America. Maybe on that account, I think that damage that's done by cult of personality leaders against the institutions of state can be irreparable. And it's also cumulative.

And so I don't think that we'll be able to really judge the outcome of the Trump presidency until many years after he's gone. Just to jump in here to clarify what Brett said, though he doesn't sound it and doesn't look it, he was born and raised in Mexico City. I was raised, raised. He was raised in Mexico City, that's correct.

Born in New York City. And his Spanish, I'm told, is quite good, unlike Mr. Luis Sique, who also spent some time in Mexico, but I saw on YouTube him speaking Spanish, I'm told, is quite good, unlike Mr. Luis Sique, who also spent some time in Mexico. But I saw on YouTube him speaking Spanish, and it appears it's very rudimentary. So let me tell you another issue. Can I just interrupt for one second? I would love a Donald Trump who was politically incorrect. And there's a big difference between being politically incorrect and being just an a-hole.

Absolutely. By all means. A-hole means asshole. Okay. I don't know what the rules were for this. This is a curseable radio. Okay, good. So what you just mentioned, I deplore the political correctness of the left.

I deplore the sort of suffocation of academic and intellectual freedom. I wrote about and deplored the way in which the presumption of innocence was tossed out for Brett Kavanaugh in the way that it never would be if the shoe were on the other foot and it were a liberal nominee being similarly accused without corroboration. I oddly agree with you there. But the problem with Trump is not that he's politically incorrect. He's just a jerk. He's just a

vile person. He's just an out-of-control egotist. He always was. He's disgusting. And a serial liar, and that's bad for a country that presumes to lead the free world. Do you think he's good at being president? No. Can I just start very quickly with regard to Kavanaugh,

what standard of proof I don't know why Nimesh is laughing at that. I just like the way he said it. What standard of proof do you think would be appropriate for a Supreme Court position? In other words, if you felt that Kavanaugh, if there were a 55% chance that Kavanaugh did that which he was accused of doing,

would that be enough in your your estimation, to preclude him from being a Supreme Court judge? Or would you need a criminal... At 17 years old, for something, you have to define the violation. What I'm saying is... Well, the violation is what he was accused of. There had to be some basic elements of corroboration that were simply

absent from the accusation. Okay, we know that. And just saying like, oh, well, Blasey Ford, Dr. Ford seems like a credible person to me, okay, and or I had a similar experience or so on. None of that, in my view, means anything. I don't know what a 55% standard of proof is. Hypothetically, when you're in court, there's two standards. There's beyond a reasonable doubt and there's preponderance of the evidence.

And you do the best you can with the evidence that you presented. I'm saying what standard, ideally, in your mind, should be in place to preclude somebody from becoming a Supreme Court judge? I thought there was neither a preponderance of evidence in that case because there was no real corroboration. And it was certainly the sort of accusation that would have never been admitted in court in the first place. Now, I understand this is not a criminal trial. This is a question of who gets to sit on the highest court in the land.

But mark my words, what's sauce for the goose is going to be sauce for the gander. And it means that at any point, any alleged instance in a person's in a person's life can and will be held against them. And then the question will always be, well, did so-and-so, might such-and-such a person have done something when they were 16 or 17 years old? We don't

know, but because this is such a high and important office, there can be not a shred of evidence. That strikes me as a recipe for no qualified person ever wanting to put themselves forward for a Supreme Court position. You know,

you end up with a standard which is essentially the stainless versus the shameless. Either you've never so much as smoked a cigarette or had a cup of coffee in your life and you can prove it going back to the time you were four years old, or you're just an Anthony Weiner type person who doesn't give a damn what people throw at you because you're going to go for it anyway. And that's where we are now as a country.

So again, so these are the damages to institutions and principles that come from the left, but they don't have any particular fingerprint on it like Donald Trump. But imagine an alternate world where one accuser just tanks the Supreme Court justice and the Title IX kids are all expelled and labeled as sex offenders because somebody accused them. And we don't believe in a robust First Amendment anymore. And all these things you could probably delineate. Or a robust Fourth, Fifth, and 6th Amendment either. I mean, this is, this goes

to the very nature of our system of justice, which is that we believe that you're entitled to a presumption of innocence. Right, so this is a a... So, I mean, so it's like, you know... Calamari. Like, if, um, if, uh,

I'm always afraid of being kind of guilty of being privileged in a way. And I say, you know, for me, like, I don't really care what they do with my taxes. Most, like, I'm pretty much, my life is pretty much unaffected by who's president. So it's very easy. It is. Honestly, I mean, so it's very easy for me to focus on the president's values or whatever it is. Social issues and shit. But if I'm a dad and I have a kid in college and he's up

for some sort of accused of something in college and he's not allowed to even face his accuser and all the girls, I say, oh shit, I'm happy Donald Trump is president. And then somebody says, well, is it worth it? And that's an impossible question to put what matters to you and what the real injustice that might happen to

you or your family as opposed to the greater good of the nation in an outcome that can't actually be predicted with any certainty. So I just don't feel I know. I mean, look, you know, you asked me earlier whether I describe myself as never Trump. And those are one of those terms that sort of come into being and they assume a meaning beyond the literal meaning. You know, when Trump has done things that I've agreed with,

I have praised him. One of the things that I praised him for, I praised his education secretary for, Betsy DeVos, was revising those Title IX standards so that the kangaroo courts that had sprung up on American college campuses, essentially destroying the lives of young men on the basis of accusation alone, that those are being reined in.

People who really worry me, this is not my saying, but Jonah Goldberg, he once coined this phrase, the always Trump people. There are now conservatives who, no matter what Trump does, they will find some preposterous defense for it. So, you know, if Obama had gone and taken the hand of Kim Jong-un and bowed and scraped to his generals and talked about him as his best friend and said the North Korean crisis had been solved, can you imagine what Sean Hannity would be saying? He's deplorable, Sean Hannity. Yeah, he's a basket of deplorables unto himself, right? What would they be saying? Or what would they be saying if Trump had made excuses for Vladimir,

if Obama had made excuses for Vladimir Putin while accusing his own intelligence officials of misstating things? But then the standard they apply for Trump is, well, he has his reasons, it must be right. What I've tried to do is ask myself, if Trump does X, what would I say about it if Hillary had done that or if Obama had done that? What I've tried to do is say,

I'd want to be consistent irrespective of whether it's an R or D in office. I agree. And that's part of also my problem with this, that the alternative was Hillary Clinton. And this is the crew that pardoned Mark Rich. I mean, everything that we feel we know about Donald Trump, they do it in a more elegant, classy way. But they're almost no less venal or vulgar than Trump is in their own way.

And that would be the team that we brought in. Question for Brett Stevens. Tough one to me. Go ahead. What do you think of the calamari? When I'm done chewing, I'll tell you. Now, let me ask another question. Can a nation that is not ready to accept a Harvard with more than 20% Asians be ready to accept a multi-ethnic population.

2044, is that what we're talking about? I'm saying it's great to say, oh, we should be a nation of immigrants and all that. But if we're not ready to look at immigrants as Americans and say, well, it doesn't matter how many Asians we have at Harvard, they're Americans at Harvard, I think this is a recipe for disaster. Where am I wrong? You are not wrong. I'm not wrong.

I hope the case, the Harvard case, succeeds. That is to say... Why? Because it's naked discrimination against Asian Americans. But you don't think it's being co-opted by that Edward, what's his name, Edward Bloom or whatever that guy was? I don't care who it's co-opted by. It's a case on behalf of Asians.

So you're saying you're pro-dismantling affirmative action? Yes. That's crazy. Let me refine his answer. Yes, but. Why is it crazy? Well, of course, Asians don't need no affirmative action. I want to say for the sake of argument.

You can disagree with me, but I think you're going to agree with me. You can say for the sake of argument that America owes a special debt to African Americans. Yes. So we're going to cordon off a certain number of spaces for African Americans. Now, I might disagree with that. He might disagree with that. But that's one argument. This goes beyond that.

The Asians are not being limited in order to protect those African American spaces. Those African American spaces are still protected. They are taking these spaces and limiting them within the 80% who are not African American. So the white people or all the other groups that are competing, they are at the point where they would prefer that you sent saliva with your application. They want to know your DNA and then they'll tell you if they can accept you or not. And this is how can a nation that is becoming majority nothing, just a bunch of competing ethnic groups, survive if we're going to be pitted at each other

that way? I think you just make it about who has the most money, or you just spread out application and entrance based on money. Affirmative action was at its core designed to let African Americans in, yeah? No, excuse me, you're mistaken. Okay, yeah, please correct me. Affirmative action at its core was designed to keep Jews out of elite universities.

Okay. Because the second generation of Jews who came after the great, you know, first wave of Jewish immigration in the late 19th century, early 20th, their kids were strivers. They did extremely well on the standardized tests that were at the time. And that's because they're sneaky But that's because they're sneaky. That's because they're, exactly, because they're sneaky, wily, clever Jews

bent on world domination and the subversion of Christian ethics everywhere. You know, since this is... I have to say, since this is radio, that I was speaking in jest and that I am myself Jewish. So you know then.

Well, so affirmative, the purpose of affirmative action... By the way, Brent Stevens, not only does he not look Mexican, he don't look Jewish either! I know. I'm really disguised. Looks like that guy, you know, from that German dude from what's his name? Christoph Waltz.

Do I really? You look a bit like Christoph Waltz. That's not horrible. The Nazi in Inglourious Bastards? You look a bit like Christoph Waltz. That's not horrible. Go ahead. Finish your point. The Nazi and Inglorious Bastards? Would you rather look like a Nazi or like... Yo soy un mexicano judio, man. I was doing an imitation of an Orthodox Jew. Go ahead.

Finish your point. Affirmative actions. Nobody said the Nazis don't look good. They just were bad people. Harvard was suddenly faced with this influx of Jews because they were scoring, they were getting the grades needed to get into Harvard. So Harvard decided to expand the criteria for what makes for a Harvard man. And one of the criteria was, is the person clubbable?

You know, can he join a club? And so, of course, Jews were not clubbable by virtue of them being Jews, and so the numbers were limited. So the origins of affirmative action begin in an anti-Semitic bias against the talented Jewish children of immigrants who wanted to make the American dream their own.

And now it's being applied in exactly the same way against the children of talented Asian immigrants who want to do the same. I think one of the most pernicious aspects of that case is, you know, Harvard, when it, in the admissions process, typically an applicant will be interviewed by a Harvard alumnus and then send in the application. And the alumni interviewers were often scoring these Asian applicants very high on personality, saying that they were just tremendously enthusiastic, personable people. And then somehow, at least according to the case, mysteriously, their personality scores dropped. And they were described as sort of average strong, or there was a term

of art similar to that. Basically to say, oh, he's just another smart Asian kid who's going to end up as a doctor somewhere. Let him go to Vanderbilt or something. Vandy's a fine school. It's a great school. But the point was... That's not what they earned. Don't come here. And I think that Vandy's a fine school. It's a great school, you know, but the point was... That's not what they earned.

Don't come here. And I think that's despicable. It's un-American. It's unethical. And if the motto of Harvard is veritas, truth in Latin, that is not veritas. So how do you balance what affirmative action is being interpreted as now, as a not what's it called, reparation, but almost a fix for what's been done to African-American communities versus what's happening.

I object to that because this isn't about the African-Americans. This is about keeping Asians out. This is really not about African-Americans. If this were a case about African-Americans, that's a different conversation. But this is basically a case of making sure that Asians are no more than about a fifth of the Harvard class, whereas if they got in on merit alone,

they would be 40%. And by the way, if it were merit alone, a lot of the Harvard legacies wouldn't be getting in. Now, if Harvard wants to pride itself as being academically the best university in America, they should have just a merit-based standard.

Can I get a calamari? Because I don't want to reach your... Can you get another order of calamari, please? I don't want a big order standard. Can I get a calamari? Because I don't want to reach your... Can you get another order of calamari, please? I don't want a big order myself. I'll just... Can you... So, but legacy...

Listen, in my opinion, legacy admission, it's kind of... That's business. They need the legacy in order to get the endowment. Harvard has, like,

the endowment, which is like the GDP of Taiwan or something. Maybe not that. It's a sovereign wealth fund. It's a sovereign wealth fund. It's a sovereign wealth fund. That's exactly right. But in the end, it's still a business decision.

But we've always recognized that distinctions based on race are fundamentally different and worse than other distinctions, which might not be fair, but we allow them to go on. We don't allow somebody to be judged on their race. I don't know the case. I think it's even worse than people are saying. I believe that if it was Germans among all Europeans, let's say, who were kicking everybody's ass academically

but they looked the same as everybody else, they wouldn't even be limiting them. I believe it at core also has something to do with the fact that they look different. Sure, because there's some idea that, oh my God, how can you have an incoming class at Harvard that's 40% Asian? And it's like,

so what? That's right. So what? They're human beings. The racial differences should not count for one iota in our eyes. I'm so right wing, I say, nothing would make me prouder of my country than a Harvard that was

40% Asian, because that would mean we are who we say we are, to me. Look, you know, there's another thing. A victory, a gold medal, and four-man bobsled would make me proud. How do you have a school that's representative

of the American population? Well, that's the thing. Demographically. That's the thing. You don't need to. Okay, so if you're a private school, you don't need to do anything. If you're a public school, you have a representation of the demographics of America. If you're a private school, you do whatever the fuck you want.

Noam's point is that if we're going to be focused on making everything look like the ethnic demographics of America, then we really are not prepared as a nation to judge everybody by the content of their character. We're still judging people by the color of their skin. And we're going to come apart as a nation.

And on top of that, you disagreed with me last time, but I also believe on top of that, listen, I'm not anti-immigrant by any stretch of the imagination, but I am most concerned about a successful America. I mean, my kids are half Indian and whatever. And I don't see planting these kind of seeds in a soil which is so... Divided. Which is so toxic to what it is we're trying to grow. And when we are encouraging everybody, everybody...

On the horizon used to be content of your character, a nation, a melting pot. That's not on the horizon anymore. On the horizon, I don't know what's on the horizon anymore. And then when I talk to my immigrants and I kind of take their temperature about how they feel about American history, what if America went to war? Would you send your kids? No. We'd go right back.

It's nothing compared. It's just different. It's not because they're bad people at all. It's something fundamentally different about leaving a country in 1920 where life was horrible and going to America where there's not even a long-distance phone call home and just going across the border and you can text message for free and call back and go back and forth and then calling yourself and being raised on a, marinated really on an idea of America

which is kind of a bad player in the world and always has been, as opposed to the savior of the world. Look, I also think the admissions numbers belie the view that America is this inveterately racist society, right? I mean, all kinds of races are having no trouble getting themselves admitted or over-admitted to elite institutions. So if we were a racist society, you'd expect that Harvard would still be 95% white, you know, 2% Jewish and 3% other, right? That's just not the case. One point I'd make, when I switched from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times,

one of the things that I noticed on social media is a lot of people were calling me the Times' affirmative action hire. And I thought it was kind of, I mean, it was hurtful, actually. It was interesting, too. Interesting in the following sense which is

that i'm sure that the people who are calling me an affirmative action hire because i was sort of the dumb conservative joining this team of you know illustrious mostly liberal writers i'm sure if you ask them well what do you think of affirmative action they'd say well i'm completely for it right so why are you calling me an affirmative action hire? Because what you really mean is that I'm a token, that I don't belong here, that I'm basically an idiot who has been plucked from undeserved or deserved obscurity and put on this pedestal at the Times because...

For a quota. For a quota, right? You're only getting a quota? My reaction to that was just how patronizing and belittling the description was. I mean, I've done a few things in my life. I ran a newspaper in a war zone. I won a Pulitzer Prize, right? I don't think I was the beneficiary.

That's not a humble brag. That's a real brag. No, that's an out-and-out brag, right? And yet the moment I came to the Times, I was at the affirmative action higher. Did people at the Times call you that? No, on social media. No, like on social media, if you just look it up, you'll see it referenced dozens of times. And what it meant was kind of an understanding that this term of affirmative action, what it really means is a special dispensation for the otherwise undeserving person, right? So if people who are supporting affirmative action understand what that means,

I was given a taste of understanding what it means on being the receiving end, being the recipient of largesse that actually did nothing but humiliate me. And I think part of the danger of affirmative action is that we have been treating a segment of our society as a problem and as a quota and as a token for 20 years too long. I think that maybe 50 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, affirmative action might have been necessary. Now I wonder how much damage it does psychically to people who never really know whether their success in life has been the result of their own achievements or whether it's just that people have been

kind of opening doors to them that haven't been opened for other people. And I suspect that that damage, even if it's invisible, is deeper than most people admit. I think there are so many strong intellectual arguments against affirmative action. The only thing that could... The only thing that could overcome them... Thank you, Kim. The only thing that

could overcome the arguments of principle would be tremendous success from affirmative action. Expedience could overcome principle maybe if you say, listen, yes, but look at how it's changed things. But the fact is, there's almost nothing to show for it after all these years. There haven't been great results. In California, where they've stopped it, they've actually had improved graduation rates of African-Americans. So what's to show for it? I'm no expert, but that's what I think. It is interesting that more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, and now more than 10 years after, we're coming on the 10th anniversary of the inauguration of

an African-American president, race relations in this country are really bad. Really bad. And so whatever it is that we're doing, I don't think is working. Is it possible that we're getting, that as a society, we're as un-racist as we're ever going to get? In other words, I go to the gym, alright? And I made some good

progress up front. But I'm stalled. And I ain't never going to bench 200. Now, analogously, America has made a lot of progress in racial relations. Is it possible that we ain't going no further? I hope not. I hope we do go further. You see, I think you're wrong. What would further look like? Further would

look like a country that isn't constantly fixated in almost every respect on the race of the person involved in any given situation. Right. So that if you have... It's just to divide us. Right.

Yeah, but the problem is now it's dressed up as righteousness. Now it comes from the people who say, no, this is a good... In other words, after 50 years of the civil rights movement, what we've decided is that actually it wasn't a problem judging people by race. We were just judging the wrong people. Now it's okay to judge white males as white males and talk about them any way you want and generalize about them. I think that is just a reaction to white males as being in power for so long. You just fight whoever's at the helm. You can fight the people in power without, when an argument comes out of a white man's mouth, dismissing it because it came out of a white man's mouth. That's called racism.

No, but you're just seeing that the white man has been in power for so long. Yes, but the fact is, an argument can be written on a page, and you can read it. And if I don't tell you whose mouth it came out of, you have to respond to the argument. But it's all so easy now. Like in the Kavanaugh thing, oh, a white male, as if it was black males or black women. I mean, it's anti-intellectual. And I don't see any difference between that mentality and what we deplore in the white supremacist movement of the alt-right. Well, but that's the essential point. And this is, I think, one of the things that the left, generally speaking,

doesn't appreciate about the kind of feral genius of Trump, which is that one of the things Trump did is he, I mean, I don't think he does it consciously or thoughtfully, but one of the things that Trump has been very successful in doing is taking left-wing politics and putting them to right-wing purposes. So, you know, when I was growing up in college in the early 1990s, even before then, the whole notion that truth was really, what we call truth was really just a function

of the power dynamics in society, that was like academic left-wing orthodoxy, right? All of a sudden, Rudy Giuliani says, well, truth isn't truth, right? Which would be a statement that would be totally at home in an academic symposium 10 or 15 years ago, and everyone goes, oh my God, he doesn't believe in the sanctity of truth. Or Trump is clearly playing towards a kind of white identitarian politics.

Well, where does that come from? That comes from black identitarian politics. It comes from the view like, well, if Group X can receive the spoils of the system by virtue of belonging to this identity why shouldn't we deserve the spoils of the system for belonging to the other identity so you have to be careful with these politics of illiberalism which are meant I think are originally intended well well-intended, intended to remedy unequal situations. But that's the difference between them. Trump is using them to divide people, whereas the left was using them to rectify situations.

I don't understand it. What is so hard among people of all political persuasions to accept the fact that when you are talking about somebody's DNA, I hate to keep using that trite phrase, that you're not, you're no longer engaged in anything intellectual. When you were scrutinizing somebody's logic or argument and bringing into the fact, basically an ad hominem attack, it came out of a white mouth,

a black mouth, a gay mouth, this is crazy talk. And the fact that we're, that this is like a national goal, we think this is where we should end up. I don't follow what you're saying. That we should end up in a nation

where everybody defines themselves in terms of... Oh, I don't agree with that at all. Well, then fight against it. And fight against it with consistency. You know what? You can say anything you want about the nonsense he's saying. Don't bring up the fact that it's a white male, because that's really not the point.

Because he'll just bring in some black guy who'll say the same thing, and then you'll have to deal with the arguments. I think the point is that, I think what the left tries to get at is that it's been white males in power this whole time. Well, you would say that. I mean, you're a brown

American, so you know. Right. That's my point. Isn't that a horrible thing for me to say? No, but you're right. It stems from the fact that I'm a brown. I hope it doesn't. I hope it stems from that you thought it through logically. No, but I'm saying my whole worldview has been stems from the fact that I'm a brown. I hope it doesn't. I hope it stems from that you thought it through logically. But I'm saying my whole worldview has been influenced by the fact that I'm a brown person. I see how the world has treated brown and black people this whole time. So you see a nation where it's okay to judge people, or not people by the color of their skin, but white people by the color of their skin.

Everyone else knows. I didn't say that either. Then explain it to me. What I'm saying is that there's a huge population that believes that the white man has been in power this whole time and that they're trying to fight against that white power. I don't see what's wrong with that. I think, look, I mean, this is another point. You know, I was mentioning the way Trump uses the left against it. Like, you know, so Trump goes and attacks the press, freedom the press, and the left is like,

oh my God, the First Amendment, right? And they're right, because free speech is important. But who's been systematically attacking free speech on college campuses for years now in the name of this or that virtue? It's been the left. So the basic standard should be, if Trump uses white identity politics, right, we should go back to the standard of e pluribus unum, out of many, one. Race doesn't count in this society.

It counted in the past, and that was wrong, and we have to escape that. If Trump is abusing his bully pulpit and speaking ill about the press, the standard should be, let's defend the First Amendment, right? It should be a resort to first principles that are consistent rather than opportunistically inclined in our favor as opposed to yours. So what happens when Pluribus no longer wants to become UNAM? I don't think that's true, by the way. I think that, by and large, this is one of the many reasons I reject Trumpism, which is the outrageous slanders and really, in my view, the nakedly racist slanders against immigrants, especially immigrants from Latin America. The idea that Latin American immigrants don't want to be a part of this country, I guess I can say it. I think that's the sheerest bullshit in the world. If you're willing to walk through a desert to be here, you want to be a part of this country, I guess I can say it. I think that's the sheerest bullshit in the world. If you're willing to walk through a desert to be here, you want to be a part of this country.

If you are sending half of your income back to your mother or your grandmother in Honduras or whatever, you are expressing a sense of family values that is the best of America. If you're working your ass off 10 to 12 hours a day in some chicken farm in Iowa doing jobs that, quote, real Americans won't do, unquote, then you are contributing as massively to this society as any Norwegian physicist might. We should be welcoming that. We should be celebrating it. You know, Jewish— We also need the labor, bottom line. Go ahead. Labor, bottom line. Listen, Jewish Americans, my great-grandfather arrived in this country in 1903 or 4

and worked as a carpenter in the Brooklyn Naval Yard. I think he made something like $7 a week. That's a dollar a day. His English probably wasn't great. And I don't know about his hygiene. I wasn't alive to sample it, right? The Stevens are renowned for their hygiene. But a few generations later, that family made good,

like all of your families, I suspect. Now, as far as Jewish Americans, and by the way, are we going to get to Louis? Because it's a huge topic in the comedy world. But I just want to talk about Jewish Americans for a second. We have done well, but let's face it, we're still very, very, very clicky.

And we haven't melted entirely into the mass of America. You go on any college campus, you see, what, Jewish fraternities. ZBT, Sammy, just to name two. What other white subgroup has their own fraternity? They know Italian fraternities. The point is there is still a clumping and a clustering of Jewish Americans clinging to... That's okay.

I'm not saying it's okay or it's not okay. I'm saying, would we want that? Would we want a 70% Jewish America? Or, you know what I'm saying to you? Brett Stevens,

I asked you this question. Would it still be... Let me put it another way. Suppose, I'm getting off the Jewish topic for a second. Suppose America hypothetically, and it wouldn't happen, became majority Muslim. And it was a prosperous nation and all the Muslims were peaceful. One day. And it was prosperous.

And everything was great. But, but you didn't have Christmas decorations in December. You turn on the radio on December 20th and you didn't hear how those ships are I mean, what a relief.

You know. Yeah, actually. God, after this season, I'm so sick of it. That's the point. And you look out over the landscape and you see mosques everywhere. And they're beautiful. The architecture is very nice, and the mosques are very peaceful. I lived in the Middle East. But that's not culturally the America that many people grew up with.

Now, do Americans have a right? I'm totally off topic with the Jewish thing. But do Americans have a right to want to keep certain cultural aspects? Not that one is better or worse, not that a Muslim society can't be a wonderful society, potentially, but that Americans don't want that. And to what extent do Americans have a right not to want that and to keep things as they are

just because they want to keep it the way they are? Look, I think you have a right to practice your religion and do so openly and proudly. But America was not founded as a Christian country. That's, you know, the first part of the First Amendment is against it. Not on paper. America was not founded as a Christian country and it wasn't founded by particularly Christian people. You will look in vain for fervent expressions of Christianity from any of our principal founders, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington. Most of these people were maybe theists.

Jefferson wrote a whole treatise kind of boiling the New Testament down to a few sort of general points of principle. And no, if the America you described, an America that was majority Muslim but was in other respects the America we know today that respected the freedom of minorities and religions and conscience and the freedom of the press, no, I would not object to that. I wish that would happen more often in the Middle East. So yeah, obviously you want to have the right to protect aspects of your identity, which are cultural in the sense of the religion you practice, the food you eat, even the people you hang out with, the jokes you find funny. There's no question there's

such a thing as Jewish humor. But we're not a Judeo-Christian nation. One of the ways in which I part with a lot of the modern Republican Party orthodoxy is this whole Judeo-Christian business. I have read the founders extensively. They were founding a republic on the basis of the Enlightenment that was trying to be as free from religious prejudice and the prejudice of religion as it is, as possible. And they succeeded. And that's why we are the first nation founded on these universalistic principles that can include Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, Jews, Muslims, Christians, you name it. And that's, I think, a better country than one like, I don't know, Denmark, which is under the Danish Lutheran Church, or Spain, which is an officially Catholic country, and so on.

But we have to have a national ethic that de-emphasizes our differences and searches to become one people. We don't really have that anymore. Sure. In my opinion. And it just really have that anymore. Sure. I mean, it might be. And it just worries the hell out of me. And anecdotally, I get worried when I speak to my, my immigrant employees in terms of the difference in their attitude about the

country to mine, let's say, but I'm well aware that in a generation or two, it might, it probably will all come out in the wash. And I'm well aware that we all, that we need the labor. We have an aging population and what are we going to do?

We have to have it. But the left scares me. One point you brought up earlier about whether this will ever get better. I hope it gets better. But let's emphasize, I mean, I think it helps to grow up abroad to see how relatively trivial our problems are. I mean, I grew up in Mexico City in a household that in the United States would be upper middle class.

In Mexico, it was just upper class. And the class differences that I witnessed, fortunately for me, from a privileged position, are so much starker, so much more fixed than the ones that exist in the United States. Go to Pakistan, go to India and look at class differences, religious differences, and how they affect society. They're so much starker than what they are in the U.S. Go to Japan and look at their view of immigrants versus our view of immigrants.

It's a reason. When you look at the world in perspective, you feel much more optimistic about the United States. I'm going to give you one example. I don't expect you to comment on it because it relates to the New York Times, but I'll give you one example. Sarah Jung, who I totally support being on the New York Times,

by the way. I'm happy they didn't buckle. But this is a first. She's born in Korea, I believe. She came here as a young girl, I believe. And within 30 years, she rose to be on the editorial board

of the New York Times. This is a remarkable immigrant success story that probably you can't imagine in any other country on the world. Yet, she seems to be seething. And I have trouble imagining somebody

in the 1940s, a Jewish immigrant or some other immigrant coming to this country from another country, finding themselves on the border of the New York Times

and seem to be seething with complaints about the country. Now, it doesn't mean she doesn't have a right to criticize the country, but can the country really believe

what she seems, be what she seems, be what she seems to think it is, if she was able to succeed like this? I think the seed... And I look at that and say, something is different here. And the fact that it doesn't even, there's no people to look at, like, what the hell is she talking about?

You're saying immigrants of yesteryear, as far as we know, we may be exaggerating their patriotism, and likely are, but your point being that immigrants of yesteryear did not resent America the way some immigrants may be seen to today. If you came from another country, especially a country where we don't even look like the people, and you find yourself on the editorial board of the New York Times within 30 years, don't you say, oh my God, this is a great country.

Look at what I did. No. Not even expected to think that way. Am I talking crazy? A few points. One, to Sarah, I don't know her story in the slightest, but I'm sure she has an

infinite amount of gratitude for America that isn't expressed on whatever paper or article you read. Two, I think immigrants now, I know when my parents came here, it was out of sort of an abundance of hope and opportunity. And that was it. You just keep your head down.

You work really hard. And you do a little better than you were doing wherever you're from. But your kids will be doing better than you were doing when they were kids. Would you consider your parents patriotic Americans? Yes. That's terrific. America, they're citizens. Yeah.

Well. I mean, they were like, we're going to apply to be citizens. We're going to become citizens of America. Do they resent the country? No, I think they're just like, this is. It's not leading questions. I don't expect the answer to be yes. I'm just asking.

To bracket or to hop off what Brett was saying is that, like that when you grow up in a place where the differences are so stark, you come here and you're like, oh, this is okay. There's things that could improve, but it's better than where we were. All right. Three, I think going back to the original argument about labeling white men and attacking white men or whatever you were talking about before we hopped off on this

not tangent but this other point but don't you understand it's not white because I'm white just the idea that it's now in polite company okay to really believe that well yeah what somebody's race is it matters

you can judge their argument by their race I think what what is happening now is that there's a lot more cognizance about what the sort of spectrum of power is in this country. And right now, everyone's trying to chip away at it and make the playing field level. That's all I think is happening. There is no difference in what you're saying and me saying some impassioned black man speak eloquently about something that he believes in and saying, ah, he's black. And that's it. I'm done with it.

That's what you're saying. Yeah, he's black. I'm done. I don't need to consider it any further. I think people discounting what someone says because they're white is wrong. But I think. Because they're anything. Sure, because anything is wrong.

But I think that, I think we're talking about two different people attacking white men in power. I stand by my Harvard Asian example as real. You don't get that many blatant examples of things. I mean, they took 20 years to lift that rock up even though everybody suspected it. And this seems to be, they wouldn't do it

if they didn't believe it was the right thing to do. And that to me is mainstream left of center mentality in this country. And I think it's very incompatible with a bright future of a multi-ethnic nation. Now, something's got to give. That's all. Something's got to give. Now, let's get to our section of the week. This week in Louis C.K.

Because every week, there seems to be a new Louis C.K. scandal. Brett, are you a C.K. fan? Do you follow the C.K., because every week there seems to be a new Louis C.K. scandal. Brett, are you a C.K. fan? Do you follow the C.K. saga? I know you don't cover it, but do you follow it? He was a fan. He told us last time. I think Louis C.K. is a comedic genius. Okay.

Well, and you're following, have you followed the latest scandal involving Louis C.K.? Vaguely involving jokes about... Let me summarize then. Go ahead. Please do. Louis CK was recorded at, I believe, Governor's Comedy Club in Long Island doing an hour set. It was a bootleg

recording that was uploaded to YouTube, I guess. I don't know if it's been taken down or not. And it has provoked scandal. Why? Because Louis joked, among other things, he did jokes about Asians that were a little, you know, provocative. He did jokes about binary, gender binary people that were a little provocative.

But mostly, the most controversial are the jokes he did about the Parkland students, the students at the Parkland School in Florida, that there was a mass shooting, and he was saying that, why do we have to listen to these kids just because they survived the shooting? Just because, quote, you pushed a fat kid in front of you, doesn't mean we gotta listen to you. And, Mesh, I don't know if you're laughing at the joke, or... It's funny. I did laugh at that

joke, by the way. When I listened to it, I did... Yes, it provoked a laugh. What can I tell you? It's a joke. But that has provoked quite a bit of controversy that Louis is going in. Now, this was a set that he did, presumably, working jokes out, not the finished product, but in any case,

going after the Parkland kids, seen as beyond the pale by many people in the Twitterverse and in the media. I think the whole purpose of comedy is to go beyond the pale, right? Otherwise, it's not comedy. Now, I didn't hear the jokes. Well, I just told you the joke.

Well, yeah, but hearing it from you. I told it well. But you still got to hear the whole context. Hearing it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, is different from hearing it from you. So obviously there are jokes that are in bad taste and they're jokes that shouldn't be told. On the other hand, I think that you, just speaking generally, you want humor to push boundaries. If it doesn't push boundaries, then it ceases to be humor. It ceases not only to be funny, it just is not in the category of humor. The second thing I would say is if you want things to work, you have to accept that things will fail.

And I think comedians are frequently failing because they're trying out material. You would know this much better than I. And some of it lands and some of it doesn't. And you can't really find out what works unless you screw up, right? That's the key point, I think, yeah. So that strikes me as kind of essential here, which is that in order for a comedian

to really create brilliant material, he's going to have to create a lot of terrible material, just like any great painter is going to have to have a lot of terrible material just like any great painter is going to have to have a lot of duds before he creates a true work of art so my general sense just listening to what you're describing is that people should give him give him a pass i i always thought that the louis ck controversy existed in a very different universe from, say, the Harvey Weinstein controversy or anything of the sort. And he got caught up in a kind of a maelstrom that he really didn't belong in. I don't obviously condone his behavior, but I just think we were talking about completely

different sorts of transgressions between what he was, he admitted to doing and apologized for doing versus what someone like Weinstein did or is alleged to have done. Absolutely. I can't defend Louis as a man, but as a comic, like hey,

I mean, that Parkland, I think if I heard it, it was probably funny. I don't know what he said about Asians or what was the other thing? He did say something about binary, gender binary. He made fun of the pronoun dimension. Yeah, I mean, like, if you're, as a comic, that is your, like, I don't want to say comics have a job, but you're just trying to make fun of anything you think is funny. And in the context of comedy, I'm sure that person recording it, like, if you listen to the recording, I'm sure people were laughing.

Oh, they were howling? Yeah, I'm sure people were fucking like, oh, this is hilarious. I mean, to be devil's advocate, I would say that, yeah, he went to an audience that was very receptive to that sort of thing. Sure. So it's kind of a bootstrap argument. I mean, you could find all sorts of audiences that would find all sorts of things funny. But, you know, one of the reasons

why Trump is so successful, and by the way, I don't think Trump has a good sense of humor. His sense of humor is either mean... Pocahontas was a first-class joke. Yeah, Pocahontas is great.

I've heard he's pretty funny, though. But maybe in private, but I have to say, one of the reasons I think Trump has succeeded is that liberals... Again, this is a gross generalization,

but there has been a massive loss of a sense of humor on the left in this country. Amen. And people like Bill Maher talk about this. You can't go to college campuses and work any material because if, God forbid, you should offend some group, then you become a persona non grata and you're guilty of this phobia or that phobia. You heard about this comedian that was kicked off stage at Columbia? And then he wrote kind of saying he deserved it. That's him.

Oh, that was you? Oh, shit. Fellow New York Times op-ed writer, Nimesh Patel. That was you. Oh, my God. I didn't say I deserved it. I said that they were right to do whatever the fuck they wanted in terms of kicking me off. It's their stage. They can do whatever they want. That is true. I think they were right to do whatever the fuck they wanted in terms of kicking me off. It's their stage.

They can do whatever they want. That is true. I think they were wrong to do so, and I think the process by which people process what is a joke is completely broken. But I think our generalization of labeling people and college students as

soft or whatever is incorrect, because I've done colleges before with saying worse stuff where nothing has happened to me. So I think that was the... Maybe it's the Upper West Side. No, what do you think about Louis' joke? Well, okay, this is the thing. On the merits of the joke.

To be the odd man out here, I think it's great when comedy pushes boundaries. I think some of the funniest comedy doesn't push boundaries. I don't know if Seinfeld pushes boundaries. I don't know that it has pushed boundaries, but pushing boundaries is definitely one brand of comedy that I respect. And Louis has done it very well in the past. He made jokes about pedophilia and abortion.

But in the past, he was very careful and strategic about the way he touched those third rails. And he really went out of his way to present it. And now he seems to have a different attitude, like, fuck this, I'm going to say whatever I want,

however it comes out. Which, nobody's defended him at risk to themselves more than I have. So, I'm still in the Louis Badger. But would I encourage someone to make jokes about a Parkland shooting victim and in such a cavalier way? No.

Can I ask you this? I wouldn't. What? Had none of his sexual assault stuff happened, would he be— No, he would have gotten away with it. He could be making all these jokes. He would have gotten some reaction, but not at this level.

They hate him so much, I made a joke that Louis ought to tweet out a picture of a crucifix in urine just to see people now come around to the fact that that's a horrible thing to do. I just hate this business. Too many people are being declared persona non grata. The mean, there are some people who really, the Richard Spencers of

the world should be persona non grata, right? But at some point, if you draw the lines so narrowly, it's going to engender a reaction. First of all, it's unfair to the people who are being excommunicated in a disproportionate way, but it's also going to elicit a reaction in which all restraints are going to come off because people just want to say, to hell with you and your enforcing of what I can and cannot laugh at, because that's a kind of a form of a of a profound um authoritarianism that you don't want to respect and humor is one of those things one of the jokes that i love or the the the class of comedy that i love are jokes that were told during the soviet period you know which which by very nature the very nature of being funny just kind of blew the lid on the whole system. You know, just exposed what a fraud the whole thing was.

And the potency of that humor has to be respected. And I don't think we're doing that here. Funny, I see some of those jokes. One of the punchlines was the parrot and I don't think alike. Obviously, the secret police came in and the parrot said something disloyal to the state. The parrot and I, we disagree. What I think, by the way, with regard to the

Parkland joke that Louis might have been getting at, and I'm not sure that he was getting at it, but which I think taps into a truth that is worth discussing is that just because you're the victim of something doesn't make you an expert necessarily in all aspects of it. His point was totally fair game.

The way he did it was, I think, a reflection of a new traumatized Louis C.K. I don't think he would have told that joke in that way prior to the sexual scandal. Oh, okay. I think he would have presented it in a way that showed more concern for his own self-interest. You must know this. Someone who's an artist, anyone who creates material, when you're creating things, your internal constitution is very delicate. It has to come from sort of reservoirs of confidence and a belief that you have some running room that allow you to create genuinely interesting comedy

or, for that matter, newspaper columns. And when that's cut out from under you, I think it can be tremendously destabilizing. And I just, I mean, I struggle to imagine what it must have been like for him for the last year, going from being a kind of a god among comedians to being this PNG, how psychically difficult that must be. So obviously he's wrestling with this

and obviously there's going to be a process of trial and error and I think that we ought to accord him some respect in terms of the fact that if he's going to make a comeback and return to what he was it's going to require error. That's just part

of the creative process. I would defend him 100% to say whatever he wants, and I don't think it should affect his comeback at all. I just, to be honest, to answer the question, if any comedian went on stage here and told a joke like that,

and they can, I wouldn't say anything the first night, but if they continue to tell it, and I saw the audience recoil, I would probably say, listen, dude, you know, it's not going down easy for them. But what if the audience laughed? If the audience laughed, I would probably shut my mouth it's not going down easy for them but what if the audience laughed

if the audience laughed I would probably shut my mouth you gotta trust the audience the crowd laughs the crowd laughs you can't really because that's the thing

with the recording is that one person recorded it and a lot of people were laughing but someone who didn't like it got to hear it and was like

this is wrong on top of that it's Louie he can't fucking say this shit. It's so weird to me that now there's a whole ecosystem designed to take shit away from people. They're trying to end Louis' life, it feels like, with this kind of every time he says something, let's fucking make it a news story or a giant podcast conversation. See, I kind of agree with you more.

And, you know, the fact is we're living in a world in which, like I call it the neurotics veto. Like whoever is sort of neurotically inclined to hate something that other people accept seems to have outsized power because of the power of social media, because sometimes the law is on their side.

They're able to marshal the forces of repressiveness in the way that most of us who are just sort of normal and think, okay, well, that joke didn't quite land, but whatever. He's a funny guy. We don't bother with it. So we've become a country in which the angry schmendrick has an outsized vote. You know, I remember... But don't angry people always have an outsized vote? We shouldn't permit... It's not that we shouldn't permit it,

but we should work against it. I mean, one of the factors for me as a columnist is that, you know, most people who spend time commenting on my columns on Twitter or putting comments onto the New York Times comment section, they're not run-of-the-mill audience, right? They're the people who have either the time or the energy to talk about this. So their reactions tend to be more excitable, more violent even. Now, whether they're a fair sample of my readers

or for that part, Louis C.K.'s audience, I think that's a totally separate question. But unfortunately, it means that you have to be especially attentive to what the angry guy thinks as opposed to thinking, well, what would a sensible person, what would a reasonable person say in response to this joke or that column? And I think we've lost sight of that because social media, instead of sort of democratizing voices,

has super empowered assholes, there I said it, to dictate the terms of conversation and the terms of acceptable discourse in a way that they wouldn't have been able to a generation ago. Do you think there's any risk that like a Kamala Harris appointed Supreme Court might start tinkering with the First Amendment in ways which reflect this mentality about speech and hate speech and offensive speech and all that stuff? I hate the fact that people seem now to be under the impression that free speech has become a weapon of the right. Free speech is nobody's

weapon except the weapon of free people against oppressive agencies or agents, whether it's a government or a university or a censor or whatever. And, you know, 40, 50 years ago, of course, it was the left that was all in favor of free speech when it came to political speech, pornography, you name it. And now, unfortunately, it's more on the right. I think that's a comment on what the left has become in terms of its instincts towards preferring, quote, inclusivity, quote, respect over, hey, it's a free society. People are going to say all kinds of things. And some of those things are going to be ugly. And we'd better respect it because the alternative is worse. And so I do fear, to answer your question, I do fear the appointment of judges who treat the First Amendment as as

squeezable right I think that would be deadly because the First Amendment isn't just any other amendment it's the core of all of our other that would be worse than Trump I can make look Hitler would be worse than Trump anything would be worse how plausible do you think it is I'm not I'm not bringing up some ridiculously some ridiculous scenario that would be very unlikely to happen. It seems to me something that really could happen. And it worries me. There are judges that are pro-censoring.

I believe there must be. I'm no expert. By the way, I'll give you an irony. It's interesting. No one has called for YouTube to take down Louis C.K.'s book. Well, they did take. No, no. No one's called for them to take it down

because it's hate speech or whatever it is. The left is very fine with this hate speech online now that they can use it as a cudgel to bash Louis C.K. Oh, yeah. But has the left ever advocated for speech to be taken offline? Of course. They want Facebook to take hate speech. They want everybody, all these bottlenecks to take Twitter.

Everybody's supposed to censor speech to the left's liking. Well, this is one of the scary things about the power of the Facebooks of the world, which is that increasingly so much of what is speech is filtered through very powerful private corporations with... With agendas. With agendas and their own sense of ethics. And I think that's going to be a fundamental question moving forward, the extent to which free speech is now going to be dictated by the channels through which we most frequently express ourselves.

Private channels, right? Yeah, I think we had to write the first, if we were writing the First Amendment today, we would probably in some way have to expand it to allow the internet to be free in some way. I mean... Because they're a more powerful sensor than the... I mean, not purely, but... There's a balance between treading on the rights of a

private company to do what it wants and promoting what we think is the greater good of free speech. That's why, in my opinion, it's all bottom-up. We are going to reflect what we actually believe as a nation. If we actually believe, if we believe in free speech, if we were the nation of the 80s and 90s that wanted to see the liberals, wanting to see the Nazis, Martians, Skokie,

then we would be inclined to want a totally free Facebook and a totally free Twitter. But when maybe majority, but a big minority, an energetic minority of youth believes that they should be protected from hearing things they don't like, these organizations are going to reflect that. And these people grow up to become the people who decide. I've been trying to think about this since the Columbia shit happened. Since you bring up the youth.

How much of it do you think is a reflection of the fact that this next generation doesn't feel in power in the slightest because of what's happening? I think it's the opposite. I think this generation is very, very, very, very removed from, I was too, but from having a parent's generation that have actually seen terrible things in the world happen. I wasn't old enough to see World War II, but it was still in my home because my father had lived through the 30s and all that. Kids born today, this is all in history books. They think none of this could ever happen again.

They're so removed from any notion of what a bubble they're living in that they're free. I made this analogy. 40 years ago, you didn't even need the microscope to see everything that was wrong. Now we're looking at quarks and reacting to them like we can see them with the naked eye.

Part of the problem, I think, is there's been just a decline in civics education. I have three children. My oldest is 15. My youngest is 9. I have felt the need to walk my children through the Constitution, article by article, amendment know, you're going to just commit this to memory. You're going to understand in your core what this is about. And I think that's kind of vanished in a lot of U.S. education.

So people talk, I mean, when people talk about, you know, what are core American values, it's like diversity, inclusivity, respect. And I don't want to denigrate those as values. Those are all fine and good. But those are not the core American values, right? Their core American values are about equality. They're about freedom. They're about seeing past questions of identity, not only looking at them. And they are essentially about having the right to your own mind, your own conscience, and your own voice, irrespective of what other people have to say. It is the right of the individual in the face of the mass, in the face of, quote, the consensus of opinion. And I think that's eroding, and that scares me.

But it is related to our time in history. No, like, this is not the same thing, but it occurred to me at the time that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we were really, probably 80, 90% of the country was ready to risk war rather than let a nuclear weapon be pointed at the United States of America

by a dictator. Yet when North Korea was making noises about pointing a missile at America, which to me is not much different than the Cuban Missile Crisis, a big chunk of the country was like, what's the big deal? Why are you getting so excited about that? Well, because they didn't live through a world war. They don't believe these terrible things can happen any longer. The lack of existential threat has led to... If you live through a World War II and then you believe these terrible things can happen any longer.

The lack of existential threat has led to... If you lived through a World War II and then you see a missile in Cuba, you're like, hell to the no, because I'm not optimistic that things can't go bad. Well, I mean, this is the thing that is funny. I don't know, how old are you? 56. Okay, so you're 11 years older than I am. But now, you know, one of the things I find astounding is that if you're

20 years old, if you're a young adult, you have no real memory of 9-11. If you're 21, like today, that means you were born in 1998, that means you were three years old on 9-11. You don't remember.

It's already something in the history books. That is to those, that generation, what, I don't know, the Jimmy Carter's election was to my generation, right? And that's hard for me to get used to, because 9-11 was, I don't want to say existential, but certainly if you were in New York at the time, it felt existential. And that's gone. That sense that we live in a much more fragile world, that the veneer of civilization is much thinner than we realize, that the ties that bind us aren't as strong and unfailing as we might think. We have, I think, my generation has a harder time appreciating or better appreciates that than my kids' generation. I don't think they quite understand how easily the cliches that they regale themselves with, how destructive they can be.

Because they don't remember how close we are to the edge of something disastrous happening. And you're also able to draw on your whole intimate knowledge of Israel's situation and the security threats in Israel, and that certainly affects the way you look at America's situation. You're very aware of how dangerous the world is. In a million years, I never would have guessed you were 56. Oh, thank you. You're the youngest-looking 56-year-old I know.

Brett, Brett. We got to wrap it up. That's a good note to end on. Apropos of disasters in the past, did you see the World War I Peter Jackson documentary? So I was dying to see it. It was playing only on two dates, and I didn't quite manage. I think it's coming back mid-January.

I hope so, because World War I is a war I've studied quite a bit. And I saw the trailer for it, those colorized images of the tanks and the men. But, you know, one of the things about World War I is so I've been reading the Churchill biography from Andrew Roberts,

which I recommend to anyone. But even up until early 1914, there was a kind of a consensus view that the chances of war, of a major war in Europe, were very slim. And the belief that the sort of upward march of civilization was going to continue forever was tremendous.

Britain and Germany were each other's number one trading partners in 1914. And it all blew up in an instant. And we ought to remember that. I mean, we're now 18, 19 years into the 21st century. There hasn't been a century in human history that hasn't had a calamitous event like the First World War. We shouldn't imagine that we're immune from it ourselves.

All right, Mr. Stevens, it's a pleasure to have you. You're quite intimidating. I find myself rushing through to me. Nothing intimidates you. That's why you're a comedian. I find myself rushing through my words. You're a fan of Brett's. You read his column regularly.

I don't have that confidence that he spoke about that you need to think that you're interesting. You've got to win a Pulitzer. That's what needs to happen. I felt very confident indeed talking to Mr. Stevens, verbally sparring at times at other times in agreement with what he has to say. But at no point

intimidated. And Ian, I think I agree with almost everything you say. I am just less sure. I don't mean to be intimidated. No, no. It's nothing you do. It's just that you are to me. Your resume precedes you. I hope that things work out, but I think that, you know, I'm worried that they won't.

What do you think of Noam's intellectual prowess? Do you think that there's a place for him in punditry, perhaps, as a radio, having his own radio, political radio show, maybe even a TV show. I think all the questions were incredibly astute, on point, funny, apropos, ahead of the curve. Do you really believe that or are you just saying that? No, I honestly think you're terrific. You're buying this calamari, right? At price.

And you just bought me two alcoholic beverages. I do think Noam is a voice that should be heard, and Noam often yells at me because he says I'm contrarian, and I the truth is I agree more often with him than I disagree, though I certainly do disagree with him

at times. I do think my point of comparing the Asians at Harvard to our obsession with being a multi-ethnic nation is a good point. I think the most important thing is we've got to learn to disagree with each other. I mean, I grew up in a family. My wife's a liberal. You know, I love her. And it's fun to disagree if you can keep yourselves from clawing each other's eyes out.

You can actually learn from people who aren't just inclined to say yes to everything you say. I'd rather have friends, have companions, have my wife, my children, who don't just say yes to me. Otherwise, you stop thinking. That's right. When I went to college,

I saw in the same semester, Merikahane speak and Noam Chomsky speak. Yeah. I don't like either of those. That's my point. And these were both very, very memorable, provocative lectures. And I wonder, both of them, probably not Chomsky, but both of them could be considered not allowed. Kahane would probably be banned today. And I had not one ounce of support for the man, but it would be terrible

that I was deprived of that chance to judge for myself, to hear him for myself. And that's where your generation is. They want to set some people up

and they're going to decide, no, no, you don't need to see this. We got this. You're better off. I don't want anybody to filter the world for me in any way.

That's really... All right. Thank you very much Thank you. Thanks for the honor of having me on. Oh