The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Coleman Hughes: Harris vs, Trump - The Best Arguments For And Against Each - Final Considerations

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Check out Coleman's book The End of Race Politics and his most recent Free Press article How the Democrats Rigged the Vote in Puerto Rico We toss around the best arguments for and against the candidates and come to the conclusion we're not voting.

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar. We are available at wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube and also on demand on Sirius. We got fired from our regular spot on Sirius Radio. Why? Well, it had to happen at some point because it's not really a comedy-oriented podcast anymore. This, of course, is Dan Natterman, Comedy Cell seller semi-regular uh here with noam dorman why did it take them that long to figure out that this wasn't a pure comedy show they they were hanging in there and then we had we had another idea that we were going to have a lou our producers

like cut in uh to every subject comedy routines that kind of oh that'd be cool pertain to the news or whatever it was but it was more work that I think Lou was really wanting to do and we never followed up on it with him really and I think it just kind of drifted away, which is fine because we've attracted such a bigger audience now as a podcast. Let me finish my intro. That's sort of my thing as you know.

It's where I shine and then after that it's Gnomes. It's Gnomes ballgame primarily. We have with us well, Perry Alashenbrand, it's Gnomes. It's Gnomes ballgame primarily. We have with us, well, Perry Alashenbrand, who's always with us. Did I mention Gnome Dorman, the owner of The Comedy Cellar, of course? And Coleman Hughes, returning to our podcast.

Coleman is a musician. He's a podcaster. He's an author. His book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America, is selling briskly, I assume. It was just published in Portuguese. Oh, well, if Portuguese speakers can get it in Portuguese.

And he is with us today, returning. It is Halloween Day as we record, so happy All Hallows to those who celebrate. By the way, before we start, just about Coleman's book, where can I find it here? You know, I'm getting a lot of stage fright now before I go on the podcast. Do you guys get that? No. Do you get that?

Not too much, no. Not too much. I never do. But Noam's under pressure because Noam is starting to make a name for himself as a... It's not mine, but... I don't know what you'd call him,

a public intellectual? Coleman, how would you qualify Noam? He said gadfly yesterday. Public gadfly. Yeah, that's pretty good. So Kyle Smith, you know him, he's right for the National Review and he does movie reviews and stuff.

He's like a really talented, interesting guy. He had this tweet. He took this from somewhere. The tweet says, the Democrats are so crazy crazy the voters don't even believe it. Their voters don't believe it. And he has an excerpt here from somewhere. The same GOP staffer who is currently working on a competitive congressional race told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of the Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. Quote, when you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down because in both polling and focus groups,

people just don't believe it, he said. Quote, they are critical of things like boys and girls sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don't believe it's true. It can't be. So I wrote, yes, and they wouldn't believe that during COVID, restaurants couldn't get aid

unless they were not owned, unless they were not owned by white males. I've gotten almost 200- Oh, I saw the comments. Yeah. Dozens of people saying, Oh, I saw the comments. Yeah. Dozens of people saying, yeah, they don't believe it because it's not true. That's bullshit. That's ridiculous.

Like people are, and they're nasty. Yeah. And I patiently post the links to the SBA website and the articles that cover it. But it's like, it's delicious because it's a real-time example of exactly what his tweet was intended to prove like i i put up a put up their policy which coleman covers in his book they couldn't get aid or they were not on the priority list they couldn't get it at all you want to explain yeah there was you know there was 28 billion dollars set aside to help restaurants that were on the brink of closing. And for the first two weeks

of the program, if you were a white male, you could not get access to that money. It was reserved for the so-called priority group, which was women, people of color, and veterans. So the only way, in theory, if you're a veteran, you could get access to it. But if you're a normal non-veteran white guy, you didn't get access to that money. $18 billion of that was gone by the time courts challenged this as unconstitutional, which it pretty clearly is. And then apparently the last $10 billion was given to some of the white guys that had initially been left out of the program. Some portion of the last $10 billion. Some portion, yeah.

I assume this is talked about in your book. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole two or three pages on it. I haven't read it because I'm waiting. You put the whole business in Juanita's name. I weighed my, I weighed it and I said, that's not even worth it. So just to, um, uh, uh, you know, expand on it. Under Trump, everything was very neat and clean clean you had to show how much you lost in the pre-covid year you compared it to how much you lost during the covid if you were lost more

than 90 you were in the first round or first tranche or whatever it is and like was it was so logical and commonsensical that a fourth grader could have constructed that plan. And Biden came in and said, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't matter how much you lost. And they actually didn't, I don't know if they even prioritized it within the black community or according to how much was lost. It mattered that you were not a white male. Now they will say, no, it mattered that you were black or whatever. But in reality, it mattered that you were not a white male because white male was the

only group excluded from that list. And they did it for farmers too as well. The farming. So now just how it affects me, my accountants were very smart. They realized actually right at the top that there was not going to be enough money here for us to be able to ever – to likely get approved for it. But the Lord was looking out for us because Senator Schumer, of all people, introduced a bill specifically earmarked for entertainment venues.

So we were able to recover under the entertainment venue bill, which kept us afloat. So it's not a matter of personal interest here. It didn't affect me. I did not get the money or anything like that. But I know people who didn't, and they're no longer in business. But the notion that our government

would hand out disaster relief based not according to need, but according to the fact that you were or were not a white man, is so difficult for people to understand. They get angry at me for saying it. So anyway, but we can actually get to this because this pertains on how I see the election.

So what I'd like to do today with Coleman, who did a very, very good video, everybody should look it up, about why he was voting for Joe Biden. And if I had not been having a friend on today, I would have gone back to that video and forced him to look at what he said and played it for him. I'm not going to challenge him with it. But he was a very clear and had given a very thoughtful reason as to why he was with a full-throated and full heart supporting Joe Biden for presidency in 2020. And now I want to ask him how he feels about that. And also just as an overall goal of this conversation, I'd like to go through the pluses and minuses of both candidates,

the best arguments for Trump, the best arguments against, the best arguments for Harris, and the best arguments against. But let's start with, have you gone back and listened to that 2020? Do you remember what you said? No, I remember what I said. And I've been thinking to me, just for myself, what are the differences between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

Because Trump is roughly the same person as he was four years ago when I voted against him and four years before that when I voted against him and four years before that when I voted against him. So, you know, to me... Except January 6th. Except January 6th. Came after. Oh, that's the video. Yeah. That's the video that you're not going to pull up. Yeah. Danny, you're not... Now, when you pull it up, Danny, it's not taking... No, no, no. Yeah, okay. Okay, I'll get it. What made me more happy with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden as candidates than potentially Kamala Harris? I mean, to you know, one big thing is that I viewed both of them as having a track record of being moderate liberals. Joe Biden's record in the Senate was moderate, whereas Kamala's Senate record was all the way to the far left of the spectrum.

She was ranked as the most liberal senator, right? Objectively, first, second, and fourth furthest to the left in the entire Senate by a nonpartisan ranking organization. I feel her general incompetence as demonstrated by the fact that she never, she did terribly in the primaries. She was chosen by Joe Biden during a fever pitch of identity politics because she was basically the closest black female

who was semi-plausible. And her total inability to articulate a vision, a foreign policy vision at a crucial time for the world, makes me think that she's, you know, I can't cast my vote for her in the way I could, I felt I could be confident casting my vote for a Hillary Clinton or a Joe Biden, who, you know, had track records of having a position on foreign policy issues. Joe Biden had a philosophy of as simple as it was supporting democracies. And he had a, you know, a long

history. Hillary Clinton, obviously, Secretary of State State, to me seemed the picture of competence in many ways, even though she was a bit corrupt, like a lot of politicians are perhaps. But I didn't feel I was, you know, sending someone to go talk to Putin and Xi that would be totally out of their depth and have no real beliefs. And so I don't, and, um, and I think it's, you know, it's also something that Andrew Sullivan said, which is in 2016, Trump was speaking like a fascist in, in some of his moods. And there was no track record to suggest he wouldn't govern that way. But after four years of Trump minus January 6th, which was, I guess you could say, it was authoritarian, certainly. And there's no defense for it. It was corrupt more than it was

cheating, you know. It was cheating and watching Republicans twist themselves into pretzels, like J.D. Vance and Ben Shapiro, knowing it was wrong and there's no defense for it has been. Vance especially. Shapiro has a more nuanced, but ahead yeah um shapiro doesn't deny it vance actually denies it yeah that's true vance will say no i think trump actually won the election right shapiro wouldn't i don't think he believes it of course not we hope um but there was a i feel i've learned something about trump's psychology and his communication style that was not obvious to me when he came on the political scene, which is that he speaks in hyperbole. He reflexively says things much crazier than what he actually wants to do. And that's the mode he operates. It's so different than the mode I'm used to people operating in that I think it took me years to translate

his utterances to what he means and what he's trying to do, which is not to say he would make a good president. I think, you know, everyone, almost everyone who works for him, you know, says he should not be back in the Oval Office, including very serious nonpartisan people. But it does make me less afraid of him as, you know, the, you know, the grim reaper of our democracy. So in other words, I can't just vote for Kamala Harris just because she's not Donald Trump. Well, let me make an argument for Harris. By the way, I communicated with Andrew Sullivan,

and he was very upset about the Madison Square Garden rally. And he said some stuff about Trump. And I said, well, actually, Andrew, I learned from you that, you know, you were the one who pointed out that during COVID, he had all this access to emergency powers that an authoritarian's wet dream. And he had almost, he showed no interest in exercising. Not just COVID, but unprecedented riots all around the country at the same time. Yes, yes. And that's right. He blustered a little bit about stopping them, but he didn't really. And Andrew didn't engage me on that. He just kind of did an end run around that paragraph of my response to him. Here's the argument for Harris. Once these guys sit in the Oval Office, sit in that chair, we know in real life that their range of options that are actually considered and actually taken compress drastically. The things Senator Obama thought he would do as president had nothing to do with the things president Obama actually did.

Harris will be pretty much a predictable, generic Democrat. She doesn't know that much, but we know pretty much what the team around her will be. And we know basically what their worldview is. And we can predict with almost certainty what their course of action will be on various issues. And the risk of her, you know, upending that is almost zero. It's hard to picture her just being a voice in the opposite direction when these, you know,

Tony Blinkins and the people who've been there since the Obama administration are around her. So if you're comfortable with that generic democratic way of governance, I think she's perfectly fine. Yeah. Well, what if you're not necessarily comfortable with that generic way? I mean, I'm giving, I don't totally, as I'm saying, it's a little bit of a devil's advocate thing. Yeah. But I'm throwing that to you to counter it in some way, if you have a counter. Well, I think that you could make a pretty good argument that the, especially with respect to foreign policy,

the Obama-Biden assumptions, which have been pretty similar, the assumptions about in particular, the Middle East, the assumptions about Iran, the assumptions about our kind of our Sunni Gulf state quasi allies were backwards and, and really harmful. Both Obama and Biden had a position of paying off the Iranians to not pursue their nuclear program, which resulted in the Iranians getting richer, but not actually really any long-term progress in halting their nuclear ambitions. They both had a position of alienating, I think, the countries that are our imperfect but certainly best allies in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia. Trump reversed those assumptions and I think got better results,

including certainly the Abraham Accords, which no one thought was possible. Yeah, you should make a really underline that. Not only did no one think it was possible, but John Kerry, Obama's Secretary of State, mocked it. He mocked the notion that any Arab country would make a separate peace with Israel. So it's really a very clear laboratory demonstration of the difference in how accurate the two worldviews were. Yeah. And so I think there is a lot to criticize when it comes to the default Democrat mode of thinking about foreign policy. What you can say in its favor is that it's

conservative in its own way. It's not disastrous immediately. It's had these bad consequences, but it's not erratic. It's consistent. It's not jerking between alternatives. It's not tweeting things before you've run them past your Secretary of State. It's not calling a nuclear dictator a little rocket man. It's mature, if perhaps naive. I think it's almost...

To be fair, Kim Jong-un did call Trump a dotard. Just to be clear. But, in other words words trump seems to me a risky but potentially high reward um president with foreign policy in the sense that he he can be erratic but he's partly because he's willing to color outside the lines. He's sometimes, you know, he has a certain leverage with respect to the world that none of our other presidents have because all the other leaders of the world believe that he's crazy enough to go through on certain threats. So let me say two things. First of all, it should be known that Coleman is speaking this way. But eight years ago, Coleman was having anxiety attacks about the fact that Trump would take office. And I think that psychological journey

that Coleman has taken represents a lot of people in the country who I've spoken to who can't believe they're saying such things, but seem to be ready, if not to vote for him, but to like, okay, that might work out, you know? As far as the generic Democrat thing goes, it's very important, two things I would say to counter my own argument. First of all, it's very important for a president to be a competent political performer. Obama, Clinton, Abraham Lincoln,

good on their feet, funny, charming, a good salesman for their own policies. It's hard to imagine how successful you, Ronald Reagan, how you can really be a successful president, at least on the highest tier, without having that level of competence. it's not simply what you sign and what you don't sign. It's your ability to sell it and your ability to persuade and to have people love you and have confidence in you. And this also carries over very much onto the world stage in foreign policy. A lot of important historical events pivot on relationships between leaders. Margaret Thatcher famously persuaded George H.W. Bush, don't go wobbly, to buck up on the war against Saddam Hussein.

There's many examples of this. No one can really picture her doing any of those things except being provocative in her perception of weakness it's it's very difficult to imagine putin or whoever's going to be in charge of iran after komini dies um being intimidated by her and then actually and i'd say like one other thing i'm almost done that um you know and it's's just like a nice illustration of how incompetent she is. Said this yesterday that eight years ago, building the wall, exhibit A of the case against Donald Trump, exhibit A of the case that Donald Trump is a racist to be feared, was that he wanted to build a wall. We had guest after guest come on our podcast, say, how can you vote? He wants to build a wall. Here we are eight years later,

and they asked her last week on CNN, well, what do you think about the wall? And she said, she wouldn't answer. I don't know. We have to keep these immigrants. Like eight years after this Exhibit A piece of evidence, she still can't formulate an answer about the wall. It's extremely pathetic quality there. I can't imagine Obama or Clinton or Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton, not having an answer. And it's going to happen a dozen times every month. It's actually such an excellent point. I can't believe I haven't heard anybody talk about it.

The one you're about to make? No, no, no. What you just said, I think, shut up. I think that, really, you're saying that. I can't believe nobody has really, like you're saying that I'm like, I can't believe nobody has really I haven't heard that. Because you only listen to MSNBC, dummy. No, that's not that's not why. But I also think and you know how much I dislike Trump.

But I think that what you're saying actually is like, you know, we we had this conversation with Batya yesterday when I said, you know, he puts on these, you know, this McDonald's outfit and this garbage man outfit. I got to talk about that. Go ahead. But this is, and I said, you know, people love him because he's like John Gotti in that way. And I think that what you're saying is like, I'm looking at this video that's playing sort of on silent on Noam's computer of him in this neon garbage vest. And this is, it's so true. I'm not getting the Gotti reference, but in any case. What do you mean?

How do you not get the Gotti reference? It's like this bully showman, tough guy. Well, in any case. They go up on the street and then he just died and the guy says, oh, what do you think of it? Great man. But what about the murder?

He goes, what murder? That's right. That's the famous meme. That's right. That's right. That's how I knew about it, Noam, because it was a meme. Noam was talking about

Coleman's psychological journey. Did you have any, was there any journey that you took between 2020 and now? We saw what Trump did in office. You said that once you saw Trump in action, some of your fears were attenuated. Allayed, yeah, attenuated, sorry. There's a better word. Allayed. Okay. But that didn't persuade you sufficiently enough to vote for him in 2020. Is there a journey that you took from 2020 to today?

No, I think that was more about me trusting Biden's competence and moderation more than I trust Kamala's competence and moderation. I think Trump is the same guy he was four years ago. So this thing about the vest. So you know this guy, so I think a lot now about this concept of having a soulful intellect because on every issue,

you can really make an argument in either direction and you can find the data and you can find a logic and it becomes almost futile but you know at some point you you hear certain people who somehow get it right with a much higher um frequency and somehow the way they uh when they lay out their thought process you you you get the the the soul of where they're coming from, a kind of decency. Is that my phone ringing?

It's okay. It wasn't bothering me, but everybody else is freaking out, so I'm going to turn it off. I didn't know if I'd say I was freaking out. That was an odd sound. So this guy, James Surowiecki, you know who he is? I know the name. I can see the name written. I didn't know that.

Yeah, he's a very, very smart guy. I wouldn't want to add my IQ to Perry L's IQ and go up this guy, against this guy. He's very, very smart. So he tweets this, but he's soulless quite often. It's like he's just like, well, I'll give you an example. So he tweets this thing with Trump in the vest. And, of course, the crowd is just eating it up,

Trump in the vest. And he writes, so he's going to clean up the garbage at the rally? I feel like they didn't really think this one through. And then he tweets, you're not garbage, which is why I'm dressed up like the person who throws garbage away.

Wait, wait, I'm not sure that makes no sense. That's stupid. So I tweeted to him, I said, many aphorisms have been inspired by people who couldn't see the bigger picture because they were hung up on apparent inconsistencies or too clever arguments. And we see this all the time, and about Trump as well. But, you know, what goes into, should we get sidetracked on this now? What goes into a soulful intellect as opposed to a you know technical mind well that's a good question i think um i'm just thinking about this because you know i i know

i sent you the haviv rated gore podcast yesterday where he i listened to that was very critical of kind of two clever intellectuals in a way. Thomas Sowell has a great book called Intellectuals in Society where he just destroys some of the most famous intellectuals of the past hundred years who are just absolutely dead wrong on simple issues. Why did W.E.B. Du Bois support Joseph Stalin? Karel, you know about that. web du bois support joseph stalin carry all you know about you know what i'm like this is a brilliant guy obviously when it comes to american race issues

but you can lose yourself in the headiness of ideas and in the beauty of ideas and fail to be grounded in reality and just what it like um yeah just viewing things from the perspective of an overeducated PhD view of the world as opposed to what an average person would experience in a situation. All the intellectuals that defended Marxism and communism would basically mostly fall into this category. I'm generalizing too much because some of them were actually pretty substantial people. But if you can't understand the logic that West Germany was better than East Germany and that migration flows out of places usually come from the bad places to the good places, IQ is not always correlated with the ability to see that reality in front of your nose and appreciate its importance.

That would be my... Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of scales, like the old doctor scale. And you have a scale like how much you weigh empathy against practicality. How much do you know to discount spin? How do you read intentions? Krauthammer used to talk about the experience of, he used to talk about the triumph of experience over hope, which is kind of turning around that old liberal thing

where there's just certain things that certain people have. What's the guy, Tetlock? Bill Tetlock. Who does these experiments about, there are certain people have. What's that guy, Tetlock? Bill Tetlock. Who does these experiments about there are certain people who are just good predictors. And nobody can really understand why. It's like the ill-defined dichotomy between book smart and street smart, if you give any credence to that. Yeah, to have that. Because reading somebody's intentions, that's a deep thing. When you're judging Sinwar, we know people who ground a lot of their support for the Palestinian cause because they're able to conceive of the fact, no, no, they want peace.

Sinwar wants peace because there was an interview one time he did, you know, seven years ago where he said he might be ready to accept, you know, the 67 board, whatever it is. And, you know, I would say, what's the matter with you? Like, are you an idiot? Do you really believe that? You can't see through that.

He says it right here. And it's true, it does say it right there. So that's why I say like, you know, so he can make the technical argument and very often people say, well, he's bullshitting. No, I think he believes it. You know, generally people really believe what they're saying. Not that many people are the grifters,

which becomes like the easy go-to way. Oh, why is Tucker Carlson saying he believes in UFOs? He's a grifter. He just trying to make money. I was like, no, no, I'm pretty sure he really believes that stuff. So did somebody just want to say something well i i just say that that that music i mean this is a little off topic but musical genius doesn't seem to be correlated with um will be with iq as far as we know no but this is but this is a good uh analogy because music can be very correct and precise and intellectually

rigorous, rigorous, and we can all listen to it and say, it doesn't have soul. It doesn't move me. And maybe AI is going to figure out what that soul is, but it's not easy to teach it. Right. And that comes from something within. And I think it applies to an ability to analyze the world as well. Like some people, yeah, I get it. I see how you put that all together, but it's not moving me because there's something human about it that

you're not able, because you don't have it, you can't communicate it. If you don't have soul as a musician, if you're not feeling that emotion, you cannot make the audience feel that emotion. Yeah, I think there are kind of two types of intellectuals. One, people who are in love with the surface level, superficial kind of appearance of intelligence and the poetry of language and how you can put words together and, you know, just make beautiful combinations of words that hit you profoundly like a poem might. And people latch on to that and they say, I want to be that. And they learn in college a way of speaking that gets approval from professors and so forth. And the more talented among them go on to write books like Ta-Nehisi Coates, where he really knows how

to put together a sentence in a way that is musical and beautiful and memorable and special. But I think there's a different type of person who their deepest motivation for being an intellectual is wanting to understand the world, like really wanting to understand the world. And I feel that's where I was, you know, mainly a musician, but I really, I loved when I read a book or listened to something and at the end of it, I said, yeah, that makes me understand the world that I'm living in and have experienced more.

A simple example is in seventh grade, I never forgot when I learned the theory, the Darwinian theory of evolution, because kids think evolution up to a certain age is like the giraffe stretches its neck and then the its son giraffe has a longer neck right but then when you actually learn what what the real theory is harry i was like that's not what when you learn what the real you stop you realize you never thought about it of course my dad hit the gym all his life but i don't i didn't get his muscles right that's it's actually the differential survival of, you know, people that are genetically different. And over time you can totally, and when you, it's for, it's counterintuitive at first. And then suddenly you realize that's how the world is. That makes perfect sense. And that's a gift. When someone

gives you the gift of understanding, I feel like what really motivates me is I love being given the gift of understanding and I like being able to give the gift of understanding to something that I've really understood. The whole craft of sounding intelligent and stuff is all secondary and just the delivery mechanism for that gift of understanding. And I think what you're talking about, people who have soul are the ones that are obsessed and really zero in on the understanding. Because that's the point of this whole thing. It's not about, you know, it's not about sounding smart. It's about understanding the world we really live in.

It takes a lot of soul, I guess, if we're going to use that word, to not be smug about the people you disagree with. I mean, what Surowiecki is doing there is just you can you can just he's dripping with contempt. Right. He wouldn't have written that same tweet if there had been a Democratic stunt like that because he would have gotten they're having fun. They're enjoying it. You know, Trump is taking this profession, a sanitation worker, which, and I don't want to give it any disrespect, but it's the kind of thing which people will, you know, make fun of a garbage worker. Nobody is proud to say that my son's a garbage worker. And Trump is saying, no, I'll be the garbage man, you know, and I love the common person and I have no problem embracing that. And we're all going to be the garbage people together. And that's a big middle finger to the people who called us, me and my supporters, garbage. All right.

It doesn't hold together technically like a math equation because, yeah, he's the one cleaning up. It's so stupid that he doesn't understand. It's like somebody overanalyzing a joke, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like, at an emotional level, we all get it. He's embracing the insult. You're calling us garbage? I'll be a garbage man.

And this great intellect, he can't see that, right? Well, you're the one who said he was this great intellect. No, Sirowike. Well, he is. I mean, he's very, very, very smart. I have a pretty high IQ. I just want to put that into this. What's your Dunning-Kruger score?

And the other thing that I want to say is that he doesn't sound that smart to me. And also, I think that that comes through when you're talking, Coleman. Like, I remember, like, even things that seem like would get like so heated because these people are really such fucking idiots who are talking to you and you're so calm and you're so nice and you're so composed like I remember I don't

remember it was maybe it was the view or something like it was something that was like a really must be the view when they were saying he's young and doesn't know shit it was just something that like somebody else would have... A charlatan she called him. Go ahead. No, what you're saying like it's genuine

and like it comes through when you're talking. Yeah. Let's make the arguments for and against Trump. My arguments against Trump, the ones I actually believe, is not the over the top ones, is that he's erratic.

First and foremost, that he's erratic. That when you have a president who might be in office when the shit actually hits the fan, that this guy cannot be trusted to analyze carefully, listen to the smart people, not shoot from the hip, have humility. We did see this once. The shit did hit the fan. We had a pandemic. And he showed none of the qualities that a Mayor Bloomberg would have

or Ron DeSantis did in terms of really step-by-step in a systematic way, analyzing based on the best information there was at the time. And this is a very cheap shot that people will now use in both directions, things we know to be true now as a way of impeaching people who made decisions back then. But based on the information we had at the time, to make careful, considered decisions. Now, in retrospect, it may not have mattered all that much because COVID just went through the entire planet. It seems like no policy really stood up to it except the behavior

of individual communities in terms of how careful they were about taking precautious behavior, masking, distancing, whatever. We know that Asians... Is that a word, precautious behavior, masking, distancing, whatever. We know that Asians... Is that a word, precautious? Precautious, I don't know. Precautious? That Asian communities in the middle of Queens,

surrounded by high COVID areas, didn't get very much COVID because of their day-to-day routines. But none of that really came from government. But, you know, if there's a war, if there's a war, if there's a real war, you know, can we trust this guy? I take very seriously, and I believe

I was the first person actually to make the argument, which has now become risen to the top as one of the key arguments, that you have to really read carefully all the people who were close to him during his administration who think he should never be allowed to be president again. I made that argument like two years ago when DeSantis was leading in the polls. I'm like, I really respect that because these were not his political opponents. They were his allies. And people were writing up, no, they're just elite and they didn't like that. Well, yeah.

I mean, I think that is the best argument. Most of these people were Republicans. Most of these people were absolutely maligned by the media and by many people in their own circles for even working for him. But they understood they had a duty over and beyond, you know, just like being liked by those around them. Um, they worked with him closely. They, you know, I'm like HR McMaster's book is really, really great because he's, he's kind of more in the neocon tradition, but he's very reasonable about everything. Um, really straight down the middle and he will confirm every single criticism of Trump's personality. So, for example, a story that stuck out to me from the book is Trump was meeting with the Jordanian king, and Trump asked H.R. McMaster to summarize what's going on with the Syrian civil war.

And McMaster very expertly said, normally I would defer to the king, but since you've asked, I'll give you a summary. And he gives about a three or four minute, very good high level summary of what the heck is going on with the Syrian civil war. It's fairly complicated. And he said, Trump sat there and listened patiently, paid attention the whole time. And he goes, it was amazing. It was like nothing i had ever experienced and he only did it because the jordanian king was in the room normally he would never have the patience to listen for a three-minute summary of the syrian civil war yeah i mean it's it's it's horrible

that his personality is such that he can't listen to complexity they i mean essentially they have to like dangle things in front of his face to get him to to pay attention to an intelligence briefing they've got probably about 30 seconds to get the key information before he sort of pivots to something else and that's the experience of everyone who worked for him they i mean everyone who worked for him confirms that he has this reflex to contrarianism, where if his advisor says, Mr. President, you're about to meet with Putin, you should say this. You should make sure to focus on this. There's a part of him that just wants to do the opposite just because he was told he has to do this. All you have to do is watch that TV show.

What was that show he did for years? The Apprentice. The Apprentice. The Apprentice. I mean, that's it, right? Like it's all right there. Well, he was good on The Apprentice. I thought he was good on The Apprentice and that was scripted. So let me say, what you're describing is very dangerous because every time you take a blind

step and then something miraculously appears to prevent you from falling, it builds up your own sense that somehow your gut is just infallible. Right. And then you take the more brazen steps until you fucking fall flat. And this can be analogized to my father who used to talk about how great artists, like Chaplin was his favorite example.

At some point, but we've seen it in many of them, at some point their work product becomes ridiculous because at some point they became so enamored with their own talent and maybe they took a risk one time and it paid off that they think everything I do is great. And then they do something awful. I mean, Francis Ford Coppola did the godfather and all these great

movies and then he did this ridiculous movie jack about the was it jack with robin williams played an overgrown uh kid or like like or or howard the duck george lucas after he did um star wars and and he's also involved in some way in raiders of the lost ark, wasn't he? Anyway, but he did all these great movies, and then he comes out with Howard the Duck, like one of the greatest flops of all time. Because in some way, probably, he says, everybody told me Star Wars would be awful. Everybody told me this would be awful.

You know, Bruce Springsteen is still writing good music to this day. Well, Bruce Springsteen may have a certain humility. George Lucas, I remember watching a whole documentary about this when he made the original Star Wars he was so disrespected by the people working with him that he got so much pushback and

the result was often so different from how he wanted to do things but the result like clearly he had a brilliant vision but he needed tons of pushback to make it not ridiculous often so different from how he wanted to do things, but the result, like clearly he had a brilliant vision, but he needed tons of pushback to make it not ridiculous. But then once he became George Lucas, who had the hit Star Wars that nobody thought was a hit,

a space hopper with a Wookiee, whatever. Then when he went on to oversee the prequels, no one pushed back against anything he said. And the results were the frigging Star Wars prequels, which are absolute farce. Yeah. So all analogies but they all they're all very human very good analogy because i think trump's foreign policy results i think were really good in a lot of ways questions why is that is that because because of his personality or in spite of his personality? I think he was surrounded by pretty serious people.

He had a habit of firing them, unfortunately, for disloyalty or perceived disloyalty or whatever. But he was surrounded by people that constantly pushed back against a lot of the things he wanted to do. That's the truth. My question is, who will he be surrounded by this time? And I genuinely do not know the answer to that. If it's just loyalists and Steve Bannon types, then he becomes extremely dangerous. And J.D. Vance?

J.D. Vance, I don't know. I don't know. He seems less dangerous to me than a Steve Bannon. But again, I don't know. He seems less dangerous to me than a Steve Bannon. But again, I don't know. Can I? Yeah. So, yeah, one of the biggest fears with Trump is his desire to settle scores. When he came into office in 2016, he was talking about Hillary, lock her up, lock her up.

But he didn't really have any real beef against Hillary Clinton. That was just like a slogan. And I didn't really think he meant it in any serious way. Now, this guy is seething mad at a lot of people, and much of that anger, if we have to be honest, is righteous anger. They really did make him out to be a Russian spy. And at some point they knew it wasn't true and they continued with it. They really did keep sending warrants to the FISA court knowing that they were withholding evidence from FISA.

They really did try to put him in jail at 78 years old for the crime of paying off his mistress who was extorting him with his own money. They wanted to see this man rot in jail for that horrible crime. I had a bookkeeper steal $150,000 from me, steal the cash. The judge didn't even think about putting her in jail.

They want to put Trump in jail for paying off an extortion thing. And then of course, not entering it into his books properly as hush money for the fact I'm fucking Stormy Daniels. That's what he... So he wants to get even with these people. So that's his... And he has an authoritarian kind of personality.

So that's... And that will be... I don't think the guardrails of our system are going to fall apart. There'll be court appeals and this and that. And eventually he'll be ground down, and there'll be turmoil, and people will sell their souls in opposing him or defending him in ridiculous ways, and the turmoil will be terrible for the country.

However, his fascism, and I'm going to talk a little bit here because this is my most important point. His fascism, as far as I read it, has no desires to intrude on our lives. The guy has never expressed any authoritarian vision of how he would get into our lives and change the way we're living. But the problem is that Trump is, as I said yesterday, he is, if you take all our fears, he becomes an anthropomorphization, is that how you say it? Anthropomorphization of a personification of all these fears. And you can see them all in this one man. And that's scary. And you don't want that man anywhere near the White House. The opposite is very, very amorphous, and this is my argument.

And I made a list here, and I'm sure Coleman can add to it. The last 10 years of our lives have seen a tremendous change. All the people that we know, Coleman and I, whose lives were ruined by accusations, many of them false, many of them ad hoc and hypocritical. For instance, our friend Louie probably still cautious when he walks into a restaurant who might scream and yell at him. But the vice president's, Harris's husband, we know now, punched a woman in the face and spun her around. He can go to any dinner party in D.C. that he wants. The self-censorship that all of us have had to go through.

Coleman and I both talked like during the Kavanaugh hearings. We both had doubts about it. We were afraid to say out loud because at that time we felt we could be ruined. All the people who are fired because of their political views, all the people who have been encouraged to snoop on people's lives and turn them in for the stuff that they could do. The bending of science to politics,

where we were told we can't go to our grandfather's funeral, and then a week later say, go out and protest for BLM, the rage that that caused. I started making a list here. The state eagerly coming between our children, what we think is best for our children and what the state thinks is best for our children based on often bullshit science that we know now was suppressed, right? About gender care and stuff like that. The notion that college administrators were suppressing political movements that they didn't like, giving ad hoc passes to ones that they do like, keeping kids out who are Asian, Asian kids having to pretend, put together applications, Asian parents actually naming their kids anglicized names so that maybe they could do a college application where no one would know that they're Asian so they could be treated just as humans. The rise of tolerated and rationalized anti-Semitism within elite circles. Indoctrination of our students in school with demonstrably false histories, right?

Like Coleman, like 1619 and stuff like that. I mean, I could just go on and on. Coleman can add to it. But oh, the suppression of major and truthful political stories, COVID stories, lab leak, Hunter Biden. But, you know, the blatant cooperation

of the mainstream media. By the way, can you bring up that video that we had yesterday about the dictator for a day? Yes. In a way that's so dishonest as to qualify as state-run media. By the way, can you bring up that video that we had yesterday about the dictator for a day? Yes. In a way that's so dishonest as to qualify as state-run media. All of this, the lives that are ruined and the general atmosphere of fear that we live through as people who want to speak and live our lives freely. If all that change in American society had the fingerprints on it of a particular leader,

that leader would be a fascist. If any leader had brought that change into our lives, that would be the most fascist experience with a leader we have ever seen in this country. And that's the left. And it's a blob. There ever seen in this country and that's the left and there is it's a blob there is no person we can put that on so somehow we can vote in a person of the left like kamala harris and somehow not feel like we're voting for all that terrible which is i think this 70 80 percent of the country agrees that stuff is terrible but if you look at it that way, that it's the left and the left

has to be defeated, this is a strong argument to vote against Kamala Harris because she does personify, in my view, a person who was on board with every single one of these issues. She never spoke out against a single one of them. This video is like a perfect example of the corruption of the media. This is, we've all seen in the New York Times and everywhere else over and over. Donald Trump says he's going to be a dictator. He's going to be a dictator on day one.

He said, holy shit, that's scary. A dictator. So this is the evidence. This is where it comes from. Play the video. Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody. Except for day one. Except for day one. Meaning?

I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill. That's not retribution. I'm going to be, I'm going to be, you know, he keeps. He's smiling. We love this guy. He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no. Other than day one. We're closing the border and we're drilling, drilling, drilling.

After that, I'm not a dictator. That sounds to me like. So that's it. No. Now, it's almost, you can't believe it. I've even said, there must be something else. Let me Google again. I don't want to be a jackass.

There's got to be some other time he said this. No, that's it. What could be more dishonest than saying that's a guy saying he wants to be a dictator? I'll tell you, reading H.R. McMaster's book, National Security Advisor for Trump for a year, serious three-star general, exactly the kind of guy you would hope is the responsible hand leading American foreign policy. The only people to come out looking worse than Trump in that book are the media. Because every time, like he will literally be talking about preparing deeply with the president of South Korea to talk about with Xi about, you know, North Korea.

Something like very crucial. He's waking up at 3 a.m. because an intercontinental ballistic missile has been shot. He's dealing with these really tough situations and he's an expert. And he'll get to the end of a chapter having, you know, wrangled Trump and worked with Trump to get a good outcome at some meeting saying, phew. And then he'll look at the headline tomorrow in the newspaper. And it's just some absolutely deranged, totally unconnected from reality summary of what has just happened. Like literally distorted by hate for Trump. Yes, always, always distorted by hate for Trump. Sometimes it always. Always distorted by hate for Trump. Sometimes it's against him too.

And sometimes it's the far right, but it's more often just what you would... Really the center left, like the New York Times. So for example, they were going to Europe meeting with all the European leaders, especially the Eastern European ones. They were in Poland, Estonia,

all of these, really Romania. And what was so important about these meetings was that all of these leaders were telling Trump that Putin is not someone you want to try to make friends with, right? And he had become so beaten down by Russia, Russia, Russia, that I think it made him have some sympathy for Putin and just distrust of any Russia hawk, because he couldn't decouple the issue of his own persecution from Russia. McMaster said this? This is your opinion? This is McMaster's. McMaster felt that the impact of the Russia investigation, he could not decouple from his view of, for instance, the fact that Russia interfered in our election, right? He couldn't separate that issue, which they did try to interfere, from the idea that he was a plant, right? It was all bound up for him. And so he was

prone to be soft on Putin as a result of the attacks on him. And so it was very important for him to talk to Romania, Poland, Estonia, all these people that have a very clear eyed view of Putin. Um, and, and so forth.

And that was the importance of this trip as HR McMaster put it. And Trump gave a speech at the end of this trip where he basically, McMaster, they're always fighting to get particular lines in these speeches or, you know, erase lines. And there was a speech, there's a line that was something like, a strong Europe is crucial for the national security of the West and America, something like that. And the reason he wanted this line in, because by a strong Europe, he meant a Europe that defends itself from the Russian threat. That was the subtext.

And he wakes up the next morning. There's an article. I forget. Maybe it was The Guardian or something that said, Trump includes nod to white nationalists. A dog whistle. Strong Europe is a dog whistle for like European white. And it's like, it's literally so crazy how far removed these concerns are from the people that are trying to prevent war with Russia and how dishonest journalists are. So it's constantly there's leaks from the White House and a journalist will just take

one anonymous leak, not question that it might be office politics. Someone, it might be someone from the Secretary of State's office trying to get after someone from the National Security Council. And they'll just take it if it has any racial or whatever spin, they'll just publish it as truth. It's absolutely insane

how much it also hurts our national security. That's what I was going to say. It really does hurt. So there were stories where world leaders were afraid to speak frankly to the American president

because they had internalized the fear that he might be a Russian plant. And so they didn't want to, you know, give sensitive information to the American president because they're afraid

he might pass it to Putin. I mean, that's... And, you know, even Trump came into office wanting to make a deal with Putin vis-a-vis Crimea and all that stuff. And we had an argument with Fred Kaplan on this podcast where I said to Fred, look, Russia is never leaving Crimea.

So if you want to have sanctions against Russia until Russia leaves Crimea, you want to have sanctions till the end of time. And I said, and that's dangerous for the world. It's dangerous to have this open sore of a relationship with Russia. So if Trump wants to make some kind of deal to settle all this, I don't see on the face of it why that's a bad thing. I know he's a Russian spy, but remember that argument.

Well, sure enough, they didn't make any kind of deal. And if Trump had even tried to make a deal with Russia in 2017, that would have been proof positive that he's in with Putin. And could anybody have been able to prove that? Well, no, actually, you don't know what was coming, but Russia was about to invade all of Ukraine. And actually, this was a relief valve because in return for signing off on Crimea, we have new up-to-date current promises, which supersede not one inch or any of these wacky arguments that go on or somewhat. I shouldn't say they're wacky arguments. Some of them have a sense of truth. Some of them are exaggerated. But whatever, all the arguments about how we provoked Putin into this Ukraine thing, they could have all been wrapped up in a bow and disposed

of by a deal in 2016 or 2017. And the press would not have allowed that because they would have seen it through this distorted lens. So all of this is a reason to hate, hate,

hate the left, hate the press. The press is, I mean, look at what's happening in the Washington Post. They're kind of self-destructing, right? And this is a part of it. So I don't know what else there is to say about these people. Well, where does that, You're not voting, but... Emotionally, I would like to see all the outcomes that I believe would come from a Trump win.

I'd like to see not his tariffs. I don't know whether you're going to believe those tariffs or whether they're bargaining chips, but the idea of deregulation, the idea of projecting strength, you know, Trump always rails against the neocons, but actually his foreign policy was not that different from a neocon. No foreign policy.

He took out the neocons with cheering when he killed the guy in Iran. To say something positive about Trump, like from the HR McMaster book, this idea that he has no beliefs is not true. He privately feels strongly about Islamic terrorism. He doesn't like it. He gets emotional in that he doesn't like it. He has instincts.

He's not just purely a vessel for self-interest. He actually does have, he believes in, I think, projecting strength, which I will say, I think, so the COVID issue and the, you know, the fact he couldn't listen to a five-minute analysis of the Syrian civil war, that is exactly the kind of personality that's bad for managing a pandemic, because you want someone that can read a summary of a scientific literature and blah, blah, blah. But for foreign policy, his businessman instincts, just the sense that always know what your leverage is and negotiate from strength,

they actually are kind of the skill set one would want in foreign policy, so long as you can delegate all the details to a great staff, right? Which is why I think it's no accident that foreign policy is the area where he had the most success. It's hard to imagine Trump would have advised Israel to take the pressure off of Hamas as they were negotiating for their hostages. Oh, and this is the other thing. The other strength is that I think he hates the press so much that he doesn't take them into consideration in terms of foreign policy. In other words, I don't think he would be worrying about what

the headline is tomorrow when he was talking to Netanyahu. But I imagine Biden and Kamala very much are worried about that. Well, Robert Gates in his book, you know, Obama's former defense secretary, while Biden was vice president, said that all Biden cared about in these meetings where they were deciding what military actions to take was the political ramifications. This was this was Gates's biggest beef with Biden. He almost didn't care about anything but the politics of things. And as people don't change yeah i just have one question i tried to get answered yesterday sorry yeah what of anti-semitism because i really think that this is the erosion i'm against it dan

i concur with no no go ahead, go ahead. Good analysis. I mean, Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump. I mean, one of the things that I've heard from many people on the left where I have historically lived is that, and you've said this numerous times, that the anti-Semitism on the left in the universities that has become like completely socially acceptable is rotting from the left. And the Harris administration seems to be pandering to these people in the same way that one could argue that the Trump administration panders to the far right wing Nazi lunatics. So who is better and worse for anti-Semitism in this country? To me, that's a no brainer. That Kamala is worse for anti-Semitism? Absolutely. Yeah. I don't think either of them are personally anti-Semites. I mean, I see no evidence of that necessarily, but... No, nor do I.

Well, well, well, well, well. No, the problem with that statement, in my opinion, is that, and we've spent a lot of time trying to get a handle on this, a realistic understanding of this, is that intersectionality, which is functionally anti-Semitic, is believed in by people

who may not actually be anti-Semites by older definitions. Meaning, I remember saying, none of the people I know who are pro-Hamas would care if their kid married a Jew. It's not that kind of anti-Semitism. I don't think Kamala Harris, she's married-Semitism. I don't think Kamala Harris, she's married to somebody Jewish. I don't think Kamala Harris has any

opinions bad about Jewish people. But the ideas that she might likely be persuaded by, the idea that the white Western people are the bad guys in the world, and that the Palestinians are somehow the oppressed,

and the people have been colonialized, and maybe the black people in that narrative. These are oxygen to anti-Semitism, if not outright anti-Semitism. Yeah, just a few days ago, New York Times reported, and one never knows if this is totally true, I mean, it might have been intended as positive propaganda for the far left that the first thing Kamala Harris did as vice president was she got this huge report on sort of like all the communications that had happened with like world leaders at the time.

And she thought that she noticed a pattern of internal White House memos describing women leaders different than men leaders, like describing Angela Merkel. I don't know what exact words it would be, but it would be all the classic kind of tropes. Highly emotional and bitchy. Yeah, yeah.

Or whatever. Oh, she was strident, but Netanyahu was strong. You know, whatever. Shrill, shrill. Yeah, shrill, whatever. I don't know what it was, but she thought she detected a pattern. They did call Putin a cunt, by the way.

So she sent someone in her staff a way to do some big analysis to see whether, you know, there was, and apparently it came back nothing. You know, there was really no finding. Apparently she was so obsessed with this, they began to do this preemptively for her, like analyzing before they even showed her the papers

because this was the most important thing to her was the language, how are they describing women. So anyway, this speaks to, if it's true, it speaks to her instincts. And combined with the fact that she's, you know, one of the most, was one of the most left-wing senators, you can see how her instincts are all to one side of this issue. It's all intersectional.

Yeah, and you see what you did there. It's exactly, and I miss it. It's exactly bringing out the point I made earlier. She's not an anti-Semite. She doesn't represent all these things. But she is going to be the leader of that fascist leftist blob that

we all agree has produced all this anti-Semitism. She is not going to stand against that. She's going to get carried away in that stream and as she, look, it looks like she might lose Pennsylvania

because she didn't pick Josh Shapiro because she did not want to upset the anti-Israel faction of her party. There was the guy who got shot in Chicago. Orthodox Jew got shot in Chicago a couple days ago. And the mayor of Chicago tried to suppress the fact that the guy yelled Allah Akbar when they shot him. But when a Palestinian

child was shot or I think killed horribly, that was the first thing the mayor talked about. Is the mayor an anti-Semite? Who cares? What difference does it make if you yourself... Is it consequentialism?

Like, like you have to judge it by all of this. It eventually has to be judged by its outcomes. So, so Coleman. But, but I have something to say about MAGA antisemitism, by the way,

but go ahead. Okay. Well, what about that? Because the, the, the, you know,

the, the grotesque, well, you haters on the right. Yeah. Are they, are they, are they going to vote for Trump? Or do they see Trump as a Zionist tool? I fear like, you know, everybody knows I feel this way.

Tucker Carlson has been flirting with David Irving ideas. David Irving is a Holocaust denier. Tucker Carlson speaks kindly about Alex Jones. Alex Jones talks about the Zionists behind all sorts of things, including John F. Kennedy and 9-11. J.D. Vance talks favorably about Alex Jones, too. They've all, at one point or another, been in good graces with Candace Owens.

I don't know exactly where she's been on that, but Candace Owens' latest is that Kamala's not black. She's actually a Jew. She's hiding. No! Yeah, that's her latest thing, yeah. Candace Owens' latest is that Kamala's not black. She's actually a Jew. She's hiding. No. Yeah, that's her latest thing, yeah. So all this stuff revolves around MAGA.

It's a throwback to an older, uglier form of right-wing anti-Semitism. It's very scary to me. Trump kind of cherry-picked Papu-Canon views, as I had written one time, like in a singularly Queens baby boomer generation way. Trump does not come from a demographic

of people who generally doesn't like Jews. He is like the most... If anything, probably the opposite. Yeah, his cohort is the most New York Jews of that... Most pro-Jewish, non-Jewish group there's ever been. People in their

70s from New York City who lived in the aftershock of the Holocaust and, I mean, what's his... And took support for Israel as a given. Yeah, and Roy Cohn was his lawyer, and Weisselberg was his thing, and Jared Kushner was his son-in-law. So I think Trump is through and through not an anti-Semite, to the contrary.

And as Coleman points out from McMaster's book, he hates jihadism and Arab terrorism. Listen, it's quite interesting that after 9-11, there was zero sympathy anywhere for anything jihadist. Look how far we've come. You know, there's tremendous sympathy for all that stuff now from kids and everything. Trump has no part of that stuff. Nor does Tucker Carlson's sympathy for jihadists, I don't think. But I think all these people do hate the Jews.

And what comes after Trump, should MAGA win? You know, that worries me. I cannot stand to see Tucker Carlson a few chairs away from Donald Trump at any event. But I don't fear Donald Trump at all as anything anti-Semitic. No, but it's the same thing. You fear the influence that these people have on Harris. I don't fear their influence on Trump. I just, it's a festering problem that I do worry about.

I keep my eyes on it. Would it not be festering under a Kamala presidency as well? It's still going on on the right. Tucker Carlson's influence on the right is growing. And I don't know that Kamala's win has any effect on it. I wish that people who are reasonable, like Joe Rogan's show, or many, many people who play nice with Tucker Carlson,

I wish they would fucking turn and fire at him. Agreed. Because the stuff that he is saying, coupled with the crazy stuff about UFOs and testicle tanning and Alex Jones being a divine prophet, this should not be going... And Alex Jones says they are controlling the weather.

I mean, there's a whole fucking crazy thing on the right which is getting way too much respect crazy but you think a trump presidency just to repeat the question it would would exacerbate this i don't think it exactly i don't i don't really think it exacerbates it i i think it has to be repudiated either way. But it's really bad. Coleman, who are you voting for? I don't think I'm voting. You were supposed to talk me off the ledge. Because you are absolutely

indifferent between the two, or you're just... I find it really hard to honestly judge in my heart of hearts which would be worse for four years. Oh, and just one more thing about that. And RFK Jr.

Running the FDA and making like vaccine policy. I just can't believe, wouldn't the Senate have to approve him? I just can't believe he'd ever get, but that bothers me too. He's another, I understand Trump was making a deal. He needs those votes.

At the time, Trump really thought he needed those votes. Right, that's the problem, is that all these people are making deals with the devil. Trump has suggested he would be relegated to food policy, which is probably a joke position. That is outrageously ridiculous. I trust him much more on food policy. What does he know about food policy?

And what can he do? What does that even mean? I feel like somehow being against the over processed nature of American foods can't hurt that much because it is a problem. That's for sure. But not on vaccine policy.

And it's not even controversial I think I mean Trump to his credit has not he still takes pride in Operation Warp Speed he doesn't talk about it really though I've heard him talk about it maybe nonetheless he knows when to not talk about it

he knows when you're on Rogan I'm just gonna breeze over that section it's not like he gave a full-throated defense of his vaccine on rogan right i don't know if it came up i don't watch the whole thing yet but i mean yeah you're right um another we should have talked about it earlier but to couple with that thing about the press with the dictator for a day that the press covered up entirely the fact that jo Biden was mentally unfit for the job. Like, how can you trust these people again?

And once you see the stuff that they do, you really have to at that point, this is part of the soul, you have to say yourself, at some point, much of what I believe about Trump has been filtered and come to me through that filtered lens of those same people who lied about Joe Biden's health and told me that Trump said he wanted to be a dictator on day one. I don't know if they covered it up. Maybe it was an attempted cover up, but everybody could. Oh, no, it was fairly visible.

No, they covered it up. Meaning there after it finally came out, stories kept coming out right and left in the papers of things that were known by reporters that they didn't report. You can't have a... Did you watch the debate where Biden came undone? I watched those. You can't have a guy at that level of performance. But it didn't seem to me any much different than what I had seen previously from him. Yes, but no one was... Very few were saying that it was there was i think a whole

year and a half in which any honest journalist could have written a piece like he's too old he's unfit and almost nobody did there was it we had the guy it's really the opposite and anytime it came up on cnn and we would cover the issue on cnn it would be covered generally through the lens of this is a republican talking point this is not not real. Cheap fakes. Or, actually, Trump's actually no spring chicken either, and look at this five-second clip of Trump where he stumbled over his words. That would be the angle.

Well, there was a whole thing about Trump having dementia in, what is it, 2016? And he took the test, and he said he did the best. Man, woman, camera, did you remember who Dr. Olshansky was? We had him on here, right? Yeah.

He was the guy who was quoted in the New York Times, the age doctor. I forget. There's a fancier scientific name. A gerontologist. Gerontologist. Gerontologist. Very good.

Yeah, I think so. Who told the New York Times that Trump, that Biden was likely a super-ager. That's what, so, and this is typical, you know, this is typical of the papers. They'll, you know, they know they have to cover something. So they'll cover it. You know, people are worried about Biden's ager. And then they will find an expert and the expert becomes simply a way for the reporter to drastically spin his story through the appearance of a, you know, disinterested or objective process. So they find, they shop for a gerontologist, but they don't, they don't put him in the article unless he says what they want, which is Biden is

a super ager. So they say, yes, we did write about the fact that Biden was getting old, but yeah, you can read it right here. You know, it happened to me, I guess we're out of time, when the Louis thing hit the fan, the Times had a quote

from this guy, Andrew Friedman, about blah, blah, blah, about how it was terrible I took Louis back with her. Now,

Andrew Friedman and I have since become really, really good friends. He lived in Hastings for a while. We go out to lunch. He writes books about- Is this the New Yorker guy? No, he's not from New York, but you might have met him.

Oh, now I'm thinking of Andrew Hankinson. Andrew Hankinson. No, he's a super guy. I really like him. We are actually legitimately friends. But he had no reason to be quoted in a New York Times article about Louis C.K. and the merits of taking him back or not

taking him back. She just... Who is he? What does he do? He writes books about cooking. I have to go back and see how they introduce him into the story, but he said something they liked, and so they found a way to give him some credential on this,

and they put him into the story. It's one of the biggest stories in the world at the time. Melina Rizek put him in her story about why Louis C.K. shouldn't have been allowed back at the comedy cellar. So this is how they operate, you know? And in the old days,

there were editors like, what is it, Rosenthal, you know, at times, who were hard-nosed and, I mean, like, honestly, I know it sounds egotistical, I feel like I could do that. I feel like I could fucking edit a paper and have the paper call things straight. I'd question every reporter's

assumptions. How do you know this? How do you know that? Is that a fair expert? Without regard to my points of view. But you really, really don't see that anymore. Well, maybe you should start one. Well, I don't know. Maybe the free press is aspiring to be that. I think so.

Moynihan could do it. Our friend Michael Moynihan, he could do that. There's not many people I know who could do that. Coleman, so could I just ask, so you absolutely have no inkling as to who would be better for the country or more likely to be better for the country. You're absolutely, to you, you can't make a decision. No, I can't. to basically continue under the assumptions of Obama and Biden, except with more far-left instincts, probably, in her soul than either Obama or Biden.

And we can expect her not to be rash or erratic. And I don't know who she'll be surrounded by. For her part, she doesn't have a good record with staff turnover. She has one of the worst records. So she's apparently not very good to work with, but probably still no comparison to Trump, who I think is a high risk, high reward option in terms of he's risky, he's erratic. He's much tougher. It's much tougher to get him to listen to the experts. He shoots from the hip. He tweets things that he doesn't run past.

So we're talking T-bills versus Bitcoin. What's the first one? T-bills? Oh, T-bills versus Bitcoin, yes. So it's hard for me to judge holistically. If I were voting truly conservatively, just mitigating the worst-case scenario, I guess you'd have to vote for Kamala. But if you wanted perhaps a better than expected foreign policy outcome in the Middle East or with Russia and Ukraine, and you're willing to endorse some risk, I think you'd vote for Trump. But I don't know really how to judge those in the fullness of history. I think it's possible. It's possible Trump gets elected and four years

later we say, oh boy, that was a disaster. That one thing he did with Iran was a disaster and it spun out. And I boy wish I really would have had Kamala who just probably would have had some middling, not so good foreign policy that didn't become World War III. If not World War III, I don't think World War III is going to happen. But on the other hand, you might get Kamala and it's just a drip drip of every leader in the world taking advantage of her perceived weakness, Iran being strengthened, North Korea strengthened, China strengthened, Putin strengthened. And you might look back and say, well, this situation has deteriorated so much, it would have been better to have Trump with all his flaws. So I don't know how to judge, honestly, the likelihood of-

Well, you wrote a whole book on a colorblind society. I assume you feel Trump is better for that. Yes, probably. But I want to be fair to Kamala in that she, outside of her pandering attempt to bribe, as Scott Jennings said, to give black men an unconstitutional bribe, which she later clarified would be a race-neutral policy. She hasn't really leaned into any of that stuff.

Let's look at it this way. Use John Hite's analogy for something else. You have an elephant and a little guy on top of it. In a Republican party, Trump is the elephant, and the little guy on top of it is everything else around Trump. Policy, Republicans, everything. He

is the elephant, nobody can stop him. On the left, she is the little guy, and the left is the elephant. It really, and that's really the way you have to look at it. Joe Biden was a moderate guy. I'm sure in his heart, he's a moderate guy. Yet he was pushed around by the left. We thought he was going to come in.

We voted for him because he was going to moderate. He's going to pull the Democrats back towards the center. He didn't dare try to pull them back to the center on a single thing, as far as I can tell, because that elephant takes him along. And she is the same, except more sympathetic to the elephant in general. And I think that's the way you have to look at her.

She is going to be carried along by the left, wherever the left wants to go. And then it begs the question, if she loses, what kind of reckoning would you expect within the Democratic Party? Because if they lose to Donald Trump, after everything they've,

after all the convictions and the scandals and not january 6th and all of it they obviously know that something's wrong i don't know i think that um as as obama obama is rumored to have said about joe never underestimate his ability to f things up i feel like don't underestimate the democrats ability to learn precisely the wrong lessons from loss yeah they can move further to the left yeah i don't know i mean these are the things you hear said publicly all the time that why don't democrat don't democrats know they would just win if they move further to the left this is the thing people say this all the time i don't know are there i think they tend to purge themselves

of the smartest analysts, like David Shore. When he pointed out all this data, riots hurt us. They basically purged him. By sliming him a little bit with a supposedly racist opinion, right? Isn't that what happened? Yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, by imputing that he was being racist, yes. Which is the fashion of the time. He was like a very respected Democrat strategist, wonk, Nate Silver type. And they purged themselves of the smartest analysts by being so terrible to their

own, you know, insofar as they come to any conclusion that isn't intersectional. They demand purity. Trump demands purity, but the right doesn't necessarily. Any right-wing publication, you don't know what you...

You open up a National Review or Dispatch, whatever it is, you actually wonder, I wonder what they're going to say about this. And they'll be contradicting opinions and even arguments between writers. You open up a left-wing publication, it's almost a waste of your time. You know exactly what it's going to say.

You don't need to. Yeah, we had Uri Berliner on recently. Oh, NPR, that's right. Ariel, are you going to be voting? Are you also taking the easy way out? I don't know if it's the easy way out. She votes for her husband, tells her. Yeah, right. Oh, we have to go. Go ahead. Who are you going to the easy way out? I don't know if it's the easy way out. She votes for her husband, tells her. Yeah, right.

Oh, we have to go. Go ahead. Who are you going to vote for, Periel? I've never not voted, but I don't think I can do it. Is this because you're Jewish? I don't know. I mean, I think I would feel this way even if I weren't Jewish. Really?

That's because... But the fact that Periel's even... Yeah, that's huge. Yeah,'s not feeling strongly enough about kamala to vote for kamala it's a big pre-october 7th kamala harris was like my dream candidate oh brother she embodied everything like i like in the world she's getting ahead based on your looks rather than your... For starters. No, really.

I mean, just like a face value, Kamala versus Donald Trump pre-October 7th is a complete no-brainer to me. Yeah. All right. All right, well, do we have final predictions? Since people aren't voting, can they at least predict? Let's do final predictions. I was feeling like this fascism thing

was having an effective Pavlovian effect on people because it was kind of affecting me and I thought that things were turning in her favor. And then when Coleman's favorite comedian, Tony Huxliff, made the joke

about the garbage. I'm like, oh, this is not going to be good. Although I should say that a number of Puerto Ricans I've spoken to weren't bothered by the joke about the garbage. I'm like, oh, this is not going to be good. Although I should say that a number of Puerto Ricans I've spoken to weren't bothered by the joke. Now, Coleman's part Puerto Rican? Coleman was bothered by the joke. Well, if a joke is funny, it can be as offensive as possible. It doesn't matter.

Once it's not funny, suddenly you feel all the offense. Yeah, yeah. But now, again, things have taken a turn in the other direction now because Biden's remark was just unbelievably terrible. It it it whether it was fair or not to what he meant, it sucked a lot of the venom out of the the entire. I think it reflects worse on Kamala than Tony Hinchcliffe reflects Trump because he's a random comic that they shouldn't have let. But that's Biden,

you know? So it's more connected to Kamala in a way. Yeah. And very, it will resonate with an already sore spot with the country, which is this deplorable thing, right? It's just deplorables 2.0.

So it's opening a wound that was already there. It's so stupid. And they really do look down on the deplorables. It's, it's really, it's awful. and they really do look down on the deplorables it's it's really it's awful this you know Coleman always accuses me of being having too much uh sympathy for the masses I mean we could do a whole other podcast about some of this stuff but I really have a lot of

sympathy for the masses I think the story of the deplorables of over the last 40 years is a story of them being intruded upon by the New York Jews, right? By us, by the elites saying, you should do this differently. You should do that differently. We don't like you with your 10 commandments and your guns are a problem. And, you know, just like, and judging them.

And I totally identify with their feeling. Like, how can you, just on the Ten Commandments, this will be the last thing I'm going to say, because they want the Ten Commandments up in their classrooms. Oh, this is a violation of church and state. I guess it is. But for people who view their morality through the Ten Commandments, and as a matter of fact,

can't even understand what morality is without the notion of God. Like it's wrong because it's wrong. No, it's wrong because God says it's wrong. Otherwise you're just making it up. So we want to teach our kids right from wrong through this lesson. While you guys up in New York, you had your total religion too, full of indoctrination and, and, and precepts and, and purity, except you don't total religion too, full of indoctrination and, and, and precepts and, and purity, except you don't talk about it in terms of God.

So you're free to indoctrinate all your kids, however you want. And, but we, you know, we've, and we've been doing this for 200 years. Now you want to come in and tromp into our classroom. It's like Andrew Sullivan was very smart after the gay marriage won and after the various cases. He says, if someone doesn't want to bake a birthday cake, let them not bake a birthday cake. Remember, he said, you don't need to win every single battle. That's the way I feel about the deplorables. We in the non-deplorable world feel like we have to go in there and drive a stake through every single

thing that they do, which we don't like. And what did we accomplish? We didn't change their beliefs about much. We tore the country apart. That's the way I feel about it. Let them frigging have their 10 commandments. We will survive it. You know, you have to draw a line somewhere. CNN has a debate and they have to say, well, you can't get in the debate unless you're. You know, you have to draw a line somewhere. CNN has a debate and they have to say, well, you can't get in the debate unless you're, you know, have more than 5%. That's not fair. These people get unrepresented, are not represented. I know, but you have to draw a line somewhere. And we don't have to draw the line where we're drawing it. We can let them do the things that they've always done and live their lives the way they've always lived their lives. That's what,

I mean. There's a lot more to this. I'm trying to really condense it. But I really feel for them. And they know where they're not wanted. And the main reason they vote for Trump is because he loves them. Or he people say he doesn't love anybody. He doesn't judge them at the very least.

He definitely doesn't look down on them. He'll dress up as a garbage man. You know, he definitely doesn't look. down on them. He'll dress up as a garbage man. If Obama dressed up as a garbage man, people would assume he's making fun of garbage men even if he wasn't. You couldn't. He would have to be. When I went to that Trump rally, I didn't

say it on this show, but I got invited to one with a journalist. I thought these were just really nice people. They closed their eyes and pray to Jesus. Very fine people. Well, they were not like me, many of them. There were black people and Indian people there. But, you know, when somebody says,

let's have a moment of silence, and I looked at them and I saw how they were taking that moment of silence seriously, and really, maybe they were thinking about porn, but it looked like they were taking it seriously. I realized that's not me. And I said, well, I wish I could have that faith, you know? Like, well, I would be happy to live in their neighborhood.

Do you think that they would be happy to have you in their neighborhood? Well, yeah. And I think that when the BLM riots were happening and we were scared, they would be on my side. They'd be on the side of, yeah, the police should make sure that the rioters don't tear down businesses and loot and pillage. And they'd be on the side of the people who say, yeah, they shouldn't be turning the blind eye, all this shoplifting. On any number of issues, they're simple-minded, right?

Don't hand me all these fancy arguments. It's wrong. You don't loot. You don't loot. You don't rob. You don't shoplift. But they disagree with us on abortion. All right. What can I do about it?

Anyway. So what's your prediction? I think Trump, my prediction is I'm beginning to think, again, that Trump's going to win. Go ahead. Yeah, that's probably my prediction too, but I don't know. We didn't talk about my Puerto Rico piece. I published this two days ago at the Free Press that Democrats, nobody cares, of course, because it's Puerto Rico. Put this in the show notes.

Democrats rigged the upcoming status referendum in Puerto Rico so that the statehood option is guaranteed to win by taking away one of the most popular choices, which is to remain a commonwealth. And it's astounding to me that it's been done openly and with this justification of the status quo is colonial, so we can only present Puerto Ricans with non-colonial options. And half the island is going to boycott it because a lot of them prefer the status quo for various reasons. But they've literally taken an option off the ballot because they want the competition to win because it benefits them. They want to be able to say if they ever get both houses of Congress and eliminate the filibuster, look, the Puerto Rican people have voted for statehood. We can make Puerto Rico state and they think it's

going to be two extra Democrat senators, and obviously it's pure self-interest, and it's pure treachery, really. And it's shameful, and it was called for by Democrats in the House. Can you conclude from that, or does that indicate to you that everything they do, including their stance on immigration, in some ways motivated by the smell of new votes? You said yesterday you didn't believe that. No, I don't think it's the same for a couple reasons. In Puerto Rico, the media simply does not care or shine a light about anything happening in Puerto Rico. So literally, they have done this, what I'm talking about, they've done this openly. I didn't do any reporting. I didn't have to uncover some conspiracy. It's just that nobody in the media cares. So they knew that they can get away with something this blatant when it's, if it's happening. That doesn't

mean they're doing things like that on the mainland, perhaps. But I think it's not that the Democrats' immigration position is motivated by a desire to like a conspiracy to get more votes. But I think the fact that they assume those votes will net out in their favor, it certainly demotivates them to clean up the border. In other words, if you don't have a strong motivation to fix the issue, you kind of know the issue might benefit your party in the long run. That's a disincentive from cleaning it up. That doesn't mean they're engineering the crisis, if that makes sense. Yeah, I don't think they're engineering the crisis.

If they were sure that these Mexican immigrants were all going to vote Republican, that would give them a kick in the ass a little bit to take the border more seriously, is my point. I think they were sure until recently that the immigration would net them new voters. If not, that there might never be an amnesty, but these people have children, and the children eventually become voters. There was no downside politically. Politicians consider

the politics of every single position they take, as they have to. That's their careers. So they seldom take a position that they think will lead to them losing elections. Right. And I think that goes for Republicans, too. If they knew all these new voters were going to be like Cuban Republicans, they might soften a bit on the whole issue. But then it's up to us as voters, like voter ID. Yeah, I am pretty sure,

at least when it first came on the national scene, that Republicans did in their evil hearts think that voter ID, forcing people to have an ID, would be good for Republican votes. But that doesn't make them wrong that it's the correct policy. Ultimately, all of these politicians are opportunists and kind of scummy, most of them.

I think that's a sad realization. And they don't really have principles. No, very few do. That they're unwilling to violate for self-interest. All right. Periel already left. I guess she has somewhere to go. The end of race politics,

arguments for a colorblind America, as Coleman used his book. And regular columns in the free press. Regular columns in the free press. And his podcast, Conversations with Coleman. Good podcast tonight? This one? Yeah.

Dan? Yeah, I thought so. And my prediction is Trump. Your prediction is Trump? I'm suspicious, though. Danny? But what the hell do I know? I'm just basing it on everybody else.

My prediction is Kanye. Good night, everybody.