The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Cringe Factor

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

Kyle Smith is critic at large for National Review and for 12 years was a film critic and columnist for The New York Post.

Welcome to live from the table the official podcast for New York's world-famous comedy cellar. I'm here with the owner of the comedy cellar, Noam Dorman. I'm Perrie Lashon-Pran, the producer, and although it didn't start that way, on-air personality. And our very special guest, Kyle Smith, who's a critic at large for National Review and for 12 years was a film critic and columnist for the New York Post and comedian

and actor. I'm in the distressed debt game currently in addition to... He's a real estate mogul. I'm nowhere near a mogul. I was going to say that. And real estate mogul. I'm nowhere near a mogul. I was going to say that. And real estate mogul. Are you open about your real estate stuff?

I'm more open about it because I don't hit the road like I used to. If I asked you how much money in real estate do you own, would you be willing to say that? I'm not really open about real estate stuff in general. That's more of a specific financial picture. How many square feet of New York property do you own? In this case, 25,000, but I only 40% of that and then another 4,500. But square feet is not representative of a number. You could own

100,000 square feet of heavily stabilized real estate with a high tax base and you're talking about a $2 million net worth which wouldn't buy you an apartment. Let's move on with cars. So you're much more than a $2 million net worth. Much more than a $2 million net worth. Much more than a $2 million, yes. But not...

Dove Davidoff. But certainly south of 10. Pretty good, Dove. Well south of 10, yes. So Kyle Smith is here. I read you in the National Review, and you first came on my radar. I once wrote you, but you didn't write me back.

I get so much fan mail. It was something about Louis C.K., but you were on the side of the people against the people who were trying to cancel Louis C.K. at the time, I believe. Yeah, I'm a little frustrated that there seems to be no sentence, no judge. I mean, he wasn't convicted of any crime.

He said he lost, he said he lost $25 million for the contract or whatever and he was publicly humiliated. So I feel like he has paid a price for what he did. So I personally want to hear what he has to say and I really hate that I can't watch Louie anymore. I was halfway through watching Louie

and you can't find it anymore. You can't? You can buy it on Amazon, I believe. You have to buy the DVD, I think. Dolph can lend you. I don't find it anymore. You can't? You can buy it on Amazon, I believe. You have to buy the DVD, I think. A dove can lend you. I don't have the DVD. No, I meant the money. Oh, yeah, of course.

Anytime. I get why people say I never want anything to do with that guy again, but why can't I listen to his comedy? I saw his last special he did on his own website and it was really good. He did address the misdeeds, which he doesn't deny them. I feel like he's paid a sufficient price in any way.

I want to hear what he has to say. And if you don't want to hear what he has to say, then don't listen to his talk. Absolutely. So that's why, by the way, he's coming down tonight if you want to see him. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm serious. He's closing the – I can say it now because this won't be on. He's closing the 8 o'clock show, so he'll probably be on like 9, 15.

I want to go down too. No, no, no. So if you want to hang out, have dinner or something, and see Louis be my guest. I'd love to. He does from time to time cancel, but I would know. So that's when you came over. And then all of a sudden, you write all this stuff for National Review.

And it's interesting to me, National Review, which is like, it was William... Yeah, yeah, National Review. National Review is like the conservative Bible was started by William F. Buckley. I'm very familiar with William F. Buckley. Thank you. But since he died, it does seem to be taken over by a different, a hipper group of conservatives, right? Like, you're much more socially liberal,

and most of the guys are, than Buckley was at the time, right? It's changed. Yeah, Buckley was a man who was born in, what, 1930 or something like that? I mean, it has evolved over the years like everything else. I think it was kind of a stodgy magazine as recently as the 1990s. It was very Catholic. It's not really a Catholic magazine anymore.

It sort of used to be, if they covered culture, it would be like classical music and string quartets and PBS and stuff like that. There's a lot of pop culture that has political ramifications, even if the ramifications are just like, should we be allowed to hear this or not? So I think the way the magazine has, or the website, it's mainly a website now. I mean, we get like 20 million hits on our website in a given month. And, you know, we're just, we can't allow

sort of the dominant cultural mainstream, which is mostly liberals. You know, Hollywood's mostly liberals, and most people who work at magazines and newspapers are liberals. They can't just allow them to have the playing field to themselves. And we shouldn't just say, we have nothing to say about this and we're only going to watch, you know.

You're a hero. You're fighting the good fight. I think. What does it say about this and we're only going to watch, you know, you're a hero. You're fighting the good fight, I think. What does it say about, just currently, what does it say about how confident conservatives ought to feel that over time, the various, especially social issues that, you know, conservatives were so against, and then you look back on it 20 years later and say, you know, what were they so excited about? Actually, they lost that fight and actually everything is okay. And actually we wouldn't even want to go back to what they wanted 20 years ago. Yeah. I mean, you've seen a lot of that,

but in particular when it comes to like gay rights, gay relationships, gay acceptance, like in the eighties, even as recent as the nineties, as it'd be like gay relationships on TV, a lot of conservatives would be like, Oh, that's immoral or it's, or it's icky or whatever. But you know, Gen X, we kind of, we all grew up knowing gay people and knowing they're okay and they were our roommates in college. And we kind of have cast off as a society, even I think the conservative half of society, sort of cast off this kind of silly disregard or disrespect for gays. Well, and marijuana laws, right?

Although Buckley was not anti-marijuana. We actually have a long record of being pro-legalization. He had a pretty libertarian stance on drugs in general. My longtime boss, Charlie Cook, said all drugs should be legal, including heroin. My father used to say that about heroin. I have trouble with that. But, you know, there is something.

We're just on it. So there was this recent issue. You want to say something? No, no, yeah. Only just the word liberal. It's funny. I was listening to a statistician who was being interviewed on Bill Maher who said only 25% of Democrats describe themselves as liberal, which would give you a, what, that would, I mean, of the entire voting population of half and half. I mean, you're talking about a, not a small number, but a relatively small number of people to self-describe as liberals, even though half the country would describe themselves as Democrats.

It's 25% of Democrats, so it's one-eighth of the country's liberals? One-eighth, which made me feel good. I'll show you the math after. Go ahead. And Louis said something to me outside when I was asking him about the mayoral race. And he said, you know, wokesters don't vote. They like to yell. There are fewer of them than they would have you think.

And they don't vote. And I thought that at least made me feel more optimistic about what's possible. And Louis said it, so it must be true. No, no, no. I thought it was an observation that added up. Yeah, that's interesting. People who don't vote really shouldn't be so loud about their political... I thought it was an observation that added up. Yeah, that's interesting.

People who don't vote really shouldn't be so loud about their political... I don't vote. Do you vote? Usually, yeah, but I never vote for the winner, though. The only winner I've ever voted for in a presidential race is George W. Bush. There you go. So, like, there was this issue where this... We talked about it two weeks ago. This trans woman came into the spa with her penis showing. And you saw that, right?

Her penis. And the black woman, you know, went off on her. It was in the news. And I, you know, began to question myself. All of the things I'm talking about. I was like, well, you know, just because I have a visceral reaction to it doesn't make it right. And I thought about how people had a visceral reaction to blacks drinking from water fountains. People had a visceral reaction to seeing gay men kiss on TV. You know, all these things.

And the visceral reaction was sincere and serious, right? And it proved to be not a sufficient reason to resist these things. So I began to question, like, what is really the, like, if my daughter were to see this trans woman's penis in a spa, other than purely my visceral reflexive reaction that this is horrible, that doesn't mean, like, maybe it's the same. Is it possible that 20 years from now I'll be like, we used to be so concerned about, what do you think about that?

You understand my point. It seems impossible, but, you know. So if Louisa Kay had said, I'm a woman, and then he got his dick out, that wouldn't be right. Yes, exactly. Well, is it possible that certain people have archaic views of gender? Is that possible?

I'll start with that. No, but it's also inextricably linked to our experience of Judeo, our reflexive attitudes around nudity in this country as distinct from Europe. And I think a penis or a vagina in general, if somebody were to see it, whether or not it's attached to And I think a penis or a vagina in general, if somebody were to see it, whether or not it's attached to a male or a female or a trans,

would be less reflexive. So I, go ahead. Okay, should women have the right to have female-only spaces at all? Can they at any point in their lives and careers say, you know, I just don't want male genitalia in this area, regardless of whether you call it. It's called Saudi Arabia.

I can go there. Yeah, I think they should. But I just, I, you know, I just was second guessing my, whether I actually had a logical reason for this or it was just excellent reflection, but it can be that just your innate reaction is accurate. That just on a human level, it's, it's sexualizing and whatever it is. Like, I'm not, I'mizing and whatever it is. I'm not advocating trans penises

in this spot. No, you're questioning whether or not your experience followed a similar trajectory from what Republicans started as 20 years ago and where they're represented at today socially. But you were against it. But no, I totally amended my position.

I was thinking out loud. You want a penis in the hot tub? In the sauna? No, no, no. Let me say that I don't think that children need to be exposed to naked adults. Like, full stop. I don't think it is anything more than that. No.

Okay, let's not get sidetracked. So anyway, it was just, and you know, you're probably about my age. Probably a little younger. We've seen, like, one of the things that's really disappointed me as I got older is that basically

nobody has ever been right. Like, on any issue. They've been telling everything I read in the National Review and the Weekly Standard or in the New Republic. Like nobody really ever gets much right. The economy has never once behaved the way they said it would. The budget being balanced, not balanced, taxes going up, taxes going down.

And I just become disillusioned. And it's actually dovetails with COVID, with experts in general. Do you have a reaction to all that? Wow. So you're questioning whether truth exists or not? Whether we can ascertain. There's a lot of things we can't know because it's just too complicated. Like, say taxes go up by a small amount and revenue goes up more.

I mean, it might be exogenous factor. Maybe productivity goes up more because of Chinese arguing and forgetting all the times you're wrong and just crashing through and predicting the future with absolute fearlessness. Which is why progressivism can be so dangerous, because if you are just suggesting an alternate model and you have not closely considered the externalities, am I right, Kyle? As a function of that which is the unintended consequences of a policy are described by economists as externalities. It's an important word, Noam. I've heard the word.

Yeah. And let me add another layer to that, and you'll probably agree with this. When Trump came on the scene and many of these conservatives became diehard anti-Trumpers, they even abandoned all those principles and opinions they used. All of a sudden, you saw people like Bill Kristol

who stood for all these bedrock principles of conservatism. Max Boot, all of them. All of a sudden, they kind of gave up and became soft on all these things. But doesn't that say more about politics than conservatism in general? Well, but it also says something about how, like they didn't get soft on two plus two equals four.

Like they just began to see things differently. Yeah. It was squishy. Like these people, I trusted them. They really believed this stuff. They couldn't be squishy on that, but Max, they're squishy on pulling out of Afghanistan now. It's just like they go with the wind like everything

else goes with the wind. Peer pressure is stronger than logic. It's very disappointing. I don't know. Yeah, you can't be very principled if the existence of one person just short-circuits your brain and you no longer stick to anything you believed. The whole 60 years you're writing about politics and suddenly you're arguing the exact opposite because Donald Trump fried your brain. I think we've done a good

job in National Review at not going crazy either way. We're not crazy pro-Trump. We're not crazy anti-Trump. We have some freelancers who are very pro-Trump, like Victor Davis Hanson and Conrad Black. So we've printed their points of view. A lot of people who work in National Review are very skeptical of Trump, and we've printed their points of view. And I think we've managed to maintain our sanity when basically everyone in the country has gone crazy one way or the other. I think you guys have been great, actually, in National Review. The one thing everybody missed... I mean, Trump was this close, right?

On January 5th or even before that, but he was this close to leaving the White House proving everybody wrong about him. Every single horrible prediction about Trump had failed, famously failed. And then he wouldn't concede the election. I never saw that. I mean, I thought he would resist it for a week or two, but I thought he would eventually concede it, right? Did you think that? Yeah, I mean, that was just a disgrace. He could have, yeah, as of January 5th,

he could have walked away with his head held high and said, I barely lost. He also said I was going to lose by 10 points, but I barely lost, and I have excellent cause to come back. But what he did on January 6th was just so juvenile and so insane that I think a lot of reasonable people who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt would no longer give him any benefit of the doubt. I personally hope we never see him in American politics again.

I'd like to see a fresh face representing the party. I agree. Do you think he believes it? Yeah, I think he, yeah. He kind of, I think he's talked himself into thinking he's going to be reinstated. I mean, he doesn't think along normal lines. Yeah, I mean, the guy has like a total personality disorder.

Like, you can't take anything that he thinks, I mean, it's not logical. He's like a classic narcissist. And he surrounds himself with yes men and some of them have academic pedigrees and stuff and he just only wants to hear the one answer and he will just keep burning through personnel until he gets the person

who's going to give him the answer he wants, regardless of whether it's at all attached to reality. Do you think Rudy really believes it? Yeah, I think Rudy kind of went crazy. I think he's in that category of people who used to be fine, and then Trump, yeah, he became a crazy Trumper. I mean, that scene where the hair dye was melting off his skull

as he was blaming Hugo Chavez or whatever. Total insanity. And I loved Rudy. He did a lot for the city, and he and Bloomberg together kind of put the city back on the right course. They sure did. 20 years of declining crime, and the economy boomed, and the city filled up with all these sex in the city girls who would have been afraid to live here in the 80s.

Yeah. The city was just firing on all cylinders, and now it's kind of slipped back a little bit. I don't think it's a total disaster yet, but, you know, a lot of things are going in the wrong direction. Do you feel like this was, this election in New York City, if you're listening outside of New York City, was a referendum on progressive policies not represented? I should say the people sort of communicating,

writing about perpetuating the most progressive policies, were shown to have not represented the communities they claimed to represent, which were the black and brown communities, because they voted for the most conservative candidate in the lineup, which was Adams. In the Bronx, I think he was outbid, out won. He was outvoting, what's the super progressive candidate? By a large margin. Maya Wiley, yeah.

Yeah, Maya Wiley. So he's near like 48 to 17 in the Bronx. Yeah, and what does that say? Is that a referendum on we don't want your style of progressive? And what's great is he also did great in Staten Island, which is a famous home for white middle class and working class people. So it was a coalition of white people and black people of the working and middle classes against the sort of champagne socialists who were going for Maya Wiley.

And you could see on the map, because it was a very good map that ran in the New York Times, of where everybody's strength was. Catherine Garcia was endorsed by the New York Times. So where all the New York Times readers live, that's where she did well. And Maya Wiley did well in this little strip in Brooklyn where all the Oberlin graduates were. Well, look, I mean, and then I want to talk about... It's a referendum on something in New York City.

Champagne socialist. I don't know anything about Eric Adams. I hear that he might be corrupt and I used to not like his columns in the Post when he used to write. But on paper, the idea of a black pro-cop mayor, one who is not naive about any aspect, he's not naive about how the cops treat black

people. He's also not naive about- About the value of stop and frisk, when he said stop questioning. He also doesn't think we're going to call out mediators to deal with violent crimes or whatever it is. So Nixon can go to China and a black mayor can really probably be great. I can't imagine that he has the competency that Bloomberg and Giuliani had. I can't imagine that's the case, no. He just doesn't seem to have that background that they do, but maybe that's not the most important thing right now in a mayor. Maybe he does actually have the most important thing,

which a New York City mayor would have, which is kind of being a moderate black guy. I think he's changed over the years, because you're right, in the 80s and 90s, he was kind of like the Al Sharpton of the police department. He was kind of like stirring up a lot of animus within the police department. It's sort of like the house radical in the cops. And now he's putting himself out there as completely the opposite.

Like, I'm the cop in the race. I'm Mr. Law and Order. I want to bring back stop and frisk, which isn't illegal anymore and was kind of discredited. He's like, I'm going to bring back a form of stop and frisk, which was sort of thrown out by judges. But is it this kind of discredited. He's like, I'm going to bring back a form of stop and frisk, which was sort of thrown out by judges. But is it this kind of I'm sorry.

But he's saying all the right things. He's saying we've got to get a handle on crime. We have to make the city welcoming to little kids, families, rich people. Rich people are the tax base of the city. That is what keeps New York from ever turning into Cleveland or Detroit, is we have all these rich people who choose to live here and they finance all the great stuff we have.

They finance everything from the welfare state to the opera. They have this massive amount of revenue that they get from Wall Street, and the last thing you want to do is chase the rich people out of town. I'm not sure where I was before, but everything you're saying seems to me to be representative of a kind of... What's the counter-argument of the ecosystem that Kyle just described facilitating a better city? I don't understand what the argument... If you don't make, if you don't treat this ecosystem in such a way that the money isn't driven out of town and that you don't embrace that which creates the probability of safety, how do you not sort of begin to? You're right, Doug, because the left.

Why is there a debate about that? The left destroys things. They destroy nations. They destroy nations. They destroy cities. Right? I mean, this is the... There's a lot of historical precedence from this all around the world.

It just seems so self-evident that... Yeah. We seem to be on the right side of history for a lot of other things. Well, I mean, I already gave full credit to the left being correct on certain social issues. Okay. But on other issues... On other issues, I mean, Cuba, I mean, it speaks for itself.

All right. So you wrote an article not long ago about the Babylon Bee. They got suspended by their, not constant contact, MailChimp. Now, this is doubly interesting. You remember a long time ago, we always used to hear that conservatives are just not funny. Conservatives, you know. Yeah, sure. Yeah, of course.

And all of a sudden, do you read the Babylon Beatle? You see there. No, I don't read. I don't know anything politically. This is why I'm good to have because I interface with people that know nothing. It's kind of an onion from the right. Is that a fair way to describe it? Yeah.

And it's hilarious. It's hilarious. So all of a fair way to describe it? Yeah. And it's hilarious. It's hilarious. So all of a sudden, conservatives can actually be funny. So what's your take on all that? And so I know they were also, I think they got reinstated, but they had mailed out

some very obvious satire about CNN with a washing machine. I don't know, but you can tell us. Yeah, so Babylon Bee ran this story. They're just perfectly made for the Twitter age because their jokes are just so punchy. So they had this joke about how CNN purchases industrial-sized washing machine to spin the news.

And Snopes, the fact-checking website, ran a fact-check on it. Did they actually buy a gigantic washing machine in which to spin the news? And the New York Times sort of picked up on this idea that what the Babylon Bee does is, quote, far-right misinformation. It's not far-right. They make fun of Donald Trump all the time. They're making fun of very obvious targets. They just happen to be the targets that the left has given up on. I mean, there's so much of comedy that there's this wide open space.

Like no one makes fun of Jim Acosta. The guy's ridiculous. CNN is ridiculous. Brian Stelter is ridiculous. These people deserve to be made fun of. And Babylon Bee and Greg Gutfeld and very few others are the ones who are actually bothering to make fun of them. And, you know, as you said before, it's like, oh, conservatives can't be funny. Well, when conservatives are funny,

they pretend we're not really funny. Like Babylon Bee has to be taken in earnest. We're going to pretend that this is misinformation rather than a joke, and we're just going to go joke blind. We're going to go joke deaf. You know, we cannot detect your comedy. Our comedy detectors no longer work

because you're not supporting our premises. But the flip side of that is you have this kind of throne sniffing comedy of Stephen Colbert, who's not funny at all. He's just like repackaging democratic party talking points into something that kind of looks like a joke. It kind of feels like a joke. It's not really funny and he doesn't get laughter. He gets clatter out of it. He just gets, uh, you know, people agreeing with him very loudly. And he's just just sort of signifying

that we're all on the same team. It's really boring. And you saw that Jon Stewart segment where he's actually taking the side of the Chinese government. Jon Stewart's is ridiculing the idea that COVID could not have originated in a lab. Of course, it could originate in the lab. They're studying infectious viruses and doing gain-of-function research. That's by far the most plausible explanation for where I came from. There's an outbreak of chocolate in Hershey Pesl. I don't think I've ever watched Colbert's current show. I used to find him very funny when he had the Comedy Central show, when he'd do those interviews.

I mean, he's quite talented. But probably if he just wouldn't get on his soapbox, he would still be that funny. Well, I mean, his soapbox, quote unquote, is part of what makes him interesting to certain... Do you watch that show? Sometimes, but I'm very fond of Colbert. I think he's really smart and funny.

I mean, I appreciate what Kyle's saying, and I don't actually disagree with him, but I do think Colbert is very funny. Fallon doesn't have a political bent, right? Fallon? I don't watch any of those. No, Fallon tries not to, but I don't watch any of them. I was just sort of examining the notion that, you know,

if conservatism can't be funny, which, of course, is ridiculous. Well, you know, there was that, like, Dennis Miller, remember? Yeah. He was hilarious as a stand-up comic. Yes, of course. But then he, and he became, and he was funny

on the O'Reilly Show, actually, when he'd do Wisecracks on the O'Reilly Show, but then he came out with some comedy special where it was like, really like full-blown

conservative humor. Yeah. And it was awful, I thought, so. Right, but that's not representative of whether or not conservatives can be funny.

I mean, funny is apart from any, you know, political leaning as much. I mean, it is apart from any, you know, political leaning as much. I mean, it seems like it's a chicken or the egg. If I'm pitching NBC on a show and there is a relatively left-leaning mandate, my show is not going to make it on the air in the first place. So you won't be able to cite my show as representative of why conservatives can be funny because it never made it to the air. If we say this, when we were kids, it was liberal. I

mean, it was conservatives who were likely to get offended at something at a comedy club. Yes. And now, double that. It's liberals who are likely to get offended. And when an audience is likely to get offended by six out of ten things you might want to talk about, they tend to also become less funny.

They sure do. And it's really flipped, right? It used to be you wouldn't want your conservative grandmother to go to the comedy club. She'd be offended by everything. You don't want your 20-year-old. You don't want your grandkids to go because, oh, dad, this is how, you know. My friend's son is like that.

That's funny. No, that's true. I think what's really interesting, though, is that the best comics are able to sort of do what you're saying, Kyle, which is to recognize the absurdity in all of it what you're saying, Kyle, which is to recognize that the absurdity in all of it, right? Like that, those observations that everybody's like a fucking hypocrite

and... Yeah, my take on Trump, the whole thing, I'm an independent, I'm conservative on some stuff, but I always got a bad feeling after Trump was done answering a question, even when I agreed with the answer. That was the point. It was like that was the needle that needed to be thread.

That was a good bit. And what's worse than being offended is they want to shut you down and de-platform you and call you far right and say you're misinformation and say, oh, you can't be on Facebook anymore because you're part of the whole misinformation ecosystem. I think Tucker Carlson's a funny guy. I mean, he's certainly funny for one of these news talking heads. He's funnier than Don Lemon or Anderson Cooper. Anybody's funnier than Don Lemon. I want to talk about Tucker Carlson. Go ahead. No, no, no.

Go ahead, Noam. So, Tucker Carlson. So, you're right. He can be funny. McCarthyism. That's funny. No, no. He was very funny at parties. It's not that well known. McCarthy was a card, baby.

Him and J. Edgar Hoover used to do the same. J. Edgar Hoover would dress up in a dress and it was a great bit. Kyle, do you feel like, again, I think perhaps if I had any value here, it was just my lack of knowledge being easily identifiable. That's usually my job. No, but I was thinking, in terms of McCarthyism, at what point have we reached that kind of level of sort of diminishing likelihood of free speech?

Yeah, and it's all coming from the left. Oh, yes, no doubt about it. I mean, they used to be against McCarthyism, and now it's like, well, we weren't against McCarthyism, it's just that the wrong people were. It's the wrong kind of McCarthyism. We're not against the principle of pushing people away from the microphone, but we just want different people pushed away from the microphone.

But it really is McCarthyism, right? I think it absolutely is. And the big difference is now that we just have realized in the last five years, like, holy shit, there's like four companies that control all the information we get. So if all four of them do like what they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story and say, no publicity is allowed, no one is allowed to talk about this, no one's allowed to know this information,

then they can very quickly chill whatever information they want from getting to you. And what you just said about Facebook too, I mean, Facebook is so corrupt. Like what they're canceling people. I mean, they have like the most shady politics of all. This is all of the I mean, it's all congressional hearings around monopolies are trying to, you know, deconstruct this. It's a pretty challenging issue because they provide a lot of value for very little money in some

cases. And so to describe them as monopolies, monopoly, anti-monopoly legislation was brought about to remove price controls consolidating in one company.

What Gmail has done, what Google has done, what Facebook has done, has actually made things so cheap that everyone has access to them. And so you're no longer protecting people from price controls. And so they're trying to determine where... People are getting their news.

I have some buzz. What is your thought on whether these private actors, like it's kind of the issues related to Trump's suit against all the tech companies. How do you think this should all be handled? I don't have an answer. I think the big question facing your society is what is the answer?

Because you cannot tell a private company what to say, and you also can't tell them what not to say. So you can't force Facebook to carry Donald Trump, or you can't force Twitter to carry Donald Trump. That would be stupid. That would be like the same thing as censorship. I find it really hypocritical that Louis Farrakhan doesn't seem to be banned from anything,

but Trump is banned from everything. But they are private companies, and they are entitled to make their own decisions about who they host and who they don't. But we're seeing consolidation with the Biden administration just saying last week that, oh, yeah, we're working closely with Facebook to decide who the bad actors are. We've identified 12 people, one of whom is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We've identified 12 people who we think are putting out most of the misinformation. We want to, you know, we obviously want to crack down on these 12 people. Well, it's not going to stop with 12 people.

And anyway, should a big provider of information, one of the big providers of information, be working with the federal government to kick people off their platform? That's pretty scary because that actually is censorship once the government is involved. Yeah, I mean, there's pretty scary because that actually is censorship once the government is involved. I talk about this on another show. There's two issues here, both of which I think are not easily dismissed. One is that when all these companies act in concert,

then it does become kind of a trust violation. And we saw this. People said, and I would say, well, if Twitter kicks Trump off, well, you know, start your own Twitter, right? Which was then all of a sudden we saw, well, you can't really start your own Twitter because Parler got kicked off. And all of a sudden, and it's not just one company won't run the Hunter Biden story. They all lock arms and none of them will run the Hunter Biden story. And at some point, this does seem like concerted action that might run afoul. And then the other thing

is what he said, what Kyle said, is that when a private company starts acting in a way they wouldn't otherwise, clearly they wouldn't, they have no reason to want to censor, except that they're trying to stay on the right side, on the correct side, on the good side of the people in power. And the people in power are making it very clear to these companies, listen, this is what we want you to do. Otherwise, there's some fucking regulation. Then it's not crazy to say that this is I think the term is jawboning, like that the government is getting these private companies to do what they can't actually do explicitly. And maybe the courts, I mean, if they could find the right to abortion in the penumbra of the 14th Amendment,

can they find the right to free expression in the penumbra of the First Amendment? What's a penumbra? I don't know. It's like it's undefined. You get my argument, right? It's not a crazy argument. No, it's not crazy. But what do you think, Hal? You're absolutely right. I do not know what the solution is. I'd be very eager to hear what we can do. I mean, people are saying maybe break up Facebook and force them to sell off Instagram. And maybe Google's forced to sell off YouTube and stuff like that.

I don't know if that would really help very much. I can certainly see that happening. I mean, AT&T was not as powerful as Google is today and when that was broken up in 84 or whatever. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if that happened in the next 10 years. I mean, there's a design flaw in the Constitution, obviously, because they never concede that anybody but the government would be so powerful that the world would have to reckon with it they know that was just not something ever conceived in the First Amendment if they

were writing the First Amendment anew today you would imagine they would word it differently somehow they would have to take stock of the new world and if they were really if it was still written by people who were dedicated to free speech, they might want to include the internet, right? And it's funny that in the 90s, the big promise of the internet was openness. It's very democratic.

Anyone can do it. You can, you know, a 12-year-old kid can become a star on YouTube or whatever and get millions of followers. And now we're seeing it's sort of the opposite of openness. It's like this very clubby, very elitist atmosphere where it's like four people. You get the idea that Zuckerberg and Bezos

and the Google guys are kind of sitting around a table going, okay, who do we ban this week? Should we ban the Hunter Bryant story? Yeah, okay, let's do that. It's become this oligopoly. It used to be like the promise of openness and freedom, and it's just completely gone the other direction. But I think, I don't know.

I think something will give, but go ahead. Yeah, perhaps, but to offer a more sort of optimistic perspective around Silicon Valley, I listened to some guys, including Chamath Palihapitaya. He sort of runs one of those space programs. He was an early Facebook executive, billionaire guy. And him and a few other guys, and they were all talking about how lots of tech entrepreneurs and companies are considering leaving Silicon Valley and how they have a big problem with general progressive politics

and the direction that Facebook and Google and the consolidation of power in those few hands. And so I don't see big tech necessarily as all on that bandwagon and that they've become the kind of, you know, some monolithic enemy. I think there's a lot of dissent within that community that I've been hearing, if that offers any solace.

Let's get to Tucker Carlson. Now, I have, I'm actually, this is not what I planned to say, but as I'm thinking about it, I'm actually going to fault the National Review here a little bit, even though I haven't read it. I think that somebody credible from the right needs to take on Tucker Carlson on the way he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth on this vaccine stuff. I don't know if you've watched a couple of those key monologues he did about the VAERS database. I mean, he was clearly scaring people out of taking the vaccine. And then when you looked into his facts, they were very, very shaky. And he similarly had another thing last week that I saw where he talked about this audit

of the votes in Georgia, I think it was. And he alluded to the fact the Atlanta Constitution newspaper agrees with him. So then I went and looked at the article and actually the article did agree with some of the facts, but the article said the net change in the vote was 27 votes. And the way he presented it, you would have thought that you were going to find the exact same opinion in the Atlanta paper as you. And I don't like it one bit. And, you know, and I think that I don't know how you feel about vaccines, but I think that, you know, to the extent that he's a provocateur. Well, to the extent that conservatives at the National Review don't believe that do believe that everybody should be taking these vaccines,

and I think most of them do. They need to call him out for this. I don't know where you feel about that. Well, you're sort of echoing a talking point that Bill Kristol came up with over the weekend. I'll take it back then. Bill Kristol said, well, I'm sure National Review is vaccine skeptical. Well, no, actually, we've been pumping for the vaccines the whole time. Yeah, I didn't think you were. One of our writers put out a long list of our pro-vaccine pieces.

Everyone at National Review has been vaccinated, I think, as far as I know. I got vaccinated as soon as I could, and I got my daughter vaccinated the day after she became eligible. And one of the pieces specifically was about Tucker Carlson like pushing back on some of his claims. I think in general, we kind of don't delve into the TV world that much because we kind of feel like all the TV people are entertainers. And we kind of assume they're all kind of just kind of jazzing things up to get a rise out of their audience. And if we kind of started back checking the TV entertainers, we kind of, we never have room for anything else. But we have pushed back on him at least once with Pete saying, no, he's wrong about this. But I think this is unprecedented. First of all, he's an entertainer, but he's also very powerful as an opinion shaper.

It's outrageous. And it's an issue that's not like any other because people die from it. Yeah. And it's discrediting conservatism. And, you know, William Buckley famously, you know, pushed out the John Birchers and, you know, had kind of a civil war about anti-Semitism. This may be overblown,

but I feel this vaccination issue is just as serious. I mean, this has got to stop. And I really do believe a big part of the far right resistance to the vaccine is Tucker Carlson. That's just my gut. I don't have any data to show that. I don't know what you think about it. I don't know to what extent this one person is responsible. There's a lot of vaccine hesitancy out there. It's, I think something like 34% of black Americans have gotten the vaccine. There's vaccine hesitancy there. There's a lot of it in the rural areas and in the South. And a lot of these areas voted

for Trump. And I assume a lot of these areas are Fox News channel watchers. But on the other hand, he only has 3 million viewers out of 300 million people in this country. So it's, you know, 1% is watching him and and there's like 30%, 40% are reluctant to get the vaccine for whatever reason. There does need to be a concerted effort to get these people to realize that the vaccine is going to save you from COVID. And if you get COVID, it'll be very mild. So I do hope we can see more uptake of the vaccine. But to be fair, I think it's 4 million, whatever, but these views of his, they get emailed, they get retweeted,

they get Facebook, word of mouth. They're spread in that community. I mean, I bet you that a very, very big number of right wing people who are vaccine hesitant are aware of Tucker Carlson's views one way or another. Isn't Tucker Carlson vaccinated? He doesn't say. I mean, I would bet anything that he is vaccinated, that his family is vaccinated. You're probably right because he's a smart guy. No, but it's also, I think in order to work where he works and to...

No, Fox has not required everybody to... I don't think you're right. I actually don't think you're right. I think that they have like a system... We would know that. We wouldn't be asking Tucker Carlson whether he's vaccinated or not if we knew that everybody at Fox is vaccinated. But listen, there are sides of it,

which I am sympathetic to. You have a nine-year-old. The risk benefit of getting a nine-year-old vaccinated, I mean, I'm going to do it, but I don't think it's crazy for parents who don't want to vaccinate their nine-year-olds. I don't know, how do you feel about that? You must have thought about this. Yeah, I've seen people say that there is, you know, there's a very small risk from vaccination and there's an even smaller risk from COVID.

So you could definitely make the case that I don't think it's a no brainer that you want to get the vaccine. But I think most of us want to get the vaccine just because it's going to be required by schools and stuff like that. Fox News airs PSA telling viewers get the vaccine. This is from the Hill an hour ago. Fox. Yeah, I mean, Fox is not totally anti-vax, but Tucker Carlson really seems to be. I know, you know, this is nothing about they have that guy, Alex Berenson, all on all the time. I mean, this guy is is a fraud. I mean, you he's clearly if I had him on our, this guy is a fraud. I mean, he's clearly a fraud. I had him on our show.

He is a fraud. He was out there tweeting the Israeli numbers, essentially saying the vaccine wasn't going to work, that Israel was going to... All kinds of nonsense. Fox has changed, right? When O'Reilly had Dick Morris on, Dick Morris was saying that Romney

was going to win the election. And he was adamant about it. And then Romney got creamed, right? O'Reilly never had Dick Morris on again. That was it. You never saw. Because O'Reilly, hate him or not, had a certain amount of, like he was disillusioned.

Like, what the fuck has this guy Morris been telling me? And I think that even Roger Ailes, like he fired Glenn Beck when Glenn Beck was going crazy. There was a certain kind of and Charles Krauthammer, like I said this before, liberals always said that Fox News was crazy. Fox News was always a 10, right? But like Spinal Tap,

now Fox goes to 11 because actually looking back on it, Fox was always pretty okay. Now it actually is fucking nuts. But it's hard for the liberals to complain about it because as far as they tell us, it's always been like this. Now it's at 11, right? Yeah, yes.

Is this important? Go ahead. CNN Business updated on July 20th. Yes. Fox has quietly implemented its own version of a vaccine passport while its top personalities attack them. Tucker Carlson has called the idea of vaccine passports the medical equivalent of, quote unquote, but Fox Corporation has quietly implemented the concept. What does that mean, implemented? That you have to be vaccinated. Does it say that you have to be vaccinated? Yeah.

Or does it mean that maybe you have to get tested before? No, I think you have to be vaccinated. Well, if you can find somebody you have to vaccinate. All right. I'm not sure. So what else? What do you think about this CRT? It's terrific that you have a nine-year-old.

What do you think about this critical race theory being taught in schools? Well, first of all, before we say that, let's define it, because a lot of people hear the CRT acronym being thrown around. How are we defining it before Kyle answers that? How do you define it, Kyle?

I think the way it has become kind of received in the mainstream is the teaching that white people are presumptively racist or beneficiaries of white privilege or white supremacy, and black people are presumptively victims of racial animus profiling. What about the Chinese who had a brutal history here in this country and all of the other people that had a brutal history. I mean, weird does... No, no, none of that compares to the history of black people. I'm not saying it compares. I'm just saying it doesn't seem to be mentioned as also... Like if the...

The scary part of it for me is it provides a kind of narrative that feels destructive. It seems the productive aspect of it is acknowledge that black people had it tougher than everybody else in this country, while simultaneously not engaging in seeing one's community as victims in an infinite CRT sense. I mean, where does the CRT end? To me, among the things it means, it's like communism. What people claim when they show you the text, it's only so important to defining what it really means in real life, right? But to me, it's all those things which have replaced content of your character but they've really taken principles and reversed them where it

used to be it's wrong to judge somebody by the color of their skin now it's wrong to judge certain people by the color of their skin it's it's no longer about or a merit system that every everything everything now has to be seen through a racial lens. And yes, and that white people are presumptively born with some guilt. And it also, to me, it also extends- What about the white people that, you know, I grew up adjacent to some people that were missing teeth, that were functional literates at best. What about people that are growing up in West Virginia that have what they call, what, Mountain Dew Mouth or something,

that literally have all kinds of dental problems by the time they're teenagers? Nobody cares about them anymore. Yeah, in coal towns in West Virginia. There are millions of white people that grow up with zero education. But nobody's saying that those people aren't suffering. They're just not all... They're not addressed at all. So let's hold that, because that's an interesting issue.

So what do you feel about teaching critical race theory in the schools and all these bills that are trying to outlaw it? The bills have to be worded very carefully, because you don't want them to say, you know, no uncomfortable subjects can be

taught and no one is allowed to feel bad and things like that. But I think there are ways, I think the way the Texas bill is drafted is pretty close to the way you want the bill drafted, which is you're not teaching people they should feel bad on account of the color of their skin. Let's not teach that. Let's not teach people that they're just helpless victims of historical forces and that if you're black, you should carry a chip on your shoulder because you're never going to make it in this country. This is the least racist country, I think, either us or Canada, maybe, in the entire world.

If you travel to Europe or Australia or anyplace else, certainly the Asian countries are very non-... non welcoming of people are not of the race on chinese uh... are notably not friendly toward other races uh... you're better off being black in america the practically anywhere else on earth like maybe get that's not good news guys at the i'm saying this is not a racist country by, you know,

racism in this country is way less than you're going to see anywhere else. Yeah. You're saying so on a relative basis, it feels destructive to communicate to someone. If there's racism that you can point at, do so. But also don't tell yourself that working hard will not produce any results because of your skin. I don't think anybody's saying that. That's what CRT is saying.

Well, so this is what I think. I think that I'm hesitant about the arguments. I've heard Ben Shapiro say this one time, and I didn't like it. He said, you know, black people are better off here than any other country in the world. Well, that may be true. But that doesn't mean they have to accept it if they're not treated properly. So like, you know, there was a time you could say, well, Jews are treated better in here than... They're treated shitty everywhere. But having said that, the question

is what's true and what's not true. What I would like to see... But isn't the question also what's destructive and not? Can't we all acknowledge that race and racism are real without some commensurate narrative about this? I was listening to take it out of race. Go ahead, Noah. No, I'll tell you the answer. I don't know why no one has said this, maybe because it's dumb, but if I was writing a law now, I say, listen, all right, you want to teach about, for instance, a red

lining, you know, the, the fact that black people couldn't get loans. And many people think this is the reason that there's so little intergenerational wealth and black people. Fine. Uh, and if, but if you're going to teach about that, we also want you to teach Glenn Lowry's explanation that actually redlining is not the reason. In other words, teach whatever you want to the kids. But if you're going to teach that, then you have to teach it. Liberals are all about, they always talk about the fairness doctrine.

They miss the fairness doctrine in the media. I'm friends with Coleman Hughes, and Coleman Hughes has written some really powerful contrarian opinions about race. So fine, if you want to assign that essay to these kids to read, then it's absolutely okay. But you also have to assign

the best scholarly opinions on the other side. And then what you would see is instead of the conservatives being the ones we're trying to censor, you would see liberals freak out. They don't want anybody teaching anything by Glenn Lauer or Coleman Hughes about race in the public schools. What you're describing would be education as opposed to indoctrination. That's right.

So instead of saying, like, we don't want you teaching any of these things. Okay, fine. You want to teach that? We'll really teach. This is how you're going to teach it. You're going to teach it. Not that it's your opinion on it. Let's teach a balanced view about it. It's a wonderful idea.

Yeah, and that's what my law would say. And liberals would not go for it. Excuse me, you have a liberal sitting right here. I just said that's a very interesting idea. Well, yeah, that's because I don't see any other way to define it. Like, I would assign a kid to say, okay, I want you to go home and think about, imagine you were a white person living in the 18th century, born in the South.

Do you think you would have known that slavery was wrong? Well, let these kids fucking think about it. That's an excellent way to educate someone. Yeah. No, you're 100% right. But, you know, to remove it from... I've asked my kids to think about that. Like, you know, just like, oh my god, I never thought of that. To try to amend this consideration

because it really forces you to bring, to apply context to a situation as opposed to just knocking down a statue without any context. But I think it's like, of course I would know that that was wrong. The question is... But if you're running a business and your ability to support your children...

That would be ridiculous. Of course you would know that was wrong. Really? Yeah, do you think the Nazis knew it was wrong to kill Jews? They know it's wrong, they just don't care. Well, I don't... I mean, do you really think people didn't know it was wrong to be whipping people and lynching them

and stealing their children? I don't... I mean, unless you're like a fucking monster. Fair enough. People probably knew their cruelty was inherently wrong. This would be a good thing for children to think about. Yeah. I don't know.

You probably don't even want to touch this subject. It's too... Trying to get kids to understand a completely different culture and, you know, immensely more cruel, immensely more violent culture. I think that should be a central goal of education. Like here's how it was then imagine you're,

you're in this situation. Right. Uh, and, and by the way, I don't think you're necessarily better than anybody else because, uh, let's say you were a Souther who was against slavery in the 1830s.

That would have been a very rare position. You would have lost a lot of people. People really would have hated you. Would you really have stood up? Because everyone thinks, oh, I would have been super brave. I would have stood up against the forces of history. Well, would you? You know, Billy Wilder.

Of course not. And we've seen it throughout history again and again. But that, I mean, that's a very interesting question. But Billy Wilder, he didn't finish. Billy Wilder, after World War II, went over to do some documentary filmmaking in Central Europe, and he said, I never met a Nazi.

Everyone was against the Nazis. Every single person I met, oh, I was totally against the Nazis. No, you weren't. Right, of course. Right, I mean, and that's the I met, oh, I was totally against the Nazis. No, you weren't. Of course. Right. I mean, and that's the case today, too. I just want to say,

in this day and age, like, do you think that, do you think that when, whenever the cultures are that they have a female mutilation, general mutilation, female genital mutilation, do you think they know

they're doing wrong to their daughters when they do that? That's an interesting question. Well, you must think that. Yes, I do. Yeah. And I'm saying, no, they don't. Yeah, I think that they...

You totally miss... Or they disagree, maybe. They know that people think it's wrong. Cult people, you're giving way too much credit to what humans know naturally about what's right and wrong. And if you raise somebody as a certain baseline that this is okay, they believe it's okay. Think about what you can get people to believe about the origin of man through Christianity. I mean, think about what people internalize early on and what they'll believe in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and they really believe it. course palestinians said they send their children as suicide bombers i mean do you think they know that's wrong why would they

do it well i think that they believe that something greater comes of that i mean maybe that's the case for that was the argument for slavery too is that you could generate an economy or something i think knowing something is wrong and then having the being brave enough or having the courage to do something about it as kyle pointed out are two very different things i mean female genital mutilation i feel like is a different episode though it might be a different episode you know but along all of those crt lines and to remove the racial aspect of it it's it's uh there was a psychiatrist who was talking about designating PTSD vets that were returning from Iraq. And she said the worst thing you can do for a vet is to confirm the belief that they have a lot of reactivity around trauma before you designate them is to believe that they have the will and the ability to get back on their feet psychologically and to continue to engage.

And if they can't, then you would provide the designation that would allow for compensation. She said it would be very destructive for their minds to just confirm that there's nothing they can do about it. Do you think – We're going to have to wrap it up. Okay. I'm sorry. So you did movie reviews. I've gone back, and I like to do this. I invite everybody to do it.

I go back and look at the reviews and the times for classic movies like Godfather II or Rocky and see just how wrong... Like Vincent Canby just panned Godfather II. He called it a Frankenstein. And I think it was also Vincent Canby just panned Godfather 2 he called it a Frankenstein and he I think it was also Vincent Canby

which no one does in his spare time he just panned Rocky which is a little bit more forgivable but still he missed the

not Rocky but still he missed the timelessness of the movie so what are your favorite movies and what have you

gotten wrong or whatever you want to talk about in movies that's a fun question. Well, I wrote about Trainspotting the other day. I just can't get enough of Trainspotting. Why?

It had its 25th anniversary. I've seen that movie like more than 12 times. I think it gets at sort of the excitement of this completely crazy life that heroin addicts have. It makes you appreciate why they're doing it, and it makes you root for them to get out of it. But you're feeling, if you've ever been a person who's just not in control of yourself for one reason or another, whether it's sex or alcohol or anything else,

gambling, overspending, overshopping, you're going to be a shopaholic, I think a lot of people can identify with this crazy situation these heroin addicts are in because they just cannot control themselves. And the way this is put on the screen by Danny Boyle is like a series of darkly comic set pieces. It's just completely enthralling.

I think it's one of the three best movies of the 90s along with Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas. Nice. I very often cannot convince people to see the greatness in Trainspotting although they acknowledge the other two are great. I have to watch it. Are you a Godfather man? Oh sure, yeah. I like Godfather 3 too. Godfather 3 is not bad.

Although the new version of it was basically indistinguishable from the old one, right? I didn't see the whole new cut right? I didn't see the whole, the new cut. But I thought the old cut had some problems with it, but I think people were overly focused on Sofia Coppola being not that great. I don't think she ruined the movie at all,

but I think people are just obsessed with the idea that, oh, this guy put his own daughter in the movie. Well, she was the only person he could get on short notice after Winona Ryder dropped out. I don't really blame him. I don't think she ruins the movie. If you didn't know she was the director's daughter,

you'd just think, well, that actress isn't very good. But it wouldn't ruin it for her. So my problem with Godfather 3 is that Al Pacino doesn't seem like slightly older Michael to me. He seems like the scent of a woman. Right.

In the Godfather. He just doesn't seem to be able to do the controlled acting anymore. At least he did. He was good in Donnie Brasco, actually. That was the last time I saw him. But in the Godfather 3, he just didn't seem to be able to do the controlled acting anymore. At least he did. He was good in Donnie Brasco, actually. That was the last time I saw him. But in The Godfather 3, he just didn't seem like the same guy. I just think it's got that great King Lear ending where it's like King Lear holding Cordelia,

the one good daughter, in his arms and just kind of roaring at his fate. And it's like the worst possible thing that could happen to this horrible human being is that his daughter would get killed. That was powerful. Yeah. Like you had to sit through the whole movie to get it. You had to earn it. Spoiler.

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I could watch The Godfather. I could literally go home and watch it every night. I don't know what it is. All right. Mr. Smith, it was a pleasure to meet you. We kind of sidetracked on other stuff, but I read your stuff all the time. I think you're the most entertaining

writer at the National Review and you also have columns in the Post now and do you have any books? I wrote two novels one was called Love Monkey and the other was called A Christmas Caroline those were back in the early 2000s alright

I hope you'll be a friend of the place and come around I'm going to try to if you want to hang out to see Louie now sure yeah I do I'm a huge fan and Dove I don't know are you on that show too I'm on it at 8.30 so yeah you're probably going right before him okay so

thank you thank you very much sir thank you good night everybody podcast.com podcast.com. Podcast at commissile.com.