The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The Inauguration!

Episode Date: January 23, 2021

Nick Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital, a words columnist at the Washington Examiner Magazine, a book reviewer, and a writer based in New York. He’s currently working on a book about the history of Trolling. Neko White is a stand up comic. His new special is called DARK OUT.

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of New York's world-famous comedy cellar, coming at you on the SiriusXM 99 Raw Dog and Laugh Button Podcast Network. Dan Natterman here, still in lockdown after all these months with Noam Dorman, owner of the world-famous comedy cellar, soon to be reopened, we when we think and we believe perriel ashenbrand is with us she is the producer of the show and we have with us this week nico white is a comedy cellar regular he's got a special out called dark out we'll talk about that and what a what a day well it's a officially as of noon eastern time today we have a a new president, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the 46th president of the United States, sworn in today, the 20th of January, as we record this.

Noam, I assumed you watched, or maybe you didn't watch. I assume too much sometimes with you. I watched a little bit. I watched his speech. You know, I didn't watch much more than that. You know, I have all these kids. We had school today and all that. But I watched the speech. It was a pretty good speech, right? Yeah. Yeah, I thought so. I thought it was more or less a pretty good speech. I was just, I'm always nervous when he talks that he's going to forget a word or I don't feel confident, you know.

And I'm always hoping that he doesn't say anything that betrays a cognitive deficiency. I don't think he necessarily has one, but I'm always worried that he will say something dementia-esque. Yeah.

I can watch him in motion, man. He really does remind me of a lot of the older people in my family. I kind of look, I look at him whenever he's in motion, like he's a grandparent. So when he went over to run and give people the fist bumps, I was really in my crib, like, yo, please stop. Do not let him keep moving like that.

Cause if he tips over, it's, we're done for. I suppose, did you see the shot when he was walking down the stairs yes pretty good pretty good but frightening man it's frightening i thought he was all right i think i mean the speech was pretty good i i didn't notice and i noticed this with trump sometimes too he seemed in the last third of the speech to kind of run out of energy. Did you notice that? He started talking.

Yeah. I guess that's age. Or the remainder of COVID as well. Yeah. So that's it. You know, we have a new president, Trump is gone. He's gonna suck a lot of the oxygen out of a lot of things now, it'll be interesting to see what happens to this, what happens to CNN,

what happens to Colbert, what happens to MSNBC, what happens to some people's Twitter feeds. Like, you know, it's been all outrage 24-7 now for a lot of people. It's made a lot of careers. People are making a living on that. I'm curious to see, you know, what the future holds. A lot of people have professed to be quite relieved and happy. I'm sure the happiness won't last long. Human nature being what it is.

We were never, we, you know, we go right back to our old, our mood is generally what it is. And we, but, but Perry, how do you feel as a, as a Trump hater, as an, as a never Trumper, I guess. I feel really relieved to be honest with you i just feel like you know the idea that you're not constantly on edge that something totally psychotic could happen is um really nice yeah well then you should have somebody for your husband. Ariel, you look like you just got, got up from the first nap. You've taken a long time. I did. I took a shower. I feel, you know, I, you know, I was in a really wrong relationship before my husband. And when we broke up, I didn't't realize how like when I finally broke up with

him I didn't realize how relieved I really was like when I moved into my apartment by myself and I had my first night there it's almost like you don't realize what kind of trauma you're holding until you're out of it it kind of felt the same way today. And that makes me happy, man. I'm happy to see everybody else be so excited. Well, I'm no less on edge than I was when Trump was in office. Because, you know, what made me on edge was the division in this country that still exists. And it's not going anywhere. And so I don't see too much reason to rejoice.

And I guess that's it. And I'm more concerned about this COVID. And that's obviously, Biden's in office. All of a sudden, people aren't going to stop dying of COVID. And I don't think that he's going to do too much better than Trump did, maybe a little bit. We have the vaccine. So hopefully, that a little bit. We have the vaccine, so hopefully, you know, that's the solution. It's weird, man.

Because even when I watch it, when I watch him go into the building and I watch Sanders be there, if COVID is airborne, I'm like, there's no way they cleaned all that shit up a couple weeks ago, fam. And if you remember when Trump was in there, what was the infection rate in the White House? High. High.

I don't know, man. I think they should have him working from home, though. Did you see? Okay, so everybody had their masks on. A lot of them were like color-coordinated black masks, right? And I noticed a lot of people had a black black mask but underneath they clearly had an N95 filter because only the N95 really protects you from getting COVID, right?

And then they cut to the scene of Bernie Sanders. He's got like a buck 99 blue surgical mask on. And it's all crooked, bro. It just made me laugh. I mean, this is like first of all maybe like thank god he's not president like this guy doesn't even know how the competence to know that he needs an n90 90 years old whatever it is he needs an n95 mask and doesn't even doesn't get with the program with the color it's paper no and everybody was outside i mean i think the risk of transmission is pretty low well they go in i'm sure they go inside after the ceremony and they congregate and they socialize. I'm

sure that's not the entire ceremony. I bet they offered Bernie another mask and he said, no, I bought my mask and I'm going to keep my mask. Just the idea that Bernie Sanders, and by the way, I met someone else who's quite bright last week who was also walking around with a surgical mask. I'm like, why don't you have an N95 mask? And she's like, oh, really? Do I need an N95 mask? I'm like, yeah, only the N95 protects you.

We couldn't get them a year ago. That's why people didn't have them. Oh, I'm going to get one right away. But you'd think somebody would have told Sanders, Bernie, there's no point in wearing a surgical mask. That is a 90-year-old man, bro. Maybe he got the vaccine already. maybe he got the vaccine already. Maybe he got the vaccine already.

Well look, 1095 masks are horrible to wear. I mean, they're absolutely miserable and uncomfortable. Or condoms. But, um. They're not as bad as being on a ventilator. Now you don't know that. Do you on a ventilator. Now, you don't know that. Do you want a ventilator? If I were outside

and I were socially distanced, I don't think I'd be too concerned about wearing an N95. Now, maybe, as Noam said, they're going inside after that. I don't know. I thought the idea was... He didn't want no parts in it. I thought the idea was... He didn't want no parts in it.

I thought the idea was... I thought the idea was that if two people have a mask on, even if it's not an N95, that's a pretty high protection rate. No? I mean, that's what I hear.

Nobody knows for sure, but they do know that the healthcare professionals wear N95 masks, and they catch it very seldom when they wear them. So they're not exactly a high-priced, high-ticket item to get an N95 mask. There's absolutely no reason one wouldn't get one other than being kind of out of it, I would guess. Either that or he doesn't want to spend the money. Yeah, and like Dan said, comfort, man.

Comfort means a lot to people. You notice now when you go outside and you see the people that wear their masks up to right here to the nose, that's all comfort. He must have, he must have gotten the memo,

we're all wearing black masks. Like, did they leave him out? Did he get there and say, what the fuck didn't anybody tell me? Like, what were we- Bernie showed up and said, fuck y'all masks, Bernie. Well, I'm not sure if it's a memo or not, but, by the way, Trump apparently, I heard, Trump left quietly, by

the way, as we all know. He didn't leave kicking and screaming. And I'm told he left a note for Biden, but I don't know if that's true. I've read that on Twitter, and I don't know if it's correct, that he left Biden a note, a nice note. I don't know. First of all, also, did you see Bill Clinton fall asleep? No.

Come on. Bill Clinton? That's because Ariana Grande wasn't singing and dancing in front of him. Remember that photo of him at, whose funeral was it? Where Ariana Grande. Aretha Franklin. Aretha Franklin. You know Ariana Grande.

And he had a smile on his face, and he was grooving to it. Then there was another photo of some older black woman singing face and he was grooving to it. Then there was another photo of some older black woman singing and he was passed out. My favorite photos of him. My eight-year-old daughter turns to me and says, I bet you Donald Trump's sitting on his couch

eating potato chips just raging. That was pretty good for an eight-year-old. She just pictured him likeuring him like a motherfucker um so what else yeah i mean yeah i mean nick our guest is gonna come on and he's gonna he's gonna uh tell us what's really happening well we have something to talk about well i don't know that he knows what's really happening anywhere that we know what's really happening you know on television i mean don't you guys think that there's some like real healing that this country could possibly do right now but it certainly could be yes i don't know that

binds a man to do it but yes obviously you know i don't first of all healing we got to listen to each other and compromise and and and not and and and not lecture, you know, and not, I mean, you know, Trump's voters are still out there. And, you know, they need to be either we need to separate from them or listen to them. And I think listening to them is the better option. I don't see any healing. Why don't you see any healing, though? Well, let Nico say what he wants to say. Go I think listening to them is the better option. I don't see any healing. Why don't you see any healing, though? Well, let Nico say it. Go ahead, Nico. As far as healing is

concerned, it's possible, but it's going to be hard because the people that you have to convince, it isn't most of that 79 million that voted for him. It's that four, five, maybe 600,000 that are willing to be radicalized. You know what I'm saying?

They ain't trying to hear anything. Well, Nico, you got muted for a second. The sound is a little off. Yeah, that was a little off. I was just saying that with that, you have people becoming what they claim to hate. On the liberal side, now they're just rubbing pie in those people's face which i don't want to get me wrong fine i just feel like if the other side has guns and they've proven to you that they're crazy crazy enough to go into the capital it might not be the best to overant antagonize them right now just because you know they won't go that far well the left can be

violent too and uh you know but not like that that i've seen anyway well i don't go that far. Well, the left can be violent too and... A hundred. But not like that, that I've seen anyway. Well, I don't know that it was too much different. I mean, because it was the Capitol, people make a bigger deal out of it, but the level of violence didn't, there was violence at times during the riots over the summer.

Noam, you said you don't see healing, why is that? Why is that? What's Nico laughing? Yeah, those were some riots, huh? They killed the man who's mad enough to retaliate. Well, listen, I don't

think the violence is really the point here, but on the subject of that, and of course seeing people attack the Capitol, it's, it's, it's jarring. And, and, and, uh, uh, as far as the other protests go, I mean, I don't know. We, you know, we had a pretty liberal guy on last week who acknowledged that, uh, maybe seeing violent protests, you know, is kind of contagious.

But there were some horrible incidents in those riots, for instance. I think it was in San Francisco. They tried to barricade the cops in a police station and burn it to the ground. And somehow the cops got out. So, you know,

if you take an incident like that, I think that's certainly comparable. But in general, I say the ratio of of stone cold crazy in the right wing riots sparks you know it was much denser than the the number of stone cold crazy people in the black lives matter riots so you know um but there there was some horrible violence in the black Lives Matter riots, of course, and many people died. I think like two dozen people died. So, you know, it's not that constructive, I think, to get into. They're similar in certain ways. They're different in certain ways. They both did attack federal buildings. Their goals were different. The right-wing rioters had an intention

to disrupt the Congress, number one. Number two, they seemed to be planned, if what I'm reading in the Times and stuff is true. So there's like a good number of them

planned this disruption. In a certain way, if we're going to get into that as i'm thinking out loud there's something about that which is i don't want to say better or worse but it's just quite different than a riot which um attacks innocent people's businesses and burns them to the ground you know in a certain way i feel worse for the business owner or the who had his life taken from him than I do for Nancy Pelosi's office, you know. OK. And political violence, you know, I mean. Terror is usually considered the worst violence and the reason terror is considered the worst violence is because it's aimed at innocence um and here they aimed it at the capitol building but innocent people died so

you know it's it's very it's very difficult i think to untangle it and i think anybody who's who gets into that topic probably has an agenda that they're trying and a point they're trying to make which i don't think is a helpful point how How, no matter how you look at it, I don't, I think the healing is not going to happen because these nuts in the Capitol and they are nuts, right? Not everybody who was out there protesting, but the people who were planning to go into the Capitol and were ready to hurt, hurt others and have themselves hurt. Because they're not the people that are angry.

The people that are angry are very close to people like myself and many, many, many people I know who just are, are repulsed by cancel culture and repulsed by the, the self-censorship that we're, we're forced to go through. I'm repulsed by what I went through. One of the most traumatic periods of my life when I was attacked by the good guys, you know, the guys who won the election now, because I had the nerve in my own property to allow Louis CK to perform some jokes in front of people who wanted to be there to watch his jokes. And in return for that, I got death threats and threats to burn down the place

and threats on my children and my waitresses were accosted on the street. That culture is not going away. And if people don't understand that that's a big reason that people were sympathetic or voted for Trump, they just don't get it. You know, I have many, many friends who are just petrified that their boss will get a wind of what their politics are and get fired, you know, and they don't have any terrible politics. So, and then you have, you know, the Michael Moore working class white people who are the only group of people who have their life expectancy going down, who have seen their jobs shipped off to overseas, and that may not be anything but inevitable, but they've seen it.

And now they see that they are, where they once were at least a priority of liberals like Michael Moore. Now they are no longer considered to the point where the Democrats or the left does a good impression of being more concerned about illegal immigrants than they're concerned about, you know, middle America, white people who lost their factory jobs. So I don't see how that's going to heal. I just don't see how that's going to heal. And by the way, anybody at home was rolling their eyes. You know, you could agree with what I'm saying is factual or not factual, but it is the perception. And perception does become reality. And Joe Biden would be the kind of guy who would know how to reach out to those people. The question is, is his party, you know, going to get behind him in 2021? And I'm, I'm skeptical. I think they hate those middle. They hate, they hate, they hate middle. They hate middle of the middle of the country.

They consider them deplorables and I don't think they have any interest in healing. I think they'd rather, I think they want the right to surrender like Hirohito like they want an unconditional surrender you're gonna you're gonna say our pronouns and you're gonna you're gonna accept our politics and you're gonna accept our speech and you're not gonna and you're gonna accept our opinions and otherwise we're gonna de platform you and move to get your networks taken off Verizon. And, you know, I don't see where the healing is going to come from. Does anybody? I don't know.

I don't know if I see where the direct healing is going to come from. I think it's sad that that's where a lot of those people that you described are. You know what I'm saying? Because that's a real small part of the of that side that they're talking about this rather than the month like that I think that's the sad part because I don't think in certain point people would know that but I guess it's happening so often they're so tired of it that they don't have time to consider that but I think most people just want to see them surrender if i if most if i just use my what i went through

as just you know as a glimpse into what is going on in america it was horrifying you know you're a comedian and we're and we're comedians are the last bastion of like liberal-minded people who don't go in for cancel culture because you guys enjoy your freedom to say whatever the fuck you want and you and and you also you know you don't even mind hanging out with other people who say whatever the fuck they want and we can have heated discussions and we all love each other but that's not the way the country is and i mean my god the the abuse and the language the way people attacked the comedy seller during our our transgression um there it's ugly as hell you know and that hatred no i'm just to be clear you don't consider it a transgression you consider it a i had as scare quotes. I didn't see the quotes. No, I didn't do it.

The quotes were out of frame. Yeah. And, you know, I feel... I mean, I think Dan is right. I wish one half of the country would just leave the other half of the country alone. Just let them be. Let them live the way they want to live.

They fuck with each other. They bully each other. That's the problem. They fuck with each other they bully each other that's the problem they're fighting each other it's an equal fight you remember when what's her name lost you know what i'm saying the back and forth say it again you remember when hillary lost the back and forth that they had you know what i'm saying shut up and take it shut the fuck up and take it she lost go to jail that back and forth has been going on for years. Even before then. It started as early as when Comey was going at Obama on Twitter. My thing is the people that are responsible for the division aren't getting in trouble. with you i agree with you about you know the lock her up and all some just you know awful disgusting stuff but i do think that one side has an agenda of laws and cultural norms that they would like to impose on the other side and i think i think that's right the left has a is not satisfied and doesn't consider

it basically acceptable the way the right wants to live the way they want to talk the way they want to social whatever whatever it is what you know their culture and they seem to think it needs to be eradicated. And the right is hateful and the home of some racism. But they don't seem to me to have an agenda that they are pushing in terms of wanting to change the laws in New York. You know, New York, we expect, we want to push our way of stuff onto Alabama. I never get the sense that Alabama wants New York to bend and live like Alabama. How often do you hang out in Alabama if somebody has family from Alabama? Well, what was it?

No, so tell me, so give me an example. Like- For example, if you go down to Alabama, right, there's a certain language up here that Alabama will get you killed, right? That's the first thing they're going to put on you. You don't understand that language because just because you come from a certain place doesn't mean you get the disrespect. You know what I'm saying?

For example, fuck boy up here. You can say that all you want. You know what I'm saying? That's not, that's not a slur or anything like that. You go down south, you could get shot for calling somebody that. That is one of the

worst things you can say to someone. And that phrase started down there. And they can understand that you're not from around here, but you're not going to disrespect them. I'm sorry to tell people that shoot. Well, what Noam is saying is, I think what he's saying is that Alabama doesn't care. I don't know what I'm saying 100%. Yeah, Alabama doesn't care if we here in New York.

Well, no, let me ask you this. The people that are pro-life, do they care that New Yorkers want to keep abortion legal? Do you think? Of course they do. Yes. Yeah, that's true. What? Hell think? Of course they do. Yes, absolutely. What? Hell yeah.

Of course they do. And they don't want trans people in the military and they don't want all sorts of things. I mean, it goes both ways. What do you think your average Alabamian would be happy if you said, look, you can outlaw abortion in your state, but in New York, we're gonna continue to have it and you know literally that my hand my hand is behind me I had a conversation with friend of mine to send PA Butler Pia

they was talking to me about abortions up here how it's legal in New York and how that's murdering your children babies. Of course they care, man. That's a religious thing. Religion doesn't shift because they're beyond state lines. Well, okay. Okay. Listen, abortion is a, is a very good example, but I would, I, I would, it's necessary to point out that prior to Roe, that prior to Roe versus Wade, abortion was a state byby-state issue. And I don't think, or maybe I'm just ignorant to the fact, that the pro-life states were pushing to outlaw abortion in the Northeast.

So, in other words, it seems like they've kind of given up. But if they are pushing to overturn Roe versus Wade, even that is not a push to force our state to live like theirs. That is a push to allow them to live the way they want to live because Roe versus Wade would have no effect on abortion in New York. Correct Dan? Yeah. So, you know, even that harsh example, but listen, there is a flip side. No, there's a flip side to it is, or obviously anti-gay treatment. Yeah, we can't tolerate that.

So I'm not saying it's easy. There are certain things which I think we're absolutely justified in doing our best to impose on all 50 states. Question is, when does that end? And it seems like no cause ever says, okay, we basically accomplished everything we set out to do. So now we can just disband. No, it seems like now there's an ever increasing magnification such that the things that we're arguing about now, we didn't even want these things in New York 10 years ago.

Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, they were against gay marriage, right? And now we're like, if somebody doesn't want to have a trans bathroom in their public school in Alabama, like how the fuck can they do that? And I don't know the answer. The question was, will there be any healing? And I'm like, I don't think so.

By the way, Nick is here. Nick Claremont is here. He's written some interesting articles. I know you want to talk, know him about Biden, but Nick wrote some interesting articles about language. I love Nick. Can we let him in? Hi, how's it going? Let me give you, we like to do formal introductions on this show,

so let me give you one. Nick Claremont is an associate editor at Arc Digital, a words columnist, he loves words, folks, at the Washington Examiner Magazine. I do too too and i think noam does as well perriel uh i'm not sure he's a book reviewer although she did write two books a book reviewer and a writer based in new york he's currently working on a book about the history of trolling and of course trolling itself is a word that i didn't that well that we didn't hear

i guess when did the word trolling come out? In the internet? It was created in October of 1992 in an internet context, as best the dictionary can tell. Although it almost certainly goes just a little bit further back than that. But that's its first recorded. That's a lot longer ago than I would have guessed.

Certainly a lot longer ago than I would have heard the term. But, you know, I guess these words, sometimes they're in the ether for a while, and they're bubbling until everybody gets wind of it. But anyway, welcome. You're a lot younger, Nick, than I had assumed you were. I'm the same age as trolling. You were born in 92?

Yes. This man is a child now. I know. A zygote, really. Actually, that's not as, I mean, it seems younger than it is, because the 90s, in fact, were kind of a while ago. But anyway, he's young compared to Noam and I. So we were talking before you got here about will there be healing in America now that Biden is in office?

Noam and I are skeptical. I think Perry Allen and Nico are less skeptical. What say you on the matter? I feel, like, fairly... So, I watched the inauguration today, and I definitely, like, I feel a little bit more relaxed. I voted for Biden, so, like, that allows me to, like... Of course, everyone's gonna feel better

about just, like, getting what they want. And so I think the temperature in, like like if it's fair to talk about the media as one thing the media like then yeah like the media will chill out a little bit and stop like freaking everybody out as much everybody will have a legitimate reason to be a little less freaked out so in as much as that I think we all know what I mean. Like, yes. On the other hand, it freaked me out to listen to right before I was, you know, joined this call. Like I was listening to the first White House press briefing of the new administration. And they were talking about the journalists were asking the White House what we can do to help stop disinformation. And, like, that's a level of everybody all agreeing

that, like, there's some correct information and that, like, the journalists are all... Everybody being on the same side, that makes me nervous. So I'm a little more relaxed than I was, but I also don't like the monocultural element of what happens when Democrats control the entire government. Well, that's... also don't like the monocultural element of what happens when Democrats control the entire government. Well, that's, I don't need, that's why I voted for the first time in my life, I voted Republican other than the president, but the rest of the ticket, there wasn't much to vote

for, but I voted Republican. I, I, I think that, you know, there could be a big reaction the next election, depending on how this... We're not out of the woods in terms of... We're not, you know, gonna all of a sudden be a united, healed nation. Yeah. Well, and also, they keep, like, Biden used this word, unite, over and over again. And, like, I get where he's coming from.

I liked... I guess I was talking to a friend about this yesterday. Like, the thing that, um, that bothers me about that word, like it's obviously a good thing. And I understand why it's like in the name of our country. On the other hand, the problem that has gone on under Trump is more that it's less that like

we're disunited or we're polarized. And there's been all these words that have kind of become like a dumb meme and more just that, like we're dealing with our disunity in ways that aren't the right ways. We make too much of it. The stakes are too high. I want us to have...

You're cut out for a second there. You want us to have what? No, they sound as bad. Then we put them away. want us to have like bitter fights over important stuff and then also to like go and like make jokes and like talk about music and other stuff. Like I don't, I, I, what really bothered me about the Trump years was the takeover of every other

part of life by politics more even than what I didn't like that happened in politics itself. Nick. So, so before you came on, I was, I was trying to express something. I don't think I did the best job of it, but I wonder if you, what'd you think about it? It seems to me on the question of healing, I get the feeling, and maybe I'm wrong, that the left side of the country is more aggressive towards what they would like to see, how they would like to see the right side clean up its act and the right side of the country is more about leave us the fuck alone get out of our business and let us live

the way we want to live you see any truth to that i see yes i see any truth to that uh i see a problem with it because like um i mean i don't want to like i feel like it's all anyone has talked about for two weeks but like you can't say we just wanted you to leave us alone and the context of where you're saying that is that they just stormed into a house or they just stormed into congress so like i think that yeah but but that's, you know, that happened last week, but obviously there's years of this. Right, right. So I think that the left has plans and the right's plan is to not let the left

get away with that plan. So if that, you know, that's obviously going to set up a dynamic where, you know, it kind of goes to this question of like in any given debate, like where should we default? And it's why, it's part of why our question of like in any given debate, like where should we default? And it's why it's part of why our like our arguments over the Supreme Court are so intense, because the Supreme Court has more power, really to stop stuff from happening to strike down laws,

right, rather than to institute policies. And what the left wants is to do a bunch of stuff to change the country in a bunch of ways and the right has this inherent advantage that the left senses the right senses too but the left is um is extremely bitter and angry about because they feel like they're being thwarted when really what's happening part of what is really happening is that when there is deadlock, when nothing happens, we default to the right preference, which is to stop the left from getting what it wants. I think the biggest, the most intractable division might be at this point, the fact that Biden has vowed to dismantle systemic racism, and half of the country doesn't think there's such a thing as systemic racism.

I mean, that it's, to me it's more just like that term is very voguish. What one might mean by saying there is such a thing or there isn't such a thing, I think, ask two different people and they might, well, they probably just refuse to answer at all. They would probably just say yes.

I mean, I think there is such a thing, but only if I am allowed to explain and define what I mean, I think there is such a thing, but only if I am allowed to explain and define what I need. And I kind of became politically conscious at a time that was defined by the politics around the Bush years. to and worried about going to war against abstract concepts because of the war on terror, which, you know, we have processed as a culture in certain ways that I think we are still dealing with. And I will note that the new president today in his inaugural speech talked about domestic terror in this way that almost seemed like he was happy about what we had done

about terror and the ways we changed our law and changed our society in the wake of 9-11. And what we needed to do was do all that stuff, but also domestically because of these threats from whether it's Proud Boys or whatever the hell the weird groups are calling themselves. So I really just, whatever about the merits of the terms systemic racism, it really freaks me out when a society at large declares war on a concept. You can't win war on a concept because a concept is not a real thing. Even if it picks out or describes a real thing or it's useful or it's analytically whatever, I just don't want the government telling us that we as a society need to orient our efforts together in unity towards the destruction of a feeling.

Why is that an abstract concept? I feel like there's such material, I mean, there are so many material examples of what that is. federal effort to get the citizenry to attack. I guess the thing that happened with Iraq was there were no conditions really for victory or for defeat. And so we could never stop. And, you know, hey, we actually are still at war, not exactly there, but the war on terror turned out to be endless. And I worry that the war on terror turned out to be endless and I worry that the war on and the war on drugs looks like there are some interesting criminal justice reform things that are actually plausible now and bipartisan but anyway that's another sort of war on an abstract thing and again there are

physical real things such as drugs but it's a war on drug taking and that's an abstract thing and and then I worry that the war on racism like when i see in the nfl end zone uh end racism i'm always like that would be great i would love to end racism but i also note that the person who decided to paint that on the end zone probably doesn't really have a concrete visual picture in their head of what a world that has ended racism might look like what does that actually mean it's a it's a sort of a fuzzy amorphous metaphor that doesn't really grab at any real idea and i and that makes it i think a little bit dangerous i think it's so nick falsification let me let me put some meat on the bone. So, and I think I agree with everything you just said. I know Nico maybe want to get in there. So, okay. Okay. So, I said before, you know, the left wants the right to, they don't want to compromise. They want an unconditional surrender like Hirohito. And let me give you an example. So Biden, right before he takes office, tweets out, this is on the subject of helping businesses rebuild after COVID. Our priority will be black, Latino, Asian and Native American owned small businesses, women owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed needed to open, blah, blah, blah.

So they list everybody but white people, right? And take that. And then, of course, they wanted to prioritize the vaccine by race. And I'm thinking, so what is a white working class person supposed to what do? Is he supposed to say, yeah, sign me up. I wanna vote for the guy who wants to prioritize everybody but me. And if I don't vote for that guy, I guess I'm part of systematic racism, right?

It's so, it seems to me so ridiculous. Why, no, y'all guilt is so ridiculous. Why are you even thinking about that? No, y'all, guilt is so ridiculous. Why are you even thinking about that? No, no, I'm saying that. That's the part. Nico, maybe you misunderstood me. Listen, call me crazy. Why couldn't our president say,

we want to rebuild businesses according to need, based on your experience. And by the way, we want to make sure that people who have traditionally maybe been kept out like black and latino people we're gonna make sure that we're gonna make sure that there's no fucked up there's no fucked up shenanigans going on think about the language you just used think about the language that you just used right in the language that you just used i don't see how for the example that you used, right?

How could you vote for somebody that's gonna leave you out, right? Which is the existence. Not just leave me out. I could, hold on, let me just, not just leave me out, but leave me out because of the color of my skin. Leave me out when I might be actually struggling just as hard.

I might have just as many generations of poverty as the people that you're going to prioritize. As a matter of fact, you just told me you're going to prioritize Asians who happen to be the highest earning people in the country. So clearly this is just about color of skin. Now, how are you going to do that and bring these people into the fold? I don't think you can. Right, right. And this is what I'm saying about how it feels when y'all hear those words versus how those words are meant. The intent versus the way you intend, right?

I don't think the intent when the man says that is to tell you, yo, we getting ready, y'all. We ain't taking care of y'all. They're trying to tell the people who are usually not taken care of that we're going to take care of you. And what happens is... Then he shouldn't say that. He's the President of the United States, and then he should say it more carefully, because that's not what he said. But think about the things that we don't say carefully, bro. Think about the things that people are fighting right now. Okay, Nico, let me tell you this. I'm going to give you for the sake of argument that you're right, although I'm not convinced you are.

I'm saying that the country- Oh, it's not about being right, bro. We're just talking. No, no, but I'm saying that for the sake of argument, if that's Joe Biden's intent, I'm saying that the country will not heal so long as he can't express himself more clearly than that. I'm not saying that I disagree with you, man.

I hear you. All I'm saying to you is, is the feeling that you have when you go, oh, we're being left out. It's like, how is that? How are y'all so fragile? I don't care. Listen, thank God, knock on wood. I'm not, I'm not.

Man, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the video. I'm not talking about no, man. Nico, but this doesn't happen in a vacuum this happens at a time when like i said they wanted to prioritize the vaccine according to ray they're talking about prioritizing what's the reason behind that there can be no good reason for prioritizing some somebody's life based on the color of their skin or let me put another way if you believe there can be a good reason for that,

the country is never going to heal because no family is ever going to say, yes, you're right. Prioritize somebody over my family because they, and it goes worse. But let me add one more thing to it. And Nick, this is, I think, important to go. They also, at the same time,

and it all ties together. They also, at the same time and it's all it all ties together they also at the same time want to bring in they want to legalize and and bring in many more brown-skinned immigrants which is fine by me but it becomes a little dicier when you say we're going to bring in millions of brown-skinned immigrants and by the way then as soon as they get here we're going to put them in the front of the line when we're doling out help for, now we're going to prioritize them. In other words, we're going to prioritize people who just got here yesterday over the people who've been here for generations. This is an ideology which will tear the country apart. You can agree with that ideology. That's neat. I'm not into debating the ideology.

I'm saying that to think that people are going to vote for that, they're not gonna. That's all I'm saying. Nick, let Nick in. Let Nick in. God, Nick. I mean, a couple things. Like, one, like, people did just vote for, like, a Democrat, and he just won, and, and like the Democrats now control like the whole government so like that there I I personally find I would disagree

what you said but go ahead you got cut off Nick Nick you're Nick you're not we Nick, we can't hear you. Nick sound. We need Biden to prioritize your internet connection. My internet's unstable. Can you hear me? Yeah. I think that we should have just done vaccines, like first come, first serve,

as long as it shows you're 65 and older. And then once we got everyone 65 and older who wants it, let's drop it to 55. That's how I would have preferred the vaccine to be done not only that i have a much bigger i think it's flat out eugenicist the way that we thought about it i believe in the 14th amendment and i think that we should not be deciding things on the basis of race but i could understand an argument for maybe vaccinating on the basis of sex but i something feels wrong in some maybe very old chivalric programming for me about prioritizing men over women, even though men are much more susceptible to the virus as a population.

And to dying of the virus, not to getting it. Anyway, so all of that said, so I find the identitarian line of thinking that has become one popular and a part of, it's popular on the left and not the right, to be off-putting myself. And I suspect, maybe it's just wish casting or projecting, but it is probably going to be not an electoral winner overall if it becomes even more dominant than it is right now but i would be really projecting too much if i said that because it has become dominant at all it means democrats can't win an election because today is the inauguration day of a democratic

president um i'll also say nick can i can i can i can you drop there and then you can finish the second half after this i i think that the fact that Biden was elected is, on the face of it seems like, oh, that's a good counter punch, but I don't think it actually is so much because I think that Trump was so fucking batshit crazy and vulgar that there's so many people who would have happily, I mean, he almost won anyway,

and also you have the pandemic, but there's so many people who would have happily voted for someone who was just as much of a middle finger to PC culture, but they felt was up to the job and not an embarrassment. And they voted for Biden, despite the fact he barely ran for office. He barely uttered a coherent sentence because they were so desperate they projected upon him uh he's probably still an old clinton type democrat he i'm sure he's a moderate he's the one democrat who doesn't believe all this nonsense he ran as the same person yeah he ran two different campaigns in the in the primary what would have beaten kamala har Harris is what I'm saying. All right, but, like, Kamala Harris ran and didn't win.

Like, ultimately, like, the Democratic Party's, you know, candidates are chosen by... Kamala. Kamala. ...people. You know, her name was missaid by Sonia Sotomayor today, so I feel a little less bad for occasionally mispronouncing it. I never mispronounced it until I started hearing everybody mispronounce it,

and then it kind of got into my brain. So, look, to the larger point, like, I personally believe that it is flat-out evil on every possible way of thinking about it. I try to give the best version of the other side of an argument before I, you know, think about it and try to tear it down. On the vaccines thing, like, I just can't. There's nothing.

I can think of nothing to recommend the opposing view to my own, which is that it's not moral, it's not effective, it's not useful, it should be outside of the bounds of what is thinkable to try to vaccinate people on the basis of their race or in that order. Among other things, I don't think it saves black lives. The only exception I would make to that rule is if there's for some reason a skin color and vulnerability to COVID were linked.

That's literally the reason why they said they're doing it. That's why I can't believe the feeling. No, no, no. You can vaccinate essential workers, and they may be predominantly black, but that's not because they're black. Hold on, bro. I'm not telling you anything I came up with.

That's the reason that they gave it. They gave it for reasons of, well, whatever. Let's not get into it. But yes, if black people had a specific, let's say white people were immune and black people all died from this, let's just say, yeah, of course they're going to vaccinate the black people. Well, haven't the deaths in black and Hispanic people been much higher than in white people since the beginning of this virus? Somewhat higher, but you know,

hostage probably dying higher grades too. Oh, well, but let me, let me just throw this in here. We ain't rushing to get the vaccine anyway. So it's not like all the vaccine for y'all. So just relax. And again, like homie said about men and women and how he went and buys doing it that way because of how we're a little bit more vulnerable to the virus. That's literally the reason that they get vaccinated. I don't, that isn't the reason that that was part of a contextual reason that if you read basically what was laid out,

it was actually by their own numbers going to get fewer black people vaccinated and save fewer of the most vulnerable people's lives. But I also say, Noam, you said something about immigrants that I thought didn't make sense because we also America is exporting a ton of vaccine. We are participating in through a number of different programs, including the COVAX program. We're getting the vaccine to a bunch of our allies and countries that we distribute aid to in normal years. And like, I'm really happy about that. I'm really proud of that. And none of that makes me feel like somehow

I'm not gonna get it or I'm unsafe for like- Wait, what are we doing? We're getting the vaccine to other countries. Yeah. What, one of, one of the things that, that. Americans who work for the government and Americans who work in, in the, you know, private sector have been doing since basically we started thinking about this as a logistics question is making sure that when a vaccine becomes available and it did so

blessedly quickly, was that we were going to try to figure out how to get the world vaccinated. And there are people all over the world doing this. There's excellent organizations working all over the world doing this. It so happens that America is a huge pharma power, and we have a lot of the best logistics work in the world. And so that's- It seems like we have, I'm sorry to interrupt you. It seems like we haven't even figured out how to disseminate it here. It's a complete shit show.

The process is ongoing in both cases. What did I say that you, what, hold on. What did I say that made you think- You mentioned that it somehow should like alarm an American or might theoretically alarm an American who's considering their own interests first, which is a reasonable human thing to do, that, like, a immigrant could show someone I know, are like getting that vaccine to people in Uganda and in almost all of Central America. Hold on.

Hold on. So I have two answers. First of all, I probably didn't express it well, but I wasn't trying to limit it just to the vaccine, which is something that didn't happen anyway.

It was something that, a trial balloon, which popped, right? But I'm saying that as we hear more and more that everything from vaccines to education, to aid, to law, you name it, might become prioritized based on race. You're going to see half the country say no. And it complicates it to know that also not only is it based on race, but then as immigrants come in, they would go into the line of the people who are prioritized. And it hasn't happened yet, but I think that's what the identitarian left seems to push for.

But also, I would say that you can appeal to people's humanitarianism. I think a lot of people would say, yes, let's feed, let's help the poor. Let's help the struggling. Let's vaccinate everyone, which is quite different to my heart than saying, let's be sure to prioritize everybody but this group of people who happen to be the same color as the people who once did horrible things, that's really what it comes down to, right? You're the color of people who have done these things in the past. And my kids, I have kids who are mixed race, so they're going to be eligible for all this stuff, including affirmative action.

So my kids who are pretty privileged and wealthy, they, based on their race, are going to have certain privileges that some third generation trailer park person is not going to have. So the country is not going to heal. Maybe that's the right policy. Again, maybe that's the right policy. But we started out before you're saying, well, how are we going to heal? I say, I don't think it's gonna heal. That's all. And Nick had something, I think, that he wanted to...

Well, no, let Nick answer me directly, and then, Nico, jump in. Go ahead. Well, no, look, I agree with you. I think that we're building a weird, reverse Jim Crow bureaucracy that, while it is intentioned and... First of all, it sometimes picks out real problems, problems that sometimes we as a society have downplayed in our wish to be done with them.

On the other hand, I think that it's massively counterproductive. So, so i you know i'm just trying to like i have like you know 90 fire breathing and 10 nuance on this stuff because like there's a lot of um the problem the way that i look at it is less like okay like this this one kid is not going to get it or like that one family is getting unfairly maligned because they're being lumped into this philosophical category of white that like i don't even believe in but like it's like i don't believe in any race categories i don't think they're analytically useful but like i guess i would say um i what bothers me about that whole structure and system is that i think that uh official power recognizing um like races or what census designated ethnic or racial categories for official purposes and designating them worthy or unworthy of some government benefit or punishment seems to me to be exactly what I might mean when I say systemic racism and that's a system based on race and it's an official system I don't like that because I think it's I haven't I was taught it's against my values I think it's immoral and and

then I also think it has a lot of really negative consequences because I know that rich and powerful people are really good at navigating bureaucracies. And so when there's a whole new race bureaucracy, I have a feeling that the people who are going to be the best positioned to succeed in getting themselves the right designations and such are not going to be necessarily the people who with the best of intentions, we, you know, are designating as the people who we intend to help but rather it's just going to be the same old replication of an irritating and complex system meant to uh you know meant to help that gets co-opted once again by sort of the rich who use it to get richer nico um I just think the irony of it all is

hilarious, first of all. You know what I'm saying? What do you mean? The one thing I find shocking is that, you know, a lot of times you don't get to hear the other side and how they feel about these types of things and where their sensitivities lie in that type of stuff. So

whenever I hear the politicians or whoever talk about this stuff, I always think they're like real bad, like the worst of the worst comedians. They can't deliver good news, even if they wanted to, right? So I think it's unfortunate that we have those people in charge

and then the media is going to sensationalize everything. I think stuff like Twitter and all that helps incite all the negative feelings. I feel like that's not going to go anywhere. I feel like the people that were incited, I feel like they're going to be forced into not hiding, but they're going to have to be quiet, and I think that stuff is going to fester, and I think it's going to look a certain way. As far as healing is concerned, I'm sure healing can be had, but it's going to be tough.

I don't think there is any future for... I don't think there's any future for America that doesn't agree on judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin as the ultimate goal.

I think anything else is going to be a road to Yugoslavia or Lebanon or every other multicultural, multi-ethnic state that comes apart. If we're going to be, you know, you can have 90% of one thing and 10% of another thing and the country can be very stable. If you have 15% that, 15% that, 15% that, and, you know, with no clear majority

and everybody competing and thinking that 50% that, 50% that, and with no clear majority and everybody competing and thinking that their ethnicity is the most important thing or even relevant to how they interact with society, the society will come apart, period. I think to think otherwise is an act of faith that can't be backed up by any historical example whatsoever and it's counter to human nature

and i think we're going down a terrible road when at a time when things are as good as they are now to i mean even like okay here's an example i think i think i think the concept of um cultural uh cultural appropriation that this is something that people police and worry about is disgusting. Obviously, I think it's obvious, I've said this before, that in a healthy society, this would be exactly what you would want to happen. In a healthy society, yeah, if I see somebody, look, in classical music, Zubin Mehta is an Indian, and he's considered one of the great maestros of, you know, conducting Mozart. Well, that's what a healthy world does. In an unhealthy world, say, you can't conduct Mozart. You're an Indian. And

that's what we're bringing to this country. You can't have that kind of restaurant. You're this. You can't wear that. What's that? In other words, in a healthy country that we'd want to have when young white kids love rap music, say, yeah, go ahead. Sing rap music. We would make fun of them. Wear your hair however you want

because that's the only future there is. But we're policing this to the point where we say, we're on the lookout. Make sure this person doesn't cross that line. That person shouldn't be selling sushi. It's gotten crazy out there. And this is the road to dissolution.

This is the road to the ruin of America, I think. What do you want to say, Perrielle? I wanted to say that when I personally hear something like, I don't remember what the exact quote is, but we are going to prioritize black businesses or Latino businesses or trans, whatever, like a group of people that historically has been oppressed that makes me happy because i don't feel like that's taking something away from me like it makes me feel like people who have historically not been included are going to be prioritized where they have never been prioritized nobody should be prioritized people should be prioritized based on need.

People have been prioritized. Stop that shit. People have been prioritized in this country forever, dog. What are we talking about? Yes, and we don't address past wrongs by persisting in those wrongs. We break that cycle. I agree with you 100%.

All I'm saying is... Go ahead, Perry. I'm sorry. No, no, no. It's just like, to me, we're going to try to make it equal. We're going to prioritize people who have never been prioritized, not to the exclusion of anybody else, but to just make it more fair. Why is it fair? Why is it fair to prioritize somebody based on race? Can I ask you something?

Are you saying because somebody else? Can I ask you something? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying because somebody else... Can I ask you something? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying because somebody else that was the same race or many, many, many people that were the same race were treated horribly, we make

it up by prioritizing somebody who can show no record of being treated horribly? What? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm the comedy seller and to the right of me is a white business who's about to go out of business and to the left of me is an arabic guy who i know doing pretty well and you're saying you should prioritize the arabic guy and i'm like no

that's that's no that's not that's not what what does it mean to prioritize based on on ethnicity then what does it mean so you know you remember how i think i think it's a it's all in the message and i think it's sad that the message is so messed up and that it could be misconstrued like that through whatever strangers it's going for i think that's sad you know what i mean I hear, I hear when you bring up what you're saying and I agree with you. The only reason it grinds my gears when I hear it is because I know what it's like to hear certain things and it's not said, it's unsaid. We go, that's why it's only now. Nico, I'll give you a great, a great example. Right. When, when,

when COVID started, they wanted, there were a lot of uh money raised to help comedians who were out of work and there was a there was this fund there was this fund in california and i you know i i donated to some of them whatever it was and there was talk about how to give out the money right and ray ellen has a and quite correctly i think the only conversations i ever heard were, well, let's see, you know, let's give it out to people who are making the least money,

who are in the most financial need, whatever it is. Nobody said, well, let's prioritize, you know, Asians and black. I would have been like, what? Like, we're not gonna prioritize comedians based on race. We're gonna prioritize comedians based on their life situation. You prioritize, though.

The way you prioritize was different, but you chose to prioritize. Because if it wasn't race, it was a different criteria. And I'm not saying that to be, like, nitpicky. I'm just saying, in that instance, I get it. Let's move on. I want to talk about it. Wait, Nick, Nick, Nick. I want it. Let's move on. I want to talk about... Wait, Nick, Nick, Nick. I want to move on to something else.

I just want to make the point and you can cap it and then go to somewhere else. I just want to say that it's this really informative here because as much as I tried, I was trying to explain why it is I thought there wouldn't be healing. And inevitably to to spell out these issues is to be interpreted as advocating one side of

the other and I just wanna make the point again I'm putting up the issues but it doesn't really matter whether what you think my opinion of it is, whether it's correct or not. What I'm saying is that to the hundred million people in this country who are Trump supporters, they are so turned off by this kind of stuff. The country will not heal. That's basically all I'm saying. So, Nick. All right. Before you do that, I just want to get this in, bro. I'm sorry. Go ahead. all i'm saying so nick but yeah all right before you do that i just want to get this in bro i'm sorry yeah go ahead go ahead i agree with you and i'm not talking about what i think you feel i'm talking about what i think those 100 million people that you're talking about how i think

that that's so ironic that they don't see that they don't see how hilariously ironic it is that that's their feelings, but I understand it. I understand it. One of the things that comedians are really good at is they know how to make an audience feel a certain way about something that they might not have before. That's, you know, they have a great sense of irony, right? And they know just how much they can ask

if somebody else has a sense of humor and how much people are really gonna be able to think through something versus kind of shut down. And like, I don't know, Periel, you were saying like, you know, when I see people organizing to support black businesses in their community, like I don't feel taken away from. And that's like totally how I feel too. I don't see that and think, well, what the hell?

What about if I started a business? Like that's never my like personal internal emotional response. I'm always like cool. Or like in my, I live in Brooklyn, like in my neighborhood when there's like before I was not allowed to go work at a cafe and mostly work like you know either a cafe that's owned by like trans people or latino people the trans cafe is like a just a place that's known as a gathering place for trans people and like that that was never just much of a thing just didn't like come up a lot and then now since the summer all the businesses in my neighborhood have like signs on them letting you know who's which business is owned

by what like it's like creepy like what like type of human i'm like i don't even believe in that type of human is it like a dog and then there's an app now in my neighborhood to let you know like to map out like which businesses are owned by what race of person and this is a level of obsessing over um race that i just i just think is unhealthy, and it reminds me of the way that racists think. It just freaks me out. Nick, that given that, I think what Noam was alluding to earlier, that given this state of affairs of racial obsession,

that maybe is not the best idea to bring in more people of different races at this time until we can get our shit together. And I agree. Look, look. Whatever. My views on immigration are... I'm so far left, I can't think reasonably about it, despite having plenty of right-wing sympathies

on other stuff. But I guess, like, the... Like, there's a case against my own position that I know, and, like, I'm wrong, and I just can't. That's just where I'm at. But, my own position that I know and like I'm wrong and I just can't that's just where I'm at but like I guess I'd say look the way that we have been talking about this is in this way that's like kind of both parallel about like the rhetoric around this stuff in public life and then also about the policy but like more about the rhetoric really than the policy and I guess what um

what gets my back up about it and what i'm pretty sure gets noam's back up about it but not to speak for him is the um the fact that the policies are often like if you talk to people who like the same rhetoric that like perriel and i seem to like for example often the policies like are pretty nuts if you actually look into it they're like pretty offensive to a normal person with like a normal like Democrat voter sensibility who like thinks that it's cool that Joe Biden is the president now. A lot of the stuff is a level of theoretical obsessing over race that actually gets turned into official changes

in the way that the government functions and that that is new. That is a new change from the previous system, which is, you know, sometimes derided as race blindness theory, and I would call the 14th Amendment being carried out under the law. And it is that change which alarms some people, and I think that we ought to focus on when we talk about this, rather than what kind of how it sounds and how it rings to people and whether it makes them react in a tone of voice that sounds fragile or something like that

because it's more relevant to what's actually happening to actual ordinary people and Nick there's something also there's a slight accretion here of concept here which may or may not be significant, but it's still worth pointing out, which is that for a long time, the only policies that were race-based were considered to be compensation to black Americans for slavery. This was a very specific, we said, we hold our nose when we do this

because we don't believe in race-based things, even affirmative action, you know, we hope it'll be a't believe in race-based things, even affirmative action. We hope it'll be a temporary thing. Supreme Court justices, I forget which one, maybe Sandra Day O'Connor, said that hopefully in 30 years it won't be necessary. I think she said 22 years. Yeah, yeah. We'll just have to grin and bear this for a little while. But there was never any question that the ultimate goal was none of this.

And now it's expanded to, no, this isn't just about slavery and its consequences anymore. Now it's about all non-white people and also sex, this is my son, and also sex stuff. And also it's not supposed to be a temporary thing but it's actually it's actually righteous in and of itself and it's it's a permanent thing and and that's that's a big change you know and and as you and as it fits into immigration as as it as it fits into immigration okay that changes if that change is good or bad whether that change is good or bad uh that change ought to be discussed yeah and it ought to be discussed very carefully and uh in a country that still has uh you know 70 some plus percent self-identified white people and where the clan has been founded multiple times uh right because it seems to me dangerous and this is where i think, you and I really align is that it seems to me dangerous

to tell a bunch of people, you know, that everybody is supposed to think really, really, really hard about what race they are, except the white people, and then expect that that'll actually happen. Because I think what will actually happen is that the white people start thinking about it too. And there's like many white people

and they won't all think about it in good ways. No, nobody's thinking about their race in good ways no nobody's thinking about their race in good ways as far as i'm concerned and so so with the immigration thing you know if you have a country who is aggressive about making sure that nobody's treated differently based on their race or their ethnicity then it becomes hard to object or even care about what race or ethnicity the immigrants are because you leave that at the door. But if you have a country which actually cares very much about that, even to the point of how you interact

with the law, then it makes perfect sense for people to consider what color the immigrants are coming in because now you're now you're bringing it's a zero-sum game now you're bringing in 10 million people so it's it's madness what we're doing in in prioritizing race i'm so not with you on the immigration stuff and the reason i'm not is pretty is like a fact a very specific factual thing which is that like in countries that don't have a lot of immigration, the politics of the backlash to immigration can exist anyway.

And we have like real examples of this in the world. Orban is one of them. Like he's become sort of nightmare meme, bogeyman for people. But like the point is it's possible for people to become highly politically activated against immigration and against immigration of outsiders and others who look different or whatever, even if there is barely any immigration?

Of course, I'm not saying I'm not I'm not contradicting that. I'm saying that you're giving them a rational reason when as opposed to having them to defend an irrational reason. Because your argument is about the backlash. And I'm saying the backlash can exist with or without immigration. So then what I'm saying, let me put it in a reverse way. I'm saying the backlash can exist with or without immigration so then what I'm saying in a reverse way I'm saying that if you're gonna tell me that Harvard can't be more than 20% Asian then I'm gonna say systemically racist organization American at Harvard University but but I'm saying if you're gonna if you're gonna limit the number of Asians at Harvard then I'm gonna say well if it's important to limit them

when they get here, then how can you tell me I can't limit them when they're not even Americans yet? Like if you think it's, if you on the left think that this is just to limit the number of Asian Americans in Harvard, then how are you gonna yell at people for saying, well, maybe we should consider, maybe we should avoid this problem when they're not even americans

why are we bringing in more asians when we're just not even gonna let them into college when they get here right it doesn't mean it doesn't hold the only thing that holds is you bring in as many asians dude like all right hold on bring in as many asians as want to come listen this is my attitude you're bringing as many asians as want to come in who's doing this because i because like har Because Harvard and the immigration system are very different organizations. You understand my point. I'm saying that I would say that,

I've said it many times on the show, you bring in as many Asians as want to come in. And by the way, if they kick everybody's butt at Harvard and Harvard becomes 75% Asian, you say, I'm very proud of my country, but we don't give a shit if you're Asian or not. My view is bring in lots and lots of immigrants and also don't have racial quotas at Harvard.

That's so, okay, what's the problem with that? No, no problem. Don't you understand what I'm saying? I'm saying you can't have it both ways. You can't have a country that wants racial quotas. You were right to note the hypocrisy, but the problem with charges of hypocrisy is you've correctly found that somebody else is full of shit, but you still with charges of hypocrisy is you've correctly found

that somebody else is full of shit, but you still haven't said what your own view is. So, like... My own view is my own view. I'm not hiding my own view. Identity politics things are full of shit, but, like, you got to have your own view of things. Like, my own view of things is that, like,

I don't care about the difference between the international... Like, I am an internationalist in the way that I think, and so I care about the rights of people who aren't American and the wellbeing of people who aren't American as well. I want them to get vaccines and I want them to get the right to travel to America and work here. And I like, these are all things that I care about. Well, I, I tend to agree with you. And I've read some open border libertarian arguments that I found very,

very persuasive. So I don't, well, they're really persuasive in theory and they don't look, they don't work, but that's, that's where I was going to get to. But like, yeah. Well, in the end you do have to have a policy and what would it be? You know? I don't know, man. I'm all for letting whoever want to come here, come here.

So America in theory is supposed to be like that anyway. Well, not, I mean, listen, at some point. Nick is frozen. to be like that anyway. Come see me. Well, not on, I mean, listen, at some point, we'll have too many people. Nick is frozen. What would your, what would your policy be, Nick? Sorry, you just, you just cut out and back in now.

So I just heard, what would your policy be? What, what, about what? I mean, I guess we're on to immigration. Like, how would you limit it? Would you, I mean, would you have total open borders or? I haven't thought about it hard enough. I know what my policy aim would be,

like, what outcome I would try to do. I know I... The open borders argument is, um, the... is what I am the most attracted to. I haven't thought about it hard enough to know what I really think. And I try not to just, you know, flap my mouth when I don't. I know hard enough to know what I really think and I try not to just you know Flap my mouth when I don't I know that I've in the history of immigration in the United States or something

I actually do know a little bit about I know that when people I know what sorts of policies cause Immigration backlashes and which ones don't. And I know what happens after, you know, and sort of starting in like 1924, like when we kind of closed the door, what happens. And I really like, partly for entirely personal reasons having to do with my family background, I like what happened to America when huge waves of immigrants hit our shores starting in the late 19th century and in the first 24 years of the 20th century. So these are all things that I think about. I think about it in terms

of trade-offs because my policy outcome goal that I wish for is as many people as wish to come here can come here. Well, when thinking about immigration, should our standard be what's best for the people that are already here? Or should the standard be what's the highest utility for people in general? I think you can balance those two things. I think if you take things like, I sometimes joke and, you know, like, sorry if I'm being, excuse my ableist slur,

but like libertarianism is the perfect political philosophy for a world populated entirely by autistic people. So like, if, like when i think about this i'm like yeah like if i was being like totally rational and all the other people in the world were also really rational and had no feelings and like whatever by the way i know that's not really what autism is but like that then like yeah that would all be fine and that's and then we could all like the world could be organized that way. If only it didn't have these pesky human beings in it. As it is the, the kind of diabolical problem of immigration and how to organize

immigration policy and border security, which is related to actual national security and all of these things. It's so complicated that like, I don't know, I kind of understand the problem, but well enough to state it, but I don't understand what kind of answer would actually you know present itself that would be satisfactory i have no idea i'm a little frustrated because i feel like i haven't been clear but maybe um i don't know i just i i guess listen i'm i'm pretty elite at this point in my life i think you are too nick i much of this is just academic for me. I don't have a lot of economic

anxiety outside of the COVID situation. But I mean, in general, I don't feel a lot of these things that we're talking about will never get through the membrane of my life to affect me in it, surrounding my life in any way. I'm trying to look at it from the point of view of the Trump middle America voter who, as we said at the beginning, you know, have decreasing life expectancy and life and economic anxiety and all that. And I'm just think that it is pretty clear to me that in a society where disparaging whiteness and white people and calling them Karen and looking to deprioritize them

and just essentially saying that it's open season to look down our noses at these people, even based on their race, and that our party, the mayor of Chicago is gonna say, "'Shut up, Karen,' and blah, blah, blah," that this is just a formula for permanent conflict. And I think Biden probably agrees with me, but if the Democratic Party actually wants to see some unity, some movement towards unity, they're going to need to de-emphasize

this bashing, which in the end is bashing people based on the color of their skin. It's not based on what these people did. It's based on what white people have done. It's no more rational than bashing, if God forbid, somebody in my family were murdered by somebody black, me bashing black people. You just can't do that. And we have a lot of policies which are embracing a very sloppy, very, very sloppy logic, very, very sloppy almost embrace of collective guilt and born guilt and now it's extending out to even groups who are very successful like Asians the most successful group

now are somehow considered in need of prioritization and that just seems to me to be because they're not white it seems to be happening that the bad part of human nature is coming out in the good guys and the bad guys now that's really what it is tribalism it's also just a very limited way of think i i assume that you saw and were as sort of amused and horrified as i was by the the

washington post headline analyzing the uh capitol hill clutch thing uh in terms of um quote multiracial whiteness. I didn't see that. Yeah, that's a real term. Like, talk about an Orwellian ridiculous formulation. But there is an element of the sort of pseudo-academic collegiate left that I think went to college but didn't really learn critical thinking that is processing news and historical events in terms of race and then when news and historical events fail to conform to

what their race-based predictions make them think is going to happen they just sort of twist everything around into something. So, you know, a black Arabic guy and an Afro-Cuban guy end up sort of at the head of the Proud Boys movement for reasons that I'm sure if I looked into the Proud Boys movement more, I could understand, but I don't care about what the hell is going on with the Proud Boys. So, you know, but to them, this is just pure, it's white supremacy, and they're processing as though it's either the Klan or like a Hitler rally and it's not.

So it's, I mean, it's somehow, it's not better. It's not like morally better. It's just different than that in some way. And so now they've had to invent this fucking notion of interracial whiteness that, or sorry, multiracial whiteness that makes so little sense that you

really don't need to um even take apart the term you sort of just need to say it to understand what's what's stupid about it but nico you know that dante nero was in that was was associated with the proud boys when they first started out in some way you know that right oh word i love dante yeah yeah no there was some um what's his name, Ira Glass, is that a name from This American Life? Is that it? They did a whole podcast on it, and Dante was on it about how he finally left them, and I wish I could remember the details, but how the Proud Boys started out,

but Nick, you're exactly right, it didn't start out as any kind of white supremacy thing, it started out more like a macho male thing. Wasn't there a guy from vice who did it? Like, wasn't it? Dennis was the founder of it.

Yeah. Yeah. I met him one time at a, I remember one time I saw him there. Like he, I think he's friendly with, uh, Anthony Akuma and,

um, yeah, yeah. I don't know, but, um, he's a compound media or whatever. Anyway,

I met this guy one time. I had no idea who he was. And he was asking me questions. And he was very funny, you know, but he's a compound media or whatever. Anyway, I met this guy one time. I had no idea who he was and he was asking me questions and he was very funny, you know, and, and he was like a really quirky dude. And then afterwards I found out who he was on all this. They weren't quite that famous then, but I was like, Oh fuck. Like why didn't somebody warn me who I was talking to, you know? But he didn't say anything outrageous in the conversation, but clearly he's capable of it.

All right. So before we go, by the way, Perry, I'll take a memo. Let's not get two guests with the same name on it anymore. Nick, what's your hot issue? We'll leave you. What's the hot issue on your mind these days? Oh, man. I mean, I guess I'm thinking about kind of the way that the so-called self-appointed resistance to Trump is going to deal with the absence of Trump.

I'm thinking less about how sort of Democrats are going to appeal to the Trumpian parts of America and more about how the people who are in this sort of parasitic relationship with him are going to sort of come to grips with not having him on the scene. I mean, he's not dead, but like, I think that it's going to be really interesting to watch people whose moral purpose in life was doing this fundamentally pointless thing, which was to like lob, not like what the actual resistance to the Nazis did, which was to like lob like grenades at train tracks

and like actually substantively harm the regime. And all of these things happened in America where we talked about the government of the United States as run by Donald Trump's executive branch, at least, as though it was the Nazis. And it was all hysterical. I really, really was disgusted by the president of the United States for the last term. But I did not think it was. It called for, you know, all these, like there were like four or five shows on TV, maybe more from, you know, Hunters to even the show The Boys on Amazon to, I think they made one of the Philip Roth books thatabel Wilkerson, which is awful. It's like a real meme of like America's Nazis now. And then the resistance is also kind of takes part in that

meme. And it's all just completely ridiculous. And I'm kind of thrilled, to be honest, to watch what happens as these people who are sort of LARPing and tilting at windmills no longer have their, the Hitler that they, he was evil enough for them to call him Hitler, but not evil enough for them to actually go out and fight, because they knew ultimately that he was not a dictator that needed to be assassinated,

which is what Hitler would call for, but he was a really bad president who needed to be voted out, and is what Hitler would call for, but he was a really bad president who needed to be voted out, and that's what they did. And so I guess the de-Trumpification of American political media is interesting to me, or in particular, not just political media, but that's why I mentioned the TV shows and the books. Nonfiction publishing was taken over by every book being at least obliquely about Trump.

I'm trying to write a book right now, and, like, it's impossible not to mention Trump because the way everybody thought was so frazzled and already in the sort of 2019, 2020 period, we forgot all the crazy stuff that we were saying and doing in the 2017, 2018 period. So that's the really... I'm trying to think about,

and if I write something soon, maybe it'll be about like what we, the sort of great forgetting and the great, either, I don't know if people are gonna relax or if people are gonna freak out harder to try to sustain that high. But what's gonna happen with Trump off the scene and the people who are fundamentally in the mirror

looking back at Trump in this creepy way. Well, great minds to some extent, but yours is greater. Actually, right at the very beginning of the show, the first thing I said was, I don't know what these people are going to do with all the oxygen removed from their lives now. It's just like, what do we do now? We're so used to this. And I mentioned somewhat, you said that they you know, they're going to miss it. I don't want to accuse people of being like tacit Trump supporters for either saying too much or saying too little about him. Everybody had to navigate this thing. It was ultimately a huge story and a bad thing. Like I just I also just I think there is a hysteria element that and if that's how people people process it like i don't want to like i

don't hate them i don't like it's not i maybe i did i did some of that so like i just it's it's just what interests me right now anyway yeah i i agree with you nick has a great mind but noam is made a specialty out of denigrating himself mind is is I think equal to no no no I would I would tell you know I go on and off Twitter I spent some I spent a week following it and then I don't look at it for two weeks but Nick's Twitter feed is is I mean that everybody should aspire to have something that sparkles into left-free like you know I turn thing, I deleted it two weeks ago. I'm going to undelete it,

but I was finding it was taking up so much of my life and making me so mad. I thought I needed to, it's not officially a new year's resolution, but I, it was, I just couldn't stand seeing people that I know are smart saying such nuts stuff that I thought instead of fighting it, I'm just going to ignore it for a little bit, but maybe with that, I feel like that all the time, watching people who I know are smart saying such nuts stuff. Oh, Ariel. By the way.

So I just want to tell you guys something because you happen to be here. I had a very emotional day today. I found, and I'll play it for some of you guys. I found a audio cassette today, which was virtually like my father talking to me from the grave and I never knew it existed. And it was a conversation that my,

I don't know how I can make it very quickly. There was a time when my father's parents had sent him an audio cassette letter. That's the way they sent letters. They were in Israel saying that they felt like failures because at that point in their life, they had no money and they didn't even have enough money to send him money to visit them in Israel. My father didn't have much money. And my father was very, very upset that his father especially felt like a failure.

So he sat down to write a, to dictate an audio cassette to his parents that I guess he never sent. And in this audio cassette, he explained to his parents everything that he wanted for me and how they had, and he was telling his parents, mama and papa, you've given me,

and then he spelled it out. I won't go into it. And he says, and that's all I could ever want for my son to have. And he went into all the details. So really it was like hearing my father telling me from the grave, everything that he wanted for me in a way that I had never, you know, he never.

And I mean, this is a unbelievable find for me. I was crying. My son came down. Daddy, why are you crying? Then he sat and he listened to it with me. He's a little too young to understand it, but he responded to the moment. He sat quietly for 20 minutes.

As Perry all knows, he never sits quietly. Anyway, I just wanted to share that because it's really weighing on me. Can we get a highlight? That sounds fabulous. Can we get a highlight of That sounds fast. Thank you, Nico. Huh? What's that? Can we get a highlight of a couple of things he said?

I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you if you want. Do you have what he wanted for you? He said that, yes. Well, he talked about, I can't say it out loud because I'm going to break down. It's very emotional. Maybe next week I'll be able to. I can't say it out loud because I'm going to break down. It's very emotional. Maybe next week I'll be able to. I can't.

It's funny how, I mean, you get an insight into how the brain works when you get emotional because you don't sense it's there. And then it instantly overtakes you. So it's obviously really all there in some way that you're not aware of. And then as soon as you utter the first word, all of it comes rushing out. And I've noticed that as soon as I try to talk about it, say specifically, I start to cry.

So anyway, but essentially it was very, very beautiful. And he did give me all that stuff. That's an awesome, I'm glad you found that. You just, you came upon it. Yeah. I mean, Nick, you and I are not friends like that, but I'll send it. It's not that long.

I'll send it to you and you listen to it if you're not. But it's quite a beautiful thing. He spoke. Was it English? He spoke to his parents in English? He spoke to his parents in English, yeah. Wow. We do want to plug Nico's special before we go.

Nico, tell us what it's called and where people can find it. Heck yeah. I have a new special. It's called Darkout, ladies and gentlemen. It's spelled D-A-R-K-O-U-T. You can find it right on YouTube. So go to YouTube, type in Nico White, N-E-K-O-W-H-I-T-E

Darkout, D-A-R-K-O-U-T. Check me out. Let me know what you think of it. The special is Darkout. Check me out. Let me know what you think of it. The special is Dark Out. Check it out. Find Nick on Twitter, apparently. I'll bring it back up tonight.

I will tell you this. I really did come from very good stock. I'm going to tell you, I have to say that about my father this isn't this is not an ordinary man it really and it was clear clear it was an age which was creating an image for me you know 15 years after his death this was the real thing so anyway okay enough about me what do you think of me I don't think i ever saw your father perform musically i was

thinking about that the other day because it's on the internet you can find it all right i guess that is it for us can we get nick on the show more often because he's always got a lot to say as maybe during the impeachment he might have some stuff if there's going to be a trial he might have and and and nico of course um, we really missed you last week. Last week was the week we did this. We had this. Yeah, but we had a really, really good expert on police brutality and stuff.

And he wanted to, he was uncomfortable having the conversation without anybody of color on the show also. But you- Oh, man. I really do wish I was there, man. He was, you would have liked this guy really smart guy all right so anyway be safe everybody i know we're um over time but i feel like um my intellect

is often challenged by you and i do think that our listeners i know i'm yes um i do think that our listeners... By know him, by know him. By know him, yes. I do think that it is worth... Wait, wait, Perrielle, I wanted to tell you something. You fucking sign off right now. What an asshole. I beat him at Clue. Wait, he's back. He's back. Please stay safe.

You hear me? I'll take my medicine. Go ahead. That joke is getting really fucking old. You won Clue. She won the Clue game. Congratulations. I don't know much about Clue.

Is that a game of wits? I don't know anything about it. To some extent it is. It's luck as well. But yes, it is a game of wits. Well. Can we go now? Also, Nick, brother, pleasure to talk to you, man.

Bye, everybody. It was nice to meet you all. Dan, have a great night. See you at the cellar soon, I think. Really? I think so. I think the governor's on our side. Governor wants to open everything up all of a sudden.

How did you just sweep that under the carpet? That's like such a major piece of news. I have no inside information. I just feel like between the vaccine and the change of attitude by you know, urban governors and mayors, I think we're gonna be open maybe 50% capacity. Y'all gonna be open. It's gonna be nothing black audience members is gonna be Oh, man. I can't wait. I watched dark out tonight? Please. It's so good.

It's so good, Nico. Thank you. I really appreciate this. It's real tough. I know you wouldn't just say that. Nick's been down to the cellar. That's how I met him. Hell yeah.

I love the cellar, man. I don't know what's going to be left in New York. I've been out of New York now for like six weeks, but I'm back in a week. It's weird looking, bro. Yeah, it's... It's not the same place it was. Nick likes whiskey, so it was whiskey, right?

You were drinking whiskey. So, 2021, we're gonna do some heavy hanging, I think. We deserve it. I'm looking forward to that. Take it easy, everybody. Bye, everybody. All love, y'all.