The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Wisdom from Frum

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

David Frum and Gibran Saleem

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, here on Sirius XM Channel 99. My name is Noam Dwarman. I'm the owner of the Comedy Cellar. We're here at the back table of the Comedy Cellar, the famous back table. I'm here, as always, with my co-host, Mr. Dan Natterman. I'd just like to briefly say that I do have a slight cold, and we'll see how that plays out. Okay. Sometimes that actually makes me a a slight cold, and we'll see how that plays out. Okay. Sometimes that actually makes me a little more loose, so we'll see. Okay, and comedian Gibran Salim is a New York City-based comedian

and has been featured on FX, MTV, and stand-up NBC. We know we've got to work on these intros. Every time, it's the same conversation. Because his podcast, Everybody Fails, will be launching soon, as well as his upcoming short film entitled Gibranistan. Wait, you've got a podcast too? Yeah, but I haven't started it yet. You are my competitor.

Yes. I have a milkshake. Yes. Anyway. And I tell you, there's too many podcasts. Okay, guest of honor, David Froome, who is more than just a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of a 2018 New York Times bestseller, Trumpocracy.

He was also speech writer to President Bush. And did you write the Axis of Evil speech? Is that correct? I was part of the team that accomplished it. Wow. It's a State of the Union address. It's like a moon launch. You have a lot of people on it.

But that actual phrase, was that your... Don't be humble. I'm trying to be neither humble. I'm trying to be both humble and accurate. Anyway, so it was part of a... I worked on it. You worked on it. Did he pronounce your name correctly? He said

Froome, and I always thought it was from. He did not, but I was from. I wasn't going to make an issue. I'm sorry. Why start up now? I think he thought there was an umlaut over the hue. So it is from. So is it like it was life, liberty, and it wasn't always a pursuit of happiness.

Like Jefferson had it different at first, and then I think Franklin said, no, how about pursuit of happiness? So it might have been something like that. A process like that, exactly. Okay. So these are the things we want to settle here today. Okay. Immigration and Trump.

Whoa. We're going to settle all of that. How long are we talking for? Now, you just wrote an article. Well, actually, we wanted to get into Christchurch. Well, I don't think there's a way to discuss immigration without getting into that at some point. So you wrote an article this week called...

It's the cover story of The Atlantic right now called How Much Immigration is Too Much. And this is one of America's most emotive issues. And the article tries to approach it in a way that is as reasonable uh... non-emotive as possible i this is what i feel awkward being at the committee's table design like such a

non-comedian like that how is the situation on politics that's a little situation is very balanced nowhere we have serious serious we have serious officer but i'd find i'd do have this often wrong faith that you can reason people through difficult things and arrive at conclusions that

work for most people. We obviously haven't met Gibran, but go ahead. So go ahead. Give us the outline of your argument on that. Because I think I agree with you. So the outline of the article is I don't think Americans understand how much immigration receipt countries receiving

and how recently this is the way and drive this point home is in the single decade of the nineteen nineties more immigrants like tend to bunch legal and illegal immigrants together they're not as different from one another's as often made out in that one decade in this is received more immigrants than in the sixty years from nineteen15 to 1975 and uh and this is part of a vast global movement of people from 1990 to 2015 45 million people

left the global south for the global north and the numbers are going to increase in this 21st century you said 45 million 45 million people in from the global south to the global north in in thirty years in in fit in uh... in quarter central course uh... and uh... the numbers are going to increase uh... and we have to make this work the key in my view to make it work is controlling the total numbers people

talk about immigration is if you're for the against against it, as if it's either or, and the big argument of the piece is it's not either or. It's more or less, and who? You can't take everybody. You can't exist with nobody. The United States is not reproducing itself without immigration. The population would fall, but you have to have

an answer that the country can sustain. You brought up that we're not reproducing ourselves. Is that a possible solution? For Americans to have more children? Correct. And policies put in place to encourage that. Has that been tried anywhere? It's been tried.

The problem is modern governments find it different. The sorts of things you'd have to do to get your birth rate up are so expensive that modern governments flinch from them. And just about everywhere in the developed world right now. That's when people don't want a lot of kids. Well, the way they raise kids now, they want to put so much attention.

I mean, when I was growing up, everybody had three kids. I have three kids. Yes, I have three kids. But we're like the only family that all my kids' friends are either only children or one of two children. And that's a clear change from when I grew up in exactly the same town. I'm in the same town growing up. You really were. In Ardsley, New York.

So it's a pretty thing. Okay, so let me ask you about this. So that's the one thing that on the left and the Democrats, they will never tell you what policy, what limitations they will accept, which to me means that they're fundamentally not serious. But let me ask you if this is correct. I think that no matter what would happen, if they were to shut down the border, we would realize immediately we need the labor. There is no two ways about it. we need the labor. There is no two ways about it. We need the labor. And very quickly, Republican business interests

would be being pressured to bear to open up that spigot of immigration because we need the labor. So I think no matter what policies we try, in the end, reality is going to prevail and we will need immigrant labor. So to me, the biggest problem that we're facing, that's going to be a constant, is that we've rejected the melting pot ideal for the nation. Well, again, I'm for immigration too. It's a question of how much,

how many do you take? So right now, the United States gets about 1.2 million legal immigrants a year, probably another 300,000 or 400,000 illegal immigrants. The illegal numbers are going to pick up if the economy stays as strong as it is right now. Until 1990, the United States took 540,000 immigrants a year. We just about doubled the numbers in 1990. And I can tell you historically why it doesn't really matter. But there's this attitude, well, we have it exactly right now. And 540 would be too few, 2.4 million would be too many. And at one point, it's so random,

it's so the outcome of a congressional process. And you say, how are you quite sure that all those years ago in 1990, Congress hit exactly the right number and no one's ever to look at it again? So, as you say, societies need to move. People are going to move. It's a global world. We have an aging population. We need the labor. We want the social safety.

We need the labor to sustain it. Do you know what the total U.S. population is? 330 million. Yeah, about that. 330 million. Just to clarify, Gibron, you are... I just want to very quickly clarify. Jabron, you are first generation, or you were born overseas, or in the United States?

No, no, I was born in America, and my family immigrated here, both from Pakistan. Well, I'm an immigrant. I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen. I was born in Canada, and I became a citizen in 2007. I'm first generation. My parents are also Canadian. Oh, really? That's correct. So I've a citizen in 2007. I'm first generation. My parents are also Canadian. Really? That's correct.

So I've been saying lately about this subject. I said, I don't see how a country that is not ready to allow Harvard to become more than 20% Asian is ready to embrace big numbers of immigrants. In other words, I don't see how we can have it both ways to say, you know, it's totally racist to look out at the people who want to come in and want to deny them or want to distinguish between them or choose where they come from.

But as soon as they get over the border, the most important thing about them is where they came from and we have to make sure that there's not too many here and not too many there. How can we hold together with that kind of thought?

Well, that's one of the questions that haunts me that led me to write the piece. The United States has already signed up for gigantic immigration. There are about 40-plus million people foreign-born in this country.

About 11 million of those 40-plus million people are here illegally. How are we going to make a success of that? How are we going to make a success? That's something we've already signed up to.

And it's difficult. It's not impossible. The United States has done things like this before. And so the thing that haunts me is how do we make a success? And controlling numbers makes it easier to make Americans. Let me give you something I worry about a lot. Most Americans say, oh, there's this total difference between legal and illegal immigrants, completely separate things. That's not true. Many illegal immigrants began legal. They came on a visa and they arrived legally and they then overstated. Many legal people began illegally. They came here illegally and they then married an American and acquired legal status. These are blurry categories, and it's very common to have households in which some members

have legal status and some members don't. I just find, you know, I am a lawyer by training, but as I think about this as a social matter, I group them all together. And making a success of this is going to be very hard. Now, here's the problem. The biggest decade for illegal immigration was the 1990s. The 2010s are shaping up to be another big decade. But those people came in the 1990s. They were in their 20s then, probably in their 40s and 50s now. About two-thirds of them have been here for more than a decade. They're not going back where they came from.

What happens when they turn 65? What do they do for a pension? What do they do for a pension? What do they do for health care? Are we going to say that at that point someone's lived in the country for 20, 25, 30 years, it's the only home you know, you don't have legal status, but you're not in the system, so if you get sick, no, we're going to have to do something about that. But if we're going to make a success of that, you can't say, all right, well, that means that anybody who shows up here gets in the Medicare program because we have to get those 11 million people, find some way before they retire to get them

into it. That means that the person who steps off the airplane and overstays a visa, they get into Medicare as a bonus prize. That can't be right. So you need a total system of enforcement. You need a total management of numbers. And then you have to take the people who arrived here, including those who have been here a long time, then you have to take the uh... people arrived here putting those who have been here a long time make americans i'd i'd agree with you and i i think that intersectionality is not good all uh... is the enemy of all this i have a big movement this country that says is what do you mean in america

you tall american short american basis american or american basis american or brownish american the fit and what is happening that the height which is supposed to be a to an expression of victimhood is actually a tool of power and as people perceive that the type of the tight

hyphen is a tool power people who don't have a hyphen what because you have to keep up with this type of arms race pepsin is in the specification of what type of person yeah your comedian american haha see and i can notice is in the trump people did that they're business effort to make trump voters of of victim did a uh... or constituents on conspiration says white people without a strong ethnic identity

uh... but they have all that youworking Americans, Trump voters, conservatives, and what they're trying to do is claim the power of the hyphen for themselves. And in the end, I end the piece by quoting this passionate speech by Teddy Roosevelt during the First World War. And Teddy Roosevelt coined the phrase hyphenated American, and he was against it, and that's often seen as an example of exclusive attitude he didn't have an exclusive and he had this extraordinary speech but how uh... that the rose well-suited country since the seventeenth century said the

immigrants would be a their children are going to marry much we have to be one nation well what do you think about rose about that it took our hyphenated americans and similarly uh... opposed i've been at america i think? I think it's a fact that people have these feelings and it's not realistic to expect them to give up the feelings immediately, but I think we have to encourage people to find a common American identity. I think there's one other thing, and I think this is maybe

a sensitive subject and I'll try to speak about it sensitively. We like sensitive subjects here. I think what has happened is that the black American experience is a particularly unique one. And a lot of other groups look at that experience and say, I want to model my story on theirs. But one of the things that makes America America is that this story is unique. And so this is a place where the hyphen really is appropriate

because of the distinctive experience. But that's somebody's unique story and it doesn't, and you can't just now do that for everybody. I feel like that's a specific cultural shift that's happened in X amount of time. And that the correlation between social status and being perceived as a victim will also adjust with time. Do you know what I mean? People get bored with it. Like that hyphenation now means social status, at least within the world of social media and stuff. But I can't predict it, but I feel like that's not here to stay.

I just hope not. Now, if we have 40 million immigrants, what percentage of them are Latin American? I don't have that at the top of my head, but Mexican-Americans are the biggest, at this point, immigrant group. Is it the most overwhelming single-nationality immigration we've ever had? We've never had. So we've had, that's a very interesting one. So we all remember the opening scenes of The Godfather.

So the United States had a huge immigration from 1880 to 1914. In some ways, even bigger than the immigration of today. But the difference then was that immigration happened at a time when Americans were having lots of children, native-born Americans having lots of children of their own. So even though relative to the size of the country, the immigration in the 1890s was bigger than it is today. Its impact on the country was smaller. In fact, the proportion of Americans who were born outside the United States was smaller in 1910 than it was in 1890, despite the huge immigration, because the Americans who were here already were also having lots of children.

But in those days, that immigration came from many, many different places. And so one of the things that accelerated the learning of English was, so you came off the boat from Sicily and you wanted to talk to the person in the next block. They did not speak, never mind Italian, because Italian and those, they didn't speak Sicilian. And even if you're from Sicily and Calabria, you had a lot of troubles. They might be from Greece. They might be from Poland. They might be from Lithuania. They might be Irish. It's the Giddish, whatever.

It's the Giddish. So whatever happened, the kids absolutely had to learn English because that was the only available language. What we are seeing is we've got pretty good English language acquisition by the present-day generation of immigrants. But what seems to be happening is they're learning something but not a lot

and so you have uh... really uh... worrying scholastic achievement getting today the the hispanic community immigrants generally especially with hispanics because they're they're living in a world which is so many people speak the same language kids go to school they watch tbd listen music they've learned enough english to but they don't learn enough English to function. But they don't learn enough English to function at the very highest levels of opportunity.

So what would be wrong if we all, and we're reasonable people here, if we all kind of agree that we need the immigrants, but we need to be one nation, need them to be to assimilate then we have to to construct immigration policy which is likely to succeed and wouldn't that mean taking more from a a wider variety of places

what would be put this is beginning to happen what one of the things that is uh... ones you would want to say and right now but seventy percent of the things that is uh... ones you would want to say and right now but seventy percent of the people come here uh... legally come because their relatives of somebody already here not and not just you know husbands and wives changing migration from hell's end of the family reunification

and this happens that's in fact it's all happened is that you come because your cousin's here, and your cousin's here because her cousin's here, and this goes back now. And so the immigrants in a way are selecting themselves. So along with taking smaller overall numbers of what I'm advocating is shifting the balance to make it have less family reunification and more people who are here because of high educational qualifications. President Trump calls it merit. There's nothing meritorious about this.

You're not a better person. It's just easier for you to function in a highly developed economy. And as a practical matter, what that will mean is you'll get more people from South Asia and West Africa and probably fewer people from Latin America and the Philippines. And not because South Asians and West Africans are necessarily better educated, but because if you're well educated in Latin America, you're not going to come to the United States. The social structure of Latin America is such,

if you're an educated person, there's some pretty good opportunities for you in your place of origin. It's if you're poor that things are bad. Whereas what happens especially in West in west africa south asia is uh... special people want to uh... traditionally disfavored groups your muslim from india if you're a woman from pakistan that you're gonna find there's a real s that the people who have educational

attainment say i can't make it here the ceiling is higher here what what precipitated your family as Gibran, to move from Pakistan? Education and stability that came along with that. My dad immigrated here. He had a Fulbright scholarship, and he moved to America, and eventually he got a PhD in engineering, went back to Pakistan to look for a wife, met my mom, and then came back with her and had kids.

And that's very common. There's so many South Asians that are coming to America because they know other people also to pursue academia because I feel and I could be wrong, the ceiling might be higher here. I might have asked you this before, but just generally how misty do you get when you hear stories about the founding fathers or Thomas Jefferson, George Washington?

Do you feel that those are your that's your history or do you feel that's I'm here, but that's their history? Or do you feel that's, I'm here, but that's their history? I feel like there's a common duality that's constantly going through me on a subconscious level, which is, yeah, I'm American.

I was born in America. I'm a full-blooded American in the sense that I was born in America, but also my other home is Pakistan. I have so many family there. I'm culturally attached to it. This is what worries me. So there's a common divide.

So let me say, so my father came over to eight years old. Yeah. And by eight and a half, he was a Yankee. Like Tom, you know. Yeah. No, but this was very binding for a nation of immigrants that they left the past behind. Yeah. I'm Jewish. I don't know if you are but if you want to tell

uh... that what is that a lot of the it an astonishing number of the people written about immigration have been jess jews attend to see in the jewish experience is normal and that of the other ninety eight percent of humanity uh... and so so what i'm saying is unique to jew is you think that it's the most italians

and irish i think reaction of the revulsion of jews to the place they came from and the falling in love with the place that the jewish immigration experience is a singularly uncomplicated that's interesting back there there is nothing but you know uh... and lucky enough to some of my relatives lived into their 90s.

So I learned something. Because the ones who died in their 70s, to get anything out of them, half my family is pre-Holocaust and half is post. But I will tell you, as a Canadian, what two countries are more similar than Canada and the United States? Yet every 4th of July, my kids troll me and say, so how do you feel about this holiday? what two countries are more similar than Canada and the United States? Yet every 4th of July, my kids troll me and say, so how do you feel about this holiday? And I get it.

And they say, because they know what I think. The Royal Navy wasn't free. It had to be paid for. It was a good thing to tax. I think he's being very optimistic. Noam, I think you're overstating the case with regard to immigrants. First of all, most Americans don't get misty-eyed over the founding fathers, unfortunately. Because there's other historical associations around the time.

Well, black Americans certainly always been the one subgroup of Americans that we understand and respect can only but have ambivalent feelings about the United States of America. Because they are Americans more than most Americans. They've always been here. And they have that history. But that's quite different from people choosing to come here and bringing in that feeling along with them. And I think that's new. Now, maybe that'll all come on the watch in a few generations. I think that's just human empathy.

You don't have to have experienced another group's trauma to understand that that wasn't good. Like, the Holocaust was bad. I wasn't good. Like, the Holocaust was bad. I wasn't there. No, but I'm saying I adopted the founding fathers as my founding fathers, and their shame is my shame in a sense, too. Like, they're me, and we did this to black Americans. And I feel that we did it,

even though I know my father wasn't even born here. But Jerron was talking about a duality that runs through him. What Caucasian group about a duality that runs through him. What Caucasian group has more duality? And I hate to say it, because this is Noam's latest obsession, dual loyalty. I'm not using the term dual loyalty.

But what white American group has more duality than the Jews? Oh my gosh. Well, let's, so here we are in New York, site of the bloodiest riots in American history in eighteen sixty three when irish when at the same time as the battle of gettysburg was being waged to save the union irish americans

uh... felt completely alienated from the united states uh... who oppose the union war effort rose up in thousands and i think dozens maybe hundreds of people were killed. Many Americans have had this experience during the First World War. But amongst white Americans. During the First World War, when German Americans were told,

you can't speak your language anymore, and your schools are going to be closed down. One of the things, and this is where, again, the Jewish experience is apparent. The making of America was a hard, rough, often brutal. It's got a lot of, I mean, I always say the reason we study history is you start off in elementary school thinking, you know, the United States, the hope of mankind, the greatest democracy in the world. And then you'll learn a little bit more. You'll learn a little bit more. You'll learn a little bit more. And it gets more and more and more complicated. What I always say to...

That's still true. The trick is you can't stop there. You have to keep going until you come out the other side of the funhouse ride and say, now I know all the dark passages. And the passages are really dark. And the whole concept of white Americans anyway is such a new idea. all the dark passages and there are the passages are really dark and and the whole concept of white Americans anyway is such you know such a new idea no one in 1910 in the south in 1910 there were white Americans but in New York there

weren't white Americans they there were just a series of groups who were mostly from Europe and who had you know violent hate you know often very violent hatred you know st. Patrick's Day which just means commemorated orange day those did they didn't think that the the south and the protestant catholic irish well white people together to make america uh... i guess and this is one of things i come out as a canadian and as a student history

uh... and this informs and be one of questions people ask me is how can you be so easy spirit usually know, so you're unusually immigration skeptical, and yet you're this fierce anti-Trump person. The foundation of all of my thinking about politics is that democracies are more fragile than they think they are. And that we have to be protective and respectful of the fragility of democracy. And not test it. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, during the economic crisis,

I was in favor of, although I'm a pretty conservative Republican most of the time, but in an economic crisis, you flood the country with money. Do not test what will happen if you have a serious depression. And bail out the auto industry, right? You were for that, too. I was for the car industry. The car industry. The auto industry. Yeah. Oh, so I thought you said oil. No, not oil. But those guys... Yeah, I agreed with that that too. I was for the car industry. The car industry. Yeah. The auto industry. Yeah. Oh, so I thought you said oil. No, not oil. Yeah.

But those guys, yeah, I agreed with that too. But do not, and I think what we're often doing is just testing how much pressure we can put on the country

before something breaks. While it would be interesting to know the answer, I'd rather not know because the only way you know the answer is when you hear crack. David, can I call you David? Yeah, too late. I'd rather not know because the only way you know the answer is when you hear crack. David,

can I call you David? I guess. Anyway, Canada. You're from there. Canada doesn't strike me, and I may be wrong, as a patriotic country. It's really not as patriotic as the United States. Is that a fair assessment? I mean, with our, you know,

Noam was talking about the founding fathers and the adoration and misty-eyed. Do Canadians get misty-eyed thinking about whoever founded Canada? I don't know who those people would be. No, it's not the same. But I just want to, I'll give you a theory of mine,

which is I think American patriotism reflects a lot of the artificiality. Let me put it this way. You go to Japan, like the most self-conscious country in the world, they don't wave a lot of flags. The reason you see flags everywhere in the United States, you know when Americans started flying flags,

not over government buildings, but over private houses? After the firing on Fort Sumter. Adam Goodhart, in his fantastic book, 1861, describes the habit, the American custom of raising flags over private homes. Very unusual in the developed world, was a response to the worst civil conflict in any of the developed countries. And so Americans do this. The cult of this was because it's so hard to put this country together and to find heroes who, on either side of the racial divide, on either side of the South-North divide, on either

side of the class divide, the United States had the most incredibly violent either side of the south-north divide, on either side of the class divide. And the United States had the most incredibly violent labor relations of any developed country. Again, with strikes in which dozens, even hundreds of people were killed. To put all of this together into one country, that took a very self-conscious effort. And the making of these founding fathers, who are very fallible people, into these demigods, that's part of the project of making America. Right, but that's kind of my point. That's what I'm worried about is that it may not reflect truth,

metaphysical truth, but it's kind of these necessary myths that we need to hold together a country that has no DNA. But neither does Canada. Canada's holding together without, I think, without... Canada's mostly all white people. Canada's more multi-ethnic than you might think. Canada's coming apart too, by the way. Canada has constant national unity problems. And Canada's a different approach. The United States says we're going to hold together

by finding some common myths and all believing them. The Canadian approach is we're going to hold together by finding some common myths and all believing them. And the Canadian approach is we're going to hold together by identifying all the places, all the cracks in the sidewalk, and nobody go near them. And so people always say, Canada, everyone's so polite. But we have a whole list of things we don't talk about because people find it upsetting. And so Americans will say we'll talk about them and we'll

be one people. But not only French and English, but East versus West, Aboriginal versus post-colonial settlement, all of those things, those are real beliefs. Also, isn't it fair to say, you know, we shouldn't bash ourselves

over the head about our past. I mean I mean slavery of course was something we inherited when we came as a nation in 1789 whatever it was we didn't decide to have slaves slavery existed so it's there

it's also the realization of growth and if you chart American history and how far we've come socially and technologically and in every aspect of how we've accomplished

as a people, it's a tremendously, it's an amazing, inspiring story that I don't know any other people since 1789 could compare it to.

And if you were to take that story out of world history, what would the other countries look like? I agree with all of that. There are many points along the way where things could have gone wrong. And this also is a point along the way where things could go wrong. And one of the things you need to draw inspiration from

is just not to take things so for granted. Not to think, okay, we're safe. It's done. The story's over. Nothing big can go wrong from here on. I'd understand. History is now. We're making history right now.

So let me make one of the points, and then can I use that to launch into the Jewish thing? What about the Christ Church? So just in your article, you had written that 33 out of 85 Nobel Prize winners in a certain time period were immigrants. I said, wow, that's fantastic. So I went to look it up.

And what I found was if we're going to look at the immigrants who are winning the Nobel Prizes, are we allowed to also notice that it's overwhelmingly from one culture and basically zero from another culture? Or do we just take the Nobel thing off the table? If we're going to say, look, this is one of the benefits, well, then, yeah. But kind of how are we going to get that benefit if we ignore? Okay, well, without going down too much of a byway on this,

so Jews have contributed disproportionately to scientific advancement in the United States, at least until very recently. Why? And the answer to that is, well, the first country in the world to organize scientific research in a systematic way was Germany. And in Germany, Jews were a disproportionate number of the highly educated people. And so, but the organization, the scientific enterprise as we know it, England or Great Britain had a very

important role, but the real organization, large scale, big science, or at least big for it to say, really starts in Germany. And then the Germans decide, right, we're going to take, you know, a third of our scientific, of the people who do the science, and drive them into exile, and then take another third who are their friends, or married to them, or, you know, like them, or are horrified by this explosion, and drive them into exile, and then take the last third and systematically dumb them down, or get them killed, and get them bombed, and then take the last third and systematically dumb them down or get them killed and get them bombed and destroy the material bases.

And we are going to remove Germany as a fact from world science, which one of the things, if you look at that list, you'll discover how many before 1933 of the Nobelists are from Germany. I don't think there's one after 1933. I started 2000 on this list because I think that's... And so what you have is this, the transplant of the culture of large-scale organized science from Germany into the United States.

And then it's both the people who did it back in Germany and their students and the next generation. I think what you're seeing is that this is something very teachable. And if you look at the list of names, you see more and more indian names south asian names i should say uh... and i think that that is going to proliferate i mean not all people going to be equally interested in all things

well you also said that the most educated classes don't come from latin america right left in latin america educated people stay at home because they have that if you are an upper middle class mexican uh... you can have a pretty good life in Mexico. It's just tough if you're in the bottom 20% of the country. So what do you want to say about the Christ Church? I'll get to the Jew thing.

What do you want to ask about it? Well, first of all, I want to have a general discussion about it because it's sort of dominating the news. Well, here's my questions. And I did a lot of research to try to find, in a sense that, you know, you say, do eggs cause heart disease? And you look at that in an empirical way, and you hopefully have it double-blind if you can, because you know how much confirmation bias can affect things. Are we sure, how sure are we, that Donald Trump is causing a rise in white nationalism? Oh, I don't think he's the cause. I think he's the symptom. You think he's the symptom.

So, look, I think what has been happening is white nationalism. And by the way, it's really weird to call it nationalism when it actually is the most global ideological movement. It's as global as jihadism. So it's white racial chauvinism. And not everybody in this movement, by the way, is actually going to be agreed by the question, what makes you white? A lot of people are ideologists. And it's like jihadism. There's a spectrum. That there are people who are doing intellectually theoretical work that is, just as there are, you can see this in the Islamic world, so there are people who are conservative Muslim clerics, very much in the tradition, wouldn't hurt a fly. And there are elements in their work that people more radical than themselves

can draw on to build a more militant ideological structure, even though they themselves wouldn't hurt a fly. And then there are people who then say, well, this creates a justification for violence, but I wouldn't do it myself. And then there are the people who goad and provoke and tease. And then there are the people who set up

the online communities where disaffected, sexless young men get radicalized and then the people actually go out and take from all of this collagen and do the murders. As a disaffected, sexless young man, do you have any... I don't think Trump is the cause of...

just to generalize the term white nationalism, but I think his lack of a statement is not helping it. It's almost a lot of his rhetoric, I feel like people will extract what they want from it. And people who are already having this white nationalist ideology, they see Trump's lack of having any aggressive statement denouncing it. He's activating it. But these symptoms that already exist. He's not responding to it like a prop he's not

would know his my god this is a giant domestic and international security and in the united states it is a source of major domestic terrorism these groups are now intersecting in interacting this with this murderer in new zealand uh... had traveled all over the world had met with like-minded people they're not nationalists. They're not paid. They have no loyalty to any national state. That's one of the reasons why

the Trump people, again, they're not violent at all, of course, but they can work so easily with the Russians because they see in light-skinned Russians, people with whom they have something in common, much more than they have with Americans with the skin of a different hue because this the passport no longer matters but we have this right it's a proper international terrorist movement with a set of ideas and what would normally happen is the domestic security apparatus the United States would be interested and when you had a killing as spectacular and horrifying as the New Zealand murder the president would get involved and say, okay, let's analyze this. What are we going to do?

What's our policy? We have to believe they are, right? No, we know they're not because the president feels, you say, Donald Trump feels implicated. Right, but doesn't the FBI follow these things as a matter of regular course state that they've been there without a presence of all uh... there's a famous back in two thousand nine department homeland security released a an important paper warning of the rise of this kind of ideology

uh... in pointing out that one of the things that was that was giving a rocket they do the thing was actually written before the onset of the Great Recession was demobilized, embittered veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One of the things that was distinctive about those wars is, well, obviously a lot of people were killed, but because of the advances in medicine, many people came back with terrible,

people who had been killed in any previous conflict. They survived, but with physical or psychic wounds. And that Homeland Security worried that these people could become the material out of which, and this provoked a huge reaction from conservative men. Are you calling conservatives racists and murderers? And so it was shut down. And to an amazing extent,

if you look at how focused we have been on jihadi violence, and I'm not saying too much, and the structures aren't there, even from the beginning to think about it. And the President of the United States feels every time, as he said in a tweet, I don't know if we're going to broadcast this on the same day, on the day that you and I are talking, the President said, you know, I'm tired of people blaming, he's hearing it in his head, because he knows everyone's like looking at him. Dial M for murder.

And he feels accused. And that means, and there's some justice to that, but not that much, some. But that means the government of the United States is paralyzed. And we need to say, you know, somebody ought to be looking at these chat rooms. Let's retrace the steps by which people turn their disaffection into murder. With the jihadis, and especially after 9-11, people were saying we should look at the root causes. Some people were saying let's look at the root causes. Others were saying F the root causes. We don't want to know what the root causes are.

This is madness. And to look at the root causes would be, in some way, justified. Now, we see the same conversation after Christchurch. Should we look at this man's manifesto? Is it worth investigating why he did what he did? Or should we dismiss him as a lunatic that deserves no analysis?

I think one of the things that is, and again, you don't want to say anything good comes out of a terrible crime like this, but one of the things that is, and again, you don't want to say anything good comes out of a terrible crime like this, but one of the things that is useful about studying jihadism and white nationalism together and seeing their similarities is when people began saying after 9-11 we need to look at the root causes, they said that means we need to look at the things that people say are their grievances. Israel, Kashmir, whatever it is. And we need to solve the problem in cash

and people like me people like me said then and what he's yeah we need to look like the root causes the root causes of this crime are not cashmere in israel for the jihadis immigration into new zealand that's the problem the root cause is young men war disaffected sexless

uh... isolated what do we do about the sexist uh... what do we do with the cell phones but uh... what we need to that the more we understand the similarities between jihadi and white nationalist that the more we can sell some the more we can focus on the right tonight i quote in my book hypocrisy a woman who was an expert, she was South Asian,

she was an expert on, especially in the Kashmir context, on the radicalization of young men, and she said, I can see this happening with young white men in America. It's the same process. And so by focusing on the two together,

we can see what are the true root causes which are the um uh combination of the place of young men the availability of the media um and and they're and the availability social media and the isolation radicalized messages and the easy availability of instruments of violence this is this is what do you think that there is no i don't want to use the word legitimate but when he this man said that he sees white european peoples becoming a minority

in traditionally european countries you don't believe that that's anything to do with his real motivation but i think a lot of human rights abuses that are occurring in Kashmir by the Indian forces against the predominantly Muslim people of Kashmir. You know, I don't think it would be a very agreeable thing to be a young Palestinian under Israeli military rule. And, you know, as I said, I'm someone who's worried about the long-term effects of immigration in two big numbers. But the question of how you turn those political concerns into justification for your individual mass murder of civilians, uh... i think i find it helpful to not not think about that as the

that might the path i want i think it's most useful to follow prevent crimes like this is not the political path but the psychological the sociological sexual i can i can i tell you what i what i worry about with this with uh... you know radical radical islamic terror with radical Islamic terror. I think there were 70,000 people killed by radical Islamic terrorists last year in the world, mostly in Muslim countries.

And we devote hundreds of billions of dollars every year to keep it to a minimum. And of course, they have territories and armies and weapons or whatever it is. So in my mind, are we comparing kind of like smallpox, the people who die from smallpox to the people who die from the complications of the common cold, and then pretending that the cold is just a serious problem, forgetting the fact that, yeah, but we have a whole tremendous infrastructure that

vaccinates us against smallpox, and we a hundred percent of the common colds and Then the fatality numbers are the same we say oh look the common cold is just like smallpox Well, no, it's not because if we got if we devoted the same attention to Jihadi terrorism that we're devoting right now to white national terrorism. We might have tens of thousands of deaths I think well if you see a Virus in a lab and say, this virus is very damaging

to a well-fed person who's properly housed and it's lethal to a poor person, we will not be surprised that the same virus can have very different effects of lethality on different kinds of populations yeah i mean uh one of the things that is different about white nationalism is it predominantly occurs in the context of society with highly

effective police systems i remember um being at a uh visiting with some British police in Manchester, about half a decade ago. And I sat with them in their control center, and you know those video cameras you see in every British town? So I'm in a room where they've got this giant TV screen that they can break. You can either show you one image, or they can break it and it can show you 500 images. And they've got a guy whose looks they don't like and they're following him down the street and then they break away and they have huge files.

The level of surveillance that a British or Australian or French or German or American state can deploy when it wants to versus you know but pakistan can do uh... we have very sophisticated states uh... and they have armies so a lot of it the reason that the jihadi violence has been so lethal to securitization barely states at all iraq and syria and then the fact that it that this thing can be so much worse. It's bad. And it seems to be growing. And in this country, there's a

problem, which is you don't need, while the defense is much more robust here, it's also true that here it is so easy to get lethal instruments. That's right. That you don't need very many of these guys to do things like what happened to the synagogue in Pittsburgh, what happened to the synagogue in Pittsburgh, what happened to the mosque in New Zealand. So, you know, that's what I

when I see a shooting of some white nationalist shoots up a place, I imagine, well, what's the iceberg underneath? And that iceberg in my mind, I could be totally wrong, seems to be not even comparable in size to the iceberg I imagine under a shooting, under when somebody, you know,

takes a car into the Halloween, a truck into the Halloween day parade. And I say, oh shit, what is, what are we preventing here? So I just, I think they're both serious problems. And I'm afraid that when we offset them as two sides of a coin, that's not actually the way we should be looking at it. They're not two sides of a coin. They're two separate problems. And they need to be on their merits reacted to. When you have some, when you have murders that look kind of the same, and the murderer, you say to the murderer, why did you do it? The murderer gives his reasons. That's not worthless information.

But it's not the whole of the story. There's something aberrant about a person who commits this crime in the first place. They may not know themselves all that well. Ted Kuczynski, the Unabomber, he had a very idiosyncratic set of political beliefs, but I see a lot of points of similarity. And I think one of the things that is really, what is very interesting about the Moskvomber, Mosk killer, is that he chose not to die. Because he wants to be an, and he said in his manifesto,

that he wants to be an ongoing witness to the suffering that he inflicted. I have a feeling Jebran had something to say. I mean, I had various viewpoints throughout, but I think, yeah, they're all extremists, no matter whether they're like Islamic jihadists or this white nationalist guy, for whatever term to use best for him. And I think there's so many people that are susceptible to be influenced in any way.

It's almost like a mental health vulnerability. But they're all extremists and they're all prone to... But we've talked about it on this show. I'm sorry. And we've had an expert one time who actually said that they thought that an Islamic terrorist

was not mentally ill, but like probably was. And they had a whole theory of psychology as to why that was. And that matters. I don't know if that's true or not. I feel like it might not be a classifiable mental health disorder, but I think there's a certain personality subset. It's almost like a latent trait.

You may be prone to schizophrenia. That doesn't mean you're going to become schizophrenia. So there's certain things that activate that, and I think there's a subset of personalities that are more responsive to certain influences. Let me ask you this. I think the guy a subset of personalities that are more responsive to certain influences. Let me ask you this. David has made... I think the guy in New Zealand is of the same mindset of Osama Bin Laden or one of his people. Do we know, by the way, that this man was sexless? Or are you just making a supposition, David? He's 28 years old, not married, not in a long-term relationship.

He seems to have been on the move all around the planet. I'm going to do you one better. I'm the planet I'm going to do you one better I'm 49 I'm going to do you one better I'm 49 unmarried not in a long term relationship I do have sex on occasion I also turn down more sex

than you might surmise believe it or not he's also from Australia but I know what it is like to be completely sexless I in college had that know what it is like to be completely sexless in college I had that problem and it is nothing to laugh at

I promise you that you know what and I shouldn't be in a way that points us in the wrong direction maybe loveless maybe is the more important thing that how

look four men around the table maybe is the more important thing. That, like, how... Well, look, four men around the table, woman who is silent, who is doing... Well, she's our producer. She does talk. But four of us around the table. So we know what we are like.

And we know how, especially when we're teenagers, how casually brutal we can be to one another. And then that we have the spaces that we have taken from our childhood of the love of our parents and maybe a sibling. And that sort of introduces us to human empathy and compassion. And then as we become older teenagers, the sex drive pulls us in directions where we

have to learn in a school for caring for other people. And one of the things I think that happens when, either because of somebody's economic failure or the Mohammedadas of the world, I mean, they're kind of their cultural isolation, they live apart from women, is that they don't go through that school of learning to see another's pain as something that they need to internalize.

One of the things that people often say about mass murderers is that they, when you go through, and not the political ones, but like the regular American mass shooter, that you start, you track their life and it begins with cruelty to animals. But there's the psychopathic triad, right?

There's the lack of empathy. But the psychopathic triad, you can point out in probably every psychopath and serial killer. You might want to give us a brief rundown on what the psychopathic triad is because I don't know. Cruelty to animals, bedwetting, and setting things on fire. Is two out of three a pass? Well, okay, so... But that's important.

I think it's also important that when white men are mass murderers, they're considered mentally ill. But when somebody of color does it, they're sort of painted... It's not about white men and people of color. The theory is based on the fact of someone who was raised

within an ideology of orthodoxy, whatever that is, as opposed to someone who... Look, I think what you're saying with mass murderers are people who are obviously more functional and less functional. I mean, I think Muhammad Ad is dead long enough that I can... Muhammad Ad is obviously a highly functional person. I think he went to engineering school. He had no arrest record of any kind. He had never committed any kind of, he had no contact with the law before.

And so, I mean, if you'd met him six months before the 9-11 atrocity, you might find him an unpleasant person, I would guess, but you would not say, whoa, there's something askew. My guess is that with ****, you would see something, you would meet him and say, okay, there's something really weird about him. Yeah.

When I meet a Hasidic Jew who was born Hasidic, and I say, oh, he's a Hasidic Jew, whatever. When I meet a 30-year-old who all of a sudden becomes Hasidic, nine times out of ten, I'm like, you know, cuckoo. That's just the difference. And similarly, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy who is a suicide bomber, he's probably not mentally

ill, he's just a product of how he's been raised. Someone who leads a normal life and then all of a sudden turns into a suicide bomber, and that's like... However, mental illness doesn't always show up at 13 no I'm just saying I'm just saying

but the white thing that she mentioned really is another thing what if you're I'm so offended by intersectionality the whole thing because I think it's it is bigotry and the idea that it's become totally okay

to use white and white male as an epithet cannot be helpful to society. And certainly we even see it among comedians. You might say, like, even some white liberal comedians, like, fuck this shit, you know, they just told me, you know, they're not looking for any white men. And if you complain, oh, you white people need to step off and Sarah Jung can tweet at will

about white this and white that and at some point they are they're complaining that nobody should feel white nationalism but then they address white people as if yeah you guys are white people and this is absorbed and then I think somehow

that doesn't help and then they've broken the beautiful guardrails that we were raised with that it was wrong to judge people by the color of their skin and I think I said it before so after 50 years of the civil rights movement

we've learned that it wasn't that it was wrong to judge people by their race it's just that we were judging the wrong race by their race. And to me, once you've broken those guardrails, then it becomes very easy to say, and Jews are blah, blah, blah. Because if you can talk about white people, why can't you talk about, tell me again, I can tweet anything I want about white people, and the New York Times will hire me, but I can't talk about Jews?

Well, what's the difference? And I think it's very, very toxic, and I'm not making any excuses for these murderers, but I think that is fueling some of the viral... Like a rebellion. No, some of Trump voters, the ones who would never, ever lay a hand on anybody, but they're like, fuck this.

You know, Michael Moore used to care about us, and now who's going to vote for the party that views them as deplorables? It's a spectrum of ideology. Yes. And I think if we're all going to take... step back from it. I mean, so, yeah, I mean,

there are people who have those reactions. Obviously, the vast majority... And those reactions are, to a greater or lesser extent reasonable. And all but nine of the people who have that reaction would never hurt anybody. But from a law enforcement point of view, I think we need to pay attention. We have got a rising, and it's a global problem,

of white jihadis. Jabron has to go and do a new joke night. Jabron, can I ask you one quick question? You're going to do a new joke night. Has this Christchurch massacre affected your act at all?

It's only been a couple days. I'm still processing the event as a whole. Has it affected my act at all? Not yet. Well, because I'll tell you, over the weekend,

I have a joke and may not be the best. No. I have a joke where I say, it's an old joke and it works well enough. It's not the greatest joke in the world, but I say that we say LOL here in the United States. Something is funny online. My friend Hassan in Jordan sent me a joke.

I sent him a joke and he said, FOCF. I said, what does that mean? He said, Fall Off Camel Funny. Now, regardless of what you might think of the joke, that's not the point. I know it's a shitty joke. It's actually kind of funny. But the point is, I didn't do it over the weekend precisely because

I just didn't want to be seen as picking on Muslim peoples. So it did affect me in that regard. I very briefly did a show Friday night where I tried to explore the silver lining. But it didn't go well. I'm not going to say the joke but the silver lining of any extreme act.

But did you address Christchurch or just extreme acts? I addressed, I said New Zealand but it was too fresh for me to explore. Yeah, and I understand. It's very visceral to people now. For sure. So let me just, let's

use this to jump off into the Well anyway, so you have to go do your new joke. We do new joke nights here every Thursday and Monday I believe it is. Yes, Monday and Thursday. Monday and Thursday we do new joke nights. Let us know how that New Zealand joke goes. Well, I'm going to put it to the side.

I want to talk about I wasn't shitting on anyone but it's Just mentioning it Just... I wasn't shitting on anyone, but it's a tough topic. Just mentioning it. Yes. Just mentioning it wasn't good. If somebody in the audience tonight, I said, where are you from?

And they said New Zealand, the room would get silent. Oh, for sure. Exactly. Just the words New Zealand would silence that room. I want to talk... I don't even know how I would respond. If somebody said I'm from New Zealand,

I don't even know what I would say in response. Hola. I would probably just say, couldn't you have lied? But anyway, which would probably get a big laugh. But in any case, have fun in New Zealand. Thank you for having me, everyone. David doesn't know what to make of this

because first we were talking very seriously and now we're being a little bit later. I want to talk to you about the anti-Semitism thing because this is... This has been Noam's latest obsession now. I have three young children. And I'm hyper-concerned about left-wing anti-Semitism. And I really am not concerned at all about right-wing anti-Semitism,

which I feel will always be there. And my reason is the following. I sent an email to somebody. That right-wing anti-Semitism rallies us. And left-wing anti-Semitism rots us. Meaning that when somebody, when they shoot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and by the way, there was a shooting under Obama

as well, but, you know, in Kansas, but the guy wasn't as competent as a mass murderer as the guy, but it could have just been the same story. We all say, we're Jews, you know, it's like, and it makes us feel to stand up for ourselves. But when they turn us into Afrikan We all say we're Jews, you know, it's like, and it makes us feel to stand up for ourselves. But when they turn us into Afrikaners is what they're doing, where you're, you shouldn't go take a semester abroad in Israel. And well, and you can't march in the

woman's march and you can't march in the, in the gay march and, and, and, and BDS and Occupy Wall Street and Ilhan Omar. We can't even muster the votes for... I see the future for my children as being afraid to hold their heads up high. Let me give you one other theory. I don't mean to talk too much. So the Democrats, according to the Pew poll, are 27% sympathetic to Israel. You've probably seen these numbers.

Republicans are 79% sympathetic to Israel. And I thought to myself, how odd is it? Normally, if you're in a political party, you would wish that the other party would take on your views. What would it mean if the Republicans took on the views about Israel that the Democrats have? Then both parties are 27% pro-Israel. And it goes maybe into a free fall, and into kind of a consensus against

sympathy to israel and does that mean and i'm finished that the republican party is the bulwark really against anti-semitism that allows us jews program from birth to be democrats to indulge our social justice aid which is a you know it on these issues instead with the democratic party while really it's's the Republicans that are protecting us from the critical mass, which I'm scared of.

So that's a lot to talk about. I often marvel that it's an incredible accomplishment of the Trump administration to at one and the same time have given license to so many anti-Semitic voices and to have used anti-Semitism as a tool, and at the same time also to be the most shonda for the goyim administration ever because it's it's it's it's full of with enemies like him we don't need friends of the jewish people doing terrible things yes and

and that's what it is that might say get back in a minute the poll you side i've've seen it, I take a little bit of a grain of salt. Even after what happened last week. Because it just doesn't line up with the behavior of the Democratic Party as a political party. If it really were true that three quarters of Democrats

were Israel skeptical, it would be impossible for the Democratic Party to function the way it is. Where is sympathy, to be fair? which is not easy to pin down. As someone who's used a lot of polls, I think you always have to be very careful to listen to the question and to say, did they ask what I think I heard? Or how did the person hearing the question hear the question? And oftentimes you'll discover that someone who cares

or is very active in an issue or very informed about it, that question means X, and then you have to put yourself in the minds of somebody who... So somebody may say, as you were just saying, it may have been phrased in a way where who do you feel more sorry for? Yeah, it was.

It was who do you feel sympathy for. They could have interpreted what you said. Someone could interpret that and say, well, I don't know. Israel seems like they're doing fine. The Palestinians say they're not doing fine. But then we wouldn't be seeing what's going on on college campuses. We wouldn't be seeing BDS. I mean, the list is long. And

the Democrats would have felt compelled to pass that resolution. I think one of the things that is going on in America, and this is very special if you're in comedy or if you're in this area, if you're educated, resolution. I think one of the things that is going on in America, and this is very special if you're in comedy, or if you're in this area, if you're educated, is to understand, I think one of the things that's going on is we're seeing, and it's symbolized by that scene in the restroom, the confrontation between Chelsea Clinton and those two provocateurs from Colombia,

that there's this intensified gathering of this woke activist left that is not where very many, I mean, obviously it draws on something important in American society. A good example of this is, okay, so you remember the story of Ralph Northam and the blackface who was the governor of Virginia? So that story breaks, and within 24 hours, at least, I don't know about your Twitter feed, my Twitter feed is unanimous, not only that he should go, but that he must go. He's doomed. There's no possible way he can survive.

This is such a terrible offense. And he doesn't quit. And four or five days later, there's a poll where they discover that an outright majority of black Virginians do not want him to quit. And you think, so all those woke people on my twitter feed who are they talking for not the people you know for whom they purported to speak um and so i think one of the things that happened that you have this um like just as the word the word woke you know think of amazing you know awakening it's a religious experience it's not really a political movement it's about you know one's own relationship to the purity of one's soul.

But it's also fleeting, right? Because they just move on from topic to topic. They're outraged and then it's over. And then they're outraged about the next thing. And black voters in Virginia seem to have decided, don't love the photo. Don't love it. don't love it, don't love it.

This guy signed Medicaid, which is why my sister, who lost her job, has healthcare coverage. And so, you know, I'm not the most important thing. And that kind of thing of real world politics, which is about,

what do I need? What do I get? I was talking tonight to somebody, a well-known journalist, and he'd just come back from interviewing Beto. He's an old, grizzled guy. He said, I think I'm in love. After all this time,

you still fall in love with politicians? I said, don't you? He said, no. They're employees. You hire them. What you just touched on is something I actually parted company with you a couple years ago, which is that, you know, if you're a voter, like to me there's the elite. Forgive me now because we're friends now, but I had felt that you'd become a little bit of an elitist in the following way. election where the candidate who is a creep, the Trump candidate,

wants to put the homeless shelter in the neighborhood and the angelic candidate doesn't want the homeless shelter in the neighborhood. If you don't live there, how could you vote for this? But the guy who actually lives in that neighborhood is like, I don't care what he said about women

and I don't even care. I can't live with a homeless shelter where my kids are walking to school. And I felt like, and I'll talk about myself, that at some point I began to realize that, you know what, no matter what, politics is very, very much entertainment for me in that I don't really feel implicated by the outcome of any election. It's got left, right, they raise the taxes, lower taxes. I'm fine. I'm going to be fine.

But there were all these Trump voters out there with this high level of economic anxiety, and whatever it is that they were feeling, and probably wrongly, and maybe they've learned their lesson now, and they were ready to overlook that stuff because they didn't want the homeless shelter and they got piled

on, and I always felt it was wrong to talk about them as if they were soft on racism or soft on this. I don't think they, many, some of them might have been. I didn't think that. I thought they're just, I mean, 70,000 kids died of opioids. I mean, they're living with stuff they're grappling with and they believe this election might actually matter.

I don't expect anybody to follow my work closely, but just to get it off my chest. So I've been writing about those problems in what is happening to down-market, old-stock white America since 2005. And I was on this beat long, you know, I think actually, was The Apprentice even on the air in 2005? I don't think so.

So back when Donald Trump was like a local New York joke, I think, actually, was The Apprentice even on the air in 2005? I don't think so. Yeah. So back when Donald Trump was like a local New York joke, before it ever... So this has been... And I, through 2014, before he was a candidate, I was writing about these things in conjunction. What is happening to the non-metropolitan, non non-college two-thirds of the population disproportionately white

and with a prolonged time i can't guarantee i write a lot that every word i've spoken as respectful as in retrospect i would wish it had been there may be a slip but i will guarantee you that almost all is as respectful of those folks as i wish it had been.

And that's how the, in any way, they're the citizens of our country. We don't condemn them. But what I, what I said, the difference between your analogy is, yeah, I have a lot of leeway. I mean, politics, they're employees. You hire them to do something. You hire them, you know, to, so that the homeless shelter goes in your neighbor's... That's where it belongs. Over in the next ward, not in your ward. And they do the same. And you want a traffic light, and they don't want...

But when you have a serious criminal who aspires, and not just to be governor of a state, but president of the United States, that's an attack on the system. And I'll tell you something about the word elitist. Because it's a word I will, if I can define it for myself, I will use it for myself. So most people are not that interested in politics. And most people, by inclination, by temperament, by time, it takes energy. It's not their thing.

But those who are, are different from other people. They have more advantages. And I certainly, I'm very conscious that in my life, I've had way more advantages than most people have. If we understand that an elite doesn't mean affluent, but an elite means actually, like the Marines are elitist. It means originally it comes from the word to choose. People are picked out by fortune or fate to have

you know a little bit more perspective some of that they have extra responsibilities and one of the their first responsibilities is to defend the system that has done so well for them and the most important thing i think we've really learned this in the past decade not just the united states is democratic systems are super vulnerable to corruption, much more than we thought. And those people who have got space and scope and some advantages, they have a special responsibility. And what has been angry at me, one of the things that made me very angry is to see people from my background, people I know who are signing, who think I can make a lot of money either directly or indirectly from this Trump experience. And so I'm going to swallow qualms that I am in a position to know. And they're shirking their responsibilities, and I don't like shirkers. I was never, I felt that Trump was more of a blowhard than a Hitler. I still feel that way.

I'd be happy if we can pocket a couple of, I wish, Kavanaugh thing had gone differently in terms of picking a conservative justice, but if we could pocket a few conservative justices and then move away from this man. Of course he's not Hitler. Because to get Hitler, you don't just need Hitler. You need a prostrate country. You need a situation of crisis. But what he can be is a Berlusconi or a Peron, somebody who systematically tries to make the judicial

system more corrupt. By the way, I supported Hillary, just for the record. On this show, I always supported Hillary. But I didn't have the panic about Trump. I recall vociferous support of Hillary. How could it be vociferous?

It was a hold your nose support. You could count votes in the Clinton household, and I think there were two vociferous, it was like two to one vociferous supporters. Well, it was a lesser of two evil support. Listen, I'll tell you what, while it would be more about Trump than what this stuff is, that I think we're playing Russian roulette.

Like, if you imagine George H.W. Bush dealing with the invasion of Kuwait, you had a president who was up to the job. If Trump had to oversee that time in history, if we find ourselves in need of a president

who's up to the job, we do not have a president who's up to the job. And Hillary would have been up to the job. So why aren't more people in power doing more things to get him out? That's what I can't wrap my brain around. You can't just get him out. He has to commit a crime.

There's this line people say, nothing matters. Nothing matters. So I can tell you if George W. Bush, for whom I worked, if he'd had 4% unemployment and fewer than 10 Americans dead in combat operations in a year, he would have been at 60% approval. I think Barack Obama had kind of a racial barrier in his approval numbers, but with the same facts, he'd have had 55%, 56% approval. So there's already like a 16 or 17 point discount for being a loudmouth jerk. And so it matters that Donald,

the facts that Donald Trump has had in his first two years as president should have made him a really popular president. And he's all right. So things matter. His loudmouthery, his, I would say, his criminality, those things matter. Getting him out. The Canadian just showed itself.

Getting him out. The Canadian just showed itself. Getting him out of the house. Getting him out of the house. It's like Jordan Peterson. Jordan's far more extreme. I do not like Jordan Peterson for the rest of my life. I'm talking about his accent. I had a chance to talk to him recently, and yet, whoa. Whoa, you've got the Canadian accent.

But doing it in any way other than by election is super hazardous. Is he going to win again? Not that he won the first time, frankly. You have to work on the... To begin with this, most American presidents get re-elected. I know. So no one should assume that he's done for, but he's got a lot of problems. And then the whole mindset of prediction asks you to look at politics like a spectator.

And so when you say, so the question is not, is he going to win? But what am I going to do? Can I tell you why he's not going to win? Why is he not going to win? He won by 70,000 votes in a few swing. I mean, he lost the popular vote by millions in a few swing states. 70,000 meaning that if 35,000 had voted the other way, 35,001, he would have lost.

I cannot believe that over this four years, and they didn't even campaign in those states. They're not going to make that mistake again. I can't believe after this four years, people, they did not pick up those 35,000 votes. Well, I think that things have changed in the years that Trump's been elected. Number one, I was scared that the country would just, that he would, I don't know, launch a nuclear missile. He hasn't done that. It's not over yet. Number two, I think things have changed.

I think things like the Covington Catholic school kid, the Smollett. He didn't win any votes from that. He didn't win any new voters in the last four years. I don't think. Not in those swing states. I think he lost. I think a lot of them felt he was going to help them. And also the economy is reasonable in 2020.

Does a president ever lose when the economy is doing well? No, but I do think a lot of people, a lot of disenfranchised poor white people especially, thought that Trump really was going to help them and he's made it abundantly clear that he doesn't give a shit about any of them. We are, by the way, an hour and a half into this. If they just hadn't said that Hillary was such a

shoo-in, he might not have gotten those. People would have gotten out and vote. Here's the optimistic case from his point of view. And this is leaving the morality out of it. It's just electoral. Here's what he's got going for him. The economy remains strong.

It looks like it's going to be a little weaker in 2019 than it was in 2017 and 2018, but it's still strong, and wages are rising. And the wages are especially rising in the bottom two-thirds of the population. That has not been true for a long time. So I think the point about Covington is really true. I think a lot of Trump voters are not voting for him. They're voting against cultural noises that they regard as right. And the things you were saying.

I mean, you're expressing them in your voice, not your voting behavior, because you've got a voice. You've got a microphone. But there are people who don't have a microphone so that the the vote is there might become and so that that this they're not voting for they're going to be voting against and uh... i think it's a uh...

but the democrats in my opinion lost in twenty sixteen for two reasons what that one was that black turnout dropped off very dramatically from the levels of twenty twelve and two thousand eight and second was at the last moment college educated white women held and held their noses that i'm voting republican one more time

are above and and they gotta stop asking white people there's nothing to be gained at those two but that thehing white people those women who voted were not they were not reacting to the they were just saying you know I'm voting for

you know got a business I've got you know it's a stain what? it's a stain but the question

can the Democrats still alienate those two groups can they and I think they can it is possible the Democrats if they were to nominate Bernie Sanders? And I think they can. It is possible. If they were to nominate Bernie Sanders, for example,

I think you would see Bernie Sanders would have a very depressive effect on black turnout. And I don't think the woke world loves him so much. I don't think they see how much he is. He is also a candidate of white ethnic expression. People also hate him on the left, though. I feel like... They don't hate him. Yes, they do. I know so... They hate everybody. They hate Chelsea Clinton now. I mean, they're out of their minds. They're like an overactive immune

system that's turned in on itself. They can never get out. I know it's time to go, but this is my theory about Mueller. I've said this for a long time already. There cannot be any collusion. There's not even any suspense, and this is the following reason. You tell me as a person who actually has been to the White House and all that stuff. If I'm Mueller and I have evidence that the president is compromised, I have to come forward immediately. I can't sit back and let him pull out of Syria,

take a flamethrower to NATO and say, well, I know why he's doing it. He's doing his Putin, but I'll tell you when I'm good and ready. He has to act immediately. Okay, you're touching a real neuralgic point with me because I wrote in the spring of 2017 that I was really worried about this whole special counsel approach because the point of a special counsel is to identify prosecutable crimes and prosecute them.

And if you find something bad that's not a prosecutable crime, your job is to keep your mouth shut. If you're investigating somebody for a crime and you discover that he's a bad father or that he's lied about his charitable contributions, that's not your business. And Mueller is such a by-the- know that that's not your business that's not a and mother is such a by the book first but he will internalize that right i have a mission my mission is to see if they're prosecutable crimes if i find them prosecute them if i don't doubt

and hope the problems a lot of the things that you were in a collision are not prosecutable crimes and he has to leak it he's a patriot and you can't you can't know that he's going to a reputable damages security united states because he is he is a patriot but he is by the book lawyer and he would not be kept and he has to he would deliver it in his report to the attorney general of the attorney general

would decide what to do uh... and i think what will that what is going to be very upsetting country this your question and this, to your question, will get him out. The thing, and I've, it's not a, I'm in writing on this since the spring of 2017. I think the truth of what happened was Trump took terrible risks with national security. He's compromised in all kinds of ways. His son-in-law's compromised in all kinds of ways. But these things, they may not have turned out to have committed prosecutable

crimes, in which case Mueller's going to say, nothing for me to do, and then we're going to have a convulsive national debate. Yeah, I don't, that's the only thing I don't agree with you. I think that if he sees Trump saying stuff about NATO and he knows and has reason to know that Trump is doing that because he's under orders, essentially, he can't sit on that. I mean, I would hope he wouldn't sit on it. I don't see how he could live with himself.

We'll know soon. We'll know soon enough. And that, okay. Well, and there was one other thing about the Mueller thing I wanted to ask you. Oh, and you have a second? Nothing that bothers me. So we were told for a long, long time that Trump, now, you know better than I do, treason is identified as a capital crime in the Constitution.

Now, Trump has never actually been accused of treason because you have to be at war or something. I don't know what the technical thing is. Treason is defined in the Constitution as levying war on the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. I don't think there's been a successful treason prosecution in almost a hundred, I mean,

there were some charges in World War II and they were overturned. But in the absence of a state of war, it's almost impossible to have a treason prosecution. All right, but the things that people like Rachel Maddow and the rest were, and I was subject to, thought were ready to accuse Trump of were in that close cousin category

to the ultimate crime of treason, which is identified as a capital crime. So much so that people had to write articles explaining why it was this, but it wasn't actually treason, which is identified as a capital crime. So much so that people had to write articles explaining why it was this, but it wasn't actually treason. And the second that it looked like we weren't going to find treason, they turned their attention to paying off a mistress who might have been extorting

him. And as if it's like, well, it turns out you didn't rape and murder my daughter, but you were speeding without any kind of shame that, you know, we were looking for something really, really important. But really, we just wanted to get you on something. So we're totally fine to take the jaywalking ticket. That bothers me.

This is one of the problems with cable TV. Like YouTube, they have to keep you watching. So they need to give you this measure of excitement. And they need to sort of string it along and promise. You know, treason is a heavy word and one to be used with care. But Donald Trump, as we know, did things that if he had any job president, it would make him ineligible for security clearance. Absolutely. And so I would say there are things that show a security risk.

His son-in-law was refused a security clearance by every competent authority and got one anyway. There's security risk. And the word I would use is compromise. And we don't know to what degree. But I'm with you. We have to be careful about how we speak but might

or is i don't think trump is motivated most traders are motivated by ideology motivated by money he got into stuff with a lot of any yes answer the end stuff with the russians we got over his head exactly what happened but it's not what a president of the United States should have done, in my opinion.

Agreed. The worst crime to me that we know about is Trump University. That's just despicable. I mean, unbelievable. Anyway, okay, we are way over time. Thank you all. I hope you felt you didn't waste your evening speaking with a bunch of dunderheads.

It was a pleasure. What a glamorous locale. The back table. I feel like you should name a sandwich of dunderheads. It was a pleasure. What a glamorous locale. The back table. I feel like you should name a sandwich after me or something. Have you heard of the Comedy Cellar? I have heard. My son is hugely interested in stand-up comedy. So he was very excited.

As a guest of the show, you have a lifetime pass to the Comedy Cellar. All right. For you or your son. It's transferable. He lives in L.A., but we were at... He goes to the Comedy Store all the time. I saw that on your son. It's transferable. He lives in L.A., but we were at, he goes to the comedy store all the time. I saw that on your Instagram. I thought you were getting well prepared to come visit us.

Does he have showbiz aspirations? How old is he? He's 25, and he does, but I'm very relieved to say, he's looked it out, he wants to be a producer. So he's got a writing partner. They make movies, but the writing partner does the directing and Nat is the guy when they say, okay, we need to have 42 bicycles piled up in the

driveway and it has to cost $11 and then we have to have them all gone before the city gives us a ticket. That's his job in the partnership. He gets the bicycles, puts them in the driveway, gets them removed, pays the $11. So he's the business guy in there. Alright.

Well, yes, I think that was a good show. Thank you. We'll see you next time. Good night, everybody. We are truly a trans... A transgender? A trans genre podcast.