Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #344 - Charlie Kirk And Vaush Join To Discuss And Debate
Episode Date: August 4, 2021Tim, Ian, and Lydia host founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk in a spirited conversation with YouTuber and self-described libertarian socialist Vaush to examine vaccination requirements, the effe...cts of Critical Race Theory, and the importance of reparations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
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Is critical race theory the biggest threat to America, or is it at least a threat to America?
Well, there's a lot of questions around that. Obviously, you guys know my position on this
to a certain degree, but there's a lot of other issues we need to talk about.
One of the biggest stories right now is that New York has imposed a, we'll call it a,
I don't want to say limited, but it's a vaccine mandate for indoor activities,
entertainment performances.
And Bill de Blasio said the goal here is to encourage people, mostly young people, to get the vaccine.
That means if you want to go to the movie theaters, if you want to engage in normal
activities like at bars, you have to have a vaccine passport.
You have to have proof.
They call it key to NYC.
Now, why do I bring up critical race theory?
Well, for one, you know the title of this video.
We're going to have a conversation, a political debate or discussion about this. But there is a question some people
have brought up due to the low level of vaccination among the black community and how that will
disproportionately affect people and whether or not this will be truly equitable. But today,
the bigger thing we're doing is not just about the news. It's about a conversation with two
prominent individuals in politics. We've got Charlie Kirk, who I'm sure most of you know.
Do you want to just briefly introduce yourself?
Charlie Kirk.
Honored to be here.
We're going to have some fun.
Do you describe yourself politically in any way?
I guess you could say I'm on the right.
Conservative?
Yeah.
More than that.
Conservative and love of the country.
Right on.
Then, of course, we have Vosh.
Join us.
Howdy.
Yeah.
I'm Vosh.
I'm a YouTuber.
And I guess I call myself a libertarian socialist.
I like some parts of the country.
I'm a big fan of some parts of it.
Some other parts I think could use some improvement.
Right on.
Now we've got Ian here, as per usual.
Hi, everyone.
I'm going to be in the chat today watching your super chats.
So keep sending them in, and I'll be clipping them so that we can get to it at the end of the show.
Hi.
And I am very excited. So I'm just going to interject here.
I'm excited for this conversation.
I'm going to be switching like a crazy person,
and hopefully tonight goes really well and we all learn something new.
And before we jump in, head over to TimCast.com,
become a member to get an ad-free experience
and exclusive access to members-only segments of this show.
And I guess I wasn't initially planning on it,
but I guess everyone's cool to do a member segment after the show, and we'll find something fun to talk about. So,
you know, we'll see how it plays out. So make sure you become a member. Make sure you like this
video. Subscribe to this channel. Share it with your friends. If you think this conversation is
important, I'm sure there are many right-wing individuals like, get him, Charlie, crush Vosh.
And there's a lot of left-wing people being like, Vosh is going to own. Oh, share it with your
friends, and let's have a good conversation. And I suppose we can start with one of two things.
Obviously, I brought up critical race theory, but also the vaccine issue.
I'm not sure if you guys have a preference for what you're...
Let me talk about the vaccine.
Why don't we talk about what's going on with vaccine passports?
Sure.
We've seen in Sydney, for instance, they issued a lockdown.
Most, or I should say enough people ignored it.
They went out in the streets. And then this resulted in news articles saying chaos in Sydney. People aren't you know, they're not following the rules. The vaccination rate in Australia is ridiculously low. I think it's 18 percent. Really, really low. Well, then they called in police and they were big protests. Now they've actually deployed military. So I'm curious if either of you wants to jump in with your thoughts on mandates, what would happen if they came here,
if you're for or against them? Look, there are elements of mandates that I can agree with.
We've already set standards for other things like the MMR vaccine, very basic standard vaccines
that we expect everyone get before they can go to school, travel. And I think for the most part,
that's worked. We've eradicated plagues from the world. I think we should be proud of that. With regards to COVID, since this is an ongoing
pandemic, we need to focus on approaches that are effective and that don't ostracize or exacerbate
tensions. With regard to the Australian situation, it's not something I'm extensively familiar with.
But generally speaking, I don't think that cracking down on protests is going to be an
effective way to incentivize people to get vaccinated. What's happening in New York might be. But my main issue with it is that I'm not entirely sure how they expect people to still have their vaccination card.
I know that there's been some confusion from the beginning as to whether or not you should keep that.
I know people have thrown theirs away.
They made it too big for wallets.
It just felt a little bit haphazardly planned from the forego.
So that's unfortunate.
Maybe they can find other ways to incentivize it, like, for example, in schools where they have a direct access to government
records where they wouldn't have to use those little cards. That might be a little bit better.
I guess we'll have to see. Well, I'm not saying you believe this, but some people on the left,
I never want to hear about the discussion of voter ID ever again, because now you can force
people to identify their medical history to try to get into a restaurant in New York City. Yeah, look, I'm not getting the vaccine. So I'm part of
the 100 million people that are unvaccinated. And it's an experimental vaccine. The FDA and CDC has
said that in January. It's questionably effective. Lindsey Graham just came down with COVID. You had
a vessel, a ship in the United Kingdom, 100% vaccinated ship that came down with COVID.
It's more like a treatment than a vaccine.
I'll leave that conversation to Dr. Brett Weinstein and the people that really understand how that works.
But yeah, this is medical apartheid.
This is trying to create a two-tiered system where if you don't make the proper medical decisions,
you're not able to go to Broadway shows or go into restaurants,
even when the efficacy of this vaccine is questionable at best.
We see that in Israel, an 85% vaccinated country.
That's about to lock down again.
And most of the new cases are from vaccinated patients,
not unvaccinated patients in Israel.
So, sorry, you want to interject, Tim?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Obviously against mandates, and I think people should be able to make their own medical decisions. I think it's
pretty obvious. Well, I disagree. I think we actually have a we actually have a story wrote
on Timcast dot com that our view of the lockdowns is that it's alarmism because a new study from
the public health of England found the Pfizer vaccine is 96 percent effective after two doses
at staving off the Delta variant and AstraZeneca was was 92%. I can probably agree it's alarmism, but it's enough of an alarm for the public health leaders
to undermine the argument that the vaccine is a solution to what would possibly satisfy the public.
I mean, I was against the lockdowns in the first place. Let me be very clear,
when there was 1,000 deaths a day, not 334. But sorry, go ahead.
Well, a couple of points on this. First of all, it's experimental in the sense that there was
an expedited process for its release, but there have been full and extensive studies
taken on the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines. The reason why the FDA study hasn't
been finished, the reason why it hasn't been fully vetted isn't because they're looking for
long-term health effects. It's because they're determining the extent to which it protects you
over a long period of time. Ergo, the fact of the matter is, by all available data, this is
undeniably much safer to get the vaccine. I mean, by orders of magnitude. Let me ask you a question.
Wait, a couple of things, because you said a few things there. There are some instances where areas
have more people being infected if they're already vaccinated. But if you take a look at like, this
is like data mining. If you take a look at the broader statistics, especially here in America,
the number of people who have gotten breakthrough cases is something like 0.003% of people who have been vaccinated.
You can take a look at the numbers. Where is this new wave exploding? It's in the unvaccinated.
In spite of the fact that fewer and fewer people are remaining unvaccinated, the vaccinated stay
relatively healthy. And not only do they get infected way less often, they also suffer far
fewer severe symptoms.
Their hospitalization rates have plummeted and their deaths are incredibly low compared
to people who are unvaccinated.
This is by all means an effective vaccine.
What's your opinion of Johnson and Johnson?
The FDA saying that it might cause a rare nerve disease.
Yeah, that's something that first of all, when you take a look at that, you have to
recognize that even if that was the case.
Which the FDA says it is.
Right.
Well, they're looking into it, of course.
They issued an official warning that it could issue a rare nerve disease.
That's a big deal.
Could issue, of course.
They're looking into it.
And that is something to look into and to be concerned about.
What's your opinion of VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System?
Hold on.
I'm just curious.
Let's do the Gillian-Bear syndrome, though you want yeah so of course stuff like that can happen now even if that claim is the case it would remain the fact that unless the
extent of that potential nerve damage is just apocalyptically severe that the effects of getting
covid would still be far far worse than the potential side effects of that vaccine however
if you were to say let's say worst case case, you know, Johnson and Johnson, it's
not viable.
That gets pulled.
We see what the consequences are.
That doesn't really speak against the greater viability of the vaccines.
I got Pfizer, for example.
We're talking hundreds of millions of people who have either been protected against the
vaccine in part, or if they get it, or sorry, against the virus, or if they get it, their
effects, their symptoms are much, much, much
more manageable.
So I just want to just kind of just play into the irony here that I'm the one criticizing
the pharmaceutical companies and you're the ones that are, you're the one defending.
I just think that's, I think it's delicious.
Well, wait, hold on.
That's an extremely dishonest talking point.
You're peddling the Pfizer vaccine.
You're saying it's so effective.
So I'm taking it.
But I'm the one saying, hold on, maybe AstraZeneca, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer.
Let's talk about the points he's made.
No, I was just enjoying the irony.
Well, the thing is, it's not really irony if you understand the issue at hand.
See, my praise doesn't go to the pharmaceutical companies or their CEOs.
It goes to the tireless workers who spend months and months and months developing these vaccines.
Who's getting rich from this vaccine?
Well, hold on.
Have I at any point praised the distribution or profiteering system behind Pfizer?
Who do you think gets rich from vaccine mandates?
The workers or the Pfizer CEO?
Nobody's talking about who gets rich.
This is a toothless critique that you could apply to literally anything that you don't like.
Everything in this country is manufactured to the profit of CEOs.
We don't mandate it and say you can't go to restaurants if you don't get one of four major pharmaceutical medicines.
I just want to say, if that's your criticism.
That's one of many.
So if that's the criticism you want to focus on, I'm in favor of nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry.
I'm willing to take it that far. But whether or not that's on the table, and I can't just make that happen,
when we're talking strictly about the effectiveness of the vaccine,
it seems to be effective.
That's not a praise of the capitalist industry behind it.
No, I was just enjoying the irony.
It's not irony.
Well, it's totally ironic because I'm the one saying that they might be lying to us,
and you're the one that's saying it's super effective.
Wait, what?
Usually, if we were wearing our traditional uniforms, right versus left, it would be the
other way around.
That's all I'm saying.
The only comment I'm making is as to the effectiveness of the vaccine.
What do you have to say about the vaccine adverse event reporting system that says,
well, over 7,000 people experience death after getting the vaccine?
Does that worry you?
The VAERS system is entirely self-reported.
I don't think it's generally used to form an accurate metric.
Or over-reported.
With VAERS, it's almost impossible to say. You know what VAERS is, right? Can you tell
me what VAERS is?
Yeah, VAERS is a government website that physicians or individuals can submit complaints
or concerns after an adverse event report from a vaccine. Since you cannot win in court
against a vaccine production company, then they go through some process where the government
then can distribute
some form of remedy if you had an adverse event reaction.
That's what VAERS is.
And researchers like it because if you take a vaccine
or you get some other procedure, any medical drug done,
you can report the effects there.
And it can be a way of gathering sort of aggregate data
concerning the effects of these potential treatments.
The problem is researchers don't use this as a bulletproof way of determining the outcome or effect of anything
because they're literally just unvetted online submissions that anybody can put in.
So I ask you because I want to know, how do you arrive at the conclusion that how many people did you say applied?
Well, VAERS' own data is 7,000 plus, and most of which, by the way—
That anyone can submit. No, by the way, most of which, by the way— That anyone can submit.
No, by the way, most of which are physicians submitted, just so you know.
These are—
The total number?
Most of the submissions on the VAERS website are done by, like, family doctors or local physicians.
So I'm just asking, what number of adverse event reactions would you say maybe there's something wrong?
But I'm asking—
10,000 deaths?
How do you know these deaths were caused by vaccines?
No, I'm just saying that's what VAERS says, right?
No, wait.
But wait.
So I need to know this.
We don't.
So that's the question.
So wait, is these just people who have died after taking the vaccine?
Like they may have died from some medical incident afterwards and it just gets put up
there.
This is the question.
Usually a vaccine gets pulled when you have 15 attributable deaths.
We have 7,000 that we have to go through.
The question is, when do you call timeout and say, maybe we should mandate it?
You're not answering the question.
How do you know that they're from the vaccine?
We don't.
That's the point.
But you don't either.
But the position is, let's mandate experimental medicine.
We don't know actually what's happening.
Wait, if you don't know, then how can you say that medical doctors are the one uploading this information?
Is there any methodology you're looking at to determine these deaths?
We do know who's actually uploading it.
We know that.
We know the entries are usually and typically traditionally.
How about menstrual cycle disruption, loss of nerve capacity, unable to walk, paralysis, miscarriages, mood changes?
Also, you can go through the VAERS database like, oh, that's interesting.
Mood changes.
What about the death?
Let me interject something real quick.
Death is 7,000 plus.
That's a serious number.
How do they know it's from the vaccine?
I keep asking you this.
You don't know how to answer it.
Let me address two points, one from each of you real quick, so we can try and – how do we know it's from the vaccine?
It's a difficult question.
I would say that if you have a mass vaccination program which gives out 330 million doses or so. And then people start saying, hey, I got the vaccine.
Then this happened.
VAERS isn't here to say it is or isn't.
They're here to say, can we find a pattern in this?
And I think 7000 suggests there may be one at the very least.
I'm not a scientist, so I can't I can't stress that.
I will also say, however, to Charlie, Guillain-Barre syndrome, which I'm probably pronouncing
wrong.
I always mispronounce it.
Yeah, I mean, Guillain-Barre.
There you go.
My understanding is actually a side effect of many vaccines. Yeah, it is. And so totally, that's correct. It could
be. Well, so the issue I have is one of the things that Vosh brought up is that there's been how
many you mentioned? 100 million, 160 million, 115, I think it is a million who have been fully
vaccinated. I think in that ballpark. So, of course, you know, if you have something very different from any other vaccination we normally do because we're not having everyone do it all at once.
Yeah.
And so this is a mass inoculation thing.
And so here's why the American system should answer this question easily.
When you have any sort of uncertainty or disagreement, yield to rights.
Yield to rights.
Allow people to say no. Let me just
build out the argument, right? So for me, for example, I'm 27. I don't consider COVID to be
a largely disproportionate risk to my way of life. I don't know about this vaccine.
I have gotten other vaccines in my life. So I want to be able to have the right to say no to that.
So the American system, constitution, kind of like the tradition, is to be able to have people have nuance, preferences, and individualism when it comes
to these sort of complex issues, not saying you can't go to a restaurant because we want you to
take experimental medicine. Right. So a couple of points on that. First of all, if we're speaking
to legal rights, the Supreme Court found over a century ago that when it came to vaccinations,
this was a special exemption from some people's rights to determine the medical history. I will agree with you that the courts
are not on my side. 1904 in that one. And there's a reason why, because of course, when you choose
not to take the vaccine, you contribute to the removal of others' freedoms. See, it's true. You
do have a freedom to not or to take a vaccine, but I think other people should have the freedom to
not grow up in a world ridden by plague.
And with the way this disease, COVID, mutates with time, as all diseases do, inevitably,
if it continues to circle the world long enough, and this is an international problem, not just an
American one, new strains will develop, which will slowly ebb at the effectiveness of this set of
vaccines. So it threatens all of us. May I say one other thing?
Sorry, sorry.
With all of that being said, just to speak to VARS,
VARS is an incredibly effective system for locating
and roughly attributing concerns related to the effects of drugs.
The problem is that there are several elements to this disease
that make it really difficult to pinpoint anything specific.
The two of which being, A, hundreds of millions of people vaccinated.
That is a huge range to pull data from.
And B, the propagandist fear campaign about an incredibly effective vaccine process that
may lead people to misattribute deaths to vaccines.
Just quick clarification.
Are you for mandating the COVID-19 vaccine?
The same way we have other vaccines, like school, travel, that kind of stuff.
So what if someone wanted to go to a restaurant or a supermarket or a movie theater?
I think that, I mean, we don't have that for other vaccines, right?
Like every time you go to a movie theater, you have a little card.
I understand that might be an effective panic measure, but long term, my goal would be to integrate it into the same revenue of vaccines.
I think that's a more reasonable response than some politicians. I'm just going to be honest. People are of vaccines. I think that's a more reasonable response than some politicians.
I'm just going to be honest.
People are panicking.
I just want to make sure we weren't having like, you know, misunderstanding.
No, I think that's more of a reasonable answer.
I'm just curious, just on the vaccine topic in general, are you concerned by like Dr.
Malone coming out who literally invented the mRNA vaccine and says that there's a dangerous
spike protein involved and he encourages people to think twice before getting it.
Does that move you at all?
Well, you're free to speak with your doctor when it comes to a world.
No, Dr. Malone, just his specific commentary.
His specific commentary.
The guy who invented this type of vaccine.
I'm not a PhD and I doubt that he was directly involved in the production of these vaccines.
No, he literally invented this type of vaccine.
The mRNA, but with the Johnson & Johnson, the Pfizer, the Moderna.
But he's very, very aware of this sort of accelerated vaccines. No, he literally invented this. The mRNA, but with the Johnson & Johnson, the Pfizer, the Moderna. But he's very, very aware
of this sort of accelerated implementation.
He's trying to call timeout and tell people
this is not like any other vaccine.
Does that worry you?
His claim is that it involves a spike protein.
It was rushed to market.
It's going to have side effects.
You don't understand it like I did.
I invented this.
And you've got to think twice before mandating it
or even taking it if you're under a certain age.
Does that bother you?
What makes the current retinue of vaccines that we take,
the mRNA process, different from other mRNA vaccines?
It doesn't involve the spike protein.
According to him, the same composition
as like the measles, mumps, rubella type vaccine
or the chickenpox vaccine.
Well, those weren't mRNA.
The process wasn't developed back during the MMR vaccine.
Totally, but some of them are getting updated
for the more mRNA type technology, right? If he wasn't involved in the production of these modern vaccines, but some of them are getting updated for the more mRNA-type technology.
If he wasn't involved in the production of these modern vaccines,
how could he possibly have any comment
on any of the rigors or tests that were done before?
Because he invented this type of vaccine.
I'm just saying, does that bother you?
Do you think he's just like a fear propagandist?
No, he may well have concerns,
but those are concerns that I would rather have addressed
by the scientific community
rather than, with respect to you and myself, YouTubers.
No, I agree.
But the question is, which scientists, right?
So there's a lot of scientists speaking out against this.
Dr. Brett Weinstein, Dr. Malone.
What is Dr. Brett Weinstein?
He's an evolutionary biologist, so he knows a little bit about how cellular function works.
That's not virology.
No, that is not virology.
That is a completely spurious association.
Do you trust Fauci more or Dr. Brett Weinstein?
It's not about Fauci.
It's about Fauci.
He's a virologist who's been wrong about everything.
It's about the global.
Well, hold on.
He's smiling with glee here.
It's the global medical community in this regard.
You mean like the WHO?
No, I'm not.
Hold on.
Put a name behind it, though.
Wait.
He's very excited.
No, I just want to say it's not just about the WHO.
We're talking about a unified effort on the part of virtually every country on Earth to
get a hold of the vaccines that us Americans are privileged to have. This isn't just some this isn't some like
pharmaceutical Dr. Fauci push that wasn't broadly supported by any of the relevant experts
in the mRNA field, which is not huge because it's a very new development. Internationally,
there is a demand for these vaccines. I wanted to just based on what you had said,
I can pull up Reuters.
Their fact check is that vaccines are not, quote, cytotoxic. They're going to mention that Robert
Malone and they show the the Brett Weinstein podcast. They show the post the FDA was alerted
months ago that the spike protein in the COVID vaccines are cytotoxic, toxic to cells. The FDA
did nothing. Reuters says this is not true. Now, the issue at hand is
trust. Like you mentioned, you said, do you trust Fauci or Weinstein? I don't know if there is a
fact-based argument. If you have the doctors you trust and the doctors you trust or the
organizations you trust, it's a clash of who you believe, to be honest. None of us have the
credentials to just come up with these arguments on their own. There will always be bias in who
we choose to believe. However, given the plurality of people seem to support the safety
and the effectiveness of the vaccine and the fact that it doesn't take a virologist to notice that
over half a million Americans have died to COVID, more than the combined death tolls of every war
since World War I combined, including the Second World War in Vietnam. Those are things that I
don't need to be a virologist to see. Can I ask you a question, though? That's pretty bad.
One of the issues that's brought up frequently, especially on Twitter, is that many of these
COVID deaths died with COVID. It's brought up where people would say something like,
it tends to be people who are over 70 or things like that. I'm only bringing that up not to make
the argument, but because you said, how would VAERS know if these are actually related to
vaccines?
I'd love to respond to that, if I may.
Yeah, absolutely. COVID rarely like directly kills you.
Like age, it causes a breakdown in other vital functions that then their death can be attributed
to such.
So for example, of the many things that people die, it's not really COVID.
It's just that COVID blanks their entire system internally.
And eventually something fails, something breaks and they die.
There were people claiming that there were deaths being spuriously attributed to COVID-19
very early on in this pandemic.
But thankfully, we know that's not the case because if you take a look at the excess mortality numbers,
the number of people who should die every year in the United States,
because there's a very normal pattern, you know, normally with this many people in this country,
we see an excess starting when COVID started that almost perfectly graphs on to the rising
death waves of COVID. I mean, it perfectly tracks onto that. I just want to say for you, Charlie,
I think, you know, the issue I see here is for me, it's I can't trust or distrust. I don't know.
You know, I think Brett Weinstein is a very smart guy and I don't think he's going to lie to me.
And these doctors are very smart people. Then I see the government agencies that, you know,
I don't always trust the government,
to be completely honest.
I'm not a big fan.
But to believe that there's like a nefarious effort or anything like that, ultimately what
it comes down to is, in my opinion, having a trusted medical professional that you can
consult with.
Well, I totally agree.
And I think there could be an argument that if you're over the age of 70, that this vaccine
might be a really good idea for you.
However, to mandate it for schools and for colleges, when these are highly
complex medical decisions, that's where I'm going to push back against it.
Well, let me, let me, let me, let me, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is not an
mRNA vaccine though. Is that, that's my understanding?
I don't want to speak out of turn.
I believe so. I would love to be fact-checked on that.
I'm not totally sure.
My memory is melting. turn. I believe so. I would love to be fact-checked on that. I'm not totally sure. So I guess another
question I have, what do you think of alternative type treatments, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin?
Why the push for mass inoculation? Well, because hydroxychloroquine studies have found it largely
ineffective. There was, I believe, a French study that stopped when people started dying of heart
failure. I think the only reason the right dies in this hill is because Trump mentioned it. I don't
think there'd be a push for it otherwise.
The vaccines are the effective way of getting mass populations inoculated.
And while it is true that most of the people who die are ancient, the fact remains that
people experience long-term side effects from getting COVID, even if they survive.
I know people who are in their 30s and, you know, me, a blistering 27-year-old myself,
I'm not especially worried, but I've heard them talk about how much harder it is for them to climb up flights of stairs i know that
erectile dysfunction fellas is one of the listed potential side effects of getting covet even young
healthy no other problems it is true that death is most um comorbid with age and pre-existing
conditions but still and that's not even to speak of the COVID variants.
I mean, right now you were on what, Delta? But if it keeps cycling around the world,
let it go for another year. Who knows how bad this could get?
So Johnson & Johnson is not an mRNA vaccine. So there's an alternative to mRNA if you're concerned about it. And there was some guidance with the nerve disease with that. Sorry to
interrupt. I do think we kind of overlooked something really interesting is that when did we mandate
vaccinations in public schools?
Well, I know the Supreme
Court case concerning this was in 1904.
So I would know it would have to have been earlier
than that. I know that Washington even had his troops
vaccinated, though. For smallpox.
Smallpox, was it? Yeah. Which is pretty
crazy to think about. Inoculated, not vaccinated.
You're right. I don't know what they did. Hit people with a rock
and then pour liquid in. It was like a needle, I't know what they did hit people with a rock and then like it was like a like a needle i think it was and they would like
they would like prick you with the needle that had like a weakened sample and they would have
had to forge that needle like with a blacksmith isn't that crazy to think about like washington's
true like they still they i i know like someone pouring it and then like you know today it's a
machine that makes it it's just wild to think about. Well, so, man, I think the real issue for the most part is just mandatory.
Well, I just also have another question.
Do you think that there might be any bad motives behind these four companies, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, considering they are big pharma and they pursue profits, which generally, as a libertarian socialist, you're skeptical of,
do you think maybe they might have nefarious motives?
Oh, their intentions are reprehensible.
They have for many years made money off the backs of American deaths.
The opioid crisis is almost entirely attributable to them.
And the Sackler family.
Yeah, I mean, no moral love for these companies.
If this could be, and by the way, the mRNA process was developed through public funding.
It was an effort invested in by the collective good, something I'm generally supportive of.
When it comes to these companies themselves, and when I say, you know, go get your Pfizer vaccine, whatever,
please do not mistake this or anything else that I say for an endorsement of the practices of these companies.
It is only through cruel twist of fate and the economic system we live in that they are the ones put in a position to handle this.
But it was the workers at those companies, not the CEOs who did the work.
I'm just curious.
Does that ever make you stop short and say,
maybe they're trying to massively inoculate us on a vaccine
that might not be as effective to try to pursue profit, not well-being?
Does that ever enter into your calculation?
It's a consideration you should take about anything produced
by any company that's run for profit,
which is everything.
Basically, every need
in American society, need,
is tempered by the knowledge that there are
people out there who are paid very large salaries
to sell it to you. This is the case for everything
we do, everything we eat. Every time you
run down Main Street, or in my case,
I guess,
the boulevards in Los Angeles,
you're seeing the protracted efforts of a billion-dollar industry
to make sure you want things they're selling.
Could that be the case for COVID?
Undeniably, there was a profit incentive involved.
Oh, my goodness, I'm sorry.
And there was probably a protracted effort on the part of these companies
to make sure they were the first,
and they probably took every dirty advantage they could get.
But with the data available, I have to still, much as I would say,
hey, I would prefer eating McDonald's food to starvation,
I have to say this is probably still something we should be doing.
Do you want to do, I don't want to stand, it's been 20 minutes.
No, for sure.
Do you want to make a final point?
Maybe you would starve instead of McDonald's.
I actually think this has been really constructive and not like that inflammatory.
I think that deep down you have this kind of urge that I'm already there where maybe they want this thing to go on for another decade to go make another $100 billion.
And maybe the cheap drug of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin might work better than they might think.
I don't have that urge.
Other studies would disagree with you earlier.
We could change the topic.
I just think it's – that was a healthy discourse.
Can I meet in the middle on that one, on that very last one?
I do not trust the pharmaceutical industries, though the available evidence does seem to point to the effectiveness of the vaccines.
I say this.
Nationalize the pharma industry.
Seriously.
It could be used for the collective good, and I would unironically actually trust it more in the hands of our ineffective, bloated government than I would the sociopaths who run it currently.
So I'll wrap this up by saying always talk to your doctor.
This is one of the biggest things.
YouTube is very strict on this especially, but I genuinely think this is the right answer.
If you're watching this, don't assume anyone here is right or wrong.
I mean I'm sure there are people who think Charlie's made a bunch of good points, and you have.
Ultimately, it's down between you and your doctor.
And I'll stress, you know, for whatever your opinion, Charlie, I understand.
Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin haven't been approved by the FDA, and so that's just another.
We're just asking questions whether it works or not.
So that's why I think it's really important because I think there are.
I've got to be honest.
In regards to ivermectin, people have been eating horse paste that they sell.
I looked up what the FDA says about it.
They say, do not do this.
And they actually give a very good reason.
They say, although people are claiming
that if an animal can take it,
someone else can.
That's not true.
There are some things that dogs can't have
that humans can.
So please talk to your doctor.
And I definitely hope
we can continue having debates
about this stuff
because that was vastly important.
I'm really glad you guys were able to have that conversation.
I hadn't even heard of the horse paste thing.
Yes.
Ivermectin is technically a drug for horses.
It's off-label use.
Oh.
Yeah, it's a dewormer.
And so you can go to, like, Tractor Supply and they have them.
They have a sign that says, like, do not eat this and please.
Any drug for horses will burn a human out from the inside.
Those things are, you've been to your horse, they're titans.
So let's talk about the other big topic, critical race theory.
You know, that's the one that I had a terrible answer, absolutely, when you asked me about it.
And it was because I think my approach to it was too surface-level cultural.
So the last time we had Vosh on, when you asked me about it, I couldn't give you a good answer.
And I think we can talk about what's happening in schools, the things they're teaching children,
and I don't know if either of you has an opinion and wants to start off with –
The floor is yours.
Yeah.
So there are two CRTs.
There's the critical race theory that I know of, which is a highly esoteric,
essentially elective class that you can take in some law schools that teaches you a variety of incredibly eclectic legal theories,
some of which I like and some of which I think I disagree with. And then there's the critical race
theory that people like Christopher Ruffo have been trying to push, a sort of catch-all term
to describe all anti-racism. We see these anti-CRT bills being put through street legislators,
and a lot of them don't even mention critical race theory. They mention stuff that's been
boilerplate anti-racist theory for like two centuries. That stuff really concerns me.
If I think that academia is to an extent sacred, of course, all the good things in our society
now were born in the halls of academia.
The Enlightenment, our democracy, the fair trial that we enjoy if we're arrested.
These were things that were originally considered to be the crackpot initiatives of academics.
And only through the respect of those ideas have we arrived at, well, what we have today.
So if there are problems within academia, I would have them solved in academia,
not through the big hand of government reaching in and censoring everyone who
says something that disagrees with some political party.
So a point of clarification, you don't believe that critical race theory is in schools?
I think that maybe there are ideas which overlap with critical race theory,
but there's always going to be overlap between academic ideas.
I mean, you know, I drank water, so did Hitler, one of those type situations.
I think you're coming at it in good faith where you're technically correct here
that the super academic way of defining critical race theory
is not being taught to fourth graders, right?
I'd hope so.
With that being said, it's almost like saying, you know, we're not teaching advanced geometry to fourth graders, right? I'd hope so. That'd be pretty tough for them. With that being said, it's almost like saying, we're not teaching advanced geometry to fourth
graders, but we are teaching them very basic math, right? We'll get them the Euclidean geometry.
So the very basics of this are definitely in schools. And there's many examples of this,
right? The National Education Association literally came out in their press release
and said that they are going to push for, and their word was critical race theory, just so we're clear.
They used that term, right?
That's not Christopher Roof, though.
That's not James Lindsay, who are good friends of mine.
That's the National Education Association, right?
And I think they might even be talking about something different than the Delgado theory of critical race theory, right? And so what I want to try to do here, Tim, is we can talk about critical race theory as an
academic theory, or we could use a filler term like wokeism, which is more like racial justice,
which I actually think would probably be, you know, we can call it racial justice and meet
in the middle, right? I mean, I really feel like there are probably four-digit number of people
in America who are studied on actual critical race
theory, not including myself.
I'm not even prepared to do that, but I'm
happy to talk about racial justice education
and wokeism, which I think
the discourse is centered on.
I think you guys actually agree
in essence that the academic
critical race theory is, there's overlap
with a component in schools, but
what we often hear is someone will say critical race theory is being taught's overlap with a component in schools, but what we often hear is
someone will say, critical race theory is being taught to my kids, and then someone will say,
cite one author of critical race theory that we've brought up in school, and the issue is,
we refer to it as, I believe it's called critical race praxis. So this is something different than
critical race theory. It's being implemented in education, but that's why you said wokeism,
and you said- I just think that discussion is so unhelpful when Joy Reid and Christopher Ruffo are screaming at each other. And Joy Reid is saying,
like, it's not being taught anywhere, Christopher Ruffo. So, yes, it is. When in reality, they're
both right. They're just talking about two completely different things. You know what I'm
saying? No, I do. And Christopher Ruffo has admitted this is like a kind of tactic. Critical
race theory does sound spooky. You know, I get a little shiver when i say it um whereas stuff like anti-racist theory or structural racism maybe compel a little bit
more thought when discussed on it's kind of a moral panic that in principle i really disagree
with but if you want to talk i mean we can call it wokeism if you want um that's probably a more
accurate term i will just say to the point about christopher ruffo white supremacist is also used
as a catch-all term in the other direction.
If we're talking, I mean, in academia, the term white supremacist is virtually never used.
It's sort of a common parlance.
What I will say, though, about to give credit to Christopher Ruffo is that this is all kind of downstream from the conversation that Marcuse and Delgado started.
It really is.
Well, let's talk about it then. But just one thing, though, since we're operating under the
blanket wokeism, which is really broad term, let's talk about specific ideas. Because I'm
sure there are some of them that I can provide a good defense for, and some of them I might
disagree with.
So how about black-only dormitories?
Generally not a fan. I don't think they're explicitly harmful in the same way that
traditional segregation is, but i also think that it
incentivizes bad types of socialization where the way that you get a reprieve from the faults of
society is to find comfort in people of your own race maybe that incentivizes some bad stuff in my
university we had safe spaces but you know what they were they were like chilled like coffee break
rooms behind like where'd you go latin i went to humbled state okay
um and right behind there and like anyone could go in there whatever just the only thing that
they asked was that you not be like a dick but as long as you met that qualification that was
fine that to me that's a good safe space maybe that works you know so just having to go through
more go for it please no hit me i just i think this is actually really helpful. So how about reparations for slavery?
I think I'm pretty in favor of that, yeah.
Okay.
Make the argument.
It's just an old debt.
We said 40 acres and a mule.
We never paid it.
And unfortunately, the material reality for a lot of people who were slaves didn't change that much after they were emancipated.
I mean, if you were a slave and you're made free, that's a big step up.
Don't get me wrong.
But you have nothing.
I mean, nothing.
And because of the way generational wealth transfers from father to son or mother to either to anyone to their children.
Yeah, caught me there.
Unfortunately, we still see the consequences of that borne out.
You can actually look county by county.
Where were slaves kept?
Which were the plantation counties?
And you see, oh, this group of black-like neighborhoods,
that's where they settled
after slavery ended. It's like really immediate
stuff, and it's a debt, oh, that this nation
never paid. I don't necessarily
agree on reparations, but I think we need to clarify what
that ultimately means. But I will say
I've long held the
same position. I actually worked on a documentary.
There's an issue of
people who were enslaved, then they were released, and they were not given any means to actually
develop and grow. And so there's a generational wealth gap between people based on race for these
historical reasons. The challenge I see, I suppose, is we've done a lot to amend the laws and change
them. For instance, redlining and blockbusting have become illegal. And now we're dealing with
an ultimately, I believe, is a class issue. Of course, racism still exists.
But anyway, I digress on that point. What I wanted to get to is specifically on reparations.
What do you view reparations as, more importantly?
So this is a big divide. Some people think like cash payments. I'm not a big fan of that. It
doesn't fix the problem, for one. You can put money into that community, but
there's been research done on how long a dollar
stays in a black neighborhood as opposed to a white
neighborhood. And if a black neighborhood, all of
the businesses are owned by
corporate boards that are all majority white,
eventually the money filters out and you get a very
temporary boost in living situation. Not much
long-term structural change. I'm a big
fan of structural reparations, not based
on race, but rather based on targeting neighborhoods that need it the most. Some of these neighborhoods structural change. I'm a big fan of structural reparations, not based on race, but rather based on targeting
neighborhoods that need it the most. Some of these neighborhoods
are white. I passed
through some of them on my way out from Ronald Reagan Airport. I can
tell which parts of this country. You can see it in the
bones of the neighborhood.
And I think that a new
proper reparations
project, a new deal, a new new deal
even, would go a long way.
So you're saying not even based on race.
I think that we should recognize that this is largely a racial project because, unfortunately,
poverty and race are really intertwined in this country.
But in terms of applying it, I think that it would be much more healthy if we treated
it like a collective effort to bring up the lowest sort of echelon of our economic.
So I want to ask you, Charlie, would you agree with a program that was in, in, in, how do I describe this? The explained as reparations,
but was not based on race, went to people based on class and neighborhood so that it could help
Latinos and white people and Asians and everybody. First of all, I'm against reparations. I just
don't like the word because it kind of implies this intergenerational type guilt or allowance that I kind of reject.
And I'm happy to build that out further.
Do I agree that the question is mostly class?
Oh, absolutely.
And I think that Vausch is hitting on something.
And I think that you're saying that it's inherently racial.
I really want to explore that with you because I think that's interesting.
I think you're wrong, but I think that's interesting where I think the racial thing is actually being used to distract people like you and I from actually talking about what's really happening here, which is a small group of people getting a lot richer while normal people get poor.
And I think the racial thing is being used as this distraction tool to throw a smoke screen in the middle while we're talking about something that we're never really going to have consensus on,
when the true struggle right now is mainly economic.
Yeah, well, I think that applying reparations along racial lines runs into a bunch of really tough issues.
Which neighborhoods do you go by like blood?
Like, can you prove your great-great-grandfather was a slave?
It gets very difficult very quickly.
Maybe that would be the most direct interpretation of generational reparations.
But in my mind,
the reason why it's important to recognize
the racial issue here is that
the nature of class divides
in this country is cut into
racial policy prior to the Civil Rights
Act. The redlining that took place,
lines which still remain not in law
but in practice, led
to very distinct i mean sometimes
you know one side of the highway is nice and the other side of the highway i mean it legitimately
can i just jump in real quick i'm from chicago 47th street was split by race no joke this this
this is long-standing uh effects on the city uh just to just to point out no and i grew up in la
and on either side of the five which cut through the city city, I mean, or the 405, sorry.
Let me interject something, too, and I don't know if you're familiar.
We were actually told that we would be arrested from the south side of 47th. If we crossed 47th, we would get arrested because the cops would pull up and say, you
don't live in this neighborhood.
What are you doing here?
I'm from the suburbs of Chicago, so I've heard stories like that.
I don't think it's very clear to say I'm not from Chicago.
I grew up in Beverly Hills, which is close, though, to West Hollywood and Koreatown.
And the lines are clear as day.
The reason I say that, though, about the racial project is that because explicit discrimination is no longer in the law, we've pretty much wiped that out, with the exception of some i guess edge cases um the project of systemic racism or
the existence of systemic racism is something which is carried through class by inertia it
isn't something you can explicitly legislate along anymore i mean obviously nobody's out there
passing laws like black people can't do this that'd be silly but instead the consequences of
slavery and of second-class citizenship for black people left unaddressed,
a wound left to fester that unfortunately can't really heal itself inertially unless we do
something specific. So the issue with that argument is that the more that we intervened
in the black community, it actually had the opposite effect. And Thomas Sowell probably
has done the best research and literature on this. You can laugh all you want.
He's got a lot of credentials.
No, I wasn't trying to besmirch.
He's a very thoughtful thinker.
He actually lived through this, right?
He lived through the black renaissance in the 40s and the 50s where redlining was a legitimate problem.
So was yellowlining, by the way, against Italians and against Jews.
Nowhere nearly as bad, but there were other degrees of discrimination based on ethnicity and cultural background.
And the black community, especially, you know, the area really well in the south of Chicago,
right near the Chicago stockyards, the black community almost had this rallying cry where
they were being discriminated against everywhere.
And they kind of collectivized their purchasing power.
And they saw their incomes increase actually at a higher rate than white Americans in the 40s and 50s and early 60s.
You've heard this argument many times.
And you probably disagree with it.
But it's just true is that the moment that we all of a sudden deemphasized fathers being in the home and subsidized fatherlessness, we saw all these other trends increase. So right before the Civil Rights Act passed, about 24% of black children were born without a father.
Now it's upwards of 70%.
You guys can look at the Washington Examiner.
It's 77%.
Let's say it's 65%.
So something has to explain that 40-point increase.
May I?
Yeah, just let me finish.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, and it's not necessarily that America got more racist.
It could be the cocaine thing, which is a common issue.
It could be operations of all these things.
But a 40-point increase, I would point to a culture of fatherlessness,
really bad government-run public schools,
and then subsidizing behavior that isn't good.
So there are a few things that I can agree with you on.
First of all, having two people in your house to raise you
is pretty much essential.
You absolutely need to.
Glad we agree.
This is undeniable.
While I don't believe in shaming single parents,
even if their single-parentedness
is a product of bad decision-making,
it's still good.
In this economy.
One parent, honestly.
But with that being said, there has been research shown that the rate of black fatherlessness
is somewhat over exaggerated in large part because that number only applies to married
fathers.
So husbands raising their children.
It turns out when you account for unmarried black couples taking care of their kids, the numbers actually rise to those just, I think, just below white couples. I think
there was an article on that. I don't know if I remember, Sutton Vice, but it tracks back to some
really big study that was done back in 2016. So that's one point, but you are right. There are
perverse incentives. For example, many welfare stipulations cut off with a shared income, which is only a few thousand dollars per year higher than the necessary cutoff for the single income.
Meaning that if you're a single mom, you can apply for the welfare just fine.
But then if you get married or otherwise file jointly, you go above the cap for welfare.
This is a horribly designed program, undeniably, and it incentivizes bad, destructive behavior. The best thing that we can do, we restructure the welfare system in
this country. Welfare is good for us. It is. I don't benefit from it. I don't think either of
you benefit from it, I'm guessing. But we do collectively downstream from the increased
economic potential of people who now have the money to afford daycare,
proper childcare, get an education.
In the long run, people in this country being richer enriches all of us.
It's a mutual project.
So we work on that.
We find out what works and what doesn't, which welfare programs function, which don't,
which types of economic revitalization function and which don't.
And I legitimately believe that if we apply this, this country has the bones to be just a permanent economic beacon on the hill the home is a good thing, which we totally agree on.
I think that's the ideal.
Everything shows that that is something that we should push for.
Three parents maybe.
Get even better.
Oh, yeah.
Polyamorous relationships.
Yeah.
Not a fan.
But I will say that if you look at the data from the government that a white child being raised by a single mother is less likely to succeed by 10
independently picked metrics than a black child being raised by a mother and a father. And so
maybe it's less about the skin color and more about the removal of parents and specifically
fathers in the homes. Now, if you want to talk about a domestic Marshall plan to go put fathers
back in the home, regardless of skin color. I will sign
up for that in a second. With the right welfare, the right systems, I think people will tend to
their own families. But that would then all of a sudden de-emphasize what you said earlier,
where it says it needs to be on racial lines, where I say, no, no, it needs to be on nuclear
family lines. Well, no, I think that the neighborhood revitalization should just be
on like a sort of class assessment. I think that when we recognize this problem, though,
there are so many trends when it comes to poverty that involve the discussion of race, you know, and there are
some which do not. There are some types of poverty, some effects that are just ubiquitous
and equally felt. But with regards to, say, you know, black people, the fact that they couldn't
get loans to purchase homes for a very long time. I mean, there are people living who couldn't do
this. The fact that they didn't benefit from the Marshall Plan, if I remember correctly, after World War II.
Marshall Plan was Europe. You're talking about the GI Bill.
Oh, sorry, the GI Bill. My apologies.
Let me just point out all these white guys sitting here having a debate over
the black community.
I just think that there is a lot of economic inequality. A lot of it's tied to race, but
we don't need to turn this into some weird blood quantum issue where we go tracking down every
black American and holding them under a microscope to see whether they get benefits.
Now, we just need to tend to our own.
This is where I want to we kind of got off critical race theory very quickly.
I forgot about that.
We're agreeing way too much.
Because this is this is one of the issues I see.
Right.
You see these conversations around.
I don't know how you describe it because it's a variety of things. Wokeism
is typically a catch-all term for some kind
of ideology that involves
anti-racism, which involves critical race theory,
critical race practice. And you're seeing
in schools, specific curriculums, where
they say to kids like
we had a book here. We had a book brought
to us by one of these parents
who's been going to these schools. And
it was an anti-racist curriculum workbook where it asked children why they thought that black
children felt bad about their skin color.
Now, I take issue with those things.
They had another book where it was a little girl yelling at her mother saying, you're
lying to me about race, and then there was a whiteness contract with a devil tail coming
out of it.
Okay, I saw that one.
Yeah, these are in schools.
Yeah, okay, so the whiteness devil tail thing, I saw that one. Yeah, these are in schools. Yeah, okay.
So the whiteness devil tail thing, I saw that.
That's indefensible.
I'm not going to stand with that.
With regards to that, what was it?
Why do you think black folk feel bad about their skin?
And I'll be careful because I don't have the book in front of me.
It was something to this effect.
It was a bunch of questions where I would ask you things like that and then ask you to answer.
What have you done to make someone, based on their their skin color behave or whatever and things of that nature it's i think these are conversations that are worth
having i wonder um with with regards to what you're saying do you know what grade level these
were at uh i think she mentioned uh the woman uh it was it was uh asra yeah i think fourth grade
yeah that's what i heard but i gotta be honest like like the anti-racist one didn't have any pictures or anything.
It was just questions.
And I think she mentioned it was in a third grade.
What was it called?
What was the book called about the whiteness contract?
The one you said was indefensible.
That one was like a little girl who looked to be about eight years old.
Yeah, I saw that online.
Can I ask a question?
So let's go to just piece, you know.
Yeah, sure.
Go for it.
Ibram X. Kendi, who's kind of one of the archangels of the wokeism movement.
Beloved figure in the minds of conservatives and liberals alike.
So Ibram X. Kendi, and I'm paraphrasing, and you guys can pick up the quote, is that we need discrimination today because there was discrimination yesterday.
That's the essence of the quote, right, Tim?
Yeah, he said the only solution for past discrimination is present discrimination, and the only solution for
present discrimination is future discrimination. So I find that to be reprehensible. What say you?
I think it's misguided in large part because I don't believe, if there was some God who could
just distribute all resources in a perfectly ordained way and did so at the snap of a finger,
then maybe that would be a decent argument. In the real world, we have to go through politics,
and any kind of discriminatory treatment under any circumstances, no matter how
well-intentioned, is going to have adverse effects. So with regard to what he said, there is a very
charitable interpretation. And that charitable interpretation is discriminatory practices in
the past necessitate favorable practices today, a way of bringing people up. My reparations argument,
I mean, the poor in this country have always had it bad, at least worse than they could otherwise. That is essentially
a version of that argument. Preferable treatment towards the poor. We do this with welfare
because there are systemic barriers keeping them from full participation. Along racial lines,
I don't even know what that would look like. I don't even know how that could look good.
I'm not a big fan of affirmative action. He wrote an amendment right called the anti-racist amendment to the constitution. It's not being considered anytime
soon where it would be preference. You'll see Biden will get it. Yeah. Based on skin color,
that there would be some sort of accommodation based just by the melanin content in your skin.
Yeah. There is one thing I want to say though, and this is common in upper academia. And I know
Ibram sometimes gets brought into non-academic discussions, which I don't consider myself an academic, so I'm including myself in that.
But sometimes I think these are fun to discuss, these ideas.
What I noticed, at least in some of the classes that I took, the higher-end classes, was that sometimes when you were presented ideas, they were presented not to have you agree with them, but rather to incentivize the greatest discussion.
For example, I wasn't an economist, but I did learn about Karl Marx. Now, not many
professors are actual Marxists, unfortunately. So when Marx was brought up in that context,
it wasn't like, here's what you need to know, here's what you should believe. It was more,
here are some ideas, radical and agreeable. What do you think about them?
And when I look at what Kendi has written, I think, I don't often agree with some of
the more radical propositions, but I do enjoy the process.
And I don't think that's something which should warrant the state intervening to cut
out those discussions.
I think that's a brutish response.
That's a great segue, if I could go.
So the next question then is, should we be teaching first and second and third graders to be hyper-conscious aware of race all the time?
I think that's destructive.
I think it goes against the American promise of e pluribus unum, of caring more about character than skin color.
And yes, Martin Luther King Jr. was a mixed bag when it came to this stuff.
He's a cool guy. But he was a very radical socialist in some regard,
but he really hit it perfectly when he said that this was the ideal of the American system.
Do you see any downsides to getting third graders caring about the color of people's skin all the time?
Well, I think depending on their environment,
they might already, whether they know it or not, in very implicit and subtle ways. We know from tests done, for example, on like
little, little kids, like four-year-olds or whatever, that some elements of implicit racial
bias already infect their thinking. Now, that isn't a moral judgment. We're all flawed beings.
We live and we die. We all have biases. That is just a part of life. But I think conversations
about those things can be valuable. I don't believe we live in a part of life. But I think conversations about those things can be
valuable. I don't believe we live in a colorblind world. So teaching people that we do can often
lead them to remain ignorant to evident problems. Now, to what extent would you be comfortable?
What would you would you like bringing a racial consciousness to third graders?
For me, very little to none as don't care it, de-emphasize it, look at the
spirit, the soul, the conduct, and the character of the human being, their skin color means nothing.
Not saying that you should start to emphasize, organize what people look like, because therefore
it means something that we're going to tell you. A great example is that this is the textbook
definition of stereotyping, right?
Is that if you see a black person, you don't know their history.
You don't know if they're the son of a Nigerian billionaire.
You don't know if they're an immigrant from Turks and Caicos.
And you don't know if they're the ninth generation descendant of slaves, right?
There's been two million blacks that have come to America legally through the immigration process since 1980.
So this sort of hyper fixation on race, and I want to keep on getting back to this because I'm just curious, is do you think this is actually helpful when there actually might
be stuff that 90% of the country agrees on?
Do you think this actually might be a smokescreen tactic?
Well, it really depends on what's being taught.
So here are some things I obviously don't want taught.
One group is better than another, of course.
Black people are like this. White people are like this. That is being taught in some schools.
There are some schools that do that. And while I would look to see their curriculum mended,
again, I just don't want to implicitly agree with a state ban. I would see adjustments done.
But there are some things that I think could be done well, for example. Say you're teaching about
very basic early history.
This is where I wanted to get to.
Yeah, okay.
This is important.
So here are some things about America's founding that I like.
One of the first practical liberal democracies, glory of the republic.
Folks had nice hair back then.
Not a democracy, but a republic.
That's okay.
I mean, they're not mutually exclusive.
And we, of course, did more to fulfill the promise of a democracy with time.
But obviously, when America was founded, it was a slave state.
One in every six people in America at that time was human property.
Can I ask you a question?
Sure.
How many states had abolished slavery by the time the Constitution was ratified?
Well, I don't know the exact number.
Nine out of 13.
That's not a slave country.
Well, then you could say it was a confederacy with portions that were slave states.
I think that's better said.
Nine out of 13 had already abolished. There was a sunset
moratorium for slavery in the Constitution. Vermont abolished slavery in
1777. We were on the way to eradication. We were not a slave country.
Well, hold on. We were on the way, but then like 80 years
later, it was still happening. So the question is why, right? That's a really important question.
Economics, I imagine. Well, yeah, so Cotton Gin and John C. Calhoun.
Happy to go through that.
There was actually a grievance in the Declaration of Independence, specifically that the crown had enslaved people.
The first draft.
Yeah, and the first draft from Thomas Jefferson.
The crown had enslaved people who had done nothing to offend the crown, brought them to the states,
and then were then offering them the freedom that was stolen from them
to wage war against the colonists who had grievances.
It's an effective strategy.
The Union did it too.
They promised the slaves and they moved southward.
Jefferson took that out, and he did it because they felt,
and this is according to historians,
that without, I think it was South Carolina and Georgia,
they would not have been able to win the Revolutionary War.
And so they had to remove that, hoping they would stay in.
Now, the reality is, let me just, I'll just say one more point.
They thought they were going to lose anyway.
They really did.
They didn't think they could go up against the greatest empire in the world at the time.
So it's kind of unfortunate, I think.
An important factor here is that I believe it was the British Empire, actually, 1833,
had abolished slavery in all of its territories, and it took the U.S. a little bit longer to do so.
But I want to make sure I stress this issue for the start of the country was contentious
and ultimately led to violence because from the beginning, as Charlie pointed out,
most of the states had already abolished this, so it was like people were ready to fight from the beginning.
Well, I just want to say to that, my understanding of the founding of America isn't as simplistic as the founding fathers were evil because X or Y.
I recognize, of course, that there are incredible complexities to those issues.
And also, I'm not a historian.
There are probably tons of things out there I don't even know that might change my opinion in the future. But with that being said, while I recognize there were fine-bodied,
hearted, and sold Americans who recognized slavery was a moral aberration from the get-go,
one in every six Americans was owned.
And while that may have been constrained to some of the states,
it was still ultimately under the purview of the federal government to make decisions
with regards to the legality and constitutionality of that.
Now, some people, they get really defensive when this conversation comes.
I'm not saying you guys, but some people they do. And I think it's because they think I'm assigning some kind of moral worth to them now or to the country now or making some kind of broad
prescriptive statement. I'm not. The only thing I'm saying is when you're teaching history to a
bunch of kids, you have to teach it all. At least you have to teach the basic pointers. And for black Americans, the history of this country has
been less than favorable. So I think that in the context of that discussion saying, and to this
day, we still have some problems with race. There are some legacies of slavery that still affect
black people. And we're working on it today, something like that. That's a kind of racialization
that I'm in favor of because it doesn't encourage stereotyping.
It doesn't encourage discrimination.
It just encourages a base awareness of some serious problems.
But that's not happening, right?
Is that largely what we're seeing through school districts like Chicago and in Washington, D.C., and the entire California school system representing 10,000 schools and 6 million students. I've seen the documents on those.C. and the entire California school system, representing 10,000 schools and 6 million
students.
I've seen the documents on those.
Yeah.
It is that it doesn't have that kind of nuance and complexity that you just presented, right?
Where it's, let me just say this, is that part of the kind of archangel triumphant of
the wokeism coalition is Nicole Hannah-Jones, Robin D'Angelo, and Ibram X. Kendi.
And Nicole Hannah-Jones in particular, right,, and Ibram X. Kendi. And Nicole Hannah-Jones in particular, the author of the 1619 Project,
she heretically says that America was founded on slavery.
I'd be okay with that.
But it's just not true.
It depends on what you mean by founded on.
She defines this.
She says the founding fathers were in favor of it.
Not true.
George Washington wasn't.
John Adams wasn't.
John Quincy Adams wasn't.
Thomas Jefferson even signed a moratorium on new slaves coming into the United States.
Ben Franklin chaired an anti-slavery convention in 1775.
None of these guys were writing expositionally how wonderful slavery was.
Well, this isn't being taught to third graders, right?
The 1619 Project is a little New York op-ed.
No, no, no, it's not.
See, that's where you're wrong.
The 1619 Project is being implemented as school district curriculum in thousands of school districts across the country.
That's true.
It's not just like a podcast.
This is curriculum.
There are principles of the 1619 Project that I think are defensible.
First of all, we as Americans tend to think of the founding of our country as its legal founding, you know?
But the legal founding of the United States didn't really mean much for a slave.
I mean, it really didn't matter that much for the peasantry of the time, no matter what.
See, that's where I disagree.
So when was the first state to abolish slavery?
Vermont in 1777.
Why?
Because they were inspired by the Declaration of Independence.
Things started to change in that year.
Right, but the slaves that then continued to be slaves would have been in the states that didn't make that choice, right?
Which were largely in southern states.
Well, that's what I mean.
Sorry, I didn't mean to miss out on the particulars there.
The only point that I'm making is that depending on whose lineage you follow, depending on the narrative that you tell, this is a very postmodern idea.
And I would like to consider myself charitable to postmodernism, the idea that there are many ways you can describe the human experience, which I think we all believe to some extent.
Depending on who you follow, you get very different ideas on what America is, when America
was founded, not in a legal sense, but in a conceptual sense, and who today holds the
birthrights to which they were entitled.
And these conversations should be had.
They're worthwhile conversations to have.
I've seen some of the curriculums in these schools.
I find some of them a little bit objectionable. But to be perfectly clear, I found school curriculums objectionable for ages. About half of Americans believe in the
lost cause myth, the idea that the North started the Civil War and it was over like states' rights
or whatever. That's believed by a large number of Americans. There are textbooks put out by
Pearson in Texas that have narratives in them. There is some truth to that, by the way,
just so we're clear.
I'm happy to go through Civil War history.
I just want to say,
I have long had problems
with many of the ways
children are taught concepts in this country.
That's fair.
None of them have made me want
to get my state legislators
to just outright ban all of these ideas.
Well, so let me, I'll make two points.
First, the 1619 Project is in schools.
Newsweek reports
U.S. schools
have openly taught
the 1619 Project
for months.
This is back in September.
We've got education next.
The 1619 Project
enters classrooms.
We have the Pulitzer Center,
the 1619 Project curriculum.
Here you will find
resources for teaching
1619 in your schools.
And I don't know
if I have one more source.
Then we move to the... Do they read the full thing in class? That's crazy. It know if I have one more source. Then we move to the-
Do they read the full thing in class? That's crazy. It's pretty dense reading.
It is. And then lawmakers push to ban 1619 from schools. So it's there. It is.
And so let me tell you why people like myself are pushing for the bans of the 1619 project,
is that first of all, it's just not true. It is not even charitably, in the most charitable reading, to use a word that you used,
even remotely fair to the ethos or the founding of the country.
It doesn't go to original source documents.
It doesn't go to quotations.
And it meanders through generalizations and very heavy emphasis on emotion.
Can I ask something, though, really quick?
Sure, go ahead.
Is this not being presented as an alternate perspective
as opposed to replacing the entirety of our curriculum?
No, it is.
And this is an important thing, which is what is education, right?
So is education where we're supposed to,
for third, fourth, and fifth, and sixth graders,
open up every single bad idea that's ever been discovered
and have kids choose?
Or are we trying to lead them towards something,
lead them towards having better developed character?
Lead them towards trying to find objective truth?
Moral.
We want to make them moral.
I agree.
And so the question is, what is good?
What is evil?
Well, we don't know a line is crooked unless we have a straight line to compare it to.
Well, you know what I think on this, don't you?
I actually don't.
The narrative we've told about the founding of this country has for a long time been deeply
whitewashed.
We talk about the founding fathers like they're heroes. And there is heroism in their lives, no denying that.
And we often gloss over many of the horrors of this country. There are things that we've done, for example, that we would use as an incentive to forever despise other countries that nobody's even taught about. Like one I read recently, for example, was that we did mass chemical bathings.
And I believe it was sterilizations of Hispanic people at the beginning of the 20th century,
moving up past the southern border, because there were like these militias forming in
towns near the border.
And they just did it because they had the de facto support of the local government as
a way of discouraging their movement up.
Now, the numbers
involved in that are significant. And I feel like, while that's maybe not great for fourth graders,
there could be more work done to talk about the faults with this country in addition to eulogizing
its largely white leaders. The question is, what's the goal, though, right? Is the goal to try to have
young people graduate by the time of high school to be skeptical, apprehensive, and not very proud of the country.
Or eventually tell a true and patriotic story where you have people graduating that are thankful and have gratitude.
That's the purpose of education when it comes through.
Gratitude is not the purpose of education.
Well, I think gratitude is a moral necessity.
No, you should be grateful for the people in your life.
But I will never be grateful to the state. I'm not that much of a
collectivist. Well, not a state. Are you not thankful
that you live in America? I'm thankful
of the things that make my life
easier. I was born white to
well-off parents, and today
I enjoy many of the benefits of having really
responsible and attentive parents. Are you thankful you have
constitutional rights that are protected by government,
given to you by God? But do you know how those constitutional
rights came about?
They were fought for by whiny bitches like me who were never satisfied with what they were already given.
They were granted by God, protected in the Constitution in 1787.
They were fought for by whiny, same as the 14th and 15th Amendments, everything that's
come since.
We fought for them, and it is discontentedness that leads us to fight.
Are you thankful for those people now?
I'm thankful for their efforts, as am I for the-
There's some gratitude.
Sure.
I'm grateful to them. But
patriotism,
I'm grateful to what people in America do.
But America's a concept. It's been used to do
a lot of good and a lot of harm. Oh, no. It's a home.
Well, a home can be a...
I mean, in the broadest sense. But I know what
my home is. I know where my family lives.
And I'm loyal to them. When it comes to
this country, though, this is a political
and economic block. And I have only one concern. And it's that the people in this country live the best lives
possible. Also outside the country, but I live here. This is my backyard. And when I want people
graduating from high school, I don't want them to feel this sense of contentedness. Contentedness
is the death of activism for all that's good. And activists have always been, you're an activist in your own way, as am I, have always been the forerunners
for good. They've done a lot of damage too. Sure, they have, but we make the world move.
And I want to get people, I want to get kids interested in the flaws in this country because
that teaches them to grow up and care about them so hard they fix them. This is a great piece of
disagreement.
We have clarity, not agreement, which is obviously what we want, where I think that we should try to be developing and graduating kids with strong character that want to appreciate and
protect a country and to try to be active against forces that wish to deconstruct it.
Your goal, and we're just not going to persuade each other, is that you want
to try to graduate activists that know the flaws and are willing to mobilize to try to fix them or
to undo whatever system might be effectuating. Is that fair? As long as it's responsible and
effective, yeah. There are ways to do progressive, of course I'm a progressive so I'll say it's good
by default, but there are ways to do it poorly. I disagree with people in the left constantly,
either over issues of actual concept or issues of optics or issues of engagement. I always find
something to disagree with people on. It's very fun living. But with all that being said,
I have to wonder, is it not the prerogative, and I'm not assigning this to you, of tyrants
to make sure that the children who graduate from their schools find no fault in the nations they're taught to love.
See, I never said no fault, but you could be thankful for something and you can have a holistic view of something,
understand that there were stumbles and there were missteps, while also being pretty freaking proud of that something.
How exceptional this project is.
What if there are current problems, like today, you know? We should talk about those. Like, we already talked about
fatherlessness, government overreach. Tim, you want to interject? Oh, no, I think
it's interesting to me. You're from the suburbs of Chicago. You grew up
in Beverly Hills. Somebody commented, I think it was on
Twitter, they said that when they went to school, they weren't taught about Black Wall Street
or the Tulsa bombings and things like that. And that's proof or that shows that our schools are not
teaching. And I was like, I was taught all those things. We were taught about the Trail of Tears.
We were taught about westward expansion. We were taught about the violation of treaties.
I was taught a lot as well. Yeah, we were taught a lot about that.
When we learn history, what we're really learning is a story. I think it's called historiography.
Obviously, when we're just looking at the facts of history, I mean, what is it, data and sheets?
Wrote transcriptions of things people have said.
Nobody teaches that.
You teach the story.
And the story we've told for a long time has bowled over a lot of problems I think we should work to fix.
Do we want people to be thankful?
Sure.
So we agree on that.
I don't want to stop teaching kids that there are
undeniable things they should be happy for for example every day that i worked before i was a
youtuber you know i thanked uh union activists back during the turn of the 20th century who gave
us the five-day work week the 40-hour work week who ensured that we had proper standards for lunch
breaks and what have you in
this. And they fought and they were whiny. And I'm sure a lot of them had really bad ideas
besides the worker activism. But we all benefited from that.
Do you ever think that as an activist, as a progressive, a libertarian socialist,
is there ever a point where the activism actually does much more harm than good
and the preservation of what already exists
actually should be desirable. I would say that's the case with black separatists.
There are some people in this country, not all of them are black, of course, but who believe that
the racial problems between white and black Americans are irreparable, and that the best
solution would be for black Americans to leave, or at the very least to form separate enclaves
within this country. And that's nothing new, just so you know.
I don't think that's what Charlie asked.
He asked you if there – do you want to rephrase?
Oh, sorry if I misunderstood.
You were in the general area, but I guess the question is a heavy emphasis on activism for activism's sake,
mobilizing for grievances. What if actually what we have as a constitutional order is actually pretty awesome?
Let me ask. Do you think there are things worth, systems in place in the United States that are
worth defending? That's a better way to word it.
Yes. Do you believe that there are systems in place in the United States that we should defend
and preserve? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there are ideas. For example, the concept of democracy, the concept of fair
representation, the idea that anybody could have a chance if they make it here. These are ideas
that I think are almost sacrosanct. I mean, I think they're almost existentially worthwhile.
Now, to what extent did this country live up to those promises? In some ways,
it does so better than most other countries, sometimes any other country. In other ways,
it could do better. Income mobility here, which is the measure for how effectively this country
manages its meritocratic systems, is higher in some European countries than it is here.
The idea remains valuable to me, but I can't help but think maybe we could make it better.
If making it better entails some highly destructive process that involves tearing
down everything we've ever known and such, then. I mean, eventually you have to do a risk-reward benefit, right?
So what I'm trying to caution you about is that the people pushing CRT or wokeism,
they don't have the same sort of nuance that you do.
These are revolutionaries that want to tear down the system.
But I am as well.
I just think that everything has its time.
No, you just had kind of a little bit more of a moderated answer. But how often
do actual critical race theorists
come on all of the talk
show circuits that end up... I mean, we've had
some. I mean, Joy Reid advocated for
it, but the actual scholars... Hold on.
They're running Lockheed Martin, Northup
Grumman. They're running the United States military.
They're running the...
They're assigning these ideas. Again,
wokeism no you mean
no with robin d'angelo and the the the federal white fragility right right right i'm not a big
fan of her largely because i think her language incites a lot of negative discourse i think that
it's bad for publication maybe good in an academic so not good to teach generals that
but like for some random people at like a business absolutely not no generals in the military oh yeah
sure no because that's what's happening well the big problem that i have but keep in mind that's
not wokists running these things what happens is this and put pretty simply the majority of
americans broadly are progressive on these issues support blm the all these sort of broad cultural
markers so corporations and other large entities think,
we need to avoid a cancellation.
We need to appeal to the business interests of this country.
We need to do something to ingratiate ourselves to the majority opinion.
So oftentimes, and they've done this for decades, by the way,
is they find some consultants.
They pay them $300,000.
Like Robin DiAngelo.
Like Robin DiAngelo to come on over there.
And Robin DiAngelo's job first and
foremost is to convince everyone who hires her that she was worth that money so is she going
to come over there and write like a powerpoint like don't be racist like come on you could be
cool no she has to go all out and what you get are these cringy like the coca-cola powerpoint
yeah where you get look some of the things there are defensible. Does systemic racism exist?
Sure.
Should we be aware of the concept of implicit bias?
Yeah, fine.
That's good.
That's just normal human things, I think. But some of the language in there really made it seem like she wanted white people to feel
a little bit bad.
And I don't want white people to feel bad.
I don't want anyone to feel guilty over who they are.
What percentage of this country do you think supports Black Lives Matter?
Well, I know that at its peak after George Floyd's murder, it was something like 71%.
I think since then it's trended downwards.
Is it gone below 50?
Yes.
Oh, wow.
Well, it depends on where you go.
I use Civics.
They have 237,458 responses from April 1st, 2018 to August 2nd, 2021.
I think they do a pretty good job, but there's always, I know, a challenge with polls and
whether they, you know, their system.
The peak support was 53% after the death of George Floyd, and opposition actually declined
fairly steadily.
There was no major spike in opposition.
There was a major spike in support after the death of George Floyd.
However, there was a rapid escalation of opposition.
According to Civics, current support for Black Lives Matter is 45%,
and opposition is 42%.
Those numbers are really different.
I might have looked at Pew Research.
I couldn't tell about the methodology, which is more valid.
Well, and it's actually CRT, the filler word, is very unpopular.
So I would look at it differently.
I think these corporations have been infiltrated by highly motivated activists,
which you said the education system, the goal should be to create activists,
that have really bad ideas.
And I think they're putting America on a trajectory that I think you are even concerned about.
Because you said that there are some sacrosanct ideas, right?
The sacrosanct ideas are general fair representation.
Wokeism does not believe in that.
Well, no, that's not true. I would say I mean, I don't know what you mean by wokeism, but I think there are plenty of find it, which is that kind of idea of judging people based on skin color discrimination.
Now, I would say that what I've advocated for represents the super majority of progressive opinions.
And what we're largely seeing is a couple of really bad examples being
brought to the limelight because they're most objectionable sure to be fair though i mean
you might have these very very like well thought out views of things you could say oh that's
indefensible of course i don't want to be unreasonable but when you get mark milley
coming out and talking about white rage oh i thought i thought his speech was was lovely
it reminded me of those old like chinese philosopher generals but you have
people quitting the military over this stuff because they're they feel like they're i've
actually spoken with people who retired because they've been discriminated against on racial lines
they don't like and one guy i met said he was planning a lifelong career in the military and
immediately got out because they implemented these policies of like white racial trainings
they were told that the symbols of amer America are no longer allowed to be displayed like
in private because they're extremists.
In the military?
In the military, yes.
Well, I can't speak to any of that.
I haven't looked into the particulars of that.
The only thing I want to say is that it feels like with Robin DiAngelo, we've seen this
pattern for decades now.
I don't think it has anything to do with infiltration.
I think it's the big ups, the CEOs, the project managers,
whatever. They know there's some broader political, social, cultural trend happening.
And they think, who's someone we could get? And if you look up racial sensitivity training on Google
or anywhere else, some names are going to pop up and we know which one comes up first. And they
just hire that person because they've got money and they need to spend it before the end of the
quarter so their budget doesn't get cut do you think that it should be
how's the right way to phrase this if a corporation were to tell say white employees
that they had an inherent characteristics based on their race or that they should undergo some
kind of um course or class based on their race should businesses be allowed to do that um you mean legally or like
morally both you know um i suppose legally if they want to i can understand people being upset over
it i don't think there's anything wrong with racial sensitivity training and concept the
problem is that it's almost always done by this consultant class of like upper middle class like
wasps who are really really intent on getting their own milquetoast veil of progressivism pushed down the throats of whoever they can have paid to listen to them.
If it's a good course, everyone should be able to hear it.
Wouldn't that violate the Civil Rights Act, though?
It might.
I guess I would defer entirely to law.
If it turns out to be unconstitutional, then he had it.
I just want to say, though, that while we are fixating
on bad behaviors here, and there's nothing wrong with that,
I do maintain my insistence that I think the vast majority of progressives would agree with what I have to say.
Though, keep in mind, there are always going to be a mix of good and bad ideas with good social movements.
Even the Civil Rights Act or the Civil Rights Movement, which we all know and love today, you know, can't deny it.
There were plenty of people acting there whose ideas I disagreed with
Malcolm X when he had his black separatist phase, though he amended that before he died.
There are even ideas of Martin Luther King's that I maybe could question if I spoke with him. He
wrote a book after the Civil Rights Act, where do we go from here chaos or something chaos or
something good. And he said a lot of stuff about the responsibility for white people to not make amends, but to educate themselves on the experience of black suffering so that we no longer just integrate.
We truly assimilate.
We know we're a collective bond.
There's always going to be some disagreement.
Is the movement valid?
To me, a movement which recognizes the racial discrimination, the systemic racism that exists, that there are problems we have yet to overcome. This is a movement worth defending.
I just want to make some data points real quick, and then, Charlie, you can come in.
Man. So first, the one thing I wanted to highlight, let me actually pull this up,
is that net support, which is support versus opposition. Before George Floyd died for Black
Lives Matter in this country was 16% net support. As of today, according to Civics, it's 3%.
That brings it all the way back to 2018, to August 16th.
Now, one of the things I think is really important to note is the severe tribalism and hyperpolarization
in this country.
So if we look at support for Black Lives Matter among Democrats, 86%.
Support or opposition for Black Lives Matter among Republicans. 86% opposition,
mere image.
You take a look at independence more alike than we may think,
huh?
Right,
right.
Um,
you take a look at the,
the independence though,
people who don't align.
And I would say,
what is the date around?
Um,
around May 1st,
there was an inversion.
And now the majority of independents oppose black lives matter,
44% to 39%.
That's not surprising to me, given that there's been very little in the way of optical.
I'm sorry, you haven't spoken in a while.
I apologize.
No, I just wanted to make those data points just to clarify some things.
I wanted this to be more of a discussion than debate.
So I think it's actually really helpful.
Are you concerned when certain judges or people running for DA say that accommodations on sentencing should be
made on race.
Does that bother you?
Who said that?
I've never heard that before.
Well, people in law schools have been saying it.
I mean, students have always been.
Kim Fox in Chicago has heavily implied that communities of color need to be accommodated
for in sentencing.
And they've all but done this by just getting rid of the bail laws
that we've seen altogether, right?
Decriminalizing, shoplifting, all that.
Please.
I'm totally okay with that.
We lock way too many people up,
just flat out.
So like murder out the next day?
No, not murder.
You said shoplifting.
Well, I'm just saying,
just the bail reform laws
in New Mexico and California
have been a disaster.
I can't speak to that.
Oh, sorry.
Here's actually a really great point.
It's a tough one for me.
I agree.
I think we lock way too many people up.
I err on the side of liberty, innocent until proven guilty.
To take a working class individual who is accused of shoplifting before he's even been
proven of guilt, lock him up for several months, he loses his job.
However, what do we see in San Francisco?
Wave of shoplifting, businesses shutting down because when you don't stop the crime, you get, I guess, a lot of crime.
It's a tough issue.
I wanted to let you guys know.
I think we'll totally disagree on this.
You first.
Maybe.
Well, I've read a lot on recidivism.
We have a fairly high recidivism rate in this country because really the thing that causes crime more than anything else, it's not actually poverty.
It's income inequality. when poor people and rich
people share the same space it leads to a lot of problems all poor people together in a neighborhood
what is there to steal poor people and rich people together in a neighborhood there you go you have
very clean targets and what's more there are other forms of um criminality that only really fully
express themselves in the types of neighborhoods that have a really strong mix of wealthy and poor.
I can see that because, again, from where I grew up,
I lived on the border of a lot of low-income communities.
Now, Beverly Hills, safest place you could be.
3 a.m., you want to take a jog, go for it.
Seriously.
Not anymore.
Maybe.
Oh, I haven't been there in like five years.
You'd be surprised, man.
I'll say this.
Good luck walking Rodeo Drive now.
Well, okay, Hurston, I don't want to walk Rodeo Drive during the daylight.
I agree.
After Garcon has had his work in L.A., it's a disaster.
Violent crime is down since the 90s.
We've had a bit of an up since COVID.
It's up massive in the last year.
Well, COVID's led to a lot of really weird exigent factors.
What about defunding the police?
We haven't defunded the police anywhere.
Minneapolis?
In a couple places.
Hold on a second.
That's not true.
Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, they've all the police anywhere. Minneapolis? In a couple places. Hold on a second. That's not true. Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, they've all cut
police funds. 260 departments,
I think it was reported last year, had stripped
their funding from the police. Sorry, when you said defund,
I thought I meant the anarchist vision of
community policing. When it comes to police
funds being stripped, there is a conversation
to be had about the relationship between that and crime,
but the crime increase seems to be all
countrywide, so I don't know if I'd be
leaning more towards that being a COVID thing and people being restless and angry and, I don't know, aggressive.
The thing that I'm trying to say, though, is when I grew up in Beverly Hills, really, really safe, free from violent crime.
I could walk half a mile, though, and the area between rich and poor were the areas where people had barred windows every time.
So when it comes to criminality, there are things that we can address very
fundamentally that will help everyone.
I'm sure there are restructures to bail
laws that we could do. I don't know the particulars.
It's not my field.
I've also read stuff in recidivism. Apparently
murder actually has a very low
default recidivist rate because usually it's
done under a very specific set of heated
conditions that don't actually speak to a person's
character, which makes you wonder a lot about moral worth and what really drives a person to do that sort
of thing. I think it's something we should look at critically, though I don't have any
really strong database arguments. The last thing I want to say, because it's the first point that
you brought up, is racial responses to the criminal justice system. Yeah, I didn't forget.
I'm actually going to triple down on this one, okay? Not only do I think that we should aggressively look at the ways our sentencing laws affect and discriminate between black and white people and Hispanic-Nasian,
I think we should do the same between men and women.
Because as much as black people are shafted by the criminal justice system, men are even more.
If you take a look at the disproportionate rates of sentencing, relative levels of implicit bias in the jury. Women get off with way more than men do.
Hush, MRA confirmed.
Way more.
So, I mean, maybe it's something we can all agree on.
We're guys, I think.
Well, so the issue, though, is that when you remove race, it's just a matter of income or wealth.
For example, if LeBron James goes in front of a jury, he's going to have the best lawyers.
And obviously that's an extreme example, right?
But O.J. Simpson had an all-star team.
And so the problem is that Obama.
He would also have good lawyers.
O.J. Simpson?
Oh, yeah.
No, sorry.
You didn't have Obama as a lawyer.
No, no.
Let me say.
Kardashian and Dershowitz.
Sorry.
I would just like to interject that Obama extrajudicially assassinated people and nobody did anything
about it.
Now, that's black privilege.
That's a joke.
Don't. Don joke. Don't.
But I think that there's an implication in your argument that I want to challenge, which is that just because you're poor doesn't mean you commit crimes.
I think that's an insult to poor people, right?
And so I think that if you automatically assume that, now there are data trends to suggest
that, but instead it should be the question of what are we trying to structurally
do or through incentives to either punish the people that are committing crimes and lift people
out of that current level so i think it's a good talking point but i don't think it's totally true
to say we have too many people in prison i think we have the wrong people in prison let me tell you
why we have more than like any other talk about no no let me tell you why the average rapist serves
four years in prison and they're very likely to rape again.
Totally different than murder.
Look, if you want funding that goes to police departments to go towards actually looking at the rape kits that they take rather than stuffing them into a bin.
Well over 250,000 untested rape kits in the tri-state area in New York City.
250,000, right?
So our criminal justice system, you could say it had nefarious intentions i'll be
neutral on that was very heavy on drugs obviously in the 80s and 90s but generally though you cited
the number you said violent crime's been down since the 90s why do you think that is it's because
we were tough on crime in the 80s and we had a massive campaign against it and we had the most
peaceful decade in american history there were a few factors the viability of broken windows policing has been challenged substantially but there are
admittedly some benefits the argument that i would make is that what you're really what you're really
doing is you're forestalling the problem uh there are socioeconomic conditions that increase
criminality not because it makes people worse people but just because oftentimes crime isn't
some direct indicator of poor moral conduct.
Oftentimes it is a crime of necessity or it is a crime born of the discontent and the apathy.
I've got to challenge you on that.
What would be a crime of necessity today with the welfare state that we have?
What would possibly be a crime of necessity?
I know for, I can at least speak to personal experience that I knew some people involved in, like they said, they would sometimes peddle drugs.
And they did it because while they may have been accounted for by the welfare state, their parents' medical bills weren't.
Not sufficiently, not even close.
Stuff like that.
Now, maybe legally, if that person got arrested, the law says they have to be.
I could never morally condemn them.
They were trying to save their mom, man.
But I got to push back on that. I mean, for
sure it's anecdotal, but... It is, so it's not
like a data point. I never
understood this, having grown up on the South Side.
Seeing people sell drugs is not the fastest
and easiest way to make money for someone who's desperate.
I mean, no joke. Plasma sales?
What would you say? I made $140
per hour playing guitar in front of a
baseball field. Now, I understand not everyone
can play guitar.
Or skateboard.
Or skateboard.
I knew a guy who said he just bought T-shirts.
He went and bought bulk T-shirts.
So the people who are selling drugs, they got to buy the drugs first or they get a loan.
And you can do the same thing with socks.
And then people go on the side of the road and sell socks.
I think the choice of committing a crime was a choice.
Well, hold on.
It is always a choice.
But what we're really talking about is the limits of determinism here.
How much do we choose the things we do? You can make an argument that it's all,
I mean, you're religious, of course, so you wouldn't have this argument.
I wouldn't have anything close to this argument.
Right. From a secular perspective, you can make the argument that at the end of the day,
the things we do are driven entirely by the chemical reactions in our brain, and therefore,
everything that we do from start to finish is just a combination of random molecular patterns and blah, blah. We don't live our lives like that. Obviously, I make a choice to get dressed every day. We know how this works in
practice. But in practice, we are also the product of our environment. And the fact that, for example,
having a single parent while growing up is a pretty strong criminal indicator is a suggestion
that, I mean, is it an indicator of a person's inherent moral worth that they were born with a
single parent? Probably not. So that
statistical difference has to be accounted for by the inevitable fact that environmental differences
can lead to harsh outcomes. The question is, though, do you then create a set of lack of
enforcement to say that we're actually not going to enforce looting, where you had an entire article
in National Public Radio not saying you believe this, that says the case for looting, right?
San Francisco's basically employed this.
$900 or less, they're not going to prosecute you, right?
Videos of them stealing entire Walgreens, right?
Not an exaggeration.
And then you have, and just one other data point, just because of COVID,
Europe's crime rates did not increase.
Ours did.
And we had a massive defund police,
almost kind of we're going to be relaxed on criminality type movement.
And this is the question, right? massive defund police, almost kind of we're going to be relaxed on criminality type movement.
And this is the question, right, which is how many excuses or accommodations are we going to give for crime? Well, we're not. And I'm just one just to finish is that my perspective,
obviously, is very little to none. Crime's a necessity. I could think of one, maybe two
examples where I would make a moral claim of a crime of necessity. And that would be a revenge
crime if someone murdered your wife or your kid.
Maybe.
Necessity?
I'm not saying necessity.
I'm saying like a moral accommodation where I could say I could see where they came from.
Not necessity.
Let me rephrase that.
But the idea that in the welfare state that we have, with the private philanthropy kind
of generosity we have, that shoplifting and arson and looting mugging barbara boxer that we should just
say you know it's actually because of the environment i don't know why you pointed at
me when you know i have never mugged barbara box saying that as an example yeah i don't mean i
don't is that was that you in san francisco where were you no i i've gotten stolen from in san
francisco before it was a very fun experience it That was back before YouTube, too, so I couldn't afford to replace anything.
Okay, a lot to respond to here.
Emil Durkheim, cool guy, dead now, thought that crime was sociologically useful
because it shows you where the antagonisms are between people's wants and the state's desires.
So crime takes place where there's an agitation between what people are being compelled to do
by whatever, their own behavior, their desires,
and what the state will allow you to do.
So, for example, during a food shortage, you know,
we can take, like, Ireland during the potato famine.
There were, to put it lightly, quite a few cases of theft during that time because people needed food.
They would do anything for it.
So the crime of theft in that instance becomes a sociological
indicator of a social need
that isn't being met. Now today,
of course, we do have, admittedly, a fairly
weak but existent welfare state.
It's rather strong. It's very generous.
It's a little baby welfare state. Multi-trillions of dollars every year.
Yeah, multi-trillions. For America?
I will say you get $70,000
in value a year. That's plenty. I want a
UBI. We can go way harder.
We do have UBI.
We just implemented it with the stimulus.
No, we didn't.
Oh, wait.
Hold on.
Yes.
The child tax credits with...
Well, no.
People got cash checks.
We have UBI now.
Well, it's not a longstanding program.
I'll admit that.
But we've tried UBI and crime went up.
Well, hold on.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on.
Wait, wait.
I need to reject the spurious...
We send checks.
People commit crimes.
Hold on.
This is a spurious correlation, okay?
First of all, you will not be able to find any analysis that attributes the increase in crime to people getting their stimulus checks.
No, actually, I'm saying it's the opposite.
The argument you're making is that if people have a sociological need, they won't commit the crime.
So people got money and they still committed crimes.
Yeah, but it doesn't always correspond one-to-one like that.
The reason why people needed money is because they weren't getting any money from their jobs because they couldn't work their jobs.
So people were still in a worse position than they were otherwise.
Well, they also got unemployment.
Remember, very generous unemployment.
The unemployment started pretty generous.
Plus $600 to $800, right?
I think it was a week or a month, right?
It was very generous.
It's still currently $300.
And not everyone is applicable for unemployment.
There are a lot of conditions there that can make that difficult.
No, they were very generous.
They didn't turn anyone down during the lockdown.
We're being very spurious with our relations.
We're very wonky.
I'm sorry I interrupted you.
I'm just...
So I just...
Oh, God, where was I?
Something about some dead guy about how crime is helpful.
I love dead white guys.
That's my...
I actually don't know if Durkheim was white.
So I'm not pro-crime, not pro-criminal here.
I'm pro-leniency only insofar as I believe it helps to lower our recidivism. Sometimes it
finds that it does. For example, you're in prison for 20 years. What do you know? You know the
inside of a jail cell. The environment in prison is very bad at encouraging people to get their
life together when they get out. And that's why so many people, they get out of prison,
they have six months on the street before they're back in. Sometimes it's because they want to go
back in. Prison's all they know. They did a movie about that um sorry um shawshank redemption
and it was a good movie it's a great movie yeah which only serves my point um but with regards to
like being lax on crime or whatever there are a couple of things i think we should all agree to
okay first of all well maybe we wouldn't drugs is bad we need to stop locking people up for weed
just flat out i think that drugs in general should be treated like a medical issue. Portugal did that.
They decriminalized all drugs.
There's conflicting data in Portugal, but fine.
It's pretty promising.
Take heroin. Nobody wants to be
on heroin. If you're on heroin
in the fleeting moments you have in between your
little sessions, you know something's up.
You treat that like a medical issue. Say,
hey, we have government offices. You want to come by?
That helps. Far fewer overdose deaths. And those people, they go Say, hey, we have government offices. You want to come by? That helps.
Far fewer overdose deaths.
And those people, they go ahead.
They become socially productive.
Bam.
No crime.
They contribute to the economy.
It just works better than locking them up.
I wanted to say something you mentioned with UBI.
You mentioned with the unemployment, the stimulus.
First of all, we've actually had a really hard time hiring for specific work, like labor stuff, because nobody wants to work. And no joke,
like we've been having, I've been having conversations like every other day, like,
can we find some people? And it's like, we can't find anybody. We got signs up and down
all throughout the area where it's like, come in, open interviews. We had over 800
flights canceled due to staffing shortages. And now we're facing fuel shortages because
it's a trucker shortage.
We're looking at this unemployment stimulus thing where they're doing the $300 bonus,
now they're doing the child tax credit, which won't be for everybody.
And we're seeing a correlation with massive job openings and people not taking these jobs.
I think it's phenomenal.
Finally, the bargaining power is in the hands of the workers more so.
But it's broken.
The flights are shutting down.
Nobody wants the jobs, even when they do increase the salaries.
So it's true.
The flights are an issue.
But here's what they don't tell you in the news briefs.
So stock buybacks, something that many companies now do because of their decriminalization.
The airline companies have spent an anomalous amount of their profits each year on stock buybacks to enrich their CEOs and shareholders rather than on hiring more pilots. It seems the
issue here is this is a simple supply-demand issue. People need to raise their wages. You see these
news stories from time to time where it's like, I raised my wage to 15 an hour and people showed up.
And it's like, yeah, that is how economics works.
We had John Schnatter, Papa John, on the show.
And he told us a story about a pizzeria where they were paying $35 an hour to some of their pizza cooks or bakers.
Because that was a line.
He kept trying to find people.
Nobody would do it.
He kept raising wages.
Finally, he settled on $35 an hour.
That means pizzas are going to basically more than double because the wage they were paying before was like $15.
And now they're over double what they were paying in labor.
Their labor costs go up.
They have no choice but to charge substantially more for pizza.
In the short term, within a month or so, that might have an impact on those pizza makers.
But the ripple effect is going to slam into everybody.
All of a sudden, the contractor can't afford to take his family out for dinner.
He can't afford to buy the food he wants because the base level costs are going to start going up.
Then the landlords aren't going to be able to hire the maintenance crews to fix the buildings.
The landlords are on fixed pricing, which they can't change, which then results in a brick wall, a collapse.
I just want to say what we're having right now is an unprecedented economic shock.
For a year, nobody worked, or very few people worked.
And people got used to staying at home. And as the government should, it should have done more. But as the government should,
it took care of them a little bit. We have to ride this out. What are government funds for,
but riding us out through common crises? Better this than war. And now people are returning to
work, and they're realizing work sucks. Work sucks everywhere. But in this country, compared to maybe some of our
equally developed contemporaries, work really sucks. The work culture, our rate of over
productivity, the Americans more than any other developed country, by the way, we push our workers
hard. And you have favorable employment numbers, but you don't have favorable
underemployment numbers. There are a lot of people who have jobs, but they have like two to three
part-time jobs. They don't get their schedule for the next month until like two weeks before the end
of the current one. They're constantly worrying about whether or not they're going to make their
shifts line up to get enough hours to get the money they need to pay down their student debt,
along with their rent and everything. It sucks. And it's untenable. And we are in an era of
unprecedented record profits for CEOs. So yes, I think the solution to this, and it'll be a rough one, that's for sure,
is we should normalize higher wages.
Maybe the solution to $15 an hour was never a federal mandate.
Maybe it was the inevitable economic necessity of incentivizing workers.
Hard to disagree with a lot of that.
I will say that the lockdowns were way too harsh and intense.
I will say there is a Fifth Amendment argument to be made, though, that if the government forces you to not work, then you should be able to get something in return.
The government cannot take something from you constitutionally and not pay you for it.
That's the eminent domain argument, right?
Right.
Which was one of the best arguments for the stimulus package.
I just think the lockdowns were far too severe and far too intense and really infringed on people's liberties and abilities to be able to take risks. I want to go a different direction. I just want to
ask you a question. It's just more kind of about human nature. Do you think human beings are
naturally good or naturally bad as human nature? Tabula rasa. I really think we are. Blank slate.
Maybe. I mean, maybe there's some inclination. We're hardwired to be social. I know that.
We're also, at least to some extent, hardwired to be self-serving.
The best society merges those two.
The best interest for you is the best interest for everyone.
The social contract from now until we die.
So which, Locke's, Rousseau's, or Hobbes?
Which social contract?
I guess I would just say the ubiquitous philosophical term more so than any specific.
Well, because they all wrote on those terms, right?
And they totally disagreed.
They all thought different things of humans.
They all thought Hobbes was at a very dark view, Rousseau very positive, Locke was more neutral.
I'm just curious.
Socialists tend to think that human beings are fundamentally positive, but I reject that.
That's why I'm curious, because you see way too cynical for that.
Well, the implicit suggestion to that, to me,
is that socialists think their system would only work if everyone was nice,
and I don't believe that.
I think that the best economic systems will work when everyone is an absolute POS,
just a dirty, horrible human being.
It's very Hobbesian.
And you can incentivize them, but it should.
Maybe humans are amazing, but the best system should survive human greed.
I want to ask you a very simple and general question.
Uh-oh.
Those are the worst ones to answer.
It is.
Do you think some people are better than other people?
Can I add a bit of nuance to that answer?
Answer however you want.
I think that some people have been developed to be more moral and of better character.
Oh, no.
Okay.
I didn't mean moral.
Just better like they're taller? That's it. Oh, no. Okay. I didn't mean moral. Just better like they're taller?
That's it.
Oh.
But I think your interpretation of the question is part of the answer.
By any metric, there will always be people who are better than others, always perhaps
by some combination of environment and genetics.
I just hope that we can all ride along beside each other.
I agree.
I think I mentioned this before the show.
If you were to ask anybody on the left or the right, you know, what did you want?
It would be like for everyone to prosper, for people to be successful, to pull people
out of poverty, things like that.
I guess the issue is disagreeing on how we get there.
Well, I think we want, I'm not sure if we want the same thing.
I want more of a preservation and conservation of what we already have.
Do you want socialism?
Absolutely not.
Oh, no.
Slight ideological disagreement.
No, but come on, come on.
I mean, but we don't need to play the word games.
Why do you want to preserve?
Well, I think that we have something beautiful, unique, and exceptional.
And I take the more Hobbesian view of human nature, which is we're brutish and nasty and awful and cruel.
And the fact we've been able to build something decent and civil is pretty remarkable.
But are you saying that we have a good system?
A great system.
And people thrive from the system?
I think people flourish and thrive. I think that a rights-based system is
naturally the best way to govern.
Do you want people to be stripped of their rights, imprisoned, brutalized, impoverished?
Of course not. No. I mean, the sacrificing of rights is something that usually has to be earned negatively,
like murdering somebody.
So this is what I mean, because I think I could ask you the same question.
Do you want people to be brutalized, impoverished, imprisoned?
Of course not.
Taking their rights away?
But I would never want to grow complacent.
You're both familiar with the Marxian theory of dialectic materialism, correct?
You mean Hegel's theory?
No.
He had the dialectic and we we we
built on it you know or he built we i'd love to get it no i really want to get into the marx thing
because i'm super fascinated by it no i well i just want to say you know the the theory i mean
put simply i guess is that um human society the human project it evolves as a product of antagonism
grinding antagonism between people in marxian view, it's very Hegelian.
Well, yeah.
No, I mean,
he was a student of Hegel.
I know.
He was part of this.
He was the young Hegelian
and he won the argument.
Well, no, I'm not.
Well, you're not.
I'm just saying, like,
he would get mad at you
if you said he was
Hegelian influenced,
but I don't think I would.
Hegel was a smart guy.
I just can't read his work
because...
The phenomenology of spirit
is impossible to read.
Thank you.
All right.
I was worried
you were going to make fun of me.
I just want to say...
No, it's really hard.
He made the very simple complex. Yeah. We agree on something. I just were going to make fun of me. I just want to say... No, it's really hard. He made the very simple complex.
Yeah. We agree on something.
I just want to say... Sorry, sorry. I just want to... The project of humans moving forward,
I think that antagonism fuels it, but in the best way. Not antagonism like war,
but antagonism in the sense that we look at our ideas, our values, and we challenge them.
So I just want to say something we disagree on. I don't think humanity is a project.
Do you think we're headed towards something better than what we have today?
Probably not.
I think that we're actually, we're probably engaging in the second law of thermodynamics
currently, that we're untangling.
We're going to chaos, not order.
See, this to me, this is the thing, and I'm not trying to patronize.
Conservatives have been shown to be more fearful on average.
And I think if they thought that way, it would be very warranted.
But some fears are legitimate.
Certainly.
Winston Churchill's fears about the evil Germans were legitimate.
No, no, no.
I'm not.
No, fear is not always illegitimate.
And there are elements of this.
I think, though, that if society is to collapse, it would probably be from climate change more so than like the.
Oh, come on.
You don't believe that.
No, for sure.
You can.
We'll see it.
Assuming COVID doesn't get you. We'll live the season pretty severe we see it right now you know my problem is
oh you're like i i see all the news i see all the arguments about climate change and i'm like i
understand them and then you get obama buying beachfront property you get the celebrities
flying airplanes and i'm like how am i supposed to trust any of these people gotta get bernie
guy rode the train to work he didn't have to do that.
Bernie's the man.
True revolutionary.
Oh, just to finish the point.
I'm sorry,
because I kept getting sidetracked.
But the idea of the human project
is super interesting to me
because that's a collision point
we're going to have.
Yeah, well,
I'd like to think,
I mean, people have always said
this is the best it gets.
You know,
the Postmaster General back in,
was it the Postmaster General?
Was it the Patent Office?
No, the Patent Office, 1900.
All the patents have been made.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm not saying it's the best it's been.
I'm not saying improvement is not possible.
Maybe we can make little improvements.
But when I try to put myself in the shoes of men past,
you know, I don't know, somebody in feudal China.
And to them, what I live in today
would have been incomprehensible to them
in every imaginable sense, every conceivable way.
But their arguments for the permanence of society then would have
been better than mine today, because they would have lived in a stable feudal society for millennia.
And today, I now am here using technology that would have been alien to humans 20 years ago.
I think about like, the Cultural Revolution, the Cultural Revolution revolution i think about the revolution in russia
and you mentioned the conservatives tend to be more fearful and i think there's history that
shows us things can go bad you can have something that's good not great could probably be better
and then end up with an unchecked movement that results in millions dead for sure 20 to 40 million
i think in the cultural revolution we had lily tong williams on the other night she's telling
us these stories are scary always hindsight right because
people thought this about every major event in social progress in america's history as well
the breakup the confederacy the civil war the fight to abolish slavery sure you know suffrage
for women yes the civil rights act yes gay marriage yes every time we make a step forward i don't i
you're probably anti-gay marriage right right? I'm pro-traditional marriage.
Okay, sure.
Right.
Anti-gay marriage.
Pro-tradition.
Yeah.
Gotcha.
One man, one woman.
Every time we take a step forward.
Well, we agreed on the three-parent household before.
I disagreed on polyamory, actually.
That was 50% more efficient than the previous method.
That's not actually a study, is it?
And 10 times more chaotic and way more perverse.
I'm not actually citing anything.
It's possibly not a linear growth pattern with parents in the house.
It's actually exponential.
It just goes up forever.
Albert Einstein had 12 parents.
By the time you hit 12 parents, should the children just a god, by the way?
It's like a warp.
Very ubermensch, but continue.
Sorry.
It always feels like everyone argues like this is
the best it gets and any future steps would be treacherous but then we always make that next
step i don't know if america is going to be around forever we're a young country and countries far
older than ours have fallen in the lifetime of america so i can't look at what we have today
or the people that i live with or the values that I believe in and assign to them a feeling of permanence, but I can say this.
I fear stagnation
and every country that has ever set
itself upon stagnation has always
died. Every time.
Every country always seeks to better
itself and maybe that road to betterment leads to
ruin, but the path of
stagnation is always ruinous. I agree.
Our culture has stagnated severely.
One thing I always bring up is like
Christmas music written in the 50s. We still play it
non-stop over and over again. Thank you. Movies have
become repetitive, redundant, reboots.
It's devolved from
where we had these interesting pieces of art to
just regurgitated crap over and over again.
Can I just take some exception with your argument?
First of all, there is this kind of
revisionist belief that somehow
conservatives, in the traditional sense, were against some of those social movements, which is just not true.
Now, I'm not saying you'd be a confederate, and I'm not even getting to the party switching thing.
But there is a direct lineage between hyper-focusing on racial politics in the 1860s and the 1920s and some of the people on the American left that are just completely obsessed with American racial politics.
It's equality versus hierarchy, right?
But what do you mean by that?
Well, back then, the slave owners wouldn't have been like, I'm really obsessed with race or equality.
You know, now, I mean, obsession with race can be pernicious in many ways.
But I think there's a pretty big difference between being obsessed with the idea of racial equality and being obsessed.
I think it's equally as pernicious, just they don't have the power to implement it.
But we kind of already did that.
Do you think I do that?
Like you?
No, I don't think you would.
I mean, I don't know you well enough.
You seem rather decent.
I try my best.
But like I wouldn't give power to Nicole Hannah-Jones.
I don't know who that is.
She founded the 1619 Project.
Oh, I just read the thing.
I don't know.
We have a constitution to prevent us against people like that.
What I'm saying, though, is that, for example, I'm not against social change.
I mean, I'd love to abolish abortion, for example.
I'd love to put fathers back in the home.
No doubt.
So conservatives are not necessarily always saying, no, we don't want to improve.
We want to stagnate.
We want the correct form of social change.
So let me ask this then.
Let's get to the core of it then.
What values are you looking to maximize?
This is a great question.
Not just like morality, because that could be the same thing or different things to anyone.
But if you were to look at a society and were asked to assess its worth,
what metrics would you look towards? It's ability to defend those that can't
defend themselves. Charity, generosity, integrity, faith to your creator, the ability to pass down
good and moral values to the next generation, one that believes in work, and one that believes in the cause of the nation above the self.
All right.
I've got an idea.
I think that's a fairly collectivist point, that last one, though, wouldn't it be?
Well, the nation above itself?
I mean, you could call it collectivist, but I wouldn't say the state.
I'd say the idea of the nation, right?
So there's two different things, and those are conflated sometimes by libertarian socialist
types, which is a walking contradiction. I'd love
to ask you about that. But just like
kind of just being like a Christian atheist.
I might answer it when you're done, by the way, because I think my
follow-up might touch on that.
But the state
is a creation of the people.
The people are the country. That's why
our Constitution, the preamble, says we the people,
not we the federal government, right? So the people are the nation. And so that's why I differentiate between the two.
Do you have a loyalty? Do you have a belief that you want to create something bigger than
yourselves? I think that's a moral good. To me, and I mean this without meaning to hyperbolize,
but to me, that's always strung rather fascist. The myth of the common man, the people, the Volk, you know, the idea that there is a state and Germany was a state, of course,
but Hitler didn't really appeal to the state. It was the concept of the fatherland that he
really hit on. And the people were a beating heart of the fatherland. They were an instrumental
organ. And to me, the problem with this is that when you get down to it, this thought process,
this mentality, it drives men to do terrible, terrible things. Because interpersonally,
all of the chemical effects of empathy kick in. I look at you, I see you. But you start bringing
in concepts like the nation, the fatherland, and it becomes very easy to convince people to
compel themselves towards courses that they would otherwise not so expected you to use
a 1930s reference earlier so congratulations no i'm only i'm not telling you i'm only saying i
know you did do the correct i didn't mean to hyperbolize but there's other nations today
that have those values that we would never call fascist like japan uh well japan has very strict
immigration well i think korea is actually a better example to be honest i really don't like
either of those countries for the reasons that I
described. You don't like Korea? I think they're both deeply
conservative countries. I agree with you.
Right. They're wonderful. And I think
they do so in part because
there's a degree of
anti-individualism in the subservience they all
expect of the common good. Now, it's funny.
I feel like our roles are being reversed a little bit here.
Isn't that interesting? The common good
isn't something I appeal to.
For me, the value I want to maximize.
No, I just appeal to the good.
The good, sure.
Which is two different things.
Is freedom.
That's what I care about most.
And that's what libertarian socialism is about.
There are many types of freedoms, positive and negative.
If I might indulge very briefly, like, is a man thrown to a lawless desert desert without food water or clothing free really asking so
probably no i agree he's free to die but that's an extreme example not applicable in modern wealthy
america no or any western nation but it's a philosophical base it's also a rousseauian
argument man's born free and he you know spends the rest of his life in chains it's just anti-commercial
in nature well no but it but it's a base philosophical argument
because it's true, they're lawless.
There's nothing preventing him from doing
anything in that environment, but he
has no ability to act on his desires.
But do you know what he does have? Consciousness.
So that's a natural rights doctrine that I will
defend. Well, I mean, I like consciousness too.
The only point that I'm getting at is when it comes
to people's freedom and the ability for people to protect
their freedom, this is what I care about. It's what Marx cared about. If you
actually read what he wrote and- I have. I've read Das Kapital. I've read the Manifesto.
Guess what? He was right about some things. Then you know.
But not everything. He didn't talk-
And he was really wrong about it. About equality. He didn't write on equality.
He wrote on freedom because he believed that society was a very complex, interlocking network
of systems that in some
ways liberated men and in other ways enslaved. But do you know what he got wrong? He got wrong
that sometimes people can be free for other devices that they are not able to regulate.
They can be free, not from alcoholism, drug addiction, some sort of any other sort of
perverse addiction. The idea of freedom is a very libertarian view of freedom. But I agree with that, though.
No, I know you do.
The greatest society...
I say that...
Okay, go ahead.
Oh, sorry.
Just the greatest society is one where a man is born
and there are as few things as possible preventing him
from doing whatever he wants for the rest of his life.
I totally disagree.
So long as, of course,
he doesn't deprive others of the ability to do the same.
So I think that's a miserable society.
Freedom?
No, that's not freedom.
That's licentiousness or degeneracy.
That's chaos.
What is degeneracy?
I like men.
How about pedophilia?
Okay.
You said whatever he wants.
Is pedophilia a freedom voucher?
As long as they don't infringe on the rights of others.
I'm sure you could believe.
I would believe that.
So there are limits on freedom is what you're saying.
It's not this Wild West campaign.
So where do you get those limits from?
Well, obviously, you would probably have to have a pretty complex interlocking legal system
to determine what we agree upon as reasonable limits we can place on people's behavior.
We have that now to an extent.
No, I know.
So pedophilia, bad.
That would be a bad thing.
Okay, kidnapping.
That would be a bad thing.
Rape.
That would be a bad thing.
Why do you think those things are bad i think they're bad because you're stripping other people of the ability to do that which they will with all those examples you're inflicting harm
on a person how about dealing drugs i think that dealing drugs is a person's freedom as is taking
a person's you're taking what about dealing drugs to kids uh dealing drugs to kids uh i think i
would disagree with that probably because I think there's something exceptional
about addictive substances and children.
That being said, I think a lot of stuff would apply to children specifically.
Contract law.
Kids can't sign contracts.
So there's nothing wrong with contracts.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
Eventually, you do agree that a conservative framework is necessary.
But I don't think that's a conservative framework,
because there are other things I care about that you would always disagree with,
like collective ownership of the means of production.
Yeah, I totally disagree.
Which I think private property and freedom are linked together.
Which would give workers the most freedom possible.
We've definitely gone along because it was just –
This has been helpful, right?
It feels like it's been five minutes.
Oh, yeah, I know.
I know, right, right.
And Ian, you've collected a bunch of great –
50, yeah, at least.
So, right, right.
I'm going to use the restroom.
Is that okay?
Go away.
All right, yeah, go.
Do it to it.
It's going to take like 100 seconds.
Yeah.
You can time me.
I'm kind of interested what you think about.
I think humans are inherently destructive by nature and that if you took a human and put them in a room with a bunch of small animals and plants over time, his hunger purely because of hunger.
Ultimately, he would destroy and consume all of those animals and all of those plants.
And then if you put another human in there, one of those would eventually destroy and consume the other human. I do think that we are maybe inherently expansionist.
I think that might be a defining trait of our species. I mean, we conquered the world.
And God willing, we survive. A thousand years from now, we'll conquer the stars.
And that's unique to us. Other animals don't do that. I don't know if that's a good thing.
Maybe everything would have been better. do this every animal does the the the issue is that
spaceships no no no uh expand expansion oh oh yeah yeah but i would not build a spaceship that'd be
cool though you know over time the um the the the the limits of their abilities constrain them to a
given area a given population.
But we clearly haven't been kept in that way.
Intelligence has separated us from the equilibrium.
A lion chasing a gazelle.
The gazelle runs faster.
The lion has to run faster.
The zebras and the stripes are confusing.
Some get away.
Some don't.
There's a natural adaptation process.
We know what evolution is.
But humans, we adapt instantly.
We are like, hey, that bird's flying.
I got an arrow.
And we have, and there are, I just want to say, we're talking about evolution.
Oh, yeah, non-controversial topic.
No, no, well, in a non-controversial way, believe it or not, you'll have to catch the behind-the-scenes release.
I just want to say that I don't have much optimism for the human condition.
I'm not like a huge optimist about this.
We are, I think, very potentially destructive.
I just think that we also experience or we're better receptive to reward incentives than any other thing.
Ian's got a bunch of questions.
So everybody who's super chatted, we were having Ian, we mentioned in the beginning, go through and try and find really good questions.
A lot of people are saying really awesome things.
I want to read one that's not a question real quickly it's from adam schrader who
said so far this whole conversation reminds me of friendly bar discussions 10 years ago i miss that
world thank you vosh and charlie for being excellent thank you tim for steel manning you
all have leader demeanors i know a lot of people disagree with each other especially in the chat
not everyone gets along but uh these are i think it's a fantastic conversation. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Charlie.
Ian's got some questions.
Let me bring them to you.
And then afterwards, if we still have time permitting, I would like to do the member segment and then personally be more involved than I've been for the most part.
Sorry, we've been back to arm wrestling.
There's a million things.
I'm like, eh.
And I did interject.
You guys know I did.
You just told us
for the right
to go through all of them.
Thanks, Ian.
Okay.
These are some pretty good ones.
So you just said press.
Okay, there we go.
So Ian's pulled
some super chats.
M asks,
please ask each guest
if they agree
or disagree
with the statement
abortion breaks
the non-aggression principle
and why?
Obviously, yeah.
I think abortion
is immoral and we should do our
best to eradicate it. I don't really believe in the NAP. I understand people's discomfort with
abortion. I think that unfortunately it's a legal necessity as a byproduct of some very compelling
personhood arguments I've heard in the past, which I would have to read up on again before reciting.
Can I ask a question? When do you think life begins? I don't know what life is. So how about your life? You have life right now. When did your
life begin? I don't remember the first six months of my life. I genuinely don't know. Looking at
the development of a human life, when would you say that begins? I know when human bodies develop.
The genuine answer that I have is that I think that it's always going to be dictated somewhat
by intuition. The intuitive answer from me is life begins I think that it's always going to be dictated somewhat by intuition.
The intuitive answer from me is life begins at birth.
That's my intuitive.
If you asked me, that's what feels right, but I'm sympathetic to other perspectives.
What about when DNA is formed?
Well, that would be a conception, right?
Or at least right after.
Well, that's obviously not the metric that I would look at.
How about heartbeat?
That's six weeks?
No, earlier.
As late as six weeks, early as 25 days.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, no, these are interesting metrics.
I think that my understanding of consciousness is more of an emergent property of experience,
more so than it is.
I would have to reread.
It's been a while since I've read up on this.
You know what I love?
You said, when do you think life begins that was your question i love i love how framing
changes everything watch uh ask me now tim when does life begin i think it was when uh proteins
formed and started self-replicating in the primordial oh you mean you see like it's interesting
how framing changes everything to me it's more i guess for me and because like any cell in our
body is alive there is life and dna and any bit of skin off my fingertip i wasn't meaning to poke at you or
anything no no i know when is a life worthy of protection begin that's a difficult question
to me that's a better way to word it to me that has to be a legal question because protection
has to be orbited by an entity and it can't be and for me that would probably be at birth i've
heard people make convincing philosophical arguments that there are times after birth
when you're not even a person.
And I've heard people make
convincing arguments for conception.
But if you're talking about
a legal entity,
the birthing seems to be the line
that's the easiest to distinguish.
And there are other legal concerns as well.
But this is an issue that I think I'm...
Well, I always support
like a pro-choice argument.
The philosophy behind it
is something I'm a little more open to.
So is it more on the size of the being or the level of development of the being or the environment of the being or the degree of dependency?
Which one do you think out of those things is the reason why you say birth?
I'm just curious.
I think the degree of dependency is legally worthwhile, but for consciousness, I think it's more about it
being an emergent property of experience. So is it okay then if we just basically pull the plug on
all the people that are kind of comatose and cucumbers on machines? They really don't have
self-consciousness and they're very dependent. Well, I mean, legally we do believe that because
if you have- Oh, it's very tricky in the courts.
It is, but it's not the same as murdering a person. If there's conservatorship over a person who's brain dead,
there are instances where you will be allowed to pull the plug.
You can't do so without an arbiter, though.
You can't just call in and say, just pull the plug.
That is murder.
Well, yeah, you can just yank it, of course.
You have to have approval and process.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it does indicate that legally and morally there is ambiguity with regards to the relationship.
But it shows that there is an arbiter, though, that you have to go through a system of checks.
I didn't mean to derail Tim.
Sorry.
Yeah.
I want to make sure we can get to as many questions as possible.
That was great.
That was great.
Camilla Mamani says WTF.
A libertarian socialist is like a meat eater.
Vegan libertarianism was actually a left leaning ideology.
It was co-opted in the early 20th centuries by capitalists.
But actually before that,
libertarianism was exclusively in the purview of socialists.
And I believe what they believed,
that freedom is the greatest human good
as long as it doesn't infringe upon others.
And that the best way to achieve that freedom
is through democracy.
We have political democracy, flawed as it is.
Economic democracy is something we should also strive for.
I'll tell you this.
Left libertarian quadrant is the hardest quadrant to be in.
You have the only persuasion tactics.
If you're a left libertarian, which exists, you're basically saying, I like socialism.
Now I have to convince people that it's the right thing and they'll agree with me.
And people just won't.
I find left
libertarians less threatening to the american way of life oh thank you because you you have a general
distaste for authoritarianism well for what it's worth right has money they're like well you won't
agree with me but i can give you money and they're like the left does too sorry go ahead no just want
to say for what it's worth there are some people who call themselves socialists who i actually think
would agree probably more with you than with me. Like people who support China, for
example. China's not socialist. It's a rampant
capitalist state. It's a cronyist state is really
what it is. Right. Well, I mean, whatever you want to call it, it's certainly
not what I want, you know. So there are people who
defend that, and I can't help but think, like, okay, these are
conservative, what would you call them, traditionalist
social positions, and
you defend, you know, a strong state with
a strong common will towards the betterment
of the state and a free market.
I don't know.
Maybe that'll be – what would they call that?
The Red-Brown Alliance?
No, I'm joking.
In a way.
So I've got a question for Charlie.
Sure.
I'm not sure – are you familiar with Alden's theory?
No.
You're not?
Oh, okay.
Then I guess I won't answer that question then.
All right.
Then the next question would be for both of you is what is the single biggest political issue for each of you?
And Charlie, we can answer first. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question.
Political for 2022. Oh, like I could get that anyway, I guess.
Right. You know what? Should Republicans run on, I guess, or like, yeah, what is the biggest issue?
Yeah, I mean, and it's I'd say the way we do elections in our country is definitely up there.
Big tech is massive.
Immigration is huge.
But I think something more fundamental that I was trying,
I think we almost achieved it tonight,
which is that we're about to tear this country apart.
And I think dialogue is something that is so beautiful
and is so complex and almost spiritual in nature
that if we don't have dialogue with people that you
fundamentally disagree with then there's really not a middle ground until you start ripping each
other apart and i'm really afraid of that what's your uh yeah what's the biggest issue of 2022 i
agree that the political rift is almost insurmountable seeming the last time we had won
this bad was pre-civil war and we didn't really fix it. We just had a Civil War, and people were still mad after. So I hope that doesn't happen. I don't
think we're going to have a Civil War, by the way. There are some people... I think that at the end
of the day, there's a big difference between the problems we're told to care about and the problems
we're willing to fight about. And I'm not entirely sure if I know where those lines are, but I know
there's a difference. With regards to what I'd care about, for me, it has to be climate change.
I know a lot of people roll their eyes at this stuff, but, like, you can take a look at the polar ice caps.
You can take a look at the weather disasters we've been having, increasing both in frequency and intensity.
This isn't like a, like, look, think of it this way, okay?
I believe in American industry, all right?
It's a little too late for us to be first comers, but if we really wanted to, we could subsidize the hell out of green energy.
You think we're doing it now?
Triple that.
OK, really lay the groundwork.
In 20 years, we'll be selling the rest of the world the energy they'll need to survive.
You know, it really breaks my heart is the video I made before the before the actual
Green New Deal talking about how we needed a Green New Deal.
And then AOC's Green New Deal was like equity and college and health care.
And then the botched FAQ.
And I was like, I'm talking about why are we spending money on war when we could be researching green technologies and morphogen energy, thorium salt reactors, things like that, get fusion to ignite.
Instead, we get this like racial equity garbage bill. I had this – well, I do like the Green New Deal.
But I had this problem too
With that teachers union board
The one that affirmed CRT
The National Education Association
It was also a union
It's the largest teacher union in the country
And first of all
What they said wasn't CRT
They did use the words
They did
And still they got that wrong
They mean what we've been taught, woke-ism.
Yeah, I just, oh, man.
Because the theory is cool, you know?
You wouldn't agree with it, but it's interesting.
Let's finish what you're saying.
I want to say something about this really quick.
I do not think it's cool.
No, the theory is awesome.
It's like the theory of communism.
We should have a class, a philosophy class,
where you learn about critical race theory.
Teaching it in practice to children is a different idea.
So I actually, in response to my absolute failure in giving you the adequate response
in our last conversation, did pull up critical race theory by Kimberly Crenshaw and actually
read what she was talking about. And I think the idea of the oppressed versus oppressor in race
is a horrible thing when we're trying to get away from that. And I had a conversation
with an actual racist recently, and the ideas to me are absolutely nonsensical to base things on race.
Coming from an actual racist who was advocating for the same things in that book,
I was like, so you're happy with this stuff?
Like, well, no, because the wrong side's in charge.
And then I had to explain to them, like, I do not see the world the way you do.
And he says, well, that's the trouble with race mixing.
And that's, no, but that's exactly, this is what I see.
When I talk to people who are in
favor of critical race theories, core ideology, and white nationalists. They tell me the same
garbage in different ways. Look, I have always been a firm supporter of the idea that the idea
should be what's criticized, not like the people who make them. Sometimes, for example, people will
make fun of me because I talk on class issues and I'm from Beverly Hills and I accept the jibing,
you know, it's fine. But I think anyone can speak in this stuff.
To be fair, this is id poll and everyone does it to an extent.
Candace Owens will deflect criticisms of racism by saying she's black.
We've all seen people do this.
The only thing I wanted to say, because I have to move back like six points here, is
that with regards to the teachers board you spoke on and the Green New Deal, I sometimes
feel like the left is a little bit bad
when it comes to mixing all their causes if they speaking of separatism if they kept things a
little bit more stringent a little more focused maybe they could get people to agree on some of
it but if every push for climate change is also every other progressive note and every push for
racial equality is every other progressive note it feels like it's like an all or nothing package
and i think that can put some people off.
I wanted to just clarify quickly
and to inject my id poll, as you
mentioned, you know, Candace Owens would do it. I would.
And a lot of people are always mentioning, you know, Tim Poole mentions
he's mixed race. And I'm like, maybe that's why you'll
understand when people are writing like
whiteness this and people of color that.
I'm like, I don't exist in that world
because I've been discriminated against by all of
these people.
And when that person said to me, you know, the perils of mixed racing or race mixing, he's talking about me personally saying,
I don't understand the tribalist worldview of racialists and identitarians because I've never experienced what it means to be in a racial tribe.
And you know what? I think he's right. And that's why I love the classical liberal view of opposition to racism, judging people based on the content of their character,
not the color of their skin.
Because I see this world that's being built
critical of whiteness.
That includes me.
But then it's always the negative.
Every experience I've ever had,
be it from white nationalists
or from critical race theorists,
is that you are bad for whatever reason.
I do not want to live in a world
where race is the predetermined policymaker or factor on these things.
And you know what?
For the progressives to come out right now and claim civil rights and say we did all these things and then tell me I now face a detriment.
I'm like, you know what, man?
My grandparents, civil rights activists, race mixers, my actual parents also mix in races and stuff. And I'm like, I have to, I can now look at the progressives who are putting a detriment on my life and insulting me no matter what I do and the white nationalists
who vandalized my home as a child. And it's the world that you're taking credit for that you're
trying now to put a detriment for, for people like me. It could, to me, it could be a matter
of perception as well. I've read a lot of like academic critiques of whiteness, which isn't
white people. It's sort of
a... That's not true at all. Well, it's an academic term to describe affectations associated with
white people culturally, more so than the actual act of being white. But black and brown literally
means black and brown. If there was a critique of whiteness, what would you think of that?
Well, if it was an academic term used in that way, then I would think of it the same way. But
since there isn't such a term, I would have to be critical. Look, regardless of the etymology of the term, in concept,
it's meant to be like, you know the term toxic masculinity?
You have heard it once or twice.
A couple of times. When I read stuff like that, it's interesting stuff. I don't think of this,
all men are bad, all masculinity is bad. It's more of a salient critique of certain cultural trends.
Now, the problem that I have is essentialism. Some people will take this on both the left and the
right, and they'll think of it as an individual critique, which it should never be used as.
If I were to say something like, imagine I'm reading MLK back in 1953. MLK had some things
to say about white people back during his era. He would say that the whites of this era are
unconcerned with the plight of black people, except he didn't say black people. And this is a
non-essentialist critique. He didn't believe in racial essentialism. He wouldn't go up to an
individual white person and judge them negatively for that. But he understood that as a cultural
trend, this is indeed a pattern he recognized. So massive group stereotyping. Well, massive group
stereotyping that's been done by every civil rights movement to have ever existed. Maybe the issue isn't the stereotyping so much as the way it's being applied and used. If the stereotyping is, I notice there's a big difference in abolitionist thoughts between white and black people in Southern America in 1852. Maybe that's the kind of stereotyping that can be used for good. Also, stereotyping by definition is assuming characteristics of an individual because of their part of a group that's close
to what mlk was saying when he said white liberals i mean that's you wouldn't apply it to an individual
though i mean i've made like i've made comments about groups uh people who play league of legends
degenerates the lot of them but i know people who play league of legends and when i talk about
people who play league of legends i'm not talking about them i'm talking about people who play league of legends
so i want to ask you about the climate change thing um what do you think is a bigger threat
climate change or china um to the world or to america to you the world america i think it's
still climate change i think china is probably going to replace us as the dominant power i'm
not really happy about that because we're more democratic than they are in terms of our political structure.
If they had a better democracy, I might favor them over us because I don't really care about national allegiances.
But we are more democratic than them.
So the climate change thing is an issue that will affect us all, though.
The big one's going to be climate refugees.
There are a lot of low-lying coastal communities that are going to be inhospitable to life in about 40 years, and they're going to move out into populated areas, and there's going to be border conflicts and war.
It's going to be tough.
We're not going to be able to get to every single Super Chat question.
I'm so sorry.
No, no, no.
It's no big deal because I think it's more important that you guys are having these arguments, so I'm not going to interrupt you when you're actually debating the ideas.
That's the point.
But a lot of people did Super Chat.
Just know that you guys, Super Chat's greatly appreciated.
There's a whole lot of them. we love you so uh but i've got one um critical for you vosh come here nasho nabo says vosh is a black person who grew up in majority
white areas those conversations are very demoralizing to be a part of i don't doubt
your intentions but it's best to speak to people affected by your ideas before trying to implement them as our white savior.
I don't appreciate the white savior critique because that's just the opposite end of Idpol, isn't it?
Saying that I'm less inclined to talk about these issues because I'm white.
Like that's kind of like the opposite.
I agree.
I think address the idea.
I agree.
But with regards to like the implementation here, obviously, like social problems like this, addressing them is going to be contentious no matter what.
I don't know if there's a way to do this, to fix any problem, even the most obvious problems.
Today we think slavery.
Obviously that's bad.
But clearly there was some disagreement.
With issues like this, there's going to be disagreement.
I don't know if there's a perfect way to handle it.
Anything is going to mix people up.
I have to balance that concern with the hope that in the future
people become more accepting of these issues.
A good example of that would be like gender stuff, for example.
In terms of like if you look at it generationally
from boomers to Gen Z,
Gen Z people are like 30 times as likely
to know a person who identifies as trans
or non-binary or whatever.
And for that reason,
conversations on those subjects have become significantly easier
just because people have been exposed to the concept.
Maybe in time this will be easier.
Maybe I'll fail.
We'll all fail and it won't be.
But I am sorry that these conversations are difficult.
All right.
Let's see.
Well, I got to be honest.
The overwhelming majority of the super chats are just saying thank you for having a conversation.
Those are the overwhelming majority ones that I copied.
No, no, no.
I was looking at it.
I thought you had all the questions.
So I was like, okay, I can see everyone very excited.
That's why I read the first one.
And some people have pointed out that in a conversational format, you are both less derisive and divisive in your arguments.
All YouTubers should try to be nice in my streams.
So here's an interesting and kind of specific question. Joshua Alley asks,
should courts decide cases based on rule of law and precedents or decide each case based
entirely on rationality and morality.
No, go ahead.
Yeah, it needs to be a balance.
Precedence definitely matters, especially in the American system.
And the idea of the whole third branch of government really kind of came into question with Marbury v. Madison, with the first Supreme Court justice of the United States, John Jay,
I believe, who was one of the co-authors of the Federalist Papers.
Precedent is important, but it's not everything.
And this is a super important thing that conservatives need to talk more about, which I think you
would agree with, Vaush, is that precedents can be really bad.
Dred Scott was awful precedent.
It was really bad.
It was seven Democrat U.S. Supreme Court justices, two Democrats that said black people were
not people.
And that precedent was in law basically for many decades until it was eventually reversed,
largely because of the Brown versus Board of Education.
But precedent also is helpful so that you don't turn the courts into another legislative branch.
So the courts are supposed to be very unique, and they're supposed to be deliberative, process-oriented,
say no to more cases than they say yes to.
And so the question is, where do you strike that balance?
Alexander Hamilton predicted that it would be mostly based on public opinion, that judges
are still people too, and they're going to look to public opinion.
This goes to more of a Democratic argument than a Republic-style argument.
I will defend precedent more than overturning,
but I definitely think the court has gone wrong in a variety of different decisions in the last 60 years.
And I think that what happens is you have very activist decisions,
and then they decide not to look at it again
under a conservative belief of precedent.
I think I would lean more towards precedent, though,
or sorry, as well, though maybe for a different reason. I think it's lean more towards precedent, though, or sorry, as well, though, maybe for a different reason.
I think it's because we need accountability.
The problem is if judicial decisions are entirely at the discretion of the judge, it becomes very difficult to correct legal trends through anything other than appoint better judges, which can be an incredibly longstanding process.
And even then, it's what, a crapshoot?
I mean, you don't know everyone's opinion on everything.
That being said, I do think that to an extent, judges are legislators. This is actually
a critical legal theory perspective, which fed into CRT, the idea that within the bounds of
discretion, judges will almost always side with the political biases they have. And that's not
like a dig on any side. That's just what we are. That judges who identify as liberal or conservative will overwhelmingly side with each other in the plurality of cases
because our biases do inform us. I think that we have to recognize that's a reality,
but we do have to constrain the process through judicial precedent or otherwise it's just
throwing darts at a wall. I just want to point out one of the super chats noted that we were
trending. Is that right? On Twitter or on YouTube?
On Twitter. But it says, content creator Vosh Debates with radio talk show host Charlie Kirk on Twitch.
Oh.
Are we on Twitch?
Oh, no.
We're on Twitch.
We're on YouTube.
I just thought it was funny that it was wrong.
Well, at least we're trending.
But it's like, how did you get that wrong?
Unless somebody's like screen grabbing.
It's the Twitter.
Hey, listen.
After the Twitter trending title descriptor had to spend like six weeks in a row describing everything that
happened with those minecraft youtubers i feel like this is a they're they're a little bit off
their game maybe maybe somebody's restreaming it on twitch or whatever you know it's just
copyright infringement i'm just kidding it is i know that i know that shoe did a uh like a stream
commentating on us. Oh, really?
Maybe that was on Twitch.
All right.
So we got one from Dylan Parrick.
He says, do you guys think philosophy could be taught instead of CRT, like Plato's Allegory and the cave?
In my opinion, stuff like this helps people better understand one another individually.
I'm hugely in favor of more theoretical classes being taught to high schoolers, philosophy, sociology, and I don't know what the modern equivalent of like finances or home ec would be, but something like that.
Kids graduate.
They don't know anything about anything when it comes to managing their finances, which is weird.
We agree.
Because that will destroy them if they don't.
Like why don't we teach them that?
Philosophy, everyone should be learned on just flat out.
That's just – I think that's a moral necessity.
And when it comes to sociology, I'm not even talking like left leaning inclinations on that.
I mean, like the basic ability to read like statistical information on what's going on, because for the rest of their lives, they're going to be asked to vote based on political information.
They don't have the education to understand.
Yeah, I mean, philosophy comes from a Greek word, love of wisdom, philosophos. and we definitely don't have that right now in our country. And yeah, I'm a big
fan of teaching it. I just want to teach it correctly. I'd say a lot less Nietzsche and Kant
and Hume and a lot more Aristotle and Locke and Aquinas and Augustine. And I think the problem is
though, if philosophy, if left on, if not, so Plato would say this. So Plato would say, I'm not going
to teach philosophy until you could do advanced Euclidean geometry.
It was his rule.
Now, why would he have that rule?
He's like, if you can't think rationally
and be able to determine good ideas from bad ideas
in the imperial...
I'm not going to even get close to teaching you
about the allegory of the cave or the ship
or Plato's Republic or the forms.
So I think there's actually something to that,
that if you introduce philosophy too early,
you can create kind of one-liner philosophers that think
they understand the entire world
and it really goes to that expression the more I know
the more I realize how little I knew when I thought I knew it all
that's kind of that idea of
daring to know. The corollary is true too
you know the scientists who worked in the
Manhattan Project many of them said
they cultivated inspiration from
religion and from philosophy,
completely outside the bound of physics.
But it got their brain a-jogging, you know?
So I'd love to talk to you about religion
and just like where you think that fits into a functioning society.
We should definitely talk about religion.
This would be really, really interesting.
Why don't we do this?
We'll move to the members-only segment.
We'll focus on religion.
And for everybody who's super chatted,
I know I really wish I could get to every single question and comment.
But when you guys – we ask a question and you guys have that debate, that's the point of this.
So I tried to do as many as we could.
I do like talking.
I just thought it was better to let you guys talk instead of constantly trying to just cut off the actual discussion and the flow of things.
So my apologies to everybody who super chatted.
But if you go to TimCast.com, become a member.
We are going to now have another conversation, which I don't believe
will be up by 11 p.m. this time
because debating religion,
I absolutely love
the religious conversations
we've had on this show,
on TimCast IRL.
So it'll be at TimCast.com.
Smash that like button.
Subscribe to this channel.
Share the show with your friends.
And do you guys want to shout?
You can follow us at TimCast IRL.
You can follow me at TimCast.
Do you guys want to mention
any social media stuff?
If you guys could subscribe to the YouTube channel and hit the bell, we'd be blessed by that.
And also check out Rumble.com so you don't get censored.
R-U-M-B-L-D.com.
My name is Vosh, and I'm on YouTube.
That's V-A-U-S-H.
I don't know.
Thank you.
Get your vaccination and vote Biden for more censorship censorship to add to to expand upon the don't
do and talk to your make good decisions make good decisions yeah there's your doctor about what's
right for you don't take uh medical opinions from people on the of course talk to your doctor about
voting for biden oh yeah that's right hey depending on where you live your doctor might say no
so i love you guys thank you for coming this is great man great, man. In a lot of Super Chats, people
were pointing out, you don't even have to agree
with anyone here. Just the fact that we're having
conversation is like the
spirit of freedom.
I really loved it when you're
naming the philosophers and then you're like,
oh, that was fun.
The extra segment? Just wait.
Oh, man, I'm stoked. Yeah, I'm not
read up on religious theory.
Five proofs of God.
You better be ready to go through the super chat.
All right.
All right, Lydia.
Oh, yeah, I'm also here in the corner.
This is a wonderful conversation.
I agree with that super chat.
I was actually at the bar earlier today and enjoying conversations that somebody just picked up somebody else.
It's like, you know what?
He's right, and I love it.
I love being able to just have this kind of conversation.
I really miss that about our society.
So here's what I want to do.
I want to have, I really want to dive in and question socialism.
And we'll start with talking about religion.
And then so go to timcast.com, members only segment will be up when it's up
because we're not going to go forever, but we'll probably have a good conversation.
So thanks for hanging out for the live version.
And we'll see you all in an hour
or so over at Timcast.com. Again, sincere thanks to everybody who hung out. Smash that like button
on your way out and we'll see you soon. Bye guys. you you you you