Within Reason - #86 Pre-Election Podcast - Destiny on Immigration, Trump, and Voter ID

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Steven Bonnell II, known online as Destiny, is an American live streamer and political commentator. He joins me to talk about Trump, Kamala, Biden, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Mark Zuckerberg, Voter ID, immigration, demographic change, and who to vote for in the upcoming election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Bunnell, welcome back to the show. Alex O'Connor, thank you for inviting me into your wonderful studio. Yes, this glorious, wonderful studio that's definitely mine, and which I have tastefully decorated myself. Mark Zuckerberg has recently come out, it seems, as a libertarian. This sort of left-wing Silicon Valley TechBrow is now lifting weights and wearing baggy t-shirts and telling people how much he regrets the political overreaching of Facebook or meta.

In particular, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee recently saying that Biden's administration had repeatedly pressured our teams, this is a quote, for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humorous and satire. And he says that he regrets this or regrets sort of ceding to this. He also has apparently called Donald Trump twice on the phone recently, trying to reestablish a relationship with him, and call him a badass on a podcast talking about his assistant. assassination attempt. More specifically, Zuckerberg has abolished Meta's election integrity team, cut its once regular election year war room, cancel transparency tools, which journalists would use to track misinformation and a few other things like that. What's going on with Mark Zuckerberg? So I don't know the details of Mark Zuckerberg's political journey in life. I don't know why he believes, necessarily the things that he believes. I haven't read like a Mark Zuckerberg biography or anything,

But it feels like as more, I complained about this like a couple years ago, that as these political movements get larger and larger and encompass more and more people, but the movement itself is like on a wider geography, you're ending up like buying into these political movements because you can plug in in one area and all of a sudden you have to believe like every single thing that this political movement believes in, even if you have no idea what this movement is about. So like going to the gym is like a right wing thing now. Yeah. So it might be because you start lifting. Now all of a sudden you're like a mega supporter and you think the election was stolen and you support Andrew Tade and Donald Trump for president. And they're like it's just like all these crazy beliefs that you necessarily have to buy into just because you're plugging into this large political movement. And it feels like it feels like I don't know. I've just heard this said a lot and I'm kind of looking and it seems like it's happening that the Silicon Valley tech bro archetype is starting to buy into politics. And of course they're entering on the conservative side for a variety of what I would say are stupid reasons. That letter in particular, from Zuckerberg is very infuriating because misinformation is a huge issue right now. I would argue that it is the largest issue that is facing the United States, potentially the world, but especially the United States right now. And we had the Twitter files and we saw what was leaked. And stuff that was leaked was along the vein of these are accounts that we think might be operated by foreign nationals.

This is misinformation that, you know, maybe you guys could deal with it. But there was no overt pressure in like people were threatening anything. People could say, well, there was a kind of, you know, subversive, not subversive, is the word I'm looking for, like, not covert, like, covert pressure, underlying pressure that like, well, if we don't do this, you're going to come after us. But there's no evidence of that. None of the leaked logs show them ever considering that, whether it's the Hunter Biden laptops or anything else. The only time I saw what was very clearly a request for a takedown just because somebody didn't like what somebody said was when the Trump admin requested

Tegan. There was a lady who made a joke saying, like, Trump is a pussy-ass bitch, and Trump's White House requested that tweet to be taken down. I personally followed through on a lot of the Biden White House requests for specific takedown tweets. I believe every single one that I followed through on was a picture of Hunter Biden's cock. So it seemed like a fair takedown request. I didn't see like politically biased messaging. But we have a huge issue right now with disinformation or misinformation of the U.S. and that if you try to control for it, you will automatically be heavily biased against conservatives because they live in fantasy world right now. So why is Zuckerberg saying that he was pressured to censor even humorous and satir?

satirical content. Isn't that troubling to you? I mean, it depends on what it was. Like, if the humor or satire is like, look, LOL vaccines are killing everybody, I mean, like, there's an issue. Like, this stuff is leading to demonstrable harm and destruction in the real world. Like, it's, yeah, not a good thing. Why do you think that weightlifting, that kind of stuff, is seen as right wing or has become right wing, especially on the online space? Why is that if you start going to the gym, suddenly you're getting algorithmically suggested and rotate and bro-science. It feels like I could imagine a world where I'm like a fiction writer and you can just write like

these stupid hooks where I don't even know where this particular thing came from, but maybe it was the fact that health at every size seemed like it was being pushed by the left. Right. And maybe it's the thing that like men are generally seen as people that lift weights. So like, oh, feminists must be opposed to going to the gym because men are like trying to get stronger and better themselves. So that's now like a right-wing topic because women just. want to be fat and have us love them even though they're fat at every size or but i don't know that's my

guess but it's it's cring and dumb but it's a bit like the something to do with sidney sweeney and her being like really liked by right wingers because she's pretty or something it was like she's been in a few adverts where she's like acting all sexy and the right wingers are saying you know this is this is going to really upset leftists because there's like a beautiful woman in an advert or something it's quite strange how these seem to culturally overlap sometimes yeah i feel like i tweeted Sorry, the other day that like 70% of what conservatives argue against, it's like them shadowboxing themselves and then losing like half the time. It's just like inventing problems and then getting so worked up over it. And then I don't even know what the point is of, well, I know what the point is, but yeah. Or maybe it's got something to do with the left wing insistence on self-acceptance. Like you said, I mean, you mentioned like this idea of body positivity or whatever, but more broadly the idea that like, you know, you be who you are, you're good enough. You know, you have worth. You have the left has traditionally being the kindness side, right? It's been the people who've been empathetic and sympathetic and said that whatever position you're in, you know, good for you. Whereas to say, actually, no, like, you can

do better. You should improve yourself and it's going to make it. You're going to have to suffer in order to do so. You think there might be something sort of more intrinsically right-wing about just that approach to life, which will result in things like being motivated to go to the gym? Not that much, no. I think a lot of things are exaggerated by people, and that's a huge issue that we have to deal with. I would argue that, I don't know if you describe it as like hyper-reality that we live in, or if people need to maybe be more concerned with,

I don't know if you say metaphysics, but like when you look at things, well, I mean, we can go very fundamental, right? Arguably, you have no true contact with the physical world, right? Everything is constructed in the mind. Your perceptions are, you know, down through your senses, like how much of that is real, versus what's not real, you know, Descartes' demon. Like, who knows, right? But let's say that we

grant all of that because being an ultimate skeptic is boring and stupid. But if you go into the real world now, one thing you have to consider, and nobody will follow me on this intuitively because it's impossible to, and it feels bad. But you really have no idea what's going on outside. Like, if I tell you right now, there are 20 million Ecuadorians storming the border, you know, climbing over like it's a zombie apocalypse movie, maybe there are, maybe there aren't. If I tell you, there were a million jobs last lost year to illegals. Maybe there were. Maybe there weren't. What if I tell you 10 million jobs were created by illegal? You have no idea. So you're consuming this information online. And I find that

the conservative playbook is to basically what you do is, is you take an issue and you amplify the fuck out of it. And then when leftists say, or liberal say like, okay, hold on, this is like blown out of proportion. You can say, you can say they're blown out of proportion, but look at how people feel. Well, why do they feel that way, right? The election fraud stuff is a really good example of that. Right. Like, there was no election fraud widespread in 2020. It didn't happen. It's like, okay, well, all these people feel that there was. Yeah, that's because of what you told them. Okay, but look at all the things they saw. Yeah, because you were showing them those things. And now we know through court documents

and filings that most of those things were completely totally fabricated. They were just invented. So you have a population that legitimately feels a thing, and that feeling is real, but it's based on a perception of reality that was put in front of them by other people that are now appealing to the real feelings of these people had about the perception of reality that they created. And this environment cannot endure. Right. So do you think it's a bad thing? than this kind of shift that we're seeing someone like Mark Zuckerberg take, in that ostensibly he's said that he wants meta to become non-partisan.

He sort of sees it as far as I can tell as having been quite explicitly and obviously left-leaning for a long time. And now he's saying, I'm a libertarian, I want a hands-off approach, I want to be non-partisan. You think that's a bad thing? I don't believe him when he says that. I think that when people say non-partisan, they have a bad understanding of what nonpartisan means. When people appeal to apoliticalness or nonpartisan or these ideas that you're above, you know, political bias, they want the aesthetic of being nonpartisan. But what actually happens is they are the most partisan. So, for example, when you say nonpartisan, the aesthetic that you're trying to wear, and the ideal that you should be striving for is I'm going to make a decision about a thing without really considering the political implications, right?

Is illegal immigration good or bad for the country? let's just see what the economists say. I don't care about brown people, don't care about black people, don't care about natives or whatever. I'm just going to look at this thing in as much of a vacuum as a human can. Okay? That would be like nonpartisan. So people want the aesthetic of that person. But when people carry nonpartisanship into the real world, what they really do is they go, oh, well, this guy over here thinks that. This guy thinks that. I'm going to think something in between these two people. That's not nonpartisan. You're just as partisan as the both of them. You're just averaging out their beliefs. And so the issue that happens is, is if you were in an environment, we could imagine an environment. We don't have to imagine an environment where one side is dramatically more incorrect than the other side. Well, your apoliticism has actually sanewashed to the other side and is hurting like any type of fight for, I would argue, like truth to exist. Because now you are sanewashing the other side by taking a position in the middle, claiming to be nonpartisan and centrist, but you're always just like carrying water for the right. It's insane. And which side is the left and which side is the left? And which side

the right there, which is the one that's... Right now, the right is as entirely divorced from reality. Yeah, I've heard you say some... You've had some choice words for the current state of right-wing America. Just to clarify there, you mean to say that because the right-wing in America has gone so off the rails crazy, to sit in between the right and the left is not to be in the center. As well as that, there are two ways to be like a centrist.

One is to say that on basically every issue, I'm a moderate. I sit in the middle on every issue. I think that abortion should sometimes be legal, sometimes not be. I think we should have some immigration, but not too much. Another way of being in the centre is to be really anti-immigration, but really anti-gun at the same time. At the same time as being really pro-life whilst being super secularist, having quite staunched in either direction, but when you take an overall look at someone's worldview, they would sort of average out in the middle, right? And there are two sort of ways of being...

Yeah, there's a lot of ways of thinking of moderateness. Sure. And I think it's often the case that when somebody says, look, I'm a moderate here, I'm a centrist, but, you know, even I think this is a huge problem, that's just because they're just using the fact that across the board, their positions are pretty extreme in either direction, but across the board they balance out in the middle. When they're talking about one particular issue, like immigration or free speech or something, they can say, well, I'm a centrist, but even I think that this is, that this is like gone too far, when really their centristism is just a result of lots of strong beliefs like that on different issues.

Yeah, that doesn't happen. I wish it did. In the real world, that used to be how moderates were defined, right? You could go to, like, Rust Belt voters or whatever, and you could find people that maybe were socially conservative, but really strong on, like, labor values. Or in some parts of the country, maybe you could find people that were really big on gun rights, but also, you know, like believe in affirmative action or something, you know. It used to be the case that it was like that.

And in the real world, I think it is still kind of like that, although we've lost a lot of that because now the political teams are so separated. But online, people that label themselves a centrist or moderates are exclusively conservative fucking cowards that won't just identify themselves accurately because they want to wear the aesthetic of moderation while carrying water and sane washing the right because they have no political or moral values. And are they doing that to whitewash themselves for the right or for the left? I think there's different ways to imagine why they do it in the best world where I'm being the most charitable.

They're doing it because they're just fucking retarded. I'm sorry, where they're an idiot? I don't know if you used the argument here. So what they do is they look at a bunch of people and they think, wow, well, the average of all these people's beliefs must be kind of true. So I'm just going to go ahead and take up the average because nobody on the left could be totally right and nobody on the right could be totally right. And that's like the best faith interpretation. The worst faith is that they are more conservative than that. they let on, but they like the aesthetic of being nonpartisan, which is cringe.

Or they're getting paid by another country to do propaganda in my country, which I think is affecting probably more people than we know at the moment, which is unfortunate. Well, I agree with you about the aesthetic, right? Like, it's nice to be seen as someone who's balanced and fair, but who is this for, right? Because if you're like this secret right-wing, and maybe you don't even realize yourself how right-wing you secretly are, and you claim to be a centrist, is that, that's either so that your right-wing listeners are somehow going to think that you're more worth listening to as someone who's not as extreme as them, someone on the other side, which, I don't know, it seems

a little strange. It seems like people should be able to see through it, right? For a left-winger, if they're doing it so that the left-wing don't, like, condemn them as this crazy right-winger, they should just be able to see right through that, right? So, like, who is this for? And do you think it works? Do you think it does fool people? I mean, it seems to be. I think that some of the largest podcasts in the world right now are all people that claim to be kind of centrist or apolitical, right? I don't know if Candice Owens still identifies strongly as conservative or Republican. I know she has those values. I don't think Joe Rogan identifies as conservative. I don't think that. Oh, there's a third one. Tim Poole, has he finally come around saying he's a conservative either? Does he still pretend he's a centrist? I don't know. I know he used to pretend that he was like classical liberal or libertarian or whatever. But all of these people like at the end of the day, like if you were outside of their apartment, you could hear them, you know, with their Trump fashion dildos, like every single night. It's insane is I've never met a centrist or moderate who's like, you know what? I think this is a real problem and they're talking about something on the right instead of something on the left.

They sanewash and they carry so much water for every single horrible thing on the right. And then when it comes to the left, it's like, oh my God, can you believe this particular thing or can you believe that or this or that? And it's like, who is he been thinking about this? A really great example of this in the recent presidential debates is for walls, it's like when you went to Tiananmen Square in 1980 or whatever, it was like 30 or 40 years ago. Like, didn't you, later on, you said that you were there, and it was actually three months later. And it was like, yeah, I said it was kind of dumb or whatever. If you go back and you look at the speeches that he gave on this, he wasn't saying, like, you know, there I was, blocking the tanks.

Yeah, he wasn't saying shit like this. It was insane. And then, like, and they let it hang after he answers on the debate. They wait for him to expand more. And I'm like, okay. Vance, is it true that you don't believe in the results of the last election? And it's like, well, no. And people think these are like the same thing.

They both avoided answering the question, right? So they both must be as bad as each other. That's insane. We've got to be fair. We've got to be balanced and centrist about this. That's insanity. That's crazy. Who do you think won the vice presidential debate? Depends on how you define winning. Ah, well, how do you define winning? What do you care about in these debates?

I care about people that are adhering to the truth. But what I just said there means fucking nothing because everybody wears that statement as a fucking aesthetic. So anything that I say like that should be the biggest red flag to never trust anything that somebody says. But I mean, whoever's like generally staying as fact base as possible, I think is good. And whoever's making better arguments towards the other person to counter what they're saying. I think is good. Who do you think had the better argument?

Who do you think was more convincing? I would probably say walls, because I tend to agree on that side more politically, but it's so hard to have a meaningful

policy debate when conservatives can just say anything they want, and now we don't, we're kind of like we've escaped policy in the United States

and it's just this forever war on culture issues. What's the most egregious sin that was committed in the debate in your view, something that someone said that you thought that's just not true or that's ridiculous or that's super misleading? Vance's refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election should immediately and permanently disqualify him from holding any office ever. Yeah, he refused to directly answer the question. In fact, I watched the vice presidential debate recently and I made a note every time I noticed a direct question

not being directly answered. Oh, Vance, I think, avoided almost everything. But he did it really well. He's a very good speaker. I think that he came out on top in terms of like public perception. Right. Absolutely. He's a very good politician, very good speaker. And he's a smart guy. You know he's smart because he was saying in, you know, a few years ago that Trump was Hitler. He knows what he's talking about. Yeah, it was a horrible administration. They didn't accomplish much. These are all Vance's words. Yeah. If it's of interest to the viewer, I have the list here of the questions that were not directly answered. Do the candidates support a preemptive strike on Iran by Israel? No direct answer. Does Vance agree with Trump that climate change is a hoax? Was waltz in China

for the Tiananmen Square massacre? He did eventually answer the question, but it had to be pressed by the moderator. Would Vance support separating children from parents, from the parents in deportation efforts? Not directly answered. He did not say yes or no. He simply said, well, they're already being separated. There was no yes or no. Where will Vance specifically seize federal land to build houses, where specifically, again, just didn't get an answer despite being pressed by the moderators. And of course, did Trump lose the election? Vance just says something like, well, you know, we had our problems with it, of course. You can go and look at what we said about that. Why is it so impossible to get a direct answer out of politicians?

I think that any time you have a question in the real world about why people are doing what they're doing, this is like a people's skill, a psychology thing. One thing that I hate is when people say, oh, my God, this person is so irrational. Like, this person's behavior doesn't make any sense. And usually they're pointing towards people that are behaving in ways that we would find disfavorable. We'd think, oh, what's going on with this person, right? Maybe you see a kid screaming in a store, you know, for a candy bar, and he's screaming,

it's like, oh, my God, like, what is wrong with this kid, right? But eventually he gets the candy bar. And this is true of a lot of people with maladaptive behaviors interpersonally or the workplace or, you know, whatever. You look at a person, you think that they're being irrational, but they're not. They're actually, they've learned this behavior, and there's usually a reward for, this particular behavior. If you're Vance and you're on stage and you're being asked questions that in reality you can't really provide a good answer for, why would you ever

answer that honestly? Especially if you know in these formats that the moderators won't press you because news stations, like a lot of these cringe online content creators, are obsessed with trying to remain fair and nonpartisan. So nobody, none of these stations will ever press Trump or Vance anywhere near as hard as they should be because they don't want to come off as being mean to conservatives or too biased, which is a waste of time because they're always going to come off that way anyway. Yeah, news sources are always biased. A lot claim not to be biased. I think the best thing that we can do when confronted with the media landscape of obviously biased outlets is not try to find one that's not biased, rather compare them and try to

effectively determine what the biases are and how they're affecting the news reporting. And that is where today's sponsor, Ground News, can help. Ground News collect stories and headlines from across the political spectrum and compares them in one place, as well as providing context. Who owns the source? What is the source's political leaning? How reliable is its reporting? All of this helps you to directly compare how the same story is being warped by media bias. You get 40% off by going to ground.

.news forward slash Alex O.C. Take a look at this story about Trump suggesting using the National Guard and military on election day. The left-leaning MSNBC quotes Trump as using the military to address the enemy from within. the right-leaning Epoch Times simply says Trump says his supporters won't cause election chaos. And I can see in the bias distribution that most of the stories reporting on this are either in the center or on the left. This means that if you only read right-leaning news, you could have missed this story altogether.

We can never get rid of media bias, but Ground News helps you to manage it and get a more rounded picture of important stories. Try it out for yourself by going to ground dot news forward slash Alex O.C. Or by scanning the QR code that's currently on your screen. my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan for as little as $5 a month. That said, back to Stephen. I did think that it's important when you talk about political bias, though, and there's all of these, and we could spend 10 hours talking about every single one of these things.

There's a lot of things that people say to pay lip service to things like, oh, be aware that everything's biased and everything, blah, blah, blah. That doesn't mean anything. You have to dive deeper into that. Like, mainstream media outlets will have a bias in that they'll tend to report collection of facts that are a little bit more favorable to their side than the other side. But you have to be very careful when you play that equating game because when people talk about political bias, they'll equate mainstream media with alternative media and then they will equivocate on the alternative media bias. And oftentimes the alternative media won't be bias. It'll be pure fucking bullshit. It won't even be remotely in this world or reality. And they'll get away with that because I can say, okay, fine, yeah, maybe we're a little biased sometimes, but so is the mainstream media. Right. There's a difference between subjective bias towards like the perspective that you're presenting, which by the way, can be done so much that it becomes dishonest versus a total retelling of the facts or denial of reality. It's a totally different concept.

Yeah, there are tools we can use to navigate media bias in the traditional media landscape. But when it comes to social media, how should one navigate this? I mean, suppose that you are, maybe you're like a young person trying to start understanding the world. You've got a Twitter account. you're beginning to see posts about the election flooding your timeline from all kinds of different sources and your algorithm hasn't developed yet. How can you go about navigating the space in an effective manner? Well, the first thing is deactivate your ex-account or don't ever trust it for news. That is exclusively a platform for shit posting or being racist or watching black people kill each other or whatever else gets posted on mass there. Elon Musk is just full-throatedly, like full-on avowedly a Trump supporter.

There are a ton of accounts on that website. We don't know what country any of these people are from. We don't know the nationalities. We don't know who they get paid by. We don't know what's going on. And they just post insane stuff. I think X has probably been one of the worst contributors to the current atmosphere of the United States, with Elon Musk being the head of that more so than probably any other single actor,

except for maybe Trump in the past couple years. You say this, but you're still on Twitter, right? Or X? A little bit, but I haven't made the announcement yet, but I'm probably going to leave it after the election. And you say after the election implying that in the run-ups of the election, you think it might be useful to tweet or entertaining to tweet? I mean, there's still people there, but I think after the election, I'm going to make a big thing, a plea to my audience, like, hey, we should, like, disconnect

from this platform. There's no reason to support Elon Musk. I consider him basically a traitor to the United States, and I don't think that we should be supporting a platform where people are just going there to be made miserable, to hate everybody, to hate this country, to deny reality. It's just not good for anybody. Why not just do it now? Why not make a statement?

Because I think everybody's still kind of active there, and if I just withdraw my voice from there, like right before an election, I think it's probably. not strategically very wise to do. Isn't that always going to be the problem that, of course, it's different within an election year, but if you withdraw your voice, then Twitter descends into a full-on echo chamber. I mean, it might seem like an echo chamber right now, but if left-wing voices start leaving because they're upset with it, then you just get a right-wing platform. That's true to a point, but I think it's past the point right now where it's worth being

on that platform at any extended version. Like, if it was, like, kind of bright leaning, I'd say, well, yeah, generally, you should always lend your voice to these spaces because if you leave, they just become more of an echo chamber. But the platform is so bad right now, and the owner of the platform is so, like, disgusting that I would rather pull anybody that I can, you know, get an ear from, like, pull them off that platform and throw them into something else and not be part of anything on that platform rather than, well, I should participate here. There are other people if they want to, but, yeah, I don't think it's good. You've just been condemning how awful Twitter is and how much it disrupts sensible discussions about politics. Can I ask you about some of your own tweets? Yeah. After the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you got quite a lot of heat for a series of tweets that you put out, which had some choice words, not just for Trump, but also for Corey Comparatore, who was the firefighter that got killed.

by mistake, by the shooter at the Trump rally, you were on Twitter almost immediately calling him fucking retarded, that is Corey, not Donald Trump, saying that you have zero sympathy for anybody who gets caught in a crosshair like that, and seeming to have no sort of ill feeling about the fact that a former president, somebody tried to assassinate them. I must say that when I saw those tweets, I was shocked. I was surprised. And a lot of people messaged me and said, is this a guy you had in your show? Like, you might want to think again before having him back on. And I'm sure that people who haven't watched this far have already commented down below. I can't believe you had this guy back on. I understand that you are angry

about the state of the right wing in America. I understand that you really don't like Trump. And that's putting it far too lightly. But when you talk about how you don't like Twitter because it sort of is poisoning our political dialogue. Do you not think you're contributing to it as well with this kind of behavior? No, I don't think the dialogue is being poisoned because people are being mean, of which conservatives have been disgusting for years,

which is why I don't give a fuck about anybody that winds up at any of these rallies and gets shot or whatever the fuck, okay, because they had no problem making fun of Paul Pelosi. They have no problem making fun of anybody else that gets killed in some horrific event. A lot of conservatives were laughing along at a lot of my tweets when I was making fun of Palestinians during my last, you know, year and a half talking about Israel,

and some of them laughed when I made fun of Israelis as well, but all of a sudden, Corey is beyond reproach. Bullshit. I think that the issue that I have with X isn't people being mean. It's people that are just lying and contributing to a destruction of the discourse. I think that people can be mean. I think hate speech is fine.

Whatever you want to do there. But when you have people that are intentionally bad actors that are just destroying the discourse by just flooding it with incorrect stuff that they're not even trying to be correct about, the entire world would be better off of these people were permanently removed from these platforms. Like, there is no downside and only upside to see people like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Tim Poole never be allowed to publicly broadcast their opinions ever again.

It's exclusively bad stuff that happens. So if somebody wants to be mean or asked, whatever, I'm totally fine with that. But when people are supporting, you know, the destruction of our world, like, informationally, right? When we've all become epistmic nihilists and now anything can be true. I remember joking two or three years ago or however long ago it was with the wildfires in Hawaii. I think I said something like, nothing will ever happen again. Nothing can happen anymore. It's all a conspiracy. And it is now, right? Like I start a lot of my debates off a conservative's being like, do you believe in dinosaurs, by the way? A lot of them don't. They don't think dinosaurs are real. They think oil is naturally replenishing and big petroleum made dinosaurs up. You know, the boat collision. I think in Ohio was the Mossad that, you know, rammed a boat in to take off the heat from Gaza. The train to railmen in East Palestine was just left as trying to poison the environment. Every single foreign affair is, you know, Ukraine was started as a revolution by the CIA. And, you know, there were bio-weller. in labs there and COVID was a hoax and the vaccine, like every single fucking thing.

And now the hurricane is made by the government, I guess. Every single thing is not real. And it is destroying us. We have no unified front right now that we can present to the world and we can't even do anything in our own country with ourselves. There's so much to say in that. I mean, for a start, being mean, as you put it, which of course is different from spreading disinformation or misinformation.

You're allowed to call someone a fucking retard if you want to. do you think that this is constructive to the political conversation? I mean, even if you think you have a right to do it, and okay, the other side do it too, isn't the point to lead by example. I mean, if I were to be, if I were engaging in some of the atrocious political conduct that you observe on the right as a left winger, and then you called me out on it and said, hey, you shouldn't be doing this. And I said, well, hey, the right do it too.

The point is that when the right do it, we say that it's a bad thing. And so to be sort of doing it in response seems, at the very least, not constructive, right? The issue, again, and I will reiterate this, even though nobody will pay attention, not calling you out, but I just whatever. I don't care about people being mean. People being mean is not the problem. The problem is the lying in the mis and disinformation. That's the big problem. When people want to say, like, the issue is we can't, the problem right now is that in the United States, there exists two different standards, and you can't live in a world where both sides have to play by different standards.

it doesn't work. For everybody that wants to jerk off evolutionary biology, we call these tit-for-tat systems in nature. You can't have a tit-tit, tit, tit, where somebody tries to attack you and there's no punishment because that type of behavior will just lead to the attacker, right, taking over because there's no repercussions for what they're doing. There is some benefit to attacking the other side, and then it rallies your side up, and it demoralizes the other side. That's why conservatives have attacked so brutally liberals for so long, and they get all of the benefit from that. They get all of the fun, all of the excitement. They get to, you know, give the strong morale to their people. They could have all the chance at rallies. And then as soon as it happens to them,

hold on, well, this isn't fair anymore. We don't like this. This isn't okay. I don't like this anymore. The fact that after that shooting Biden, who in a private call to donors said, like, we need to put the Trump campaign in the bullseye or whatever, that that guy, that he went on, I don't remember which news station it was, but he had to apologize for those comments when conservatives are like on the regular saying some of the most deranged onion shit. I wish I had examples offhand if I knew this is a topic, but Trump is like himself on every rally will just say like insane shit. No, That's bullshit. The double standards can exist. If conservatives don't like it, they need to elevate their own behavior because I'm getting really tired of liberals constantly having to fucking row the boat while conservatives are this anchor that are just dragging us into the Atlantic with absolutely, you know, no responsibility or accountability for their behavior. So you don't like the whole Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go high kind of approach. Is there no? I think Michelle got rid of that. By the way, most people on the right think she's trans.

Yeah, right. Okay. So I understand what you're saying, I think. And you say, I know you were emphasizing a second ago, I don't care about being mean, I care about lies. But is there an extent to which we should care about it, at least in terms of optics? Much the same way that you should care about, no, optics don't matter. You're never getting credit from the right for any optics because they can act infinitely amoral and evil, and there's no repercussion for it. People on the left, if you're right that the right wingers here are like the sort of evil ones who are doing this all the time and the left wingers are not, then when the left wing is see you doing this, are they not going to think, well, here's someone that. that I thought was nice and reasonable and kind in politics. And actually, it turns out he's just like the right wingers. He's willing to say these horrible things about a man who's just

been killed as an innocent bystander at a Trump rally. Can't you see that that's going to Yeah, that's part of my failing. And as part of the big regret I had, being so nice in the beginning of this year when I was talking to Peterson and Shapiro and Owens, my issue is that people, I don't want people to follow me because I'm nice. I want people to follow me because I'm correct because I'm tethered to reality. And if you're just picking one political position because the people who are a bit more nice, then you're missing the real differences. And if somebody being mean to you,

Anna Casparian is now on her, I left the left arc, so she can go be Dave Rubin, you know, 3.R or whatever. Like when people have this thing where it's like, well, I saw somebody on that side being mean, so now I'm going to go ahead and 180 all my political opinions to join the side

that is even more unhinged, to join the side where the leader says he wants to suspend the Constitution where he's trying to direct the DOJ to go and arrest political enemies where they deny the results of the last election. Like, these are the people that you're going to jump to

because you saw somebody in the left being mean. What a stupid way to define. your political opinions. Suppose somebody said to you, or you heard, I mean, there has since been another attempt on Donald Trump's life.

Suppose there were a third. Somebody tries to assassinate Donald Trump, perhaps even succeeds, and says, you know what? I was sort of on the fence about the ethics of all of this. I thought Trump was a big threat

to America, but I thought the political assassination was off the table in a democracy. But then I was on Twitter and I saw Destiny, this left-wing streamer that I really look up to,

saying that actually no sympathy like who cares and he thought actually okay fair enough maybe I should go and do this and so he went and assassinated or tried to assassinate Donald Trump how would you feel? I don't think you should

I've said it over and over again I don't think anybody should assassinate anybody I don't think it's a good thing like we should ever come to that into democracy but conservatives are never ever ever making these statements on their side so why the fuck would I waste my time making the statements on my side both consider shooters so far arguably have been conservative

now some people want to say well the one guy donated $15 to the Democrats so he you know whatever but like um no that's if if now i'm in a position where i'll wait for them to shape up i had this conversation on periods where it's like don't you disavow this and i'm like no fuck you i won't do it here in front of day rubin because then when i turn around i asked day rubin do you think that j6 was bad and he's like well you know antifa like conservatives will not take accountability for anything they've done so why the fuck would i disavow any individual shooter is that like they shouldn't do it but like you guys think that look at look at all the weird shit you obsess over for trans people

and the trans groomer and the cutting off children's dicks and all of this and all the document and the obsession over it or the obsession over like I could give like a million examples but like there's there's so much horrible shit that goes on over here I'm not going to sit here and try to like crawl and beg for forgiveness from a side that has has exited orbit although maybe you don't believe that's possible because Candice Owen says we could not leave the planet so you know who knows but you said why would I do this why would I spend time condemning this and I would answer on point of political principle. I mean, the whole criticism that you might make of the right wing is that they don't have political principles. They just sort of emotive, and they'll drop their political principles on a whim to support a deranged president who's started a cold personality. The whole point is that we're supposed to be better than that. We're supposed to have our political principles. I've heard you say, for example, like, no, I don't have any sympathy for anyone who's at a Donald Trump, probably. Anyone who's at a rally supporting a man who try to incite an insurrection, which is like a fundamental threat to democracy, that should

like invalidate their ability to vote. And as well as that, I have no sympathy for them being at a rally because of their undermining of the basic principles of democracy. Well, you know what else undermines the basic principle of democracy? The assassination of political leaders and democratically elected presidents. And so, in other words, to do like a two-quoc way, to say, well, you do this too, why would I spend my time condemning this? It's to show political principles, say that actually I do believe in democracy. So even when, you know, my opponent is clipped in the ear with a bullet, I'm going to come out and say, of course I think that's bad. Obviously that's bad. And of course I have sympathy for anyone who's caught up in that. And you can use that

as an opportunity if you do it without actually grandstanding. Because I see that a lot. I must say, I do see a lot of people on the right condemning, um, condemning political violence against left-wingers. There's going to be people on Twitter saying crap all the time, right? No, I couldn't find anybody. I went back after my peers thing and I went to see what these people said about Paul Pelosi and all of these guys. Trump Jr. did it.

Dave Rubin did it. All these guys made disgusting comments and jokes about it. The reality is, is there is no political virtue or principle in allowing yourself to be crushed by an opposition that's not going to play by the same set of rules. There is no value in that. There is no principal position in that. All your politics is for power. The idea behind any type of political action is to gain power politically for your side.

Now, in a democracy, there are ways that you're supposed to do that, ideally through liberal principles, classical liberal principles like freedom of speech and press and all of this. But when the other side's not playing by that same rule set, you existing using a different rule set is not a virtuous thing to be proud of or to be principled about. You know, for you to go on your sinking ship that you decided not to put any cannons on because it's a violation of maritime law while you're getting sunk by another boat and going, well, at least we. sailed, you know, righteously is ridiculous. Okay. But bear in mind, you're not talking now to a Don Trump or Donald Trump, I mean, Don Trump, Jr. You're talking to me, and I'm somebody who, who, I mean, I feel as much sympathy as I could for a stranger I never met. But yeah, like, it upsets me to think that somebody who was innocently attending a rally was shot. Now, you might say it wasn't innocent because

they were supporting Donald Trump, but, I mean, you and I both know that people's opinions on things can be shaped by all kinds of things. I mean, I don't know where he grew up. I don't know what his education was like. I don't know who he had around him. As far as I can tell, he could have just been a man who was broadly a Republican thinking about voting for Donald Trump because you know, like he's on the right and that's just how his family's been, sees that Trump is coming to town, like a former president's going to be in town. What a cool spectacle goes along to watch it. I understand that it's maybe not a good thing to be like supporting Trump in a Trump rally, but to have no sympathy for someone who's potentially in that position to be

killed. Like, what I'm asking is personally, I know that when you're, when you're speaking publicly, it's almost like you want to make a point that, well, we get to do this too. You know, why am I going to play by rules that they're not playing by? But personally, do you not consider a circumstance like that and have... I mean, on a very personal level, maybe, but it's never going to be a part of the public conversation. We are so far beyond any, like, the idea that, like, the discourse is destroyed because people on the left won't feel bad about, you know, dipshit's getting shot at a fucking rally.

We're so far beyond that being anywhere. That's not even on my top 50 list of issues that we have right now in this country. And conservatives just want to hyper fixate on it and make it number one because they don't want to take responsibility for a single fucking thing that they're doing, which has put this country on a crash course for destruction. And just to round this off, because I don't want to sort of go in circles here, but there are two potential ways you can approach this thing about, yeah, I'm going to, you know, say mean things about Corey on Twitter right after he's killed.

There's, I have the right to do this, and there's, this is an effective political tactic. Do you think one of those is true? Both of those is true? Because as far as I can see. It's probably an effective political tactic. Nobody wants to hear it, but there's a reason why people engage in that type of rhetoric. Do you think it was an effective political tactic when people made, you know, gay jokes about Paul Pelosi? It was because they make memes out of it.

They laugh about it. It boosts morale. There's a reason why people engage in this type of rhetoric is because there is an advantage. advantage to it. And to pretend that it's strictly negative doesn't make any sense. Because if so, where is the right suffering for it? Show me where the punishments have been on the right for all of the unhinged statements and actions that Donald Trump has made or said. Donald Trump is literally a guy who gives bad nicknames to his political opponents. Right now we're seeing on X this massive disinformation campaign saying that FEMA is not responding in states, despite

direct statements from people like Roy Cooper from Brian Kemp, from Ron DeSand, direct contradictory statement saying that Biden called us yesterday. We have everything the federal government can provide. They're lying and lying and lying. And I'm so sick of this like, but don't you think it's bad? We're going to make fun and love up. Show me these conversations happening on the right ever. And I will begin to give a fuck because this conversation that's happening right now is never happening on Tucker Carlson, on Joe Rogan, on Tim Poole, on Candace Owens, on Ben Shapiro, on Walsh, on Nolz, on any of these other shows, on Megan Kelly, on any, none of these people are like, well, were we too mean when we did this?

There's not even close to these cards. So for me to sit here and pretend to like entertain that conversation, I don't give a fuck. Now, I'm so beyond giving a fuck on it. You don't think that's just because, I mean, you're making the criticism that that right wingers don't sort of police themselves in this way. You say like, where is this happening on the right? Does that mean that it's also not going to happen on the left? I mean, maybe the reason why the right can get away with it as, and again, here I'm strictly

talking about whether it's an effective political tactic. If you want to say, look, I have the right to do this, they're doing this, I have the moral rights to do this, fine. But that's an effective political tactic. If right wingers are more like morally deranged than left wingers in the way that you sort of seem to observe them as being, then isn't it the case that that kind of tactic is going to work with right wingers in a way that it might not work with left wingers. I mean, you say it has to be an effective political tactic because look at how Trump's using it, look at the name calling, look at the way that there's no self-policing on the right. Maybe that's because it's the right. Maybe left wingers being less morally deranged,

more, you know, having more better political principle, being the more moral side of things, are going to see someone using those tactics as you use them on Twitter. No, I don't think so. I'm not the right wing, so that's not going to work on me. I don't think fundamentally we're that different between different groups of humans. I think that people like to make fun of people and make jokes and all that shit. Even dark humor, I think it happens on both sides. On every side, I think that's just like a pretty normal human thing.

I don't think it's good, but again, the right has set the standard for behavior in this country and it is in hell. So was it, was it humor what you were, what you were doing on Twitter there? Was it an attempt at humor or was it sort of a genuine expression of rage anger? Well, I mean, it's a combination of both, right? Humor. Truth is always some extent in comedy, right? The easiest way to tell if somebody is sub-65 IQ is when they say something like, it's just a joke. Like, jokes are funny for reasons. It's because there's usually some aspect of reality that they're pointing to, unless you're literally doing an anti-joke or

anti-humor, so. You just mentioned Tucker Carlson. Elon Musk just sat down with Tucker Carlson for about two hours, the better part of two hours. He also recently spoke at a Trump prally off the cuff. On both occasions, he said that if Republicans do not get out and vote for Donald Trump, this will be the last election. What do you make of that? It's just an idiot. I thought I was supposed to have communism after eight years of Obama, and then I thought I was getting communism after four years of Biden. Still hasn't happened. I thought we were getting a wall after four years of Trump didn't happen. I thought we were getting a balanced budget after eight years of Bush and four years of Trump didn't happen. Like, it's just bullshit talking points. That means nothing. I must say, I was

shocked to hear such, well, extreme language. And again, even just from a point of optics, I mean, if that's what he believes, then fine. But to get up and say, this will be the last election, I find that's sort of difficult to believe that he could take it seriously. But listening to him on Tucker, he's making a very specific point about border crossings. He's making a very specific, he's not saying that there won't literally be elections again. His point is that democratic policy is opening up the border, flooding the country with, immigrants who will be fast-tracked to green cards and then citizenship, specifically shipped into swing states where the states can be decided by tens of thousands of votes, shipping

in hundreds of thousands of people who will vote Democrat, even though they might be culturally more right-wing where they come from, their top priority is going to be getting their family to come and live with them, and so they're always going to vote blue. And so if we vote Democrat, we get four more years of flooding the border with immigrants who are going to vote blue, thereby flooding the border with even more immigrants who are always going to vote blue, setting up what Elon Musk predicts will be like a essentially a one-party country in the way that California is in effect, de facto, a one-party state. That's the specific point that he's making. So when he says, this will be the last election, he means that this will be

the last election with a meaningful discrepancy between right-wing and left-wing voters on issues other than just trying to get their families to come and live with them. Do you think there's any credence in what he said. No, I think that Elon Musk is a 97 IQ man who masquerades as 137 IQ and all of his followers are 85 IQ, so they all believe that he's as smart as he says he is. He wouldn't be able to pass a civics 101 test. The man is just astoundingly fucking stupid when it comes to talking about anything outside of his very narrow set of expertise, which just seems to be creating a whole bunch of children with a whole bunch of women. So nothing that he says, again, we've been hearing these same arguments for decades. Even what conservatives say, I just caught a guy trying to make this

dog shit argument before about bringing in certain types of immigrants that will only vote liberal, every immigrant votes for liberals, because conservatives are fucking insane, and that's their fault. If you can't find a way to appeal to anybody that comes into this country that's not bought in and indoctrinated with your political ideology from birth, that sounds like a fucking you problem. Because I caught a guy doing, oh, I don't want a bunch of brown, Haitian, black, whatever, immigrants coming. It's like, oh, really? You think people coming from fucking Norway and Sweden are voting for Donald Trump? Do you think people immigrating from Italy or France or Germany or Poland even are voting for

Donald Trump? No, this is not happening. Nobody from around the world comes to the United States. Like, man, Donald Trump, this guy seems like he's making some real good point. I'm going to vote conservative. It doesn't really happen. So every immigrant group, and you can go and look at the poll, at the Pew polling for this. Like, every immigrant group votes left. That's a conservative problem.

And by the way, there's not even a real reason why that has to be the case because if conservatives would just not be fucking racist, they actually have a lot in common with immigrant groups, especially when it comes to social values. If you look at stuff like trans stuff, you think it's a bunch of brown immigrants from South America that are championing the – no, it's white kids, right? It's almost exclusively these, like, young white college kids that are non-binary and blue hair and all this shit. So this is like, again, this is conservatives creating their own problem and then getting super assmat about it. But again, the idea that there's like the significant demographic change for people coming to this country, I, no, like, what are we going to do, shut down all immigration?

Like, is even worse now than it was in the past. We, you know, we've got an issue with asylum seeking right now. We try to fix it, but Republicans shut that bill down. So apparently they don't give a fuck about it too much because they wanted to keep the issue open for Donald Trump to run on. So I guess they don't actually care. Now, I have no sympathy. And Elon Musk is an idiot, so I wouldn't trust anything he says whatsoever about immigration or the border. You said the idea demographic shift, you said I sort of don't buy into it.

Do you mean the idea that it's happening or the idea that it's bad? The idea that it's happening in like some unprecedented rate, the idea that it's even necessarily a bad thing. And the idea that it can't be like politically accounted for. There is no reason why brown people or black people or people of color coming from other countries have to vote Democrat and can't vote Republican. right? Like, Republicans are the ones that say over and over again, Trump is doing better with black voters. And he knows, okay, well, keep doing that then appeal to them. Why can you not appeal to people that aren't white, you know, rural voter? You should be able to do this. I quibble with what you said about, like, European immigrants. Because, I mean, Europe

has been having something of a perceivable shift to the right. It's quite hard to track because the elections keep surprising us. But I don't know, maybe like nationalists are more likely to stay at home because they're nationalists. Like, potentially, sure. But, I mean, it still plays under my point. People aren't immigrating. White immigrants don't from Europe to vote for conservatives in the United States. Where there are immigrants immigrating into a country, of course there could be so many reasons why they're voting left. Maybe it's just because they're all really reasonable people and left-wing parties are eminently more reasonable and that's why immigrants are voting left on the whole. Do you don't think it could possibly

have something to do with them wanting to support their family coming over the border? Something to do with, you know, immigration welfare, this kind of stuff that is much more supported by the left. The The United States sucks for welfare. We're a dog-shed country when it comes to welfare. Like, people immigrate illegally to the United States, usually because they're looking to work and they're looking for employment opportunities. I think we need an immigration overhaul,

but nobody wants to sit down and actually do it to make it easier to come in and out of the country, at the very least for, like, work visas, so people don't feel the need to illegally immigrate to the country. But people aren't, like, the idea, this is just the most fucking American thing in the world. I think that people are coming here to get our excellent fucking welfare benefits. This is absolutely not the case.

I mean, I know that you obviously don't agree with the, Elon Musk, let's put it that way. But there's no course for concern, like even a slither, the idea that there might be a sort of self-reinforcing policy in politics. That is, self-reinforcing in the sense that if we vote for these people, they bring in these people who vote for the same people, who bring in more of those people, ultimately culminating in this self-fulfilling sort of democratic. I mean, I guess, like, I guess theoretically that can happen, but like that can happen in so many different ways, right? Like, who's to say that when, like, here would be an example, like liberals, broadly speaking, support things like abortion.

Aren't you aborting, like, most of your voter base? Like, isn't it generally minorities or people, you know, they always talk about the black holocausts as abortion? Aren't black voters generally Democrat? So if we think that people are specifically choosing policies just to increase their voter base, why do Democrats support abortion, right? That's an example of a policy that Republicans want to fight against as hard as possible that hurts them, So I don't think that people are necessarily making, you know, the argument that we should allow in more immigrants because we know they're going to vote for us. And also, that can be a workaround or a thing that you do for immigration overall. Again, maybe you make it so that people can come in for work visas, but they can't vote because they're just on temporary visas or maybe the path to citizenship is, you know, 10 years out or something or a little bit harder than just residency. I don't know. There are ways to counter that, but it can't be, it can't be that your country's immigration policy should be centered around the well-being of the country. It can't be centered around your party being too fucking. racist to appeal to a huge demographic of voters coming from other parts of the world. Fuck you, leave.

Go somewhere else. If your idea of good immigration is we can't have too many people coming in that don't match our racist, you know, ideology, then fuck you. We're actively making ourselves worse. And we already have restrictions on immigration. Like, I think it's 7% per country is like the cap or something like that. It's not like we'll take like 50 million legal Mexican immigrants in one time. Do you think immigration is too high?

I don't even know what that means. And nobody that is even debating it knows what that means. like the problem is that when you get into these types of conversations you really have to you really need to get in the weeds about what you're saying like so for instance if somebody is immigration too high well for what it grows the economy because labor is one of the most productive and important inputs to your economy so in that sense our GDP grows and our economy grows fiscally it tends to be pretty beneficial because immigrants tend to be young and they work as young people right they're not old and consuming a ton of health care like older people are in terms of cost of housing probably be negative it's probably driving prices up a bit because wherever they go, there's going to be an increased demand for houses. In terms of opportunity for locals, depending on what the unemployment is, you could have immigrants that are competing with local workers. You know, tech workers complain about H-1B immigrants. Some poor people in the South will complain about competing with illegals for work. To say that it's necessarily all good or all bad, or even good or bad, it really

depends particularly on the issue that you're talking about. It was discussed in the VP debate recently, and housing came up as one example. But it was also said, that more than 50% or around 50% of Americans support mass deportations? I seriously doubt that. Which kind of stunned me as a statistic. I don't know if it's true, but like, I mean, that would surprise you if it were true? I don't think that's true. My guess is if I could dig into that poll or whatever it's citing, it probably says something like,

would you be in favor of deporting every illegal with like a violent felony or a felony conviction or whatever? In which case, even I would be in favor of that. Yeah, fuck you. If you're going to illegally immigrate in here and then commit a fucking felony, it's time to go. yeah, of course. I mean, do you think that there's a reasonable case to be made for the sort of broad idea that immigration is too high that isn't based on just like emotive racist, right-wing like paranoia? I don't know if I would say it's based on racist paranoia, but it is based on paranoia. Like we said earlier, it's an aesthetic, right, in terms of, or the presentation of reality

is aesthetic. Shane Gillist is a funny bit, you know, where he's talking about Trump and everything about how, you know, my dad in Pennsylvania is oddly concerned with the border. he's very obsessed with illegal immigration, you know, like an illegal immigrant is going to walk up to Pennsylvania and threaten his job. You know, I could tell you right now, there are five million illegals crossing the border yesterday, or I could tell you it was 5,000 last year. You would have no idea. You have no way to track that. You have no way to know that. It's hard to know where this even shows up in people's lives. Yeah, there was a good you gov poll and like, how do you feel about the outlook of the economy and the, uh, or how are you doing in the economy? And it was like,

as soon as Trump was elected, uh, versus Biden. And then when Biden was reelected again, it flips completely where all of a sudden, like, as soon as Trump is elected, like, when the economy was starting to do good. It is doing good now. But when it was doing good, I think, a couple of years ago, and the stock market started to shoot up, Trump said that the reason why was because people thought that he was going to get elected again. So now the stock market is up. Like, it's, people are totally untethered from reality. Yeah, I see a lot of people, do you have any thoughts about the relevance of demographic change? I mean, I constantly see statistics being thrown around about how, like, white people are going to become a minority

by 2100 or whatever it may be. Again, same question. Do you think So this is just sort of racist paranoia, or do you think there's any legitimate concern in this? I think that good people can be driven to legitimate concern, but I don't think there is true legitimate concern. Who cares? Like, this is a country that is founded on immigration. Right now, I said this when I was talking to Sam Harris. Like, I've been told for decades that immigrants that don't share my values are going to

overwhelm my country and either do Sharia law or Hispanic law or whatever the fuck is going to come in a industry. And right now, the biggest threat to democracy in the United States is large. largely white conservatives. They share less in line with me politically and in terms of American values than any immigrant that illegally jumped a fence to come over here and work. So, no, I don't think it's a true concern. And the United States, we're really good at integrating immigrants for different backgrounds. We just, we do it exceptionally well. We should continue to do that. Yeah, that's one thing that makes the United States discussion so unique, I think, is that

it's a new country and has just a different story. It has a different mythos. It has a different sort of origin and culture of immigration, I think, which makes it a different discussion from, say, the UK where I'm from. One thing that did surprise me, again, as an outsider here, is listening to Elon Musk talk about voter ID laws. This isn't really a conversation in the UK in the same way, I don't think. But when I hear that not only do you not need to bring ID in order to vote in federal elections, Elon must make the claim that California just passed a law banning any kind of regulation based on ID, like banning the idea that you can even check people's IDs in elections. That to me, I must say, I don't know how true that is, but it kind of does

stun me. I would have to check, I wouldn't trust anything Elon Musk cites. I'm not 100% sure if he can even read English. So I would have to go and check the particular law or statute or regulation that either the California legislature passed or the executive is enforcing. So I can't speak to that. I don't think there is inherently a problem with voter ID. I want to say like 30 some states require some form of ID. I would have to go and check. It's a high now. I think it's more than half. I think that the main issue is that any time voter ID comes up, it always feels like Republicans are just using this as a way to disenfranchise voters. So like there was a big Supreme Court case in North Carolina where when they wanted to do voter ID, they wanted to like allow all of the

voter all of the types of IDs that white people were likely to have and then disallow all the types of IDs that black people were more likely to have. I think the Supreme Court, when they rejected that new law that they were trying to write, the phrase they used was it was surgically targeting the black community. And they did the same thing with closing like certain early voting areas or certain polling booths that like just had black people there. I think if you wanted to have like a national voter ID and you wanted to have it that it was automatically issued to every citizen of the United States that could, you know, prove they had an address there. And you wanted to require that to vote, I don't think that should be a huge problem. I think most people

should be okay with that. Do you think that voters should be required to show some form of identification before they can vote? I mean, right now it seems like I haven't, I don't think there's ever been like any substantial fraud uncovered as a result of how we run our elections right now. So, I don't feel strongly about it. But I think if somebody wants to do it and they want to provide for a way to get that ID for free, I think it's okay to do it. Yeah, because I mean, the problem to me when I hear people say like, well, you know, what about people who've struggled to get IDs? I can, I mean, I mean, free government IDs for everyone. I mean, to me, it just seems really strange to me that there are, I mean, especially if it's true that California did indeed just pass a law that

actually prohibits this. Like, forgetting that for a moment, for not to be a requirement to show ID. I can't imagine just like walking into a booth and just saying, yeah, I'm here and being a vote in a federal election. Generally, you walk in and then you verify your name, in your address, and then if you're registered at that address with that name, then that's how you vote. If you're registered at that address. Yeah. So I would go on out and say, my name is, you know, X, Y, Z, and then they go, okay, and then you say, my address is this, and then they check whether you're telling the truth about what you're

saying, well, you just say it. You just say it, right? And, like, that just seems like, and then they say, have you voted yet. Way too easy a thing to do with something as important as a federal election. Sure. Especially even, like, even if you're not actually worried about voter fraud, which I think, you know, we should be, we should be concerned about all things that can happen in an election that can go wrong, because they don't go wrong until they do, should be concerned about voter fraud.

But even if you're not, just like the optics of that, in terms of when you have Trump losing an election and saying the election was stolen and there's a bunch of voter fraud, you can't turn around and say, well, actually, Mr. Trump, like, every single voter was IDed and vetted. Doesn't matter what you say, what you do, that will always make accusations of voter fraud. There's literally nothing to do to do. No, absolutely not. Republicans dance, they delight in anybody taking these arguments seriously. For the best example of that, Trump spent a year attacking mail-in ballots.

He didn't give a single suggestion. The Republicans didn't give a single suggestion one single time to make that process more secure. Instead, they decried them because they knew the Democrats were more likely to take social distancing and COVID restriction seriously and vote by mail. Republicans do not give a fuck about the integrity of the vote that was proved on January 6th when Donald Trump tried to flip the votes of seven different states. It was proved when Republicans didn't do anything to make mail-in ballots better. And it was proved when the only states that they thought significant fraud happened in was in 2020. It was proved in 2016 when Trump put together a voter commission, a voter fraud commission to find voter fraud and found nothing. Like they've looked for it.

Again, if you want to do voter ID, I don't necessarily think it's the worst thing. If you wanted to, that's fine. I will say, though, I thought Republicans were all about states' rights and the state's, you know, right to do whatever they wanted and to run their elections as they see fit and to do things as they want as individual states. It's very interesting that Republicans that are big on states' rights all of a sudden want the federal government to come down with a heavy hand when it's something that could benefit them. Yeah, well, I think that's the problem with political sloganeering, isn't it? I mean, when you say, I'm in favor of states' rights, very rarely do you mean, like, totally, completely. Like, even if you ask somebody who's super pro-state, right, small government, is like, okay, well, should we allow Nevada to, like, lower the voting age to three? It's like, well, actually, maybe with the federal election, there are things which the federal government should regulate.

And I think this is something which would be not particularly controversial. I mean, I might be speaking out of ignorance here, but I don't think it's an issue in the UK to the extent that I think if you went around and asked people on the street, in the UK, do you think you should have to have ID in order to vote for, you know, in a general election? They'd look at you like you'd lost your mind, be like, of course, what the hell do you mean? And if I said to them, well, in America, you know, 14 states don't require that, and one of them possibly actually prohibits it, then they'd turn to look at America like it's lost its mind. I mean, it seems like... The reality is we've ran our elections this way for 200 plus years, and we haven't run out of significant issues. If a state wants to require some form

of ID, they can. They're, I'm pretty sure over 30 states to do. If they wanted to make a federal rule, I think they could. I wouldn't be super opposed to it. But when these issues are brought up, they're not usually brought up from a group of people that feel like they want to secure our elections. It feels like it's just brought it from a group of people that wants to try to prohibit other people from voting. Which, by the way, is why I like to bring up these issues, because like for me, especially not even as an American, when you talk to, it seems like when you talk to a Republican and someone says, well, you know, Stephen, what about this mean tweet or what about this, what about that? You can say, well, look, man, you know, fucking Republicans, dude.

Like, who the hell are they to say this? Like, I don't think they actually care about this. I think that they're just using this as a point. But I'm somebody who's looking at this as an outsider and going, like, actually, that does really surprise me. And I care about voter integrity. And that's why I think that, like, voter ID sounds like a good idea. I mean, like I say, I might be speaking out of ignorance here.

I know this is more of a debate in the United States. Maybe there's some, like, really obvious thing that I'm missing and people are going to be commenting, Alex, you're an idiot and whatever. No, there's not. The only obvious thing is that there's... I just, it blows my mind, frankly, that you can just walk into a booth. say that you live in America and they go, sure thing, man, here's the ticket. Yeah, it's pretty exceptional compared to the rest of the world. Seems like insane to me. Seems like that's, I mean,

that's how we've ran our elections. But I mean, like, how insane is our Second Amendment? If you want, we can go upstairs later. I've got, you know, like a rifle and six pistols upstairs that we can go kill each other with right now if you wanted to do that. That I bought completely legally in the state of Florida. You don't even need a license to do it in this state. The background check is just making sure you're not a felon. I can lie on the paperwork. Like, we can go upstairs and see that right now. That, to me, is insane too. Yeah, I'd also like to see that changed. Okay, but that's the state's right.

So, like, here's the difference, okay? What I just said, all right, and this is why this will never be an equivalent conversation. And if there was a conservative here, I wouldn't even granted you the voter ID thing. I would be screaming and fighting to the death on that and saying, fuck, no, we shouldn't put any roadblocks in front of voting because we haven't even proven there's a problem yet. The difference between this right now is that if you bring a conservative on this program and you talk about anything relating to, okay, you believe in states' rights, you think that there are some problems that need to be addressed, do you think the state should have a right to regulate? firearms more than they already do, conservative will start pissing and shitting and coming and throwing up all at the

same time in their pants in front of you. And they won't give an inch on that. And they'll have all sorts of reasons why they won't give an inch on that. A whole bunch of bullshit reasons that aren't historically founded. A whole bunch of bullshit reasons that aren't even founded in the data. By the way, the CDC, which studies the Center for Disease Control, which studies health phenomena in the United States, is explicitly barred

from our Congress from even studying gun violence. That's how crazy we are about it. Then we'll give you an inch on that. Is that true? Yes. So why the fuck would I sit here and quibble with you about voter ID when conservatives won't give an inch on any of their platforms positions. I'm going to ask you why the CDC is banned from studying guns. I don't want to know why they're actually banned. I want to know what the ostensible reason is. I actually am not sure. I would have to go and look up what the rationale is for that. I don't think there's a good, but I don't think there's like a, I don't even know

like a steel man. I think the idea is just that like if the government can like track firearms and get this information on you, they could make like a registry. So we have an organization. called the ATF, the alcohol, tobaccos, and firearms organizations, it is illegal in the United States to have an electronic database of firearms that people have. So they do it by paper. So if somebody gets killed and they get the serial number and I call into the FBI and they run it, they give it to the ATF, the ATF has to go through physical fucking papers, boxes of paperwork to find out who the gun was originally sold to. Why? Because we're not allowed to keep an electronic database of firearm owners. But why? Because we don't want a list of gun owners,

the government will come and tick all your guns. If you can find a better answer to that, I would love to hear it. I challenge you to ask any conservative that comes on this program, why the fuck can the ATF not have an actual electronic database of firearms? If they say, well, Destiny's lying, they actually do have one, then they're being sneaky because some of the ATF is allowed to scan the papers, but they can't, like, do metadata or anything. They have to click the next button to look at each picture.

It's like the farthest they're allowed to go. They can have, like, a database where they could search, like, an Excel sheet for a particular entry. They've got to put, you can, yeah, you can look up videos. That's an invitation. There's a real one if you're out there and want to come on the show and talk about this. Not anyone, but you know what I mean. But like, you're doing it again, right? We were talking about voter ID and I totally understand what you're saying, by the way, because, yeah, like, it's pretty crazy to be like, look, elections are really important. You need to be able to show some identification if you're going to vote. But if you want to go buy a gun, yeah, sure, whatever, man. I gave my

six-year-old a handgun for Christmas this year, right? That is insane to me, right? But in the way that you might look at America's insane gun laws, at least some places insane gun laws, and be like, this is crazy, this needs to change. You're not talking to a big Second Amendment guy here. You're talking to somebody who looks at that similarly to how I look at something like voting in a federal election. This is important enough that there should be regulation in place. Now, that's going to upset people as an outsider coming in. They're going to say, well, who the hell are you to have an opinion on America, you know, go back home? Whatever, man. I don't care about that. But like, I'm looking at this thinking, that's crazy. And that's why maybe I, you know, maybe a conservative is listening to this and being like, see, as an outsider, like, look how insane it is, the voter ID thing. See, it's like common sense, man. We should obviously have voter ID. Yeah, but the difference is at the end of the day, if we engage in the actual factual analysis, we could say, oh, okay, well, I agree the voter ID thing is a little bit weird in, you know, 15 or however many states that don't require it. But we've done huge surveys to try to find voter fraud, and it just hasn't been discovered. Meanwhile,

with guns, we have, what, 60,000 people killed every single year in the United States from gun violence, 40,000 of them commit suicides with a firearm. We've got more gang violence and shootings and mass shootings per capita than any other country, the G7 or the OECD. Like, again, it's almost like the same Washington I'm talking about. To present these two issues, it's the same, and then to say it's the country of, or it's the party that will wheel out all these arguments for the Second Amendment, right? Well, I don't want, you know, the government to take my guns. The states should, oh, actually, even the states can't even decide that. It's so holy. It's so sacrosyn. Even the states can't ban this. But then when it comes to voter ID, well, actually,

I think the federal government, the United States, federal government should tell the states how to run their elections, even though in the Constitution it explicitly states that the time and manner of an election is dictated by the state legislature. Like the, yeah, time and or place. Yeah, it was surprising to learn. I mean, I think you're certainly right that the comparison to guns there is a limited one, one that you brought up in a limited context.

And I understand what you mean when you say that they're not comparable to that degree. I must say though it does just seem insane to me and I know you basically said yeah sure you know like voter ID laws yeah I'm kind of whatever about them but like can you see where that does just seem crazy to me?

Yeah of course I especially because in Europe I think it's pretty common that you're showing I do an idea to vote and it is really weird even I because I have to I do a lot of reading on this because it does seem kind of strange that I can just walk into a place and like I know where Sam lives I'm just going to say hey I'm Sam from one two three Smith Street I'm going to go ahead and vote now and they're like okay here you go that seems fucking great It does.

It does seem like really crazy. I can admit that. It seems like a relatively easy fix. Like a federal law... Well, so here's the issue, and this is again where I will blame conservatives because they've hijacked so many conversations with so many insane fucking claims. We can't even have a conversation about voter ID because a conservative will come to the voter ID conversation saying the reason why they're fighting against it is because they want mass

illegals to vote. They're importing them all. They're having them vote without IDs because they're trying to do mass ballot harvesting and mass ballot fraud and mass, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, well, I'm not going to make a fucking voter ID lot with this dude. This guy's fucking insane. sane, right? Because the conversation isn't even starting in a real place, which is one of the largest issues I have with a lot of the conservative talking points on stuff, where COVID lockdowns

too far, probably, but we can't have that conversation with conservatives because they think that lockdowns were done so that Jews could keep you locked up in your households or so that Bill Gates could go and fuck your, you know, wife or some shit, I don't know. And we can't have conversations on foreign policy because it's all done by the military industrial complex or it's just, like, even a good conversation that we could have about a particular issue is immediately hijacked by the conspiratorial nonsense from the other side. So now we don't even get to debate. the policy position. Do you think that that is a product of the right wing or a product of the right wing like on Twitter? It's an intentional product of the entirety of the right wing because

the reason is that they can't fight on policy because they've had none since at least 2016. So they have to make it about either perceived reality or about bullshit culture issues or about conspiracy paranoia. They can't possibly fight on policy because what the fuck policy would they even argue for? Tax cuts? Like what is the policy of the right? Now they're trying to say Well, we were actually, you know, we like pre-existing conditions from the Affordable Care Act. No, you didn't. The first thing Donald Trump did when he came into office was he tried to completely totally fucking get rid of it. It was only McCain's vote that stopped it.

And then they went to the Supreme Court to try to get rid of it. And now he's trying to say, well, Republicans like that the whole time? Bullshit. He's talking about inflation and budget deficits. Donald Trump ran a massive budget deficit. For what reason? Before COVID, there was no reason for that. And he wants to take credit for the economy at the same time.

He's doing wild, unhinged spending. Why? Why do you get to do both? So conservatives have just seen, but they don't care about the policy ground anymore. They just want to talk about Haitians eating dogs. even if it's a totally fucking fabricated story. I'm going to ask you some questions, which I know the answer to. Okay.

Because I've heard you give these answers before, but for the benefit of my audience. Okay. Somebody's listening, an American citizen, they say, I'm an undecided voter. You know, I've watched the debates. I'm not really sure who to vote for. I'm still looking for that smoking gun. What do you say to that person? I think it would depend on where they come from, because the type of answer is going to be a lot different.

I presume that they are, like, relatively knowledgeable about the actual policies by the party? If they're relatively knowledgeable, then I would say that the biggest issue is conservatives don't have a real vision for the United States of America, that right now the conservative party has gotten lost into a cult that is surrounded by Donald Trump. This is evidenced by the fact that Donald Trump doesn't talk policy. It's evidenced by the fact that Donald Trump makes it a part of his rhetoric and platform to attack like a rabid dog anybody that stands against him. It's why Donald Trump, anytime somebody says something bad, he's like, we're not going to help him win the re-election or like, you're going to lose in 2022 or whatever. Donald Trump backed

a whole bunch of bad candidates in 2022. A lot of them lost. They did way worse than they were expected to. We could go into all the January 6th stuff where Donald Trump lied and engaged in so many criminal conspiracies to try to flip the outcome of the election because he has no respect for the American vote for American institutions, for the institution of government. Just MAGA and Trump does not share that he does not have any of the values of what a core American is supposed to stand for. anytime you get a guy who is like the epitome of authoritarian leader, you know, saying things like the media is the enemy of the people, if warning sirens aren't going off in your head. I don't know what else he could possibly do.

So that's your answer to the question. Why should a person not vote for Donald Trump in the upcoming election? What are your biggest concerns about the left in the same respect. Like, what, if somebody were to say, were to make the, the best steelman case as to why you shouldn't vote for Kamala Harris, what would it look like? There is no statement for why you shouldn't vote for when the opposition is Donald Trump. In terms of issues that you could have, personally, I feel like the economic policy is too far to the left of what I would prefer. I don't even like to give these answers, actually, because conservatives are fucking morons. They don't even have good responses to her. This should go on your pay-walled patron or whatever.

But, like, I think it's bad economic policy to pretend that the solution to every problem, is to just like inject money into certain parts of the economy. And I believe that all three solutions that Kamala provided that were policy solutions on stage, which puts her ahead of Trump because she actually has some policy position, are just injecting money to different parts of the economy. When you talk about expanding the child tax credit, when you talk about giving a $15,000 tax credit to first-time home buyers, when you talk about giving a $50,000 deduction to start-up businesses, all of these are things that are ostensibly going to increase things like

inflation and put more upward pressure on things like homes or whatever other products and services poor people buy. I don't know if these are the most effective policies. I also feel like everybody's leaning a little bit too much into the protectionist bend right now. The MAGA people are hardcore protectionist, but I think that the left kind of enjoys the rhetoric around protectionism as well. Made in America. We're going to make our own stuff. These are things that I would like to see a strong, dare I say, the N-word on your show.

Neo-conservatives, okay, actually rise up and fight against, you know, some of the very far left-leaning economic policy. It's not socialist or communist, but it's quite far to the left, but we don't have that tension right now. a lot of the right wing policy is in a very roundabout way kind of left wing and that they're very like protectionist and very isolationist which isn't necessarily left wing but it's very like pro worker as long as you're like pro worker in a nativist sense so for the sake of fairness what are your concerns with a kamala harris victory at the election that side covered two um my concerns um i mean like i think that things will generally, I think that Biden's administration for people that aren't delusional ended up being way better than anybody thought it would have been. He passed a lot of legislation, some, a lot of it bipartisan, all of bipartisan, which people thought was impossible. The concerns for Kamala Harris, I feel like one of the things that helps the Democratic Party right now is I think it feels like a very big tent party. There's a lot of different groups inside of the Democratic

Party, and that gives them the ability to kind of like pull people back from the crazy extremes. Like, for instance, if Donald Trump has a bad debate performance, if you go up against Donald Trump, you're done. That's it. That's your last day in media. He's attacked Fox News. He goes after politicians that say bad things. You're over, okay?

Whereas on the left, when Biden has a bad debate performance, like, there's so much pressure from left-leaning media and from within the actual party and from the constituents, then Biden, the incumbent president, actually steps back to let his vice president run. It shows that there's a lot of internal pressure and stuff in the Democratic Party that's demanding some sort of like, you can call it a sanity check, but like there's a lot of people with a lot of interest here, and you need to make sure that you're functioning well to adhere to the constituent interest. In Donald Trump, the only interest is with Donald Trump. That's it. Do you think it was right for Biden to step down from the race? That was a really, really,

really hard one at the time. I said that the worries that could go either really good or really bad, so unless the polling got really bad, I was kind of against it. But I mean, in retrospect, I mean, it seemed okay. I think it was okay for him to do it or not do it. I think either situation could have been justified. Obviously, there were a lot of people that were leaning on. He should definitely do it. I think it has turned out really well. So retrospectively, I'd say it was good.

Perspectively, at the time, he could have made either decision. I commend him for making the decision. I wrote an essay at the time. It was on the day that he stepped down and out stepping down. I had written an essay basically calling for him to step down. And it was largely based on the reaction to the assassination attempt. I wrote this piece. It surprised a lot of my followers, actually, because I was, I suppose, a bit mean about Joe Biden.

But I really, especially, again, as an outsider, I sort of imagined in this essay, like, how would he have reacted to a similar incident? You know, like, I think I said that if the bullet didn't kill him, then the Secret Service for wrestling him to the ground probably would have done. It might have taken him 20 minutes to realize he'd been shot. Do you think that this idea of Biden's declining cognitive ability was a legitimate concern? No. Because looking at it from an outsider, as an outsider, I remember just looking at the way he. acted and behaved and seem to sort of not know where he was and not be able to string a sentence together as a legitimate concern that would really put me off.

I mean, we can say, yeah, we can say it might be a legitimate concern insofar as like Democrats actually have standards for behavior. So maybe it was a legitimate concern in that sense. But I mean, Donald Trump's inability to put together sentences that are coherent is undeniable. But it seems like it seems different. No, it doesn't. The only difference is that when Biden is speaking and he's searching for words, he kind of stops. Trump will infinitely fill the space with bullshit garbage that means.

Let me tell you about what it means. And I saw these things. And it was like, like, this is the challenge that I do. People will write down sometimes Biden's sentences and then read them off and say, write down a Trump sentence and just fucking read it out. It's unhinged. It's insanity. If there are so many things that Donald Trump says where if Biden would have said a single

one of these things, people would have had the same reaction. You got to go, dude. You're fucking crazy. The best example recently was Donald Trump in front of that economic forum. And they asked him, what specific policy would you enact to alleviate? at childhood poverty. And that answer was some of the most unbelievable, incoherent rambling I've ever heard of my entire life. And I think you got to clap for it at the end. But the standards are different. Like with the conservatives, if Donald Trump shows up and he hasn't

shit his pants in a way that's publicly visible, like he's doing a great job. And yeah, when the standards are that different, yeah, I can understand Biden being disappointing to people because there is the perception of him being senile or at least slower, which he's definitely slower. Is he senile? I'm not sure, maybe, maybe not. But Trump, there is no standard for Trump's speeches or Trump's behavior or what Trump says. Again, write any of him down and look It seems different to me in the sense that, like, Trump's an idiot, right? And, like, he can't string a sentence together in the sense that he, like, rambles and goes on tangents and just, just, you know, overuses ridiculous adjectives and all of this kind of stuff. But it seems like he's cognitively there in a way that Biden often seemed like he wasn't.

This might all, like, be appearances, but there's sort of different ways to stumble over your sentences. There's a way that makes it seem like you're actually losing the train of the thought. And there's a much more sort of ADHD sense in which you're just sort of going over here and then you're going over here and then you're saying this and then you're doing this catchphrase and you're trying to get it all in. Trump seemed much more like that, like the showman. Here's what I was. A low verbal IQ, but it's like cognitively there in a way that Biden.

If Biden spoke like Trump, you wouldn't notice a thing. If Biden just filled the space with random bullshit like Trump does, then he probably could just fill the space. But I said this in that debate where he had a really bad performance, the issue there wasn't his senility or his cognitive decline or anything. The issue was actually his approach to the debate. Listen to the two and the difference between what they're doing. They'll ask Biden, like, what are you going to do about immigration? And Biden is like trying to remember like 52 different fucking stats and numbers about what we've 22,000 border encounters and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, Trump is like, we have to do something. The border is worse than it's ever been. And that's why they support me. And that's why we're going to make this border the best border. I've seen the border and it's better than any border ever. And people like, yeah, Yeah, Trump seems like he's like there altogether. Well, he doesn't have to fucking remember anything. He's just saying random fucking gibberish. But that's like the expectation for behavior.

The biggest criticism of Biden is that Biden would have had the same type of answers. He probably could have to just rattle that shit off because you don't have to fucking think about it because Trump doesn't think about it. There's a pressure point that I applied to conservatives. Show me a single, a single fucking clip in the past eight years of Donald Trump speaking intelligently about any policy decision, domestic or foreign. You will not find a single one, not a single clip of the president of the United States. States speaking like he has any fucking wherewithal whatsoever about policy. Donald Trump, if you put him on stage right now, he wouldn't be able to tell you what a tariff is. He wouldn't be able to explain the responsibilities of the three branches of government. He wouldn't

be able to do it. He doesn't know what the Attorney General is for. He doesn't know what the Department of Justice. He has no fucking concept of any of these things. But he gets a pass by it because the media won't press him on it because they don't want to seem biased and because the supporters are fucking idiots. Hmm. Strong word. And another challenge for anyone who can find such a clip A reward of... Sure. Or if you want to argue with me about it, I'm totally, although conservatives are brightened.

A reward of $10 for Donald Trump speaking cogently. By any policy, domestic or foreign, or for the past eight years. Something that where you listen to the guy and you're like, oh, shit, this guy knows some shit. He knows some shit. We'll set up a special email address or something for the submissions. Kamala Harris was recently on the Cool Her Daddy podcast.

I think it's called. And a clip went viral where the host asks Kamala, can you think of a single law which restricts the bodily autonomy of men? And she says, no. And they sort of have a bit of a chuckle about it. The idea being, of course, whereas there is a plan for restrictive abortion laws that will restrict a woman's bodily autonomy, there's no such parallel for men's bodily autonomy. Twitter was set ablaze with people retweeting this and saying, what about the draft, which still exists in the sense of selective service. In the United States, males between the ages of 18 and 25, almost all males, have to sign up

for selective service, which essentially means signing up to potentially be called upon one day to die for an as yet undisclosed cause by an as yet undetermined government of an as yet undetermined political leaning, potentially being, and being forced to sign up for potentially one day being called to be killed, possibly incredibly violently, for that as yet undetermined cause. So a lot of people were very upset with this clip and said it was silly and unthinking to say that there are not laws which restrict male bodily autonomy. What do you make of that spat? From a philosophical standpoint, the debate on abortion is actual mindworms, like all the arguments made are, I think, really ridiculous. I do think it's, I mean, I guess you can quibble over

the selective service thing being another thing that does apply only to men. I think only men have to sign up for selective service in the United States. But it's in the real world, it's not even remotely equivalent. Like the, when was the last draft we had, I think was for Vietnam. The idea that having to sign up for selective service is the same as being denied, you know, rights to your body. If you believe, you know, in abortion or your pro choice, it's not even remotely comparable. So, yeah, you can say that, like, well, you know, the selective service thing makes this slogan or talking point, not the best talking point, but to bring that up as like some kind of reasonable count, like, well, actually, we have this restriction

where we have to do this, is like, bro, you're not getting drafted. Come on. Oh, what about another Vietnam? Another circumstance. We had another Vietnam. It was called Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn't draft for that. Sure. Yeah. But, I mean, is it not conceivable that there could be a circumstance in which this would happen? Again, I guess I'm trying to sort of steal man the Twitter I mean, could it happen? Personally, no, I don't think so anytime soon unless we get like fucking, you know, World War against Russia or China or some shit, which I, right now I don't foresee happening. But again, like it's not, again, it's not even remotely comparable to that right now

people are faced with issues relating to abortion and access to their body. Like right now, we don't need a hypothetical enemy or hypothetical war with a hypothetical draft that it will hypothetically affect a hypothetical amount of the population against a hypothetical enemy at some hypothetical point in time. Yeah, I saw a tweet about, um, about, about, uh, The consequence of sort of not signing up for the draft, rather the consequences of there being this selective service draft versus the consequences of there being restrictive abortion laws are like just unthinkably different. Like you don't sign up for the draft, you can't get your driver's license.

Restrictive abortion laws, women die in states with like super restrictive abortion laws. I'm not even sure about this. I don't even know if they have to force that selective service stuff. I'm not 100 sure. I think it's something, I think it is required by federal law. Yeah, but I mean, like, required by federal law. I think, like, for example, I think you need to do it, at least in some states to, like, get your driver's license. So, like, it's impossible to get your driver's license if you haven't signed up. That's the main thing that I know that I know that can't possibly be the case because in most states you can get at least like a POP, a provisional operators permit before you're 18. And I think you sign up for selective services at 18.

Now, maybe it's by the time you're 18, you have to show that you've got like your draft. Yeah, I think that's a case everywhere. That's what I've been seeing people discussing is saying, well, you know, I couldn't get my driver's license without this. But again, the circumstances are differently. It's also pointed out by this, by this thread, I wish I could remember her name. I'll put it on screen if I can find it, that, like, some of the biggest opponents of the draft have been historically feminists, the same feminists who campaign for, you know, looser abortion laws, who also say that if there is going to be a draft, then women should be drafted too. So, like, it's not necessarily a good two-cock way to have. But there's two senses in which this happens.

There's like, is it actually unfair for a left-winger to sort of ignore the draft? Like, I don't know, maybe whatever. But as a tactic, I think it might have been better for Kamala to have said. I mean, she might not have thought of it at the time. But can you imagine how much better it would have been, how kind of awesome it would be? No, it wouldn't have been better whatsoever. If she'd have just said, nope. I don't mean that she could have, that she should have said, like, well, yeah, I mean, there's a draft and it's really serious.

But even just to sort of say, like, I mean, can you think of anything? any laws which are strict male, bodily autonomy, to say something like, well, look, I mean, people are going to say the draft, but I think it's different for this reason, this reason, this reason, so no, I don't think there is such a law. Do you think that would have been a more considered answer? I understand what you're saying, but again, contributors delight in the fact that we just wasted 10 minutes talking about something that's so obviously fucking stupid, right? Consequentially, daintologically, however you want to analyze the action, right?

Even in a just world, we could probably justify by virtue of action of if we believe that a fetus isn't a human until some, you know, second, third trimester, whatever. that having abortion is good, but we could also probably say having a draft is good too, that if our country gets invaded, we need to be able to call up our people and we need to be able to fight a war.

Like, that's a morally good action. We could justify literally both of these things. There's no contradiction inherent in either of these. And most conservatives would probably even agree because the same conservatives arguing about the draft and it affecting men also probably say they don't want women to fight in wars anyways.

So it's just another good example of conservatives being able to yank the chain off of something and have a totally arbitrary, pointless, capricious conversation about, oh, well, what about drafting a men and blah, blah, blah. when we had I've had a draft for like 50 fucking years or more. Again, I agree.

Is it a dumb thing for Kamala, Kamala, Kamala? I don't even know how to pronounce her name anymore. Conservatives are so obsessed with saying it incorrectly. Kamala Harris, Kamala. There's, was it a dumb thing for her to say, maybe? But again, you're playing with a side that is like scouring every single fucking word for something to harp on. Meanwhile, for Trump, don't take them literally, just take them seriously.

The fuck is that even supposed to mean? Yeah, I mean, like people... The thing is Twitter was set ablaze, as I say. and I saw it sort of everywhere for a bit, and I saw people retweeting it, and I could so easily imagine, I know you say that Conservatives Delight when they waste 10 minutes talking about the draft,

but if they did that, I don't think that really hurts Harris's campaign. I don't think it gives any ammunition for right-wingers to complain about her, whereas because she was just like, no, like, no, there is no such law, obviously, that's what provides right-wingers' ammunition

to go crazy on Twitter, and there's going to need a lot of people who are going to see a tweet, they won't have even seen the clip, but now they see it on a little thread They see that there's a video. They hear us say that. They see the next tweet above it, which is somebody saying,

and then the next tweet above it says, what about the draft? And they go, oh, interesting. I understand what you're saying. As a good faith person waiting through the bullshit that is politics, I understand the feelings that you have. It's just this world is unworkable. I used to work at a casino when we wanted to get rid of an employee.

We call it papering somebody out the door. What it basically means is you see somebody, you're like, I want to fire this employee. I don't really have a great reason. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hound the cameras for two hours a day and find him fucking up enough, either not checking an ID on a credit card, not counting cash correctly.

This is true, probably any corporate job you'll work ever, or any service help or any job, because nobody is a perfect employee, right? To say that, like, well, if you would have just said this one thing better or this one thing or whatever, conservatives would harp or find 50 million other things, anything to avoid having the actual fucking conversation, the actual conversation of what do we think about abortion in the United States? What do we think about federal laws or Supreme Court rulings or whatever? Anything to avoid the conversation of substance and to yank the chain on some stupid irrelevant side point. And the idea that if we would have just avoided this one pitfall, when the other side is analyzing you for 50 million pitfalls, because they will they will look for 50 million pitfalls and 50 million things you can and it might be

this one thing that you fucked up but if you didn't it might be another thing that you fuck up or might be another thing you fuck up or might be like you can't that world is not survivable and all of this again is to avoid having the main conversation right if I was having a debate with somebody that I had respect for okay and you uttered that line to me let's say that I'm pro-life and you're poor choice and you said like well listen I can't think of any you know I can't think of any laws that restrict men's bodies the way that women's bodies are restricted right I'm not a fucking moron, so I understand the argument you're making. Now, I might quip at you and say, like, what about the draft?

But then I would immediately say, yeah, obviously, I know it's not the same. And then we would go in, we would have the real conversation because I'm not a fucking child, okay? But if I'm trying to win a debate, I don't know how much like formal debate or informal debate. What the fuck? I don't do formal debate. Informal debate you do, right? You're not actually to harp on that point and to jump down your throat and to fight, bite, bite, fight, fight, on that comparison and obsess over the draft, when I hear somebody do that, again,

because I'm not a fucking idiot, I know why they're doing that, and it's because they can't defend the point. And if you're attuned to how people debate, and you watch how people debate, and you know what debates are like, as soon as somebody starts doing these things where they're picking out, like, minor grievances and arguments, I think that Israel should have conducted themselves in this way, because in 1968, you know, there was the Six Day War and it was such a horrible thing or whatever, and you're, and all these, and you're like, six day war was 1967, okay, hold on. Like, the fact that you got this here wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah, and you hyper fix it. The reason why people do that, and I've done this, you know, five or six years ago when I used to be a little bit more. debate brain, is when you've lost a debate on the substance, you try to win on the deduction and the induction. You go to prop logic and you try to find any kind of minor error and then fight for contradiction and then expose that and just fight there all day because you've lost on substance. And that's all of the conservative argumentation. It's never debate on substance. It's always obsession with these fake stories on the media, with these minor misspeaks. It happened again. Elon Musk did it too with Wals, and they got him on the debate with this.

I don't know if Wals forgot where they said Wals wants to ban hate speech. They're doing that because of a clip that went viral on Twitter, that clip of him talking about banning certain types of speech was about banning people that were doing election misinformation, which is already federally illegal. He's not even saying anything contradictory to U.S. statute, to federal statute. It is illegal to lie about where you go to vote or how to submit like a vote.

You can't do that already, but they clipped that. They took it out of context, and now people think he wants to ban hate speech. He's never said that. You can go and find the original clip for that. But this is what I'm saying that, like, I wish you wouldn't have said that one thing. Or with me, when I debated leftist and I'm like, you know, the writing needs

to fucking stop, you know, these dipshit protesters that want to burn down buildings past 10 people and be like, you wanted to kill protests. I said protesters wanted to burn down buildings. Like, well, if you would have just said rioters, it would have been to say, bullshit. No, it would not have been, okay, if I would have said rioters.

Like, people are just harping on one thing. That world is bullshit. And to try to constantly rise to that standard of never, ever, ever, being even minorly incorrect on a non-central point when the other side is just frolicking through the fields of irrationality,

okay, it's, and it's unworkable. You can't do it. You can't exist in that world. I will challenge any conservative to have a debate on substance on any of these topics, and I will fucking annihilate them. There's a reason they all hide for me. But Tim Walts, you were in China three months after the massacre, and you said you were there while it happened. And also you said that you have become friends with school shooters. You must be a terrible person.

What a world. It's interesting that it's sometimes done and sometimes not. I suppose in some cases it's less obvious that it is a gaff. Like, I became friends with school shooters. Kind of funny. I want to ban hate speech. Kind of funny if you know that it's a misspeak, but not very funny if you don't. Perhaps we should wrap up in asking, what do we do here?

What do we do with the fact that people are so obsessed with catching people out with Zingers? I mean, it's nothing new in politics, but it's much more accessible social media, blah, blah, blah. You're obviously passionately against this approach to political debate, but people do it. So what do you do in the face of it? Do you do it back? Do you ignore it? Do you try to point out that people are doing it? Like, what do you do in the face of somebody who is doing this to you? My goal for future debates, and I'll get to pilot this because I've got one coming up in a few days with Owen Schroier, another anti-American traitor that was arrested for his behavior on January 6th.

My goal is just going to be, and we'll see how this goes, it's going to be a shit show. But like, I want to read three quotes, and I want you to acknowledge that those quotes are real. And my prediction is it's going to take 15 to 20 minutes just to get somebody to acknowledge that these quotes are real. You said, and like the first topic is going to be over, you said that the federal government, has failed in responding to this disaster. Do you acknowledge that Roy Cooper, Brian Kemp, and Ron DeSantis all said that they were getting

the federal support they needed? And it's going to be a whole bunch to talk around, a whole bunch, and I'm going to bring it back and say, do you acknowledge that these quotes are real? Because I don't think we can even do that. And it's, like, you see how many people are saying, like, the hurricane is made by machines.

It's, the world that we're in right now is unworkable. There has to be, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be reworked. People's ontological understanding of what a human is, and what our minds are designed to do and how we arrive at, you know,

correct conclusions and the types of things we look for. People have this really naive and stupid idea that you put a human in an environment with a ton of information and our senses are designed to derive what is true rather than what is pleasurable or satisfy some other sense or the idea that, you know,

the solution to bad speech is we just need more and more and more free speech when you would never, ever apply that rationale to anything else. I'm getting a lot of noise on this cable. Oh, we just need more signal noise and eventually everything will sort itself out or like, I don't really know, you know, which book here is correct.

give you 50 other books and then you'll be able to figure it all out like we only have so many attention resources at the end of the day we can't sort through an infinite amount of information and when there's no gatekeeping and there's no epistemic validity or source of truth in anything it's just it's a fucking disaster so what should i say to a family member or a friend who i'm debating with having a conversation with and then they start and one time they sort of go well it was actually 97 or 968 and you sort of go well okay whatever move on but then they sort of do it again, they say, oh, you got this wrong, how you got this wrong? And they start getting all sort of picky like that. What do you say to them in the context? You're not on a public

platform where it doesn't matter if they're not convinced because you're talking to the audience. You're at home with your family over the dinner table. How do you respond to that? I mean, it really depends on the particular subject. But personally, I think that it's good if you're doing art, if you're doing music, if you're doing editing for video. Sometimes it's good to take a step back and have like a macro perspective of like, what the fuck are we talking about this can happen in debates a lot where you get like super lost in the weeds not like we're going over individual facts but like we're just like very like i don't know where we're debating sometimes it's going to take a step back and like okay hold on what the fuck are we talking about right now

so when people get like really lost on the like well you know uh commo said this fucking thing and the democrats with the party of the fucking kKK and i think they did the um bigotry of low expectations and i think they're the real race and okay hold on me wait wait wait wait okay hold on let's let's step back and sanity check so right now you're saying that the democratic party are the ones that are like the real racist versus the conservative party. In the aggregate, do you think that that's true? And then on a macro reset, you can kind of, you know, now obviously they're not going to say that conservatives are the races or whatever.

But like today, if the KKK were to come back, do you think that the Democrats are the ones joining the KKK and not the conservative? Do you really think that that's true right now? Yeah, that's a really interesting example because you hear that all the time. It's like, well, who, you know, who founded the KKK? It was the Democrats. And it's like, okay, pause. Like, what hell do you mean by that?

I mean, are you trying to somehow imply that, like, the KKK is more aligned with the modern democratic. Yeah, exactly. It's going to just, like, sanity check. Yeah. Like, I mean, just, I would recommend, by the way, to not do that to your family. Don't say, what the hell are you talking about, you moron. But ask the question, be like, well, like, what are you saying here? Like, it's specific.

And I think oftentimes we need a bit of charitability. That's why I'm so uncomfortable with the mean tweets. Let's put it that way that you might have. Interpersonally, charitability, I think, is good. But I conduct myself all that different. I think it's not just good. I think it's effective. I think it works. It can be. But remember, being mean works too. There's a reason why they do it. It's because it drives up morale on their side and it demoralizes the other side. That's the reason why you dehumanize people and why you attack people is because it makes your people more energized and more righteous and it mobilizes them to go and vote against these evil, horrible Democrats or whatever. Like, it's effective. And if one side is allowed to utilize that tool effectively and the other side is to constantly chastise themselves for it, you're in an uneven environment where you're rewarding aggressive, toxic, parasitic behavior and you're punishing the other side for even venturing in, into the same realm as what the other side is doing.

It's not sustainable. Yeah, I don't know. Intuitively, I want to say that I half agree with you. I half agree with you on the sort of moral right thing. Like, if they can do it, why can't we? I think it would be better if no one was doing it, of course, but I'm not going to like Lex Friedman you and say, let's just get along.

Why can't we all just love each other? Do you think that you should ever preemptively nuclear strike somebody? Well, thanks for watching, everybody. That's about all we have time for. Man, that's a complicated question because I, I mean, ever in philosophy is a horrible term because like okay if it were the case that if i didn't then like you know a billion new earths are going to be created with nothing but billions of evil so you know sure maybe fine um but like i i'm not sure i can see a uh a circumstance in which preemptive

nuclear yeah it sounds really horrible but like let's say that you know for a certain fact that somebody else is about to launch nukes at you is there a political virtue and abstaining from first strike for nuclear weapons and your country is obliterated but like at the very least you martyred yourselves for your good politically virtuous cause i actually don't know right really for sure but i i am totally willing to to say that intuitively yeah okay yeah i can see a circumstance in which that's okay and i suppose you're pulling an analogy here with like i'm saying that the world only functions anything whether it's social groups whether it's relationships if both are playing by the same you have to be playing by the same or at least like roughly the same set of

standards. That when one set of standards dramatically changes, remember, again, there is a reason why people engage in bad behavior, because there's usually a reward for it. And you cannot allow it aside to continually engage in that behavior while you have to play by a different set of rules. It's not sustainable. You will be destroyed. Yeah, that's how fascism works, I think. Not to say that this is fascism, but that is one of the big fears of fascism or one of the big problems of fascism is that when you have essentially monopoly on political violence, not just because of the institution of the state, but also because of like the moral principle of your opposition, it's kind of a recipe for disaster.

And I think that's actually why a lot of left wingers, you know, post-World War II are much more sort of friendly to the idea of like political violence than perhaps they would have been without that episode in our history. It's hard to say. I don't know. But yeah, what I was going to say is that the moral right thing, fine. The effective political tactic thing, I'm still unconvinced of it's. sounds like maybe you know not when they go like we go high like when they go low we dive right in

there with them we battle them in the mud and then hopefully win and then we can like all clamber back out out of the mud afterwards that's what you do fucking a amen everybody ends up in the mud exactly it's not what we want well stephen i'm glad that i braced the hurricane to be here in florida in order to have this conversation and i'm not talking about the weather of course So I'm talking about the hurricane of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Remember to register to vote, people. I don't know when this is going out. It might have already been time up.

I don't know when the deadline is in the last state, whenever that is. But if there's time, remember to do it. Remember to do it, yeah. It's important. But I suppose, you know, don't worry about getting your passport renewed before you do so or something. Yeah, Stephen, thanks. It's been heavy. It's been interesting.

And I am intrigued. As I always say at the end of my podcasts, but particularly true, to see what people think of this one. So thanks. Thanks so much for having the conversation. Cool. To get early access to videos, add free, and support the channel, subscribe to my substack at alexoConnor.com.