Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism

00:00:00.000 | something has to happen with Iran.

00:00:01.740 | There has to be some diplomatic bilateral

00:00:03.520 | communication there.

00:00:04.720 | - No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran.

00:00:06.640 | - History moves in one direction.

00:00:08.280 | - Right. - Why?

00:00:09.200 | - Because of time.

00:00:10.160 | - Communism, Nazism, all of that was a regression

00:00:13.080 | from what was happening at, for example,

00:00:14.360 | the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century.

00:00:16.600 | - In what way?

00:00:17.760 | - Do you think that today Donald Trump knows

00:00:19.240 | that he lost the election?

00:00:20.080 | - Absolutely.

00:00:21.000 | - So I don't.

00:00:22.360 | - This is one of the areas where we get into this.

00:00:24.080 | I don't understand if there's like brain breaking happening

00:00:27.420 | or what's going on.

00:00:28.260 | I don't know what world we can ever live in

00:00:30.120 | where we say that Trump is less divisive

00:00:32.640 | for the country than Biden.

00:00:33.920 | - Joe Biden literally used the Occupational Safety

00:00:36.800 | and Hazard Administration to try to cram down

00:00:38.880 | VAX mandates on 80 million Americans.

00:00:40.840 | That's insane.

00:00:41.720 | - What about supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?

00:00:43.160 | And then you're done.

00:00:44.000 | - What about pneumoultramicroscopics?

00:00:44.820 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:00:45.660 | - Or the science terms.

00:00:46.500 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:00:47.320 | - Or what about the 7,000 letter thing

00:00:48.160 | that's from part of a biochemical?

00:00:49.440 | - I got my education in the Soviet Union,

00:00:51.480 | so we just did math.

00:00:52.680 | - That's why you're a useful person.

00:00:54.660 | - Does body count matter?

00:00:57.020 | (air whooshing)

00:00:59.220 | - The following is a debate

00:01:00.460 | between Ben Shapiro and Destiny,

00:01:03.060 | each arguably representing the right

00:01:05.060 | and the left of American politics, respectively.

00:01:08.360 | They are two of the most influential

00:01:10.340 | and skilled political debaters in the world.

00:01:12.780 | This debate has been a long time coming, for many years.

00:01:17.200 | It's about 2.5 hours,

00:01:19.100 | and we could have easily gone for many more,

00:01:21.660 | and I'm sure we will.

00:01:23.960 | It is only round one.

00:01:27.020 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:28.700 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:30.620 | in the description.

00:01:31.700 | And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro and Destiny.

00:01:35.700 | Ben, you're a conservative.

00:01:38.460 | Destiny, you're a liberal.

00:01:40.380 | Can you each describe what key values

00:01:42.540 | underpin your philosophy on politics,

00:01:44.620 | and maybe life in the context

00:01:46.540 | of this left-to-right political spectrum?

00:01:49.180 | You wanna go first?

00:01:50.260 | - Yeah, so I think that we have a huge country

00:01:54.060 | full of a lot of people,

00:01:55.440 | a lot of individual talents, capabilities,

00:01:58.340 | and I think that the goal of government, broadly speaking,

00:02:01.840 | should be to try to ensure that everybody's able

00:02:03.980 | to achieve as much as possible.

00:02:05.980 | So on a liberal level,

00:02:07.860 | that usually means some people might need

00:02:09.740 | a little bit of a boost

00:02:10.580 | when it comes to things like education.

00:02:12.780 | They might need a little bit of a boost

00:02:13.980 | when it comes to providing certain necessities,

00:02:15.900 | like housing or food or clothing.

00:02:18.300 | But broadly speaking, I mean, I'm still a liberal,

00:02:20.520 | not a communist or a socialist.

00:02:21.680 | I don't believe in the total command economy,

00:02:24.240 | total communist takeover of all of the economy.

00:02:27.800 | But I think that, broadly speaking,

00:02:28.960 | the government should kind of kick in

00:02:30.040 | and help people when they need it.

00:02:32.040 | - And that government can and should be big.

00:02:34.880 | - Not necessarily.

00:02:36.360 | I noticed that when liberals talk about government,

00:02:38.440 | especially taxes, it seems like they talk about it

00:02:40.380 | for taxes' sake or bigness' sake.

00:02:43.680 | So people talk about taxes sometimes as like a punishment,

00:02:46.520 | like tax the rich.

00:02:48.200 | I think taxing the rich is fine

00:02:49.600 | insofar as it funds the programs that we want to fund.

00:02:52.880 | But Democrats have a really big problem

00:02:54.940 | demonizing success or wealth.

00:02:56.680 | And I don't think that's a bad thing.

00:02:58.180 | I don't think it's a bad thing to be wealthy,

00:03:00.160 | to be a billionaire or whatever,

00:03:01.240 | as long as we're funding what we need to fund.

00:03:03.540 | - Ben, what do you think it means to be a conservative?

00:03:05.520 | What's the philosophy that underlies your political view?

00:03:07.960 | - So first of all, I'm glad that, Destiny,

00:03:09.800 | you're already coming out as a Republican.

00:03:11.060 | That's exciting.

00:03:12.040 | I mean, we hold a lot in common in terms of

00:03:15.240 | the basic idea that

00:03:16.920 | people ought to have as much opportunity as possible,

00:03:20.800 | and also insofar as the government should do

00:03:24.720 | the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people's lives

00:03:29.240 | in order to pursue certain functions,

00:03:31.640 | particularly at the local level.

00:03:33.460 | So a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level

00:03:36.120 | end up being discussions about

00:03:37.680 | where government ought to be involved,

00:03:39.120 | but also at what level government ought to be involved.

00:03:42.640 | And I have an incredibly subsidiary view of government.

00:03:45.960 | I think that local governments,

00:03:48.160 | because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent,

00:03:52.240 | are capable of doing more things.

00:03:54.000 | And as you abstract up the chain,

00:03:55.880 | it becomes more and more impractical

00:03:57.400 | and more and more divisive to do more things.

00:03:59.780 | In my view, government is basically there

00:04:02.040 | to preserve certain key liberties.

00:04:05.120 | Those key liberties preexist the government

00:04:08.920 | insofar as they are more important

00:04:11.120 | than what priorities the government has.

00:04:13.840 | The job of government is to maintain,

00:04:17.080 | for example, national defense,

00:04:19.040 | protection of property rights,

00:04:20.840 | protection of religious freedom.

00:04:22.680 | These are the key focuses of government

00:04:25.240 | as generally expressed

00:04:26.360 | in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

00:04:27.960 | And I agree with the general philosophy

00:04:29.440 | of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

00:04:31.400 | Now, that doesn't mean, by the way,

00:04:32.360 | that you can't do more on a governmental level,

00:04:34.080 | again, as you get closer to the ground,

00:04:35.600 | which, by the way, is also embedded in the Constitution.

00:04:37.560 | People forget the Constitution

00:04:38.680 | was originally applied to the federal government,

00:04:40.240 | not to local and state governments.

00:04:42.600 | But if I were gonna define conservatism,

00:04:45.400 | it would actually be a little broader than that,

00:04:46.520 | because I think to understand

00:04:47.520 | how people interact with government,

00:04:48.880 | you have to go to kind of core values.

00:04:50.760 | And so for me, there are a couple of premises.

00:04:53.360 | One, human beings have a nature.

00:04:54.840 | That nature is neither good nor bad.

00:04:57.200 | We have aspects of goodness,

00:04:58.560 | and we have aspects of badness.

00:04:59.880 | Human beings are sinful, we have temptations.

00:05:02.640 | And what that means is that we have to be careful

00:05:05.160 | not to incentivize the bad,

00:05:06.760 | and that we should incentivize the good.

00:05:08.560 | Human beings do have agency

00:05:09.800 | and are capable of making decisions

00:05:11.440 | in the vast majority of circumstances,

00:05:13.960 | and it is better for society if we act as though they do.

00:05:17.240 | Second, the basic idea of human nature.

00:05:20.400 | There is an idea, in my view,

00:05:22.040 | that all human beings have equal value before the law.

00:05:25.560 | I'm a religious person,

00:05:26.840 | so I'd say equal value before God,

00:05:28.080 | but I think that's also sort of a key tenet

00:05:29.600 | of Western civilization, being non-religious or religious,

00:05:31.760 | that every individual has equivalent value

00:05:34.720 | in sort of cosmic terms.

00:05:36.640 | But that does not necessarily mean

00:05:38.120 | that every person is equally equipped

00:05:39.680 | to do everything equally well,

00:05:41.080 | and so it is not the job of government

00:05:42.760 | to rectify every imbalance of life.

00:05:45.240 | The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell suggests,

00:05:48.560 | is something that government

00:05:49.560 | is generally incapable of doing,

00:05:51.080 | and more often than not botches and makes things worse.

00:05:54.840 | So those are a few key tenets,

00:05:56.160 | and that tends to materialize in a variety of ways.

00:05:59.720 | The easiest way to sum that up,

00:06:01.520 | the traditional kind of three legs of the conservative stool,

00:06:04.560 | although now, obviously,

00:06:05.400 | there's a very fragmented conservative movement

00:06:07.160 | in the United States,

00:06:08.080 | would be a socially conservative view

00:06:10.120 | in which family is the chief institution of society,

00:06:13.480 | like the little platoons of society,

00:06:14.960 | as Edmund Burke suggested,

00:06:16.680 | in which free market and property rights

00:06:21.320 | are extraordinarily valuable and necessary

00:06:24.760 | because every individual has the ability

00:06:27.120 | to be creative with their property

00:06:28.840 | and to freely alienate that property.

00:06:32.920 | And finally, I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy

00:06:36.640 | that suggests that the world is not filled

00:06:38.120 | with wonderful people who all agree with us

00:06:40.040 | and think like us,

00:06:41.120 | and those people will pursue adversarial interests

00:06:43.640 | if we do not protect our own interests.

00:06:46.880 | - Can I ask a question on that?

00:06:47.720 | I'm so curious, okay. - Yeah, sure, sure.

00:06:49.800 | - I'm excited for this conversation

00:06:50.800 | 'cause I consider you to be really intelligent,

00:06:53.720 | but I feel like sometimes there are ways

00:06:55.280 | that conservatives talk about certain issues

00:06:57.520 | that seem to defy logic and reason, I guess.

00:07:00.520 | So, and I'm sure you feel the same way about,

00:07:02.640 | well, I feel the same way about progressives,

00:07:04.160 | but even some liberals, for sure.

00:07:05.920 | Before I ask this question,

00:07:07.840 | it's gonna relate to education,

00:07:09.240 | we can agree broadly speaking that statistics are real

00:07:13.000 | and that not everybody could do everything.

00:07:15.800 | So for a grounded example, my life was pretty bad.

00:07:18.600 | I got into streaming and I turned my life around

00:07:20.880 | and that was really cool,

00:07:21.920 | but I can't expect everybody to do what I did, right?

00:07:25.000 | Like everybody being able to join the NBA

00:07:26.640 | or to be like a streamer.

00:07:27.760 | - Well, of course, everybody has different qualities, sure.

00:07:29.360 | - Okay, so I used to be a lot more libertarian

00:07:32.560 | when I was 20, 21, and one of the things

00:07:34.400 | that dramatically changed kind of my view

00:07:36.080 | on government manipulation of things in the,

00:07:39.680 | I guess in society, came when it came time

00:07:42.600 | to deal with my son and the school that he went to.

00:07:45.260 | And one of the things that I noticed was

00:07:47.360 | when it came time to send my son to school,

00:07:48.960 | I could either do private education or I could do public.

00:07:51.240 | Personally, I did 12 years of Catholic private education.

00:07:54.780 | However, the public schools in Nebraska,

00:07:56.800 | depending on where you lived, were very, very, very good.

00:07:59.360 | And I opted for a certain district, I bought a house there,

00:08:02.320 | I moved there, and then my son was able

00:08:03.720 | to go to those schools.

00:08:04.960 | And he's been going through those schools.

00:08:06.920 | And the difference of availability of like technology,

00:08:10.020 | like these kids are taking home iPads in like first grade.

00:08:13.280 | They've got like huge computer labs and everything.

00:08:16.200 | Do you think that there is some type of,

00:08:19.160 | I don't wanna say injustice or unfairness,

00:08:20.960 | 'cause I'm not even looking at it that way,

00:08:22.320 | just pragmatically, that there might be children

00:08:24.880 | that are in certain schools

00:08:26.640 | that if they just had better funding

00:08:28.160 | or more access to technologies or things available to them,

00:08:31.740 | that those kids would become more productive members

00:08:34.240 | of society, that with like a little bit of a help,

00:08:36.240 | they could actually achieve more

00:08:37.840 | and do better for all of society?

00:08:39.280 | - So I think that on the list of priorities,

00:08:41.160 | when it comes to education, the availability of technology

00:08:43.920 | is actually fairly low on the list of priorities.

00:08:46.240 | - Sure, the two things I've heard are food availability

00:08:48.800 | and I think air conditioning, I think are the two biggest

00:08:50.680 | ones that I hear, but sure.

00:08:51.520 | - I mean, the biggest thing in terms of education itself,

00:08:53.840 | not just the physical facilities that we're talking about,

00:08:56.580 | would actually be two parent family households.

00:08:59.920 | - Sure.

00:09:00.760 | - Communities that have fathers in them

00:09:02.640 | is actually the number one,

00:09:03.680 | decisive according to Roland Fryer

00:09:04.960 | and many studies done on this particular topic.

00:09:07.140 | And the idea that money alone, that investment of resources

00:09:11.300 | is the top priority in schooling is belied by the fact

00:09:13.760 | that LAUSD, which is where I went to school

00:09:15.520 | when I was younger, they pour an enormous amount of money

00:09:18.000 | into LAUSD, we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars

00:09:21.240 | very often per student, and it does not result

00:09:23.600 | in better schooling outcomes.

00:09:25.760 | And so when you say, if we could give every kid an iPad,

00:09:29.280 | would you give every kid an iPad?

00:09:30.960 | The question is not if I had a replicator machine

00:09:33.520 | from Star Trek, would I give everybody

00:09:34.720 | an enormous amount of stuff?

00:09:35.560 | Sure, I would, every resource is finite,

00:09:37.920 | every resource is limited and you have to prioritize

00:09:40.400 | what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means

00:09:45.400 | with which you are seeking them.

00:09:47.040 | And so, again, I think that the question is,

00:09:50.400 | I quibble with the premise of the question,

00:09:52.280 | which is that, again, the chief injustice

00:09:55.480 | when it comes to education on the list of injustices

00:09:58.100 | is lack of availability to technology

00:10:00.600 | or that it's a funding problem.

00:10:01.920 | I just don't think that's the case.

00:10:02.920 | - Sure, and I can half agree with you there,

00:10:04.880 | but I don't think any amount of changes in the schools

00:10:08.120 | will create two-parent households, right?

00:10:10.240 | We can't bring a--

00:10:11.080 | - I totally agree with you.

00:10:12.440 | That's why I think that the fundamental educational problem

00:10:14.640 | is not, in fact, a schooling problem.

00:10:16.120 | I think that it pre-exists that.

00:10:17.400 | - Sure, but then I feel like we're,

00:10:18.920 | now I feel like this is kind of the conservative merry-go-round

00:10:21.720 | where it's like, what can we do to help with schools?

00:10:24.300 | So two of the things that I've seen, I think,

00:10:26.040 | that are usually brought up in research is,

00:10:27.560 | one is air conditioning,

00:10:28.680 | that children in hotter environments

00:10:30.280 | just don't learn as well.

00:10:31.560 | And then the second one is access to food.

00:10:34.120 | So kids that are given a breakfast or a lunch

00:10:36.240 | that's provided at school increases educational outcomes.

00:10:38.920 | Now, I agree that neither of these things

00:10:40.380 | might be determinative in, well,

00:10:42.760 | 20% of kids are graduating

00:10:43.960 | and now 80% of kids are graduating,

00:10:45.360 | or these kids are all going with their GEDs

00:10:48.280 | into the workforce,

00:10:49.120 | and now these kids are all suddenly becoming engineers.

00:10:51.240 | But in terms of where we can help,

00:10:53.440 | do you think there should be some minimum threshold

00:10:55.680 | or minimum baseline of like, at the very least,

00:10:58.280 | every school should have a non-leaky gym,

00:11:00.500 | or every school should have,

00:11:02.260 | if children can't afford lunch or breakfast,

00:11:03.920 | like some sort of food provided,

00:11:05.040 | or every school should have these baseline things?

00:11:07.440 | - So, again, I'm gonna quibble

00:11:09.280 | with the premise of the question,

00:11:10.260 | because I think that when it comes to, for example,

00:11:11.640 | food insecurity, school food programs,

00:11:15.160 | again, you can always pour money into any program

00:11:17.240 | and at the margins create change.

00:11:19.240 | I mean, there's no doubt that pouring money onto anything

00:11:21.240 | will create change in a marginal way.

00:11:23.120 | The question is how large is the margin

00:11:24.560 | and how big is the movement, right?

00:11:26.320 | So the delta is what I'm looking at.

00:11:28.200 | And so I think that the,

00:11:29.920 | you're starting at a second order question,

00:11:32.060 | which is what if we ignore what I would think

00:11:34.360 | are the big primary questions of education,

00:11:36.320 | namely family structure, value of education at home,

00:11:38.800 | how much you have parents who are capable

00:11:40.560 | or willing to help with homework.

00:11:42.080 | What are the incentive structures we can set up

00:11:43.400 | for a society that actually facilitate that?

00:11:45.500 | How local communities take ownership of their schools

00:11:47.800 | is a big one, right?

00:11:48.760 | All of these issues we're ignoring

00:11:50.280 | in favor of, say, air conditioning or lunch programs.

00:11:52.660 | And so in a vacuum, if you say air conditioning

00:11:54.660 | and lunch programs, sounds great in a vacuum.

00:11:56.740 | In terms of prioritization of values and cost structure,

00:12:00.700 | are those the things that I think are gonna move the needle

00:12:02.960 | in a major way in terms of public policy?

00:12:05.100 | I do not.

00:12:06.900 | And in fact, I think that many of them

00:12:08.820 | ends up being disproportionate wastes of money.

00:12:11.220 | I mean, I've talked before pretty controversially

00:12:13.500 | about the fact that an enormous amount

00:12:15.260 | of school lunch programs are thrown out.

00:12:17.020 | Like an enormous amount of that food

00:12:18.900 | ends up in the garbage can.

00:12:20.560 | Is there a better way to do that?

00:12:21.820 | If there is a better way to do it,

00:12:22.940 | then I'm perfectly willing to hear about

00:12:24.180 | that better way to do it.

00:12:25.180 | But it seems to me that one of the big flaws

00:12:26.980 | in the way that many people of the left approach government

00:12:30.020 | is what if we hit every gnat with a hammer?

00:12:32.280 | And my question is, what if the gnat isn't even the problem?

00:12:36.740 | What if there is a much bigger substructure problem

00:12:38.780 | that needs to be solved in order to,

00:12:41.060 | if you're shifting deck chairs on the Titanic,

00:12:43.180 | sure, you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced

00:12:45.620 | because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented.

00:12:47.860 | But the real question is the water

00:12:49.220 | that's gaping into the Titanic, right?

00:12:50.940 | - Yeah, and I agree with you 100%.

00:12:53.100 | But again, I feel like we're on

00:12:54.540 | the conservative merry-go-round then

00:12:55.780 | of never wanting to address--

00:12:57.220 | - I'm not a conservative merry-go-round.

00:12:58.420 | I can give you 10 ways.

00:12:59.820 | - Well, sure, but so here would be the merry-go-round.

00:13:01.220 | I would say that there is a minimum funding

00:13:02.860 | for schools that I think would help children.

00:13:04.380 | And then we go, well, the thing that would help them

00:13:05.700 | the most is two-parent households.

00:13:06.700 | Then I go, okay, well, two-parent households

00:13:08.220 | actually aren't the problem.

00:13:09.660 | The issue is access to things like birth controls,

00:13:11.660 | that people don't have children early on.

00:13:13.500 | But the issue isn't actually birth control.

00:13:15.080 | The issue is actually you need a certain amount of money

00:13:17.180 | to move out early and to get married

00:13:18.940 | and then to have a two-parent household.

00:13:20.100 | So it's actually like economic opportunity.

00:13:21.900 | - No, no, just two-parent households.

00:13:24.300 | That's it. - Yeah, but like,

00:13:25.140 | what are the precursors-- - Don't fuck people

00:13:26.180 | before you're married and have babies.

00:13:27.020 | - Sure. - Done.

00:13:28.100 | - That's great.

00:13:28.940 | We can say that and try to fight against, you know,

00:13:30.900 | however many hundreds of thousands of years

00:13:32.140 | of human evolution, but people will have sex

00:13:33.540 | and people will make babies.

00:13:34.380 | - And then they used to get married.

00:13:35.820 | The vast majority of people in this country

00:13:37.700 | with kids used to be married.

00:13:39.220 | The vast majority of people with kids in this country

00:13:41.660 | now are not married increasingly.

00:13:43.660 | That is obviously a societal change.

00:13:45.300 | Something changed. - Yeah, true.

00:13:46.140 | - It wasn't human evolution.

00:13:46.980 | - But a lot of those things in terms of resting

00:13:48.540 | on whether or not people get married

00:13:49.740 | have to do with financial decisions.

00:13:51.220 | Do you have the money-- - People are worse off now

00:13:52.980 | than they were 50, 60 years ago

00:13:54.140 | when the marriage rates were higher?

00:13:54.980 | - People are delaying the start of their careers

00:13:56.580 | because education's gonna be increasingly important.

00:13:58.460 | - So, in other words, people are richer now

00:14:00.860 | and they have more education now

00:14:02.020 | and yet they're having more babies out of wedlock now

00:14:03.860 | because they're richer and have more education?

00:14:05.300 | - I'm saying that one of the biggest indicators

00:14:07.820 | for whether or not somebody's willing to get married

00:14:09.220 | is how much money both people are making

00:14:10.420 | if they can move out of their household.

00:14:11.780 | People don't tend to wanna get married at 22

00:14:13.780 | when they've just finished college,

00:14:14.820 | when they don't have the money to move out

00:14:15.740 | and they can't afford a house.

00:14:16.580 | - Because we have changed the moral status

00:14:18.100 | of marriage in the culture,

00:14:19.140 | meaning that everyone, poor, rich, and in-between,

00:14:21.380 | used to get married.

00:14:22.940 | By the way, a huge percentage of marriages

00:14:24.300 | in the United States used to be

00:14:25.260 | what they would call shotgun marriages,

00:14:26.420 | meaning that somebody knocked somebody up

00:14:27.700 | and because they did not want the baby to be born

00:14:29.580 | outside of a two-parent household,

00:14:31.060 | they would then get married.

00:14:32.120 | - Do we think that shotgun marriages, though,

00:14:33.820 | are a way to bring back equilibrium to education?

00:14:36.660 | - Yes, yes, absolutely.

00:14:39.340 | Yes, 100%.

00:14:40.500 | - Do we think that-- - Each house deserves

00:14:41.340 | a mother and a father. - Sure.

00:14:42.340 | - Because that is the basis

00:14:43.180 | for all of this, including education.

00:14:44.340 | - Do we think that shotgun marriages are,

00:14:46.580 | well, let's say this.

00:14:47.600 | Do we think that that's a reasonable direction

00:14:49.260 | that society would ever take?

00:14:50.340 | Or is this like--

00:14:51.180 | - Yes, it was the reasonable direction

00:14:52.000 | for nearly all of modern history.

00:14:52.840 | - It was, but history moves in one direction.

00:14:55.180 | - Right. - Why?

00:14:56.100 | - Because of time.

00:14:56.940 | - I mean, people don't think that's a,

00:14:58.380 | in what way is that?

00:14:59.220 | - As in, I don't think we've ever regressed

00:15:01.740 | social standards back to, oh, well,

00:15:03.500 | let's go 100 years back and do things

00:15:05.060 | that used to exist before.

00:15:06.380 | I think that's like-- - That's weird.

00:15:07.220 | The entire left right now is arguing

00:15:08.040 | that we regressed social standards

00:15:08.900 | by rejecting Roe versus Wade,

00:15:09.940 | so that's obviously not true.

00:15:11.260 | - The Roe versus Wade is not a social standard.

00:15:12.780 | It's a Supreme Court ruling, number one.

00:15:14.140 | Number two, if you read the actual majority opinion

00:15:16.720 | on Roe v. Wade, we can see that socially,

00:15:18.200 | we actually never made huge progress

00:15:20.200 | on how society viewed abortion.

00:15:22.080 | This has always been an incredibly divisive thing, right?

00:15:24.420 | Even, that was, I think, part of Alito's writing on it

00:15:27.080 | was that things like gay marriage, for instance,

00:15:28.580 | we've kind of moved past,

00:15:29.640 | and it's not really as debated anymore,

00:15:31.200 | but abortion was never a settled topic,

00:15:33.280 | despite Roe v. Wade's high cases.

00:15:34.120 | - The notion that the arc of history

00:15:35.440 | constantly moves in one direction

00:15:36.680 | is belied by nearly all of the 20th century.

00:15:39.440 | - What do we mean by that?

00:15:40.480 | - I mean, I mean,

00:15:41.320 | half of the 20th century-- - In terms of like,

00:15:42.140 | women's rights, civil rights--

00:15:42.980 | - Terrorism, communism, Nazism,

00:15:44.920 | all of that was a regression

00:15:46.440 | from what was happening at, for example,

00:15:47.720 | the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century.

00:15:49.960 | - In what way?

00:15:51.680 | - Nazism and communism weren't a regression

00:15:53.120 | from what was going on in 1905.

00:15:54.640 | - Well, in terms of communism being a regression,

00:15:57.040 | for instance, I'm not a communist,

00:15:58.560 | but the industrialization of the Soviet Union

00:16:00.480 | happened under a communist society.

00:16:02.160 | The industrialization--

00:16:03.000 | - So the murder of tens of millions of people.

00:16:04.660 | - Yeah, there's obviously--

00:16:05.500 | - I consider that a regression, a moral regression,

00:16:07.440 | which is what we are talking about now, moral regression.

00:16:09.600 | And you're suggesting that moral regression,

00:16:11.680 | I wouldn't term a return to traditional values

00:16:13.780 | a moral regression, you would,

00:16:15.300 | but your suggestion is that history

00:16:17.140 | only moves in one direction.

00:16:18.060 | And I'm suggesting that history

00:16:18.980 | does not only move in one direction,

00:16:20.500 | it tends to move actually back and forth.

00:16:22.780 | - Sure, I don't think that all of history

00:16:24.280 | moves in one direction.

00:16:25.660 | There are gonna be wars,

00:16:26.540 | there are gonna be times of peace.

00:16:27.700 | I think in general, we're more peaceful now

00:16:29.300 | than we have been in the past.

00:16:30.420 | But I think when we look at the way

00:16:31.580 | that people live their lives,

00:16:33.040 | I think that we tend to move in a certain direction socially.

00:16:35.860 | So when it comes to things like racism,

00:16:37.420 | or when it comes to things like slavery or women's rights,

00:16:39.520 | I think that there are two huge things

00:16:40.980 | that probably aren't changing in the US.

00:16:42.300 | And one is access to contraception,

00:16:43.820 | and one is women working jobs.

00:16:45.620 | I think that these two things are probably huge things

00:16:47.460 | that are moving us off of shotgun marriages

00:16:49.820 | or getting married very early on.

00:16:51.500 | And I don't see those,

00:16:52.340 | do you think that those two things

00:16:53.560 | are gonna change fundamentally?

00:16:54.400 | - First of all, what the data tend to show

00:16:55.520 | is that actually more highly educated people,

00:16:58.680 | as you were saying, tend to get married more.

00:17:00.540 | So the idea is that women getting an education

00:17:02.540 | somehow throws them off marriage, it's the opposite.

00:17:05.040 | Usually it's women who are not educated

00:17:06.480 | when they're married. - But those women

00:17:07.320 | aren't getting shotgun marriages.

00:17:08.520 | Those women aren't having children

00:17:09.360 | when they're 18, 17. - Yeah, but now,

00:17:10.180 | you're shifting the topic.

00:17:11.020 | My topic was how to get more people married.

00:17:13.800 | And then you suggested that higher levels of education

00:17:17.620 | are delaying marriage and making it less probable.

00:17:19.840 | And what I'm telling you,

00:17:21.160 | because this is what the data suggests,

00:17:22.680 | is that actually as you raise up the educational ladder,

00:17:26.340 | people tend to be married more

00:17:27.780 | than they are lower down on the educational ladder.

00:17:29.520 | If you're a high school graduate,

00:17:30.660 | you're less likely to be married than if you're a postdoc.

00:17:33.600 | - I agree with you,

00:17:34.560 | but that's because one of the biggest precursors

00:17:36.200 | to getting married is having a level of economic stability.

00:17:38.540 | So as people get more educated,

00:17:39.760 | they obtain this economic stability,

00:17:41.160 | and then they're in a more comfortable position

00:17:42.400 | to explore more serious relationships.

00:17:43.240 | - There's another confound there.

00:17:44.280 | I mean, the confound is that people in stable marriages

00:17:47.640 | tend to be the children of stable marriages,

00:17:49.200 | and there's only one way to break that cycle,

00:17:50.520 | which is to create a stable marriage.

00:17:51.940 | And that is something that is in everyone's hands.

00:17:54.000 | Again, this notion that it is somehow an unbreakable,

00:17:56.800 | unshatterable barrier to get married and have kids,

00:17:59.360 | I don't understand where this is coming from.

00:18:01.360 | Why is that such a challenge?

00:18:03.000 | It's not a challenge. - I don't think it's

00:18:03.840 | unbreakable or unshatterable.

00:18:05.200 | I was just, the initial point was for school,

00:18:07.640 | if we can provide a minimum level of educational stuff

00:18:11.000 | for children, that'd probably be good.

00:18:12.560 | But when we retreat back to,

00:18:13.920 | well, it has to be the families that are fixed first,

00:18:16.160 | fixing families is a multivariate problem.

00:18:18.680 | - Matt, I am fine.

00:18:19.800 | Within my local community, we all vote.

00:18:21.420 | Again, I've suggested that there's a difference

00:18:23.000 | between local community and federal.

00:18:24.640 | I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches

00:18:27.400 | or air conditioning or whatever it is

00:18:28.880 | that we all agree to do.

00:18:30.080 | Because the more local you get,

00:18:31.300 | the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest,

00:18:33.240 | and the more interest you have in your neighbors.

00:18:34.760 | All of that's fine.

00:18:35.600 | I'm part of a very, very solid community

00:18:37.540 | in our community.

00:18:38.380 | We give to each other.

00:18:39.200 | We have minimum standards of helping one another.

00:18:41.060 | All of that's wonderful.

00:18:42.120 | When it comes to the actual problem of education,

00:18:45.080 | what I object to in the political sphere,

00:18:47.320 | and this happens all the time,

00:18:48.640 | is everybody is arguing on top of the iceberg

00:18:50.760 | about how we can move the needle 0.5 percentage points,

00:18:55.520 | as opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them.

00:18:58.680 | And we just ignore that.

00:18:59.520 | We pretend that that's just, you know,

00:19:00.600 | sort of the natural consequence of things.

00:19:01.920 | The arc of history suggests that people

00:19:03.160 | are never gonna get married again.

00:19:04.720 | Well, I mean, actually what the arc of history suggests,

00:19:06.400 | realistically speaking,

00:19:07.460 | is that the people who are not getting married

00:19:08.900 | are not going to be having kids.

00:19:10.420 | And what it also suggests,

00:19:11.320 | the people who are married are going to be having kids.

00:19:13.380 | And so the demographic profile, actually over time,

00:19:15.320 | is rather going to shift toward people

00:19:17.180 | who are having lots and lots of kids.

00:19:18.900 | I'm married, I have four kids.

00:19:20.660 | Everyone in my community is married.

00:19:22.180 | It's like minimum buy-in in my community is four kids.

00:19:24.380 | Okay, and so what's happening actually,

00:19:26.140 | in terms of demographics,

00:19:27.580 | is that the people who are more religious

00:19:29.100 | and getting married are having more kids.

00:19:30.980 | And so if you're talking about the arc of history

00:19:32.460 | shifting toward marriage,

00:19:33.300 | I would suggest that actually demographically,

00:19:35.260 | over time, long periods of time, not over one generation,

00:19:38.000 | over long periods of time,

00:19:39.120 | the only cure for low birth rate

00:19:40.240 | is going to be the people who get married

00:19:41.520 | and have lots of kids.

00:19:42.540 | - Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with any of that.

00:19:44.840 | But I'm just saying that, again,

00:19:46.600 | on the Europe side, when I bring up the term merry-go-round,

00:19:49.600 | I think that there are good conversations to be had

00:19:51.560 | about people getting married,

00:19:53.340 | because stable families produce stable children

00:19:55.080 | that are less likely to commit crime,

00:19:56.080 | that are more likely to go to school,

00:19:56.920 | that are more likely to be productive members of society,

00:19:58.200 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:19:59.040 | I'm not gonna disagree with you on any of that.

00:19:59.920 | All of that is true.

00:20:01.480 | It's just frustrating that sometimes

00:20:03.000 | when you bring up any problem,

00:20:04.320 | all of it will circle back to other things

00:20:06.200 | that makes it seem like we can't make any progress

00:20:08.440 | in any area without fixing something that's fundamental.

00:20:09.900 | - In what way?

00:20:10.740 | I mean, I literally just told you that on the local level,

00:20:12.200 | I'm fine with people voting for air conditioning.

00:20:13.160 | - Yeah, but so, for instance, on the local level,

00:20:14.580 | so for school funding, school funding is done,

00:20:17.580 | I think, generally per district.

00:20:19.000 | So what do you do when you have poor districts

00:20:20.280 | that can't afford air conditioner for their schools?

00:20:23.280 | - I mean, the idea there would be that, presumably,

00:20:26.840 | if the society, meaning the state,

00:20:29.220 | and I generally don't mean the federal state,

00:20:30.620 | I mean, like the state of California, for example,

00:20:32.360 | decides that everybody ought to have air conditioning,

00:20:34.320 | people will vote for air conditioning,

00:20:35.440 | and that's perfectly legal,

00:20:36.520 | and I don't think there's anything morally objectionable

00:20:38.920 | about that, per se.

00:20:40.440 | I also don't think that that's going to heal

00:20:41.720 | anything remotely like the central problem.

00:20:43.560 | And I think that what tends to happen

00:20:45.440 | in terms of government is people love arguing

00:20:47.240 | about the problems that can be solved by opening a wallet,

00:20:49.480 | and nobody likes to solve a problem by, you know,

00:20:53.720 | closing their sex life to one person, for example,

00:20:58.720 | or having kids within a stable religious community.

00:21:01.240 | Like, the things that actually build society.

00:21:03.660 | I'm fine with arguing about each of these policies,

00:21:06.440 | and whether we apply them or not

00:21:07.760 | is a matter generally of pragmatism, not morality.

00:21:10.720 | It's a matter of incentive structures, not, per se, morality.

00:21:13.920 | Because incentive structures do have moral underpinnings.

00:21:16.840 | There's such a thing as, for example,

00:21:18.440 | if you're gonna use a welfare program,

00:21:19.520 | you have to decide how effective it is,

00:21:20.640 | to what crowd it applies, where the cutoffs are,

00:21:23.260 | does it disincentivize work, does it not?

00:21:25.560 | All of these are pragmatic concerns.

00:21:27.680 | But on a moral level, the generalized objection

00:21:29.560 | that I have to people on the left side of the aisle

00:21:32.400 | is that they like to focus,

00:21:34.640 | in these conversations, very often it feels

00:21:36.500 | as though it's a conversation with people

00:21:39.400 | who are drunk searching under the lamp for their keys.

00:21:42.480 | The problems they wanna look at

00:21:43.320 | are the problems that are solvable by government,

00:21:45.080 | and then all the problems they don't wanna look at,

00:21:46.560 | which are the actual giant monsters lurking in the dark,

00:21:49.200 | and not particularly solvable by government,

00:21:50.880 | are the ones they want to ignore and assume

00:21:52.480 | are just the natural state of things.

00:21:53.800 | And I don't think that's correct at all.

00:21:54.640 | - Yeah, and I one billion percent agree.

00:21:56.280 | And then, obviously, my criticism for the conservative side

00:21:57.980 | is the exact opposite, where there are parts

00:21:59.960 | where government could remedy some issues.

00:22:02.200 | For instance, children having sex with each other

00:22:04.360 | and producing other children out of wedlock,

00:22:06.480 | sometimes having after-school programs

00:22:08.220 | is nice to prevent that.

00:22:09.320 | I didn't have time for these things when I was in school.

00:22:11.080 | I was doing football practice.

00:22:12.000 | I was doing cross-country practice.

00:22:13.100 | I went in early for a band.

00:22:15.280 | I agree with you that sometimes people only focus

00:22:17.020 | on one end of the problem.

00:22:18.440 | I hate to be that guy, but as somebody that,

00:22:20.800 | have you ever watched "The Wire"?

00:22:21.980 | - Sure.

00:22:22.820 | - I'm not gonna cite "The Wire" as your life example,

00:22:23.920 | but obviously, there's only so much you can do in a school

00:22:26.360 | when the children coming in are so beyond destroyed

00:22:29.220 | because of the family life and everything

00:22:30.540 | prior to them even getting to school that day.

00:22:32.300 | So, I agree.

00:22:33.140 | Government is not like the solution to broken families.

00:22:36.040 | That would never be the case.

00:22:36.880 | - And it's actually not the solution to education

00:22:39.620 | depending on the kind of solutions that you're talking about.

00:22:42.140 | Some solutions, yeah.

00:22:42.980 | Some solutions, no.

00:22:43.820 | - Yeah, the only thing I'm looking at is,

00:22:45.180 | as I said earlier, just like these minimum threshold things

00:22:47.460 | where it's like, where can government make,

00:22:48.620 | 'cause you mentioned marginal,

00:22:49.780 | which I think is a really good way to look at things.

00:22:50.900 | There's marginal costs and marginal utility to things

00:22:53.100 | where the first $1,000 per student you spend

00:22:55.780 | might give you a huge return,

00:22:57.320 | but the extra $20,000 after is just a waste of money.

00:22:59.020 | - Again, I think these are all pragmatic discussions.

00:23:00.300 | - Sure, of course.

00:23:01.140 | - And actually, this is what we used to hash out

00:23:02.100 | in legislatures before they turned into platforms

00:23:04.240 | for people grandstanding, but yes.

00:23:05.380 | - Sure. - Okay, yeah.

00:23:06.400 | - As we descend from the heavens of philosophical discussion

00:23:09.580 | of conservatism and liberalism,

00:23:11.300 | let's go to the pragmatic muck of politics.

00:23:13.820 | Trump versus Biden.

00:23:16.460 | Between the two of them,

00:23:18.060 | who was, in their first term, the better president?

00:23:21.940 | And thus, who should win if the two of them are,

00:23:24.700 | in fact, our choices, should win a second term in 2024?

00:23:28.180 | Ben?

00:23:30.520 | - Sure, so in terms of actual job performance,

00:23:34.220 | you have to separate it into a few categories.

00:23:36.620 | In terms of actual performance in foreign policy,

00:23:39.780 | I think Trump's foreign policy record

00:23:41.240 | is significantly better than Biden's,

00:23:42.820 | the world being on fire right now

00:23:44.940 | being a fairly good example of that.

00:23:47.120 | And we can get into each aspect of the world being on fire

00:23:49.780 | and where the incentive structures came from

00:23:51.260 | and how all of that happened in a moment.

00:23:52.940 | When it comes to the economy,

00:23:54.140 | I think that Trump's economic record

00:23:55.480 | was better than Biden's.

00:23:57.020 | Doesn't mean he didn't overspend.

00:23:58.020 | He did, he wildly overspent.

00:24:00.220 | But he also had a very solid record of job creation.

00:24:04.900 | A huge percentage of the gains in the economy

00:24:06.640 | went to people on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

00:24:09.420 | Actually, the gross income to the average American

00:24:13.260 | was about $6,000 during his term.

00:24:15.460 | The unemployment rates were very, very low before COVID.

00:24:18.620 | I think that you almost have to separate

00:24:19.780 | the Trump administration

00:24:20.620 | into sort of before COVID and during COVID,

00:24:22.020 | because COVID obviously is sort of a black swan event,

00:24:24.340 | the most signal change in politics in our lifetime.

00:24:28.900 | And so governance during COVID is almost its own category,

00:24:31.940 | which we can discuss.

00:24:33.120 | But in terms of foreign policy,

00:24:34.540 | in terms of domestic policy,

00:24:35.500 | I think that Trump was significantly better

00:24:37.380 | than Biden has been.

00:24:38.540 | And that's on the upside for Trump.

00:24:39.980 | On the downside for Biden,

00:24:41.300 | obviously you're talking 40 year highs in inflation.

00:24:42.920 | You're talking about savings being eaten away.

00:24:44.740 | You're talking about everything being 20 to 30%

00:24:47.260 | more expensive.

00:24:48.300 | You're talking about massive increases to the deficit,

00:24:51.180 | even at a rate that was unknown under Trump.

00:24:53.180 | The deficit under Trump raised

00:24:54.660 | by about a little under a trillion dollars every year

00:24:56.780 | up until 2020.

00:24:57.620 | Again, 2020 was COVID year,

00:24:58.900 | so everybody decided

00:24:59.820 | that we're gonna fire hose money at things.

00:25:01.780 | But then Joe Biden continued to fire hose money at things

00:25:04.300 | in '21, '22, and '23.

00:25:06.980 | That obviously is, in my opinion, bad economic policy.

00:25:10.980 | And then you get to the rhetoric

00:25:12.580 | and you get to the stuff that Donald Trump says.

00:25:14.420 | And as I've said before,

00:25:16.460 | my view is that on Donald Trump's epitaph,

00:25:18.740 | on his gravestone, it will say Donald Trump,

00:25:20.180 | he's had a lot of shit.

00:25:21.180 | I think that Donald Trump does say a lot of things.

00:25:24.500 | I think that that is basically baked into the cake,

00:25:26.580 | which is why everyone who's bewildered by the polls

00:25:28.700 | is ignoring human nature,

00:25:29.980 | which is at the beginning,

00:25:31.500 | when you see something very shocking, it's very shocking.

00:25:33.740 | And then if you see it over and over and over and over

00:25:35.500 | for years on end, it is no longer shocking.

00:25:37.300 | It is just part of the background noise like tinnitus.

00:25:39.380 | It just becomes something that your brain adjusts for.

00:25:42.540 | And so do I like a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric?

00:25:45.500 | No, and I never have.

00:25:46.700 | Do I think that that is just positive as to his presidency?

00:25:49.580 | No, I do not.

00:25:50.980 | When it comes to Biden, again,

00:25:52.540 | I think he's underperforming economically.

00:25:54.140 | I think that his foreign policy has been really a problem.

00:25:57.700 | Even the things I think he's done right are,

00:25:59.660 | I think, band-aids for things that he created by doing wrong.

00:26:02.980 | And when it comes to his own rhetoric,

00:26:05.020 | you can argue that it's grating on a curve

00:26:08.220 | because Trump was coming in with such wild rhetoric

00:26:10.980 | that just a maintenance of that wild rhetoric

00:26:12.540 | doesn't really change, again, the baseline.

00:26:14.460 | For Biden, he came in in the same way that Obama did,

00:26:18.180 | on the sort of soaring rhetoric of American unity.

00:26:20.260 | I'm the president for all,

00:26:21.100 | like Trump came in and he's like,

00:26:21.940 | "Listen, I'm the president for what I am.

00:26:23.500 | "And I'm gonna say the things I wanna say.

00:26:25.060 | "I'm gonna be on the toilet and I'm tweeting."

00:26:26.380 | And we're like, "Okay, that's what it is."

00:26:28.340 | With Biden, he came in with,

00:26:29.260 | "I'm the president for all Americans.

00:26:30.540 | "I'm trying to unify everybody."

00:26:32.060 | And that pretty quickly broke down

00:26:33.820 | into a lot of oppositional language

00:26:36.220 | about his political opponents in particular,

00:26:38.420 | an attempt to lump in, for example,

00:26:40.460 | huge swaths of the conservative movement

00:26:42.740 | with the people who participated, for example,

00:26:44.940 | in January 6th or who are fans of January 6th.

00:26:48.220 | And the sort of lumping in of everybody

00:26:51.780 | into MAGA Republicans who wasn't personally signed on

00:26:54.260 | to an infrastructure bill with him.

00:26:56.420 | That sort of stuff, I think, has been truly terrible.

00:26:58.380 | I thought his Philadelphia speech was truly terrible.

00:27:00.540 | And again, I think that you do have the problem

00:27:02.500 | of he is no longer capable

00:27:05.620 | of certainly rhetorically unifying the country

00:27:08.140 | when every speech from him feels

00:27:10.100 | like watching Nick Melenda walk across a volcano

00:27:12.060 | on a tightrope.

00:27:13.180 | I mean, it really is like you're just sort of waiting

00:27:15.500 | for him to fall.

00:27:16.340 | I mean, it's sad to say, I mean, the other day,

00:27:18.860 | he was speaking for what was in effect his campaign kickoff

00:27:22.780 | and this was in Valley Forge.

00:27:24.420 | And I mean, Jill rushed up there like off the,

00:27:27.620 | as soon as he was done, Jill rushed up there,

00:27:30.460 | you know, like she'd been shot out of a cannon

00:27:31.940 | to come and try and guide him away

00:27:33.420 | so he didn't become the Shane Gillis Roomba.

00:27:35.580 | And, you know, that's not really, you know,

00:27:39.340 | let's put it this way, it does not quiet the soul

00:27:41.620 | to watch Joe Biden rhetorically.

00:27:43.220 | Again, that's a different problem than Trump's problem,

00:27:45.060 | but that's my analysis.

00:27:46.700 | - This is one of the areas where we get into this.

00:27:49.460 | I don't understand if there's like brain breaking happening

00:27:52.780 | or what's going on.

00:27:53.620 | I don't know what world we can ever live in

00:27:55.460 | where we say that Trump is less divisive

00:27:57.980 | for the country than Biden.

00:27:59.500 | I think it is so patently obvious.

00:28:01.260 | Trump is so divisive.

00:28:02.660 | Like not only does Trump make an enemy

00:28:04.980 | out of every person in the opposition party,

00:28:07.020 | he makes an enemy out of his own party

00:28:08.860 | and every single person around him.

00:28:10.580 | Like we all watched him bully, you know, Jeff Sessions.

00:28:13.260 | We all watched him bully his own party on Twitter.

00:28:15.180 | We all watched like all of these people walk away from him.

00:28:18.420 | Even recently, I think the Secretary of Defense Esper

00:28:22.740 | and John Kelly, the Chief of Staff were saying,

00:28:25.660 | I think Trump is a threat to democracy.

00:28:27.900 | You know, you've got all of his prior people

00:28:29.780 | that were around him, some of his closest allies.

00:28:31.220 | You've got Bill Barr that won't co-sign

00:28:33.020 | a single thing that he says.

00:28:35.100 | You've got all these people that he used to work with

00:28:37.300 | that all say Trump is a horrible, evil person.

00:28:39.860 | He is ineffective as a leader.

00:28:40.900 | He doesn't accomplish anything.

00:28:41.940 | And he didn't.

00:28:42.900 | You know, to say that Biden has failed at bipartisanship

00:28:45.180 | when, you know, we've gotten the CHIPS Act,

00:28:46.620 | we've gotten the IRA, we've gotten the ARP,

00:28:49.460 | we've gotten the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill,

00:28:51.260 | when we've gotten like all this major legislation

00:28:53.060 | that is working in this historically divided Congress,

00:28:55.500 | as opposed to Trump that got us tax cuts

00:28:58.220 | and deficit spending.

00:28:59.260 | I don't understand where we ever are in this world

00:29:02.540 | where Biden is somehow more divisive than Trump.

00:29:06.020 | Even the speeches that Ben is bringing up,

00:29:08.300 | they always bring up,

00:29:09.340 | I remember that one,

00:29:10.740 | I think we might've even done it on our episode.

00:29:12.420 | The one speech that Biden gave

00:29:13.700 | where at one point the background is red.

00:29:16.060 | - Yeah, the Philly speech I referenced.

00:29:17.500 | - Yeah, and they're like, "Oh my God, it's over.

00:29:18.980 | "This is the end."

00:29:19.980 | And then meanwhile, you've got Donald Trump

00:29:21.980 | coming into office saying things like,

00:29:23.220 | "If you burn the flag,

00:29:24.140 | "you should have your citizenship revoked."

00:29:25.980 | Or talking about MSDNC that I'm gonna investigate

00:29:29.660 | every single one of these media organizations

00:29:32.500 | for corruptness.

00:29:33.340 | I'm gonna open the libel and defamation laws.

00:29:34.780 | I'm gonna take all of these guys to court.

00:29:36.740 | You've got this weird Project 2025 stuff

00:29:38.780 | where, is it John Paschal, I think,

00:29:41.860 | is talking about we're gonna investigate

00:29:45.260 | all of these people

00:29:46.100 | and we're gonna try to throw crimes at all these people.

00:29:48.380 | Trump is like the most divisive president

00:29:50.460 | I think we've ever had,

00:29:51.700 | at least in my lifetime of being an American citizen.

00:29:56.500 | And the rhetoric from him is just,

00:29:57.860 | it's on a whole other level

00:29:59.340 | in terms of the demonization of political opponents.

00:30:02.020 | I mean, this is a guy that's known

00:30:03.180 | for giving his political opponents bad nicknames, right?

00:30:06.340 | Like that's what Trump does.

00:30:08.140 | You know, like it's funny,

00:30:09.540 | but even as a resident of Florida,

00:30:11.780 | if Florida had another natural disaster,

00:30:14.060 | do you think Trump would withhold aid?

00:30:15.980 | Because you had, I think that was one of the few nice things

00:30:18.660 | that DeSantis actually said about Biden was like,

00:30:20.300 | "Hey, listen, you know, when the buildings collapsed in,"

00:30:22.940 | I think that was Miami Beach. - Surfside, yeah.

00:30:24.700 | - That, you know, for the hurricane stuff

00:30:26.380 | that Biden was there.

00:30:27.500 | He was saying, "If you guys need aid,

00:30:28.660 | "however many billions, you can have it."

00:30:30.140 | Meanwhile, Trump, I think, was threatening

00:30:31.940 | to withhold federal funding from blue states

00:30:33.780 | that wouldn't, I think it had to do

00:30:35.780 | with the National Guard stuff,

00:30:37.060 | the deployment of the National Guard,

00:30:38.100 | that they weren't like doing enough for the riots,

00:30:39.780 | and Trump was threatening to withhold aid

00:30:42.340 | from some of these blue states.

00:30:44.700 | Yeah, Trump is literally the most divisive person

00:30:46.980 | in the world.

00:30:47.820 | I don't see how on any metric he is ever succeeding

00:30:50.660 | in the divisive category.

00:30:52.100 | In terms of the economy, I do think it's funny

00:30:54.500 | that Republicans are very keen to say that like,

00:30:56.060 | "Well, we can't really grade Trump, you know, post-COVID

00:30:58.860 | "because obviously COVID messed everything up,"

00:31:00.340 | which is fair, but pre-COVID, what did Trump do?

00:31:03.860 | Yeah, he did deficit spending tax cuts.

00:31:05.860 | He presided over historic low interest rates

00:31:07.460 | and an economy that was already like blazing

00:31:10.580 | past the final years of Obama.

00:31:11.940 | We were posting all-time highs

00:31:12.940 | in all the stock markets in 2013 onwards.

00:31:15.500 | You know, unemployment rates were falling.

00:31:16.940 | Now under Biden, unemployment rates are even lower

00:31:18.980 | than they were under Trump,

00:31:20.180 | but it sucks that for Trump, we can say,

00:31:22.220 | "Well, we can't really hold him accountable for 2020.

00:31:23.980 | "That was COVID."

00:31:25.060 | Well, all we have for Biden is post-COVID.

00:31:27.300 | We don't have any pre-COVID Biden, you know, economy.

00:31:30.180 | And it was the same thing for Obama too,

00:31:31.300 | coming in right after the housing collapse as well.

00:31:33.420 | And it sucks that Republicans are able

00:31:35.140 | to walk out of office, you know,

00:31:37.060 | having burned the entire American society

00:31:39.620 | to the ground economically,

00:31:40.860 | and now we've got to try to evaluate,

00:31:42.060 | "Okay, well, what did Obama do

00:31:43.580 | "during his first two to three to four years

00:31:45.500 | "just trying to recover

00:31:46.820 | "from where the housing crash left it?"

00:31:49.140 | And then we look at Biden now,

00:31:50.380 | who's trying to recover from COVID,

00:31:52.180 | and now we're grading him on a totally different scale

00:31:54.380 | than what Trump is being graded on.

00:31:55.780 | Yeah, that sucks, I think.

00:31:57.300 | - Can you comment on the foreign policy?

00:31:59.260 | - On the foreign policy, I'm gonna be honest.

00:32:01.660 | I am a, I am very liberal, I'm very not progressive.

00:32:06.180 | I'll probably come off as more hawkish than others

00:32:09.300 | because I'm not a big fan of this,

00:32:10.820 | which also, if, I mean, if Ben agrees,

00:32:12.860 | like, I think people like,

00:32:15.100 | people like Trump are gonna be

00:32:16.540 | the most dovish isolationist people ever.

00:32:18.740 | They don't wanna do anything internationally.

00:32:21.140 | They just wanna, you know, protect America,

00:32:22.660 | be at home, protect our economy,

00:32:23.860 | don't do anything internationally,

00:32:25.500 | which is why he was constantly undermining NATO

00:32:27.460 | and constantly, you know, attacking the European Union

00:32:30.220 | and, you know, cheering on the UK

00:32:31.580 | for Brexiting away from the EU.

00:32:33.980 | I think, that being said,

00:32:35.780 | I think that Biden's done a phenomenal job

00:32:38.220 | when it comes to foreign policy.

00:32:39.380 | I think that the coalition building

00:32:41.860 | was so important for Ukraine, Russia,

00:32:43.860 | and I'm so happy that he decided to go

00:32:46.060 | to our European allies and our NATO allies

00:32:47.980 | and try to build a coalition of people to help Ukraine

00:32:50.220 | so that that wasn't only the United States.

00:32:53.260 | Personally, especially after doing a whole bunch of research,

00:32:55.580 | I do tend to side with Israel over Palestine

00:32:58.820 | in a lot of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.

00:33:00.820 | I'm glad that Biden,

00:33:02.260 | while remaining a staunch defender of Israel,

00:33:04.020 | is trying to rein in some of the more aggressive posturing

00:33:07.140 | towards the Palestinians and the Gaza Strip.

00:33:09.380 | I'm proud that Biden said,

00:33:10.780 | "Hey, listen, we're going to delay some of these attacks.

00:33:12.820 | "Hey, listen, we are going to allow humanitarian aid here.

00:33:15.420 | "Hey, listen, we are going to try to, you know,

00:33:17.940 | "not kill as many Palestinian people down there,"

00:33:19.580 | while still, you know, signaling

00:33:21.060 | that he would be a staunch supporter of Israel

00:33:25.060 | in the conflict,

00:33:25.900 | assuming the civilian casualties don't go too high.

00:33:29.060 | For foreign policy, I mean, blemishes.

00:33:31.940 | I mean, like the biggest one you can give to Biden

00:33:34.500 | is Afghanistan and the pullout there.

00:33:36.860 | But man, are we going to talk about, you know,

00:33:39.460 | the inspector general report

00:33:40.860 | that says that one of the biggest reasons

00:33:41.980 | why the Afghanistan pullout was so disastrous

00:33:43.860 | was because of the Doha Accords,

00:33:45.700 | where Donald Trump headed talks

00:33:47.420 | that didn't even include the Afghanistan Army.

00:33:49.740 | I mean, like these were disasters.

00:33:51.340 | Like when Biden took office,

00:33:53.140 | we had 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan.

00:33:55.500 | Like what was the options even afforded to Biden

00:33:57.820 | at that point?

00:33:59.260 | Obviously, you've got the abandonment of the Kurds

00:34:00.780 | in northern Syria, you know,

00:34:01.940 | for the Turkish armies to lay waste to.

00:34:04.500 | You talk about Iran and North Korea,

00:34:06.860 | although I'm not sure where that would land on those,

00:34:09.700 | but yeah, that's a broadly-

00:34:11.060 | - That's a lot from both.

00:34:11.900 | - That's a lot, yeah.

00:34:12.740 | - You wanna pick at something we disagree with here?

00:34:14.980 | - Well, I mean, there's a lot.

00:34:16.140 | So, I mean, I wanna ask a few questions

00:34:18.980 | on each one of these. - Yeah, sure.

00:34:20.140 | - So let's talk about divisiveness for a second.

00:34:23.620 | So there's no one who can make the case

00:34:25.740 | that Donald Trump is not divisive.

00:34:26.740 | - Yeah. - Of course,

00:34:27.580 | he's incredibly divisive.

00:34:28.740 | It's a given.

00:34:31.100 | Do you treat Biden's rhetoric

00:34:33.380 | with the same level of seriousness

00:34:34.700 | that you treat Trump's rhetoric?

00:34:35.700 | Or I should probably put that to the other way around.

00:34:37.660 | Should we treat Trump's rhetoric

00:34:39.060 | with the same level of seriousness

00:34:40.500 | as Joe Biden or say Barack Obama's rhetoric?

00:34:43.660 | - I'm gonna try to be concise when I say this.

00:34:45.020 | Broadly speaking, especially in studying Israel-Palestine

00:34:48.060 | and Ukraine-Russia,

00:34:48.900 | I try not to take politicians at their word

00:34:50.780 | 'cause sometimes they just say stuff to say stuff.

00:34:52.460 | I understand that.

00:34:53.540 | But broadly speaking,

00:34:54.580 | I'm gonna look at the rhetoric and the actions,

00:34:56.220 | and I am gonna grade them the same.

00:34:57.740 | So yes, I would hold Biden and Trump to the same standards.

00:35:00.340 | - Right, so my feeling is,

00:35:02.220 | and this is one area where, for clarification,

00:35:04.180 | we're gonna have a division,

00:35:05.340 | is that I, of course, don't treat Trump's rhetoric

00:35:07.780 | in the same way that I treat Biden's or Obama's.

00:35:09.780 | He's utterly uncalibrated,

00:35:10.900 | and he says whatever he wants to at any given time,

00:35:12.780 | and it doesn't even match up with his policy very often.

00:35:14.900 | - Can I ask you, like, for our head of state,

00:35:17.540 | our chief executive,

00:35:18.900 | shouldn't rhetoric be arguably

00:35:20.500 | one of the most important things that he does?

00:35:22.540 | - I mean, the answer would be yes,

00:35:24.300 | and now I've been given a choice between a person

00:35:26.340 | who I think in calibrated ways says things that are divisive

00:35:29.300 | and a person who in uncalibrated ways

00:35:31.420 | says things that are divisive.

00:35:33.300 | And so the evidence that Joe Biden is divisive

00:35:35.940 | is every poll taken since essentially August of 2021.

00:35:40.620 | He is, by all available metrics, incredibly divisive.

00:35:45.340 | A huge percentage of Americans are deeply unhappy,

00:35:47.820 | not only with his performance,

00:35:49.540 | but don't believe he's a uniter.

00:35:51.660 | That's just the reality.

00:35:52.580 | And that may just be a reflection.

00:35:53.660 | I mean, honestly, we may be putting too much on Trump

00:35:55.340 | or Biden personally.

00:35:56.180 | It may just be that the American people themselves

00:35:57.980 | are rhetorically divided because of social media,

00:36:00.020 | and social media can in fact be assessable, and all that.

00:36:03.340 | - One thing that I would ask you about that, though,

00:36:05.340 | is I agree, especially when you look at the favorability,

00:36:07.700 | but sometimes when I look at these polls,

00:36:09.900 | when you start to disaggregate them by party,

00:36:11.820 | I wonder if it's actually, is Biden historically divisive,

00:36:15.660 | or I'm trying to think of a really polite way to say this,

00:36:18.340 | the people that like Trump worship Trump.

00:36:20.860 | I don't know.

00:36:21.860 | One of the most prescient things

00:36:22.820 | that Trump could have probably ever said

00:36:24.260 | was that I could kill someone on Fifth Street

00:36:25.780 | and nobody would hold me accountable.

00:36:26.980 | So is it really that Biden is historically divisive,

00:36:28.900 | or is it that every single Trump supporter

00:36:30.420 | will always say that Trump is great

00:36:31.820 | and always say that Biden is bad?

00:36:32.660 | - No, the reason I would say that Biden

00:36:33.900 | is in fact historically divisive

00:36:35.260 | is because Republicans felt much more strongly

00:36:37.180 | about Barack Obama than Joe Biden, actually.

00:36:40.580 | - But they didn't feel as strongly about Trump

00:36:41.780 | as they did about Romney or McCain, right?

00:36:44.140 | - In what way?

00:36:44.980 | - I mean, the allegiance to Trump.

00:36:46.900 | - Oh, no, there's certainly more allegiance to Trump

00:36:48.340 | than there is to Romney or McCain,

00:36:49.340 | largely because Trump won in 2016.

00:36:51.100 | But beyond that, the point that I'm making

00:36:53.980 | is that if you're looking at the stats

00:36:56.380 | in terms of divisiveness,

00:36:57.700 | Republicans always find the Democratic president divisive.

00:36:59.780 | The question is where the rest of the country is.

00:37:01.740 | And right now, there are a lot of Democrats

00:37:03.780 | who either don't agree with Biden or find him divisive.

00:37:06.540 | There are a lot of independents who find him divisive.

00:37:08.300 | So when we're comparing these things,

00:37:10.300 | I don't think they're leagues apart

00:37:11.540 | in terms of the divisive effect of what they say.

00:37:14.220 | Right, and I'm separating that off

00:37:16.060 | from the inherent content of what they say,

00:37:17.340 | 'cause obviously what Trump says is more divisive,

00:37:19.300 | just on the raw level.

00:37:20.380 | I mean, if he's insulting people

00:37:21.540 | as opposed to Joe Biden doing MAGA Republicans,

00:37:24.180 | like if I were to just,

00:37:25.100 | if I were an alien and come down from space

00:37:26.660 | and look at these two statements,

00:37:27.500 | I'd say this one's more divisive than this one.

00:37:29.380 | But then there's the reality

00:37:30.820 | of being a human being in the world,

00:37:32.020 | and that is everyone has baked Donald Trump into the cake.

00:37:34.700 | And Joe Biden, again, started off

00:37:37.460 | with a patina of being non-divisive

00:37:40.180 | and now has emerged as divisive.

00:37:42.020 | If you don't mind,

00:37:42.860 | I actually wanna get to the foreign policy questions,

00:37:44.220 | 'cause this one is actually

00:37:45.060 | slightly less interesting to me.

00:37:45.900 | - Sure, well, can I-- - You're free to answer.

00:37:46.980 | - Yeah, just one quick thing, I guess.

00:37:48.700 | 'Cause we can say the reality of it

00:37:50.020 | and we can look at opinion polls.

00:37:51.380 | What if we look at legislative accomplishments?

00:37:53.580 | Like Biden is working on a 50-50 divided Senate.

00:37:56.340 | Donald Trump had both House of Congress

00:37:58.580 | and the Supreme Court

00:37:59.860 | and got no major legislation passed.

00:38:01.940 | - Well, I mean, he did lose Congress in 2018, but--

00:38:05.580 | - Sure, but prior to that.

00:38:07.340 | We got the infrastructure bill, I think, in one year,

00:38:09.380 | which Trump promised for his entire presidency,

00:38:11.380 | didn't get anywhere on it.

00:38:12.220 | - Well, I mean, yes, his Republican base

00:38:13.980 | was not in favor of mass spending on infrastructure

00:38:16.180 | and neither am I.

00:38:17.060 | So there's that.

00:38:17.900 | I think that's mostly a state and local issue.

00:38:19.060 | - But they were in favor of mass spending for tax cuts?

00:38:21.060 | - That's not a spending.

00:38:21.900 | I mean, we--

00:38:22.740 | - I mean, effectively, it is, right?

00:38:24.500 | - Effectively, it's not.

00:38:25.500 | - Well, if you're cutting tax receipts,

00:38:27.140 | but you're not changing the level of spending,

00:38:28.860 | like Biden did with the IRA--

00:38:30.660 | - Again, we have a fundamental philosophical difference here.

00:38:33.100 | I think that when the government takes my money,

00:38:35.020 | that is not the government

00:38:37.940 | somehow being more fiscally responsible.

00:38:39.660 | And when the government allows me to keep my money,

00:38:41.340 | I don't see that as the government spending.

00:38:42.660 | I see that as my money

00:38:43.940 | and the government is taking less of it.

00:38:45.180 | - That's great, but at the end of the day,

00:38:46.140 | the government is still gonna be in a deficit spending

00:38:48.020 | and they're gonna have to borrow money from the treasury.

00:38:49.060 | - Right, we have a spending problem.

00:38:50.020 | In other words, it's not a receipts problem,

00:38:51.060 | is the case that I'm making.

00:38:52.100 | The problem with Donald Trump is not that he lowered taxes.

00:38:54.300 | The United States has one of the most progressive

00:38:55.540 | tax systems on the planet.

00:38:56.700 | And in fact, if you wish to have a European-style

00:38:58.940 | social welfare state,

00:38:59.780 | what you actually need is to tax the middle class to death.

00:39:02.220 | I mean, the reality is that the top 20%

00:39:04.380 | of the American population pays literally all net taxes

00:39:07.100 | in the United States after state benefits and all of this.

00:39:09.900 | So if you actually wanted to have

00:39:11.900 | the kind of social welfare state

00:39:13.060 | that many liberals seem to want to have,

00:39:14.620 | like Northern Europe, for example,

00:39:16.140 | you'd actually have to tax people who make 40, 50, $60,000.

00:39:18.940 | - And I don't want that, I agree with that.

00:39:20.140 | So how do you explain the lack of legislation?

00:39:22.300 | I mean, if he's like such a uniter.

00:39:23.980 | - Because I think the Republican Party itself

00:39:25.660 | is quite divided.

00:39:26.500 | And I think that Trump's-

00:39:27.340 | - But isn't that his job?

00:39:28.160 | He's the head of the Republican Party.

00:39:29.580 | He's the president,

00:39:30.420 | Republican president of the United States.

00:39:31.580 | - I mean, again, I don't think that Joe Biden

00:39:32.860 | has passed wildly historic legislation.

00:39:35.980 | - The infrastructure bill was the largest like-

00:39:37.820 | - So here's the problem.

00:39:38.660 | If you're a Republican,

00:39:40.020 | the only bills that you can get consensus on

00:39:42.020 | tend to be bills that either,

00:39:44.180 | let's be real about this,

00:39:46.540 | that are tax cuts because,

00:39:49.020 | as you would, I think, agree with,

00:39:52.300 | when it comes to polling data,

00:39:53.260 | Americans constantly say they want to cut the government.

00:39:54.980 | And then the minute you ask them which program,

00:39:56.540 | they have no idea what they're-

00:39:57.380 | - They don't want to cut anything.

00:39:58.200 | - Right, exactly.

00:39:59.040 | It's much harder to come up with a bill to cut things

00:40:01.780 | than it is to come up with a bill to add things,

00:40:04.140 | which is why spending was out of control under Trump as well.

00:40:07.020 | But there are some Republicans

00:40:07.900 | who still don't want to spend on those things, right?

00:40:09.260 | So inherently, the task that,

00:40:11.900 | this goes back to the first question,

00:40:12.940 | the task that Republicans think government is there to do

00:40:15.620 | is different than the task that Democrats think

00:40:17.820 | that government is there to do.

00:40:19.020 | So the way that the very metric of success

00:40:20.900 | for a Democratic president versus a Republican president,

00:40:23.340 | namely, for example, pieces of legislation passed,

00:40:25.780 | as a Republican, one of my goals

00:40:27.100 | is to pass nearly no legislation

00:40:28.460 | because I don't actually want the government involved

00:40:30.860 | in more areas of our life.

00:40:32.660 | I want to ask a couple of questions on the foreign policy.

00:40:34.580 | - Sure, yeah, okay, wait, real quick.

00:40:36.100 | So for instance, like Donald Trump wanted to punish China

00:40:38.740 | and he wanted to bring a microprocessor manufacturer

00:40:41.100 | to the United States.

00:40:42.220 | Biden did that with legislation, with the CHIPS Act.

00:40:44.260 | You talk about spending being out of control

00:40:46.220 | and I mean, I can agree with that.

00:40:47.620 | I think anybody that looks at the numbers

00:40:48.580 | has to agree with that, but why not pass legislation

00:40:50.420 | like the Inflation Reduction Act,

00:40:52.380 | which is at least spending neutral, right?

00:40:54.660 | Why are there not bills where Donald Trump could take--

00:40:56.380 | - Well, I mean, first of all,

00:40:57.220 | I think that whenever the government

00:40:58.060 | says something is spending neutral,

00:40:58.940 | it rarely materializes that way.

00:41:00.420 | That is not going to be a spending neutral bill.

00:41:01.780 | - Sure, but there's a difference between

00:41:03.100 | at least they say it's spending neutral

00:41:04.620 | versus this is a $500 billion bill over 10 years, right?

00:41:07.880 | - Well, but again, I don't see a tax cut

00:41:09.780 | as a matter of quote-unquote spending neutrality.

00:41:11.380 | The big problem is they keep spending,

00:41:12.540 | not that they are allowing me to keep the money

00:41:14.340 | that I earned and they did not earn, but--

00:41:15.820 | - Okay, so then just to understand,

00:41:16.900 | so if somebody just did massive reductions in tax receipts,

00:41:20.460 | so tax cut after tax cut after tax cut,

00:41:21.900 | but they didn't change spending at all,

00:41:23.620 | you wouldn't consider that an increase in deficit spending

00:41:26.180 | or out of control spending?

00:41:27.180 | You would just say they're just tax cuts?

00:41:28.980 | - No, the opposite.

00:41:29.820 | I would consider it a wild overspending.

00:41:33.500 | - Okay, so then was it under Trump then

00:41:35.300 | when he did the tax 2017?

00:41:36.140 | - Yeah, the deficit spending by the way under Biden

00:41:37.960 | is way worse than it was under Trump.

00:41:38.800 | - Of course, but we're in post-COVID, right?

00:41:41.520 | - COVID ended effectively, I mean, you live in Florida.

00:41:43.400 | COVID effectively ended in the state of Florida

00:41:45.120 | by the middle of 2021.

00:41:46.320 | - Yeah.

00:41:47.160 | - I mean, even if you're a vaccine fan,

00:41:48.080 | by like April, May of 2021,

00:41:49.680 | there was wide availability of vaccines,

00:41:51.920 | whether or not you liked the vaccines.

00:41:53.080 | - Yeah.

00:41:53.920 | - And at that point, we were done.

00:41:55.120 | - I agree, but like we're in a post,

00:41:56.760 | like how many trillions of dollars

00:41:58.840 | have been dumped in worldwide

00:42:00.080 | that are like leading to inflation, right?

00:42:01.680 | The inflation is like a worldwide issue right now

00:42:04.000 | because of the economy shutting down for a year or two.

00:42:05.720 | It's not like those effects are gone in one year, right?

00:42:08.040 | COVID might be gone,

00:42:08.880 | but the after effects of all the stimulus spending

00:42:10.640 | and the unemployment and everything else.

00:42:11.480 | - But the definition of inflation

00:42:12.480 | is too much money chasing too few goods.

00:42:14.000 | So pouring more money on top of that

00:42:15.400 | makes for more inflation.

00:42:16.600 | That's what it does.

00:42:17.440 | - Sure, I agree.

00:42:19.160 | But like there's also the definition

00:42:20.640 | of when do you deficit spend

00:42:21.800 | is when economies are headed for recessions, right?

00:42:23.400 | Rather than when economies are doing really well,

00:42:24.780 | like they were under Trump and he was deficit spending.

00:42:26.640 | Whereas Biden can at least make the argument

00:42:28.080 | that I should, I ought to be deficit spending

00:42:29.480 | because the economy is headed

00:42:30.320 | for potential recession, right?

00:42:31.440 | - So here's the thing.

00:42:32.280 | I don't think that the economy

00:42:33.120 | is actually headed for a session.

00:42:34.720 | In fact, if you look at the economic statistics.

00:42:37.000 | - Every economist said it was.

00:42:38.360 | - No, okay.

00:42:39.200 | - They're still saying

00:42:40.020 | that there's like a recession coming, right?

00:42:40.860 | - Right, but that was largely

00:42:41.700 | because of the after effects of inflation.

00:42:43.240 | Meaning if you inflate the economy,

00:42:44.900 | what you're going to end up doing is bursting a bubble.

00:42:46.920 | And then when that bubble bursts, you'll get a recession.

00:42:48.520 | I mean, that was the basic idea, right?

00:42:49.720 | The idea, the question was

00:42:50.720 | whether you're gonna get a soft landing.

00:42:52.080 | But if you actually look at, for example,

00:42:53.800 | the employment statistics

00:42:54.800 | or the economic growth statistics in the United States,

00:42:56.520 | what they look like under the last year's Obama

00:42:58.720 | and then Trump, I mean, this is what the chart looks like,

00:43:00.240 | is it looks like this.

00:43:01.080 | And then it hits March of 2020, it goes like that, right?

00:43:04.040 | And then by like September, it bounces back up, right?

00:43:06.400 | It's a V-shaped recovery.

00:43:07.480 | And then it starts to peter out.

00:43:08.980 | - Sure, a lot because of the American recovery plan, right?

00:43:10.960 | That Biden did as well.

00:43:12.280 | - I mean-

00:43:14.160 | - 4 million jobs, yeah.

00:43:14.980 | - No, I'm not gonna attribute it to that

00:43:16.280 | because the rates of growth in job growth

00:43:18.880 | from September, October, November,

00:43:20.120 | were actually very similar to the rates of job growth

00:43:22.400 | after Joe Biden took office.

00:43:24.480 | What you see is actually kind of a straight line.

00:43:26.000 | I mean, what the chart looks like, in any case.

00:43:28.520 | Okay, so on the foreign policy stuff,

00:43:30.120 | this is getting abstruse, but on the foreign policy stuff.

00:43:33.560 | So the questions that I have

00:43:36.600 | with regard to Biden on foreign policy,

00:43:38.640 | very, very simple question.

00:43:42.240 | Do you think that the situation in the Middle East

00:43:44.200 | is better now than it was under Donald Trump?

00:43:47.160 | - Probably, that's a hard one.

00:43:55.080 | The factors that I'm making right now are,

00:43:58.420 | like, obviously you've got the Israel-Palestinian war

00:44:00.880 | that's going on right now, which is kind of bad,

00:44:02.600 | but like broadly speaking,

00:44:04.020 | I'm not sure how much that affects the Middle East

00:44:05.600 | as much as like the collapse of Syria.

00:44:07.400 | 2013 Syrian civil war sent millions of immigrants

00:44:11.000 | throughout all of Europe.

00:44:12.160 | - Which was under?

00:44:13.640 | - Which was under Obama and continued under Trump.

00:44:15.600 | Trump didn't do anything to alleviate

00:44:17.080 | any of the Syrian civil war.

00:44:18.480 | - Why did Syria end up as a preserve of Russia again?

00:44:22.760 | - How did Syria end up as a preserve of Russia?

00:44:24.520 | - Yes, why did it end up being essentially

00:44:26.020 | a client state of Russia?

00:44:28.080 | I know that Putin enjoys access to the ports down there.

00:44:31.540 | I don't know.

00:44:32.380 | - I mean, the reason is because Barack Obama suggested

00:44:34.160 | that there was a red line that would be drawn

00:44:35.640 | in the face of chemical weapons use.

00:44:36.880 | Bashar al-Assad then used chemical weapons in Syria

00:44:39.400 | and Barack Obama was unwilling to then

00:44:41.920 | essentially create consequences for Syria

00:44:44.980 | in the form of any sort of Western strike.

00:44:46.480 | And so instead he outsourced it to Russia.

00:44:48.000 | This is 2013, 2014.

00:44:49.640 | - Sure, do you think there might've been some hesitancy

00:44:51.140 | after like seeing how Libya ended up

00:44:52.920 | that maybe us like intervening?

00:44:54.640 | - Who was president during Libya?

00:44:56.600 | - Yeah, I mean, like I said.

00:44:57.960 | - Sure, but what does that have to do with anything though?

00:44:59.880 | There might've been like a mistake learned.

00:45:01.040 | - The point that I'm making is that actually

00:45:02.000 | the Middle East, I mean, just historically speaking,

00:45:04.000 | was historically good under Donald Trump.

00:45:06.040 | I mean, it's very difficult to make the case

00:45:07.720 | that either before or after Trump

00:45:09.420 | were better than during Donald Trump.

00:45:10.880 | - I mean, the Syrian, I don't think that Trump

00:45:13.720 | contributed to the Syrian situation in improving much.

00:45:17.240 | - I mean, he wrecked ISIS, which was in the-

00:45:19.520 | - I mean, ISIS had been getting wrecked by the Kurds

00:45:21.800 | in Iraq, by every single person, by Assad's army,

00:45:25.000 | by Putin, by Turkey, literally everybody

00:45:26.920 | was fighting against ISIS at that point.

00:45:29.080 | - There's a spike in violence.

00:45:29.960 | And then the Trump, I mean, you get credit

00:45:32.440 | for when you're president, presumably.

00:45:34.120 | I mean, things got better with ISIS under Trump.

00:45:36.880 | - I mean, yeah, they did.

00:45:37.720 | I mean- - Things got worse

00:45:38.560 | with ISIS under Obama.

00:45:40.320 | - For sure. - He called them

00:45:41.160 | the JV squad. - Sure.

00:45:42.320 | - And then they became not the JV squad.

00:45:43.920 | - Yeah, but I don't know if ISIS is originating in Syria

00:45:47.400 | and Baghdadi and all of the growth of that

00:45:49.640 | is necessarily Obama's fault.

00:45:51.280 | I know that we like to say that Obama created ISIS.

00:45:53.640 | I don't know if you say that,

00:45:54.480 | I've heard that saying a lot.

00:45:55.480 | I think that's a little bit simplistic.

00:45:57.640 | I don't think that- - Sure.

00:45:58.680 | - When I'm looking at actions that presidents have taken,

00:46:01.760 | the biggest criticism I have for Middle Eastern policy

00:46:03.960 | is I think the Doha Accords were a disaster.

00:46:05.880 | And I think that's one of the biggest blemishes

00:46:07.440 | that we have right now.

00:46:08.480 | I would also argue that moving the embassy to Jerusalem

00:46:11.360 | was also kind of silly and arguably contributed

00:46:14.240 | to some of the conflict we see right now

00:46:15.640 | between Israel and Palestine. - No, exactly.

00:46:16.480 | I'll argue precisely the opposite,

00:46:17.920 | especially given the fact

00:46:18.760 | that after the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem,

00:46:21.000 | the Abraham Accords continued to sign and actually expand.

00:46:23.560 | And that if Donald Trump had been elected,

00:46:25.600 | I have no doubt in my mind that Saudi Arabia

00:46:27.560 | would now be a part of the Abraham Accords.

00:46:29.520 | In fact, that was basically pre-negotiated.

00:46:31.600 | And then when Joe Biden took office,

00:46:33.400 | Joe Biden took a very anti-Saudi stance

00:46:35.360 | on a wide variety of issues.

00:46:36.920 | The biggest single effect in the Middle East

00:46:39.320 | of Joe Biden's presidency, and again,

00:46:41.080 | I agree with you that not every foreign policy issue

00:46:42.840 | can be laid at the hands of a president.

00:46:44.880 | Joe Biden's main approach to the Middle East

00:46:46.840 | was very similar to the Obama approach,

00:46:48.400 | which is why the Middle East was chaotic under Obama

00:46:50.000 | and chaotic under Biden.

00:46:51.080 | And that was to alienate allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel

00:46:55.800 | and instead to try to make common cause

00:46:59.400 | or cut deals with Iran.

00:47:00.800 | What that did is incentivize terrorism from Iran.

00:47:02.880 | What we're watching in the Middle East

00:47:03.840 | is Iran attempting to use every one of its terror proxies

00:47:06.680 | in the Middle East.

00:47:07.520 | And it was specifically launched in an attempt to avoid

00:47:10.400 | what Biden actually was trying to do, which was good,

00:47:12.280 | which was after two years of failure with Saudi Arabia,

00:47:14.920 | try to bring them into the Abraham Accords, right?

00:47:16.440 | That was what was burgeoning at the end of last year.

00:47:19.240 | And Iran saw that, and Iran decided

00:47:21.440 | that they were going to throw a grenade

00:47:22.680 | into the middle of those negotiations

00:47:24.360 | by essentially activating Hamas.

00:47:25.760 | Hamas activates, Hamas commits October 7th.

00:47:27.720 | Israel as a sovereign nation state has to respond

00:47:30.080 | to the murder of 1,200 of its citizens

00:47:31.480 | and the taken kidnapping of 240.

00:47:33.840 | Israel has to do that not only to go after its own hostages

00:47:36.440 | and try to restore them,

00:47:37.280 | but also to reestablish military deterrence

00:47:39.200 | in the most violent region of the world.

00:47:40.920 | Hezbollah gets active on Israel's northern border.

00:47:43.360 | Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy.

00:47:45.240 | They get active on the northern border.

00:47:47.400 | The Houthis in Yemen get active.

00:47:49.800 | These are all, the only reason all this is happening

00:47:51.440 | at the same time is because Iran is doing this, right?

00:47:53.760 | Not just that, they are threatening global shipping.

00:47:56.200 | If you're talking about the effects of global supply lines,

00:47:57.920 | which I totally agree had a major inflationary effect

00:48:00.520 | on the economy thanks to COVID,

00:48:02.320 | right now, the cost of shipping is nearly double

00:48:05.720 | what it was just a few weeks ago,

00:48:07.320 | and that is because a ragtag group of Houthi barbarians

00:48:10.620 | are attacking international shipping

00:48:12.040 | and forcing everybody to stop using

00:48:13.480 | the Bab el-Mandeb's freight,

00:48:14.440 | instead of going around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.

00:48:18.000 | All of that is the result of the fact

00:48:19.640 | that Joe Biden reoriented the United States

00:48:21.600 | in the very early days,

00:48:23.060 | in favor of a more pro-Iranian stance.

00:48:24.800 | He appointed Robert Malley to negotiate the Iran deal,

00:48:26.660 | who, as it turns out, was using proxies.

00:48:29.240 | Many of his aides were actually taking money from Iran.

00:48:32.400 | The Biden administration, literally one of their first acts,

00:48:34.780 | was to delist the Houthis as a terror organization

00:48:37.080 | and end sanctions against the Houthis.

00:48:39.640 | These are all moves that Biden made very early on.

00:48:41.920 | They were disastrous moves,

00:48:42.760 | but when it comes to domestic policy,

00:48:44.560 | I think he hasn't been nearly as damaging

00:48:45.840 | in domestic policy as he has been on foreign policy.

00:48:47.280 | - Sure, sure.

00:48:48.120 | So just on a couple of Middle Eastern things.

00:48:49.000 | So one of the big things that threw the Middle East

00:48:50.520 | into disaster was, we are all traumatized by it now,

00:48:54.160 | was the Iraq invasion, which happened

00:48:55.880 | under a Republican president.

00:48:56.960 | - Sure. - You agree with that, right?

00:48:57.780 | - Sure. - The deposition

00:48:59.480 | of Saddam Hussein and everything that followed after

00:49:01.880 | probably contributed more to the growth of ISIS

00:49:03.640 | and the destabilization of that entire region,

00:49:05.640 | probably more than anything else.

00:49:06.640 | I think that under, prior to Bush,

00:49:09.080 | for Clinton, and even at the beginning

00:49:10.120 | of Bush's presidency, we were on some kind of road

00:49:12.360 | to normalcy with Iran, which I think has to happen,

00:49:15.160 | whether we like them or not,

00:49:17.080 | until Bush, for whatever reason,

00:49:18.760 | decides to throw Iran into the axis of evil.

00:49:20.800 | - It needs some evidence that we're on a road

00:49:22.000 | to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s.

00:49:23.680 | - We do in the, wait, what?

00:49:25.080 | - That we're on a road to normalcy with Iran in the 1990s.

00:49:27.680 | - My understanding is that, yeah, from the late '90s

00:49:30.040 | and prior to the axis of evil labeling of Iran,

00:49:33.080 | that there was gonna be some path forward

00:49:34.760 | to where we could start to normalize relationships with them.

00:49:36.800 | - I find that very difficult to believe,

00:49:38.840 | and I don't see a lot of evidence.

00:49:39.960 | I mean, we can just disagree on that.

00:49:40.920 | - Sure, okay, yeah, sure, we can disagree on that,

00:49:42.280 | but I know that, by the way, the aftereffects,

00:49:44.360 | just a quick note, the after effect of the Iraq war

00:49:46.160 | that was the most devastating

00:49:47.120 | was the increase in power of Iran.

00:49:48.840 | - I agree, yeah, because of the destabilization of Iraq,

00:49:50.880 | and Iraq not having a government there

00:49:53.540 | that was functional for at least a decade.

00:49:55.800 | - And was, in fact, a Sunni government, right?

00:49:57.120 | Originally, it was a Sunni government.

00:49:58.600 | Disbanding the Sunni army was one of the worst things

00:50:00.640 | that the Bush administration did.

00:50:01.480 | - Probably, yeah, banning all the former Ba'ath parties,

00:50:02.800 | all the military, yeah, all horrible,

00:50:04.360 | under a Republican president.

00:50:05.880 | - Don't disagree.

00:50:07.200 | - Yeah, that that probably contributed more to ISIS,

00:50:10.080 | to the growth of power in Iran,

00:50:11.240 | maybe even to the destabilization of Syria,

00:50:13.440 | probably more than anything that Obama did.

00:50:16.000 | Also, when we look at Iran funding people in the region,

00:50:19.560 | I don't disagree with that as well.

00:50:20.700 | I think Iran is the number one instigator

00:50:22.220 | of bad guy things right now in the Middle East.

00:50:24.000 | Iran, the IRGC, I supported

00:50:25.840 | when Donald Trump killed Soleimani.

00:50:27.080 | I think that was a great thing.

00:50:28.640 | I think that Iran is a major problem.

00:50:30.600 | However, I don't know if the path forward

00:50:33.640 | is constantly being a belligerent to Iran

00:50:36.160 | or trying to figure out some road to normalcy.

00:50:38.180 | I don't know if the collapse of Iran

00:50:40.340 | or the destruction of that country,

00:50:41.640 | considering how unpopular the Ayatollah even is there,

00:50:44.720 | like the citizens of Iran,

00:50:45.720 | I don't think are big supporters of the government there.

00:50:47.980 | I feel like moving on a path where,

00:50:50.040 | let's do our nuclear inspections.

00:50:51.300 | We had that Iranian nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of.

00:50:54.200 | Let's do the nuclear inspections.

00:50:55.360 | Make sure you're not on the way to nuclear weapons.

00:50:56.800 | Let's unfreeze some funds.

00:50:57.900 | Let's move in some direction

00:50:59.080 | where we get on a good term with you.

00:51:00.720 | I feel like that's the most important thing

00:51:02.600 | that needs to happen in the Middle East.

00:51:03.900 | As much as people like to look at the Abraham Accords,

00:51:05.760 | who cares if, what was it, Bahrain, I think Oman,

00:51:09.760 | I think Sudan. - UAE and Morocco.

00:51:10.680 | - The UAE and Morocco, yeah.

00:51:12.760 | All of these people, even Saudi Arabia,

00:51:14.480 | already have de facto normalization with Israel anyway.

00:51:16.900 | They're all trading.

00:51:17.740 | - No, this is, I mean, to pretend that anybody,

00:51:20.000 | even 15 years ago, would have been talking

00:51:22.400 | about normalization, Saudi Arabia and Israel is insane.

00:51:25.360 | I mean, that's insane.

00:51:26.320 | - They were already on that path.

00:51:28.280 | They had already been trading.

00:51:29.120 | They were already de facto trading partners with each other.

00:51:32.320 | They had already been collaborating and doing things.

00:51:34.040 | - That's a wild claim that Israel and Saudi Arabia

00:51:36.080 | were going to normalize 15 years ago.

00:51:38.160 | - 15 years ago might've been a wild claim.

00:51:39.680 | But after Turkey, after Jordan,

00:51:42.680 | and then in the past 20 years of economic relations

00:51:45.280 | and ties with each other,

00:51:46.160 | all of the leadership in the Middle East,

00:51:47.520 | and you'll agree with this, look at Israel,

00:51:49.440 | and they go, okay, well, we've got Palestinians

00:51:51.280 | who, God bless them, do nothing.

00:51:54.560 | And then you've got Israel,

00:51:55.500 | which is on a region with no natural resources

00:51:58.400 | to somehow become an economic giant.

00:51:59.800 | They're good to trade with.

00:52:00.620 | Their population's educated.

00:52:01.780 | They have military power.

00:52:03.760 | All of the leadership in these Middle Eastern countries

00:52:05.680 | are wanting to be friendly with Israel

00:52:07.160 | and are engaging in trade de facto with Israel.

00:52:09.320 | And the idea that the UAE and Bahrain were brought in

00:52:12.640 | to say like, oh, well, now we're gonna officially say this,

00:52:14.640 | I just--

00:52:15.480 | - Those are the first steps toward, obviously,

00:52:17.480 | the formation of a new Middle East

00:52:19.200 | in which economics would predominate

00:52:21.480 | over sectarian conflict.

00:52:23.040 | The chief obstacle to that is Iran.

00:52:24.840 | - I agree.

00:52:25.680 | - The notion that negotiations with the Ayatollah

00:52:27.800 | were going to be a solution to any of this

00:52:30.080 | is absolutely benign.

00:52:30.920 | - But do we think, is it the Abraham Accords

00:52:33.520 | that's convincing Saudi Arabia

00:52:34.920 | to take a stance against Iran?

00:52:37.120 | - No, I mean, Saudi Arabia--

00:52:37.960 | - They're already fighting with each other, right?

00:52:40.160 | I don't think the Abraham Accords

00:52:41.000 | moved us any closer towards any type of real peace

00:52:43.880 | in the region.

00:52:44.720 | What has to happen is something has to happen with Iran.

00:52:46.720 | There has to be some diplomatic

00:52:47.920 | bilateral communication there.

00:52:49.680 | - No, what has to happen is the containment of Iran,

00:52:51.600 | which was what was taking place

00:52:54.400 | with the increased normalization with the Sunni Arab world

00:52:57.640 | and Israel combined with significant economic sanctions.

00:53:00.600 | The notion that there's this far-fetched notion

00:53:04.160 | in foreign policy circles that diplomacy

00:53:06.280 | can sort of be wish-cast out of thin air.

00:53:08.040 | That if you sit around a table

00:53:09.000 | that you can always come to an agreement with somebody.

00:53:10.920 | The Ayatollahs do not have common interests

00:53:12.840 | with the United States.

00:53:13.920 | They do not.

00:53:14.760 | And this idea that they are willing to take money

00:53:16.760 | in exchange for, for example,

00:53:18.600 | some sort of peaceful acquiescence to Israel's existence

00:53:21.720 | is obviously untrue.

00:53:22.920 | - Hasn't that historically,

00:53:24.080 | hasn't that been the case though?

00:53:25.720 | That you've had a region with tons of sectarian violence

00:53:28.200 | for a long time and then finally Turkey was like,

00:53:30.160 | "You know what, this isn't worth it."

00:53:32.040 | The United States paid them a lot of money.

00:53:33.400 | They had conversations with Israel.

00:53:35.280 | And you know what, the economy, the economic gains--

00:53:37.560 | - Well, I mean--

00:53:38.400 | - And that's the same thing with Jordan,

00:53:39.480 | same thing with--

00:53:40.320 | - Not to get into Turkish politics.

00:53:41.160 | - Sure, yeah.

00:53:41.980 | - But the situation with Turkey was actually quite warm

00:53:45.000 | between Israel and Turkey in the '90s

00:53:46.360 | when you had the, you know,

00:53:48.920 | sort of secular Muslim regime--

00:53:52.480 | - In the '90s, but they signed peace--

00:53:53.320 | - Of Kemal Ataturk in place.

00:53:54.560 | And now Erdogan has joined in the fray

00:53:57.760 | and Erdogan is significantly more radical

00:53:59.560 | than what he was before. - Sure, I'm so sorry.

00:54:01.600 | If I said Turkey, I meant Egypt, my bad.

00:54:03.360 | - Yeah, okay, so--

00:54:04.200 | - I meant Egypt, yeah.

00:54:05.040 | - Yeah, so in terms of like Egypt and Jordan, right,

00:54:07.080 | were the first two--

00:54:07.920 | - You need back to, so here's the thing.

00:54:10.480 | Is it possible that you could theoretically

00:54:11.960 | come to a deal with Iran only with a new leadership crew?

00:54:14.720 | Okay, this is true for every peace agreement in the region.

00:54:17.200 | You could not, Israel could not have made peace with--

00:54:20.280 | - Well, they made peace with Egypt and Sadat

00:54:22.400 | was the leader for Yom Kippur, right?

00:54:23.720 | - They did not make peace with Nasser, right?

00:54:25.720 | The point is that this is a different regime.

00:54:27.200 | You need a different regime.

00:54:28.400 | This is one of the problems--

00:54:29.240 | - But I'm saying the same regime

00:54:30.080 | that did part of the Yom Kippur War

00:54:31.360 | was the same regime that negotiated peace with Israel.

00:54:34.200 | I mean, that's true, it is also true

00:54:36.400 | that that is a relationship that could be cultivated

00:54:40.000 | specifically because it was Sadat who made clear

00:54:43.280 | he was gonna come to the table.

00:54:44.840 | Have the Iranians ever made clear

00:54:45.960 | that they would come to the table over, for example,

00:54:47.320 | the existence of the state of Israel?

00:54:48.920 | - No.

00:54:50.040 | - That is not a thing that's going to happen.

00:54:51.760 | But I think people probably--

00:54:52.600 | - Literally felt the same.

00:54:53.520 | - Every single one of their proxy groups,

00:54:54.680 | every one of them not only calls

00:54:56.240 | for the destruction of the state of Israel,

00:54:57.840 | they also call for the destruction of America.

00:55:00.000 | I mean, this is literally the Houthi slogan.

00:55:01.780 | They're busy hitting ships

00:55:02.720 | and their slogan is literally "Allahu Akbar,"

00:55:05.240 | "Death to America," "Death to the Jews," "Death to Israel."

00:55:07.720 | It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker,

00:55:08.880 | but it's not all that catchy,

00:55:10.240 | but that is, in fact, their slogan.

00:55:11.880 | The notion that the regime that propagates that

00:55:14.640 | is going to be approached with diplomacy

00:55:16.800 | is not only wrong, the problem is

00:55:19.480 | that it's easy to say that the stakes of diplomacy are,

00:55:22.400 | okay, so we try to talk, right?

00:55:23.720 | Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.

00:55:25.840 | Sure, the only problem is that in the Middle East,

00:55:29.160 | weakness is taken as a sign

00:55:30.840 | that aggression might be an appropriate response.

00:55:33.320 | That is how things work in the Middle East.

00:55:35.440 | And the fact that Joe Biden came into office

00:55:40.200 | with an orientation toward continuing

00:55:42.240 | the Obama policies in Iran has led to conflagrations,

00:55:46.520 | these sort of brush fires breaking out everywhere

00:55:49.360 | that Iran has borders with either the West

00:55:52.040 | or Israel or both, right?

00:55:53.600 | Any place that's happening is leading to brush fires

00:55:55.440 | because, again, the logic of violence in the Middle East

00:55:57.560 | is not quite the logic of violence

00:55:58.980 | in other places in the world.

00:56:00.560 | By the way, I think the logic of violence in the Middle East

00:56:01.840 | is actually closer to what most international politics

00:56:03.560 | looks like than we wish that it were.

00:56:05.600 | I mean, I think that's part of

00:56:06.440 | what's happening in Ukraine as well.

00:56:08.160 | - So you think that for-- - Which brings me,

00:56:09.200 | by the way, here's my question about Ukraine.

00:56:11.040 | - Sure. - I don't mean to

00:56:11.880 | skip around. - We'll just real quick,

00:56:12.700 | and then you can answer this one.

00:56:13.540 | So you think that for Iran, right,

00:56:15.040 | a country that has been sanctioned

00:56:16.080 | for God knows how many years now,

00:56:17.880 | you think that for Iran, just continuing to sanction them

00:56:20.080 | and contain them is an effective way,

00:56:22.080 | is more effective than trying to engage them

00:56:24.040 | in bilateral or multilateral peace talks?

00:56:26.280 | - Yes, 100%. - Okay.

00:56:27.640 | - And the proof is in the pudding.

00:56:28.560 | Before we go to Ukraine, can I ask about Israel?

00:56:30.720 | So you're both mostly in agreement,

00:56:33.480 | but what is Israel-- - I was about to say that.

00:56:35.000 | - Okay, but as I'm learning,

00:56:38.480 | what is Israel doing right, what is Israel doing wrong

00:56:41.520 | in this very specific current war in Gaza?

00:56:45.900 | - I mean, frankly, I think that what Israel's doing wrong

00:56:49.160 | is if I were Israel, okay, like again,

00:56:51.400 | America's interests are not coincident

00:56:53.120 | with Israel's interests.

00:56:54.400 | If I were an Israeli leader, I would have swiveled up

00:56:57.960 | and I would have knocked the bleep out of Hezbollah early.

00:57:01.280 | - What does that mean? - So I would have,

00:57:03.720 | Yoav Galant, who was the defense minister of Israel,

00:57:05.560 | was encouraging Netanyahu, who's the prime minister,

00:57:07.820 | and the war cabinet, including Benny Gantz.

00:57:09.280 | So whenever people talk about the Netanyahu government,

00:57:10.960 | that's not what's in place right now.

00:57:11.960 | There's a unity war government in place

00:57:13.400 | that includes the political opposition.

00:57:15.280 | The reason I point that out

00:57:16.120 | is because there are a lot of people politically

00:57:17.600 | who will suggest that the actions Israel is currently taking

00:57:19.760 | are somehow the manifestation of a right-wing government.

00:57:23.000 | Israel currently does not have

00:57:24.280 | a quote-unquote right-wing government,

00:57:25.260 | they have a unity government that includes the opposition.

00:57:27.000 | But in any case, Yoav Galant was urging

00:57:28.920 | in the very early days of the war

00:57:29.960 | that Israel should turn north and instead of hitting Hamas,

00:57:32.720 | they should actually take the opportunity

00:57:34.360 | to knock Hezbollah out

00:57:35.320 | because Hezbollah is significantly more dangerous

00:57:37.440 | to the existence of the state of Israel than Hamas.

00:57:39.360 | I actually agree with that.

00:57:40.680 | As far as what Israel has been doing wrong

00:57:43.800 | in the actual war, I mean, I think that,

00:57:47.240 | again, from an American perspective,

00:57:50.120 | I think that Israel is doing pretty well.

00:57:52.000 | From an Israeli perspective, if I were Israeli,

00:57:53.680 | I would actually want Israel to be less loose

00:57:57.360 | about sending its soldiers in on the ground level.

00:58:00.960 | So Israel is attempting to minimize civilian casualties

00:58:02.920 | and the cost of that has been the highest military death toll

00:58:05.920 | that Israel has had since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

00:58:08.720 | I mean, I personally know through one degree of separation,

00:58:11.480 | three separate people have been killed in Gaza

00:58:13.200 | and that's because they're going in door to door,

00:58:15.480 | it's because they're attempting

00:58:16.880 | to minimize civilian casualties

00:58:19.160 | and they're losing a lot of guys in this particular war.

00:58:23.660 | The problem that Israel has had, historically speaking,

00:58:25.980 | is that Israel got very complacent

00:58:27.980 | about its own security situation.

00:58:29.220 | They believed the technology was going to somehow correct

00:58:32.020 | for the hatred on the other side of the wall.

00:58:35.260 | Okay, so our people have to live underground

00:58:37.300 | for two weeks at a time while some rockets fall,

00:58:39.380 | but at least it's not a war.

00:58:40.740 | And that complacence bred what happened on October 7th.

00:58:45.260 | So to me, what Israel did wrong

00:58:47.860 | was years and years and years of complacence

00:58:50.260 | and belief in an Oslo system that is at root a failure

00:58:53.380 | because you cannot make a peace agreement

00:58:54.740 | with people who do not want to make peace with you.

00:58:56.580 | So that's what I think Israel is doing wrong.

00:58:58.280 | I have a feeling there's gonna be wide divergence

00:58:59.940 | on this point.

00:59:00.780 | - Maybe.

00:59:03.780 | So in terms of, broadly speaking,

00:59:07.020 | I generally oppose settlement expansion.

00:59:08.700 | It's a thing that Israel does incorrectly

00:59:10.220 | that I think is kind of like provocative

00:59:11.660 | to at least all the Palestinians in the West Bank

00:59:14.420 | and it probably energizes hatred

00:59:16.140 | in the Gaza Strip for them as well.

00:59:17.780 | In terms of conducting warfare,

00:59:21.540 | the one thing that I always say to everybody,

00:59:23.980 | especially Americans,

00:59:25.300 | is you can't evaluate things from an American perspective.

00:59:28.000 | It's very stupid.

00:59:28.840 | It happened a lot with Ukraine where people are like,

00:59:30.340 | oh, well, didn't they work with the Nazis

00:59:31.780 | and weren't the Soviets the good guys?

00:59:33.500 | And it's like, well, in other parts of the world,

00:59:35.140 | it's not quite as simple.

00:59:36.500 | And I think the same is true for Israel-Palestine,

00:59:39.100 | that a lot of Americans will analyze the conflict

00:59:41.540 | as just being one between only Israel and Palestine,

00:59:44.360 | which it's not.

00:59:45.200 | It's a conflict between Israel

00:59:46.060 | and then Palestine has below the Houthis and Iran.

00:59:48.620 | Right now it is.

00:59:49.520 | I think that the,

00:59:51.620 | however, one area where I'll break with Ben

00:59:53.260 | is I think that minimizing civilian casualties

00:59:55.740 | and everything is very, very, very important.

00:59:57.180 | I think on the Israeli side,

00:59:58.420 | I don't think it's important

00:59:59.260 | so that the US will stay with them

01:00:00.580 | 'cause I think the US is probably gonna stick with Israel

01:00:02.740 | as long as they're not doing anything crazy.

01:00:03.940 | And I don't even think it matters

01:00:04.980 | for the international community.

01:00:06.180 | It definitely doesn't matter for the UN

01:00:07.620 | because Jesus Christ.

01:00:09.500 | However, I think it's really, really, really important

01:00:11.960 | that I think that in the Middle East, broadly speaking,

01:00:15.340 | I think that leadership, especially in the Gulf,

01:00:18.220 | has gotten over the Palestinian issue.

01:00:22.220 | I think that leadership is kind of like

01:00:24.300 | they don't care as much anymore,

01:00:25.560 | but the populations still care quite a bit.

01:00:28.220 | And I think that the main issue that Israel could run into

01:00:31.340 | is if the civilian death toll does climb too high

01:00:33.980 | and if they start to hit this 40, 50, 60,000 number

01:00:36.940 | of civilian casualties,

01:00:38.140 | they run the risk of the civilian populations

01:00:40.220 | in the surrounding Middle Eastern states

01:00:41.340 | becoming so antagonistic towards Israel

01:00:43.620 | that they start to take steps back

01:00:45.220 | towards normalization in the region.

01:00:47.380 | So for instance, I know that Bahrain, I think,

01:00:49.580 | already pulled out their ambassador to Israel.

01:00:52.300 | My guess is going to be it's temporary.

01:00:54.580 | I know that on the public speaking side,

01:00:58.240 | you've got a lot of people condemning Israel for the attacks

01:01:00.380 | and on the private side,

01:01:01.420 | you've got people telling Israel,

01:01:02.620 | "Please kill all of Hamas because this is untenable

01:01:05.180 | "and nobody wants to work in this situation."

01:01:07.420 | I don't know if this ended up being true or not.

01:01:09.540 | I'm guessing it didn't,

01:01:10.560 | but I saw on a couple of Twitter accounts,

01:01:12.000 | it was leaked that potentially Saudi Arabia

01:01:14.200 | was considering installing a government in the West Bank

01:01:16.780 | that they would run.

01:01:18.460 | - No, I think Israel would love nothing better than that,

01:01:20.980 | but that is not helping the Saudis.

01:01:22.420 | One of the big problems in the Middle East

01:01:23.540 | is literally no one wants to preside over the Palestinians.

01:01:26.940 | No one, in the Arab states, Israel, no one.

01:01:29.780 | - So I think the issue, and I'm largely actually,

01:01:32.460 | I'm very sympathetic towards the Palestinians

01:01:33.940 | because I think that since '48 and onwards,

01:01:36.620 | I think that all of the Arab states

01:01:38.300 | super gassed them up on that.

01:01:39.700 | They wanted the Palestinians to fight

01:01:41.040 | because they wanted to fight with Israel.

01:01:42.840 | However, as time has gone on and they've realized

01:01:45.420 | that it's kind of a lost cause,

01:01:46.900 | states have started to drop out.

01:01:48.500 | So you're getting these bilateral peace treaties

01:01:50.700 | with Egypt and with Jordan.

01:01:53.180 | You're getting multilateral agreements

01:01:54.420 | like the Abraham Accords.

01:01:55.580 | And now the Palestinians are looking around.

01:01:57.160 | I'm like, "Okay, well, you guys told us

01:01:58.000 | "to fight all this time, and now the only people

01:01:59.500 | "that we have supporting us are Iranian proxies."

01:02:02.620 | So the Palestinians are in a very weird spot

01:02:04.380 | where they've lost all their support.

01:02:06.820 | Yeah, I think that Israel, what I would say

01:02:09.820 | to be quote-unquote critical of Israel

01:02:11.560 | is Israel needs to take strong steps towards peace

01:02:14.080 | that probably involves them enduring some undue hardship.

01:02:17.440 | So not the October 7th attacks because Jesus,

01:02:19.960 | that's way too much, but other types of attacks

01:02:23.480 | that they might have to deal with

01:02:24.320 | that might cause some civilians to die

01:02:25.560 | that they don't come out over the top with

01:02:27.040 | and retaliate with if there's ever gonna be peace

01:02:29.280 | in that region.

01:02:30.120 | However, another thing that I've always said

01:02:32.240 | is a huge problem between Israel and Palestine

01:02:34.280 | is I think that both sides think

01:02:36.680 | that if they continue to fight, it will be good for them,

01:02:39.680 | but the problem is one side is delusional.

01:02:41.740 | I think Israel wants to continue to fight

01:02:44.820 | because they get justifications for the annexation

01:02:48.100 | of the Golan Heights, they get justifications

01:02:50.020 | for expansions, especially in Area C,

01:02:51.860 | that I think they're probably gonna try to annex soon.

01:02:54.320 | They get justifications for the increased

01:02:56.020 | military posturing towards the Gaza Strip

01:02:58.100 | and the embargoes, and Israel is right

01:03:00.220 | that if the conflict continues,

01:03:01.220 | really the situation only improves for Israel over time,

01:03:04.040 | but the Palestinians also all believe

01:03:05.700 | that if they keep fighting, they've thought this

01:03:07.580 | since 2000 under Arafat, that if they just keep fighting,

01:03:09.660 | they'll get better gains too, but that's not the case.

01:03:12.320 | - Is there a difference between Palestinian citizens

01:03:15.000 | and the leadership when you say that?

01:03:16.620 | - I love all people, I love all people around the world,

01:03:19.640 | and I think that when we analyze issues,

01:03:21.480 | I think that we have to be very honest

01:03:23.000 | with what the people on the ground think,

01:03:24.600 | and the idea that Hamas is just this one-off thing

01:03:28.020 | in the Gaza Strip is not only incorrect

01:03:30.480 | with the situation on the ground,

01:03:31.320 | it's also incredibly ahistorical,

01:03:32.980 | and the idea that the Palestinians in the West Bank,

01:03:35.480 | of which I believe the most recent polling shows,

01:03:37.600 | I wanna say 75 to 80% support the October 7th attacks.

01:03:41.840 | Palestinians in general want to fight

01:03:45.760 | in violent conflict with Israel,

01:03:47.280 | that's not just the position of the government,

01:03:49.520 | that's not just people.

01:03:50.800 | There's a reason why Abbas doesn't wanna do elections

01:03:53.720 | in the West Bank, and it's because the Palestinian people

01:03:56.440 | really do wanna fight with Israel,

01:03:57.540 | but to combat that problem is like,

01:04:00.580 | you have to get the UN on board,

01:04:02.000 | we've gotta do an actual addressing

01:04:03.720 | of the Palestinian refugee problem,

01:04:05.720 | which is handled like a joke right now.

01:04:07.720 | Iran has to be brought to the table

01:04:09.080 | in terms of negotiations,

01:04:10.640 | there has to be huge efforts made

01:04:11.880 | to economically revitalize these Palestinian areas,

01:04:14.800 | even though they're one of the highest recipients

01:04:16.000 | of aid in the world.

01:04:17.680 | You have to do something about the embargo

01:04:19.480 | and the blockade in the Gaza Strip,

01:04:21.200 | which isn't just maintained by Israel,

01:04:22.580 | it's also maintained by Egypt, you should ask why.

01:04:25.720 | Yeah, there's a lot of things that have to happen

01:04:27.320 | to fix that problem, but the reality is,

01:04:29.040 | is I don't think Israel really wants to,

01:04:30.760 | because they get to continue their expansion

01:04:32.400 | into the West Bank, and I don't think anybody

01:04:33.960 | around the world really cares that much,

01:04:35.000 | so I will argue with that.

01:04:36.920 | The idea that Israel does not want to end the conflict

01:04:39.440 | is belied by the history of what just happened

01:04:41.400 | with the Gaza Strip.

01:04:42.240 | So when we talk about settlements, for example,

01:04:43.720 | Israel did have settlements inside the Gaza Strip,

01:04:45.480 | there were 8,000 Jews who were living

01:04:46.640 | inside the Gaza Strip in Gush Katif.

01:04:49.360 | Up until 2005, they withdrew all of those people,

01:04:53.560 | I mean, took them literally out of their homes,

01:04:55.640 | and the result was not the burgeoning

01:04:58.440 | of a better attitude toward the state of Israel

01:05:01.480 | with regard to, for example,

01:05:03.600 | the Palestinian population in Gaza.

01:05:05.080 | In fact, it was more radical in Gaza

01:05:06.440 | than it was in the West Bank.

01:05:08.560 | The result was obviously the election of Hamas,

01:05:11.360 | the October 7th attacks, in which, unfortunately,

01:05:13.640 | many civilians took part in the October 7th attacks.

01:05:16.960 | There's video of people rushing, who are civilians,

01:05:19.280 | and dressed in civilian clothing, into Israeli villages.

01:05:22.400 | - Always the same thing.

01:05:23.320 | - Well, no, no, that is 100% true, obviously.

01:05:26.240 | And when it comes to Area C, and Israel's supposed deep

01:05:30.200 | and abiding desire for territorial expansion in Area C,

01:05:33.400 | Area C, so for those who are not familiar

01:05:35.520 | with the Oslo Accords, and again,

01:05:36.360 | this is getting very abstruse,

01:05:37.240 | but the Oslo Accords are broken down

01:05:39.360 | into three areas of the West Bank.

01:05:41.240 | Area A is under full Palestinian control.

01:05:43.040 | That'd be like Jenin and Nablus,

01:05:44.320 | the major cities, for example.

01:05:45.880 | There's Area B, which is mixed Israeli-Palestinian control,

01:05:48.440 | where Israel provides some level

01:05:50.280 | of military security and control.

01:05:52.840 | And then there's Area C.

01:05:53.760 | And Area C was to be decided later.

01:05:55.720 | It was left up for possible concessions

01:05:59.000 | to the Palestinian Authority

01:06:01.000 | if the Oslo Accords had moved forward.

01:06:02.760 | Those are disputed territories.

01:06:04.360 | There is building taking place in Area C

01:06:05.920 | by both actually, no one talks about this,

01:06:07.320 | but by Palestinians as well as Israelis.

01:06:10.080 | And the question as to whether, if Israel stopped building,

01:06:14.000 | there've been many settlement freeze in the past,

01:06:15.560 | including some undertaken by Netanyahu.

01:06:17.720 | And it actually has not done one iota of good

01:06:21.120 | in moving the ball forward in terms of actual negotiations.

01:06:24.800 | Again, the biggest problem is that the leadership

01:06:27.400 | for Palestinians has spent every day since really '67.

01:06:31.120 | It's not even '48, because between '48 and '67,

01:06:34.040 | Jordan was in charge of the West Bank,

01:06:35.120 | and Egypt was in charge of the Gaza Strip,

01:06:36.440 | and at no point did either of those powers say,

01:06:38.360 | hey, maybe we oughta hand this over

01:06:39.400 | to an independent Palestinian state,

01:06:40.920 | which was originally the division

01:06:42.920 | that was promoted by the UN Partition Plan in '47.

01:06:46.160 | Because of that, the leadership post '67,

01:06:50.920 | and really starting in '64,

01:06:52.240 | the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in '64,

01:06:55.120 | and it called for the liberation of the land in '64.

01:06:59.640 | They had the West Bank, and they had the Gaza Strip,

01:07:01.280 | so they're talking about Tel Aviv.

01:07:02.760 | When it was founded in '64, the basic idea,

01:07:06.720 | as kind of indicated by that, was Israel will not exist.

01:07:10.360 | And that was a promise that's been made

01:07:11.400 | by pretty much every Palestinian leader in Arabic

01:07:14.240 | to the people that they are talking to.

01:07:16.400 | Yasser Arafat famously would do this sort of thing.

01:07:18.920 | He'd speak in English and talk about

01:07:19.960 | how he wanted a two-state solution,

01:07:21.040 | and then he'd go back to his own people and say,

01:07:22.640 | this is a Trojan horse, and we're gonna...

01:07:24.680 | If Israel could, if you think that Israeli parents

01:07:27.840 | wanna send their kids at the age of 18

01:07:30.040 | to go and monitor Jenin and Nablus and be in Khan Yunis,

01:07:35.040 | you're out of your mind.

01:07:36.240 | You're out of your mind.

01:07:37.080 | Israelis do not want that.

01:07:38.120 | In fact, Israelis didn't want that so much

01:07:39.480 | that they allowed rockets to fall in their cities

01:07:41.040 | for full-on 18 years in order to avoid sending soldiers

01:07:44.040 | en masse back into the Gaza Strip.

01:07:45.760 | - True, but I think Israel does wanna continue

01:07:47.160 | to expand settlements under the West Bank, right?

01:07:48.680 | They wanna continue to build.

01:07:49.640 | They wanna have all of Jerusalem, East Jerusalem as well.

01:07:52.080 | - Well, I mean, East Jerusalem has already been annexed,

01:07:53.440 | so East Jerusalem is, according to Israel,

01:07:55.360 | a part of Israel.

01:07:56.200 | That's not a settlement. - Sure.

01:07:57.040 | - So there's that.

01:07:57.880 | With regard to does Israel have an interest

01:08:00.400 | in expanding settlements in the West Bank,

01:08:02.800 | why would they not until there's a peace partner?

01:08:04.760 | - Sure, that's what I mean,

01:08:05.600 | but I'm saying as long as the conflict continues,

01:08:07.120 | 'cause even when you talk about the--

01:08:07.960 | - No, but your suggestion is that they're incentivizing

01:08:09.920 | the conflict to continue so they can grab more land.

01:08:11.840 | - Well, no, let me be very clear.

01:08:12.920 | I don't think there's a plan.

01:08:14.400 | So some people say, for instance,

01:08:16.080 | they'll take that one quote from Netanyahu,

01:08:17.920 | and they'll try to say that he was funding

01:08:19.440 | the people in the Gaza Strip

01:08:20.400 | by allowing Qatari money to come in,

01:08:21.840 | even though he was actually speaking in opposition to Abbas,

01:08:23.960 | allowing the Gaza Strip to fall for Netanyahu

01:08:25.560 | to clear it out for him, they give it back, et cetera, et cetera.

01:08:27.200 | I'm not saying, I'm not claiming those theories.

01:08:29.160 | I'm just saying that I think that Israel

01:08:30.800 | will take a relatively neutral stance

01:08:32.760 | towards conflict enduring,

01:08:34.480 | because as long as the conflict endures

01:08:35.960 | and as long as the settlements can expand,

01:08:38.720 | I think that benefits,

01:08:40.060 | I think that ultimately benefits Israel.

01:08:42.320 | - I think there'd be very, let's put it this way.

01:08:44.080 | If suddenly there arose among the Palestinians

01:08:46.360 | a deep and abiding desire for peace,

01:08:48.040 | approved by a vast majority of the population

01:08:49.560 | with serious security guarantees,

01:08:51.640 | I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find Israelis

01:08:54.880 | who would not be willing to at least consider that,

01:08:57.160 | in return for not expanding Bathroom to Nefrat.

01:08:59.080 | - I kind of, I would have agreed with you on October 6th.

01:09:01.880 | I think we're probably a year or two away

01:09:03.320 | from that right now, though.

01:09:04.160 | - No, no, but the point I'm making is that Israelis

01:09:06.080 | now realize that the entire peace process was a sham,

01:09:08.440 | meaning the people who are on the other side of the table

01:09:09.800 | were using it as a Trojan horse in the first place.

01:09:11.720 | The death of Oslo is not the death of Israeli hopefulness.

01:09:15.080 | It's the death of the illusion

01:09:17.400 | that on the other side of the table

01:09:18.440 | was anyone worth bargaining with.

01:09:20.080 | That's what's happening,

01:09:20.920 | and that's why you have this sort of insane disconnect

01:09:22.600 | right now between the United States

01:09:23.720 | and the Israeli government.

01:09:24.560 | Again, it's a unity government.

01:09:25.800 | No one in Israel is talking about making concessions

01:09:27.960 | to the Palestinian Authority for a wide variety of reasons,

01:09:30.080 | including the fact that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah

01:09:31.720 | continues to pay actual families of terrorists

01:09:34.160 | who killed Jews.

01:09:35.000 | - Sure, the Mark Fund, yeah.

01:09:35.840 | - Right, and the fact--

01:09:37.040 | - Which is from the moderate West Bank.

01:09:39.040 | - Right, exactly.

01:09:40.280 | So again, the taste in Israel for this is,

01:09:44.200 | even the people who are the Chilonim, right,

01:09:45.960 | those are the most secular people in Israel,

01:09:47.600 | which was, by the way,

01:09:48.440 | the place that was attacked on October 7th.

01:09:50.200 | I mean, what people should understand is that October 7th

01:09:52.080 | was not an attack against settlements in the West Bank.

01:09:54.200 | It was an attack on peace villages

01:09:56.120 | that were essentially disarmed,

01:09:57.280 | and many of these people who were killed

01:09:59.000 | were peace activists who were literally trying to work

01:10:01.160 | with people in Gaza to get them jobs.

01:10:02.640 | I mean, it's just, it's mind-boggling.

01:10:04.800 | That's why you've had this ground shift in Israel.

01:10:06.800 | The next 20 years in Israel is gonna be about security

01:10:09.040 | and economic development, period, end of story.

01:10:11.040 | Everything else goes second, third place.

01:10:12.880 | - And I will say, I agree essentially

01:10:14.880 | with everything you're saying,

01:10:16.380 | not to loop back on another topic,

01:10:17.640 | but this is one of the reasons then why I was so critical.

01:10:20.080 | I don't wanna say critical,

01:10:20.960 | but like kind of nonchalant about the Abraham Accords,

01:10:23.480 | because they didn't address anything

01:10:24.560 | with the Palestinians whatsoever.

01:10:25.540 | They brought up countries

01:10:26.380 | that weren't super relevant to the conflict.

01:10:27.280 | They didn't bring in Qatar,

01:10:28.200 | which is where a lot of the money and support

01:10:29.720 | for the Gaza Strip comes from.

01:10:30.640 | They didn't involve Iran at all.

01:10:31.680 | They involved bilateral peace talks.

01:10:32.520 | - No, but it totally changed the mentality.

01:10:33.880 | And this is why, what I'm seeing right now,

01:10:35.360 | this is why, listen, I think that Biden has done better

01:10:38.000 | than I certainly expected him to do

01:10:39.200 | in terms of support for Israel.

01:10:40.160 | Like Obama was way less supportive of Israel

01:10:42.160 | than Biden by every metric.

01:10:44.160 | With that said, the rhetoric that he's been using recently

01:10:46.400 | and the Blinken have been using recently

01:10:47.560 | about Israel needs to make painful concessions for peace,

01:10:49.560 | Israel needs, re-centering this issue

01:10:52.080 | at the center of relations in the Middle East

01:10:54.320 | is doomed to failure.

01:10:55.760 | The magic, magic is a strong word,

01:10:57.820 | the benefit of the Abraham Accords

01:11:01.080 | was proof of what you're saying, which is true,

01:11:03.880 | which is that all of these surrounding countries

01:11:05.520 | in reality have abandoned the idea

01:11:07.520 | that there's a centrality

01:11:08.560 | to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

01:11:09.880 | That is not the central conflict in the Middle East.

01:11:12.280 | And by the way, one of the reasons

01:11:13.120 | it's not the central conflict in the Middle East

01:11:14.320 | is because actually, ironically,

01:11:15.560 | 'cause of the rise of Iran, right?

01:11:16.760 | It's Sunni states that are largely signing up with Israel

01:11:19.320 | because they're realizing they need

01:11:20.560 | some sort of counterweight

01:11:21.400 | to a burgeoning nuclear power in Iran.

01:11:24.180 | - Can we talk about Ukraine?

01:11:26.760 | - Sure.

01:11:27.600 | - Do you have a disagreement with what Destiny said?

01:11:31.040 | - My main problem with Biden's policy with regard to Ukraine

01:11:35.320 | is that he outsourced the end goal

01:11:38.600 | of the war to Zelensky early on.

01:11:41.220 | Now, that might make sense if that goal

01:11:44.880 | were something that he was willing to fund

01:11:46.360 | to the point of achievement,

01:11:48.360 | or if Zelensky could have achieved it on his own.

01:11:50.440 | But right now, and this has been true

01:11:51.720 | since pretty early on,

01:11:52.560 | the worst point Henry Kissinger made,

01:11:54.480 | that pretty early on in the war,

01:11:56.160 | it was very clear that, for example,

01:11:58.760 | Crimea was going nowhere.

01:12:00.220 | The Russians had control of Crimea,

01:12:01.920 | barring the United States giving permission

01:12:04.180 | to fly F-16s over Crimea,

01:12:05.820 | nothing was going to change over there.

01:12:07.200 | The same thing was true in most of the Donbass, right,

01:12:10.040 | in Luhansk and Donetsk, that that was not going to change.

01:12:12.480 | Zelensky stated goal, and you understand it,

01:12:14.400 | he's the leader of Ukraine, right,

01:12:15.840 | is that there was a predation on his territory in 2014,

01:12:19.320 | and that the Russians sent their little green men

01:12:20.960 | across the border, and then they took all of these areas,

01:12:22.640 | and so he, as leader of Ukraine, is saying,

01:12:24.160 | "Okay, I want all of that back."

01:12:25.640 | Now, the reality is that the US's interest

01:12:27.680 | had largely been achieved in the first few months of the war,

01:12:30.160 | meaning the revocation of the ability of Russia

01:12:33.440 | to take Ukraine and just ingest it,

01:12:36.760 | and two, the devastation of Russia's military capability.

01:12:39.360 | I mean, Russia has just been wrecked.

01:12:40.600 | I mean, their military is in serious straits

01:12:42.860 | because of the war in Ukraine.

01:12:44.160 | From an American perspective, I'm very much pro all of that.

01:12:46.520 | I think that we have an interest in Ukraine

01:12:48.440 | maintaining the buffer status

01:12:49.720 | against a territorially aggressive Russia.

01:12:52.360 | I think that the United States does have an interest

01:12:54.720 | in degrading the Russian military to the extent

01:12:56.760 | that it can't threaten the Baltic states

01:12:58.020 | or threaten Kazakhstan or other countries in the region.

01:13:01.600 | The problem I have with Biden's strategy is,

01:13:04.980 | as always, I think that it's a muddle,

01:13:07.460 | and I think muddles tend to end with misperceptions.

01:13:10.600 | War tends to break out and maintain

01:13:12.360 | because of misperception.

01:13:13.600 | Misperception, the other side's strength,

01:13:14.960 | the other side's intentions, and all of the rest.

01:13:16.720 | People misperceive what's gonna happen.

01:13:17.960 | They say, "I'll cross that line and nothing will happen,"

01:13:19.920 | right, this is what Putin thought.

01:13:20.920 | He thought, "I'll cross that line.

01:13:22.480 | They'll greet me as a liberator."

01:13:24.160 | And because the United States

01:13:25.320 | just surrendered in Afghanistan,

01:13:26.480 | essentially, they won't do anything,

01:13:27.920 | and the West is fragmenting 'cause NATO's fragmenting,

01:13:29.840 | and all the rest of this, and obviously,

01:13:30.800 | he was wrong on all of those scores.

01:13:32.760 | The problem for Biden is that, as with virtually every war,

01:13:37.040 | no end line was set.

01:13:39.680 | And so it became out recently, it was widely reported,

01:13:42.480 | that actually there was a peace deal that was on the table

01:13:44.440 | in the first few months that Putin was on board with

01:13:47.040 | that basically would have ceded

01:13:48.680 | Luhansk, and Donetsk, and Crimea to Russia

01:13:51.280 | in return for solidification of those lines,

01:13:54.040 | American and Western security guarantees to Ukraine, right?

01:13:57.320 | Ukraine wouldn't formally join NATO,

01:13:58.520 | but there would be security guarantees to Ukraine.

01:14:00.760 | We're ending up there anyway.

01:14:02.040 | It's just taking a lot more money

01:14:03.280 | and a lot more time to get there.

01:14:04.680 | - And do you think Trump would have helped push that peace?

01:14:07.280 | - Yes, and I think that Biden actually did Zelensky

01:14:09.680 | a bit of a disservice because Zelensky knows

01:14:11.240 | where this war is gonna end, and it's not gonna end

01:14:12.800 | with Luhansk, and Donetsk, and Crimea in Ukrainian hands.

01:14:15.360 | It's just not going to, and he knows that.

01:14:17.120 | What actually, in my opinion, Zelensky needed

01:14:21.760 | was for Joe Biden to be the person

01:14:23.760 | who foisted that deal upon him,

01:14:25.560 | so that he could then go back to his own people

01:14:27.400 | and say, "Listen, guys, I wanted all those things,

01:14:29.680 | "but the Americans weren't willing to allow me

01:14:31.240 | "to have all those things."

01:14:32.760 | And so we did an amazing job.

01:14:34.760 | We did a heroic job in defending our own land.

01:14:36.640 | We devastated the Russian military,

01:14:37.960 | even though no one expected us to,

01:14:39.320 | but we can't get back those things

01:14:41.000 | because it's unrealistic to get back those things

01:14:42.600 | because America basically, they're a big funder,

01:14:45.040 | and they're the ones who want the deal.

01:14:46.360 | Instead, what Biden said, and this was reported

01:14:48.280 | in the Washington Post last year,

01:14:49.400 | the Biden administration said, "We're gonna fight

01:14:51.680 | "for as long as it takes with as much as it takes."

01:14:53.760 | And when they were asked until when,

01:14:56.200 | they said, "Whatever Zelensky says."

01:14:58.560 | And that's not a policy.

01:15:00.720 | That's just a recipe for a frozen conflict

01:15:03.240 | with endless funding.

01:15:04.960 | Now, it may be that Putin has walked away from the table

01:15:06.720 | and that deal is no longer available.

01:15:08.240 | If that deal is available right now,

01:15:10.120 | I certainly hope that's being pursued behind closed doors.

01:15:13.000 | My main critique, again, of Biden is that

01:15:15.560 | when you outsource the end goal to another country

01:15:18.560 | without stating what America's interest is, that's a problem.

01:15:21.400 | I also think that Biden did really quite a poor job

01:15:23.760 | of sort of explaining what America's realistic interests are.

01:15:26.520 | I don't like it when American leaders,

01:15:28.520 | it's weird for me to say this, but I'm not a huge fan

01:15:32.320 | of the we're in it to protect democracy kind of rhetoric,

01:15:35.600 | because frankly, we are allied with many, many countries

01:15:37.840 | that are not democracies,

01:15:38.680 | and that's not actually how foreign policy works.

01:15:41.040 | We should, as an overall, you know, 30,000 foot goal,

01:15:45.560 | advance democracy and rights where we can.

01:15:49.520 | But the reason that we were fighting in favor of Ukraine,

01:15:53.040 | and when I say fighting, I mean giving them money

01:15:54.680 | and giving them weaponry.

01:15:55.640 | The reason that we were doing that in favor of Ukraine

01:15:57.760 | is not because of Ukraine's long history of clean voting

01:16:01.520 | and non-corruption.

01:16:02.680 | The reason that we were doing that

01:16:03.760 | is to counter Russian interests in the region.

01:16:05.680 | I mean, it was a pure real politic play.

01:16:08.360 | And that real politic play is hard to deny

01:16:09.840 | no matter what side of the aisle you're on.

01:16:11.800 | I think that what many Americans are going to,

01:16:14.480 | are reverting to is we have no interest there.

01:16:17.280 | Why are we spending money there

01:16:18.280 | and not spending money here?

01:16:19.120 | And that kind of stuff.

01:16:19.960 | And that argument can always be applied

01:16:21.160 | unless you actually articulate the reason

01:16:22.600 | why it is good for Americans beyond simply the ideological

01:16:25.400 | for the United States to be involved in a thing.

01:16:26.880 | So for example, I think right now,

01:16:28.720 | when Biden is talking, I think that what Biden just did,

01:16:32.040 | the United States as we speak, is striking the Houthis.

01:16:34.480 | I think that that's a really, really good thing.

01:16:36.080 | I think that's a necessary thing.

01:16:37.200 | I think American people should understand

01:16:38.960 | why that is happening.

01:16:40.160 | It's not because of quote unquote ideology, it is.

01:16:43.320 | I mean, on a very root level,

01:16:44.800 | but really it's because you're screwing up the straights.

01:16:48.160 | I mean, you can't do that.

01:16:49.160 | You can't screw up free trade.

01:16:50.720 | And Americans have an interest in not seeing

01:16:52.200 | all of our prices at the grocery store double and triple

01:16:54.640 | because a bunch of ragtag pirates,

01:16:57.040 | akin to the Barbary pirates from 1800,

01:16:59.280 | are bothering everyone, right?

01:17:00.800 | - So Ben said a lot there.

01:17:01.880 | Do you disagree with any aspect on the Ukraine side?

01:17:04.520 | - A little bit, yeah.

01:17:06.080 | I think on the macro, I agree.

01:17:07.280 | Maybe we get at the weasel a little bit on some things.

01:17:09.400 | On the final thing that he said though,

01:17:10.720 | I wish that Americans could have honest conversations

01:17:13.800 | about foreign policy.

01:17:14.760 | I think that it would just be better for everybody.

01:17:17.200 | I don't know if it's Red Scare after the Cold War,

01:17:20.680 | where it was like literally the behemoths

01:17:23.280 | were fighting against communism.

01:17:24.560 | And we felt like after '91,

01:17:26.240 | every single foreign policy decision

01:17:27.840 | needs to be able to be explained in like seven words.

01:17:30.760 | Like he's the bad guy and that's it.

01:17:32.960 | I wish we had more honest conversations

01:17:35.040 | about what our foreign policy interest is

01:17:37.960 | in a particular region.

01:17:38.840 | Because I don't think most Americans

01:17:41.040 | honestly could even articulate

01:17:42.320 | why Israel would be an important ally

01:17:43.840 | or why it's important to defend Ukraine against Russia

01:17:46.280 | or why should we care about Taiwan at all.

01:17:48.520 | I don't know if most Americans

01:17:49.360 | could articulate anything there,

01:17:50.960 | even though they might have very strong opinions

01:17:52.560 | about why we ought to be involved in certain conflicts.

01:17:55.400 | So I do agree with that.

01:17:56.280 | I wish we had more honest conversations about foreign policy.

01:17:59.440 | In terms of how Biden has handled Ukraine,

01:18:02.920 | the things that I liked the most were,

01:18:05.000 | one, that he was very clear in the beginning

01:18:06.800 | about what we wouldn't do.

01:18:07.880 | So Biden saying that we're not gonna do not a red line,

01:18:12.000 | no fly zones over Ukraine.

01:18:13.320 | We're not gonna be deploying troops

01:18:14.480 | on the ground in Ukraine.

01:18:15.480 | We're not gonna be doing anything

01:18:17.080 | that would have US soldiers and Russian soldiers

01:18:19.600 | crossing swords with each other.

01:18:20.560 | That's not gonna happen.

01:18:21.400 | I liked that he made that very clear at the beginning.

01:18:24.080 | And I liked that he coalition built

01:18:25.760 | between NATO and the EU to get people to send funds,

01:18:29.080 | training, soldiers, airplanes, and everything to Ukraine.

01:18:31.680 | I thought those two things were really good.

01:18:33.120 | In terms of basically writing Zelensky a blank check,

01:18:36.560 | I would like to hope that Biden

01:18:38.720 | and the entire United States learned a lesson

01:18:40.920 | from Iraq and Afghanistan that open-ended missions

01:18:43.960 | with unlimited budgets and no clear goal

01:18:46.200 | are like the worst foreign policy decisions you can ever do.

01:18:49.160 | They've like defined US foreign policy

01:18:51.400 | for the past two or three decades, which is unfortunate,

01:18:53.800 | but seems to be the case.

01:18:55.240 | My feeling would be, and this is just a feeling,

01:18:58.960 | I don't know if internal cables have leaked

01:19:00.400 | that say otherwise, is the Biden administration

01:19:04.200 | has probably always had a quiet position

01:19:06.400 | of at some point, there's gonna be an off-ramp here.

01:19:08.760 | And I think even a month or two ago,

01:19:10.120 | I think those talks were being leaked,

01:19:11.840 | that discussion had begun with Zelensky

01:19:13.720 | looking for an off-ramp.

01:19:14.680 | But publicly, of course,

01:19:16.640 | the United States is never gonna come out and say,

01:19:18.240 | "We are gonna support you guys to fight

01:19:19.480 | "as much as you want for three months."

01:19:21.640 | And then after that, it's no more.

01:19:23.160 | Obviously, that can't be the statement.

01:19:24.600 | It's always going to be that we're gonna support you

01:19:27.160 | in your fight against Russia-

01:19:28.000 | - Yeah, we tried that under Obama with Afghanistan.

01:19:29.800 | It was terrible.

01:19:30.640 | - Sure, yeah, you can't-

01:19:31.480 | - We'll escalate the troop levels to X,

01:19:33.200 | but only for six months and then we're-

01:19:34.280 | - Yeah, you just can't do that.

01:19:35.480 | It's always gonna come off as,

01:19:36.520 | "We're gonna support you forever and as long as it takes,

01:19:38.320 | "and as long as you need, whatever we have to do

01:19:39.600 | "to defend freedom and democracy in your country."

01:19:41.440 | And any other statement would be absurd.

01:19:43.800 | So I can understand why it feels like on a public level,

01:19:46.880 | a blank check and an indefinite time period

01:19:48.960 | was granted to Zelensky,

01:19:50.200 | but I don't think that's gonna be the case.

01:19:51.520 | I think, again, I hope we've learned our lessons

01:19:54.000 | in the Middle East about the forever wars,

01:19:55.800 | that this isn't gonna be a forever funding to Ukraine

01:19:57.800 | to fight for as long as they want.

01:19:59.440 | I do disagree.

01:20:00.640 | I feel like we're playing a little bit retrospectively

01:20:02.520 | saying that, "Well, it's obvious

01:20:03.920 | "that they're not gonna capture the Donbas.

01:20:05.200 | "It's obvious that they're not gonna capture Crimea."

01:20:06.960 | I agree for Crimea, that was incredibly obvious,

01:20:08.840 | but it was also really obvious that in two weeks,

01:20:10.760 | Russia would own Kiev and Ukraine was gonna be Belarus 2.0.

01:20:14.080 | I think that even for a lot of military people

01:20:17.760 | and analysts around the world,

01:20:19.720 | that that was an expectation

01:20:21.640 | or at least a significant probability.

01:20:23.160 | Nobody knew, the phrase that's thrown around now

01:20:25.560 | is paper tiger, that Russia's military

01:20:27.760 | was as ill-equipped as they were.

01:20:29.120 | So I can understand why, especially if you're Ukraine

01:20:32.120 | and if you've repelled an invasion

01:20:33.760 | from one of the world's largest armies,

01:20:34.960 | why you might feel like, "Well, fuck it.

01:20:36.280 | "Let's fight for a few months.

01:20:37.280 | "Let's fight for a year.

01:20:38.120 | "Let's see what happens."

01:20:38.960 | And I can understand the United States supporting them,

01:20:40.960 | but I agree that there has to be some reasonable off-ramp

01:20:43.640 | where we're not gonna fight forever.

01:20:44.520 | I think the U.S. State Department

01:20:46.240 | has already begun those conversations with Zelenskyy

01:20:48.440 | to look at what that off-ramp looks like.

01:20:50.480 | But yeah, I'm not too sure,

01:20:52.440 | other than explicitly stating publicly,

01:20:55.160 | "You can only fight until this date."

01:20:57.440 | I don't really know what else I would change.

01:20:59.080 | I don't think the Biden administration should have done that.

01:21:01.480 | I don't know what else-

01:21:02.320 | - Do you think Biden should cut this deal on the funding?

01:21:04.960 | Meaning there's this $105 billion deal

01:21:07.240 | that's been held up by debate

01:21:08.960 | between Republicans and Democrats over border, right?

01:21:11.640 | So basically, it contains $60 billion for Ukraine,

01:21:14.040 | $14 billion for Israel,

01:21:16.000 | another several billion dollars

01:21:17.120 | for Taiwanese defense against China,

01:21:19.440 | and then includes some border funding

01:21:20.960 | and some border provisions.

01:21:22.000 | Republicans want the border funding

01:21:23.120 | and the border provisions

01:21:23.960 | because we can get into the illegal immigration issue,

01:21:25.840 | but that's a pretty serious issue.

01:21:27.480 | And Biden and Democrats have been unwilling to hold that up.

01:21:29.440 | And that seems to me like,

01:21:30.720 | just from, put aside Republican, Democrats,

01:21:32.440 | it seems like political malpractice.

01:21:33.920 | Meaning there's a widespread perception

01:21:35.440 | in the United States that the border's a disaster area.

01:21:37.680 | Joe Biden wants these things.

01:21:38.880 | Many Republicans don't want these things.

01:21:40.720 | If he caves on the border stuff,

01:21:41.720 | he gets all the things that he wants,

01:21:43.040 | and he's gonna be able to go back

01:21:44.400 | to the moderates in the country

01:21:45.720 | and say, "I did something about the border."

01:21:47.000 | It seems like such an obvious win.

01:21:48.440 | - If he caves on the border stuff,

01:21:49.360 | you mean on the Ukraine stuff?

01:21:50.280 | - Yes, because then he gets the whole package.

01:21:51.720 | Meaning he can go back to his own base and he can say,

01:21:53.700 | "Listen, guys, I wanted to be easy on the border.

01:21:56.040 | The Republicans forced me to it,

01:21:57.120 | but we needed the Ukraine aid.

01:21:58.240 | We needed the Taiwan aid, right?"

01:21:59.320 | - Yeah.

01:22:00.160 | Honestly, you're gonna be more educated than me on this.

01:22:02.560 | I don't like, or maybe I just don't know enough.

01:22:06.040 | I don't like the principle

01:22:07.080 | that when we negotiate things in the United States,

01:22:08.920 | there's like 50 million hostages at all points in time

01:22:11.640 | for every single thing.

01:22:12.800 | Like, "Oh boy, here comes the debt ceiling.

01:22:14.800 | What do the Republicans want?

01:22:15.800 | What do the Democrats want?

01:22:16.680 | Oh boy, we can't fund our government."

01:22:19.000 | But I mean, obviously the argument is gonna be

01:22:22.880 | that if the Ukraine funding doesn't come in this bill,

01:22:24.980 | and if Biden and his administration feel

01:22:26.360 | like it's really important that unilaterally,

01:22:28.000 | or not unilaterally, but as a single issue,

01:22:29.520 | it's not gonna pass.

01:22:30.680 | So I would say that at this point,

01:22:33.980 | and I don't know what the conversations look like

01:22:35.600 | between the Biden administration and Zelensky,

01:22:36.840 | I would say at this point that it's probably fair

01:22:38.580 | to start making contingencies on the money

01:22:40.800 | that we give to Ukraine that, "Listen,

01:22:43.280 | this conflict has waged on now.

01:22:46.520 | Now we need to start looking for potential peace.

01:22:49.080 | We can't just write you an unlimited check."

01:22:50.860 | So I mean, if those strings are attached,

01:22:52.700 | I'd be okay with it.

01:22:53.620 | But the broader question of like,

01:22:54.820 | is it okay to make this particular piece of legislation

01:22:57.020 | with all this funding contingent on the Ukrainian funding?

01:22:59.460 | I mean, that just seems to be the way

01:23:00.620 | the government works now, unfortunately.

01:23:02.660 | - Quick pause, bathroom break.

01:23:05.020 | One of the big issues in this presidential election

01:23:07.860 | is gonna be January 6th.

01:23:10.380 | It's in the news now, and I think it's gonna get,

01:23:12.580 | become bigger and bigger and bigger.

01:23:13.860 | So question for Destiny first.

01:23:16.660 | Did Donald Trump incite an insurrection

01:23:19.260 | on January 6th, 2021?

01:23:22.000 | - Absolutely.

01:23:23.380 | This is probably ignoring every other issue

01:23:25.500 | we've talked about, of which I think there are plenty

01:23:27.080 | that I would say disqualify Trump from holding office.

01:23:30.340 | I think that the conduct and the behavior leading up to

01:23:33.140 | and including January 6th, I think is wildly indefensible.

01:23:37.780 | I am excited to see Ben trying to, yeah.

01:23:42.140 | The three to four stages are the taking

01:23:47.000 | what I think any reasonable person would say,

01:23:48.380 | knowingly false information about elections being rigged

01:23:51.660 | or ballot boxes being stuffed, or Ruby Freeman,

01:23:54.060 | running ballots three times in Georgia,

01:23:55.780 | taking that knowingly false information

01:23:57.900 | and trying to call state secretaries and stuff

01:24:00.700 | to have them flip their electoral vote.

01:24:03.380 | That was horrible.

01:24:04.900 | The plot that Eastman hatched in order to have these

01:24:10.780 | false slates of electors, where all seven states

01:24:13.800 | had citizens go in and falsely say

01:24:16.420 | that they were the duly elected electors

01:24:19.220 | that could submit votes to Congress.

01:24:20.820 | That was insane.

01:24:22.420 | That happened.

01:24:23.260 | Asking or begging Pence to accept these false states

01:24:27.980 | of electors initially, and then just say,

01:24:29.660 | you should just throw it out completely

01:24:30.900 | and throw it to the House delegation,

01:24:32.420 | which was majority Republican.

01:24:34.820 | That was absolutely unbelievable.

01:24:36.780 | And then on the day of January 6th,

01:24:39.900 | trying to capitalize on the violence by him,

01:24:42.060 | Giuliani and Eastman making phone calls

01:24:43.940 | to senators and congressmen saying,

01:24:45.460 | well, don't you think maybe you guys

01:24:47.140 | should delay the vote a little bit?

01:24:48.900 | Don't you think they're just really mad about the election?

01:24:50.700 | I think he said to McCarthy, they're more upset than you.

01:24:53.620 | And his utter dereliction of duty

01:24:56.340 | in not doing anything to stop the rioting

01:24:59.620 | that happened on January 6th,

01:25:00.620 | 'cause he was too busy taking advantage of it.

01:25:01.860 | I think all of these things are horrible.

01:25:04.140 | I look forward to seeing the Jack Smith indictments

01:25:07.060 | play out in court, maybe even the Georgia Rico case.

01:25:10.500 | But yeah, I think all of these things are unfathomable.

01:25:13.740 | And I think when you look at the plot from start to finish,

01:25:15.820 | clearly the goal the entire time

01:25:17.420 | was to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power.

01:25:19.780 | That was the goal from start to finish,

01:25:21.460 | whether it was through false claims,

01:25:22.900 | whether it was through illegal schemes,

01:25:24.700 | or whether it was through violence at the Capitol

01:25:26.180 | to delay the certification of the vote.

01:25:28.340 | - Ben?

01:25:29.620 | - So I'm glad you're excited, it's always fun.

01:25:31.700 | So there are two elements to incitement of insurrection.

01:25:34.500 | One is incitement, the other is insurrection.

01:25:36.620 | So incitement has a legal standard, so does insurrection.

01:25:40.100 | Neither of those standards are met.

01:25:41.220 | So if you're asking me, morally speaking,

01:25:43.300 | did Donald Trump do the right thing

01:25:44.340 | between November 4th and January 6th?

01:25:46.060 | I said, I will continue to say, no, he did not.

01:25:48.540 | I think he was saying things that are false,

01:25:50.660 | with just factually false about his theories

01:25:53.020 | with regard to the election,

01:25:54.380 | about the election being stolen, about fraud.

01:25:56.380 | This was all adjudicated in court.

01:25:57.740 | He did not even bring many of the claims

01:25:59.060 | that he's brought publicly and all the rest of that.

01:26:01.420 | If we're talking about incitement of insurrection

01:26:03.380 | as a legal standard,

01:26:04.220 | it doesn't meet any of those standards.

01:26:05.260 | When it comes to incitement,

01:26:06.380 | it has to be incitement to immediate lawless action.

01:26:09.300 | That's the standard for incitement.

01:26:10.980 | And I'm very meticulous in how I use this

01:26:13.500 | because I happen to speak publicly a lot,

01:26:15.260 | and that means there are lots of people who listen to me,

01:26:16.620 | which means some of those people are probably crazy.

01:26:18.460 | And some of them may go and do a crazy thing.

01:26:20.500 | Did I incite them?

01:26:21.580 | The media tends to use the word incitement very loosely

01:26:23.940 | with regard to this sort of stuff,

01:26:25.100 | in the same way that Bernie Sanders, quote-unquote,

01:26:26.500 | incited the congressional baseball shooting.

01:26:28.100 | He did not.

01:26:29.180 | Bernie Sanders has a lot of things I disagree with.

01:26:30.940 | I think Bernie's a schmuck, doesn't matter.

01:26:32.620 | He did not incite that.

01:26:34.020 | So saying bad things is not the same thing

01:26:36.820 | as inciting violence.

01:26:38.460 | Inciting violence, the legal standard in the United States

01:26:40.260 | is I want you to go punch that guy in the face.

01:26:42.020 | That's inciting.

01:26:43.700 | With regard to insurrection, typically an insurrection,

01:26:46.620 | and there are some descriptions in case law,

01:26:48.420 | though none in statutory law as far as I'm aware,

01:26:50.420 | the typical description in case law

01:26:52.020 | is the replacement of one legitimate government

01:26:53.700 | of the United States with another by violent means.

01:26:56.100 | The notion that Donald Trump coordinated

01:26:58.900 | any such insurrection is belied by the FBI itself.

01:27:01.980 | The FBI put out a report in, I believe it was August of 2021

01:27:05.500 | suggesting that there was no well-coordinated

01:27:07.420 | insurrectionist attempt coordinated by the White House.

01:27:10.420 | In fact, what you had was Donald Trump thrashing around

01:27:12.660 | like that weird alien in the movie "Life."

01:27:15.660 | I don't know if you ever saw it with Jake Gyllenhaal

01:27:16.980 | where he's like kind of thrashing up against this glass box,

01:27:18.900 | just an alien just thrashing up against the glass box.

01:27:20.980 | That I think is more what you were seeing

01:27:23.100 | from November 4th to January 6th.

01:27:25.820 | And then again, the claim that January 6th itself

01:27:29.420 | was an insurrection.

01:27:30.540 | So virtually, I'm not aware that anyone was charged

01:27:32.940 | with actual insurrection.

01:27:33.820 | There were some people who were charged

01:27:34.660 | with seditious conspiracy.

01:27:35.720 | There are insurrection statutes that do exist.

01:27:37.660 | No one was charged under those particular statutes.

01:27:40.940 | There were some people who you could say informally

01:27:42.940 | had insurrectionist ideas.

01:27:45.040 | Those would be the people who wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi

01:27:46.960 | or kill Mike Pence.

01:27:47.980 | And those people are in jail right now.

01:27:50.980 | And the election went forward.

01:27:53.160 | The election was certified.

01:27:54.540 | Mike Pence presided over the certification.

01:27:55.980 | Mitch McConnell presided over the certification.

01:27:57.580 | Joe Biden has been the president for the last three years.

01:28:00.540 | So Donald Trump, by the way,

01:28:02.540 | was still president at that point.

01:28:03.660 | If he had actively wanted to do what other people

01:28:05.760 | who have actually launched coups have done,

01:28:08.080 | he would have theoretically called the National Guard

01:28:09.800 | not to put down the riot,

01:28:10.760 | but to actually depose the sitting government

01:28:13.800 | of the United States in the name of a specious legal theory.

01:28:16.520 | He did not do that.

01:28:17.360 | He did not attempt that.

01:28:18.180 | Nobody working for him did that.

01:28:20.220 | The most you can say, I think,

01:28:21.800 | about what everybody was doing is that,

01:28:24.280 | you know, and I wanna say everybody.

01:28:26.000 | We can talk about Trump 'cause this is really about Trump.

01:28:28.520 | He used a phrase that Trump was disseminating

01:28:30.680 | knowingly false information.

01:28:32.360 | The word that's carrying a lot of weight there

01:28:34.000 | is the word knowingly.

01:28:35.260 | So knowingly implies a knower.

01:28:39.100 | Do I think the information he was disseminating was false?

01:28:40.900 | Yes.

01:28:41.740 | Do I think that Donald Trump has unique capacity

01:28:43.560 | to convince himself of nearly anything

01:28:45.220 | that is to his own benefit?

01:28:46.260 | Absolutely.

01:28:47.220 | And I think that that's actually

01:28:48.460 | what Donald Trump was doing there.

01:28:50.500 | And the evidence of that is Donald Trump being a human

01:28:52.300 | and all of us watching him for the last several years.

01:28:54.340 | So, you know, the idea that he knew it to be false,

01:28:58.280 | I'm not even sure those standards apply in any,

01:29:01.060 | like just assessing him as a human,

01:29:02.580 | which is really what we're being asked to do

01:29:03.620 | because there's an intent element to this crime.

01:29:06.360 | Does Donald Trump,

01:29:07.200 | do you think that today Donald Trump knows

01:29:08.600 | that he lost the election?

01:29:09.460 | Absolutely.

01:29:10.380 | So I don't actually.

01:29:12.800 | I think that--

01:29:13.640 | But when we, so I'm glad

01:29:14.540 | that you have the attorney background.

01:29:15.660 | When we are assessing mens rea,

01:29:17.380 | when we're looking at certain criminal statutes

01:29:19.060 | where intent is required,

01:29:20.460 | it's a reasonable person standard, right?

01:29:22.260 | Would a reasonable person have known that they were--

01:29:24.920 | No, it depends on the mens rea standard.

01:29:26.140 | So it's not the same in every case.

01:29:27.940 | If you have to establish individual intent,

01:29:30.760 | then it's not enough to say

01:29:32.140 | a reasonable person should have known.

01:29:33.300 | That would be enough for a negligent statute.

01:29:35.000 | Usually when you're talking about reasonable people,

01:29:36.780 | person statutes, just legally speaking,

01:29:38.760 | a reasonable person statute is,

01:29:40.340 | should a reasonable person have known,

01:29:41.740 | that's when you get to like manslaughter.

01:29:43.060 | You can't do a reasonable person standard

01:29:44.620 | on like first degree murder.

01:29:45.740 | So you have to establish actual motive

01:29:47.120 | in first degree murder.

01:29:47.960 | But for first degree murder,

01:29:49.000 | you don't need the statement of,

01:29:50.220 | I plan to kill this person,

01:29:51.900 | or I intend to kill this person.

01:29:53.820 | We can prove that state of mind.

01:29:55.380 | You can have other circumstantial evidence.

01:29:57.060 | Correct, yes.

01:29:57.900 | Sure, you could prove it.

01:29:58.720 | So I feel like my feeling for Donald Trump was,

01:30:00.340 | there were all these people around him

01:30:01.940 | that he trusted to investigate election fraud.

01:30:04.260 | He trusted Barr and the DOJ.

01:30:05.820 | He asked Pence, his vice president, to look into it.

01:30:08.260 | He asked his chief of staff.

01:30:09.540 | He asked his legal counselor.

01:30:10.380 | There's so many people that ostensibly,

01:30:12.360 | he trusts them if he's asking them to look into it.

01:30:14.500 | And when all of them looked into it

01:30:15.980 | and reported back to him, no, we found nothing.

01:30:18.500 | What, unless we're gonna literally make the concession

01:30:20.660 | that Trump might actually be a delusional psycho man,

01:30:23.700 | at that point, should he not have realized like,

01:30:25.300 | well, okay, maybe there's-

01:30:26.140 | That's a nice thing you should have realized

01:30:27.380 | the day of the election, that he lost the election.

01:30:28.780 | But that's not, but that's not-

01:30:29.620 | Sure, but I'm just asking, I'm saying that like,

01:30:30.980 | at that point, should he not have known that,

01:30:33.500 | for him to go and propagate those claims

01:30:36.340 | that he'd asked all of the people he trusted to research,

01:30:38.580 | and then for him to take those claims

01:30:40.180 | to Michigan and to Georgia and then publicly,

01:30:42.740 | and to try to convince people to throw out the election,

01:30:44.780 | you don't think that-

01:30:45.620 | But you're doing the same thing.

01:30:46.440 | You're reverting to, should a reasonable person have known?

01:30:48.060 | Yes, a reasonable person should have known.

01:30:49.460 | Did Donald Trump know?

01:30:51.380 | That's a different question.

01:30:53.540 | And so conflating those two questions

01:30:54.980 | is gonna get you into some mess of territory.

01:30:56.220 | By the way, this is why Jack Smith

01:30:57.340 | charged the way Jack Smith charged.

01:30:58.580 | Yeah, which wasn't-

01:30:59.620 | Right, Jack Smith did not charge conspiracy.

01:31:00.780 | Jack Smith did not charge the insurrection.

01:31:03.340 | He did not charge seditious conspiracy, right?

01:31:05.180 | If he, the reason is because he's,

01:31:07.380 | Jack Smith is a good lawyer.

01:31:08.220 | What he's doing is he's actually broadly,

01:31:10.820 | I would say pretty obviously,

01:31:12.460 | expanding statutory coverage in weird areas

01:31:16.260 | in order to cover a thing that doesn't quite fit

01:31:18.140 | into any of these legal categories.

01:31:19.840 | But the point that I'm making is that

01:31:20.820 | Jack Smith is on my side of this.

01:31:21.980 | He doesn't think that he can actually establish

01:31:23.540 | the intent necessary to convict under a seditious conspiracy

01:31:26.860 | or an insurrection charge.

01:31:28.700 | I agree with that,

01:31:29.540 | but I think a lot of the underlying facts though,

01:31:30.980 | because he does bring up those calls

01:31:32.680 | to Raffensperger in Georgia,

01:31:34.300 | he does bring up in the indictments

01:31:35.420 | that they were knowingly false information.

01:31:37.940 | So it seems like that's gonna be part of the case,

01:31:39.540 | maybe not to convict on any of the four

01:31:41.180 | particular charges that he mentioned,

01:31:42.460 | but it seems like that's probably going to be part of

01:31:45.500 | what he's gonna have to establish in court to convict Trump.

01:31:47.900 | So I wanna look at the actual text of the charges.

01:31:50.460 | So I'm sorry that I don't have the memorization.

01:31:52.580 | I believe one's a fraud charge

01:31:53.660 | that generally does not apply to cases like this.

01:31:55.360 | Generally the fraud charge is like

01:31:56.500 | you're trying to steal money from the government.

01:31:58.260 | - Sure, probably it's been used pretty broadly in the past,

01:32:00.380 | though it doesn't have to just be

01:32:01.220 | because Smith has done oral arguments

01:32:03.060 | in response to a lot of the claims by Trump's lawyers.

01:32:04.700 | This was one of them,

01:32:05.540 | the infinite civil and criminal immunity

01:32:07.340 | was another one of them where he cites past cases

01:32:08.980 | where these types of things,

01:32:10.660 | because I think it was to defraud of civil rights,

01:32:12.420 | I think was the fourth charge.

01:32:13.340 | - Right, so the defraud of civil rights

01:32:14.700 | is usually somebody standing in the actual

01:32:16.300 | like voting house door and preventing you from voting,

01:32:18.980 | not you have a specious legal theory

01:32:20.740 | that you espouse in court

01:32:21.700 | about whether those votes should be thrown out.

01:32:24.660 | - Sure.

01:32:25.500 | - So I don't like the, when we say specious legal theory

01:32:27.340 | and novel application, which I do agree,

01:32:29.820 | some of these, in some ways it's novel.

01:32:32.020 | I don't think we've ever also had a president

01:32:33.900 | try to do this before.

01:32:34.940 | It is a novel situation

01:32:36.140 | where somebody has resisted the peaceful transfer of power

01:32:38.820 | this clearly in so many different ways.

01:32:40.500 | - Well, if you're talking about the legal cases,

01:32:42.060 | I mean, that's not true,

01:32:42.900 | but Gore sued in 2000, right?

01:32:44.460 | I mean, so like if you're talking about the legal cases--

01:32:46.180 | - Well, if this is comparable to Gore,

01:32:47.500 | if this is comparable to Gore--

01:32:48.540 | - I'm not saying it's comparable to Gore,

01:32:49.500 | I'm saying that if the idea

01:32:50.820 | is that espousing a legal theory in court

01:32:52.660 | amounts to de facto some form of election--

01:32:56.820 | - Well, I'm just saying that Gore--

01:32:57.660 | - Denial or interference in some way,

01:33:00.580 | that can't, that's not true.

01:33:02.660 | As a general principle, it's over-inclusive.

01:33:04.260 | - Sure, Gore wasn't trying to decertify the vote, though,

01:33:06.660 | for states, right?

01:33:07.620 | They challenged their thing to the Supreme Court,

01:33:09.180 | they lost their case in the Supreme Court,

01:33:10.340 | and then power transfer happened--

01:33:11.780 | - Right, and Donald Trump had a bunch of legal challenges,

01:33:13.780 | and then he had a rally, and then there was a riot,

01:33:15.180 | and then he left power.

01:33:16.020 | - Yeah, but the Eastman theory

01:33:18.380 | of what Pence could do in Congress

01:33:21.060 | is a far cry away--

01:33:22.260 | - It's a truly shitty theory, I mean, make no mistake,

01:33:24.260 | it's a really-- - But not just shitty,

01:33:25.340 | I think that if any Democrat had done this,

01:33:27.380 | I think that, I feel like we'd be looking at it

01:33:29.740 | in a far different lens.

01:33:31.980 | As in, we would be using terms like attempted coup,

01:33:34.700 | subversion of peaceful transfer of power,

01:33:36.700 | if a Democrat vice president had tried

01:33:39.980 | to essentially say that in Congress,

01:33:42.700 | they could throw away the vote.

01:33:44.300 | - So, I think what I wanna get to here, actually,

01:33:47.420 | so we can be more specific,

01:33:48.940 | is why are these terms important?

01:33:51.340 | We agree on, largely speaking, what happened.

01:33:54.220 | I think the characterization of the term,

01:33:56.540 | are we, we keep kind of bouncing around

01:33:58.340 | between two different categories,

01:34:00.100 | and I wanna make sure-- - We can dump the legal stuff,

01:34:02.020 | actually. - Okay, okay,

01:34:02.860 | so we're just talking-- - We're not looking at,

01:34:03.700 | 'cause like you said, Jack Smith,

01:34:04.860 | nobody's charging with incitement,

01:34:06.420 | and I don't believe insurrection is a part of it,

01:34:08.220 | so we can dump it in legal.

01:34:09.060 | Just in terms of a president that is trying

01:34:10.940 | to prevent the peaceful transfer of power,

01:34:12.740 | so we can call that a bloodless coup,

01:34:14.300 | or a coup, or whatever contemporaneous term

01:34:16.980 | you wanna use.

01:34:17.820 | - Right, so prevent the peaceful transfer of power

01:34:20.420 | with all means, or using means that are inappropriate,

01:34:23.860 | not quite the same thing.

01:34:24.740 | - Using means that are inappropriate or illegal.

01:34:26.620 | - Okay, inappropriate, okay, so illegal, I don't think so.

01:34:29.580 | I don't think that these charges actually meet

01:34:31.900 | the criteria for the various charges,

01:34:33.740 | and we can discuss each case if you want.

01:34:34.820 | - Sure. - As far as inappropriate,

01:34:37.940 | sure, I think tons of inappropriate stuff.

01:34:39.880 | I mean, inappropriate seems not--

01:34:41.700 | - The reason why I don't like the word inappropriate, though,

01:34:43.180 | is because then conservatives are very quick to say,

01:34:44.660 | well, sure, he was inappropriate,

01:34:45.540 | but everybody was inappropriate.

01:34:47.140 | - I mean, I'll concede that he was more inappropriate

01:34:48.660 | than others, I just don't see that--

01:34:49.500 | - I don't see most inappropriate.

01:34:51.660 | - Sure. - Okay, that's important

01:34:53.340 | to me, though, does it not bother you

01:34:55.060 | that Donald Trump sought through legal

01:34:58.540 | and extra-legal and Trump-magical ways

01:35:01.980 | of trying to entrench his power as president

01:35:05.980 | past when he should have been able to?

01:35:07.380 | Is that not something that is incredibly troublesome?

01:35:09.560 | - I mean, the question to me is the bigger question

01:35:14.340 | that I think the Democrats are trying to promote

01:35:15.820 | in this election cycle, which is this means

01:35:17.580 | he is a threat to democracy sufficient

01:35:19.280 | that if he were to win the election,

01:35:20.860 | there would not be another.

01:35:22.220 | - Is that not, but he tried to do that last time,

01:35:24.660 | could he not try to do it next time?

01:35:26.620 | - I mean, he could try to do whatever he wants,

01:35:28.420 | presumably, and he would fail the same way

01:35:30.100 | that he did last time.

01:35:30.980 | - Why do we think that?

01:35:31.820 | - Because he failed.

01:35:32.940 | - Because if he failed once, he could never succeed.

01:35:33.780 | - Because it was a riot, it went on three hours, yes.

01:35:36.460 | - Like, let's say hypothetically,

01:35:38.540 | Lord, save me, let's say hypothetically,

01:35:41.540 | Giuliani was the next head of the Department of Justice.

01:35:45.060 | Giuliani was the next Attorney General.

01:35:46.580 | - How would he be confirmed?

01:35:48.920 | - Well, I'm not entirely sure if,

01:35:52.040 | because so much of the Republican Party,

01:35:53.480 | despite feeling like they don't support Trump,

01:35:55.280 | when it comes time to actually back him in Congress.

01:35:56.840 | - Also, I'd have to check whether he would be barred

01:35:59.640 | by criminal conviction from holding,

01:36:00.960 | I don't know the answer to that.

01:36:02.000 | - Sure, well, yeah, especially with the 14th Amendment,

01:36:04.280 | we're figuring out a lot of this right now, yeah.

01:36:07.200 | But I mean, like, say if not Giuliani,

01:36:09.240 | say if there are any other number of insane people

01:36:11.640 | that Trump could theoretically put

01:36:12.800 | on his side of the government

01:36:14.200 | that wouldn't tell him no next time,

01:36:16.480 | because there were a lot of people

01:36:17.680 | that rebuked him.

01:36:18.520 | There were Republicans in a lot of the states, right?

01:36:21.600 | Rappensperger is one of them.

01:36:23.040 | There were Republicans in his own administration.

01:36:25.320 | You've got Rosen, you've got Barr.

01:36:27.800 | There was his own vice president.

01:36:29.240 | But like, theoretically, next time,

01:36:30.920 | and I feel like last time going in,

01:36:32.880 | I'm gonna do a little bit of mind reading and macro,

01:36:34.400 | maybe you can maybe disagree.

01:36:35.260 | I think that Trump kind of thought,

01:36:36.480 | one, I don't think Trump knows much at all

01:36:38.320 | about how the government works.

01:36:39.440 | I think we probably agree with that.

01:36:40.800 | I think Trump probably thought that if he had people

01:36:43.020 | that were like, at least in his party and kind of camp,

01:36:45.180 | that they'll basically do whatever needs to be done

01:36:47.540 | to give him what he wants,

01:36:49.160 | and with no respect for process.

01:36:51.360 | But now that he sees it,

01:36:52.360 | well, it's not enough to just have allies.

01:36:54.860 | I need people that are fiercely allegiant to me.

01:36:57.040 | Would we not be worried that a guy

01:36:58.320 | that tried to essentially steal the election for real

01:37:01.160 | wouldn't try to pick people

01:37:02.160 | that would be more amenable to his plans

01:37:03.640 | in the next administration?

01:37:04.600 | - I believe in the checks and balances

01:37:06.000 | of American government.

01:37:06.840 | I believe they worked on January 6th.

01:37:08.720 | So if you're asking me,

01:37:09.560 | do I think that Trump has bad intent

01:37:11.240 | or could have bad intent with that sort of stuff?

01:37:13.280 | Sure.

01:37:14.120 | Do I believe that the guardrails held

01:37:15.880 | and will continue to hold?

01:37:17.000 | Also sure.

01:37:18.520 | - So if somebody was running and they blatantly said,

01:37:23.520 | like, I don't wanna use the fascist word,

01:37:25.840 | but if they said, like, I wanna be an authoritarian,

01:37:27.320 | I'm gonna abolish all elections.

01:37:29.100 | You would say, sure, he's saying that,

01:37:31.320 | but like, I don't think he can actually do it.

01:37:32.680 | So it's okay if he runs for president.

01:37:34.280 | You don't care at all,

01:37:35.120 | as long as you feel like the guardrails--

01:37:35.960 | - I mean, I might prefer other candidates,

01:37:37.440 | but I think that also one of the things that you do

01:37:39.280 | is that politicians,

01:37:41.080 | again, this would be an exceptional circumstance,

01:37:43.140 | but politicians constantly make promises

01:37:45.920 | about the things that they are going to do

01:37:47.260 | and then don't fulfill,

01:37:48.100 | and we tend to take those out in the wash,

01:37:49.300 | meaning that if I promise that day one,

01:37:53.040 | as Donald Trump has pledged to do,

01:37:54.060 | that he's going to deport literally

01:37:55.220 | every legal immigrant into the country,

01:37:56.420 | do I think he's actually going to do that?

01:37:58.260 | I mean, I really highly doubt it.

01:37:59.860 | He didn't do it last time he was in office.

01:38:01.500 | That's just, there are many examples of this.

01:38:03.380 | - I agree.

01:38:04.660 | - Here's my question.

01:38:05.500 | Do you think the guardrails are going to fail to hold?

01:38:07.540 | - I'm not sure.

01:38:08.820 | - Really?

01:38:09.660 | - Yeah, because I think the issue is,

01:38:10.620 | is one, when it's election time,

01:38:12.940 | Republicans are spineless in office,

01:38:14.980 | and I don't know how many congressmen

01:38:16.380 | would support what he wants

01:38:17.600 | just because they want to win re-election

01:38:19.420 | or because they think it's inevitable anyway.

01:38:20.860 | - Well, I mean, I think that one of the things

01:38:22.500 | that happened in 2022 is Democrats ran directly

01:38:24.620 | on this platform and a bunch of Republicans lost

01:38:26.540 | were running on this platform.

01:38:27.420 | Literally every secretary of state ran

01:38:29.420 | on the Donald Trump, we should deny elections platform,

01:38:32.360 | lost in every state.

01:38:33.620 | - Sure, but other Republicans that have been--

01:38:34.460 | - A great way to lose local office is this.

01:38:35.820 | - Sure, but I mean, look at what happened

01:38:36.820 | with Kinzinger and Cheney, right,

01:38:39.620 | who were very staunchly anti-Trump.

01:38:42.300 | - After J6, for that select committee, right,

01:38:44.540 | Kinzinger didn't even run again,

01:38:46.180 | and Cheney lost her election by, I think,

01:38:48.300 | the widest margin that anybody has ever lost

01:38:50.180 | an election ever in history, like all of US politics.

01:38:52.660 | - People who were not yet born voted against, yes.

01:38:54.500 | - I guess it's just, it's a surprising position to me

01:38:56.380 | for, if we're looking at like principled stances

01:38:57.860 | of government, the idea that a man who has,

01:39:00.380 | and I think we both agree on this,

01:39:02.220 | that Donald Trump's, Donald Trump's only allegiance

01:39:05.060 | is to Donald Trump, right?

01:39:06.280 | We agree on that.

01:39:07.120 | The only thing he cares about is Donald Trump.

01:39:07.940 | - I don't think it's the only thing he cares about,

01:39:09.300 | I think it's certainly the largest thing he cares about.

01:39:10.140 | - It's the largest thing he cares about, right?

01:39:11.940 | So you've got a man who only cares about himself.

01:39:14.060 | - Well, not even. - And not even politics.

01:39:14.900 | I mean, it may be more.

01:39:16.020 | - But that's not even--

01:39:16.860 | - It may be more with Trump,

01:39:17.780 | but it's certainly not unique to Trump.

01:39:18.940 | - I think that the issue with Trump, too, though,

01:39:20.440 | is I think he's even a threat to the Republican Party,

01:39:23.860 | in which I think he would mostly agree with me,

01:39:25.940 | maybe not overall, but on every individual point,

01:39:28.140 | Trump picks bad candidates, he has no concern

01:39:30.180 | for the future of the Republican Party.

01:39:31.380 | Like, for instance, I think there is a chance,

01:39:33.580 | I don't think it'll happen because of how the polling

01:39:34.980 | looks now, but if Trump didn't get the nomination,

01:39:37.140 | I think Trump would say, "Screw it and run as an

01:39:38.660 | "independent," because he thinks he can win or whatever,

01:39:40.560 | right? - I doubt that he would do that,

01:39:42.540 | but theoretically, he could. - It's possible, yeah.

01:39:44.140 | - Again, Trump has, he was really content to throw Georgia,

01:39:48.080 | the two runoff elections under the bus,

01:39:49.300 | because Rappaport didn't support him for the election.

01:39:51.300 | - So what is all this in service of?

01:39:53.740 | What's the generalized argument that you're making?

01:39:55.580 | Do you believe, I'll go back to my question,

01:39:58.180 | do you think that if Trump wins,

01:40:00.100 | there will be no more elections?

01:40:01.660 | Is that, like, put a percentage on it.

01:40:03.660 | What percentage do you think that that's a reality,

01:40:05.620 | that if Donald Trump becomes president?

01:40:06.460 | - If Donald Trump wins, I think there is a 100% chance

01:40:08.460 | that he will try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

01:40:11.040 | In terms of, would he succeed?

01:40:12.520 | - I can guarantee you he will not do that.

01:40:14.080 | - Why is that? - Because he's in

01:40:14.920 | his second term, and he's no longer eligible,

01:40:16.280 | and he will believe he won, and he will leave.

01:40:17.600 | - Yeah, but hasn't Donald Trump himself

01:40:18.800 | joked about running for a third term?

01:40:20.400 | I think that having a third term--

01:40:22.480 | - What has Donald Trump not joked about?

01:40:24.480 | I mean, for God's sake. - I don't, okay, hold on.

01:40:26.880 | - If you wanna prevent him from creating a revolution,

01:40:30.000 | you probably should actually just appoint him president,

01:40:31.600 | and then he can run again, so.

01:40:32.440 | - Here's another broad argument that I don't like

01:40:33.800 | in favor of Trump, and this was brought up earlier,

01:40:35.280 | in terms of, like, we talk about not grading presidents

01:40:37.960 | on a curve, but then earlier we said

01:40:39.380 | we'd take Biden's rhetoric--

01:40:40.220 | - Oh, no, I totally grade Trump.

01:40:41.060 | No, I 100% grade presidents on a curve, are you kidding?

01:40:43.300 | - Oh, okay. - I grade pretty much

01:40:44.420 | everybody on a curve. - But then I feel like--

01:40:45.260 | - I don't treat my seven-year-old the same way

01:40:46.580 | that I treat my nine-year-old.

01:40:47.580 | - Sure, but I don't like that it feels like

01:40:49.580 | we're treating Donald Trump like a seven-year-old

01:40:50.980 | or a nine-year-old.

01:40:51.820 | I think we should treat him like the president

01:40:52.640 | of the United States.

01:40:53.480 | I don't think having a president that has taken, like,

01:40:54.980 | concrete steps to prevent the transfer of power,

01:40:56.780 | which he did with the electorate sham,

01:40:58.140 | which he did with Pence, and which he did

01:40:59.620 | with trying to capitalize on the J6 violence,

01:41:01.440 | a president that's taken concrete steps

01:41:03.080 | towards cooing the government, essentially,

01:41:05.320 | I don't know why that guy, we'd say,

01:41:07.320 | well, you know, it's Trump, he does Trump things.

01:41:08.760 | The guardrail's held.

01:41:09.720 | I'll probably hold next to him.

01:41:10.560 | - So, I mean, when we say we shouldn't,

01:41:12.480 | do you mean that he should be actually barred from office?

01:41:15.760 | - I'm just talking about support for him.

01:41:16.720 | I don't even think Republicans should support Trump.

01:41:19.120 | You lose your incumbent advantage.

01:41:20.200 | The guy's obviously self-destructive.

01:41:21.440 | He's destructed the political party itself, like--

01:41:24.160 | - Do you think he should be on the ballot?

01:41:26.200 | You think there's a case to be made

01:41:28.840 | to remove him from the ballot?

01:41:30.440 | - I think there's a case to be made,

01:41:32.740 | but man, the phrasing, for as much

01:41:34.900 | as our governmental founding fathers and everybody else

01:41:37.940 | wrote nice amendments and wrote nice constitutions,

01:41:39.500 | some of the phrasing is very, very, very blech,

01:41:41.700 | and the section three,

01:41:43.340 | not requiring any type of actual conviction,

01:41:48.220 | I don't have a strong feeling on it.

01:41:49.700 | I will say I'm very interested in reading

01:41:51.340 | the majority opinion from the Supreme Court.

01:41:52.860 | I seriously doubt the Supreme Court is going to uphold

01:41:55.700 | that states should be able to decide

01:41:57.020 | if they leave him off the ballot or not.

01:41:58.960 | I think for the political future of the United States,

01:42:00.900 | it's probably not healthy

01:42:02.100 | that the leading opposition candidate

01:42:04.060 | is now gonna be barred from the ballot.

01:42:05.580 | It's probably not healthy for us,

01:42:07.940 | 'cause then what--

01:42:08.780 | - You wanna talk about threats to democracy,

01:42:09.860 | that would be a pretty serious one,

01:42:11.860 | applied across the board, by the way.

01:42:13.180 | - It would be, however, that threat to democracy

01:42:15.620 | was earned by Donald Trump and the conservatives

01:42:17.140 | that supported him.

01:42:17.980 | I think conservatives made a dangerous gamble

01:42:19.500 | when they threw Trump into office,

01:42:20.620 | and now all of the fallout from that

01:42:22.820 | is something that we all, as Americans, have to deal with.

01:42:24.980 | - I mean, I think that the unprecedented legal theory

01:42:27.740 | that a state can simply bar somebody from the ballot

01:42:29.940 | on the basis of, in an informal way,

01:42:31.920 | believing that he is, quote-unquote, an insurrectionist,

01:42:34.440 | is pretty wild.

01:42:35.980 | I mean, that's--

01:42:36.820 | - You can say it's pretty wild,

01:42:37.640 | but there is an amendment in the Constitution,

01:42:38.980 | the 14th Amendment, that says

01:42:39.980 | that if they have engaged in this,

01:42:41.600 | they shall not be, or you shall,

01:42:43.580 | I don't remember the phrasing,

01:42:44.420 | 'cause it doesn't require conviction,

01:42:45.340 | but it's a self-executing, arguably, thing.

01:42:47.220 | - If we're getting into constitutional law,

01:42:48.340 | I mean, there are a number of provisions

01:42:50.660 | that suggest that this is, number one, not self-executing.

01:42:52.860 | I mean, minority opinions

01:42:53.700 | in the Colorado Supreme Court case are pretty thorough.

01:42:56.540 | The number one contention,

01:42:58.380 | which is that this is not self-executing

01:43:00.420 | because other elements are not self-executing,

01:43:02.660 | that ignores subsequent actual law that happened.

01:43:05.860 | I mean, Congress passed a law, for example, in 1872,

01:43:08.020 | defining who was an insurrectionist,

01:43:09.460 | who was not an insurrectionist,

01:43:10.300 | for purposes of elections.

01:43:11.780 | In 1994, Congress passed a law

01:43:13.360 | that specifically defined insurrection

01:43:14.740 | as a criminal activity,

01:43:15.580 | so that somebody could theoretically be convicted

01:43:17.700 | of insurrection, and therefore,

01:43:18.740 | ineligible to run for office.

01:43:20.460 | It is unlike, say, the analogs that are used

01:43:23.760 | by the majority opinion, like age.

01:43:26.040 | Obviously, this is not the same thing.

01:43:27.900 | We can all tell what somebody's age is

01:43:29.620 | by looking at their birth certificate.

01:43:30.740 | I can't tell whether somebody's an insurrectionist

01:43:32.540 | without any reference to a legal stature

01:43:33.980 | or a definition of the term.

01:43:35.020 | - I would also be careful with that

01:43:35.860 | because remember, one of Trump's first big political actions

01:43:38.380 | was challenging Obama's birth certificate.

01:43:40.380 | - Well, and I thought that was dumb at the time,

01:43:42.780 | but in any case. - Sure.

01:43:43.620 | - I like that you both said 100% chance

01:43:46.240 | that Trump will try to go for third term

01:43:48.180 | and 0% chance,

01:43:49.260 | which statistically- - Third term?

01:43:50.180 | He's done, man.

01:43:51.000 | Are you kidding?

01:43:51.840 | I even want to.

01:43:52.660 | Trump's gonna walk around- - Try.

01:43:53.580 | - Hands up high.

01:43:54.420 | He's gonna be like, "I'm a two-term president.

01:43:55.700 | I'm the only president since Grover Cleveland."

01:43:57.240 | He wouldn't know.

01:43:58.080 | "But since Grover Cleveland,

01:43:59.020 | who served two non-consecutive terms,

01:44:00.700 | I kicked Joe Biden out of office

01:44:01.780 | and I kicked Hillary Clinton out of office."

01:44:03.100 | Dude would be like, he'd be living large.

01:44:04.780 | You're kidding?

01:44:05.620 | He doesn't want the presidency anymore after that?

01:44:06.860 | - I just think that the,

01:44:07.700 | I think it's scary that like Donald Trump,

01:44:09.700 | it feels like for all of the accusations

01:44:11.340 | that are made sometimes against Democrats,

01:44:12.840 | like Biden is ordering Garland

01:44:14.900 | to investigate Donald Trump and blah, blah, blah.

01:44:17.080 | It seems like Donald Trump would actually do that

01:44:19.400 | with his DOJ, would give them orders.

01:44:20.900 | - He didn't.

01:44:21.740 | He didn't.

01:44:22.560 | He didn't do it with his DOJ. - Well, he kind of did though.

01:44:24.580 | Right?

01:44:25.660 | So for instance, with Jeffrey Clark,

01:44:28.540 | Jeffrey Clark went to Rosen and Donahue and said,

01:44:30.720 | "Hey, listen, I need you guys to sign off on a letter

01:44:33.760 | that we're gonna use essentially to bully states

01:44:35.600 | into overturning their elections

01:44:36.740 | by saying we found significant election fraud."

01:44:38.460 | And part of that threat was Jeffrey Clark saying,

01:44:40.180 | "Listen, if you're not gonna do it, Rosen,

01:44:42.740 | Trump's gonna fire you

01:44:43.580 | and just make me the acting attorney general."

01:44:46.060 | That was the threat that he carried.

01:44:46.900 | And I think Trump repeated that threat

01:44:48.060 | in a meeting later on that was,

01:44:49.660 | I only rebuked when I think like half the White House staff

01:44:51.860 | said, "If you do this, we're resigning."

01:44:52.980 | - Okay, so this is a slightly different topic

01:44:54.260 | because now you're getting into all the election shenanigans

01:44:56.380 | and all of this, but-

01:44:57.220 | - Trump threatened to fire his acting attorney general

01:44:59.620 | if he wouldn't carry the same platform, essentially.

01:45:02.020 | If Trump could order his DOJ to do something, would he?

01:45:04.780 | It's not beyond the pale for him, right?

01:45:08.060 | - It's not beyond the pale for him to order them to do it,

01:45:09.540 | and then it's not beyond the pale

01:45:10.380 | for them to reject him doing that,

01:45:11.420 | which is the story of his entire administration.

01:45:13.000 | Whereas Joe Biden orders his DOJ to do things

01:45:14.660 | and then they just do them.

01:45:15.500 | - Well, we can get into specifics there.

01:45:18.280 | - This is one of the big problems that I have with,

01:45:22.300 | I mean, for example,

01:45:23.140 | the talk about Trump tyrant, Trump executive power.

01:45:25.620 | I mean, Joe Biden has used executive power

01:45:27.700 | in ways that far outstrip anything that Trump-

01:45:29.260 | - Every president has been stretching

01:45:31.460 | and stretching and stretching executive power.

01:45:33.260 | - Joe Biden is going like,

01:45:35.080 | Joe Biden has gone well beyond anything Trump

01:45:37.420 | even remotely attempted to maintain

01:45:38.780 | via just pure executive power.

01:45:40.740 | And actually Trump's use of executive power

01:45:42.100 | is nowhere near even what Obama's was.

01:45:43.300 | - I mean, Trump inability to get border policy passed

01:45:45.700 | literally had him using executive power

01:45:47.060 | to march the military down to the border

01:45:49.220 | to do border policy.

01:45:50.380 | I mean-

01:45:51.620 | - I mean, Joe Biden literally used

01:45:53.740 | the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration

01:45:55.900 | to try to cram down VAX mandates on 80 million Americans.

01:45:58.900 | That's insane.

01:45:59.820 | He literally said, "I cannot relieve student loan debt,"

01:46:01.940 | and then tried to relieve hundreds of billions of dollars

01:46:05.460 | in student loan debt.

01:46:06.300 | - Yeah, but what happened to that?

01:46:07.260 | - It got struck down by the Supreme Court.

01:46:08.220 | And then they still did it.

01:46:09.820 | They still did it.

01:46:10.700 | Biden brags about it for what he was able to,

01:46:14.500 | for what he was able to relieve,

01:46:15.500 | which I think were related

01:46:16.580 | to particular types of student loan debt.

01:46:17.860 | But I'm just saying that like,

01:46:18.700 | well, the guardrails are holding with Biden

01:46:20.140 | as much as they're holding with Trump.

01:46:21.220 | The only difference is,

01:46:22.060 | is that once Biden exhausts his executive power,

01:46:24.180 | he's not running around like lying to people

01:46:26.940 | or trying to extort people

01:46:28.420 | or trying to concoct insane schemes.

01:46:31.220 | - Well, I mean, so here's the way I would think of this.

01:46:33.780 | Think of the guardrails holding as the filter, okay?

01:46:36.620 | Meaning like the coffee is in the filter.

01:46:39.060 | Some of it's, you know,

01:46:39.900 | what you want is gonna get through and all this stuff.

01:46:41.380 | The guardrails prevent the other stuff from getting through.

01:46:43.300 | Now the question becomes,

01:46:44.140 | what liquid are you pouring into the filter?

01:46:46.300 | Okay, meaning, so if the filter exists,

01:46:48.460 | if the guardrails hold, and if Donald Trump

01:46:49.860 | can't steal elections,

01:46:50.860 | what's the policy that comes through

01:46:52.300 | the other end of the filter?

01:46:53.460 | The policy I get from Donald Trump

01:46:54.460 | on the other end of the filter

01:46:55.300 | is a bunch of stuff that I like.

01:46:56.340 | The policy that I get from Joe Biden

01:46:57.540 | on the other end of the filter

01:46:58.380 | is a bunch of bullshit I don't.

01:46:59.500 | So that's the basic calculation.

01:47:01.220 | - Okay, so then the idea is essentially that

01:47:04.380 | Donald Trump's rhetoric is insane, but we don't care.

01:47:07.380 | Donald Trump would probably try

01:47:08.300 | to steal an election if he could,

01:47:09.420 | but he probably won't be able to.

01:47:11.180 | - He's not gonna do it again, I told you, he's not.

01:47:13.720 | - You don't think he has any, why not?

01:47:15.900 | - Because he won't be eligible

01:47:17.260 | to be on the ballot in, I mean, by the way,

01:47:19.180 | you wanna talk about 14th Amendment?

01:47:20.580 | That's where the 14th Amendment applies.

01:47:22.460 | Okay, that's where it actually applies.

01:47:23.780 | Meaning you cannot, he is not qualified

01:47:26.100 | to be on the ballot in 2028

01:47:28.020 | if he is the President of the United States.

01:47:29.420 | States can literally, in self-executing fashion,

01:47:31.980 | take him off the ballot.

01:47:32.860 | Just like he's past the age of 35,

01:47:35.140 | once you have been President two times,

01:47:36.540 | you're no longer eligible

01:47:37.620 | to be President of the United States.

01:47:39.220 | - Why do you think-- - Then you actually

01:47:40.060 | would have a strong little-- - Yeah, but like--

01:47:40.900 | - To keep him off the ballot.

01:47:41.740 | - Why would the 14th Amendment stop him

01:47:44.060 | if he thought Vice President Pence

01:47:45.180 | could unilaterally decide the outcome of the election?

01:47:48.380 | - When he's not on the ballot?

01:47:49.740 | So now your theory is that he's gonna get reelected,

01:47:52.540 | and then in 2028, he's not even gonna be on the ballot,

01:47:54.900 | and he's gonna direct his new Vice President, Kerry Lake,

01:47:57.540 | to simply declare him President of the United States

01:47:59.820 | when he has not been on a ballot?

01:48:01.180 | - I don't know what the scheme would be.

01:48:04.060 | I think we can kind of like laugh and say

01:48:05.420 | there's no scheme we could even concoct,

01:48:07.540 | but I think that-- - Macho like with the machine gun

01:48:09.580 | he's gonna walk into the-- - I think the issue though

01:48:11.540 | is that like the idea of electing another President

01:48:14.060 | that has tried to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power

01:48:16.260 | using extra legal means, and then pretending like

01:48:18.180 | we can't concoct a single scheme

01:48:20.220 | that he could try to circumvent other legal processes

01:48:23.020 | to have a third term or to have a longer term

01:48:25.620 | or to install who he wants as the next President.

01:48:28.380 | I just, when a person has already shown you who they are,

01:48:30.540 | and when every single person around him agrees with that,

01:48:33.220 | when every single person that's worked with him,

01:48:34.740 | save for the, what, Sidney Powell, Eastman, and Giuliani,

01:48:38.380 | which I don't think even, I don't think anybody

01:48:39.980 | would wanna throw their lot in with those three,

01:48:42.180 | it just seems wild to me that we would say like,

01:48:43.900 | yeah, we're just gonna go ahead and trust this guy

01:48:45.220 | with another term of President,

01:48:46.620 | but like he can't run for a third term, so it's fine,

01:48:48.460 | when there's like 50 million other things--

01:48:50.060 | - And I'll make you the case that if you want him

01:48:51.380 | not to make election trouble,

01:48:52.220 | you should elect him President in the next election cycle,

01:48:54.620 | and then he will be ineligible.

01:48:56.180 | - That, okay, well, I find that to be

01:48:58.220 | a wholly unconvincing argument, but okay.

01:49:00.540 | - Well, recently in the news,

01:49:03.020 | the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT

01:49:06.540 | failed to fully denounce calls for genocide,

01:49:10.140 | and that rose questions about the influence

01:49:13.060 | of DEI programs at universities,

01:49:15.580 | and so maybe either looking at this,

01:49:17.940 | or zooming out more broadly at identity politics

01:49:21.220 | at universities, or identity politics,

01:49:23.540 | wokeism in our culture, how big of a threat is it

01:49:27.860 | to our culture, to Western civilization?

01:49:30.500 | - So obviously, I'm gonna say it's a huge threat.

01:49:32.180 | The reason that I think there's a huge threat,

01:49:33.700 | I wanna give a definition of wokeism,

01:49:35.180 | because people are very often accused

01:49:36.580 | of not using wokeism properly,

01:49:38.220 | or believing that it's sort of a catch-all phrase.

01:49:39.980 | I don't think it's a catch-all term.

01:49:41.260 | I think that wokeism has its roots in postmodernism,

01:49:45.620 | which essentially suggests that every principle

01:49:49.580 | is a reflection of underlying structures of power,

01:49:53.540 | and that therefore, any inequality that emerges

01:49:56.980 | under such a system is a reflection, again,

01:49:59.420 | of that structure of power.

01:50:01.100 | That used to be applied in sort of Marxist ways,

01:50:02.780 | the suggestion being that economic inequality

01:50:04.860 | was the result of misallocation of power

01:50:07.460 | in the structure preserved by an upper crust of people

01:50:11.620 | who wanted to cram down exploitation on people.

01:50:13.420 | That was sort of the Marxist version of postmodernism,

01:50:15.860 | and then got transmuted into sort of a racial version

01:50:18.540 | of postmodernism, in which the systems of the United States

01:50:21.100 | are white supremacist in orientation,

01:50:23.540 | and are perpetuated by a group of people

01:50:26.140 | who are, in fact, in favor of the preservation

01:50:29.100 | of white power and white supremacy.

01:50:30.700 | That is the generalized theory of critical race theory,

01:50:34.220 | as proposed by, for example, Jean Stefanczyk,

01:50:37.180 | and Richard Delgado in their book on critical race theory.

01:50:41.100 | That has taken a softer form that we refer to as DEI.

01:50:45.340 | The key in DEI is the E, meaning equity.

01:50:47.780 | So equity is a term that does not mean equality.

01:50:50.860 | People mix it up.

01:50:51.700 | Equality is the idea that we all ought to have equal rights,

01:50:55.180 | that we all ought to be treated equally by the law.

01:50:58.500 | Equity is the idea that if there is an inequality

01:51:00.580 | that emerges from any system,

01:51:01.700 | it is therefore due to discrimination.

01:51:03.380 | And the best way to tell whether somebody

01:51:05.060 | has been victimized is by dint of their race.

01:51:08.340 | And we can tell whether you're a member

01:51:09.540 | of an oppressed group or an oppressor group

01:51:11.300 | by the intersectional identity that you carry,

01:51:15.380 | and by the nature of your group's success or failure,

01:51:18.860 | predominantly along economic and power lines

01:51:20.980 | in American life.

01:51:22.300 | This means that if one group

01:51:24.180 | is predominantly successful economically,

01:51:26.420 | they must be a member of the victimizing class.

01:51:29.060 | And the only corrective for that would be,

01:51:31.060 | as Ibram X. Kendi likes to suggest,

01:51:33.460 | effectively, anti-racist policy is racism

01:51:35.740 | in the service of destroying racism,

01:51:37.460 | that you're going to have to discriminate

01:51:40.980 | on the basis of race in order to correct

01:51:42.660 | for discrimination that's baked into the system.

01:51:45.260 | That's incredibly dangerous.

01:51:46.700 | It leads to a victim-victimizer narrative

01:51:48.580 | that is unhealthy for individuals

01:51:50.020 | and terrible for societies.

01:51:51.380 | It relieves people of individual responsibility,

01:51:54.180 | and it destroys the very notion of an objective metric

01:51:58.500 | by which we can decide meritocracy.

01:52:00.020 | And meritocracy is the only system

01:52:01.380 | human beings have ever devised

01:52:02.940 | that has positive externalities

01:52:04.300 | in literally any area of life.

01:52:06.260 | Every other distribution of wealth, power,

01:52:09.700 | done along other lines

01:52:10.940 | that is not having to do with merit

01:52:12.900 | has negative externalities.

01:52:14.380 | Every system having to do with merit

01:52:15.540 | has positive externalities

01:52:16.700 | because presumably the most effective and useful people

01:52:18.980 | are going to succeed under those systems.

01:52:20.380 | That's the very basis of a meritocracy.

01:52:22.220 | And the externalities of that mean

01:52:24.420 | that other people benefit from the meritorious

01:52:26.740 | and excellent performance of those people.

01:52:28.940 | - Maybe you'd be good to get your comments,

01:52:31.420 | you're all stomping ground Harvard.

01:52:33.100 | Do you think the president of Harvard

01:52:34.660 | should have been fired?

01:52:36.340 | - I mean, I think she should have been fired

01:52:37.340 | not over the plagiarism allegations.

01:52:38.620 | I think she should have been fired

01:52:39.900 | based on her performance just at that congressional hearing.

01:52:44.580 | If the word black had been substituted for Jew

01:52:48.060 | in that statement by Elise Stefanik

01:52:50.820 | that she was asking about-- - Or trans.

01:52:51.900 | - Or trans, or literally any other minority in America,

01:52:54.700 | maybe with the exception of Asian,

01:52:56.300 | then the answer would have been very different

01:52:57.780 | coming from clouding gay.

01:52:59.660 | With that said, I don't think the firing of clouding gay

01:53:01.380 | really accomplishes very much.

01:53:02.860 | Did she get what she deserved?

01:53:04.900 | Sure.

01:53:05.740 | Does that mean that the underlying DEI equity-based system

01:53:09.540 | has been in any way severely damaged?

01:53:10.980 | No, I think that this is a way for universities,

01:53:14.260 | as truthful as McGillipan also,

01:53:15.820 | to basically throw somebody overboard as the sacrifice

01:53:19.980 | to maintain the underlying system

01:53:21.660 | that continues to predominate at American universities

01:53:23.900 | where they spend literally billions of dollars

01:53:25.380 | every year on DEI initiatives and diversity hires

01:53:28.580 | and diversity administrators and all of this.

01:53:31.020 | And one of the cost of education escalating

01:53:33.100 | is in the massive administrative function

01:53:35.900 | that is now undertaken by universities

01:53:38.500 | as opposed to teaching and cost of dorms and such.

01:53:42.380 | - You guys probably agree on a lot of this, right?

01:53:44.660 | - Kind of, maybe, yeah.

01:53:45.820 | I don't know what makes things do this,

01:53:50.740 | but it feels like we can never have a good thing

01:53:52.860 | and then have it end as a good thing.

01:53:55.380 | Things always get taken to their extreme,

01:53:58.540 | and then we have to fight on those extremes.

01:54:00.740 | I would argue that, back in my day,

01:54:03.060 | we called it SJWs, Social Justice Warriors,

01:54:05.060 | before it became WOKE, I think like 2013 onwards, whatever.

01:54:08.380 | There are aspects to WOKEism that I think are good.

01:54:10.780 | I like the additional representation

01:54:12.540 | that we have in media now.

01:54:13.380 | I like how, as much as people complain about the internet

01:54:15.780 | and how it's regulated,

01:54:16.620 | that there are way more groups

01:54:17.620 | that are represented on the internet,

01:54:18.940 | whether we're talking X, the platform formerly known

01:54:22.020 | as Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

01:54:24.540 | I think in some ways,

01:54:25.380 | or whether we're pushing women's achievements in school

01:54:27.780 | and in the wider workforce,

01:54:29.860 | I think that these are all good things.

01:54:31.860 | The issue that you run into

01:54:33.180 | is people don't ever have a stopping point,

01:54:35.580 | and I think people kind of get lost

01:54:37.140 | in this WOKE for WOKE's sake thing,

01:54:39.600 | where we start to see these very weird warpings

01:54:42.380 | of these academic, I guess, arguments

01:54:45.640 | that are used for really horrible things.

01:54:48.500 | So for instance, I think that you can talk about,

01:54:50.100 | in the United States, things like white supremacy

01:54:52.420 | or things like oppression or certain demographics,

01:54:55.300 | especially with Jim Crow laws and pre-Jim Crow,

01:54:57.140 | and you can even talk about effects from that.

01:54:58.660 | But then when you run into this weird world

01:55:00.140 | where we've kind of warped these things

01:55:01.440 | so that not only is white supremacy

01:55:03.300 | still as present today as it ever has been,

01:55:05.060 | well, actually, black people and other minorities

01:55:07.120 | can't even be racist.

01:55:08.100 | They don't have the power to

01:55:08.940 | because we're gonna use a different definition of racism,

01:55:11.100 | and we can only talk about punching up

01:55:12.780 | as opposed to punching down,

01:55:14.340 | and we're actually gonna say it's totally okay

01:55:15.820 | for these people to say or do whatever they want,

01:55:17.320 | and it's never bad, but white people

01:55:19.100 | who have always been the oppressors,

01:55:20.260 | even if you're a trailer park guy

01:55:21.460 | whose family's addicted to meth,

01:55:23.020 | you have all this privilege, et cetera, et cetera,

01:55:24.620 | I think that you run into these issues

01:55:26.100 | where at WOKEism, it starts off as a really good idea,

01:55:28.260 | and I would argue has achieved really good things,

01:55:29.980 | especially in regards to women's education and everything,

01:55:32.100 | and then it just gets so academia-i-e,

01:55:34.540 | so there's a word there, academic whatever,

01:55:36.340 | where you take something and you put it into school too much

01:55:38.060 | and then it comes out as some Frankenstein,

01:55:40.140 | cancer baby of horrible things,

01:55:42.060 | such that today, when I'm reading stuff,

01:55:43.940 | and I know Ben is the same way,

01:55:45.340 | if I even hear somebody say the word anti-racism,

01:55:47.900 | I'm probably ignoring every other thing you have to say.

01:55:50.460 | If you utter the word colonial anything,

01:55:52.860 | I'm probably gonna say

01:55:53.700 | you probably don't have anything good to say.

01:55:57.100 | Yeah, a lot of it is just taken way too far,

01:55:59.820 | but you know what I will blame on some of this

01:56:01.980 | is I will blame conservatives for some of this,

01:56:04.280 | because I think one issue that happens,

01:56:05.700 | and I think Ben might even agree with me here too,

01:56:07.540 | is I think there's two huge problems

01:56:09.900 | that have happened in the United States,

01:56:11.180 | I think broadly speaking,

01:56:12.420 | is that one, we've become more different

01:56:14.660 | than we ever have been,

01:56:15.860 | and two, we've become more similar than we ever have been,

01:56:18.460 | and when I say this, what I mean is that

01:56:20.060 | we're splitting off into these groups,

01:56:21.740 | and then these groups are enforcing

01:56:23.060 | this insane homogeneity between these two separate groups,

01:56:26.340 | and I think one of these schisms

01:56:27.780 | has been conservatives' reluctancy

01:56:29.460 | to participate in things related to higher education.

01:56:32.940 | So for a long time, conservatives are saying like,

01:56:34.620 | oh, you know, the educational institutions are against us,

01:56:37.100 | you know, Rush Limbaugh talks about

01:56:38.140 | how evil the colleges are, and blah, blah, blah,

01:56:39.740 | and then what happens is is conservatives

01:56:41.220 | are less and less willing to engage in them,

01:56:43.080 | so then you get this scenario, or this environment,

01:56:45.360 | where everybody that's engaged in academia

01:56:48.540 | on the administrative side are fucking insane.

01:56:52.500 | They're, like, even more so to,

01:56:54.360 | and I also wanna draw a distinction

01:56:55.300 | between the administrators and the faculty,

01:56:57.580 | because oftentimes when you're reading

01:56:58.860 | story after story after story of all of these insane admins

01:57:01.540 | that are pushing further and further left,

01:57:02.820 | usually the faculty is fighting against it.

01:57:04.900 | A lot of the tenured professors,

01:57:06.300 | a lot of people in their departments are saying like,

01:57:07.720 | hold on, well, we actually don't agree with this,

01:57:09.660 | but I feel like because conservatives for so long

01:57:11.660 | have demonized these institutions,

01:57:14.220 | rather than critically evaluated them

01:57:17.140 | and tried to have honest critique and engagement,

01:57:19.900 | that they've just completely broken off,

01:57:21.860 | and when you only have a bunch of lefties

01:57:23.540 | or righties together, all they'll do

01:57:24.980 | is they'll veer off even more into their insane directions.

01:57:28.420 | I feel like that's a big problem

01:57:29.540 | that we've run into in the country,

01:57:30.640 | to where conservatives have totally broken off

01:57:32.760 | some conversations, broken away from,

01:57:34.660 | where they won't participate in them anymore,

01:57:36.220 | and then the people that you have left

01:57:37.260 | just run as far to the left as possible.

01:57:39.700 | - Certainly when you look at certain institutions,

01:57:41.220 | I think that one of the things

01:57:42.220 | that people on both sides of the aisle

01:57:43.500 | are constantly looking at is,

01:57:44.980 | has the institution suffered such capture

01:57:46.920 | that there is just no capacity to fix it?

01:57:49.540 | And when you talk about the universities,

01:57:51.400 | I'm not gonna blame conservatives

01:57:52.420 | for the failure of the universities,

01:57:53.700 | because they haven't been present

01:57:55.100 | in major positions at universities

01:57:57.100 | since effectively the late 1960s.

01:57:59.220 | And you can go read Shelby Steele's work on this,

01:58:01.820 | where he talks about how he used to be,

01:58:04.500 | he's now a conservative black person,

01:58:06.580 | he was a liberal black person at the time,

01:58:08.700 | and he was actually quite a radical black activist

01:58:10.940 | at the time in the '60s,

01:58:12.180 | and he talks about walking into the office

01:58:14.640 | of liberal administrators, who are largely on his side

01:58:16.940 | with regard to civil rights, and being a radical,

01:58:20.220 | him claiming that the systems of the university

01:58:21.980 | were inherently broken, were inherently wrong, unfixable,

01:58:24.900 | and he talks about this, it's a very evocative episode,

01:58:27.700 | where he's talking about how he's smoking,

01:58:29.060 | and as he's smoking, the ash is growing more and more,

01:58:32.620 | and the ash falls down on this very expensive carpet.

01:58:34.820 | And the president of the university,

01:58:36.940 | who's listening to him rant and rave,

01:58:38.820 | he, Shelby Steele says,

01:58:40.580 | "I thought he was gonna say something about this,

01:58:41.960 | "I mean, I was wrecking like a thousand dollar carpet

01:58:44.020 | "in his office being a jackass,

01:58:45.720 | "and instead, I could see him wilt inside,

01:58:47.980 | "I could see him collapse,

01:58:48.800 | "he didn't have the institutional credibility

01:58:50.720 | "or sort of the spiritual strength to just say,

01:58:54.700 | "listen, I agree with you on some of these things,

01:58:56.060 | "but you're acting like a jackass."

01:58:57.820 | And what you see in the late 1960s and early 1970s

01:59:00.460 | is, in fact, the collapse of these institutions,

01:59:02.580 | to the point where, by the time I was going to college,

01:59:04.540 | there was this radical disproportion

01:59:06.620 | between conservatives and liberals.

01:59:07.860 | And the problem is that when it comes to a system

01:59:09.620 | like the universities, basically,

01:59:11.500 | you have to separate the universities off

01:59:12.500 | into two separate categories.

01:59:13.500 | One is STEM, where the universities

01:59:15.180 | are still pretty damn good.

01:59:16.460 | American universities, when it comes to STEM,

01:59:18.180 | are still leading universities in the world.

01:59:20.300 | Harvard's main creations these days

01:59:22.160 | are coming from actual hard science fields.

01:59:24.700 | Then you have the liberal arts field,

01:59:26.700 | in which you basically have a self-perpetuating elite,

01:59:29.040 | because that's actually how dissertations work.

01:59:31.200 | If you have somebody who's very far to the left,

01:59:32.700 | and you decide that you're gonna write a dissertation

01:59:34.100 | on the history of American gun rights,

01:59:35.540 | the chances that that is going to be approved

01:59:37.100 | by your dissertation advisor are much lower

01:59:38.860 | than if you happen to write something

01:59:39.940 | that tends to agree with the political positions

01:59:42.220 | of your dissertation advisor.

01:59:43.260 | Now, listen, I think there are open and tolerant professors,

01:59:46.380 | even in the liberal arts at these universities.

01:59:48.140 | I went to these universities, I went to UCLA,

01:59:49.620 | I went to Harvard Law School.

01:59:50.740 | When I was at Harvard Law School,

01:59:51.640 | one of my favorite professors was Lani Guinier.

01:59:53.580 | Lani Guinier, they tried to appoint her,

01:59:55.100 | I believe, Secretary of Labor under Clinton,

01:59:57.300 | and she was too liberal, and she got rejected.

01:59:59.300 | So she was like a full-on communist.

02:00:00.580 | By the time I went there, she was great.

02:00:01.980 | We had debates every day, it was wonderful.

02:00:03.560 | She used to write me recommendations

02:00:05.120 | for my legal jobs after we left.

02:00:07.020 | Randall Kennedy, I don't agree with him very much.

02:00:08.900 | Randall Kennedy was a terrific professor.

02:00:10.560 | There are some professors who are like this.

02:00:11.900 | Unfortunately, there tends to be, in these echo chambers,

02:00:15.140 | more and more ideological conformity

02:00:17.860 | that is rigorously enforced,

02:00:19.300 | and it is by left on left.

02:00:20.780 | So for example, when I was at Harvard Law School,

02:00:23.100 | the president of the university was another president

02:00:24.900 | who ended up being ousted, Larry Summers.

02:00:26.480 | Larry Summers had been the Secretary of Treasury

02:00:28.460 | under Bill Clinton, and he made the critical error

02:00:30.980 | of suggesting that perhaps the dearth of women

02:00:32.960 | in hard sciences in prestigious positions

02:00:35.060 | was due to possibly two factors

02:00:37.460 | that people were refusing to talk about.

02:00:38.880 | One was the possibility that women

02:00:41.100 | actually didn't want to be in hard sciences

02:00:42.940 | at nearly the rates that men do, which happens to be true.

02:00:45.460 | And two was the distribution of STEM IQ,

02:00:49.340 | which is something that you certainly

02:00:50.380 | were not allowed to talk about.

02:00:51.260 | The idea that the men's bell curve when it comes to IQ,

02:00:54.380 | particularly on STEM subjects,

02:00:55.500 | tends to be shallower than the women's bell curve.

02:00:57.060 | So when you get to the very end of the bell curve,

02:00:58.380 | what you tend to see is a lot of really dumb guys

02:01:00.340 | and a lot of really smart guys.

02:01:01.460 | And so when you're talking about the top universities,

02:01:03.340 | maybe that has something to do with the disproportion.

02:01:05.820 | And he's trying to explain that to say

02:01:07.500 | that our systems are not discriminating.

02:01:08.880 | If we end up with more men than women,

02:01:10.000 | maybe more men are applying and more men are qualified.

02:01:12.220 | He was ousted for that by a left-wing faculty

02:01:15.980 | and general alum network at Harvard University.

02:01:20.780 | There's a lot to blame conservatives for

02:01:22.060 | for surrendering the playing field.

02:01:23.140 | I totally agree that conservatives

02:01:24.460 | should not have surrendered the playing field

02:01:25.900 | in some institutions.

02:01:27.100 | Colleges were surrendered a lot earlier than 20 years ago.

02:01:29.300 | They were surrendered in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

02:01:31.900 | - Yeah, so I think that a couple of things.

02:01:34.020 | So one of the big issues that I have

02:01:36.340 | with kind of like this, I don't know if we call it

02:01:38.180 | era of Trumpism or populism,

02:01:40.380 | is this total disregard for institutions

02:01:42.900 | and this disconnect from participation in the system.

02:01:45.620 | So it's one of the big things that I felt

02:01:46.580 | with progressives about, who cares,

02:01:48.160 | 'cause they're all 20 years old, they don't vote anyway.

02:01:49.960 | But it's another thing that I noticed

02:01:51.100 | with a lot of people that are Trump voters,

02:01:54.300 | Trump fans or whatever, is this idea

02:01:56.700 | where we say this institution is irrevocably destroyed.

02:02:00.160 | It's irredeemable, it can't be saved,

02:02:02.100 | nothing that we do can fix it.

02:02:03.920 | And I think that what that leads people to doing

02:02:06.580 | is one, they disconnect further,

02:02:08.220 | and then two, there's a general hopelessness

02:02:11.020 | when it comes to how society is like ran or structured,

02:02:13.460 | such that you fall into that populist brain rot

02:02:15.380 | of the only person that can save me is Donald Trump,

02:02:17.500 | I can't trust literally anything.

02:02:19.300 | And I think that when you start driving people

02:02:21.080 | into that direction, all it does is it further amplifies

02:02:24.020 | all the problems that you're complaining about.

02:02:25.900 | So that's one of the reasons why when we talk

02:02:27.740 | about like conservative participation,

02:02:29.100 | I want there to be more conservatives

02:02:31.100 | that are trying to participate in academia,

02:02:32.460 | but I feel like the leading thought

02:02:34.320 | or the leading speaking out against it

02:02:36.340 | is basically saying it's a waste of time,

02:02:37.500 | it's completely lost.

02:02:38.340 | - So I think that the alternative to that

02:02:39.740 | is that you're seeing on the right,

02:02:41.660 | a growth of, for example, alternative universities.

02:02:43.860 | - Yeah, but that's the worst thing.

02:02:45.220 | - No, I don't think so at all.

02:02:46.300 | I think competition is a great way of incentivizing

02:02:48.520 | some change on behalf of universities

02:02:50.420 | that may have forgotten that there's an entire

02:02:51.740 | another side of the aisle in the United States.

02:02:54.060 | - No, no shot.

02:02:55.140 | I don't believe even, I don't think even you think that.

02:02:56.940 | - So first of all, first of all, let me be clear.

02:02:58.900 | I think the entire educational system at the upper levels,

02:03:00.900 | if you're not in STEM is a complete scam.

02:03:02.260 | I think it's a complete waste of money.

02:03:03.220 | I think it's a complete waste of time.

02:03:04.240 | And I think that it's all it is,

02:03:05.700 | is a formalized, very expensive sorting mechanism

02:03:08.060 | for people of IQ.

02:03:09.100 | That's all it is.

02:03:09.940 | People take an SAT, you go to a good school,

02:03:11.900 | you take four years of bullshit.

02:03:13.060 | I know I did at UCLA.

02:03:14.420 | And then we analyze based on your degree,

02:03:16.740 | where you should go to law school.

02:03:18.380 | I could have gone directly from high school to law school

02:03:20.740 | with maybe one year of training

02:03:21.860 | and then done one year of law school and been done.

02:03:23.700 | Okay, the reality is that this is a giant scam.

02:03:26.460 | And this is again, it's a bipartisan problem,

02:03:27.980 | but it's just a generalized problem.

02:03:29.880 | We have, you wanna talk about things

02:03:32.140 | that hurt the lower classes in the United States,

02:03:33.980 | the bleeding of degrees up is so wild and crazy.

02:03:37.260 | There's so many jobs in the United States

02:03:38.540 | that should not require a college degree

02:03:40.220 | that we now require a college degree to do

02:03:41.580 | because there was this weird idea that came over Americans

02:03:44.060 | where they mistook correlation for causation.

02:03:46.420 | They would say, oh, look, people who go to college

02:03:48.100 | are making more money than people who don't go to college.

02:03:49.620 | Therefore, everyone should go to college.

02:03:51.540 | Well, maybe the reason is because people

02:03:54.060 | who are going to college were better qualified

02:03:56.100 | for particular jobs because on average,

02:03:58.260 | not all the time, but on average,

02:03:59.420 | a lot of those people were smarter

02:04:00.460 | and making more money because of that.

02:04:01.980 | And so all you've done is you've now created

02:04:03.700 | these additional layers of stratification.

02:04:05.340 | So a person who used to be able to get a job

02:04:06.980 | with a college degree now has to have a postdoc degree

02:04:09.020 | in order to go get that degree.

02:04:10.220 | A person who used to be able to just graduate high school,

02:04:12.700 | now it's de facto, you gotta go to JUCO

02:04:14.260 | and then you gotta go to college

02:04:15.420 | or nobody's gonna look at your resume.

02:04:16.780 | It's really, really terrible.

02:04:18.540 | For people who can't afford all of that,

02:04:19.900 | it's led to this massive increase in educational cost

02:04:22.740 | that is inexplicable other than this particular

02:04:26.020 | sort of bleed up and by the way,

02:04:26.860 | federal subsidies for higher education.

02:04:29.060 | Again, one of my problems with federal subsidies

02:04:30.660 | for higher education, I'd love for everyone

02:04:32.500 | to be able to go to college if qualified to do so

02:04:34.860 | and if it is productive.

02:04:36.060 | But one of the things I did when I went to law school

02:04:37.580 | is I took loans because a bank said

02:04:39.620 | I was gonna get my money back

02:04:40.900 | if I got a law degree from Harvard.

02:04:42.460 | But you know when you're not gonna get your money back?

02:04:44.220 | If you're a bank, you're not gonna lend to some dude

02:04:45.980 | who wants to major in art theory

02:04:48.060 | because is that a good bet?

02:04:49.500 | There's no collateral, right?

02:04:50.860 | If I give a loan for a house, I can go repossess the house.

02:04:52.820 | How do I repossess your garbage college degree from UCLA?

02:04:55.300 | There's no way to do that.

02:04:56.260 | So this is a broader conversation

02:04:59.780 | about education in general.

02:05:00.860 | I think the educational system is cruising for a bruising

02:05:03.260 | and I think all that's necessary

02:05:04.540 | for it to completely collapse on the non-STEM side

02:05:06.740 | where you actually learn things

02:05:07.860 | is for people who employ to simply say,

02:05:11.460 | give me your SAT score and I will hire you

02:05:13.060 | for an apprenticeship directly out of high school.

02:05:14.860 | That it would cut out so much of the middleman.

02:05:16.660 | But as far as the general point

02:05:18.060 | that you're making about institutions,

02:05:20.580 | I may disagree on the education and how far it's gone.

02:05:23.740 | In general, I agree with you.

02:05:25.340 | So in general, I agree and I get to use my favorite,

02:05:29.560 | longest word in the English language here.

02:05:30.820 | I would consider myself in many cases

02:05:32.700 | an anti-disestablishmentarianist.

02:05:34.340 | - Nice. - Right?

02:05:35.180 | You see, I like to drop that.

02:05:36.540 | 'Cause if you're an establishmentarian,

02:05:38.060 | that means you like-

02:05:38.900 | - Opposition to the- - Disestablishmentarianism.

02:05:40.140 | Right, so I'm an anti, so-

02:05:41.180 | - Can you say that word, Justin?

02:05:42.420 | - That's the one we all learned growing up,

02:05:43.620 | anti-disestablishmentarianism.

02:05:44.780 | - There you go. - Longest word

02:05:45.620 | in the dictionary. - And so he is also.

02:05:47.520 | - But I think- - And then some

02:05:48.460 | candidate group would say,

02:05:49.280 | what about supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?

02:05:50.120 | And then you're- - What about

02:05:50.940 | pneumoultramicroscopic-

02:05:51.780 | - Yeah, or the science terms. - Yeah, exactly.

02:05:53.500 | - Or what about the 7,000 letter thing

02:05:55.040 | that's from part of a biochem?

02:05:56.680 | - I got my education in the Soviet Union,

02:05:58.720 | so we just did math.

02:05:59.800 | (Justin laughs)

02:06:00.920 | - That's why you're a useful person.

02:06:01.960 | - Soviet Union math was that one plus one,

02:06:03.500 | how to make that equal three?

02:06:04.520 | - We know long words, and he streams on the internet.

02:06:06.600 | (Justin laughs)

02:06:08.600 | And I talk for a living.

02:06:09.440 | So anyway, but the point is that I don't disagree

02:06:13.040 | that there is a general populist tendency

02:06:15.160 | on all sides of the aisle to look at the institutions

02:06:17.480 | and then throw them overboard.

02:06:18.900 | I think that some of that is earned

02:06:21.080 | by people who are in positions of power

02:06:22.720 | at institutions who have completely undermined

02:06:25.360 | the faith and credibility of those institutions.

02:06:27.440 | I think you have to examine institution by institutions

02:06:29.680 | which ones are salvageable and which ones are not.

02:06:31.320 | So I'm not a full anti-disestablishmentarianism.

02:06:34.080 | I'd be partially in that camp.

02:06:35.680 | There are certain institutions like higher education

02:06:37.880 | in the liberal arts that I think

02:06:39.160 | we may be better off without.

02:06:40.320 | And then there are certain institutions,

02:06:41.800 | like say participation in American government,

02:06:43.620 | where when people talk about we need a revolution,

02:06:45.480 | like no, we don't, that's not a thing.

02:06:47.160 | We need an evolution, we need change,

02:06:48.800 | we can use the system.

02:06:50.360 | And yeah, but I think you have to establish,

02:06:52.080 | you have to look at it industry by industry,

02:06:55.480 | just institution by institution.

02:06:57.960 | - On that position on institutions,

02:06:59.120 | do you think Biden or Trump would salvage you more?

02:07:01.440 | - As far as the institutions?

02:07:02.760 | I think the institutions in the United States

02:07:04.200 | at the governmental level are robust.

02:07:05.560 | I think the social institutions are fair.

02:07:06.840 | - Yeah, but I'm just curious,

02:07:07.660 | on your general view of institutions,

02:07:08.680 | do you think Biden or Trump would salvage you more

02:07:10.200 | on how you view them?

02:07:11.640 | - I mean, I think that in rhetoric, Biden would.

02:07:13.460 | And then I think that he would tear out the face

02:07:15.720 | of the institution and wear it around

02:07:17.360 | like a masculine cannibal lecher.

02:07:18.680 | - Even though he resisted some people's calls

02:07:20.400 | to like pack the court and?

02:07:22.720 | - Yes, because I think that his use of executive power

02:07:25.640 | was greater than that of Donald Trump.

02:07:27.280 | The power that he had,

02:07:28.160 | he used to greater effect than Donald Trump.

02:07:29.960 | Donald Trump, again, thrashed up against the sides

02:07:31.760 | of the box, but could not get out of it.

02:07:33.560 | - Okay, for just real quick,

02:07:35.400 | 'cause that answer went a lot farther

02:07:37.480 | than the initial question.

02:07:38.640 | Yeah, just on the real quick thing,

02:07:39.680 | the reason why I, again, my main problem

02:07:41.880 | that I feel like we have today in society

02:07:43.120 | is people are getting into their own bubbles.

02:07:44.480 | The idea of having like conservative schools

02:07:46.380 | and liberal schools seems like the saddest thing

02:07:48.000 | in the world to me.

02:07:49.080 | Like I would want conservatives and liberals

02:07:51.060 | going to school together

02:07:51.900 | because I think these people need to interact

02:07:53.480 | with each other more, if for no other reason,

02:07:54.820 | than to say that the other person is not

02:07:56.360 | like an actual monstrous, horrible entity

02:07:58.520 | that wants to destroy the country.

02:07:59.960 | - I think a classically liberal idea for many schools

02:08:02.000 | would not be a bad thing.

02:08:02.840 | I think it would be a good thing.

02:08:03.680 | You just wonder if that's salvageable.

02:08:04.920 | And if it's not salvageable, then the answer to that

02:08:07.000 | is to actually create alternative institutions.

02:08:08.760 | - I feel like the biggest issue that we have

02:08:10.560 | is people are, they sort into these different

02:08:12.840 | like phantom worlds to where,

02:08:14.280 | even if you live in the same city,

02:08:15.720 | there are totally different worlds that exist

02:08:17.000 | between liberals and conservatives.

02:08:18.000 | And I feel like one of the big barriers

02:08:19.160 | to people understanding the other side,

02:08:20.600 | sometimes it's just a little bit of information

02:08:22.660 | or a little bit of like firsthand experience.

02:08:25.400 | When I, so in terms of information,

02:08:27.000 | I'm sure you saw, I don't know if this is a full on study,

02:08:30.040 | but they were talking about how some huge percentage

02:08:32.560 | of students would change their mind on

02:08:34.000 | from the river to the sea when you told them

02:08:35.420 | what from the river to the sea actually meant.

02:08:36.260 | - What the river was and what the sea was, yeah.

02:08:37.800 | - Yeah, or when you said like, yeah,

02:08:39.460 | what does a one state solution mean?

02:08:40.600 | A lot of them like, such that the numbers went

02:08:42.120 | from like 70% to like 30% in terms of like support

02:08:45.000 | would fall, and it wasn't because you were doing

02:08:46.360 | a radical redefining of their whole ideology,

02:08:48.040 | you were just giving them a little bit more information.

02:08:49.640 | And then something that I've seen on a firsthand level

02:08:51.400 | is when I go and speak or do debates at university,

02:08:53.520 | sometimes I'm in very, very, very conservative areas.

02:08:55.460 | Some of my fans are trans.

02:08:56.960 | Having like a trans person show up

02:08:58.200 | and talk to conservatives for a little bit,

02:08:59.840 | not like in a speech, but just like in like a bar

02:09:01.720 | or a setting, like a lot of them walk away,

02:09:03.240 | they're like, oh, not every trans person

02:09:04.480 | is like this insane lunatic from Twitter

02:09:06.100 | that is fucking an actual crazy person.

02:09:08.400 | And then for some of my fans,

02:09:09.520 | when they hang out with conservatives,

02:09:10.440 | they're like, oh, these guys are actually pretty friendly.

02:09:11.860 | I thought they would have all been homophobic, racist,

02:09:13.360 | transphobic and evil, but they're not.

02:09:14.200 | They're just like normal people.

02:09:15.520 | I feel like we need more of that mixing.

02:09:16.720 | - I totally agree with that, certainly.

02:09:17.760 | - Yeah, and I feel like on our social media platforms,

02:09:19.480 | on our algorithms, in our schools,

02:09:20.800 | I feel like we're sorting harder and harder and harder.

02:09:22.760 | And any type of rhetoric that encourages the sorting

02:09:25.480 | is really bad and damaging.

02:09:27.080 | We need to like continue to mix up.

02:09:28.720 | And there's other things I wanted to talk about,

02:09:29.920 | but Lex is opening his mouth.

02:09:31.160 | - Destiny the uniter, wow.

02:09:33.560 | - Like Biden, not like Trump.

02:09:36.600 | - As we approach the end,

02:09:37.680 | let us descend into the meme further and further.

02:09:41.080 | Ben, you're in a monogamous marriage.

02:09:43.760 | And Destiny, you've been mostly

02:09:45.160 | in an open marriage until recently.

02:09:47.520 | How foundational is marriage, monogamous marriage,

02:09:50.640 | to the United States of America?

02:09:53.080 | Can open marriages work?

02:09:54.560 | Are they harmful to society, Ben?

02:09:58.120 | - Marriages are the single most important thing

02:09:59.880 | that people can do in the United States

02:10:01.320 | because the things within your control

02:10:03.080 | are easier to control than the things outside your control.

02:10:05.020 | People tend to think about big political change,

02:10:07.480 | obviously, about things they can do

02:10:08.700 | to change the entire system.

02:10:10.080 | But the reality is the thing that you can do

02:10:11.920 | that best changes society is to get married

02:10:13.920 | and have kids and raise your kids responsibly.

02:10:15.760 | That is the single best thing that you can do.

02:10:17.480 | Can an open marriage work?

02:10:18.840 | I mean, I think that it depends on your definition of work.

02:10:20.840 | So in my version of work, the answer is no,

02:10:23.320 | because what you actually need in order to facilitate

02:10:26.120 | the healthy growing of a child

02:10:28.400 | is a father and mother who are committed to each other.

02:10:30.560 | All ideas about there being no emotional component

02:10:34.040 | to sexual activity are completely specious.

02:10:38.560 | That it is truer for men than it is for women,

02:10:40.080 | but it's not true for either.

02:10:41.520 | The idea of a full commitment to a human being

02:10:46.520 | with whom you genetically create children,

02:10:48.680 | which is typically how we've done it

02:10:50.760 | throughout human existence,

02:10:52.360 | is in fact the fundamental basis

02:10:54.740 | for any functional civilization.

02:10:56.160 | It allows for the transmission of culture and values.

02:10:58.040 | It allows for the transmission

02:10:59.200 | of beliefs and responsibility.

02:11:01.000 | And it gives the great lie to both the communitarian lie

02:11:05.000 | and the atomistic individualist lie.

02:11:07.440 | The communitarian lie is that you belong

02:11:09.560 | to the giant community of man,

02:11:11.760 | which is not true because you have a family

02:11:14.240 | and your allegiance should be and is naturally

02:11:16.840 | to the members of your family first.

02:11:18.160 | That's how we learn.

02:11:19.280 | And then we expound that out.

02:11:21.640 | And it also is a lie to the notion

02:11:23.320 | that we are all atomistic individuals

02:11:24.740 | with no responsibilities.

02:11:25.840 | We are born into a world of responsibilities.

02:11:28.200 | Everyone is born into a world of responsibilities

02:11:30.440 | and rules and roles, and those are good.

02:11:32.880 | And if we do not actually socialize our children that way,

02:11:35.900 | there will be, number one, no children.

02:11:37.480 | Number one, there will be no healthy children.

02:11:39.040 | Number two, there will be no healthy children.

02:11:40.120 | Number three, there will be not the foundation

02:11:42.000 | for either social fabric, which is the real glue

02:11:45.440 | that holds together society, or for a functional government.

02:11:48.440 | So yes, yes, monogamous marriage.

02:11:51.760 | I'm a fan.

02:11:52.600 | 15 years married, four kids, yes.

02:11:55.280 | - Destiny, what do you think?

02:11:56.920 | - I think that when we talk about

02:11:57.760 | like relationships or marriage,

02:11:58.720 | I think something that's really important

02:11:59.920 | is we have to talk about whether or not

02:12:01.240 | children are being discussed or not.

02:12:03.060 | Because I think once you introduce the child aspect,

02:12:05.600 | I think the style or the type of relationship that you do

02:12:07.660 | is gonna become way more important

02:12:09.200 | than whatever exists prior to that.

02:12:11.560 | Like I would agree, for instance,

02:12:12.840 | in terms of what Ben is saying,

02:12:13.800 | that there's probably going to be some structure

02:12:16.480 | that is ideal for the care and the raising of a child.

02:12:19.960 | I think that having a child

02:12:21.120 | gives you a much bigger buy-in to society,

02:12:23.360 | because now all of a sudden you care about a lot of things

02:12:25.080 | that you might not have before,

02:12:26.240 | because not only do you exist in society,

02:12:27.760 | you can't just run.

02:12:28.960 | Now you've got a child that exists there,

02:12:30.160 | and you've got to ensure that everything functions smoothly,

02:12:32.160 | not just for you, but for that child as well.

02:12:34.840 | And arguably, although we're getting into weird places,

02:12:37.600 | I guess, in the world now,

02:12:38.880 | like children are the primary conduit

02:12:41.520 | for where you transmit cultural values and everything.

02:12:44.520 | The one kind of weird thing that we're coming up against,

02:12:47.200 | that we have been coming up against

02:12:49.480 | now for some number of decades and will continue to,

02:12:51.640 | is as societies progress,

02:12:54.240 | seems like people are having less children.

02:12:56.720 | And I actually don't know 100%

02:12:58.440 | what the answer is to that question.

02:13:00.400 | - I do.

02:13:01.240 | - Yeah, I'm sure you do, yeah.

02:13:02.440 | I mean, an implementable answer that works,

02:13:04.520 | that we know we can get everybody on board with.

02:13:06.400 | It seems like, for a large part of human history,

02:13:09.580 | having children, and it still is,

02:13:11.240 | having children is awesome, and children are cool,

02:13:13.360 | and children are magical and miraculous and all of this,

02:13:15.880 | but you didn't really have much competing

02:13:17.480 | for your attention to have a child, right?

02:13:20.120 | When you hit a certain age and you started working,

02:13:22.160 | especially if you're a woman,

02:13:23.240 | I mean, childbirth is kind of the next step,

02:13:25.400 | and then having a family, raising your children,

02:13:27.000 | and then doing that is kind of the next step.

02:13:28.420 | Nowadays, especially with women being able to work,

02:13:30.440 | especially women having access to birth control,

02:13:32.080 | there's a lot available in the world

02:13:33.440 | that's competing for the interest of people

02:13:34.960 | that could otherwise be having children,

02:13:36.800 | such that we've almost flipped it,

02:13:38.180 | such that, as Ben brought up earlier,

02:13:39.960 | wealthy people tend to have less children

02:13:41.300 | than not wealthy people,

02:13:43.000 | or unless you're part of particular religious communities

02:13:45.000 | that push childbirth a lot.

02:13:46.840 | I don't know if I would say there exists

02:13:48.640 | a moral imperative on an individual to have children.

02:13:52.960 | I think that there's a lot of interesting arguments

02:13:54.480 | down that path.

02:13:55.320 | I don't know if we're quite at the point yet

02:13:57.080 | where we need to say, oh my God, we're running out of people,

02:13:59.280 | we need to have more kids.

02:14:00.640 | I don't think we're quite there yet,

02:14:02.080 | but we are seeing weird demographic trends

02:14:05.040 | that are having big impacts

02:14:06.040 | on how countries are playing out.

02:14:07.240 | For instance, the fact that we have

02:14:08.360 | a disproportionately huge aging population

02:14:10.360 | that needs to be taken care of

02:14:11.240 | with medical expenses and everything,

02:14:12.520 | that vote in different ways than our younger population,

02:14:14.360 | and that when they die off,

02:14:15.400 | the way that society is gonna look

02:14:17.160 | is gonna be a lot different.

02:14:18.880 | Yeah, I don't actually have a,

02:14:20.440 | I'm not entirely sure what the future's gonna look like

02:14:22.240 | in terms of pushing people to have kids

02:14:24.560 | when every single industrialized country,

02:14:26.240 | as they become more industrialized,

02:14:27.600 | have fewer and fewer and fewer children.

02:14:29.240 | - Rapid-fire questions.

02:14:31.200 | - And the answer, my answer was go to church.

02:14:33.440 | - Religion, yeah, I figured.

02:14:35.120 | - Well, we could talk about religion,

02:14:36.280 | but that's not rapid-fire at all.

02:14:38.520 | Let me ask, this is from the internet.

02:14:41.160 | Does body count matter?

02:14:42.800 | - Jesus Christ.

02:14:44.120 | You're really bringing up the red pill stuff.

02:14:47.240 | - Are you avoiding answering?

02:14:48.640 | - I mean, it's totally, it depends on who you are.

02:14:50.640 | If you're somebody that doesn't care about it, it doesn't.

02:14:52.120 | If you're somebody that does care about it,

02:14:53.040 | yeah, it does, of course.

02:14:53.880 | Depends on the, the answer is yes.

02:14:55.720 | - Okay.

02:14:56.720 | Should porn be banned?

02:14:58.520 | - No.

02:15:00.360 | If you could do it, yes.

02:15:04.840 | There is no, there is no benefit to pornography.

02:15:08.320 | It's a waste of time and destructive to the human soul.

02:15:10.240 | - I can't believe I'm asking this question.

02:15:12.200 | Is OnlyFans empowering or destructive for women?

02:15:14.800 | - I, Jesus, these are rapid-fire?

02:15:19.280 | - Yeah, just, you can't, wow.

02:15:20.480 | - I mean, it's probably empowering

02:15:21.400 | for the ones that are making a lot of money off it.

02:15:22.720 | It probably feels disempowering for others

02:15:24.120 | that feel affected by the cultural norms

02:15:25.480 | set by women that do OnlyFans.

02:15:26.640 | There's my rapid-fire answer.

02:15:28.160 | It's destructive to even the ones

02:15:29.960 | who are making a lot of money

02:15:30.800 | because when you degrade yourself

02:15:31.960 | to being just a set of human body characteristics

02:15:35.240 | that other people jack off to,

02:15:36.420 | it's bad for you and it's bad for them.

02:15:38.560 | - Is rap music?

02:15:40.640 | - Absolutely.

02:15:41.480 | - Have you evolved on this or?

02:15:43.120 | - Have I evolved on this?

02:15:44.680 | So, again, I'm gonna go to what's the definition of music?

02:15:48.040 | My original argument about rap

02:15:49.240 | was that music involves the following three elements,

02:15:52.040 | rhythm, melody, harmony.

02:15:53.960 | Rap typically involves maybe one of those.

02:15:58.040 | There may be a melody, maybe, sometimes.

02:16:02.120 | So it depends on the kind of rap.

02:16:04.480 | With that said, I could be convinced on this issue,

02:16:06.800 | but listen, I'm a classical violinist.

02:16:10.320 | I mean, that's how I was raised.

02:16:12.200 | I listened to Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart

02:16:14.200 | like in the car with my kids.

02:16:15.480 | So is it comparable, is it in the same category

02:16:18.440 | as Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart?

02:16:19.600 | I have a very hard time sticking it

02:16:21.320 | in the same category as that.

02:16:23.520 | - All right, you're both world-class debaters.

02:16:27.540 | Even public intellectuals, if I can say that.

02:16:31.100 | - Jesus.

02:16:31.940 | - Yeah, I know.

02:16:32.780 | - I'm going real hard here.

02:16:33.600 | - I know.

02:16:34.440 | You both care about the truth.

02:16:35.500 | What is your process of arriving at the truth?

02:16:39.360 | - I think it's really important to,

02:16:43.220 | everybody will say that they're objective

02:16:45.660 | and that they are nonpartisan.

02:16:46.980 | I think it's really important to have mental safeguards

02:16:49.740 | for bad opinions.

02:16:51.820 | So, for instance, a couple things that I'll ask myself is

02:16:55.700 | for a particular debate that I'm having,

02:16:57.500 | can I argue convincingly both sides of the debate?

02:16:59.540 | If I can't, I won't bother having the debate

02:17:00.860 | 'cause I realize that I'm probably too partisanly dug in

02:17:03.220 | if I can't even represent an opposite argument here.

02:17:06.700 | Another question that you might ask yourself is like,

02:17:08.260 | well, what would it take to convince you

02:17:09.540 | out of a certain position?

02:17:11.060 | If you feel very strongly that Medicare for all

02:17:14.860 | is a good system by which to run

02:17:16.880 | the United States healthcare,

02:17:17.860 | and somebody says, well, what would it take you

02:17:18.980 | to convince you otherwise, if you can't even fathom,

02:17:20.700 | like, well, what would it take to convince me otherwise,

02:17:21.920 | you're probably too dug into a position.

02:17:23.360 | So, I think if you go through life saying like,

02:17:26.180 | well, I try my best to be unbiased,

02:17:28.480 | rather than saying, I try my best to be aware of my biases,

02:17:32.300 | because the latter is more realistic

02:17:33.580 | and the former is literally impossible,

02:17:34.900 | unless you're a computer, yeah.

02:17:36.620 | So, I think having like actual mental practices

02:17:39.380 | that you engage in to try to counter some of the biases

02:17:42.400 | that you have is more important than trying to pretend

02:17:44.220 | that you're free of all biases,

02:17:45.700 | and then consuming all your media from one source, yeah.

02:17:47.660 | - Ben?

02:17:48.500 | - So, I mean, I agree with a lot of that.

02:17:50.480 | I think that the easiest practical guide

02:17:52.680 | is read a bunch of different things

02:17:54.020 | from a bunch of different sources,

02:17:55.140 | and where they cross is probably the set of facts,

02:17:58.260 | and then everything else is extrapolated opinion

02:18:00.540 | from different premises.

02:18:02.180 | That's sort of the short story.

02:18:03.860 | So, read the New York Times and Breitbart,

02:18:06.560 | and they're gonna disagree on a lot,

02:18:07.580 | but if the core of the story--

02:18:09.020 | - And the Daily Wire.

02:18:10.060 | - Certainly read the Daily Wire.

02:18:11.140 | If you read the Daily Wire,

02:18:12.300 | and you read the Washington Post,

02:18:14.020 | and there's a nexus of the same thing,

02:18:17.740 | then you can pretty well guarantee

02:18:19.420 | that at least if we're all blind men feeling the elephant,

02:18:22.500 | at least if we're all feeling the trunk,

02:18:24.260 | we know that there's a trunk there, right?

02:18:25.380 | You may not know what the elephant is.

02:18:26.820 | - And if you're feeling frisky, then watch Destiny as well.

02:18:30.260 | You've talked about having a conversation debating Ben

02:18:35.680 | for a long time.

02:18:37.080 | What is your favorite thing about Ben Shapiro?

02:18:40.580 | - My favorite thing about Ben Shapiro is,

02:18:43.100 | at least when we're in election season,

02:18:44.500 | he's very critical of his own party.

02:18:45.760 | I appreciate that.

02:18:46.600 | (laughing)

02:18:48.540 | That doesn't, I feel like Ben generally tries

02:18:50.700 | to adhere more to the fact-based arguments

02:18:53.060 | than other conservatives that I listen to,

02:18:54.780 | which is something that I appreciate

02:18:55.780 | 'cause it's more fun to fight on the factual grounds

02:18:58.980 | of discussing things like foreign policy or whatever,

02:19:00.620 | rather than people that only inhabit

02:19:02.540 | the idealistic or philosophical grounds

02:19:04.300 | because they don't wanna learn about any of the facts,

02:19:06.060 | so I appreciate that.

02:19:07.900 | - Ben, you've gotten a chance to talk to Destiny.

02:19:09.580 | Now, what do you like about the guy?

02:19:11.220 | - A lot of the same sorts of things,

02:19:12.740 | but it's really fun to see how you do your process.

02:19:15.460 | That is a cool thing.

02:19:16.300 | That is a cool thing, and it's a gift to the audience

02:19:18.020 | because, honestly, doing what we do,

02:19:20.140 | so much of what we do is sitting and reading

02:19:22.060 | and being behind closed doors and educating yourself

02:19:24.080 | and talking with people,

02:19:25.140 | but getting to watch you do it in real time

02:19:26.300 | is a really cool window into how people think

02:19:28.460 | and how people learn, so that's a really neat thing.

02:19:30.520 | - Well, gentlemen, this was incredible.

02:19:32.660 | It's an honor.

02:19:33.540 | Thank you for doing this today.

02:19:34.580 | - Hey, thanks a lot.

02:19:35.420 | - Thanks for having me.

02:19:36.720 | - Thanks for listening to this debate

02:19:38.140 | between Ben Shapiro and Destiny.

02:19:40.220 | To support this podcast,

02:19:41.340 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:19:43.860 | And now, let me leave you with some words from Aristotle.

02:19:47.900 | The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

02:19:51.640 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:19:55.540 | (upbeat music)

02:19:58.120 | (upbeat music)

02:20:00.700 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism | Lex Fridman Podcast #410

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