Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Are we back in the stone age? The 320th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

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Are we back in the stone age? The 320th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  (Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream number 320.
• 0:11
  Nailed it. I'm Dr. Bret Weinstein.
• 0:14
  You're Dr. Heather Heying. Spring rages on here before anyone has returned to the Stone Age. And I don't know, these are exciting times. I'm kind of nervous about, well, everything from the markets to the straits of hormones, which ordinarily I don't think enough about, but boy am I focused on them at the moment.
• 0:40
  And we have a lot of interesting things to talk about from the philosophical to the kinetic to the descent into tyranny as viewed from right here in the state of Washington. Kinetic, huh? Yeah, there's a lot of kinetic. And, you know, depending upon who you ask, the the kineticism of the war in Iran is either going brilliantly or catastrophically, and presumably the truth could lie somewhere in between those. But nonetheless, all of our futures seem to be hanging in the balance of a story that I don't know anybody who's really got a grasp on exactly what's happening. And I and I will say the degree to which events that should be very hard to conceal are actually obscure to us in in the West is shocking. We can talk about anything, but we know very little. And I think that that's so describes nearly the entire world at this point.
• 1:48
  Yeah, I mean, that's right. If it were showing up anywhere to the degree that people are trying to make meaning from their screens, none of it is, as we've said before, none of it is eyewitness.
• 1:58
  None of it. You don't know anything that comes to your screen as to whether or not it's actually true. Yeah, I mean, we've said that even when you do see it on your screen, you don't know what kind of an edit you're getting. But I think we've got even another level here where we have like Cartesian blinders being put on us so that we are trying to make sense out of scraps of information and hints. And boy, is it is it? It's a tough job to even know where to start. It's one thing if you're trying to take a bunch of information that's unfiltered and has lots of noise and misleading stuff in it and make sense of it. It's another thing if you're trying to infer things from silence and from implications from people who do have good information, who may not be telling you the truth. I don't know.
• 2:48
  It's a level of Cartesian crisis that on the one hand, you can anticipate. I mean, at the point that I guess it was during the probably the first Gulf War that they innovated the ability, not the ability, they innovated the embedding that was their term of the press in with military units such that basically what we saw was modified. So we were effectively looking through the eyes of soldiers rather than looking at the situation soldiers were in. We've now moved into some kind of high gear where it's not, you know, a I don't know who you didn't bear with, but we're not even getting a highly skewed perspective based on a, you know, a pairing of the press. It's just like the press is in the dark. And I don't know. I think we need to come up with some sort of framework for even how to think about reasoning with the deliberate censorship of information is probably something that people who have lived under totalitarian regimes would be way better positioned to talk about. Because of course, you know, if you lived in Russia during the Soviet days, you knew that what Pravda was telling you was nonsense or selective sense. Well, I wonder to what degree, I mean, that's easy for us to say now, but I imagine that a large proportion of the population didn't know that. Or they imagined that the system was mostly intact and that it was sometimes getting it wrong and maybe even sometimes lying.
• 4:33
  But, you know, the idea that in hindsight, we can see that a population would have known that things were totally awry is actually, I think, a pretty classic error of thinking historically and imagine that we couldn't possibly be living in those in such historic times now. It is it is it you never live through the clarity that resolves after this past. That's true. I mean, my guess would be, you know, it obviously depends on what date you're talking about. But I would argue late in the Soviet era, I think the population was broadly aware that they were they were seeing shadows on the wall and they and they had an adaptation to it. I guess this is kind of my point is I think if you've lived for a generation under complete control of information, then you've learned to think privately. And in fact, yes, we had a Czech friend. We didn't know him well, but he was a guy in our graduate school.
• 5:38
  I've mentioned before Miro, Miro Slav, I believe, is his full first name. But Miro was a Czech guy who had in the very late stages of the Soviet era published. What would it have been called? Is it Samistat? Do I have the right word? He published, you know, dissident literature, knowing that he would likely be killed or tortured if this was discovered. And, you know, it was sort of a sort of a speakeasy response to prohibition. The idea is a culture of tuning out the nonsense and figuring out how to cobble together since privately existed. And we're now in some new situation where we're sort of publicly just grappling with the first stages of a war in which, you know, at some level, trying to infer reality from memes and public pronouncements by people who have interests at many different levels that are, you know, that are not consistent with the public being informed. They want the public on board. But anyway, I think we need a whole new toolkit for thinking about this. Oh, that's the case, which is not a not toolkit that anyone arrives with or really has generated.
• 7:07
  I would say that what I want to talk about this week requires no such thing.
• 7:14
  You know, imagining that we know what is going on in the minds of legislators is quite a task. But once they instantiate their thinking into law, then we have a document to look at. And so we've got a new document in the state of Washington.
• 7:31
  And we talked on the last episode about some of the stuff going on in Washington. Well, we've got something unrelated yet coming out of the same legislative session to talk about this week. And of course, you know, the law is not the same as, say, biology, in that when you're trying to infer what is true in biological space, there is a reality. And your interpretation is your interpretation, but it doesn't change what is underlying the true. And when you're talking about the law, there is text. And regardless, you know, it is, you know, should it go to such a place, there will be interpretation of what has been written. And there is no underlying reality outside of the text. And so there is inference required, but it's not nearly the same kind of inference with shadows and, and second and third and fourth order effects like what you're talking about. So it is far it is a far easier task, at least at I would say first, second, third approximation to understand what, what our lawmakers here in the state of Washington have in mind for us with this new piece of legislation. Yeah, it's different because you have no idea why, but you do know what exactly you know what they've done.
• 8:48
  It's just it's it's it's right there, black and white. Yeah, it's right there in black and white, even if it's written to obscure. I mean, as we talked about last time, the hidden marriage penalty in the new tax, the new. Well, it says no, I'm scared. They're really clear about it. Well, they don't describe it as a marriage penalty. They don't call it a marriage penalty anymore than they call it a state tax, a death tax. But you know, there's different words for different things. But the idea that in many states, you have a tax above a certain income level for individuals and in a few states, including the state of Washington, you have a tax above a certain level for couple for for entities, regardless of whether or not you're single or a couple, which means obviously you're better off if you are a high earner, but not an extraordinarily high earner. Actually, either way, if you are a high earner, you're better off financially if you're single. Right.
• 9:46
  Which is, you know, which, you know, we can call it a marriage penalty. Do they call it a marriage penalty? Of course not. But that's what it is. Right. But I guess what I'm saying is, if you take the marriage penalty that obviously exists in that law and you pair it with all of the other attacks on family that we have seen, you can hypothesize there is something that wishes to disrupt family and it manifests in this bill. Right. Or at least that is a likely explanation for why you would do a curious thing. Yeah.
• 10:19
  Like punish people for being married. You know, it's a twofer from their perspective, more money and they get to continue to attack the family. It's win-win. Right. Yes. It's win-win. But at least it paints a kind of a picture. It allows you. You can look at the dots and then you can connect them. You may not always connect them accurately, but at least you have dots to connect. It's a very different scenario than where every dot is taken on some kind of faith about the person describing its location. Yeah.
• 10:49
  And anyway, these are both bad situations to be in, but boy, I'd rather have dots to connect. That's a far easier game to play. And anyway, we're in both situations simultaneously. So join us on Locals where there's a watch party going on. We don't have a Q&A today, but we did last Sunday. You can find that one there as well. And we are in the second of a four-pack of evolutionary lens episodes right now. We were here on Wednesday.
• 11:17
  We'll be here next Wednesday, next Saturday. So lots of DarkHorse content coming up. And in recent history, you did a Patreon call this morning. Oh, wow. All of those things are true. Was it? Oh man.
• 11:29
  Yeah. We were firing on all cylinders. We got another one tomorrow. Yes, that's true. We've got more cylinders. Is that how that works? Or are you just going to reuse the same cylinders I would expect?
• 11:39
  I mean, I guess if we're going to continue the cylinder analogy, we'll probably just for expense reasons continue using the same cylinders, but try to fire them all. All right. So let's do our ads for our three carefully chosen awesome sponsors and then get into more of the meat of the matter. Our first sponsor this week is ARMRA Colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. Here at DarkHorse, we talk frequently about the fact that we live in an age of hyper novelty. Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. And even we can't keep up with the rate of change that we are enacting on ourselves. We are bathed in electromagnetic fields, artificial light, seed oils, microplastics, hopefully not literally bathed in seed oils, but you get my point.
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• 14:13
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• 16:44
  Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win. Joincrowdhealth.com. You know how people who know each other really well, people who've been married a long time can't help but finish each other's sentences in their heads. When you said that in the second incident that you needed a head, my mind finished the sentence with transplant, which not only is that not possible, but I'm really glad you didn't need one. And I feel like you might have plans for me that I'm not that into. No, no, it was just, I, you know what it was? It was my inner LM. What does that mean? Well, it means that the LLM is constantly looking for the next word that would make a lot of sense. And this was not the most shining moment of my inner LLM, but it did. But I, you know, LLM, I mean, you've said that, you know, what it is, is, is, is trying to be as human as possible. Like an LLM is trying to mimic what the human language capacity is. So what do you mean by your inner LLM? You're like, you are, like you are an animate, original, organic, LLM inherently. Yep. And so that's, I feel like that's an excuse. All right. I feel like you're planning a head transplant.
• 18:02
  And frankly, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to keep my eye on you. With the head I have. No, I both of the eyes that I have on the head that I have. Yes. No, I appreciate it. I don't think you need to watch out for this. I think we're good. I think it was just because you may not know that they're actually, they're not, they're not working yet. No, they're not. They're definitely, they're definitely. There's one and embarrassingly involves our field. JBS Haldane somehow a dog head transplant. If I'm remembering the story correctly, I believe the head last. From like the fifties? Yeah. It's a long ago and dark chapter in Frankenstein. So when did this last? Very short. And it was, you know, not highly. Like minutes? Yes. Something like that. I don't think that counts.
• 18:49
  All right. I mean, the first flight was 30 seconds. So, you know, things count, but let's put it this way. If you're listing the number of instances in which this has been tried, that's definitely. I didn't say tried, but I, but I, but I grant your point about the first flight being 30 seconds and still counting as the first manned flight. So yes. Okay.
• 19:12
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• 20:06
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• 22:41
  Make sure you enter our show name after checkout. So they know we sent you once again, that's H E L I X S L E E P.com slash DarkHorse for seriously. No, it's great. The last sentence for a seriously comfortable mattress period. The end just once more. What was the, what was the CDA or what do you, what do you, what do you put in? You put in, no, you go to helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse and then you put in our show name at checkout. All right. That was dramatic, but I'm past it. Are you? Yes, I am past. I would like, if possible, to start with a, a thought that occurred to me out of the blue that will not let me go since it happened. As our viewers and anybody who's the slightest bit familiar with last names will realize I'm Jewish. I grew up in a secular Jewish home and not that long after the end of world war II, I was born in 1969. World war II ended in 1945 and the Holocaust loomed very large in the thinking of many people and especially Jews, um, during that period.
• 24:07
  And one of the things that I was raised with was the question of can it happen here?
• 24:14
  And the answer to that question, as I came to understand it, was yes, it can happen here. And the implication of that was that we must be ever vigilant for the signs that a genocide might be emerging.
• 24:32
  And frankly, I think it's a very good lesson and a good mental exercise, even if an uncomfortable one. Now that question wasn't just a feature of my household. In fact, it was widely discussed. Uh, in fact, there's a book by Sinclair Lewis from 1935. That's pretty early, um, called, It Can't Happen Here.
• 24:56
  You can see it on the screen now. And the title of 1935, uh, what he was motivated.
• 25:05
  He was motivated by the rise of Hitler and Mussolini. And so it effectively anticipates a genocidal outburst. And I haven't read the book, but the title is ironic and it concludes that it can, that the United States may be not a prime location to worry about this, but that it can happen anywhere. So anyway, this is a long standing question and, um, it's an important one. Now I will come back to my own framework for thinking about such questions. But what occurred to me this week was that there's a question that we didn't ask and I can't figure out why not. And the question is, we being people in your family, uh, the community of similar Jews, you were largely friendly.
• 26:01
  Let's put it to this way. I think Can It Happen Here was a ubiquitous question. It was described in many contexts, but the question that was never asked in those contexts that I'm aware of is Can It Happen to Us? Now the subtlety here is that it is a different thing. The question is, is there something about us, whoever us might be, whether it's Americans or Jews or any other ethnicity, race, population? Question is, the thing that happened to the Germans, are we immune from that happening to us?
• 26:45
  In other words, if we take this outbreak of genocidal impulse and we ask the question, is there something special about populations that fall into this? I believe I know from all of the work I've done over an evolution space, thinking about genocide, which longtime viewers will know goes back to when I was in college. In fact, I wrote a paper for Bob Trivers on the question of basically an evolutionary analysis of what had taken place in Nazi Germany. And the conclusion was a very disturbing one. It was that what happened was monstrous, but completely comprehensible from an evolutionary perspective. It is not an accident that the genocidal outburst of the Nazis would, if it had functioned as intended, resulted in the mass replacement of one population with another population. And that that's an evolutionary win, even if it's morally unforgivable, it is not incomprehensible in the slightest. So in light of that, and in light of the fact that the Nazi genocide is distinct in some ways, it was a large genocide, it was also thoroughly well documented by the Nazis themselves, which gives us a lot more access to what happened. And it had a particular German character to it, right? The sort of systematic nature of it looks very different than other genocides, or at least many of them. But nonetheless, despite the specifics being different, it was a recognizable pattern of human history. It's a recurrent pattern. And so obviously it isn't limited to Germans for any obvious reason, would be impossible to make the argument that it was in light of how many genocides there were. I would also point out that the idea of never again, which was a kind of global idea, right? The horrors of the Holocaust resulted in a lot of thought about how it is that we can banish this pattern forever. And that's been a failure. We've seen numerous genocides since. But again, the question that has been preoccupying me is, what is it that makes a population capable of doing this? And is there any reason to think that Jews who have been repeated repeatedly on the downside of genocide might not find themselves in the opposite position? And obviously, this is a relevant question in the present, because many of the things that are taking place, while I don't think any of them technically qualify fully for that, at least not in an unarguable way, do raise the question of whether or not the shoe is on the other foot. Let me point out that we've got multiple, we've got the Israelis, and it isn't really the Israelis. It's the Israeli regime which has pointed the Israeli military at multiple populations. We've seen a major military operation in Gaza that involved a tremendous amount of civilian death.
• 30:38
  The question has been raised about whether or not that's a genocide. And I think it is worth recognizing that genocide has a specific and narrow definition which leaves the question at the very least ambiguous. Because one of the things that is required for something to actually qualify is intent. Now, I do think we see genocidal intent in the statements of- The distinction of being genocide is to mass slaughter as murder is to manslaughter.
• 31:18
  Homicide is to manslaughter. Yeah, that's- Genocide is to mass slaughter.
• 31:22
  That's at least pretty close. Because if the idea- That's the distinction you're making is if intent is required for genocide to have occurred. Intent is required because obviously there's a difference between people being killed in mass numbers as true collateral damage and people being targeted. And so the definition of genocide requires that a population is targeted for destruction in whole or in part. And of course, Gaza is confusing in this regard because October 7th, whatever it was, created a situation in which you had a hostile force embedded in a civilian population and going after that force does not have any straightforward military answer that leaves the population out of it. So in other words, you had the destruction of a large fraction of a population, something like 50,000 deaths in Gaza and the displacement of nearly the entire population as I understand it.
• 32:42
  But you also had a military, I write paramilitary force that was intentionally so thoroughly intertwined that yes, if the question is a technical one, it's difficult to answer, maybe by design.
• 32:59
  Well, so one piece of what you're saying troubles me. I doubt you meant to conflate these two things, but you were speaking precisely enough that maybe you did. You said with regard to it could never happen here, could it happen to us in this case being Jews and you are using as a possible example what is happening with regard to the Israelis acting against the Palestinians in Gaza. But the Israelis and diaspora Jews are not the same thing at all. And that feels to me a little bit like, well, I can use an analogy from my own, not my personal history, but my family history where my father, as listeners will know, I am not Jewish. And my father was German American, German Catholic farm boy, grew up in Northeastern Iowa, among a lot of other German Catholic families. And he was born in 1938. And they, because they were mostly surrounded by other Germans, weren't the target of a lot of hate, but felt a certain amount of responsibility and disgust towards what they had left and what they still felt was a homeland, even though my father was not a first generation immigrant, you know, he'd never been. And so there was sort of a sense of like, what the hell are people doing? And also we are not of them anymore. And it would have been, I think, absurd for someone who had never been to the place, but whose family came from there some generations earlier, to feel that he was somehow responsible. So I don't understand why you would conflate, you know, and even, you know, all of Israel, but certainly all of, you know, all of modern Jewry with an action that is being taken by a particular group of people within a particular country, which is Israel. I 100% agree. I think the reason that I'm not placing that distinction front and center yet is that I think we have to do this in the abstract, even to understand where we are. And one of the things that I'm hoping emerges from this is a recognition that immunity to this behavior requires active control of it by people who are morally constrained as they should be. I don't believe I'm capable of genocide. I think I am, I don't think I have any genetic immunity to it, but I think I have a developmental immunity, which comes from values that would not allow me to participate in that, you know, frankly, even with a gun to my head. So it's not that I think we are all condemned to, you know, be capable of becoming genocidal at a moment's notice, but I do think an awful lot of effort needs to be put into thinking about what is it that actually practically takes this off the list of possibilities. And one of the things that takes it off the list of possibilities is that a population itself has within it an immunity to this behavior. And I don't see that immunity functioning effectively in the present. I see lots of people who appear to be acting out of a genocidal impulse. They may be the tiniest minority, but... So perhaps, perhaps it's a couple of things.
• 36:47
  You would have thought and you would hope that having been the target of genocidal impulse over and over and over again throughout history, Jews have been. And, you know, this explains in part why there are so many, there's so much diaspora, right? That you might expect both greater awareness of a tendency to go there and reduced capacity to enact it on others.
• 37:16
  And you're not sure that you see either of these things. Yeah, I'm disappointed that I don't see, I mean, and, you know, there are reasons we don't see it. The pushback when you explore any question in this neighborhood is so ferocious that I think lots of people who themselves do have the correct impulses to take this off the map to, you know, to forego this option completely, that those people are cowed into silence and it is leaving a tiny number of people who appear to me to be genocidal in positions of power that they shouldn't be. So, you know, that may be my oversimplifying the situation, but I guess the reason I started with the question, can it happen to us where it is a genocidal outburst? I mean, first of all, I'm no biblical scholar, but as I read Moses's laws for war in the Torah, they basically describe the situation in which this is the prescribed behavior from God, that this is what God wants.
• 38:29
  What is it? That there are circumstances in which, if I think if I remember the rules correctly, that if you intend to capture a territory that you are to do away with everybody, if you intend to defeat an enemy and go home, the behavior is different. But in any case, I don't think, let me go back to the evolutionary point, which will be familiar to many of you. I think the most fundamental rule of human population interaction is not a human rule at all. It goes back to the evolutionary history of populations of creatures. All creatures are driven, evolutionarily, to capture resource, territory being the primary one.
• 39:21
  Territory is something that has the other things that you need, food, water, hospitable climate, et cetera, to capture territory. That means displacing whatever was there in your niche. So creatures, the weed that invades your lawn is displacing the grass. You, as a gardener, intervene on behalf of the grass in order to keep the weeds out. But the point is, the weeds are not concerned about the rights of the grass. They're doing what they do. They're displacing their competitor. And so displacing your competitor population, whether it's one version of a species displacing another one or it's one species replacing another one, this is just simply the way evolutionary ecology functions day in, day out, species after species.
• 40:16
  So one thing that occurs to me as you're talking is that I think people get confused by the many meanings of phrases like "that's understandable" and "I get it." And I think, you know, when you say, speaking as an evolutionary biologist,"this is understandable," and you haven't actually used that term, but most people would be hearing this and say, "oh, you know, was it rational? Is it understandable? Do you get it?" You are making a absolute case for there being logic behind predictability about this behavior that explains why it happens over and over and over again across time, across space, across context. What you're in no way doing is excusing it, is justifying it, is saying they should have. And yet, when people say that's understandable or "I get it," sometimes they mean the first and sometimes they mean the second. And that means that many of us in our heads, when we hear someone say that, will replace one with the other. And then forever after having our heads, "oh, well, you know, he was justifying that thing." It's like, no, he never said that. And in fact, there was some language that was used that actually has two distinct meanings. And because we're not careful about which thing we mean, and then humans also aren't careful about which meaning we interpreted, we can take it forward as that's an evolutionary biologist, again, justifying genocide. And there is no justification here. There is an attempt to understand such that we can better minimize its occurrence going forward. Yes. And in fact, I'll go one step further. And I will say the reason that I've spent as much time on this question as I have over the course of, or even had a career, but since I was a college student, is that I believe the best shot we have at actually eliminating genocide as a pattern of history is thoroughly understanding why it happens. And therefore understanding that we do have a choice, but the choice doesn't come at the point that a genocide is about to begin, we have to choose an alternative pattern. And in fact, in the work I did in college, I coined the term to describe Hitler himself, that he was a rational monster. And so my point is, if you hear me say he's rational, you'll get the meaning that you were just worried people would be taking. If you understand that I've used it to the word monster, so you can't possibly understand this as a justification. It's not a justification.
• 43:07
  And do you understand the mafia? Because you don't have to like the mafia to understand how they function and that they do function and that it's a pattern that recurs and that there's a Japanese mafia and a Jewish mafia and an Italian mafia and cartels in Mexico and all. The point is understanding that these things have a logic to them is not the same thing as saying they're okay. And in fact, you'd be a fool to surrender the tool of understanding them if what you want to do is prevent them. You'd precisely be a fool to surrender the tool of trying to understand them. You would be a fool, and indeed we have those fools among us all over the place. I remember being told in grad school, there are some questions we shouldn't ask. I find that to be an anti-scientific and dangerous perspective. Are there some answers that will be ugly and make us uncomfortable? Surely.
• 44:05
  But the idea that there are questions that we should not be asking is reprehensible, honestly. Yeah, it is. It is reprehensible. And so I know this is in some ways a tortured explanation, but the reason that this question preoccupies me is that I feel like the genuine sympathy that people rightly have for Jews based on repeated genocides and programs against them, and the Holocaust specifically, that that desire to be on the right side of this issue with respect to Jews causes an inference that is not justified, which is that Jews would, of course, be incapable of such behavior because that history would have taught them the moral lesson of it. And the problem, to go back to the evolutionary question, to go back to the grass and the weeds, is that populations displace each other. That is their basic nature. And because it is their basic nature, a model that I built out that I call lineage selection, that lineage selection involves not only thinking about individuals and their success and competing with each other, which we all understand pretty well, that populations do this, that they do it to their own evolutionary benefit over the long term at large scale, and that that pattern has, you know, just the same way if we were looking at primates, non-human primates, and we saw hairs that were pair bonded, and the male was sticking close to the female, we'd say, "Oh, that's mate guarding," right? And then if you see a young couple, humans, in love, you say,"Oh, I wonder if they'll get married." And it's like, well, actually, marriage is a special case of mate guarding. It's not all it is, but the point is we actually know that pattern. It has a different name, and we've got a whole body of literature on how it functions.
• 46:08
  And then when we get to the human context, we pretended some brand new thing, and it ain't. So lineage selection, the way it unfolds with human populations is that human populations displace each other because the alternative involves being displaced, right? If you forego displacing other populations, then you're limited in scope, and the likelihood that your population will be displaced by somebody else, and it might not have been fully displaced if it had been larger because you had displaced competing populations.
• 46:37
  And I mean, as we talk about in the final chapter of "Hunter Gathers Guide," the frontier that we have to be fighting over now can't be one of space, can't be one of territory, because at least here on Earth, we've done it. Well, you mean you can't find a new territorial frontier that doesn't have other people there?
• 46:58
  Yeah, that other people haven't already at least been to and decided it isn't worth their time. So theft of resource is ever present. Theft of territory being the primary, most valuable resource there is because it is finite and you can't substitute anything else for it. So the default state of nature involves populations displacing each other because they don't have a choice. We humans have an alternative mode that we have been experimenting with, and that alternative mode is effectively what I would call the modern West. In the modern West, what we do is we agree not to stop competing because you can't build a system in which competition isn't present, but to reduce that competition to a non-violent, non-displacing type that we set aside our racial differences, we collaborate with whoever has the goods to collaborate with us because it is wealth producing to do so, and we try to sideline the violence. My claim is that that system is superior in every important regard to lineage versus lineage violence. It is safer, it is fairer, it is more productive, it is more rewarding, it provides more opportunity to engage in meaning-making. All of the benefits of being a human are enhanced by living under a system of decidedly reduced violence where displacing other populations is not an objective, but that system, the West, is fragile. It breaks down, and when it breaks down because something has gone awry, it breaks down into lineage against lineage violence.
• 48:55
  And so I want to be careful to make sure people understand that my argument here is that all human populations are capable of falling into this displacement mode, that it is the expected mode when surrounding conditions foster it. So I'm particularly worried about the Middle East because there's an awful lot of concern about who owns territory based on ethnicity and lineage and religious doctrine, all of these things being proxy for underlying genetic reality, which is sometimes confusing. You have multiple different lineages of Jews, you have obviously multiple different lineages of Muslims, but the point is once you spot that even a population that I think because of its diaspora nature has faced repeated genocidal outbursts against it, there is no immunity to behaving this way because these are effectively the old rules reasserting themselves. Well, I wonder if what you just said was, let's see, you said repeated genocides are, you think, due to the diaspora nature of many Jewish populations because the Jews are at least three distinct adaptive radiations.
• 50:40
  I wonder if that actually, I wouldn't necessarily argue to reverse causation there, but I would say that I suspect that there is something culturally and I have not, I grew up among many different secular Jewish households and print groups, each of which was different in its way, but there is something cultural, at least in American diaspora Jews, that is different from other people as I have met them, that may itself lead to the diaspora nature. I don't think that saying diaspora as the initial thing that prompts the reaction is explanatory enough. I think there's something distinct culturally about a group that isn't actually a single lineage, that is multiple lineages that comes together around a book, a set of ancient texts, and in some cases, a set of religious beliefs, but really, the number, at least in diaspora, the number of Jews who are actually secular is extraordinary, a remarkably high fraction. And so there's something about the focus on the interest in dissent, in coming together over food and family and conversation and not being scared of disagreement, and insisting, in fact, on disagreement if you hear something that you think is wrong, that I find not true in many other, at least, subcultures of America. Well, I'm also watching that recede, which is frightening and disheartening, but more to your earlier point, there's a cycle here too, right? If you were raised with the question like explicitly repeated multiple times, discussed at length, can it happen here? That lodges itself in a certain place. And can it happen here?
• 52:55
  The answer is yes. That's the rational answer. Once you know that the answer is yes, it raises the question, is it happening here? Yeah. Was that joke the first sign? And the answer is no, it probably wasn't. But there's a heightened sense of awareness that, again, is impossible to tease apart from the diaspora nature. Is this my homeland?
• 53:17
  Well, like homeland, hmm, like no. Well, if you've got a whole population, if I meet another secular Jew from somewhere else, I don't have the conversation with them. Did you grow up with the question?
• 53:31
  Can it happen here? It would just be my assumption. It's assumed, yeah. So the point is, okay, you have that feature of your personality. I have that feature of my personality. You may not have thought about the question in a decade, but it functions as a uniting force, which I think is fine. But it also functions to create a distance, right? From? Well, if it's going to happen here, who will be manning it? Who will staff it? Who will lead it? Right? This is why so many of the accusations in the run up to Trump's elections were so jarring, because the point is people were saying it is happening here. There he is. Right? And so anyway, that mindset is part of a cycle. If you know that you might be selected out and that it could happen here, and you know what that looks like because you've studied it, then. And some of your family lived it. Right. So there's a kind of sleep with one eye open aspect. And when you've got a population, you've got a population of people, they're by and large ignoring race.
• 54:41
  Nobody's thinking terribly hard about whose ancestors believed in what book.
• 54:47
  But some fraction of them are sleeping thinking, "Oh, I got to be alert because at some moment that may become the primary feature of my life." Right. Then that creates a kind of circle the wagons mentality. And I'm not arguing that that's a bad thing. I wouldn't, you know, I've taught this to our children because I want them to know it. But I guess point being, it creates an insular layer and that insular layer makes it more likely that it actually happens. It means that, you know, there is some sort of barrier to feeling fully at home and safe or whatever it is. And so anyway, it's part of a cycle. And the, well, I will just say one anecdote. I'm not going to say who, but I recently had a Jewish friend take me to task for trying to be analytical in this space, trying to figure out what's actually taking place in the relationship between Israel and the US. What's taking place in the Middle East? What's my responsibility to it? And the person said something pretty nasty, which I think they had absolutely no legitimate basis for saying it, but nonetheless, they said it and it wasn't the first time I've heard it. They said, you know, you might be able to last a little longer. They might come for you five minutes after they come from me, but they're coming for you all the same. As if that's what this is. Right. As if, as if I don't, you know, as if you're trying to say, as if I'm a coward trying to save my own skin, which is, you know, whatever the reality of the situation is, personally, I feel jeopardy talking about these things in public. I don't think this preserves me. Anyone who knows you also knows that this is not. Right.
• 56:42
  Anybody who knows me should understand that that's, that's not, that's not what's going on. But nonetheless, even the fact that the sentiment adds up, right? Oh, I get why you're doing this.
• 56:52
  You're trying to get in good with the genociders. It's like, okay. So now I'm watching the cycle kind of kick into high gear. Yes, I see a ton of antisemitism.
• 57:05
  And in fact, I see, you know, I was of course talking about what I called Nazi Twitter, you know, a year before most people had even encountered it. Right.
• 57:13
  Right. So I'm well aware of the danger of that mindset and the fact that it is out there and it's not even hiding. It's just the algorithm isn't showing it to you or it wasn't. But at the same time, I'm watching the kind of insular reaction to that thing, which is causing a shutdown of the exact things that I valued most about my Jewish upbringing was the, you know, fearless confrontation with possibilities that were hard to discuss and the willingness to do so, you know, you know, even though it created, you know, impassioned arguments without doing so personally and all of that, those things I see receding and I see a lot of people being quiet about what they actually privately understand because the thing that comes back at you is so ferocious when you dare raise any skepticism about anything. So anyway, it's, I'm watching the thing unfold in real time in a way I frankly didn't think I was going to live to see. I thought it might happen, but I didn't think I was going to live to see it. And living it is very different than the cartoon that we were presented, which is yes, it can happen. Be alert for it. But, you know, watching the dynamics is very unfortunate. And so well, but it's I would, I would ask that you and everyone who is experiencing some version of what you are describing, try to truly record it because again, we are handed cartoons down through history. We are told this is what it was like and it feels obvious in retrospect what the good people should have done and what the bad people clearly did. And that's of course not what happens. So, you know, I wonder as I did during COVID, as I did during the summer of 2020 after George Floyd died, during the whole BLM, like I wonder over and over and over again, how this actually differs from other variants that are too far in the past for us to have direct memory of, for which we only have historians records or the victors records or, you know, whatever it is that very, and that, you know, this is one of the things that story does because story doesn't pretend to be objective. It tries to tell an individual's experience and frankly, it is the individual experience of what it what it was like on the ground day to day that actually gives you a sense of what happened and how it happened and how people could have been so foolish, cowardly, despicable, murderous in that order. A single individual that starts off foolish and ends up murderous potentially. Well, I think the most relevant example is Orwell and the unfortunate thing about Orwell is, you know, Orwell obviously wrote a ton of analytical stuff and then he wrote the stuff that he's remembered for and the stuff that he remembered for, he's remembered for like 1984 turns out to be much more literal than I certainly understood before we started living through the madness of the last 10 years.
• 1:00:41
  But the inversion of language, right, I thought that that was like a bridge too far. It was a little too cartoonish. And then I've seen language go through this process and it's like, oh, that was a warning and I'm very grateful to have had Orwell seed the idea that this can really happen. People can actually just start inverting language, right? And they will do so in the open without embarrassment and you won't be able to believe it.
• 1:01:10
  Right. So that was, you know, without Orwell, we'd be struggling to describe this inversion of language with Orwell.
• 1:01:18
  At least it snaps into place as soon as you see it. Yeah. I'm reminded and sorry, I was just looking it up to make sure back in May of 2022, we talked about Viktor Frankl's man's search for meaning.
• 1:01:35
  And which I see in my notes here, I had found a copy of on our friend, Dave Stevens, carefully curated small library on his boat. He lived the Nazis coming in. And so his reports are, Orwell is brilliant. I find in some ways Orwell at his most brilliant when he is reporting on his actual travels through the countryside and in his nonfiction. And I can't remember at the moment I'm forgetting the name, although I've read from some of that work of his as well.
• 1:02:21
  You know, 1984 and Animal Farm are brilliant narratives, but they are him imagining a future given what he has seen and reports of people who actually lived through the horror in real time and how it is that they experience what it felt like to them, which is part of what you are talking about is seeing how people are responding to what we are being told and, you know, almost acting in opposite ways than what you would expect them to do. We need that recorded. I agree.
• 1:03:01
  That's the story at the moment that I'm asking for. I'm not actually, I want story of all sorts, but I specifically want individual story that the individuals telling them believe to be true and someone else who was there at the same time with a different persona may have read it an entirely different way. But, you know, you walk through your own life and you are experiencing, you know, you are experiencing an historic moment, a series of historic moments right now. And maybe this too will feel extraordinarily clear cut 100 years from now. It doesn't right now. It doesn't. And so I'm hoping that that is one of the things that we figure out how to understand what's happening and record it because each time it happens, it is the most valuable of lessons. I'm also hoping that we can hold our own feet to the fire. I think increasingly a key to breaking these dynamics is a fearless willingness to reflect on, you know, on our own behavior and the behavior of populations that we're part of. And I wanted to just look at something that, you want to put up the tweet, the let that sink in tweet by hand army.
• 1:04:34
  This is an account I don't know, but it pointed me to something that I had been unaware of previously. It has to do with what's going on in southern Lebanon as the world is focused on the war with Iran. So the tweet that caught my attention says,"Jewish troops will be looking for Muslims hidden in the attics of Christians. Let that sink in." Now, I did not know what that was a reference to at first, and I pursued it down a couple of levels to, you want to show the tweet with the New York Times articles. You can get there through Ryan Grimm's quoted tweet there if you want. But in any case, what this is referring to is an explicit warning. So this is from Zachary Foster.
• 1:05:33
  He says, "Israeli authorities confess they are singling out Shiite Lebanese population for destruction." This is a textbook ethnic cleansing described as Israel's message by the New York Times.
• 1:05:47
  So never mind for the moment whether or not that's an accurate description. Let's just look at what the New York Times is reporting. So the headline of this article is "Israel's Message to a Broad Swath of Lebanon. Shiites Must Go. Israel Has Issued Sweeping Evacuation Warnings and Press Some Christians and Druze Leaders to Expell Shiite Muslims from Southern Towns," the leaders said. And then let's go to the other screenshot. It says, "In private calls to local leaders across southern Lebanon, Israeli military officials have assured several Christian and Druze communities that they could remain in the evacuation zone." So in any case, you have to kind of cobble the story together here, but the Israelis have been very aggressive in southern Lebanon. They're effectively at war there. And I don't want to oversimplify the context because the Israeli position is not one any of us would want to be in. The Israelis in northern Israel are routinely being shelled by Hezbollah from Lebanon. Now there's a long history there.
• 1:06:59
  Palestinians were expelled from Israel.
• 1:07:01
  They retreated to Lebanon and have been, they have had various organizational structures. Most recently Hezbollah, which is not only funded by Iran, but was actually created by Iran, if my understanding is correct. And Iran infuses something like three quarters of a billion dollars a year there, three quarters of a billion to a billion dollars a year. So you wouldn't want to be Israel being shelled by an enemy across the border with a huge infusion of cash from Iran, which has its own interests in the region.
• 1:07:40
  So that's not a good position to be in.
• 1:07:42
  And I think one does have to think about what would we do if, you know, China was funding the cartels in Mexico to shell Texas, right? What exactly would we do?
• 1:07:59
  So it's not an easy puzzle. The answer to that is not obvious. And if you think it's obvious, it isn't. However, this does create the pretext for Israel to attempt to drive Shiite Muslims out of southern Lebanon, which does pretty easily match the definition of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing not being genocide. It can be, you can have, genocide can be the mechanism of ethnic cleansing. But here you have a population that is targeted for removal from an area for reasons that are actually understandable in this case. But presumably not all the Shiite Muslims are involved in shelling northern Israel. So in any case, I don't like this. But the answer is ethnic cleansing appears to be on the table for the Israeli regime. The reasons for it are comprehensible. But nonetheless, that initial tweet that said, you know, let this sink in, that you might have Shiite Muslims being hidden in the attics of Christians being hunted by Jews, it's worth thinking about. So anyway, you have that and it deserves a conversation that I don't hear happening. And I know has to happen if this is not just going to be the repeated pattern of history. I think we have to realize that all human beings arise from populations that displaced other populations. So the potential exists everywhere. There are always reasons for history. Sometimes there are justifications. Sometimes those justifications aren't real and they're rationalizations or they're the result of false flags designed to provide a cause as bell. History is nothing if not complicated. But understanding that actually none of us are immune to that pattern. None of our populations are immune to that pattern is, I think, a key insight in order for us just simply to go forward without saying, well, you can't raise that accusation against these people because they would never do that.
• 1:10:19
  Well, yes. And frankly, that's a I think that's critical. I think that is the crux exactly of what you've just been talking about. And it reminds me of the objection of many of us to the frankly anti analytical claims made by the DEI Black Lives Matter folks around, if you are black, you cannot be racist. This is the same kind of assumption. If you are Jewish, you could not possibly be on one side of a genocide because you have experienced so much of the other. It's the same error. And it's and I think with potentially serious consequences in both cases. Yeah, it's magical thinking. And, you know, maybe I'm now I'm pretty sure.
• 1:11:12
  I think the thing is in in any of the discussions that I look back on from my upbringing that I thought were formative and important and model behavior that we are supposed to be engaged in.
• 1:11:28
  Magical thinking is quite an accusation, right? If you are engaged in magic, if somebody says you are engaged in magical thinking, they're telling you that whether willfully or because you can't face something, you are engaging in illogic with a purpose. And I just think, I mean, frankly, I've always been troubled by the concept of the chosen people. It always rubs me the wrong way.
• 1:11:59
  And not because I don't understand what it is at a biblical level, but because everybody's population is special in the eyes of their God. And so the idea that this particular claim about God has, you know, general cachet doesn't add up to me. So I don't think any of us on earth are entitled to magical thinking when the topic is something as important as ethnic cleansing, genocide, how to present these, prevent these patterns that we all agree are bad. What the solution is in northern Israel, I have no idea. But we have to talk about what the problem actually is and what its causes are in order to hope for a solution, in order to pursue a solution that doesn't involve all of this stuff that in our better moments we all understand is abhorrent and shouldn't exist. All right. I will just say before we fully leave this topic, that the idea that the Israeli regime is involved in things that in our better moments we all understand are intolerable, even with the understanding that they're in a tough spot that none of us have the solution for. We have been drawn into a conflict in Iran, the dimensions of which those of us in the public can't understand because we can't see it. But the noises that are coming out of our leaders are similarly troubling, even if they don't meet the exact patterns that we've been discussing. And I just wanted to call attention to this. So can you put on that clip of President Trump from the other day? Thanks to the progress we've made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly, very shortly. We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong. Okay. That kind of rhetoric, the idea, I mean, not only we're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong, who exactly belongs in the Stone Ages? I mean, even if you have your villains who are engaged in the behavior that motivated this war in Iran, even if that's the story, presumably most of the people in the path of these ferocious bombings that he is describing are not deserving of going back to the Stone Age.
• 1:14:53
  In fact, I distinctly remember him telling us that part of what we were up to was liberating the people of Iran from their tyrannical regime. So if it's the tyrannical regime that justifies the ferocious bombing, then it's a tragedy that other people are going to be sent back to the Stone Ages with them. Right?
• 1:15:15
  And it's not a narrative. It's an incoherent set of talking points. Yeah.
• 1:15:20
  It's a kind of cheerleading that is completely inappropriate from the perspective of the president. And it ain't just him. And that wasn't just one line. You want to put up Pete Hegseth's tweet? So Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, tweets back to the Stone Age. So this is a theme in the Trump administration in the midst of a war started, I don't even want to say false pretenses. I'm not even sure what the pretenses were. Nothing was spelled out that would allow us to know what the victory conditions were. The explanation for why we're there has dodged and weaved. And now we're talking about bombing people back to the Stone Age. And then further, do you have a, did I send you a tweet? It makes harder to, it makes it much more difficult to have any hope that the people on the so-called other side are going to grow up and figure out what's true because they're fighting against something that is increasingly incoherent and unnecessarily just across the board aggressive. Yeah, across the board aggressive and saber rattling, to use a weird term to have on this side of the equation, but okay, saber rattling from the highest echelons of government put up the White House's tweet. So this actually came from the White House account. It says, remember when I gave around around 10 days to make a deal or open up the Strait of Hormuz, or the Hormuz Strait, time is running eight out, 48 hours before all hell will rain down on them, glory be to God. And then, that's a quote from Trump. Yeah, and they scroll down. You can see here, here's Trump on Truth Social. Time is running eight out, 48 hours before all hell will rain down on them, glory be to God. Well, I don't even know what to say. Here he is invoking God as he's threatening to rain hell down on the Iranians without the sense that there are innocent people, innocent people who he used as a pretext early on in this conflict. It's so bizarre and unacceptable that I don't even know what to say about it. But I guess the point is, you know what, we are the descendants of chimp-like ancestors. We've had six million years to get over our pure chimpiness and become something with the potential to not do that chimp stuff. And we're close enough to it that we fall back in that direction very easily. And if you just recognize what we are and what we've accomplished and the fact that you can walk out and you can go to the market and you can buy some food and bring it home and cook it from your family and not be thinking about whether barbarians are going to break down your door and, you know, rape your family and take your stuff. We live better than this. We can't let ourselves fall back into these prior modes because the fact is as flawed as our system is, it is just in a whole other world, right?
• 1:18:48
  If we were smart, we would be trying to protect the alternative to this lineage versus lineage displacement stuff at all costs. There's just no comparison to the quality of life under these two different rubrics. And yet, as I said at the beginning of this conflict, as I said just after October 7th, we are in danger of all being dragged back into lineage against lineage violence based on the fact that these two worlds come together in the Middle East. And it was very unwise of us to get involved in a conflict with no clear exit strategy that immediately involves the entire world economy and therefore puts everybody on the map with respect to who they want to win and in what way. And this was reckless. And to hear the most base motivations being phrased by our secretary of war and our president ought to stop everybody in their tracks. Where are we? How did we get here? And how do we get out as quickly as possible? That's the question. Maybe it is always true that if you've got a two-party system, two obvious sides, that both of them will tend to be looking their worst at the same time. I don't know if that is the case, but it feels like that's what we've got right now. And so given everything that you just went through, there's a part of me that feels like, I don't know if I want to go after the Washington State Democrats right now. On the other hand, they're ludicrous and they're decreasing our quality of life and making no sense and seeming to have no idea that that is what they were doing.
• 1:20:42
  And so we are left as Americans with no place to turn. Right? Neither the red team nor the blue team are coherent at this point.
• 1:20:52
  Well, actually, if I can just put one more nuance in the connection, we are watching the system that is the alternative to a war of all against all break down at global scale. And we are living the breakdown of the thing that works here locally. It's across scales and it reflects something that I think people need to spend more time thinking about.
• 1:21:18
  Is the West just simply targeted for destruction by something because it's happening at every scale and that could be the result of something organic or it could not. It may be that it's systematic. Well, when you say it's happening at every scale, I think that's confusing because it's happening in opposite directions in many places. And it may be true that it's happening at every scale. I'm not even sure exactly what that means, but that sounds like it's happening in the same way at all these different scales. And in fact, what we're seeing with regard to what you're talking about out of the executive branch and the DOD, I insist, feels like a particularly chest thumping, chimpy kind of approach that we all recognize. But then what's happening at, for instance, in the state of Washington, in the very strongly blue legislature, is something that is newer.
• 1:22:19
  But anyone who's been listening to us or just paying attention or in academia or the arts or HR or practically any place since at least 2017 knows that it's in a different kind of attack on the West. And this is the one that looks like... So now we've got all the toxicities.
• 1:22:45
  We've got the silly, overly empathic, suicidal, empathic kind of empathy, as we'll talk about briefly here coming out of the Dems. And we've got the traditional toxic, kill them all, blast them back to the Stone Age kind of masculinity that is also by far, in neither case, the best of what the feminine or the masculine can offer humans. So... Oh, that's an interesting point. Yeah. No, that's really good.
• 1:23:18
  Yeah, we're watching the male and the female failure mode simultaneously, and they're happening at two different scales, which would actually maybe be expected. And in part, Trump was elected this last time with our help, as a pushback against the toxic feminization of so many of our systems and not just the feminization, but the toxic feminine. And that is not to say that there isn't a place for the good feminine in functional systems, just there's a place for the good masculine in functional systems. But the, you know, you use Gadsad's term, the suicidal empathy that has rendered so many people incompetent and destroyed systems out of service to like, "Oh, let's just help the other, no matter what, no matter what kind of harm I impart on myself and those I supposedly love," is what we have been dealing with since, you know, at least for 10 years. Whereas the, you know, blast them back to the Stone Age has been happening since the Stone Age and longer, right? Like that's more than six, that's since before we branched off from the proto-Gems, six million years or so, ish.
• 1:24:35
  So, okay. Last episode, we talked about the new millionaires talks that the Washington state legislature voted in and that Ferguson, Governor Ferguson signed recently and about a whole other suite of taxes that are new while we're seeing quality of life go down, cost of living go up, you know, all of this in the state of Washington. But there's another bill that passed the legislation this year that Governor Ferguson signed on March 18th that expands who can get jobs into law in law enforcement in both in law enforcement and in, well, I'll read some sections from it. But a friend of ours who, yes, has moved to Idaho from Washington mentioned to me a few months ago that this was moving through legislature a little while ago and I thought, "Oh, God, well, that, you know, that's too stupid. That won't pass." But no, indeed, as of March 18th, as I said, the governor has signed it through. So, let me just actually share some highlighted bits. It's not a super long document. Here we go. It's in Gross Senate Bill 5068, again, effective March 18th, 2026. So, the short version is, "It is an act relating to agencies, firefighters, prosecutors, and general or limited authority law enforcement extending eligibility for employment to all United States citizens or persons legally authorized to work in the United States under federal law." And then I also highlighted this.
• 1:26:10
  Another thing that this does is declares an emergency. Now, I read the whole thing and I don't see the declaration of emergency, nor do I especially, nor do I specifically see what the emergency might be that warrants this. So, that's a confusing little bit in this bill. So, what are they doing? "Be it enacted by the legislature of the state of Washington," again, this just happened last month, "a general authority Washington law enforcement agency, or limited authority Washington law enforcement agency, may consider the application of a citizen of the United States," which has always been the case,"or a lawful permanent resident for any office, place, position, or employment within the agency." That is, until this law was passed, you are required to be a citizen of the United States in order to apply for and get a position in either a general authority Washington law enforcement agency or limited. That is to say either a peace officer or a," I'm forgetting what the name of the officer is for people who work in prisons." But so either, corrections officer. So, a peace officer or corrections officer. You do not need to be a citizen anymore to apply for or perhaps to get such a job, but you do need to be a lawful permanent resident. Okay? I see no justification for why. Are they, "Oh, is it maybe because they defunded the police and so made police and corrections officers work so heinous that tons of people took early retirement and lots of good people who might have gone into the field decided against it because all you do is receive hate from the people who you live amongst?" Yeah, that could be it. But is the answer to let non-citizens be doing the job of policing citizens? I'm not convinced, but it gets worse. Did you have something to say? Yeah, I just wanted to point out, I think you caught up to it at the end. It wasn't just the defunding of the police. What we witnessed on the ground was that the local government actually backed the people who were demonizing and threatening the police. Yeah, from the beginning. And so, to have literal advocating of the murder of cops sprayed on public buildings to have burning and effigy pigs in front of the courthouse.
• 1:28:47
  All of these- As we covered extensively at the time. Extensively back in 2020.
• 1:28:52
  Yeah. It was utterly grotesque. It was grotesque, but the point is it resulted in the police. And the police also experienced a kind of jeopardy from the fact that if the population is of a mood that all cops are bastards, then the last thing you want to do is be a cop on the scene of some contentious something or other where something goes wrong, you get sued. It's not a safe situation. So, I think what we watched in Portland was the police kind of stopped enforcing the law.
• 1:29:21
  They stopped showing up. They wouldn't answer the phone. And- I mean, 9-11 calls were going unanswered or taking upwards of an hour to be responded. Yeah, even for things like a home invasions and stuff. It was insane. So, the point is, if there's an emergency, because we don't have enough cops and it's forcing us to this, guess whose bill that goes on?
• 1:29:42
  Right. And so, as I say, this not very long document, 12 pages, doesn't specify it says there's an emergency and that's why we're doing this, but it doesn't specify what the emergency is. And the emergency, of course, is caused by the very people who are enacting this into law, who voted this into law, by encouraging hatred of police and by basically requiring that they not be able to do- the neighborhoods are now so unsafe in urban places in Washington state that the police have no chance of making a difference.
• 1:30:16
  So, what's the answer?
• 1:30:17
  Well, let's bring in people who aren't citizens. Again, in this particular section, specifies citizens or lawful permanent residents, which I think means green cards. Okay, that's section one.
• 1:30:32
  Section two, employees whose primary job function is to provide for the custody, safety, and security of adult persons in state correctional facilities or local jails must be a citizen of the United States or a person who is legally authorized to work in the United States under federal law. So, peace officers have to be citizens or green card holders.
• 1:30:55
  Corrections officers have to be citizens or just be legally authorized to work.
• 1:31:00
  This is a step down. This is different and it is less of a requirement. There are many people who might be legally authorized to work who are not considered permanent residents. So, now you have corrections officers, people who can apply to be corrections officers who are simply legally authorized to work, but are not even making any claim as to whether or not they intend to live here permanently and not citizens. Okay, the prosecuting attorney. So, now we are in not police and corrections officers, but prosecutors offices. The prosecuting attorney may appoint one or more deputies who shall have the same power in all respects as their principal.
• 1:31:44
  Each appointment shall be in writing signed by the prosecuting attorney and filed in the county auditor's office.
• 1:31:48
  Each deputy thus appointed shall have the same qualifications required of the prosecuting attorney, except that such deputy need not be a resident of the county in which he or she serves nor qualified electorate therein. Each deputy appointed must be a citizen of the United States or a, and here they've got it crossed out lawful permanent resident.
• 1:32:05
  No, they've changed it or a person who was legally authorized to work in the United States under federal law. So, once again, we have not only are we expanding who can work in the prosecuting attorney's office to people beyond citizens, but what was originally proposed was to lawful permanent residents. No, let's expand it further into people who are merely legally authorized to work with no indication that they have applied to be permanent residents or that they intend to be permanent residents. It gets, now it takes a surprising turn. So that, like, this is what I thought was going to be in here-ish. It's shocking. It is, there is no way that an emergency, especially of their own making, warrants this. But what you have as you continue to scroll down in this document is employees of pro- oh, this is actually, this is the same again.
• 1:33:04
  Employees of prosecuting attorney's offices must be a citizen of the United States or a person who is legally authorized to work in the United States under federal law. Again, just repeating the same thing, that lower standard, not just the originally lower standard of citizen or green card holder, but citizen or must be legally allowed to work. I just also want to highlight that actually there is no reason to include citizen in that sentence, because the point is you're including the higher standard, and then you're saying there's a lower standard. And the point is citizens are included in that category already. So it's almost functioning as a kind of cloak, as if, oh, it's mostly citizens.
• 1:33:48
  But who knows what these people are up to? Maybe you do, because you've seen further down here. But- No, I mean, I don't object to that. I think a legal document should be clear and refer to what has happened before. And so you may have redundancy on the basis that what this used to be restricted to was citizens. And now it's citizens and. And I'm frankly, I'm grateful for it because it shows us what has been done. And in fact, that strike through earlier on shows us most explicitly what has been done here. Okay, but oops. What goes here in section seven is surprising.
• 1:34:29
  To help prevent misconduct, enhance peace officer and corrections officer accountability through the imposition of sanctions commensurate to the wrongdoing when misconduct occurs, and enhance public trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. So here, what we're doing this section is about making sure that these people who may or may not be citizens, whom we have hired, behave themselves. We've got a bunch of things.
• 1:34:52
  Okay, I'm not going to go through all of them, but they can't have been convicted of a felony offense, a gross misdemeanor domestic violence offense, et cetera, right? But here's what else goes on and on and on. The commission may deny, suspend, or revoke certification, or require remedial training of an applicant or officer if the applicant or officer, several conditions included in which is this, engaged in conduct, including but not limited to verbal statements, writings, online posts, recordings, and gestures, involving prejudice or discrimination against a person on the basis of race, religion, creed, color, national origin, immigration status, disability, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, or military and veteran status. A gesture that is considered to be dismissive of someone's fraudulent sense of themselves as a man, if they are actually a woman, or vice versa, is sufficient to get you reprimanded or perhaps fired if you are a peace officer or a corrections officer in the state of Washington, but not being a citizen is not sufficient to not have you considered for the job. Well, that does seem very modern Washingtonian. It's unbelievable.
• 1:36:20
  And then just to get back to the question about emergency, at the very end of the document, this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety, or support of the state government and its existing public institutions, and takes effect immediately. That, as far as I can tell, is the extent of their discussion of what the emergency is that they have claimed is the reason that they need to enact this, which again, they are enacting this on an emergency basis because of an emergency that they have not named, which allows non-citizens, they have to be legally employable in the United States, to have peace officer roles in the state of Washington, corrections officers roles in the state of Washington, and to work under the prosecuting attorney in the state of Washington. And for the second two, they need not be permanent residents. They need only be eligible, lawfully eligible to work in the United States. However, if they, or anyone, citizen or not says something mean on social media, or makes a gesture that is interpretable as offensive by anyone, including the delusional people who are busy thinking that there's something they're not, then they can lose their jobs. What kind of crazy are we living in? Yeah, that's insane. Because for one thing, okay, you've got people who are not citizens, who are being trained in, you don't actually have the right to speak freely. That's interesting, right? We say things on this program all the time that I'm sure would be used as a justification. There's no hate in us. We are simply analyzing the situation and aghast when it is ridiculous. But so you're training a population out of thinking that this is actually a right that does belong to citizens. And I mean, you've said it several times, but I just think to the extent that there is an emergency, it is that we cannot staff these positions. The law enforcement officers are not showing up in light of the rate of pay and the hazardous nature of the work and the abuse that they take. Because when they tried to do their jobs, they were shut down. Right. Because the government participated in emboldening those who were demonizing them and jeopardizing them. I mean, like literally launching BBs with wrist rockets and stuff like that. So of course, nobody wants those jobs. So you've created an emergency where a rational person won't take this job at the rate of pay, which does again, raise the issue from last live stream, where we talked about, okay, you've got these incredibly high taxes. Why are the services so crappy? Where's the money going? And the answer is, okay, you allow these people to be demonized. Actually, there is an appropriate way to address the emergency, which is to make the pay consummate with the horrible job that you've now created for them. You're not doing that. So what are you going to do?
• 1:39:18
  Oh, you're going to find another population that has sufficient vulnerability and privation that they'll take the job that no rational American would take. Right. So the point is, at what point do you become responsible for the insane consequences of your own stupid actions? Right. It's like the right response to this is to make sure that emergency doesn't continue. It doesn't happen again to go back and figure out how it was that these local governments tolerated the demonizing of their own police. Right. How did that happen? How can we make sure that never happens again? Can't we all agree that that was insane and that that was the cause of the problem? Apparently not.
• 1:40:03
  Apparently they're just, I mean, it's like, you know, bumping the age of enlistment up for the military because you know, you don't have enough people signing up for the adventures you've signed up for abroad. You mean down. Oh, you mean the maximum age. Yeah. The maximum age that was elevated by, I think five years recently. Anyway, so yeah, finding a new population, lowering the IQ requirements for soldiers in order to get more. It's like look at the BMI and changing the BMI requirements. Yep.
• 1:40:31
  Right. It's bonkers. You've got a system.
• 1:40:35
  You're supposed to like limit your actions to the things you're actually capable of dealing with. You're supposed to protect the stuff that's essential to its function. This isn't hard. You just, people are just too crazy to, to understand what you're supposed to do or to care. Yeah. And you know, so this bill has gotten some attention online as, oh, they're letting illegal immigrants into the peace officer positions. Well, no, that's not happening. That's not, that's not what this allows. For one thing, of the three categories of work that are being specifically changed with regard to who can apply and who can have these jobs, the peace officers, well, yes, it's opening up. It's opening up to permanent residence only. And the other two, the other two classes of work are opening up further to people who are lawfully allowed to work in the United States.
• 1:41:25
  That doesn't include illegal immigrants.
• 1:41:27
  So that's, that's not what this is. And it's not, you know, it's, it's unhelpful to have these conversations explode in directions that are untrue because all you have to do is figure out that they're untrue and it makes you easy to dismiss.
• 1:41:42
  So, okay, you know, we, both of these things we've talked about today, like we just, can we, can we stop it with the toxicity? Can we stop it with the really stupid ways of being male and female and human? But, you know, we just have two really clear examples here of the, you know, old school chimpy toxic masculine and the new school HR, I don't know, high school toxic feminine. And they're both, they're both beyond, beyond dangerous, actually. And it's always been easy to point to the like, blowing back the Stone Age is dangerous. And it's harder, it's been harder to make people aware that the, that the toxic feminine is actually extraordinarily dangerous too. But it is, they both are. We are being, we are having the West undermined from under us and we are being given no good choices. There are no good options here. This is, this is not the way to do it. Claim an emergency that you created and then change the rules of engagement, including telling people that if they, you know, look at someone funny, they could lose their job. No, that's because what? Their feelings were hurt? That's not, that's not how we live. That's, that's not, go back to the First Amendment, look at it, think about it, live it and consider whether or not your feelings being hurt might not actually be something that you have to deal with, as opposed to the person who you think are your feelings.
• 1:43:13
  With respect to both of these topics, it again goes back to this thing, which is now commonly said, you and I have been saying it for a long time, which is that the failure of people to encounter systems abroad that don't work, right? If you haven't seen a country in which governance does not function, it's very hard to understand what danger you're in by undermining the system you've got. And we're watching the system that we have either systematically targeted because some powerful force doesn't like the rights of people in the West, which I think is happening. And we're also seeing it hollowed out from within by people who do not understand that they are effectively sinking a ship on which they are depending to keep them from drowning.
• 1:44:05
  And both of these things are insane. It's very hard to make this point. If people imagine that things kind of work because they always have, right? They work because of systems you didn't build and you don't understand. And the alternative to those systems is so much worse that if you did understand what you were risking by tampering with them in this way, you wouldn't consider it for a second because you're not going to know how to function in the absence of these things. That's right. Unfortunately, I think it might be. Yeah.
• 1:44:46
  In better news. I didn't know there was any. It's our youngest child's 20th birthday today. We don't have teenagers anymore. That's not the good news. That feels weird. But happy birthday to Toby.
• 1:44:58
  Hey, Toby. Happy birthday. You won't be watching. No. And good on you.
• 1:45:03
  His generation doesn't do podcasts. And if they did, he probably wouldn't be watching this one because he knows awkward. Oh, he also knows. Yes. That's true. But we'll be back on Wednesday for, I don't know, we're going to find something at least one piece of something awesome to talk about. Not toxic anything. That's what we're going to find. We're going to find something that has no toxic component. All right. I think we're up to it.
• 1:45:31
  Yeah. It's a challenge for you.
• 1:45:33
  Okay. I'm on it. Okay. Excellent. So check out our sponsors this week, which were, I don't even remember. Helix, Parma, and Crowdhelp. That's right. Did I do it? That is exactly right. All amazing.
• 1:45:48
  I wouldn't use them all at once, but they're all fantastic products or services. You figure it out. I think if you took a little armor up before bed, went to sleep on your Helix mattress while knowing that you were protected by the crowd, if you had a medical order.
• 1:46:04
  Just knowing that you were protected.
• 1:46:06
  Okay. I could sleep better. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:46:08
  All right. Yeah. Use them all at once.
• 1:46:10
  You have my blessing and I assume Heather's. Oh, absolutely. That was well done. Beautiful. Okay. Until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.