Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Trump, One Year In: The 310th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Trump, One Year In: The 310th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  (Door Opens) (Doorbell Rings) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream, number 310, if I am not mistaken.
• 0:11
  You are not mistaken.
• 0:12
  I am not mistaken for once.
• 0:15
  It is a gorgeous day here in the San Juan Islands.
• 0:20
  It is one of those winter days that we are famous for here where it's actually sunny and beautiful, cold, but- We are not famous for this.
• 0:27
  No, we're famous for it, whether it's a common thing or not.
• 0:31
  No, we're not.
• 0:31
  Yeah, sunny days in the San Juan Islands, 260 sunny days a year is the claim, something like that.
• 0:39
  Anyway, it's a claim.
• 0:40
  It's based largely on wishful thinking.
• 0:43
  It's a claim that you just made up.
• 0:44
  No, no, no, it's because, see, we're in the rain shadow of the Olympic mountains, so the rain tends to fall out.
• 0:52
  And in fact, pilots describe that there is often a hole in the clouds over the San Juan Islands.
• 0:58
  You can literally see it.
• 1:01
  So we are sunnier than the mainland, but not as- We are sunnier than the mainland, but that doesn't mean that we're in any way famous for sun in the winter because we don't tend to get much, but it has been beautiful the last few days, and the rest of the country is about to get walloped, and we are sorry for that, although we have had so much drenching rain for so many weeks that the ground is still spongy and saturated even though it's been sunny for days.
• 1:24
  But that's the weather report.
• 1:26
  That's the weather report.
• 1:27
  Yes.
• 1:28
  This new segment here on DarkHorse, it's also the last of this new segment on the weather.
• 1:33
  For now anyway.
• 1:33
  Yeah.
• 1:34
  So here we are Wednesday, January 21st, one month into winter.
• 1:40
  So winter is here, not coming.
• 1:43
  Third of the way finished.
• 1:44
  A third of the way finished, that's right.
• 1:46
  And today we are gonna talk about, we're a year into the second Trump presidency, and so we're gonna talk about what we thought was gonna happen and what's happening and what we like and what we don't, and also what the Atlantic predicted would happen if Trump won and where they got it right and wrong.
• 2:05
  That used to be one of my favorite oceans, but now I just, I have trouble with them.
• 2:10
  It seems as an ocean, it seems to have shrunk, I don't know.
• 2:13
  Yes.
• 2:13
  Yeah.
• 2:14
  Its perspective certainly has.
• 2:17
  Yes.
• 2:18
  Okay, so we're not gonna do a Q&A today, but we got a watch party going on at Locals, and we are going to start, as we always do, by paying the rent with our three awesome sponsors who make products or offer services that are truly excellent.
• 2:33
  Go for it, you're first.
• 2:34
  Whoa, did not see that coming.
• 2:37
  Donning the equipment.
• 2:39
  Our first sponsor this week is brand new to us.
• 2:43
  It is Xlear, Xlear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health, and it's a product that we've been using for quite some time, made by a company with which we are well familiar.
• 2:52
  It's Xlear that's X-L-E-A-R pronounced clear.
• 2:57
  Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life, more so than traditional medical advances, for instance, when, no, for instance, comma, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down.
• 3:16
  Go figure.
• 3:17
  Yeah, go figure.
• 3:18
  It seems so obvious in retrospect.
• 3:20
  But yes.
• 3:21
  How many things it seems so obvious, will seem so obvious 50 years from now, we are doing and I think it's fine.
• 3:28
  I shudder to think.
• 3:29
  Yes.
• 3:30
  Breathing, polluted air, where was I?
• 3:33
  Sorry.
• 3:33
  Yes, the deaths went way down after the discovery of hand washing between cadavers and birthing.
• 3:39
  Breathing, polluted air, and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health.
• 3:44
  Clean up the air and water and people get healthier.
• 3:47
  Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose.
• 3:54
  It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person, but it's rare that you get sick through your hands, rather we get sick through our mouth and our nose.
• 4:05
  Thus, it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose.
• 4:11
  Enter Xlear.
• 4:13
  Xlear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a five carbon sugar alcohol.
• 4:18
  Our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars of RNA and DNA respectively.
• 4:27
  While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugars like, no, while most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugar like glucose and fructose.
• 4:37
  Six carbon sugars like, I'm not, yeah, you know, you can read in post, we'll correct, we'll put the pauses where they go and the intonation.
• 4:46
  No, we probably won't.
• 4:46
  You know what we need, we need auto to-- Livestream means there's no post.
• 4:50
  That's part of the wonder of livestream.
• 4:52
  Yes, it really is.
• 4:54
  Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues.
• 4:58
  In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including strep, SARS-CoV-2, RSV, don't adhere to our airways nearly as well, which helps our bodies natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away.
• 5:10
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• 5:13
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• 5:14
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• 5:17
  If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to my conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Xlear, on the inside rail in November of 2024, or my conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Xlear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses.
• 5:34
  That episode was in May of 2025.
• 5:36
  We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Xlear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses.
• 5:44
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• 5:49
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• 6:00
  Man, just think of the difference.
• 6:03
  If you do this and you even fend off one respiratory virus a year, even if it's a mild one, imagine what it would be worth to you to get rid of a cold that you would otherwise have come down with.
• 6:14
  Much better if it's flu or COVID or something like that.
• 6:17
  So anyway, it's a small investment for a big payoff.
• 6:21
  Oh, you're done.
• 6:21
  Yeah.
• 6:22
  Yeah, that was just a, that was a side note after at the end.
• 6:25
  I thought that was an intermediary note.
• 6:27
  That was an amusing aside.
• 6:29
  Oh, was it?
• 6:30
  No, but it was,(Laughing) wow, all right.
• 6:36
  It's better than laugh track, I'll give it that.
• 6:37
  Oh, absolutely.
• 6:38
  Yeah.
• 6:38
  I mean, I can't cry in command, but I think everyone can laugh to some degree on command.
• 6:43
  Yeah, not all that compellingly, but sure.
• 6:45
  Was I compelling?
• 6:46
  No.
• 6:47
  Good.
• 6:49
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• 6:54
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• 6:58
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• 6:58
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• 6:59
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• 7:01
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• 7:06
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• 8:07
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• 8:16
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• 8:30
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• 8:36
  That's the product that is certified to be glyphosate free.
• 8:39
  Presumably the quality control itself is also glyphosate free.
• 8:41
  One would help.
• 8:42
  As written, which was my sentence, I claim full responsibility.
• 8:47
  I have claimed that the quality control is glyphosate free.
• 8:49
  You also claim that the cows have co-op dairy farms, which is very advanced, economically speaking.
• 8:56
  Yes, ARMRA colostrum starts.
• 8:58
  Well, as the company starts.
• 9:00
  That's the company.
• 9:01
  I'm gonna say that.
• 9:02
  Read this once again.
• 9:03
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• 9:09
  There.
• 9:10
  Well, but the there is the ARMRA colostrum.
• 9:12
  I'm gonna defend this.
• 9:13
  I don't think it's brilliant, but I think it's defensible.
• 9:16
  I mean, I think they'll infer the correct meaning, but I have, of course.
• 9:18
  The cows?
• 9:20
  Exactly.
• 9:21
  Okay.
• 9:21
  Good.
• 9:21
  I mean, what we definitely do not want is cows wandering around with misinformation in their minds.
• 9:27
  Wow, that would be frightening.
• 9:30
  I'm not sure we could tell the difference.
• 9:32
  But still, right?
• 9:33
  I don't think the vacant look in their eyes would change.
• 9:35
  Yeah.
• 9:37
  But we'd know.
• 9:38
  We would know.
• 9:39
  Actually, we wouldn't know.
• 9:42
  The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate-free.
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• 10:19
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• 11:05
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• 11:10
  It feels like the options we used to have before Obamacare messed everything up.
• 11:14
  After we left our salary jobs as college professors, collage professors.
• 11:19
  Oh no, that's probably a thing.
• 11:22
  Oh, we've met them.
• 11:24
  I mean, it probably-- Oh, you mean like actually the art of collage?
• 11:27
  I was thinking just sort of like that.
• 11:28
  I think it's generous to call it an art, but yes, something like that.
• 11:32
  After we left our salary jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace.
• 11:36
  It was awful.
• 11:37
  Our family of four had health insurance for emergencies only, and we were paying more than $15 a month, sometimes in Portland at over $2,000 a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that was unresponsive and unhelpful.
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• 13:17
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• 13:22
  All right.
• 13:24
  We got, mostly we're gonna be kind of riffing today.
• 13:30
  I was prompted to think, you know, a year into the Trump presidency about how he has surprised us in both directions and how he has lived up to expectations and not lived up to expectations, in part because back when this issue of the Atlantic came out and it's the January, February 2024 issue a year ago, fully a year before he took office the second time and, you know, more than half a year before it was known that he would win his election.
• 14:02
  This, the Atlantic put out an issue called if Trump wins and it's got several short essays by people.
• 14:10
  And I thought I would do a careful analysis of all of it.
• 14:13
  And I started looking through it and I just don't really think it's worth it.
• 14:16
  So I do wanna come back to this and, you know, point out a few things in it.
• 14:20
  But first I thought maybe, maybe we should start by just reviewing some of what we think is not going right.
• 14:29
  And then some of what we think is going right.
• 14:31
  And then go back to the Atlantic and see where we think they didn't get it right.
• 14:34
  And then I actually wanna finish, excuse me, by going back to the essay that I wrote for Natural Selections, my sub-stack at the very end of October of 2024, right before the election.
• 14:48
  Called something like why I'm voting for Trump.
• 14:50
  It's the first time I was doing so.
• 14:52
  And I felt that it warranted an explanation in the positive as opposed to what so many people were doing on both sides of the political spectrum.
• 15:01
  They were voting against what they saw as a major threat and instead of voting for someone.
• 15:07
  And so I made a number of cases for why I was voting for Trump.
• 15:11
  And I'd like to also review which of those things I think I got right and I got wrong at the end.
• 15:18
  Yes, that essay made quite a stir, as I recall it.
• 15:21
  People having somebody who's obviously known for careful, thoughtful, compassionate responses to things say out loud, I'm voting for Trump.
• 15:34
  And here's why, making the case for him was I think unignorable for people who encountered it in both directions.
• 15:41
  And those other people who were voting for Trump were super grateful to hear the case made in rigorous terms.
• 15:50
  And of course other people were dismayed by it.
• 15:52
  But anyway, quite a good essay.
• 15:54
  So let's go there.
• 15:56
  Yeah, let's go there.
• 15:57
  But we're gonna go there at the end.
• 15:59
  Okay.
• 16:01
  So, I mean, there's obvious stuff right now that's going on that's hard to look past, right?
• 16:09
  Just, I'm gonna try to stop doing that.
• 16:14
  Let me just say it in some reform and then let you pick up on anything and everything you wanna pick up on.
• 16:20
  The sort of the three big things that I find reason to be concerned about, gosh, excuse me, are the aggressive interventionist policy, foreign wars, sort of the generally bombastic and might makes right attitude.
• 16:38
  You know, everything from Greenland to Venezuela to Iran, maybe, you know, what's going on with Israel, all of that.
• 16:46
  And that includes, you know, right from the beginning renaming things like the Gulf of Mexico, which was ridiculous and it's not his right to do so, to the Department of Defense, which I suppose is his right to do so, but come on, come on, man, it's just not a good look, right?
• 17:00
  And just, you know, the Department of Defense makes sense as something that we should have.
• 17:06
  The Department of War makes us look like what you appear to be making us be becoming.
• 17:11
  So, second large point, unless you wanna interject with each of these.
• 17:17
  Well, actually I do.
• 17:20
  As I said at the time, the Gulf of America is an insane thing to have done.
• 17:27
  It was a deliberate-- And it's not-- It's a deliberate finger in the eye.
• 17:30
  But what I said at the time was if he had made this obviously symbolic gesture and called it the Gulf of the Americas, I think it would have actually started a proper discussion of something.
• 17:43
  Now, mind you, I don't need stuff renamed.
• 17:45
  Symbolic level is not what this is about.
• 17:48
  But Gulf of the Americas actually I think would have been a hint towards some of what we are seeing him do in this hemisphere.
• 17:57
  Now, why he's doing it will get there, I hope.
• 18:00
  But I don't mind the idea that it would be the Gulf of the Americas.
• 18:05
  In fact, it is the Gulf of the Americas and the Americas are a real thing.
• 18:08
  And because the Americas are a real thing, that would have been A, not excluding anybody.
• 18:13
  It's not like stealing a Gulf from Mexico, which is obviously not exactly what happened.
• 18:18
  But the idea that hey, the Americas are a thing.
• 18:22
  This giant base, it's inside of the Americas and we need to go back to thinking about the Americas as a thing, maybe not as we once did because our history in Latin America is truly brutal and awful.
• 18:36
  Are the United States history?
• 18:38
  Right, nonetheless, there are regional considerations which are important.
• 18:43
  So anyway, if he had said Gulf of the Americas, I would have thought, hmm, I didn't think of that, but I'm okay with it.
• 18:51
  Gulf of America does seem petty.
• 18:52
  Yeah, it seems petty and it also returns us.
• 18:56
  And I think we have said this a year ago when he first made this announcement.
• 19:02
  It's reminiscent of the very small minded nature of Americans who've never gone anywhere.
• 19:07
  And obviously Trump's been all over the place.
• 19:09
  He's a worldly man.
• 19:11
  But the fact that we call ourselves Americans when we are one country in two continents, each of which are Americas, is revealed when as Americans, and we have no other word for what our national identity is in English, when we travel into Latin America, we are told, no, what do you mean you're calling yourself Americanos?
• 19:35
  We all are Americanos, be we Ecuadorian or Panamanian or Salvadoran or Chilean, whatever.
• 19:43
  And interesting that their word for us still doesn't get to perfect specificity, but we are asked to call ourselves Norte Americanos, North Americans, which is at least a bit more precise.
• 19:55
  And so this conflation of like, we are America.
• 19:59
  The United States is America as opposed to granted the most powerful country within the Americas, but we are one living in a global world, living in the Western Hemisphere.
• 20:11
  We are in the Northern Hemisphere as well, but I think your point about what sorts of moves he's making with regard to the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, Masa Manos, is an interesting one and important one.
• 20:26
  And it suggests that we should be constantly recognizing that we are not the only ones out here.
• 20:35
  On the Department of War, I would say I'm actually neutral.
• 20:39
  I don't think, again, I don't think renaming is where we need to be focused in it, obviously, you know, drew a lot of fire to do that.
• 20:47
  On the other hand, I do think one of the subtle messages of the Trump administration is we're going to be more honest about what we are doing.
• 20:57
  Now, I don't think we're being perfectly honest across the board, but to the extent, what is the Department of Defense?
• 21:03
  Is it always defensive?
• 21:04
  No.
• 21:05
  A lot of the time it isn't.
• 21:06
  And so at some level, the idea, what this thing does is war, whether we're defending ourselves or aggressing, maybe sometimes in a justified way, other times not.
• 21:18
  But I did have a sort of sense of like, that's a weird flex, but I'm okay with that one.
• 21:28
  I'm not wild about it, but I'm okay with it.
• 21:30
  I don't like it, I think for a sort of a more meta reason, which is that it seems to be borrowing directly, and this maybe is sort of a James Lindsay style point, but it seems to be borrowing directly from the work playbook.
• 21:44
  You know, it's like they got so focused on, I got so focused on trying to get us to change what we thought by changing the words that we were allowed to use.
• 21:55
  Yeah.
• 21:56
  And by spending time, yeah, I mean, the most obvious go-to example for us, because it's personal and most people don't know it, is, you know, summer of 2020, schools have been shut down in March, schools in the West were going to be cut down.
• 22:12
  Gosh, I'm really sorry.
• 22:15
  Schools were gonna be shut down for the 2020-2021 school year, although we didn't know that for sure that it was gonna be the entire school year yet.
• 22:23
  And the public high school in Portland that Toby was about to start at, having graduated from middle school during COVID lockdowns, knew that part of what it needed to do was a big public school with a lot of low-income students, that if they were gonna be doing entirely remote schooling for a while, they were gonna need to get computers into the hands of the vast number of students who didn't have them.
• 22:47
  Orson didn't have that problem.
• 22:48
  He had a laptop of his own.
• 22:50
  We weren't suffering in this regard, but a lot of students were gonna be in trouble, and the school system already knew that, and instead of focusing on trying to get students, students' laptops that they would need when school started, the entire summer was spent working on how to rename the school.
• 23:11
  It had been-- Woodrow Wilson.
• 23:14
  It had been Woodrow Wilson High for many, many decades, and it was triumphantly renamed the Ida B.
• 23:21
  Wells Barnett High School.
• 23:23
  And that was an insane use of resources and time.
• 23:28
  It was time that needed to be spent actually getting resources into the hands of underprivileged and underserved students, which is exactly what the local left claims to be caring about, and they clearly and patently don't.
• 23:40
  And it drew the anger and ire of people who had long known this as, I knew a woman whose kids were going there who had gone there herself when she was, she was our age when she was in high school in the 80s, she's like,"Why are they doing this?
• 23:55
  What is the point?" And she was someone who continued to vote blue.
• 23:59
  So the idea of renaming things that are absolutely fine is a way to waste time and anger people, and I don't think it generally doesn't serve much good.
• 24:11
  Okay, point taken.
• 24:13
  I think you're right about the analogy, but again, any move in the direction of more honesty is probably a good thing.
• 24:23
  Okay, in the broad category of things going on in this presidency that seem questionable at best, item two is that Doge turned out to have been done very badly.
• 24:39
  The idea of government accountability and government efficiency is obviously fantastic, and we need it.
• 24:48
  And I think it could have been done well.
• 24:50
  There would have been a lot of collateral damage no matter what, and we talked about that at the time as we were holding out hope, and actually we haven't talked about this, I don't know where you land, but my feeling is it could have been well done, it was not, it was a total shit show really, took out lots of good people.
• 25:08
  And it seemed to be in service to political aims when the stated purpose was exactly to get the politics out of these systems and to clean house.
• 25:20
  And for instance, and we discussed this fairly extensively at the time, it's not just fine and legitimate, but actually a positive to review the ideologically informed grants, for instance, that the Fed is funding at the NIH, at the NSF, at the DOD, the DOW now is at the Department of War, I guess.
• 25:39
  So, and try to make them more scientifically, more scientific and less political.
• 25:45
  That is to say, well, individual grants are given with regard to particular political beliefs made, you know, that the individuals who are deciding on grant programs may have.
• 26:00
  The programs that exist are bigger political decisions, and many of them had become either calcified to serve old aims that no longer made sense, or worse yet, had grown in these just like these crazy ways such that, for instance, and again, I talked about this at the time, whole degree programs at elite institutions and presumably elsewhere too, but I chased this down at some of the elite institutions.
• 26:31
  Entire degree programs like the MD PhD program at Harvard are effectively entirely funded by the federal government.
• 26:37
  And yet the degrees that people get don't say NIH, degree awarded by the NIH, they say degree awarded by Harvard.
• 26:46
  And that's dishonest and it's despicable, honestly.
• 26:52
  So, and I didn't know that.
• 26:55
  Like I thought I knew a lot about what was going on with regard to grants and granting agencies and the programs and how politicized they were, and the fact that entire degree programs had become effectively funded by the federal government is absurd and the curtain was pulled back.
• 27:17
  We got to see some of that.
• 27:19
  But instead, like I don't think that there's actually been the follow through and the accountability of the universities to actually take responsibility for their own degree programs and not have taxpayers pay not only for science, scientific research, which is a common good, and I will stand for, but to actually stop funding degree programs, I don't think there's been follow through.
• 27:47
  Instead, what we see is things like Trump demanding that Columbia take a particular stance on Israel or else they lose their funding.
• 27:55
  That's explicitly political.
• 27:58
  I know it was framed in terms of free speech, but we didn't get what we were promised.
• 28:03
  We got something political instead and it was framed as the anti-political way to clean house and it was the opposite.
• 28:09
  So I definitely feel like I voted for Doge and then I got something else.
• 28:15
  And I think the most obvious indicator that this was not what it was billed as, is the fact that they failed to do the congressional work necessary to recover anything from that.
• 28:28
  So what that suggests is that this was propaganda.
• 28:33
  Of course, is it better for the government to be efficient?
• 28:35
  Obviously, how much do we spend on this thing?
• 28:38
  But if you're not gonna get the dividend, then it's not about government deficiency.
• 28:44
  It's about using the claim of efficiency to go after things you don't like, some of which I also don't like.
• 28:50
  But I didn't vote for that.
• 28:52
  What I voted for was, let's simplify this, shrink it down, keep the good stuff, get rid of the bad stuff and spend less on it.
• 29:01
  And it's like, okay, so I voted for the label on the box.
• 29:06
  I didn't vote for the contents of the box, even though some of the contents of the box were all right.
• 29:10
  That's right.
• 29:11
  And I guess I will say, and I believe I've said this here before, that I personally know people who had not just their research but their livelihoods extremely badly affected by the way that Doge was enacted, which is to say this.
• 29:30
  It's quite one thing to look at a grant program and say, you know what, that is either politically motivated and it's very framing, or the way that it is being manifested has become politically owned.
• 29:43
  And so we're gonna stop that.
• 29:45
  We're not gonna fund those sorts of grants anymore.
• 29:47
  We're gonna take that program off the books and maybe revisit it later, whatever.
• 29:51
  But I know that they're, and I'm making something up here, but maybe there's people who've been getting grants in this program for 20 years, and they've sort of begun to build some of their career on the expectation they will continue to get grants.
• 30:03
  Well, too bad, that was federal funding and the federal government is allowed to decide that those grants are not gonna be available with the next grant cycle.
• 30:14
  What Doge did was it actually took money mid-grant from people, money that had already been promised, money that had already been in the pipeline that people were relying on, both to do their research and to live, because one of the things about how academia and specifically academic science is funded is that you might imagine that if you're a professor at Harvard or the University of British Columbia or wherever, that Harvard or the University of British Columbia, UBC is a bad example because it's Canadian, but University of Ohio are being paid entirely by the university, they're entirely on salary.
• 30:54
  Not only is it the rare research professor that is entirely on salary, usually they actually solicit summer salary from their grants, but there are many, many researchers out there who are entirely on what's called soft money, which is to say they're entirely reliant for all of their income on grant money and they get nothing from the university that they may be affiliated with.
• 31:17
  And so it can look like they're affiliated with the university, therefore they're getting salary from them, but they may not be.
• 31:22
  None of this is any of your problem inherently, right, as a taxpayer, but if you are promised a grant that is supposed to be paying out a certain amount through a certain date and a new administration comes in and says, actually, all those promises are null and void and sorry, you don't get to pay your mortgage next month, that's not okay.
• 31:43
  So promises made should be promises kept and that's quite different from saying, we're not gonna fund that sort of thing going forward.
• 31:50
  Yeah.
• 31:53
  Okay, so Doge isn't what it seemed.
• 31:56
  That's the second big negative I see in the administration so far.
• 32:03
  And then this is a big one and can go lots of places.
• 32:06
  The third of three is the apparent reliance on tech bros, tech optimism, and the unnuanced embrace of algorithms and heuristics that will actually and obviously hurt people.
• 32:20
  So it feels like we have been forced to embrace a kind of transhumanism that's scaled up to an apocalyptic scale.
• 32:29
  It's juvenile, we're seeing constant conflation of complicated systems with complex systems and it emerges from that sector of the economy that seems super sophisticated and sciency to people who aren't thinking about it and so people trust it and they shouldn't.
• 32:46
  So here I wanna spend just a little bit of time and I'm gonna read a little bit from our friend Holly's piece on Pete Hegseth and then you can riff on this.
• 32:57
  So I'm not gonna get into the details much, but Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth has declared that he is taking a sledgehammer to the oldest DEI program in the federal government and that's the 8(a) program.
• 33:11
  And there's ample evidence to the contrary that the program under attack is, while flawed and gameable, not the biggest, the oldest DEI program in the federal government.
• 33:21
  So let's see, can you see my screen?
• 33:23
  No, you cannot.
• 33:24
  That's not all that surprising.
• 33:26
  How about now?
• 33:31
  All right, okay.
• 33:32
  So this is an open letter to Secretary Hegseth by on Holly Mathenard's substack.
• 33:41
  I have a PDF here and I'm just gonna scroll down to, it's a very good piece, I recommend it.
• 33:47
  We'll link to it of course, but here's just a section I want to read and then have you discuss.
• 33:57
  "When you examine Department of War soul sourcing, you will find that from fiscal year 2018 to fiscal year 2024, the Department of War obligated approximately$1.06 trillion through soul source awards to non-8(a) firms, compared with about$19.7 billion to 8(a) firms.
• 34:15
  That means that over 98% of soul source Department of War dollars flowed to non-8(a) contractors during this period." So I haven't even defined what 8(a) is yet, but just like take it at face value for the moment.
• 34:27
  Hegseth has said, "8(a) program is the oldest DEI program in the federal government.
• 34:34
  Here we have a, wait a minute, it's less than 2% of Department of War funding." Department of War soul source funding.
• 34:42
  Soul source funding, yes.
• 34:44
  Who got that 1.06 trillion in non-8(a) soul source taxpayer money?
• 34:49
  Holly writes, "Mostly the largest primes, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and a small handful of other incumbents that face far less scrutiny on their own soul source awards than 8(a) firms do. 8(a) soul source contracts require mandatory price negotiation, formal determinations of fair market value, and SBA acceptance of the requirement.
• 35:08
  By contrast, soul source awards to large primes typically proceed without SBA oversight or the same program specific line by line negotiation regime.
• 35:17
  Gutting 8(a) does not discipline the largest contractors.
• 35:20
  It removes one of the few areas where the department demands exceptional transparency and leverage.
• 35:25
  8(a) soul source awards are tightly constrained and have very real consequences for failure, which is why you will never have to ask President Trump to call an 8(a) company on the public carpet.
• 35:34
  Because the 8(a) program gives the customer the power to choose which contractor they want instead of being forced to take the contractor that wins the bid.
• 35:41
  It also makes firing 8(a) firms exceptionally easy.
• 35:44
  If an 8(a) screws up, they simply do not get federal work again.
• 35:50
  And you on Twitter had something to say about this as well.
• 35:54
  Yeah, I did.
• 35:55
  And what I will say is this issue is nothing if not complicated.
• 36:02
  And what I had the sense of watching Hegcess video, first of all, I would have people notice how slickly produced that video is.
• 36:12
  The transitions, the multiple camera angles.
• 36:14
  This wasn't a Department of War secretary who has become angry about 8(a) and went to the public directly.
• 36:24
  This is a well-produced piece.
• 36:27
  And it's clear from the piece that Hegcess has been spun up by something about the idea that this is a DEI program rampant fraud, and there is fraud in the 8(a) program.
• 36:40
  It's been established, but is there more fraud than in the rest of the Department of Defense, now War's portfolio?
• 36:49
  That's a different question.
• 36:52
  And Holly's point is it's likely to be less.
• 36:54
  It's likely to be less.
• 36:55
  Because it has more, so much more legitimate, regular rigorous oversight.
• 37:00
  Right, so much in Hegcess statement is actually upside down once you understand how the program works.
• 37:07
  Now, is there a arguably diversity orientation to the program?
• 37:13
  Yes, the largest group of grantees are Alaska Natives.
• 37:19
  We will get back to why that is, why Alaska Natives are eligible for this 8(a) program.
• 37:27
  But the Congress specifically rejected making this specifically about demographics and included an economic justification.
• 37:39
  So something like the third or fourth largest group of grantees are veterans, right?
• 37:48
  These are people who face economic disadvantage and are eligible for this program.
• 37:52
  So it is in error to portray this as a DEI program in the first place.
• 37:59
  And unlike much of what we've seen with regard to DEI hires in the workplace, where people apparently don't have skills and don't have the capacity to do the work for which they are hired, as Holly points out, the 8(a) program is actually constantly assesses the work done and those contracts that don't turn out to have been effective don't get reestablished, they don't get re-upped.
• 38:28
  Right, now, why is this so heavily in the direction of Alaska Native grantees?
• 38:38
  The reason is apparently because the federal government did not want to give Alaska Natives the sovereignty rights that it gave to Natives in the lower 48.
• 38:49
  Why?
• 38:50
  Because they did not want to fight battles over mineral rights later on.
• 38:54
  They recognized Alaska as full of minerals that they wanted access to.
• 38:58
  And so they gave this instead.
• 39:00
  So instead of reservations.
• 39:01
  Instead of reservations, exactly.
• 39:03
  So at some level, this is a concession to a group that gave up a tremendous amount and it does force them into competition in order to get these grants.
• 39:17
  What I suspect is going on here, and I really don't know, but what I suspect is going on is that other players, big players like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that stand to gain a great deal if 8A vanishes, have portrayed this as a DEI fraudulent, anti-meritocratic program in order to get those contracts.
• 39:45
  That this is galling to them that these smaller players, and there aren't very many small defense contractors outside of this program, this program that allows smaller firms to compete with these larger firms, that's galling to the larger firms, and obviously there's profit to be made if they can be done away with.
• 40:02
  So that's what I suspect is going on, but I think HEGSEF just doesn't really understand what this program is or how it works.
• 40:10
  I'm not saying there's no fraud, but I am saying you gotta compare what's going on in this program to outside this program.
• 40:16
  Is it competitive?
• 40:18
  Yes.
• 40:19
  Is it more fraudulent?
• 40:22
  Likely no.
• 40:23
  So those things belong in the discussion.
• 40:26
  Instead, people have been ramped up over a headline, and it's a mistake.
• 40:35
  That's it?
• 40:35
  That's it.
• 40:35
  All right.
• 40:40
  There's been a lot right too though, in this administration so far.
• 40:45
  And I think it's easy to forget that, especially because the right things are, they're caveats, right?
• 40:55
  It's not far enough, it's not fast enough, all of this.
• 40:59
  But the two big things, the two big absolutely clear positives that yes, could go further and should are basically what's going on at HHS, maha, and sex and gender.
• 41:17
  So with regard to maha, installing Kennedy at HHS and J.
• 41:21
  Bhattacharya and NIH, and several other people in the various relevant agencies, are excellent choices and have created, and we've seen positive movement.
• 41:32
  We've seen the childhood vaccine schedule come closer into line with that of Western Europe.
• 41:39
  We talked about this last time or the time before at some length, and it's, you know, to many of us, it's not far enough, it's not fast enough, but it's huge.
• 41:50
  And there was no indication of us going anything like that direction before now.
• 41:56
  We've got the food pyramid, it's been changed from a toxic recipe for ill health to something resembling good advice at any rate.
• 42:04
  And interestingly, with regard to the food pyramid, I'm already seeing things change on grocery store shelves.
• 42:13
  Like I'm actually shocked at the speed with which I am seeing change.
• 42:17
  So the particular example I'm thinking about is I'm seeing tallow, beef tallow to cook with sold in glass jars.
• 42:27
  Yes, it's on the shelves of our excellent food cop here on the island.
• 42:30
  So just, we live on an island with less than 10,000 people.
• 42:33
  And those numbers swell in the summer because it's a beautiful place to come visit and a lot of people do so.
• 42:38
  There's destination weddings and just people come and they kayak and they hike and they look at orcas and they buy knickknacks or I don't know what people do.
• 42:46
  But we have a stable population of less than 10,000 people and a couple of grocery stores and an excellent food co-op.
• 42:55
  And the fact that you can buy tallow at the food co-op isn't all that surprising.
• 42:58
  Although I don't think I would have seen tallow at a food co-op 20 years ago.
• 43:03
  But still, I'm not too surprised by that.
• 43:06
  At the larger market on the island, I was looking and they've got like a natural food section and it's not the main part of the market and all of this is true.
• 43:14
  But they've got not one but multiple brands of tallow to choose between and that is brand new.
• 43:21
  Like I know I didn't go explicitly looking for tallow two years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but I wasn't looking this time and there it was in among the other cooking fats.
• 43:31
  And that's extraordinary.
• 43:33
  So I feel like this is a cultural shift that we're living through that has been waiting to happen.
• 43:38
  Like we were just, we were poised on the edge of ready to stop eating crap.
• 43:43
  And even people who didn't know it were ready to embrace change for the good.
• 43:49
  So I had a clip go somewhat viral from my discussion with Michael Shermer a week or so ago.
• 43:58
  I got angry at Michael for failing to understand the degree to which the change in our orientation towards in this case, this clip, the COVID shots is not the result of the system working and coming to understand things better.
• 44:16
  It was the result of Renegades having forced the system to acknowledge something that was clear and that the system would never have acknowledged had it not been for this end run that we did through podcast land and X more or less.
• 44:32
  This food pyramid thing is a really interesting test case because many of us were already on board with the new food pyramid before it was announced.
• 44:42
  We had no idea.
• 44:43
  Well, we've been mocking the food pyramid as it stood for years in our course.
• 44:47
  And I presumably other people had been as well, but I know we explicitly brought it up a couple of times and like, look at this nonsense, you eat like this and you're of course, you're gonna be unhealthy.
• 44:56
  Right, but the point is the federal government is last to the party on this.
• 45:05
  Lots of people were aware that the food pyramid was a terrible guide to health and had re-engineered their own diets.
• 45:13
  Many other people were listening because many of us have gone around the system and contradicted their advice and explained why and pointed to the evidence and all of that.
• 45:23
  So I guess my point would be, one of the things the Trump administration has done is it has unlocked a understanding of the world that existed but was not allowed into official circles.
• 45:37
  So this is the rebels having burst into the institutions and Kennedy is of course portrayed as a madman and somebody who doesn't understand and somebody who has a vendetta against vaccines or something like this.
• 45:53
  It's not what's going on.
• 45:55
  And you can see this with the food pyramid.
• 45:56
  The reason that the tallow showed up in regular markets all of a sudden was that this was just waiting for the officials to finally get on board with the wisdom that had been circulating outside of the institutions for a decade or more.
• 46:12
  Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.
• 46:15
  And I did vote for that.
• 46:17
  I absolutely voted for that.
• 46:18
  I mean, the maha part, there are a lot of people within maha who are frustrated that things aren't going fast enough.
• 46:24
  It's not, it doesn't go far enough.
• 46:26
  It's not fast enough and I agree.
• 46:29
  But my goodness, like we're seeing changes with regard to maha that are, that we could not have begun to dream of under standard issue red or any of the current blue team presidential.
• 46:45
  Yeah, it took a rebel.
• 46:46
  I wanna say though, I voted for this style more than just maha, right?
• 46:53
  The approach to DEI, for example, there were many of us who understood on the outside that this is a hijacking of the system.
• 47:02
  It's anti-meritocratic.
• 47:03
  It jeopardizes every single thing that functions and it's gotta go.
• 47:06
  That was well understood by outsiders.
• 47:09
  And now, it's in the top office and it's making positive moves.
• 47:17
  On the maha side though, I think it is very important to say, and maybe this is just more generally a Trump.
• 47:25
  Trump alerted us with his book, The Art of the Deal, what his approach to everything was going to be.
• 47:34
  It is both his greatest strength and his Achilles heel because there are many things that can be renegotiated and you need somebody incredibly bold to pull it off.
• 47:48
  Somebody has to level a credible threat in order to negotiate for a position that we need to get to that you couldn't get to if you did the things politely.
• 47:57
  On the other hand, there are non-negotiables and I don't think Trump understands that.
• 48:02
  So what we got on the Epstein files was Trump changing his position from the one that we voted for and then getting angry at us in the public for not accepting it.
• 48:17
  And his point was, "Look at all the other cool stuff you're getting." And the answer is, "So what?" This is a giant question mark until you resolve it.
• 48:27
  How much influence is this having over the life that we are living?
• 48:30
  How much influence is this having over the federal government?
• 48:35
  Until we've nailed that down, this is not negotiable.
• 48:38
  It has to be dealt with and you can't give us other stuff in exchange.
• 48:42
  Yeah, no, there's a bigger issue that is being obscured by pretending that these are all just interchangeable commodity wins or losses.
• 48:51
  Right.
• 48:52
  And I think actually this is gonna sound like a non sequitur.
• 48:54
  It goes back to what we were just talking about but I think it actually plays into this.
• 48:58
  One of the biggest mainstream media lines of objection to the new food pyramid is about the full fat dairy recommendations.
• 49:05
  Yeah.
• 49:06
  Right?
• 49:07
  And even though it's become clear that the war on fat that was waged by Kellogg's presumably and other big processed food purveyors that encouraged Americans to be eating carbs, carbs, carbs to focus less on protein and to be really, really worried about fat was misguided and a problem.
• 49:34
  And yet obviously an extremely high fat diet is going to contribute to you getting fat.
• 49:40
  Like that is true even though in general fat doesn't make you fat.
• 49:43
  It's all the crap and all the carbs in combination with a little bit of fuel in the form of fat that will.
• 49:50
  Go on, okay.
• 49:52
  It's not clear to me that a high percentage of fat in the diet makes you fat.
• 49:57
  A high amount, a high total amount.
• 50:00
  Yes, I did not mean to say, I didn't say percentage.
• 50:03
  I did not mean to imply percentage.
• 50:07
  That high protein, moderate fat, low carb diet is your best bet for health.
• 50:15
  But the fat has to be real fat and all of the food should be real food that's low processed.
• 50:22
  And this is not the place for whole dietary analysis but with regard to these frankly moronic dieticians who are convinced that what you really need is low fat dairy.
• 50:35
  One point that I have not seen made in this particular place of the argument is the objection that many of us have to low fat dairy is yes, in part you are blaming fat for the problems caused by other foodstuffs.
• 50:55
  But also the only way to get low fat dairy is to mess with your dairy.
• 51:00
  Is to use modern technical interventions to pull things out of your dairy.
• 51:06
  And I want my food as whole and as close to source as possible.
• 51:10
  This is part of why I want to be able to buy raw dairy.
• 51:15
  There is no low fat dairy that hasn't been messed with to some degree.
• 51:18
  An exception being that you can skim, you can natively skim cream off the top of milk, not pasteurize it, not homogenize it, end up with cream over here and lower fat milk over here.
• 51:29
  But that's not any of the dairy that people are arguing about.
• 51:32
  So the low fat dairy proponents are effectively inherently arguing for the technologizing of our food which is part of what those of us in Maha are saying, actually no thank you.
• 51:46
  Also the government doesn't get to tell me that I don't get to eat real food.
• 51:50
  Before we leave Maha Land, I just wanted to say that I am stunned by how much progress has been made and I am dismayed that negotiation seems to be required of Maha also.
• 52:07
  And I don't know how Kennedy does it because I know he understands that every time he negotiates something away, it means people are going to be maimed because of it.
• 52:27
  If we say, well, nobody wants to take away your COVID shots, we just want you to have a choice, that means some doctor and parent are gonna inject some kid with a COVID shot that he doesn't need that's going to result in a radical shortening of his life.
• 52:42
  So every one of those is not only a tragedy, but it's a crime.
• 52:48
  And so to have to negotiate in this milieu where everything that you have to give up in order to get these obvious gains is costly in terms of human life and wellbeing, that's a tragic position to have to be in.
• 53:04
  Many of us wouldn't be able to stomach it.
• 53:07
  And I know it must be very painful to Kennedy to have to do it.
• 53:14
  But thank goodness he's doing it because of the massive savings in life and reduced maiming of innocent people that will happen as a result of the radical shifts we have seen.
• 53:26
  So I think it's not even a Faustian bargain.
• 53:31
  This is some extreme case that one struggles to find examples that are not part of the major tragedies of history, where I don't know that the representation at the end of the movie Schindler is accurate, but where he's lamenting the fact that every item, every fancy cufflink he had could have been liquidated and used to rescue a few more people.
• 53:59
  And so it's kind of like that, right?
• 54:01
  We're in this extreme situation and the idea that negotiation is possible over these things is great in one way because of all of the hardship that will be avoided.
• 54:12
  But wow, is negotiation not where we should be when it comes to human health and wellbeing.
• 54:18
  It's just, it's shocking.
• 54:20
  Yes, indeed.
• 54:24
  The other obvious big positive, and I'll return to this a couple of times as we talk about the Atlantic issue on what will happen if Trump wins written two years ago, published two years ago, and also my piece as to why I was voting for Trump in this last election, is he put out these executive orders early on.
• 54:44
  We talked about them like in day one, two, three of his presidency that embraced the reality of male and female, finally.
• 54:51
  Just, you know, it should have been so simple, so obvious.
• 54:54
  I can't believe we got here to this level of confusion where still, and I know as we talked about on the live stream last week, you've still got people, elected officials, refusing to say what a man or a woman is and claiming that you can switch sex if you're a human, which you cannot, and frankly, everyone knows that.
• 55:14
  Everyone knows that.
• 55:15
  So these executive orders state what male and female are, reveal the unchanging nature of men and women, and downstream of that, we see men still trying to force their way into men, still trying to force their way into women's sports, into women's locker rooms, into women's domestic crisis centers, into women's prisons, all of this, but that particular scam is beginning to fail because there was so much now governmental support for reality on this topic that the scammers, that very few of them are actually confused about what they are.
• 55:55
  Most of them are scammers trying to get access to something they should not have access to, and most people are now waking up to the reality that that's them getting away with shit they shouldn't get away with.
• 56:06
  And we shouldn't have needed anyone to thank for that, but under Biden, and before that, even under Obama, we had the beginnings of support for this, and under Biden, we had a full-fledged embrace of the nonsense that is reality denying, and certainly that would have continued under Trump's competitor, Harris.
• 56:31
  Yes, absolutely, and this just simply required somebody willing to endure the slanders that would be hurled back, and you need a Trump-like person to do it, right?
• 56:43
  You just need somebody who isn't going to listen to that stuff.
• 56:47
  Yeah, right.
• 56:48
  And then, I guess, a third item on my sort of what's going right is obviously fraught, and it'll come up again here when we go through a few of the things in the Atlantic, but we have borders for a reason, right?
• 57:01
  We need borders that are actually defended, and obviously, conflicts between ICE and protesters is getting a lot of media play right now, and some of it's very bad, and we're gonna come back to a story that Rogan mentions that you've responded to on Twitter, but the fact is, there are legal ways to come into the country, and legal immigrants don't want illegal immigrants here any more than citizens do.
• 57:26
  So this is not an anti-immigration stance.
• 57:30
  This is a, if you are actually arguing for no laws or borders whatsoever, own it, own the fact that you are arguing for the end of the nation state and pro-anarchy, or grant that borders exist for a reason, and you are going to support the laws to allow people to legally immigrate, and not support people who do so illegally.
• 57:52
  Yes, are we gonna do that Rogan piece, because it will lead to the things I wanna say on that topic.
• 57:59
  Let's, yeah, we can do that.
• 58:03
  Let me just find, I wasn't gonna do that right, oh yeah.
• 58:06
  So, okay, let's just, let me segue first into, so this January, February, 2024 Atlantic issue of "Trump Wins," there's a whole bunch of pieces in it, and I'm not gonna really read from any of them except for one.
• 58:19
  On page 24, we have, I know the order that numbers go in, the "Spectre of Family Separation" by Caitlin Dickerson.
• 58:29
  And this is, it comes with a terrifying picture of a child, a Honduran asylum.
• 58:36
  I didn't send this to Jen, so you guys can't see it that well.
• 58:39
  But a Honduran asylum seeker child being terrified perhaps by border police.
• 58:48
  And the piece is terror inducing, right?
• 58:53
  And that is a real risk.
• 58:59
  Before we show the Rogan video and your response to it though, I will say that the left seems to frankly enjoy, the left in which I still sometimes feel to be a member.
• 59:15
  Seems to enjoy telling stories of family separated at the border by Trump.
• 59:19
  But Democratic presidents have presided under separations quite a lot as well, and they never tell those stories.
• 59:27
  So there's a political slant to which stories they do and do not want to tell, even when the stories sound identical.
• 59:34
  So there's a dishonesty in the reporting.
• 59:36
  That said, we're talking about right now, and there is chaos happening right now and injustice.
• 59:41
  Yes.
• 59:42
  So if you would show Jen the Rogan talking about one such story.
• 59:48
  Then they start showing up at Home Depot.
• 59:49
  Instead of like looking for gang bangers, looking for criminals and cartel members, they go to whatever's easiest pickings so they can get numbers up.
• 1:00:00
  Do you know Ed Calderon?
• 1:00:02
  Do you know who he is?
• 1:00:06
  He's worked, he was a Mexican military guy who now is an American citizen, but he reports extensively on the cartels and just was telling me some horror stories about ICE raids.
• 1:00:20
  And one of them was, they took this guy who had been brought over here when he was a baby, but didn't have American citizenship.
• 1:00:27
  His family came over here illegally, lived here for 20 years, can't speak Spanish.
• 1:00:34
  They deport him, send him to Tijuana.
• 1:00:38
  Can't speak Spanish.
• 1:00:39
  Can't speak Spanish, does not speak Spanish.
• 1:00:41
  He is essentially an American citizen.
• 1:00:43
  He just never lived anywhere else.
• 1:00:46
  He just doesn't have the paperwork.
• 1:00:48
  He's not a criminal.
• 1:00:49
  They sent him over to Tijuana and now he has to live in Mexico.
• 1:00:54
  He doesn't know what the fuck to do.
• 1:00:56
  He's on the streets, has no idea.
• 1:00:58
  He doesn't have any money.
• 1:01:03
  So I responded to this because-- Yeah, you wanna show my tweet?
• 1:01:11
  I said, "I have been vocal about my concerns "with respect to illegal immigration "and my sympathy has rightly or wrongly "been limited for people who broke the law to enter.
• 1:01:20
  "We can't give illegal immigrants an advantage "over those who chose to abide by the law.
• 1:01:24
  "Needless to say, I have zero tolerance"for any illegal alien who has broken"important laws within the country.
• 1:01:31
  "But a person who was brought here as a minor, "especially a baby, is a different matter entirely.
• 1:01:37
  "Such people didn't break the law "and deporting such a person once they have grown "within our country and our culture is inhumane.
• 1:01:44
  "I did not vote for that.
• 1:01:46
  "It should obviously stop along with the harassment "of citizens who don't happen to be carrying their papers.
• 1:01:51
  "This is out of control." So the straw man response, I don't know if it's straw man, the response from the other side will be, but birthright citizenship creates a gameable set of conditions wherein rich Russian women come over here just to give birth and their kids get citizenship.
• 1:02:12
  Right, I am aware of that and in fact, the response to my tweet shocked me because basically people who voted for Trump as I did are largely of a mindset that this has gone too far and we have to have no compassion whatsoever.
• 1:02:30
  And my point is, look, I'm actually with you farther than you think.
• 1:02:35
  My feeling is there are lots of productive illegal aliens in the country and my sympathy for them is truly limited because we have lots of people who'd like to come into the country and are trying to do it legally.
• 1:02:47
  And to have a system where we look at individual stories and try to make exceptions, my feeling is no.
• 1:02:57
  We should figure out how much immigration is good for the country, that should be our litmus test.
• 1:03:02
  Is it good for the country?
• 1:03:04
  We should set that number and we should have a process that works well and then we should have zero tolerance for anybody who does otherwise.
• 1:03:14
  Do I think children who are born here ought to stay if their parents are being deported?
• 1:03:20
  No, I actually think irrespective of what the law currently says and the difficulty of getting the law to be what it is, the parents should be deported if they broke the law and the family should be kept together and they should be deported in a humane way, but they should go.
• 1:03:34
  This is a different case.
• 1:03:36
  This is a special case in which somebody did not break the law, somebody brought over as a baby, did not have a choice in this, their parents broke the law, they apparently are not law breaking and are therefore presumably productive in the country and there can't be that many cases of this.
• 1:03:54
  So my point is if you don't see that this is a different situation, then you're not thinking very hard.
• 1:04:00
  This is a person that is inhumane to send somebody to a country where they don't speak the language and have them fend for themselves.
• 1:04:10
  That's not a rational policy and we're better than that.
• 1:04:13
  So anyway, my feeling is in the truly rare exceptions where somebody didn't break the law but is here illegally, that does not fall within the policy.
• 1:04:23
  Further-- So I agree with that, but isn't that gonna be the case for all children who were brought over, who didn't become criminals?
• 1:04:30
  None of the children who were brought over broke the law by being brought over.
• 1:04:34
  Yes, but first of all, if you were brought over at 15, that's a very different situation because you have your home culture.
• 1:04:44
  If you were brought over at two, my feeling is if you haven't been breaking the law while you're here and you're brought over at two, that's the answer and it's not that big a population that we have to worry about it.
• 1:04:55
  The argument has to do with what humans are, right?
• 1:04:58
  That we are the products of our environment and if you're culturally American, sending you back to Mexico because you were ethnically Mexican is cruel and inhumane.
• 1:05:08
  Yeah, it's not really back is the point.
• 1:05:11
  It's back in one regard and not in the one that matters primarily, so it's inhumane.
• 1:05:16
  Let me just say, I have one question about the story as Joe reports it, which is that people coming over from somewhere in Latin America and bringing their baby with them were already English speakers because how else does this young man not speak any Spanish?
• 1:05:36
  Well, I wondered about that too.
• 1:05:38
  I don't know.
• 1:05:39
  We don't know if the story is right, but given the facts of the story, I mean, it doesn't really even matter from the point of view of my interaction with the people who disagreed with me because it all proceeds from the assumption that the story is basically right and there are people who say it doesn't matter and then there's me saying, yeah, it does matter and we're better than that.
• 1:05:57
  So anyway, I would ask everybody, first of all, if you're yelling at me about immigration, like really?
• 1:06:05
  Didn't I invest a bunch to make it clear that there was a huge freaking immigration problem coming up through Central America and not entirely Latin Americans either, we had people from the Middle East, we had a huge number of people from China and I do wonder-- Where did that story go?
• 1:06:20
  I mean, you and Zach went down there along with several other people and did amazing reporting on the Chinese camps.
• 1:06:33
  All these people come into the US illegally from China and I haven't ever seen that in the mainstream media.
• 1:06:39
  Yeah, I don't see it in this wave of deportations and I just have to wonder, it seems to me that that would, I'm very much of a mindset that we have to prioritize people who are rampantly breaking our laws after illegally immigrating, but in light of where China sits with respect to us and the apparent bias in the direction of military-aged males, I think we have to be very concerned about what it was that Zach and I witnessed and it has to be dealt with and the idea that Trump is not dealing with it doesn't make any sense to me.
• 1:07:17
  It would be a political win.
• 1:07:19
  It would be the obviously right thing from the point of view of the security of the country.
• 1:07:24
  It would be symbolic.
• 1:07:26
  Yeah, one of the things that you guys reported at the time was that in the Latin American camps, you were seeing families and not that, the faces of deportation of criminal people here illegally are dudes from Latin American gangs all tied it up and looking like badasses, but families are families and in the camp that was filled with Chinese people, you weren't seeing families.
• 1:07:50
  You were seeing young men of military age and young men of military age don't come on mass and create honest lives for themselves typically, whereas families do.
• 1:08:04
  And this is not an argument for illegal immigration.
• 1:08:07
  It is an observation about the distinct behavioral futures of the demographics of families versus a bunch of single men of military age.
• 1:08:16
  Yeah, I mean, there just obviously ought to be priorities and yes, we should deport people who came illegally across the border, even if they're families and the adults are working productively.
• 1:08:29
  However, we ought to be prioritizing people who are a military threat to the country and I'm not saying every Chinese person who came across the border is, but that certainly was a potential element.
• 1:08:41
  And we left the border open.
• 1:08:43
  Do we really think our enemies abroad didn't exploit that?
• 1:08:46
  We should be looking for the people who are most likely to be in that hostile group and I anecdotally will just say, we experienced nothing but hostility in the Chinese camp in Darien.
• 1:09:00
  It was decidedly hostile, which I can't say.
• 1:09:04
  China is a different culture, but if I were picking up my life and I were moving from China to the US, I would be very curious about Americans.
• 1:09:16
  I wouldn't be hostile to them.
• 1:09:18
  So that was exactly two years ago.
• 1:09:20
  I believe that was January of 2024.
• 1:09:22
  That's not that long ago.
• 1:09:24
  Yeah, so anyway, there's something off about the fact that that does not show up prominently and I can't figure out why Trump wouldn't do it because even if it were purely symbolic, it would be a win for him.
• 1:09:35
  Absolutely.
• 1:09:35
  Okay, so the Atlantic sort of nominally got that one right.
• 1:09:41
  The concern about the specter of family separation, maybe not framed that way, but is there chaos and brutality happening?
• 1:09:48
  There is.
• 1:09:49
  On page 20, we have America will abandon NATO, a prediction?
• 1:09:56
  No, that hasn't happened, but to be fair, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024, which was enacted at the very end of 2023, presumably after this issue of the Atlantic went to press, makes it very, very difficult to do so.
• 1:10:10
  So it's not that Trump didn't necessarily want to and hasn't spoken about separated from NATO a lot, but it became very, very difficult.
• 1:10:18
  So wrong, but with a big caveat.
• 1:10:23
  On page 29, we have of this two year old, two year old, if Trump wins issue of the Atlantic, women will be targets.
• 1:10:37
  And it's just, it's the same stuff, right?
• 1:10:41
  Like he's gross and he says gross things about women and he encourages grossness in influencers and gives credence to the manosphere and helps create a culture of grossness in young men.
• 1:10:55
  All of which is kind of true.
• 1:10:57
  But as I said in that, why I'm voting for Trump piece, which we'll come back to shortly, he is absolutely net positive for women, 100%.
• 1:11:06
  Because saying mean things and gross things about women is bad, okay, cool.
• 1:11:13
  But if you think that's more bad than protecting the safety and dignity of women and girls across the board is good, then I don't even know what universe you're living in.
• 1:11:23
  Like you have just completely failed to understand the risks that women and girls actually face.
• 1:11:29
  And if having mean things said to you or about you is the highest bar that you can imagine for bad things that can happen, you've been living in a really sheltered world and you should get out more.
• 1:11:42
  Yeah.
• 1:11:43
  Okay, so that's wrong.
• 1:11:46
  We have on the next page, I'm skipping a bunch of them, but we have climate denial will flourish.
• 1:11:53
  Well, it would be really, really fantastic if we could take politics out of the science and actually, actually fund and encourage scientists to do research that might come up with different answers and not be forced to then slide those answers under the carpet and pretend they never did the research because is our climate changing?
• 1:12:13
  Yeah, it is.
• 1:12:14
  Is it anthropogenic?
• 1:12:15
  Partially, sure, probably.
• 1:12:17
  To what degree are the changes that we're seeing anthropogenic?
• 1:12:20
  We don't know because we haven't been allowed, people who do this kind of science haven't been allowed to do the work that would actually find those questions out.
• 1:12:29
  Most of the work is model-based, which means you feed in your assumptions and you get your assumptions out the other end and you claim that's results.
• 1:12:35
  And what we do know for sure is that there's a lot going on on our planet that is changing our climate that has nothing to do with us.
• 1:12:43
  And we're not allowed to talk about that either.
• 1:12:44
  So climate denial will flourish.
• 1:12:46
  How about you people on the left start actually thinking scientifically and learn what it might mean to assess what the climate changing means and how it is changing and why?
• 1:12:57
  Yeah, 100% agree.
• 1:12:59
  There is climate change, but we have bigger dangers.
• 1:13:03
  And what we don't have is science capable of telling us how significant anthropogenic climate change is.
• 1:13:10
  There's lots.
• 1:13:10
  It's not that we don't have the capacity as a species, it's that we're not being allowed to do it.
• 1:13:15
  No, and we've got science that's only allowed to reach one conclusion.
• 1:13:21
  So that's science.
• 1:13:22
  That's not science.
• 1:13:24
  On the next page we have, and I'll just put this up, is journalism ready?
• 1:13:31
  Not if you're at the Atlantic.
• 1:13:33
  Nope, because you stopped doing journalism guys.
• 1:13:36
  This is on you.
• 1:13:40
  Start journalisming again.
• 1:13:42
  Consider that, consider that.
• 1:13:44
  And then watch your audience come back.
• 1:13:47
  That'll be amazing for you.
• 1:13:48
  You'll actually grow your subscribership again if you actually start doing journalism.
• 1:13:53
  Is journalism ready?
• 1:13:54
  No, because you stopped doing it.
• 1:13:56
  Journalism is dead, but that's not on us who are questioning what you're saying.
• 1:14:00
  It's because you're not doing journalism.
• 1:14:02
  Majata, make journalism a thing again.
• 1:14:06
  A thing again.
• 1:14:08
  Yes, good.
• 1:14:11
  Next page, man, they really got going.
• 1:14:14
  When science becomes a slogan.
• 1:14:17
  Can you imagine the people at the Atlantic who brought us the most biased and crappy so-called science reporting during COVID of any of the major players?
• 1:14:28
  Even the New York Times could not hold a candle to the Atlantic with regard to the really ass backwards reporting on COVID is when science becomes a slogan.
• 1:14:38
  Yeah, you did that.
• 1:14:40
  That was you.
• 1:14:41
  And so do you have a problem on the right where a lot of people, I don't know, my right, on the right where a lot of people are saying, screw it, no more science for me.
• 1:14:53
  I'm out because science keeps lying to me.
• 1:14:55
  Yeah, that's a problem.
• 1:14:56
  You know why?
• 1:14:57
  Because you have people on the left going, I follow the science.
• 1:15:00
  In this house, we believe in science and you don't.
• 1:15:03
  You believe in authorities in lab coats and nice grants and fancy degrees telling you what to do because you like to follow instructions.
• 1:15:12
  That's not science.
• 1:15:13
  It never has been.
• 1:15:14
  So you've got the abuse of science on the left and the rejection of bad science on the right.
• 1:15:20
  And there are still a bunch of us out here going like, actually guys, we're gonna need the science.
• 1:15:23
  We're gonna need to be able to do science.
• 1:15:25
  All of us should be able to think scientifically and we can, but not when you have this stupid insane war between reject all science because it sounds like that and accept all science, except I don't know what science is and I'm accepting something that isn't science after all.
• 1:15:39
  So like when science becomes a slogan, how dare you?
• 1:15:43
  Not a bunch of income poops.
• 1:15:44
  Yeah, totally.
• 1:15:45
  Bunch of income poops.
• 1:15:47
  Okay, I'm gonna skip a few because it's just too many.
• 1:15:53
  No, wait, I skipped too far.
• 1:15:54
  Page 43, a plan to outlaw abortion everywhere.
• 1:15:59
  No, that was never his plan.
• 1:16:02
  Are there some people in the United States who would like to outlaw abortion everywhere?
• 1:16:06
  Yeah, of course there are, there always will be.
• 1:16:09
  That was never Trump's interest.
• 1:16:11
  I don't know that he actually cared at all about Roe v.
• 1:16:14
  Wade.
• 1:16:14
  I don't know that he cared about that issue at all.
• 1:16:16
  Was he pandering to some degree to his constituents, but also listening to many constitutional law experts who said that's bad law, that's not gonna stay on the books forever, no matter what, and you're gonna need to send it back to the States.
• 1:16:28
  I don't know what his justification was in his first term for putting the people on the court that he did and knowing that that would end up overturning Roe, but it wasn't that he was gunning for abortion.
• 1:16:39
  He really, I believe, was interested in sending it back to the States, and does that mean that in some States it's now very, very difficult, if not impossible, for women to get an abortion, and it wasn't nearly as difficult, if not impossible, before?
• 1:16:51
  Yes, but good people who know the law say that Roe was bad law, and that is actually distinct from the question of whether or not you feel that it should be your right to have an abortion, and when.
• 1:17:05
  And so, again, we have some people on the right having a very extreme position, and some extremely vocal people on the left having an extreme position that is, frankly, disgusting to almost everyone to hear, and that's not helping.
• 1:17:18
  The idea that you should be able to have an abortion until the moment before you give birth at your whim is reprehensible to basically all human beings, and the idea that you would celebrate an abortion, no.
• 1:17:31
  No, no one reasonable celebrates such a thing, and yet, I feel that it should be a right early on for women, but I don't think that any normal human being would be celebrating such a choice if they had to make it, if they felt that they had to make it.
• 1:17:51
  So, no Atlantic wrong on this.
• 1:17:54
  If Trump gets into office a second time, this again published two years before now, there will be a plan to outlaw abortion everywhere.
• 1:18:01
  Wrong.
• 1:18:02
  Okay, so it goes on and on and on, but the one of these that I wanted to read a little bit from seems to me kind of the encapsulation of this, what I insist on calling the pseudo-liberal mindset that has helped us arrive in a place where the Atlantic could publish so many things.
• 1:18:19
  They got it right in a few places, but a lot wrong.
• 1:18:24
  Even a broken magazine is right a couple times.
• 1:18:28
  Well, the Aunt Applebaum piece on NATO was, I think, right in spirit, and I can't remember who wrote about, you know, the specter of family separation, Caitlin Dickerson, and there were some other pieces that, right, but in part, what has happened, and I am not the first to say this, but I have been saying it for a long time, is that we have placed the neuroses of women front and center in the American consciousness.
• 1:18:55
  And that doesn't mean that we've placed women's interests front and center far, far, far from it.
• 1:19:00
  We have placed the neuroses of women who are interested in being vocal and active front and center and allowed those neuroses to triumph over reality.
• 1:19:12
  My line of evidence here is this piece.
• 1:19:15
  On page 60 of this Atlantic issue from two years ago, predicting what would happen if Trump wins, it's called "The Psychic Toll" by Jennifer Sr.
• 1:19:26
  I'm just gonna read a few paragraphs.
• 1:19:28
  There were times during the first two years of the Biden presidency when I came close to forgetting about it all.
• 1:19:33
  The taunts and the provocations, the incitements and the resentments, the disorchestrated reasoning, the verbal incontinence, the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance and soup sauce, hydrocl- I'm gonna have to read that one again because it's good.
• 1:19:46
  I'm gonna start over.
• 1:19:47
  There were times during the first two years of the Biden presidency when I came close to forgetting about it all, the taunts and the provocations, the incitements and the resentments, the disorchestrated reasoning, the verbal incontinence, the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance and a soup sawn of hydroxychloroquine.
• 1:20:06
  I forgot almost that we'd had a man in the White House who governed by tweet.
• 1:20:10
  I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds.
• 1:20:13
  I forgot even that we had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so disregulated, this being a central irony, that our nation's top executive had zero executive function, that the generals around him had to choose between carrying out presidential orders and upholding the constitution.
• 1:20:28
  I forgot in short that I'd spent nearly five years scanning the veld for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin, just as Erica Zhang believed that her concentration and vigilance were what kept her flight from plunging into the sea.
• 1:20:45
  Say what you want about Joe Biden.
• 1:20:47
  He's allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he's there.
• 1:20:51
  But now here we are, faced with the prospect of a Trump restoration.
• 1:20:55
  We've already seen the cruelty and chaos at having a malignant narcissist in the Oval Office entails what will happen to the American psyche if he wins again.
• 1:21:02
  What will happen if we have to live in fight or flight mode for four more years and possibly far beyond?
• 1:21:10
  This is on you, okay?
• 1:21:14
  Urinarosis is your problem.
• 1:21:18
  Neuroticism is more common in women than in men.
• 1:21:22
  It's one of the big five personality traits and it's one of the things that is highly sexed, okay?
• 1:21:28
  Full disclosure, this is one of many places that I myself am gender nonconforming.
• 1:21:34
  I both have extremely low neurosism and have very little patience for it in other people.
• 1:21:38
  So my reaction to this is kind of extreme.
• 1:21:42
  I simply have no patience for your bullshit.
• 1:21:45
  Your anxiety, your neuroticism is a you problem, not a rest of us problem.
• 1:21:52
  Our entire culture has been turned into the neuroses of some women have become the problem of the rest of us.
• 1:22:02
  And it's insane.
• 1:22:04
  It's just insane.
• 1:22:05
  So just the neuroticism is broadly speaking, having a negative reaction to events as they happen, tending towards negative emotions rather than positive ones.
• 1:22:17
  So things like fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness, people high in neuroticism are more likely to have negative interpretations of events, greater difficulty dealing with stress.
• 1:22:29
  They're more likely to lash out at others and conclude that ordinary situations are impossible or untenable.
• 1:22:35
  So of course, women who are on average higher in neuroticism are gonna be more likely to view what they already see as a negative as world ending.
• 1:22:44
  The sky is falling, but it's in their power, your power.
• 1:22:49
  You were the individual who's experiencing this.
• 1:22:51
  It is in your power to reframe your response to it.
• 1:22:54
  And that doesn't mean that you may not want to make change in the world, but your neuroticism, enough that it actually shows up in the Atlantic's issue about what will happen if Trump wins, we're all gonna have a psychic toll.
• 1:23:05
  We're all gonna be neurotic.
• 1:23:06
  No, we're not.
• 1:23:08
  Even those of us who are displeased with what is playing out and don't like a lot of what is happening can do so without the anxiety and the fear and the anger and the frankly insanity that you are inflicting on the rest of us.
• 1:23:21
  You aren't allowed to make a you problem and our problem and yet you're doing it.
• 1:23:24
  And it is our not just response, it is not just our right, but our responsibility to resist your neuroticism from taking over more.
• 1:23:35
  Beautifully said.
• 1:23:36
  I would also just point out that that little bit at the end where she points out that under Biden, it was possible to just relax and not think about these things.
• 1:23:48
  This is the problem with being governed by neuroticism is that it's what you've decided to freak out about.
• 1:23:55
  And the fact that you weren't freaked out about a demented president sitting in the White House with the capacity to launch nuclear weapons, presumably because somebody else wants them launched and he doesn't know enough to say no, everything that happened over COVID under the Biden administration, you're choosing to freak out about this thing because somebody's wound you up over it and you're choosing not to freak out about this other thing.
• 1:24:19
  And you have to compare them, right?
• 1:24:23
  When it came to Joe Biden, there wasn't much there there.
• 1:24:27
  He was gone and you can tell.
• 1:24:29
  If you just look at a comparison between his speeches at the end of his presidency and compare them to Joe Biden from 20 or 30 years ago.
• 1:24:38
  Or 10.
• 1:24:39
  Even 10, yeah.
• 1:24:41
  It's obvious what had happened and you chose not to freak out about it.
• 1:24:45
  So anyway, neuroticism is both your reaction and the fact that it's pointed at some things and not others.
• 1:24:51
  That's totally arbitrary.
• 1:24:53
  And we can't live like that, as you say.
• 1:24:56
  Yeah, that's right.
• 1:25:00
  So the last thing I wanna do is just go through the main points in my original piece, why I'm voting for Trump from a year and a half, 14 months ago, not read the whole piece, but I think I split it up into sort of five main points.
• 1:25:15
  Well, I have a couple other things.
• 1:25:16
  And I don't need to go there yet.
• 1:25:17
  Yeah, I have a couple other things that I wanted to say before we do that.
• 1:25:21
  Great.
• 1:25:22
  One is I wanna talk a little bit about foreign policy.
• 1:25:27
  I wanna talk about what's going on with Iran.
• 1:25:30
  And I also wanna talk about Venezuela.
• 1:25:32
  Okay.
• 1:25:33
  Now, when it comes to Iran, this is a place where I absolutely didn't vote for this and I know it.
• 1:25:42
  I do not feel that it is in the United States interest to attack Iran, and it is especially in our interest to avoid going to war with Iran.
• 1:25:53
  So the bombing raid on Iran seems to have worked the first time without precipitating a wider war.
• 1:25:59
  On the other hand, I remember Gulf War I, and then I remember the Quagmire in Iraq years later.
• 1:26:06
  So there's a pattern.
• 1:26:09
  The neocons and now the neo-neocons have Iran on their list, it's next, it has to go.
• 1:26:14
  The United States has to fight this war, and we are told that it is in our interest.
• 1:26:18
  And frankly, if the neocons say it is in your interest, that's like the CDC telling you how to avoid COVID, right?
• 1:26:26
  It's upside down and backwards.
• 1:26:28
  The neocons are not on our team.
• 1:26:29
  I don't know if that's because they're entirely delusional or they're actually effectively working for somebody else.
• 1:26:35
  But the point is no, war with Iran would be a terrible error and Trump is obviously contemplating it.
• 1:26:42
  We had a false start last week, which I take to have been strategically clever.
• 1:26:48
  Leave the Iranians to think that we're about to attack them so that you can see what their countermeasures look like.
• 1:26:53
  Yes, I'm sure that's a wise way to go about conducting a war, but the war itself is misguided and we shouldn't go there.
• 1:27:00
  And I have the feeling this time, we're not going to be allowed to say now that the powers that be are going to force this to happen and we, the American public, don't get a say and that ought to make you think.
• 1:27:11
  Not even Trump.
• 1:27:13
  I don't know that Trump wants to go to war in Iran, but I don't think he has a choice somehow.
• 1:27:17
  Yes.
• 1:27:19
  Now, Venezuela, I want to say this very carefully.
• 1:27:23
  What happened in Venezuela, I don't know whether I voted for it, right?
• 1:27:28
  Because I don't know what it is.
• 1:27:29
  I know that there was a pretext that I really don't like, that this was about the introduction of drugs flowing into the US.
• 1:27:36
  Fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela.
• 1:27:39
  No, I don't think those speedboats were, what did Toby call them?
• 1:27:44
  Ultra rapid fishermen?
• 1:27:45
  I don't know.
• 1:27:47
  I'm willing to believe that there's likely something off about those boats, but I don't know.
• 1:27:51
  And we don't kill people based on, you know, the executive telling us that they're guilty of stuff.
• 1:27:56
  That's not how we behave.
• 1:27:59
  So there's definitely some uncool stuff that we've done in Venezuela.
• 1:28:04
  As for, and I don't love the idea that we're going to go and kidnap leaders of foreign countries, because once you open that particular version of Pandora's Box, who knows where it stops and what we feel entitled to do.
• 1:28:19
  But that said, Venezuela was a total disaster.
• 1:28:26
  Maduro needed to go.
• 1:28:28
  Yep.
• 1:28:29
  The Venezuelan people are caught in the middle of something that is clearly much bigger.
• 1:28:37
  Now, the question is, why did we go after Venezuela?
• 1:28:41
  Did we do it because of oil?
• 1:28:46
  Well, I'm persuaded that we probably did, but that the picture is likely a geopolitical, a global geopolitical question in which Venezuela and our ability to hopefully purchase its oil, rather than having that oil flow to China, changes the picture of the world radically in the direction of our being safer in the Western Hemisphere and possibly Taiwan being safer without the oil as big a threat from China.
• 1:29:26
  The idea is that without access to Venezuelan oil, the Chinese can't afford to attack Taiwan.
• 1:29:33
  We were in danger of being dragged into a conflict that was going to be potentially ruinous in Taiwan.
• 1:29:41
  And so what I'm saying is, I don't know how clear headed this attack was or what it's about.
• 1:29:47
  It's very undemocratic.
• 1:29:50
  Yep.
• 1:29:51
  There is a question that I can't answer, but I think it belongs on the table.
• 1:29:58
  Can we be a functioning democratic republic at home and function more in an imperial framework abroad?
• 1:30:08
  And could we do it humanely?
• 1:30:10
  In other words, you and I have spent, I don't know how many years in Latin America.
• 1:30:17
  We have not only fascination with the place, but a great love of numerous cultures there.
• 1:30:24
  And I find it tragic actually that our relationship, that the American relationship to Latin America has been exploitative and authoritarian.
• 1:30:34
  Just over and over and over again.
• 1:30:35
  Nicaragua, Panama, Chile, Venezuela, and I'm missing many.
• 1:30:42
  Those are the obvious ones.
• 1:30:43
  Right.
• 1:30:43
  So what I'm hoping is that, yes, we're gonna make some moves that are gonna make people thoroughly uncomfortable, that they will be made in a way that the populations who have no choice about this, that's very anti-democratic, but that those populations end up feeling that it was in their interest and positive.
• 1:31:05
  And to the extent that we have a global realpolitik situation, how do you deal with the threat of China invading Taiwan?
• 1:31:15
  I don't know that Venezuela has the effect that people have suggested it does, where our control over Venezuela prevents China from attacking Taiwan.
• 1:31:25
  But if so, that may well end up being net positive for planet Earth.
• 1:31:31
  And I am not, I am definitely for us being a democratic republic at home, and us abiding by those principles 100%.
• 1:31:41
  Our constitution I think is incomplete.
• 1:31:43
  It's got some flaws, but overwhelmingly, it's the best document on planet Earth, and I want us to live by it, and we haven't been.
• 1:31:51
  So that's a problem.
• 1:31:53
  But am I willing to understand that the world is a more complex place, and that the rule set is different abroad, and that even our values at home cannot be mapped onto the entire world, and that it may end up causing a net decrease in those values being realized across the globe?
• 1:32:12
  Yes, I am.
• 1:32:12
  If this was well thought out and wise somehow on the Trump administration's part, and it ends up working to the advantage of the Venezuelan people who were frankly suffering terribly, then I did vote for it.
• 1:32:28
  If on the other hand, this is more bravado, and it's going to be turned into a vassal state, and we're gonna extract from them in a way that the population now suffers in a new way under our hegemony, then I didn't vote for it.
• 1:32:44
  So I'd love to know the answer to that question, and I don't.
• 1:32:47
  I agree with everything you said, and let me just add an anecdote, one that you're familiar with already, which is having interacted with people in several of the nation states in Latin America who have suffered because of the interventionist policies in the United States in the past, I watched this with some horror, but also with a recognition that at least many, I won't claim to know what percentage, but at least many Venezuelans had fled Venezuela in recent years because it had become an intenable place to live.
• 1:33:31
  That first under Hugo Chavez, and then under Maduro since 2013, what had once been a country that was coming up to standards of quality of life that were quite high, that suddenly, not suddenly, under Chavez and then under Maduro, conditions got worse and worse, goods weren't available, inflation was rampant, corruption was on the rise, and there had been a movement in the right direction, and now there was movement in very much the wrong direction, and specifically, it was 10 years ago actually, that we spent 11 weeks in Ecuador with our sons and 30 students leading study abroad, and when we were in Cuenca in Ecuador, a colonial Spanish city in the Andes for a couple of weeks while students did homestays in Spanish language, and we did some day trips and such, I met a Venezuelan family who had escaped on foot, if I remember correctly, from Venezuela and had opened up a restaurant.
• 1:34:35
  I found myself in a restaurant, I took you guys back there, and I had several conversations with these people.
• 1:34:40
  These had been professionals, these were, and I didn't find my notes, I didn't know exactly where we were gonna be going here, but if memory serves, I think, she was a veterinarian and he was a judge or something, like they had been upper middle class professionals in Venezuela, and they had an adult, a young adult, son or daughter as well, who was helping run the restaurant, who had been in college, was just trying to figure out what they were gonna be doing in the world, and they'd had to escape.
• 1:35:05
  They felt that they were at risk, that they were going to be having their belongings taken from them, because that was the kind of state that Maduro was creating, and he wasn't the first to do so.
• 1:35:17
  He had inherited such a set of policies from Chavez before that, so I, for 10 years, have had this knowledge in me that Venezuela is failing its people, and that Maduro was failing its people, and failing his people, failing Venezuela's people, and that it would be better for Venezuelans who were under a different kind of leadership.
• 1:35:42
  I don't know if this is the way to do it.
• 1:35:45
  It certainly feels that abducting the leaders of other states is a bridge too far, but that doesn't mean that this won't be net positive for the people of Venezuela.
• 1:35:58
  Right, I would agree.
• 1:36:00
  Yeah.
• 1:36:02
  Did you have more?
• 1:36:03
  Nope, I think that's it.
• 1:36:05
  We're gonna go to your piece, and then I have one thing at the end.
• 1:36:09
  Okay, fair enough.
• 1:36:11
  Okay, so, in, can you see my screen?
• 1:36:15
  Awesome, amazing.
• 1:36:16
  Well, wonders never cease.
• 1:36:19
  In October 29th of 2024, about a week before the election, I posted why I am voting for Trump, and I'm proud to do so.
• 1:36:29
  It was by far my most engaged with and appreciated piece on my sub-stack, which is maybe should have been obvious that that was coming, but I didn't see it coming.
• 1:36:41
  I rather like my piece on starfish, but somehow it didn't attract as much engagement.
• 1:36:46
  So, I begin just this way.
• 1:36:48
  I'm not gonna read the whole piece at all, but eight years ago, I couldn't imagine that I would ever vote for Trump.
• 1:36:54
  Four years ago, I considered it, but opted against voting third party instead, voted for Tulsi Gabbard.
• 1:36:59
  This year, I am voting for Trump.
• 1:37:01
  There are many Americans who have followed a similar path.
• 1:37:04
  Last week's DarkHorse made a case for Trump, but I am still met with dismay and disbelief by some family and friends.
• 1:37:09
  Increasingly, what I hear is this, I understand that you can't possibly vote for Kamala, but what are the reasons to vote for Trump?
• 1:37:15
  Here's one set of answers.
• 1:37:17
  So, I'm just gonna go through the main categories first and then work back up to point out where I think I got it.
• 1:37:24
  Either I got it wrong or right, or maybe I had it right at the time, but conditions have changed.
• 1:37:29
  The first one was Trump is not owned.
• 1:37:32
  The second is Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots.
• 1:37:39
  The third broad reason is Trump is better for Americans.
• 1:37:45
  Trump is better for women.
• 1:37:48
  And finally, Trump is better for America and for its core values.
• 1:37:53
  So, in reverse order, is Trump better than the alternative over in team blue for America and for its core values?
• 1:38:00
  I still say net yes.
• 1:38:03
  I don't even think this is close in light of the fact that we had a non-president followed by a candidate who wasn't supported by anybody and was an empty shirt.
• 1:38:13
  Well, and one of my pieces of evidence here in advance of the election is that the Biden administration literally formed a ministry of truth, short-lived though it was.
• 1:38:23
  Its formal name was the Disinformation Governance Board.
• 1:38:26
  The Biden administration defined and took a stand on misdiss and malinformation definitions currently housed at the site of the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency and I named them.
• 1:38:36
  So, the evidence is there.
• 1:38:39
  And this is a place where, although I didn't point out how Trump has been positive in this regard, because I don't think there have been any executive orders or explicit places, the standing against DEI and wokeness is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to actually standing up for our constitution.
• 1:39:02
  And the First Amendment is a key piece that obviously he's better than the opposition.
• 1:39:08
  So, that was the last of my reasons and still stands.
• 1:39:14
  Trump is better for women.
• 1:39:16
  Yes, we already talked about this, but the recognition that male and female are real categories that can't get turned into the other in mammals and that allowing men in a dress into a domestic crisis center or a prison is barbaric, is obvious, and somehow team blue didn't get that.
• 1:39:40
  So, I would argue on the substance, he is leaps and bounds better.
• 1:39:46
  Absolutely.
• 1:39:47
  And what this being responded to is pure symbolic stuff.
• 1:39:52
  And so, I made a point in this piece of not saying anything about Harris.
• 1:39:57
  It was just too easy, but like, there was so much being written then about what an incompetent know-nothing she was.
• 1:40:08
  But remember Bratz Summer, right?
• 1:40:12
  So, this sort of hapless, vapid banal embrace of the lowest form of female sexuality as a stand-in for an embrace of womanhood and femininity.
• 1:40:29
  If that's good for women, I'm done.
• 1:40:32
  I'm not interested.
• 1:40:34
  So, yes, not interested in being in on the private conversations Trump has with his bros about women.
• 1:40:43
  I'm sure they're gross, but on the substance, he's way better for women.
• 1:40:47
  So, that's two points on which I believe I was correct.
• 1:40:52
  This one, Trump is better for Americans.
• 1:40:57
  This is a little bit more nuanced, right?
• 1:40:59
  There's the border, there's border protection, there's prices, the prime rate isn't really falling like I expected it would.
• 1:41:09
  Inflation is still bad.
• 1:41:12
  There's a lot of people still suffering.
• 1:41:14
  I think less than they were under Biden, but this is a mixed bag.
• 1:41:21
  Well, I think we don't know.
• 1:41:26
  I think we don't know.
• 1:41:27
  I think we don't know yet, but the Venezuela move, which may be, depending upon what it was, could be thoroughly unjustified, would still, I think, be net positive for Americans.
• 1:41:44
  The amount of oil that Venezuela has and the likely impact of our access to it, especially as a new energy crisis looms in light of the demand for energy that is obviously inside of the AI revolution.
• 1:42:10
  So, we suddenly, the battle is on and it is about energy and oil is clearly a big piece of that puzzle for now.
• 1:42:21
  If fusion showed up maybe 10 years into building reactors, oil wouldn't be such a big player, but for the moment, it's oil.
• 1:42:32
  And so, from the point of view of the wellbeing of Americans, I think that may end up being a strongly positive move, whether or not it can be justified.
• 1:42:40
  Yep.
• 1:42:42
  Yeah, I agree.
• 1:42:43
  I just think we don't know this one yet.
• 1:42:46
  We don't.
• 1:42:47
  Yeah.
• 1:42:47
  But I'm still hopeful.
• 1:42:49
  Yep.
• 1:42:50
  Okay, so that was three of, I think, five main points, maybe six that I'm making here.
• 1:42:56
  Oh yeah, four.
• 1:42:58
  Number four, Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots, specifically Kennedy and Maha.
• 1:43:05
  And I write, Kennedy sees the death grip, the big farm, my big food and big hab.
• 1:43:10
  Hab and big ag, hab on the American people.
• 1:43:13
  We've already talked about this, but this is all moving in the right direction.
• 1:43:20
  The sway that the neocons and-- But that's not this point.
• 1:43:28
  This is gonna be the final point, is the sway.
• 1:43:30
  Well, I guess what I would just say is I see a tension.
• 1:43:34
  There are a number of factions.
• 1:43:36
  So Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots.
• 1:43:40
  Well, that's true.
• 1:43:41
  Yes, he is.
• 1:43:42
  And yes, he is, and we've seen really excellent changes afoot already.
• 1:43:48
  My first point, however, Trump is not owned.
• 1:43:53
  I wrote, "Trump is not the nominee for the Republican Party of old, Justice Kamala is not the nominee for the Democratic Party of old.
• 1:43:59
  Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris, and all the neocons are becoming Democrats, saying that Trump has suffocated the soul of the GOP.
• 1:44:05
  Traditional power is scared and is concentrating in the modern Democratic Party.
• 1:44:10
  Trump doesn't answer to the power brokers of either party.
• 1:44:12
  He is his own man, and he is what you see is what you get." I don't know if that was true when I wrote it.
• 1:44:19
  I hope it was.
• 1:44:21
  I don't think it is anymore.
• 1:44:23
  And I think this, to your point, about the neocons.
• 1:44:25
  The neocons switched again.
• 1:44:29
  Like, they clearly have sway at this point.
• 1:44:33
  I think they are clearly indifferent and agnostic to party.
• 1:44:39
  Oh, of course.
• 1:44:39
  That they have an agenda.
• 1:44:40
  The point is, wherever the power is, they'll be there and have their voice in the President's ear.
• 1:44:47
  But I do worry, I think Trump intended to be his own man and that we don't know what happened.
• 1:45:00
  There are ways in which he is still his own man, but again, in the idiom of negotiation, I think it feels like somebody said the equivalent of, "Mr.
• 1:45:14
  President, congratulations, well done.
• 1:45:17
  There's certain things you can do.
• 1:45:20
  There's certain things you can't." And then, I don't know what was said that gave that weight.
• 1:45:25
  I mean, I don't know that it was said at all, but it feels that way.
• 1:45:28
  There are certain places in which, you know, our belligerence with respect to Iran, this was the no new wars guy.
• 1:45:39
  So what happened, right?
• 1:45:42
  The Epstein file, why the turnaround?
• 1:45:45
  So anyway, yeah, I think there's a ratio.
• 1:45:51
  How free is this person?
• 1:45:53
  And we don't know.
• 1:45:54
  There are some places where he appears to be quite free and it's good.
• 1:45:58
  And there are some places in which he appears not to be free and it's frightening.
• 1:46:04
  I absolutely agree.
• 1:46:06
  So, you know, I stand by this piece that I wrote and I very much prefer him to the alternative, but my very first point in it, which, you know, maybe it's ranked, maybe not.
• 1:46:18
  So five important points that I made.
• 1:46:20
  And I think the very first one is the one that is least true.
• 1:46:25
  Trump is not owned, I wrote.
• 1:46:27
  And again, I don't know if what is true now and what was true then are different things, but there are clear indications that he is not entirely his own man now.
• 1:46:39
  Yeah, I would say, yeah, it depends on your definition of owned.
• 1:46:44
  Yeah.
• 1:46:45
  He's not as free as he might be.
• 1:46:48
  All right, I had one last thing.
• 1:46:50
  I wanted to connect the question that was raised by Hegseth regarding 8A with the midterm elections, as I did in my tweet on the subject.
• 1:47:04
  There is a concern that whatever Hegseth is being spun up over and whatever the ultimate reason is that he's being spun up about this and he is spinning up the public, giving a very cartoonish portrayal of what the 8A program is and why, you know, he's taking a sledgehammer to it.
• 1:47:24
  There is a danger in his approach that could cost Trump his presidency, literally.
• 1:47:34
  And it has to do with the fact that the 8A program is overwhelmingly benefiting rural voters.
• 1:47:41
  It is overwhelmingly, it is a profound influence on the wellbeing of the state of Alaska.
• 1:47:47
  And so in the sledgehammering or Hegseth-ing or whatever it is of the 8A program, he could change the will of the electorate with respect to the Senate.
• 1:48:03
  So it is very likely in the midterms that the Democrats will regain the House, which means that they will impeach the president again with near certainty.
• 1:48:12
  They can't convict him if they don't have the Senate.
• 1:48:15
  And so if Hegseth creates, you know, changes the will of Alaska, changes the balance, you know, by empowering the urban centers and putting a finger in the eye of rural people, veterans, if he ends up costing Trump the Senate or the Republicans the Senate, then it is very likely going to result in this president being removed from office.
• 1:48:43
  And that is obviously a spectacular loss.
• 1:48:47
  So what I urged in my tweet and what I urge now is for Secretary Hegseth to go look at the complete picture of what 8A is, what the comparison is between fraud inside the 8A program and the rest of the defense budget.
• 1:49:06
  And an honest reading will lead him somewhere very different than he is.
• 1:49:11
  I'm not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but this is a mistake, and it's a mistake based on a cartoon portrayal of this as yet more DEI when that is by far not the full story of the 8A program.
• 1:49:24
  So anyway, I've said my piece and I think people need to pay attention to the fact that it is connected to the fate of the Senate, which is connected to the fate of this presidency ultimately.
• 1:49:37
  Well, on that happy note, it's January and a bunch of you are about to get thwacked by major storms.
• 1:49:43
  I feel bad for those people.
• 1:49:45
  I hope you do fine and that the grids don't go out and there's not too much accumulation of ice as they're saying there might be in the South and the middle of the country.
• 1:49:57
  We will be back next week, same time, same place.
• 1:49:59
  Wait, wait, hold on.
• 1:50:01
  Yes, we will.
• 1:50:02
  It occurs to me that in light of what may be about to happen in the East and in the South.
• 1:50:07
  And in the Central States.
• 1:50:08
  That we are gonna have a confusion.
• 1:50:11
  Oh boy.
• 1:50:12
  Brewing.
• 1:50:13
  Okay.
• 1:50:13
  Because an ice storm could be a reference to immigration or it could be a reference to snapped power lines and broken trees.
• 1:50:21
  At the very least, we should expect some good cartoons.
• 1:50:24
  Well, I think for the next, for the foreseeable weather future, we should refer to an ice storm that involves actual ice as an ice storm and an ice storm that involves immigration as a shit storm.
• 1:50:39
  Okay.
• 1:50:40
  That was a long way to go, but there's something there.
• 1:50:43
  There is something there.
• 1:50:45
  Consider it amongst yourselves.
• 1:50:47
  So check out our sponsors this week.
• 1:50:49
  That's Clear with an X, X-L-E-R and ARMRA and Crowd Health.
• 1:50:54
  And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food and get outside.
• 1:50:59
  Be well everyone.