Transcription
Well, I'll let's talk about hope. I have something that I think could very easily explain some optimism for everybody. You used to be a woke journalist, and you're no longer. You wrote a book against it. Yeah, so tell me, like, how do you, how do you find yourself, like, how do you end up as a woke reporter and then one day have an unwokening and become anti-woke?
Yeah, my deprogramming. It was like a bunch of things, you know, like, very slow and then all at once. But I definitely had the Trump derangement syndrome. It was like, in the beginning, it was very hard for me to talk to, to, I took it very personally that he won. And in that super lame liberal way, and, um, it, you know, it took me a while to be able to admit, like, "Oh, that's a really good thing he did," and "That's a really good thing he did."
But, um, my deprogramming, I think it started with hearing, learning about the deaths of despair. And, and every night, I would turn on CNN and see the very people who we had abandoned, who were literally killing themselves because they didn't see a future for themselves in this country. You know, killing themselves, being mocked on CNN, being called racist in the New York Times. Like, and I could, that sort of started to really, like, it was jarring to me. Like, why are we, why do we not have compassion for them?
And then the second thing I would say was, um, I read this Yale study from 2018. Do you guys know about this study? No. You're really, there's a lot of studies from here. You're really gonna love this one, though. You do, right? Yeah, maybe. Um, so, and Yale did a study in 2018. What they found was there's a difference between how white liberals and white conservatives talk to Black people. I remember this study. Great study. Oh, yeah. Top tier. And, um, it found that white liberals dumb down their vocabulary when they're talking to Blacks and Latinos, and white conservatives do not.
And I remember reading that in 2018 and thinking to myself, "This implicates my entire worldview," and I was not ready to deal with it. And I put it aside. But I had this moment where I was like, "This is disgusting," and everything I think is caught up in that thing that makes you dumb down your language. You assume a person of color is less educated than you, is poorer than you, and needs your help and needs your generosity and your beneficence, right? That move of like, I instantly recoiled because I, I recognized it.
And then the third thing that really, I think, was like the death of my Trump derangement syndrome was my rabbi. He's just the best person that I know. He, he's the kind of person who, like, in the winter, he walks down the stream, he sees a homeless person, he starts taking his clothes off and giving them his coat and his scarf and everything. He's just the most humble, generous person I know. And we were, you know, having a Shabbat meal once, and, you know, Trump came up. And he was like, "Oh, I love Trump." And I was like, "Excuse me?" And he was like, "Yeah, I love the guy." And I was like, "You mean you voted for him, you know, holding your nose?" And he was like, "No, I love him."
And it was like that. And that's what I tell people. People often ask me, like, "How can I convince people to not be woke anymore?" And what I say is, like, you can't really change someone's mind with information. Our brains aren't wired that way. What you can do is you can be a person who is so humble and virtuous, or strives to be virtuous, so clearly trying to be a good person, that a person who disagrees with you can no longer say about everyone who holds your opinion, "You're, they're racist, they're evil."
But I think that's, uh, uh, for liberals, it's a liberal perspective. I think conservatives have a tendency to be swayed by facts and information. Not all of them, obviously. Obviously, there's very emotional people. And I think the left has a tendency, a tendency to be swayed by feelings. It's why Ben Shapiro tweets, "Interesting facts don't care about your feelings," and gets 50,000 retweets and a million followers, and everyone's cheering for them on the right. And on the left, they're very much driven by, you know, care and fairness. To sites specifically, Jonathan Haidt's researchers. Yes, of course. Conservatives have all six moral foundations. Liberals have two. But when Ben Shapiro says, "Facts don't care about your feelings," he's kind of making an emotional statement, you know? But, but it's the stance. And the inverse is true for the left. Feelings don't care about your facts.
But, uh, Jonathan Haidt's research found that, uh, conservatives, when they take a moral foundations test, they have a balance of all these different moral foundations, which is, it's what care, fairness, purity, authority, um, freedom. Yeah. And there's one more. But you're super anti-authoritarian. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, I think the divide, the political divide, is, it's obviously not left or right. Yeah. It's authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian. So if you're someone who, uh, I think liberals have a tendency towards authoritarianism. I hate using the word liberal because it doesn't mean that. Yeah. But whatever modern American leftism is, because they're collectivist, and collectivism is inherently authoritarian. Because if the collective, which is the authority, decrees, you either follow suit or you're ostracized.
So if you're someone who is driven by care and fairness and that's it, you don't care about loyalty, purity, authority, or anything like that. Or freedom. Liberty is a, is a moral foundation. And if you don't have that, well, then you don't care if they're doing vaccine mandates. Let me tell you something. I think people really need to understand the left and the right don't speak the same language. They come out right now in New York City and they say, "Vaccine mandates work." Let me just ask you a very simple question: Do you think vaccine mandates work? No. Why not? Well, I think they're unconstitutional. Well, that's not a question of what you mean. Do they work at preventing this? I didn't say that. I said, do they work? Do they work? And you, with no qualifications, no qualifications, do you think they work? Do I think they work? I don't think they work. And why is that? Well, because of Omicron.
So this is really interesting because people, the left knows this. They know New York is experiencing a massive surge in cases. But when they say vaccine mandates work, they're not talking about preventing COVID. They're talking about forcing people to adhere to the collective, which is, you must get the vaccine regardless of the outcome. On the right, they say vaccine mandates don't work because COVID is still spreading like crazy. So that's a really interesting distinction between the two cultural definitions of the word "work," right? Yeah.
Um, um, the, the left today is also deeply meritocratic. Not, not in the sense of a real meritocracy, but in the sense of their deeply careerist and deeply obsessed with credentials. And that's not meritocracy. It's, it's, it's okay. Okay. So agree, we disagree about. Well, it's authoritarianism. It's, look, getting, getting, getting a college degree doesn't prove you're a journalist, but it's very individual. It's like the desire to rise above the pack and tell everybody else what to do and become famous and be like that. To me, that seems really individualist. Like, no, no, no. I mean, in North Korea, you want to be a party member. In China, you want to be a party member. You want to be a part of the collective at the highest ranks to prove your value to the authority. Whereas, on the right, you have a tendency towards libertarianism, which is, "Get off my property and leave me alone." Right.
When, when someone says, "Go to college and get a degree," they're not saying, "Get an education." They're saying, "Adhere to the cult. Adhere to the authority." You get it? It's remarkable to me. I meet so many people who are, you know, "I'm going to go to college and get a degree and then get a job." I'm like, "What is that degree going to do for your job or what you want to do?" "Nothing." They admit this. They say, "It's a piece of paper that proves you've done something." Millennials, my entire life, have said this. When I'm like, "What's the point of getting a college degree?" "It just proves you did it." That's authoritarianism. The adherence to the authority. Me, I've always been libertarian. I dropped out of high school. I said, "Screw college, I'm going to make my own way and decide for myself, and I don't care what you think, and you can't tell me what to do." Conversely, or subsequently, I don't want to tell you what to do either. Just leave me alone. Those are the, those are the big differences.
But isn't populism and libertarianism in tension with each other? Um, not necessarily. Why? Why do you think that? Because libertarianism to me signifies like free trade and. Well, that's big L liberty. You're like a civil libertarian. Civil libertarian. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, do you have a tendency towards live and let live, or do you have a tendency towards, "Do as you're told"? Right. What we should call liberalism. Except liberals exactly don't believe in that.
New York City now, St. Paul, Minneapolis, they're now enforcing a vaccine mandate. Cook County, the second biggest county in the country, vaccine mandate. And we're watching record COVID cases. So what is the point of the vaccine mandate? They repeatedly say it works. They on TV, they say it works. In New York, they say it works. Well, it's not stopping COVID. Oh, but the vaccine mandates are getting people to drop down, bend the knee, and give in to your authority. In that, in that sense, it is working. And that's exactly what they mean when they say it works. Yeah. And they're finding people.
And then I look at, Luke, I'm already, I already have something lined up. I'm sure you're talking about what was happening in Quebec with, of course, the premier there setting up a tax on the unvaccinated. He's calling it a health contribution, but in reality, it's just theft. The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, also says that he supports this strong measure and most likely will be implementing, uh, this kind of exploitative measure on the Canadian public. As a collective, you better be a part of our gang, or we're going to steal your money. That's essentially what's happening right now in Quebec and what's going to happen nationally throughout Canada in a few days.
Look at this article from the LA Times: "Mocking Anti-Vaxxer's Deaths Is Ghoulish, Yes, But Necessary." It is? Yes. No, no, it isn't. It convinces no one of anything. What is the purpose of mocking an anti-vaxxer's death? Seriously. It's to gloat so that people on your side can laugh and feel like they're part of the, the group. I call it a cult because the way cults work is convincing a person that everyone loves you, you're right, you're on the right side, and they're the crazy people. Don't listen to them. Don't talk to them. Is that a photo of the author? No, that's a photo of women who died due to COVID who opposed mandates. Okay, because I was going to say that that's like, of that publication, to use the photo of the author would have been like clearly signaling what had happened here, which was like, they knew that this piece was going to go viral for hate, and they were putting a target on the back of the author. And they, like, this is something. No, edit. I'm saying this is an opinion editor. This piece got a ton of track, the kind of traffic like you dream of as an editor. I would never have let somebody write that because you just know that it's, it's so ghoulish, and it's just going to, it's only going to get hate shares. And essentially, it's like, this, this editor just did not have the back of that writer. It's not just one editor. I mean, how many people are probably involved in the process of this getting approved?
So if our goal is to make a better country and to help people, do you think it makes sense to go to someone whose wife just died of COVID and laugh and mock them and say, "Your wife's up an effing, what a dumb piece of garbage, haha," and then high-five your friend? Is that going to convince them to join you? Is it going to convince them to get vaccinated? No.
So, actually, interestingly, people don't know this, but, um, Walmart has had a campaign to help vaccinate people, and it has been incredibly successful in the two most vaccine-hesitant populations: African Americans and Trump voters, as well as evangelicals. Big overlap there. And when they asked them, like, "Why are you succeeding with these populations that nobody else can get vaccinated?" Their answer was, "We're meeting people where they're at." And they had, they, they partnered with local leaders who had a lot of trust in the community, sports teams, or pastors. Or there was one community of Latinos who were very vaccine-hesitant, and they found a local publication in Spanish, and they had a press conference in Spanish, and then partnered with an immigration center. And so, you know, I, I know you guys are probably ambivalent about this, but basically, what they found was that meeting people where they were at was the vaccine, like, that was how you. But it was the opposite of a mandate, opposite of shaming. Um, yeah, respect, respecting people's distrust, because you earned their distrust by being, you know, you know, untrustworthy. Yeah.
Do you, do you, uh, is there, is there zero improvement in this country by mocking people? You, you, uh, you know, who have opposed mandates? If someone's wife dies of COVID, and you show up, you're wearing a suit at the funeral, and you walk over and you pat him on the shoulder and shake his hand and say, "I'm sorry for your loss. I'm here if you need anything. Here's my number. Seriously, give me a call. We'll grab a drink at any time." And then you can have those conversations. And then you can say, "Well, you know, look, man, I mean, you look at these numbers, and people who are vaccinated are less likely to be hospitalized." You have a real conversation. And the person might still disagree, but you're having a real conversation.
Are you familiar with Daryl Davis? Yes. Perfect example. Oh God, he's amazing. He's the Black jazz musician who said, um, "I just want to meet these, these racists who hate me who never met me." That was it. He didn't have a plan to de-radicalize Klansmen. He just said, "I'm going to go talk to him." He drove the children of a Klansman to see their father in jail every week for years, and they were still racist. I mean, it took years for them to stop. He's amazing. Yeah. He just, he was like, "Well, you know, how they gonna know if they don't know? And you got to talk to them." And that's, and that's exactly, exactly it.
So it is tough, though, because we, we have, we have the data, and we discuss it quite a bit. People on the left traditionally do not follow people on the right and don't seek to engage with them. People on the right are the inverse. They constantly seek to engage people on the left, and they consume news from all, you know, different political spectrum, political outlets. In 2016, this is what Jack Dorsey said: Left journalists, liberal journalists did not follow right-wing journalists, but right-wing journalists follow both right and left-wing journalists. So this is why a lot of people on the right weren't surprised that Trump won. We had, um, I think it was Max Keiser, who's not a right-wing journalist or anything, he's a financial guy. He said, uh, it was him and Stacy. They're, you know, very, they have the Orange Pill podcast. You guys check it out if you're interested in crypto. They were in Europe. I could be getting the story wrong, but the general, I, uh, I remember, as they were in Europe, and they were hearing all across the media that Trump could never win, that everyone hated him, and it was, it was a slam dunk for Hillary. And they flew back to the U.S. and landed in North Carolina and saw nothing but support for Trump signs everywhere, and they immediately said, "Trump's going to win." But why was the media so disconnected? Because they don't follow anyone but themselves.
So we see that still today. We actually pulled up, there's a website called Ground.news, and you can put in someone's Twitter handle and see, um, the, the political bias of the outlets they interact with. When we pulled up left-wing personalities, it was like 80 to 100% left-wing. When you pull up moderate personalities, it's mixed. When you pull up conservatives, it leans conservative with a little bit of left in there, but many, uh, conservative personalities follow left-wing publications. People on the left don't do the same thing.
But again, I, I just want to make the point that like, that sounds like a story about politics, but it is also very much a story about class. You know, if, if these journalists lived in working-class neighborhoods or knew any working-class people, they would not have been so shocked by Trump's victory. But they don't. They live in these extremely affluent, wealthy, you know, Hillary Clinton plus 20 districts. And this is data that has showed this. A, a political survey found that, you know, journalists, 75% of journalists live not just in blue districts, but in the most blue districts. Looks like a story about, about politics, but is actually a story about class. About how, you know, the Republican Party became the party of the working class, and the Democrats became the party of, you know, Big Tech, Wall Street, which gave more money to Biden than to Trump, and then highly educated liberal elites.
Did you see this story in 2016 from Vox, June 3rd, 2016? Left-wing publication, vox.com: "Democrats are replacing Republicans as the preferred party of the very wealthy." And that is true today. And the neocon establishment conservatives like the Lincoln Project fled to support Democrats. And even after 2020, the Lincoln Project said, "Now we're going to go after Republicans in the Senate." And conservatives were like, "Why? We thought you were the party of Lincoln. You just opposed Trump." No, they're establishment politicians.
My favorite story, maybe you saw it, was during the George Floyd riots. There was a guy in LA who was cheering on the rioting, saying, "Yeah, yeah, get it, go, go!" Until the rioters started coming to Beverly Hills. And then he tweets something like, "No, don't come to my neighborhood. Why are you coming here? Go downtown." It was amazing to see the contempt and disdain for regular people as the rioters were destroying the neighborhoods of the poor, and he cheered them on and then panicked. We got to be careful that we don't get too excited about the, the vindication as the, the wealthy start to suffer as their dollar gets closer and closer to the value of zero. Because the French Revolution, you just look at past revolutions where people rise up against the elite, it can go really bad, really fast. And you don't know who's going to try and take power if something like that were to happen. Oh, yeah. Rather than revel in and seeing them fall, maybe we can help them and help them change their behavior.
It's not about the wealthy. It's about the, um, who are the, you know, these, these the nobles that would enter, that would inbreed. And then, you know, nobles. Was it? Yeah. There was one famous family where, like, the guy was like, "Oh, yeah, it's like his jaw was all messed up." I'm like, "That's how I view most of these people." They, they, they are the product of this, um, insular culture they've developed where they isolate themselves from regular people. They come from old money. They're extremely arrogant and disdainful, and they think they're better than you. And, and, and I know, again, uh, I know people. I've met people throughout my life who came from wealthy families who became, yes, became very humble. And they were like, "I'm really, you know, peop, I know some people who are wealthy, who are born into rich families, who would say, you know, 'I'm really careful to, um, enter politics or anything like that because I've not experienced what most of the people have gone through, and so I don't want to assert myself over people.'" I'm like, "That's the right way to do it, man."
So Tim was referring to a very famous family called the Habsburgs, since like 1273, and they were notoriously an inbreeding family and developed this weird lip-jaw deformity looking thing. So check out the Habsburg. Most modern breeding, most monarchies are inbred. Yeah. And they would do that to maintain, keep wealth within the family. Yeah. You know, you'd have to sell half your wealth to your, your son's wife if you're, if his wife is your daughter. Yeah. Yeah. Or cousin. Gross. I don't know.
I'm fairly optimistic when I see, when I see, look, the success that we have. Everybody who's a member at Timcast.com, everybody who supports us in super chats, we're growing, we're hiring, we're expanding, we're doing more every single day. So as a news organization, how do we taking, don't, or like you were saying, with subscription model, we have a core group of people that like what we do. And fortunately, what you do, journalist-wise, is rip on everybody that's messing up, for the most part. So maybe you don't have to target a type of person. You know how like the New York Times is going out of their way to to supplant these. Well, look, I, I just, um, I'm anti-authoritarian. That's, that's about it. So if a person is a working-class person, but they use their voice to try and force other people to bend the knee, I'm going to criticize them. For the most part, though, I'm more concerned with the power structures themselves and the ideas, which is why in a lot of stories, we don't say the person's name, or we'll specifically reference a person who did this instead of calling out someone individually. I don't care about an individual. I care about the structure and the system and the person. But there are some people who are so high profile, we talk about them. It's, it's, you know, nobody's perfect, right? It's not, it's not a perfect, uh, yeah, there's no simple way to ignore everybody. But there are a lot of people, uh, especially on YouTube and in the political space, who their whole career is insulting and targeting a single person. Oh, it gets so old so fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But, you know, look, I'm optimistic. I see, I see the populist growth, the expansion, success. And I think the censorship may be bad, but, you know, Rumble's doing really well. There's more systems on the rise. I don't think, you know, it's like all of these movies and stories and hero's journeys, all these comic books about a villain who wants to take over the world, and they always fail. You cannot, as an individual, no single human is smart enough to seize control of everything, and they fail every time they try. Oh, yeah. And if they were to succeed, they'd be offed by the number two in command in a holy second, and then that guy would be offed by the number three, who would become the new. You saw in the Roman Empire. That's why we don't aim for centralization of authority. Yep.
There will come a, a day where, you know, I walk into the room, and then everyone, you know, takes a, a rubber mallet, hits me in the back, and then Ian walks over and hits me. And I say, I look up and I say, "You two, either time has come." You two, Ian. Let me get my hat. That's two. Thanks for checking out this segment from the Timcast IRL podcast. If you want to watch live, you can check out this channel Monday through Friday at 8 PM. And don't forget to smash that like button, subscribe to this channel. And if you want more unfiltered and uncensored content with all of these guests, go to Timcast.com and become a member. All of these guests, you know, and love in exclusive segments on our website, where we are unrestricted in what we talk about. So you'll definitely not want to miss it. Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you all next time.