SIO42: Trump Impeachment Talk; Fox News Is A Fairytale Land Right Now

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 42, and I am your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, well, since I skipped the voicemail segment last week, got a little bit of a longer one, lots of questions and comments. Good stuff, my favorite segment. So that's coming up later, but I also want to talk about a couple current events. It's obvious what's going on. You know what I'm gonna talk about. But not too in-depth, because I think a lot of these questions will be better dealt with over on Opening Arguments on next Tuesday's episode. So that will be crucial. But I'm going to talk about it a little bit. And I've got also the great Gad Saad up against some senators in Canadian Parliament regarding Bill C-16.

0:01:14 Thomas: And as I speak right now, Jordan B. Peterson is also testifying. That's happening now. I'm not going to have time to to fully analyze it before this episode, but Gad Saad was last week, so I can talk about. I'm going to play a tiny clip from that one that I just thought was too hilarious to pass up on. So I'm gonna talk about all those things and more, and let's get right to it.

0:01:44 Thomas: Well, guys, it's possible that I might have been wrong about something, and that will make me happier than I can even possibly say, because right now, over on that predictionbook.com website, slash users, slash SeriousPod, there's my current outstanding prediction, that is my pending prediction, of Trump will finish his first term as president. Now, it's easy to get carried away, but I would say where a month ago I might have been like very, very confident that would happen, I'm a little less confident now, I got to tell you. And potentially being wrong never felt so good. However, I might still be right, because while we're all excited about it, just hit my phone right now that a special prosecutor has has been appointed, Robert S.

0:02:35 Thomas: Mueller, I think is how you pronounce it, former FBI director, served under Bush and a few years of Obama. So, you know, I think this is definitely good, it's more good than bad, but I wonder if we shouldn't get our hopes up too much about a special prosecutor, because they can go in, they can look like they've been brought in as a totally unbiased person, and then they can just just kind of bury things for a year and look like they're doing something and then not really get anything done. I don't know that it, a special prosecutor is still, according to what I'm reading, under the direction of Rod Rosenstein, who is the deputy attorney general, because Jeff Sessions has recused himself on the Russia stuff.

0:03:24 Thomas: So he's still under Rosenstein's authority. So I I don't know that it does like amazing things. Again, it's probably good. Maybe it means that he's going to have to, or going to be more inclined to look more into it or something. But I don't know how much of a difference this makes. But nevertheless, that's the big headline right now. But let's go back, because I guess I never really got to talk about the Comey firing at all.

It's funny, I posted my theory of it, that was really just, I don't know, I was kind of toying around with ideas, and how it made sense in my head, a few weeks back, I guess it would be by now, right, when Comey was dismissed, was fired, my theory was, and it's funny, because I should have, another thing I should have posted on PredictionBook or something, but I, it turned out to be largely true actually, so my theory was that that Trump thought Comey was going to be kind of a sycophant, or kind of going to be his man, because of how Comey behaved during the election with the memo, the letter, with condemning Hillary for her carelessness and all that stuff, that he really, Comey really didn't need to do.

He went above and beyond his duty there, and making Hillary look bad and all that. So my thought was, I bet Trump, because he's an idiot, thought that this meant, because he's an idiot and he's used to people probably kissing up to him and doing whatever to get on his good side because he has billions of dollars, he probably took that as some sort of sign of loyalty.

And then, over the course of the next few months from that, came to find out, oh, wait, Comey is actually, Comey actually prides himself on being an independent guy, guy. And I know some liberals may not want to hear that, because it is true. And I agree that he hasn't, that doesn't mean he's done a perfect job of being independent. I think he tipped the scales in favor of the Republicans throughout this election, but not like astronomically so, and not as much as he could have.

0:05:16 Thomas: So again, not apologizing for everything Comey's done, but I think that Comey believes he's an independent guy, even if he might be a little biased or skewed. And for that reason, I not for a second did I think that Comey was Trump's guy. I don't think he would ever, Comey would ever just pledge loyalty to a president, especially an imbecile, because Comey strikes me as somebody with integrity, even if he's not perfect. So my theory was that he tried to get some sort of loyalty out of Comey, and then quickly discovered he was wrong about him, he's, what he thought, what he took to be a pledge of loyalty in the stuff Comey did on the Hillary investigation was actually, oh wait, it's he's just being independent. And when he contradicted Trump in testimony, when, when Trump tweeted about the wiretaps and Comey was forced to say, yeah, there's nothing that supports this tweet, that's probably when Trump realized, oh, wait a minute, it.

0:06:09 Thomas: You know, this, this is not my guy. I thought he was going to be loyal to me. And that was my little theory. And, and, and also like a, almost like a spurned lover, you know, Trump being mistaken about Comey, I'm sure would make him even more pissed off that he had the wrong impression of him. It probably would, would arouse even more anger. So that was all my guesswork. I largely though, uh, based on what the New York times later reported, it's interesting because it sounds like Trump did try to get like a loyalty pledge from Comey. And I said all that before I, before I knew about that, you can check my Facebook, but I think it's funny that it, my little fan fiction, my Comey, uh, fan fiction turned out to be kind of, kind of true. You know, like it turned out the major motivations there. And I, you know, I try to base all my fan fiction on a fact.

0:06:55 Thomas: So it's more like a fan fact, but, but either that was funny and funny in a way that, that was like, I can't believe our president is this way. You You know, that's funny in that way. It's horrifying in every other way. It's unprecedented. As I said on OA, not even Nixon fired the FBI director. He fired a special prosecutor. So we may get that from Trump. We may also get that. You may collect them all in terms of firing people that are investigating you.

But not even Nixon fired the FBI Director. The only one, of course, as you've heard by now, is a different Sessions, not Jeff Sessions but a different sessions was fired by Clinton in 94 or 5 for extremely bad ethics violations, so not investigating Clinton. So it's unprecedented. Let me outline a couple questions, although ultimately I think we're going to answer them better on opening arguments on Tuesday, but whether or not this is obstruction of justice and then whether or not, uh, and again, even, even worse, maybe if Comey testifies to the fact that Comey has claimed that Trump tried to get him to drop the Flynn investigation, which I think would be an even more dramatically obvious case of obstruction of justice. This.

It's one thing if you fire the guy who's investigating you and you say, well, maybe you come up with an excuse. Oh, he wasn't doing a good job. And I didn't, I didn't mean to stop an investigation. I'm sure it'll still go on. That would already be a tough case because Trump is such an idiot. He explicitly said, I did this because of Russia, but he could, you could still make that case because with obstruction, you have to prove intent and that's always really hard.

0:08:32 Thomas: But with asking if it could be proved that, or believed, I guess, that he asked Comey to drop the investigation on Flynn, that seems even more egregious to me. So those are some questions I think we'll answer again more on OA. But one thing I can talk about is the research I've done. It's not clear that a sitting president can even be indicted. So that's interesting, there's case history, and it's never been done, and it, it's possible that even if this investigation digs up a lot of stuff, that the sitting president can't be indited. It, it's highly possible, I mean, again, I'll ask Andrew more for more detail. But guys, it's actually looking probable to me that throughout all of this, and Andrew's tweets bear this out, throughout all of this we still may be at the mercy of one Paul Ryan. And then, it, so this is a reason why I might have still been right in my prediction that Trump will finish his term, even if Paul Ryan gathers the courage to do something about this.

0:09:30 Thomas: But it requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. And so that actually means 67 senators, so that, I mean, could happen, maybe, I think it would be more likely at that point that Trump would resign, although that's what a normal person would do, so maybe Trump would cling on to power for as long as he possibly could and declare his impeachment fake news. But that's why, I mean, you know, I'm a little less confident about Trump finishing his term, but but still, when with that uphill climb, with the amount he would have to do, I believe he could, even there could even be an an investigation now that turns up wrongdoing, and still we could be stuck with Trump. But you never know, because at a certain point, I've got to think Republicans in Paul Ryan and in the Senate, I'm going to have to think, let's just get President Pence in there.

0:10:19 Thomas: I mean, I get that it's a major political problem to have your side's president be impeached. That is a major political problem, but at a certain point, having a non-imbecile, who probably has a more right-wing agenda, to be honest, at a certain point that might outweigh everything else. So that's the reason I could see potentially Trump get impeached, that's something we have to think about. 'Cause I've said, I said a long time ago that I thought President Pence could be possibly worse than Trump. I think that was ultimately proven wrong by just how truly awful Trump is, but it doesn't mean it's astronomically wrong. Pence still has ways in which he's worse than Trump, and ways that he's better.

0:11:07 Thomas: But overall, he might be slightly better than Trump, but it doesn't mean everything's OK. And one thing I've been thinking about is, OK, let's say Trump gets impeached. Boy, we have to completely adjust our approach. We have to, we have to sign on to a whole new set of tactics to try to battle this horrendous right-wing agenda. Because, for now, it's been easy to just focus on how Trump is insane, narcissistic, he's a perpetual liar, lies all the time, everything he says is a lie.

It's been easier to focus on that, and we should, we absolutely should be focusing on that. Now, imagine all that goes away in, in Pence, and we just have a horrific agenda executed by somebody competent, somebody without any, you know, major indictable offenses and stuff like that, and doesn't lie every other word, you know, somebody who just takes his position of power, and the fact that he has a Republican Congress, and just get stuff done. And again, that's not a reason to not impeach Trump. We very much should impeach Trump. If I were given a button to do it, I would do it right now, even with President Pence incoming, because Trump, Trump is the worst person that we've ever elected to a high office. I mean, he just, he's so unqualified, and he's such a profound liar.

And the idea that the image that this must give other people of how stupid we are as Americans. And I don't blame them, because, well, half of it, they should, they should make sure to know that only half of the voters, not even half of, of the country, half of the voters voted for Trump. But anyway, it, he's such an awful, awful stain on our reputation.

0:12:51 Thomas: And to me, he really has brought down the office of president. Like, I don't even, I wouldn't even tell my, my daughter is going to be born in, you know, assuming everything goes, goes to plan, going to Be born in August. He used to be like, yeah, you, you Know, president of the United States, that's like the highest office, the highest thing you could achieve. Now it's like, well, I guess any idiot can do it. I mean, you could be a total bungling moron who lies every other word with a narcissistic personality disorder and you could be president. So in a way it has become less impressive, the office overall, but that's why he needs to be impeached. He just, we absolutely need to undo this, this thing that we've done. And then we'll deal with Pence on his own terms. So that's something I've been thinking about.

0:13:36 Thomas: We'll have to adjust ourselves, but again, it's an uphill climb, it's a hugely uphill climb, and we may end up with Trump for four years. I mean, at this rate, it's hard to imagine, but let's look at his approval rating. This is something I was looking at, somebody tweeted stuff about Nixon's approval rating, and I lost the tweet. I can't find it, because once I refresh something, I never know where anything is, because I've got too many tweets on there. But it inspired me to look myself, so I, I went back in the, uh, in the records on Gallup, and I took a look at Nixon's approval rating. I took a look at Trump's approval rate. And there's some interesting stuff to look at here. So, what horrifies me is how much more polarized we are with this, because Trump's approval rating among Republicans, is it's 84 right now.

0:14:26 Thomas: The lowest it's dipped to is 81. And meanwhile, Democrats are at eight. I don't know who those 8% people are. Are, because that's weird. But just the distance, it didn't used to be that way. If you look at past presidents going back to like Eisenhower, there's, of course, there's partisanship. There's, you know, Democrats don't like what Republicans are doing and vice versa. But it was clustered within a tighter range of percentages. So You let's look at Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, and I'll link where you can look at this data. It's really cool on gallup.com. But Lyndon Johnson, the widest his, I guess, discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans ever got that I'm seeing here is something like 41%. So pretty big.

0:15:11 Thomas: So he had a 62 approval among Democrats, 21 approval among Republicans, and independents are in, in the middle, they're 40, they're somewhere reasonably in the middle. So yeah, 40 is big, but also there are convergences, you know, toward the end of his presidency the numbers were closer, more like only, you know, 20 or 30 apart. So the point is that we used to be partisan, partisan, but it would cluster around a number that seemed to be based in reality, some sort of reality, you know, someone, maybe the real, like if you had a computer somehow do, do the approval rating, it would be somewhere within that range. Now, when you look at the same chart and pull up those three comparisons for Trump, it's, it's disturbing. I mean, it's, because you look at independents and they're quite far down by Democrats.

0:16:03 Thomas: So it's it's again, Again, I hate to pin it all on Republicans, but it is all on Republicans. Now, independents say they approve of Trump right now 35%. So, sure, higher than Democrats. It's not as though independents and Democrats are lining up, but they're much lower than so they're only 27 away from Democrats and they are almost 50 points away from Republicans. And that's what I worry about with Republicans. Here's another shocking bit. This is going to surprise you all, but Republicans being partisan to the point of denying reality. You know, kind of like the Syria strike thing where when Obama did it, it was one percentage of support. And then when Trump did it, it was another.

0:16:48 Thomas: I can't remember the exact numbers, but divided by a ton. And then for Democrats, when Obama did it, it was, what, 37 or something? And Trump did it, it was 36. So, consistency. Here's people another thing like that. Were asked James Comey was leading an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether any Trump campaign associates cluded with Russia. Do you think A. Trump fired Comey at least partly to disrupt the Russia investigation, B. Trump's firing of Comey was unrelated to the Russian investigation, or C. not sure? Sure. Seventy percent of Republicans said Trump's firing of Comey was unrelated to the Russia investigation. Now, Trump, it might have been later.

0:17:33 Thomas: We'll give we'll give Republicans as much credit as possible. And still doesn't matter. Within a day or two, Trump said explicitly, yes, it was related to the Russian investigation. But but before Trump admitting that, 70 percent of Americans were willing to just buy. I told that I would be curious what this is now. Like if they redid this poll, I, who knows, would it be 60%? I mean, would there probably still be a ton of Republicans denying the reality that Trump said in his own words that he did this because of Russia. And you know why Fox news, I was watching Fox news this week, guys, I did it. I decided, you know what? I'm, I just want to, I've done it before, but I decided to, you know, I want to see what they're covering in the wake of all the scandal that's going going on.

0:18:19 Thomas: And you tune into Fox News, and it's unfair to say they never mention it. It's mentioned here and there. Sometimes there'll be, oh, there's allegations against Trump, he denies them, they'll mention it in that way. But it's incredible, it is a different world on Fox News. You all know this already, but I watched it for a while just to witness it. And I have to say, if you were someone who only watches Fox News, I can't blame you. I blame you for only watching Fox News. But I can't blame you for, if you do only watch Fox News, for not having any idea what the hell is going on and for thinking all these things that just aren't true, because it is a whole different world. They're covering anything and everything. They're cover some bullshit controversy over what Miss America said, whether health care was a right or a privilege.

0:19:08 Thomas: Who cares about that? They cover all they do. It's amazing. It's directly what Rubin and others are doing. I didn't realize it came straight from Fox News. They point out things that a few angry liberals do or say. They point OUT why it's contradictory. They point Out why it is hypocritical of them to do. And they paint that as the only story that is going on in the world. I saw one part of the five or so. I don't know what stupid Fox News show it was. But it was five people. One seemed to be a Democrat, which was interesting. And he was like, what am I doing here, guys? And he would argue back sometimes. Times. But in that, in this segment, they talked about Trump having given a speech to police officers. And they talked as though Obama never gave a speech to police officers, as though Obama didn't constantly do that.

0:19:55 Thomas: And I'm not even exaggerating. They talked as though, like, Obama didn't have their backs. They implied that Obama was kind of okay with people killing police officers. Like he wasn't going to do anything. But now Trump is really going in there. He's going to put a stop to it somehow. I don't know how. I, I don't know. He's going to catch bullets or something. But that was the focus of that part of the show. During the time when all hell was breaking loose in the White House, it wasn't being covered at all. And it leads me to a depressing conclusion that for all the talk of exchange of ideas and debate and changing people's minds, how do you fight this? Like, how do you do it? I don't even know that the free exchange of ideas matters in a world where people watch, watch this as their only source of news and thought.

0:20:44 Thomas: You can't get through to that. There's just no, it just creates a different reality. And look, you shouldn't get your news from any one source. Like, I'm sure if you did the same with MSNBC and you just watch that, you'd probably have a pretty unrealistic version of the world as well. I think it would be closer, but it would be pretty unrealistic.

It would be, it would have a big liberal slant, and I think you would miss things, and sure, there's things that Fox News covers that the, the mainstream media maybe leaves out that sometimes, they maybe they should cover, because they're more of like a positive conservative story or positive story about Trump. It's true that there are not many positive stories about Trump in the mainstream, but the fact is it's for a good reason, because there's much more bullshit going on.

We don't need to cover his speech to police officers and how he said, you, you know, he's in the midst of. Unprecedented moves, firing the FBI director who was investigating. I mean, he's in the midst of unprecedented stuff, Nixonian level stuff that warrants more attention. And Fox News just does not do it. It covers, it's, it's amazing. It's, it's depressing. So how do we stop people from watching Fox News? Like really how realistically how do do we do that? How do we get people to turn away from that or me or hey? Maybe you want to watch Fox News. How do you get people?

You know, you're conservative. I get it. You want your own little propaganda channel. How we get to at least include other sources of news in their diet, you know, a more balanced news diet. I don't know. That'll be the major battle going forward, I think. Sure, we can just try to win by outvoting Republicans all the time and maybe that'll work, but there's no guarantee that this group won't grow.

0:22:26 Thomas: I mean, I hope it won't, but who knows? It's certainly possible that the group of people who get all their news from Fox News and have an 84% or whatever it was approval rating of Trump, in a time where it should be zero, who's to say that group, that 84% is coming from, won't increase in size by 20% and just outnumber all of us? Can you imagine a world, or rather a country, I guess, the U.S., where more people than don't think that Trump's reality is true, that they just kind of buy his reality? So we need to find a way to fight that. And outvoting it in the short term is great. By all means, we need to go outvote it.

0:23:11 Thomas: But in the long run, we got to finda way to approach that. And I don't know what it is. It's certainly kind of a focus of what I'm going to try to figure out in the coming years, years, I guess, of this fallout from the Trump presidency. But But let's quickly touch on something more fun here. Guys, this is so magical. Gad Saad, as I said, testifying in front of the Canadian Senate. This, the perfect analogy for this for me is those martial artists who think they have like powers of the mind or something and somehow, I don't know if they're all willing participants or what, but Sam Harris has talked about these where they convince people somehow they're stopping them with their force, you know, and you'll see these videos where they're like using their hand to stop these people who are attacking them, who are just falling over, you you know, and then if they go against an actual fighter, they're just knocked out in one punch.

0:24:00 Thomas: This to me is like that. So Gad Saad is such a narcissist that he makes a bubble in which everyone worships him. So he blocks anyone who remotely disagrees with him. And then the result is all his followers think he's a genius. So there's a bunch of people who worship him. And you can see it here in this video that I'm about to play. By the way, he posted it on his his own side. I think that's another consequence of this. He thinks he came across well in this. Let me play just the last, there's like two minutes that I think is so great in this, I'll just play this and let me know how you find it.

0:24:35 Clip: The very real possibility that someone could come along and say, the way you're teaching your course is marginalizing me, change it, or else you're biased. Well, a lot of what you argue is, in defense of your position, is extremely hypothetical. But we actually have a hypothetical that has been tested. We have an hypothesis in your case that has directly been tested.

You are saying that your course will be, or could be, declared transphobic if this bill is passed, but you have been, your course is under Quebec legislation. Quebec legislation has had gender identification protected for a number of years under section 10 of the Quebec Charter, and it has never happened. You are still teaching that course, and nobody is accused, or in an official way, you, it'll be in a transphobia course, so why would it be that C-16 that won't cover your jurisdiction where you teach at all? Why would it make your case that somehow it's going to result in your course being declared transphobic? And remember, you keep repeating that you're not a lawyer, so I'm not at all certain how you could effectively make the statements that you make. I could speak about the general atmosphere and the trenches of academia, and so because of that, I could hypothesize the trajectory, trajectory of victimhood that

0:25:59 Thomas: Yeah, so that's how it went. He completely destroyed his position there. It's nonsense, of course. He's already under this law and none of that has happened, so he really thinks that jackbooted thugs are going to come stop him from teaching evolution because of this bill. It is absurd, but he's... The thing about Gad is he's obviously an intelligent guy. He holds a position of esteem, so is able to use a pretty pretty good intellect, plus the fact that he has some knowledge. He has a PhD. PhD, he's qualified in some ways, to leverage some amount of audience, I don't know, maybe it's in the tens, 20,000, and block anyone who remotely disagrees with him. I've told the story of getting blocked by Gad before, I shouldn't tell it again, I shouldn't waste your time with it, but he blocks anyone who disagrees With him, and he creates this bubble, which thinks he's a genius, and it's funny what it makes him do.

0:26:52 Thomas: So he lashes out against identity politics all the time. If you watch the full video, which I will link, on Gad Saad's channel, watch the full video. Tell me how many times he says, as a Lebanese Jew, I know more about oppression than you do. He engages in the very same oppression Olympics that he always talks crap on, and he does it five or six times in the video over the course of an hour. And by the way, that's an hour of not even him. Time. He's probably talking for like 15 of those minutes, 20 of those minutes. And he still is able to get in there that he's a Lebanese Jew and therefore listen to him about oppression. So so he posts this on his own channel, again, he posts it voluntarily despite the complete, he didn't even trim the end off of it, which maybe he should have done, but in the description, the last sentence is, history will be unkind to the deeply disrespectful senators.

0:27:49 Thomas: Can you imagine having that point of view about things, that you go in to testify about a bill and you can't believe that senators would be disrespectful to you, to you. I can't imagine having that mindset. Like, it's, it's wow. It's that amazing.

0:28:11 Thomas: All, maybe I'll make some good highlights, maybe make a video of people completely getting C-16 wrong, misrepresenting it, and being totally wrong about it, I can prove why, know I more about how the law works than these people apparently, even though it's not that hard. So that's fun, I just want to play a little bit of that, and with that said, let's get over to the voicemail, because that's truly my favorite part of the show. Here we go.

0:28:40 Clip: It's time to check the voicemail. And of course, if you'd like to leave a message, that's 916-750-4SIO. That's 916-750-4746. Let's check out this week's messages. Messages. Hey,

0:29:00 Voicemail: Thomas, uh, this is Jeremiah, it was nice to talk to you at, uh, Reason time, just a one thought on the wall, I was at a town hall for my senator a few weeks ago, and he was a Democrat, and his opinion was that some segments of the wall would definitely get built, but as per usual with this presidency it would just be for optics, you know, just something that, uh, Donnie could just take a photo next to, get a photo op and look all cool, appease his base. And the rest of it is completely unwieldy and like practically impossible. Of course, like any segment of the wall is a complete waste of money.

0:29:45 Voicemail: We should be funding useful shit like science and everything. But anyway, just wanted your opinion on that. Love what you do. Cheers. Hey, Jeremiah. Yeah, it was really cool to see you and to meet you and to put a face, by the very intelligent comments that you frequently leave. I think I've read a few of them. I hope I've made that clear on the show. Jeremiah leaves great comments. So dealing with this one. Yeah, that's interesting. First off, good on you for going to town halls. I know it was a Democratic one, but that's good. But everybody go to town halls, go to Republican town halls, especially keep that pressure up. That's great stuff. But even, you know, like Jeremiah did, go to your town halls, participate in the political process. It's good stuff. But about the wall. So yeah, exactly. There's so many issues with the wall. I've listened to a few podcasts on it, done a little research.

0:30:32 Thomas: And one thing that's interesting is, as I said before, and I think you're kind of alluding to here, walls are effective in certain areas, in urban areas, in heavily populated areas. It makes sense because it's easy to have people on guard there. They're patrolling. They can see if someone's trying to climb it or whatever. They can detain them. Them. But one thing I found out is in the places where it makes sense to have a wall, we already have fencing. So that's a lot of what George Bush did, George W. Bush did. And they pointed out something else that's kind of obvious in retrospect, but I think that also makes a big difference. A fence is better than a wall because you can see through it. So the wall that Trump is advocating, like an old timey kind of almost biblical wall, except, of course, with upgrades and 30 feet higher and whatever he promised that's not going to happen.

0:31:24 Thomas: The downside of that is you can't see through it. So you don't know if people are building something behind the wall, digging, I don't know, digging a tunnel, otherwise gathering. You can't see through it. A fence, you can tell if that's happening. And one podcast I listened to, I think it was The Weeds or something, talked about the fact that people in these places don't want the wall. Like they, they, they already are happy with the fence, you know, people patrolling these places. Really, if you wanted to end illegal immigration, which we've covered a bunch of times, this isn't even really the biggest source of it currently, but, but assuming you thought it was a problem that we needed to stop, manpower is probably the way to go. Being able to patrol these areas is better than building a wall in the middle of a desert or, or on a river bed or or something, you know, like a riverbank, that's going to be much more difficult and impractical.

0:32:16 Thomas: And as you stated, Jeremiah, a huge waste of money that could be put to otherwise good use. As for your representative's prediction that parts of it would get built as a photo op, I don't even know that that's going to happen, to be honest with you, because Trump has to get money through Congress. Like, he has to get a spending bill for his stupid wall wall through Congress. And maybe what will happen is he gets a small portion of it first. They go and upgrade some of these fences to a giant wall in select locations. Maybe. I mean, I don't even know if that'll happen. First off, who knows how long Trump is going to be in there. I predicted he would finish 2020. I hope I wasn't right about that.

0:33:01 Thomas: And by the way, I think I booked that one into that PredictionBook website, whatever that was. I predicted he'd make it through 2020 because I'm a pessimist and because I don't think Paul Ryan will ever have the guts to do anything. But as we already talked about, we'll see. But enough about that. Back to the wall. I just don't know that there's ever going to be a bill that he's going to get through that will allow this spending, because what the Republicans want to do is cut taxes for the wealthy, and you need to pay for that somehow. And a wall is going backwards for that. So I'd say that's all around, that prediction on the wall is not a bad one. That could happen. If I put my top two predictions, nowhere would be an actual wall gets built for the length of the border. That is not happening.

0:33:47 Thomas: Maybe I should book that in predictionbook.com. And actually, I just did. So I went and looked that up. I booked in my predictions on Trump finishing his term and the wall. So predictionbook.com slash users slash SeriousPod. I'll try to put in as many of those as I think of to actually hold me accountable, because so far I'm one for one, but I haven't made too many predictions. Just the nuclear option on Gorsuch, I correctly predicted that, but it wasn't that hard. So, eh. But anyway, yeah, just to summarize, top two options would be some small portions of the wall or no wall at all, because it'll never get funded. A distant, distant, distant option, would be a possibility would be the wall gets completed along the full border, that's just not happening, I, I, I have extreme confidence in that prediction, but, uh, Thanks for the voicemail, Jeremiah, keep them coming. My

0:34:46 Voicemail: Name is Susan, and I really enjoy, I enjoyed your criticism of the beach fee to kind of address a question. I'm a white woman, and I live in a community. I feel like the way that you addressed the Obama issue is that you took it apart in a way that was very logical, and you're obviously not becoming tinged by racism at all. I mean, that has nothing to do with—I don't feel like there's— but sometimes I feel like criticisms that are towards Hillary and towards people like Susan, And sometimes I feel like those criticisms become larger and bigger issues because those people are women or people of color.

And I wonder, how do we figure out if somebody is legitimately criticizing somebody, you know, in a logical way? Or if they just have unconscious bias, the kind that you talked about in a previous episode, the gentleman whose name I am blanking out. I wanted to thank you for, you know, the way that you broke down your thought process. I always enjoy it because I feel like I learn a lot from you. You try to be, in the most real way, fair and balanced,

0:36:28 Voicemail: Intellectually honest. And so when you explain the way you think about things, I learn from you. So I would love to hear your thoughts about, see if people are disappointed.

0:36:43 Voicemail: Thanks, and keep being awesome, and have an awesome day. Susan, thanks for the call. Wow, this is an incredibly good and an incredibly difficult question. So just to remind everybody, I did an episode a while back where the guest talked about implicit sexism, also implicit racism, but the one I remember more is sexism in the wake of the Hillary campaign that I think was going at the time, or maybe it just finished, I'm not sure. And we talked about the fact there's like resume studies where people evaluate identical resumes, but depending on the name, they react differently. And one big problem is that they find ways to justify it. And this is a lot of what Susan is talking about. And it's a great point, because if you have a resume with maybe heavy on education, not as much on experience, and one that's the opposite, lots of experience, no education, What we come to find out surveying this is that there's a lot of implicit sexism where if there's a female candidate,

0:37:42 Thomas: You'll find the one weakness to justify not taking them on or not screening, I guess, screening through the applicant. And you technically are right because you came up with a reason, like your reason was not enough education or vice versa, too much education, not enough experience. The problem is they're contradictory. And we find that when you do a survey of this, a large survey of this, people find contradictory reasons to not hire women. And the implications of this are huge. And we can't get carried away because I think there's an extreme version of this where we can just assume anybody we disagree with at any time is being racist or sexist and they just don't know it, despite the fact that they're reporting their own reasons, which are wrong.

0:38:28 Thomas: Wrong, that's something you need to be careful of. I think we all need to be careful of because, I mean, I don't want to live in a world where anything that someone disagrees with me on, I can be just accused of sexism or racism or some sort of ism and not know it and, you know, I don't have any recourse. I think that we need to at least recognize the limits of this. For example, if the same person, maybe there's a resume where it's just a god-awful resume and there's no qualifications at all. It doesn't matter male, female, what the race is. It's still possible to look at a resume and say, well, that person can't be hired. They have no experience at all and not be called a sexist. And I just bring that up. It may seem obvious, but I just want to bring that up because one way to try to filter through this is to just look at the merits of the criticism.

0:39:14 Thomas: And that's something we could actually do if this, like, let's take this resume experiment. Let's say it was a real company that, you know, you worked at, or you had some hand in you're higher up or whatever, you could evaluate the reasons. So they could say, oh, I'm evaluating candidate Hillary here who applied and candidate Donald who applied. I think I'm going to go with Donald because he doesn't have any experience, but he has the know-how. And Hillary, she's got all kinds of education and experience, but I just think Donald's firm know-how is really going to get us. His experience in an unrelated field is really going to get the job done here. And you could keep track of that and you could, with a knowledge of this person's past decisions, evaluate it against their other decisions. You could come at this person with, well, what about last week when you screened out this female candidate because her experience wasn't related to the field?

0:40:05 Thomas: What's going on there? You know, you would be able to have a broader knowledge of and evaluate these decisions, not in a little vacuum. You. Now, maybe online or maybe in interactions with everyday people talking about Obama, that's going to be harder to do, but you can at least look at the merits of the criticism and do some work there. I also think you can just evaluate the overall temperament and the emotion behind the criticism, because I'm still seeing my friends that I'm arguing with talking about out Hillary with a, with a anger and a, just a vitriol and a hatred that I just don't know where that comes from. I mean, it just, there's no way that they have that for an equivalent male politician.

0:40:50 Thomas: And even if they're making critical points of Hillary, which this was the great conundrum we faced during the election, people would bring up valid points like, oh, she didn't do this right. Or she, you know, maybe she didn't campaign right here or maybe she, yeah, she she accepted big money for speeches. But to pair that with just an irrational, just rabid hatred that you saw in a lot of these people, and same goes with people who criticized Obama for his birth certificate and all that. I mean, right away, talking about evaluating the actual merits of criticism, the birth certificate thing is, it couldn't be more plainly racist and xenophobic of, you look different. I bet you're not from around here. I bet you're, you know, despite the fact that you've produced your birth certificate and we're making you do something no other candidate ever has to do.

0:41:37 Thomas: But even when you produced it, nah, it's a fake. I mean, all that kind of stuff is so very clearly racist at heart. So I would say for me, I guess, and I appreciate you saying you don't detect any, you know, implicit racism in my criticism. If I had to guess, I would say that's because I tried to go about it in the most fair way I could. I tried to show why this isn't like a special standard I'm holding him up to and that there's not really a hatred behind it. I love Obama. I miss him. I wish you were president today. I wish you were president for another eight years. And it's more just like, and the fact that I tried to illustrate, yeah, I would pledge to a GoFundMe to fund this amount of money. Hey, two things on that that I saw. First off, I did see a lot of people post the later on headline that I even mentioned in the episode, by the way, of, oh, Obama donated $2 million.

0:42:29 Thomas: Now, where's all the criticism about that speech? I have to say, this kind of reasoning, I can't support. Because the people who argued with me on the thread, which is, by the way, preserved in time, before we knew Obama was going to donate all this money, their reasoning wasn't, I bet you Obama will donate all this this money. Like, if that was the reasoning, then by all means, go ahead and say, hey, if your reasoning at the time was, hey, I bet you he will donate two million of this in the next week or so, and it'll be, you know, that's fine. The reasoning wasn't that. All the reasoning was, oh, who are you to say, how can you decide how much money he makes, capital, whatever, all that stuff. And then when he donates the money, oh, see, I was right, you know, and that doesn't really work. That's That's not how reasoning works.

0:43:15 Thomas: And my response to that donation was, of course, bravo, first off. And that becomes even easier to specifically just earmark the 400K and say, yeah, this win in that. That's all I want him to do, to just say. And another way that this isn't, I guess, racially motivated is I don't even want to cost him any money. Just he's got the 400,000 already. He's donated the 2 million. Just say, I respect the fact that people are sensitive to the influence of big money in politics. For that reason, that $400,000 I took, it's going into this $2 million donation and any other big Wall Street money that's also going in there. And man, I guess I'm going to get back on this real quick because I forgot a bunch of people had stuff that I just want to address. Somebody complained to me that I'd never dealt with the fact that he's retired, so it's okay. And I think all of my criticism pretty much dealt with that, but maybe I guess I wasn't like explicit enough enough with it.

0:44:05 Thomas: The whole concern is the perception that politicians do a bunch of work behind closed doors for banks and then get paid huge sums of money after they retire from politics. That's the whole image problem. So to say, well, it's okay because he's retired. Well, that would apply to anybody who gets any sort of gigantic golden parachute type thing once they're done with their political appointment. That would apply to, oh, they're retired. It's fine. That doesn't answer or the criticism of, well, now this makes it look like everything he did, the bailout or any decisions he had were influenced by the promise of big money after he was done. And the whole point of this is to preserve his legacy and to help limit Republicans' ability to equivocate between the two parties going forward, which will in turn help his legacy.

0:44:54 Thomas: Because the sooner we can get a Democrat in there, the sooner Obamacare is going to be safe and the rest of Obama's legacy might be saved. So it's for him that I think he should do this. And the answer of he's retired, it doesn't matter. That response doesn't make any sense. Yes, I know he's retired. He was president five minutes ago. It's not like all of a sudden he's 100 years old and he's in a home or something. He was president, a public person, a minute ago. All I'm asking is he makes this very small, insignificant step to preserve his own legacy. But anyway, to get back to Susan's very intelligent question, which, sorry, I got sidetracked. I just forgot there were these pending criticisms I wasn't able to answer on the show because, you know, so many different things took off in the news and all that.

0:45:39 Thomas: But to get back to Susan's very excellent question, I think you have to do your best to, while it is certainly true that there's so much racism and sexism motivating a lot of these critiques that we've seen coming from the right and all that, I think we have to do our best to, when we're dealing with an individual person, try to meet them where they are. And if you can prove, if you can point out like, hey, your criticism here makes no sense. And furthermore, you never criticized Bush when he did this or, you know, whatever it may be. If you can point out where they're being different. And then if you want to say, hey, there's data here in this study that, you know, shows that there's implicit bias is a very difficult problem to identify. And oftentimes people will find they they have reasons for it.

0:46:24 Thomas: I know that's going to be a tough sell, but if you're someone who is, Susan, is wanting to try to, I guess, confront people on that, that would be how I would suggest to do it. I don't know if that will be profitable there, but all I can say is I wouldn't just blanket, you know, call anyone who is criticizing Obama or Hillary a racist or sexist, and I know you weren't going to do that, but I would try as hard as I could to meet an individual on their terms and just try to first evaluate if their reasoning makes sense. And then if they're spewing vitriol on either of those two people, I would just ask them like, where's that coming from? Just look at how full of rage you are right now while you're talking about, like Hillary, for example, someone who did her best, did everything she could in the way she knew how.

0:47:17 Thomas: Sure, she was flawed. Sure, she made mistakes, but she was trying to prevent Trump. She was trying to beat this horrible person in an election. She had to withstand so much abuse. I mean, remember when they were on the debate stage and Trump put women who Bill Clinton had a range of sexual relations with in the front row to intimidate Hillary and in that same debate being asked to say something nice about her opponent. I mean, just all the crap she had to put up with in the name of a very good liberal agenda, in my view. You could talk about how you think she's big business or she's too corporate or whatever. Her stated agenda was great. It looks incredible right now compared to the stated agenda that's happened, the actualized agenda of Trump.

0:48:07 Thomas: So that's something I would look for. I mean, when someone's so full of rage about either of those people to the point where you think implicit bias is the culprit, maybe try to point that out. Like, look at how angry you are at this person. And why is that, I guess? I'm sure they'll have reasons. Just like if someone asked me that about Trump, I'd have a litany of reasons. But I don't know. That's the only attempt I would say we could make. So thanks for an excellent question, Susan. Sorry for the branching off a little bit on it, but I appreciate the call and keep them coming. Hey,

0:48:45 Voicemail: Thomas. This is Felicia Entwistle from the Utah Outcast. I had a thought about your concern that we are past the point of no return, that there is nothing we can do about the way people see us fundamentally different. And I came across an interesting concept this last week called self-domestication, and it is something where a species actually, through the process of selecting their own mates, selects for things that make us like domesticated animals, like dogs, and it's an idea that we kind of extend our childhoods out, but when this happened in our closest relatives, bonobos, when they did this, they became far less aggressive, they didn't, there's not the infanticide, and they're, they're sexier.

0:49:34 Voicemail: So that's kind of what we're doing to ourselves, actually. And the fact that we're doing this, and it keeps happening, and we keep selecting for these things, even with people believing such crazy things, I think we're going to see these far extreme ideas decrease on their own. Because even conservatives don't want to marry a murderer anymore. All right. Thanks, Thomas. Thomas? Oh, Felicia, you, well, first off, thanks for bringing up an interesting subject that I did a little digging around on because I always love learning new things. Yeah, self-domestication is a theory, it looks like, and it's not something that anybody thinks is definitely the way we evolved or anything, but it seems to be a theory as to how we might have evolved.

0:50:19 Thomas: I have to say that applying something that may or may not have happened in evolutionary time periods to current events, I don't think that's going to... I think you're being a little too optimistic. I think that while it could certainly be true that bonobos and humans self-selected for less violent people through time, while that might be true, I don't think it's going to help us in our current state, because it's going to take years and years and generations and generations. And also what we're seeing is how effective a small group of people can be online when they can sort of coagulate, they can find each other online, like InfoWars kind of thing, and something that would have been just a small percentage of people can coalesce into a group and seem more powerful than it should be.

0:51:12 Thomas: The same thing, by the way, has a good effect. I mean, trans people can do the same thing where they might be alienated in their little communities or whatever community they're in. They might just be a tiny minority with nowhere to turn and no one to talk to, but the internet gives them the power to unite and be more visible and talk to each other and support each other. So at least there's an offsetting benefit to some of these costs that the internet provides. But I don't know. As I talked about a bit earlier, when I watch Fox News for a little while this week. I don't know that anything's going to help. I mean, I just, it's too easy for people to be in a different reality and there doesn't seem to be any ready solution for that. And for that reason, you don't even have to be a violent person.

0:51:58 Thomas: Like that's another good point. If you think that there are baby murdering factories, it's not as though, like imagine if you really believe that, like there's just these fact, there's places where people are just murdering babies and you, and you viewed it in that way. Like this is literally just murdering people. It's not as though you have to be a violent person to think I need to put an end to this. You know, it's, it's not as though, you know, you or I might be as nonviolent as can be. I mean, I, I don't participate in violence at all for, you know, for anything, for any cause thus far in my life. But let's say, I don't know, there's an alien takeover. There's a Russian takeover of this country. If we're put in a war situation, we would fight.

0:52:44 Thomas: And it's not as though we would consider ourselves like immorally violent for fighting back or something like that. If you're a pacifist, ignore this part of the podcast. So the only point I'm making there is this distortion of reality can put events in a way, or can put concepts in a way, so that even if you aren't a violent person, you can view something that shouldn't cause a violent reaction in a way that does, even though you're not a violent person. So the analogy being, or it's not even an analogy, I suppose, an illustration of this being people who do awful things to abortion clinics. For the most part, I think it's usually, usually only the unstable people who actually murder abortion doctors.

0:53:32 Thomas: But I think there's all kinds of otherwise, I was going to say rational, I don't know about rational, but otherwise nonviolent, peaceful people who shout and say and do pretty horrible things to anyone trying to get to an abortion clinic. And so that's another reason why I think that just in overall, the species calming down is not necessarily a fix to an information problem because people that people can always be misled. So interesting call. Thanks for bringing that topic to my attention. It's an interesting thing to look at. But unfortunately, I have to say, I don't think it's a solution for our current problems by any means.

0:54:16 Voicemail: Hey, Thomas, it's Aaron from Embrace the Void podcast. Great work on the interview with Michael Shermer. I thought you did a solid job cutting through the platitudes and focusing on specifics. Something that struck me as, he was inconsistent in Shermer's position. Early on, he threw some shade at Coulter, Milo, and Alex Jones as performance artists. He said that it made it difficult to address them because it was unclear if they actually believe what they're saying. But then, just a short bit later, when you pressed him on his recent tweet, he admitted that he had been tweeting in haste at the behest of his media director. That seems problematic for someone who claims to be a skeptic and puts themselves apart from the rest of the performance artists, since it makes it hard to know which of his tweets are skeptical and which are just sort of meant to play the Twitter game.

0:55:03 Voicemail: This problem was then, I think, compounded by the fact that whenever you pressed him on the social justice and free speech issues, he seemed to kind of give in easily or claim lack of information, or I think at one point he just tried to dismiss the issue in the case of human suffering caused by Trump. My concern is that his persona, while it's very friendly and affable, may remain unchanged by this interaction. I hope you'll be keeping an eye on his Twitter to see if his rhetoric changes and to see if his skepticism gets put ahead of his sort of quick Twitter responses. So anyway, thanks, man. Great show. Thanks, Aaron. And hopefully sometime soon I'll be going on Embrace the Void podcast,

0:55:42 Thomas: Discussing a topic that matters more to me than any other nonsense we discuss on this show. And that's my hatred of the musical Hamilton. Now, while I just probably lost all of my listeners for saying that. That'll be fun. Let's talk about Aaron's comment. Yeah, that's a disappointing thing. You know, it's two things that I never say on Twitter and two excuses I never have to make that I see other people making. First off, RTs are not endorsements, meaning retweets are not endorsements. So many people find themselves having to say this and I don't know why. I don't get it. If I retweet something, it's usually something I like. It's usually something funny or a good point. But I think there's this weird category of people where they want to retweet something that probably says something controversial that maybe they're afraid to stand behind.

0:56:35 Thomas: So they'll retweet it. And then if someone complains, then they kind of say, well, I don't endorse all of it. It's just an interesting thing to think about. But you can just retweet with a comment saying, I like this part, don't agree with this other part. Like it's a weird, I've never found it necessary to put, because a lot of people have in their own like profile, in their bio of Twitter, RTs do not equal endorsements. I just, I do not understand why that's such a problem. Similarly, I don't think I've ever given the excuse or if I have, it's only a very, very small percentage of the time that I don't even remember of, well, I'm trying to react and then and make a, you know, make a stir on Twitter and that, you know, just tweet what you believe in. And if you happen to be wrong later, tweet a correction.

0:57:23 Thomas: I've tweeted a correction before. If I find out I'm wrong about something, I'll tweet, I'm sorry, I got this wrong. Disregard. Not, you know, oh, I need to react fast, so I'm going to say something inflammatory. And oh, whoops, it was wrong. I guess I'll take it back all the time. Like, if that's your constant method of tweeting, you're doing it wrong, I think. Well, you're probably doing it right, by the way. You probably have more followers than I do because Twitter is the place you go for that kind of stuff. But you make an excellent point, Aaron. I do think that was kind of contradictory of him. And it just shows that that's the kind of thing that I am so irritated by the other side, or anybody, anybody's side. Reacting and tweeting and making points without knowing the facts or skewing the facts, all to serve a narrative that is, you know, snowflakes at colleges are ruining everybody's lives and, you know, super far left liberals are way more in number than they actually are.

0:58:17 Thomas: Stuff like that. I mean, isn't being a skeptic not doing that stuff kind of to repeat what you said? So excellent point. Maybe he'll stop doing that. I don't know. We'll see. Everybody keep an eye on it. And if he tweets something that is kind of messed up again, just go ahead and remind him, hey, didn't you go on Serious Inquiries Only and talk about maybe dialing some of this stuff back. And I can certainly try to contact him again too, if he goes off the rails and maybe try to keep making progress. But it felt to me like I made progress, but who knows? I don't know. I don't know the guy intimately. I don't know if he's the kind of person who would just say, oh yeah, you're right. And then forget later on. He shared the episode, you know, he was super friendly via email afterwards.

0:59:05 Thomas: So I think hopefully we've made honest progress and conversation there. And if we did, I'm really, really, really happy about that. And we'll just have to wait and see. So thank you all so much for the calls. Keep them coming. Keep that number. It's in the show notes. As I said, this is my favorite part of the show, getting to hear from you guys and interact with you. So keep it up, keep up the good work. And that's it for the voicemail today.

0:59:34 Thomas: All right, I've got to thank my new patrons over at patreon.com/seriouspod. Seriously, you guys make the show happen. It would not happen without you. I've gotta thank Douglas Yencer, Brian goldsmith, Jimmy SM, Kittens and Puppies. Oh great, finally I got Kittens & Puppies supporting me. Wine drunk for butt stuff. Don't know what that is, refer- okay, whatever. That's your patreon name. It's fine. You got one reading out of me. Michael Keith and aig787@gmail.com. Thank you guys for pledging so, so much.

And, of course, I've got to thank my all-time greats, my Hall of Famers, and they are Travis Peterson, Matt Garrett, Brian Gareford, Peter Skelton, Steve Sigmund, Adrian Borschoff, Roger Metcalf, Detective Matthew Maxson, over on the Odd Atheist Friends podcast, by the way, I did that podcast, should be appearing next week, I think it is, so check that out if you'd like, Andrew Waddington, Zabby, John Bodley Esquire, Ian Ryan, Matthew Vernon, Ray Loves Jenny, Robin, The Zika Baby That Lived, Thank you guys so much. You're the reason that I was able to talk to Shermer last episode because you're the reason that this show goes. So if you'd like to be a reason that this show goes, go to patreon.com/seriouspod. All right, guys. Thanks for another great week.

Really interesting interview next week with Dan Arel, who is, it's kind of funny because I've been arguing, I suppose Michael Shermer was more toward the right, even though it's unfair to call him right wing, but libertarian kind of to the right of me, certainly. And now Dan Arel is way to the left of me and I will be debating some things with him next Monday. Uh, worthwhile conversation. He's, I disagree with him a lot and we talked it out and, uh, definitely going to want to hear that one.

1:01:28 Thomas: So kind of interesting to battle both sides of the ledger here. So look forward to that Monday. And oh, and I'm thinking, by the way, I got a lot of comments that I should release that conversation I had with a Jordan B. Peterson supporter, which was of a success. It's hesitant to say, but I think it was a success. I may release that. It's not that long. Maybe I can pare it down a little bit and have it be in Thursday's episode next week. So that's what I'm looking to do. Just giving you guys an an indication. But if you were on patreon.com/seriouspod, you've already heard it. So thanks to those people. And I will see you next week.