SIO63: Dangers of Neoliberalism with Michael A. Wood Jr.

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 63. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, got a really good conversation for you today with Michael A. Wood Jr. We started off kind of in one direction. We were going to talk about the atheist movement a little bit, some observations he had, having not really been a part of it for a while, and then coming back and seeing kind of where it is now. But, you know, we didn't end up focusing on that a whole lot, just to give you the heads up. One, we ended up having a pretty heated debate about neoliberalism and what candidates we should be supporting, how to move forward to accomplish the kind of social change we need. It was really fascinating stuff. One of those cases where I think I'm debating someone pretty far to the left of me, and we're trying to find common some ground there.

0:01:17 Thomas: So it was really exciting. Thanks so much to Michael for coming on. And here we go. Let's get over to it.

0:01:29 Thomas: Joining me back for I think the second time, Michael A. Wood Jr. How you doing, Michael?

0:01:34 Michael: I'm fine, Thomas. How are you? What a pleasure to be here with a wonderfully thinking mind of a skeptic.

0:01:40 Thomas: Thanks so much, man. You reached out. It was really interesting to me. I can't wait to hear what you're talking about. Now, you've been on the show. We talked a lot about police reform. I know there's always more we could cover on that. But you you reached out to me. Yeah.

0:02:05 Michael: Yeah, I'm extremely alarmed. I guess essentially what happened is I got deep into activism for Black Lives Matter, for police reform, for things like that. Right about the time that Hitch had died, I started seeing logical flaws in what Harris was talking about. So, I don't know, I got caught up in the activism of Black Lives Matter. And then when I was in there, it was like the best activists that were really dedicated to causes were a lot of radical Christians and mostly Muslims, if not other atheists. So we were kind I kind of got into this bubble of activism and didn't wasn't in the atheism world.

And when I came back, I've been like two or three years, I came back into it and I listened to a few podcasts and I expected our community, which is obviously a loose term, to Be talking about things like weaponizing the privileges that we have, about critical thinking and digging in to what the problems are in our system so we can fix them. But that is not what I saw when I came back. What I came by really scared me. I felt like, like I was really at a loss for words. I saw a complete lack of science and skepticism. So like applying antidotes and outliers to generalizations in mass in like a very neoliberal kind of idea where pretending that there is a... I'm generalizing here. I am generalizing, but there's this mass pretending that are, as atheists, stand above everybody else. And we are the reasonable ones as being skeptics who are trying to compare the left and the right.

0:02:56 Thomas: Oh,

0:03:44 Michael: But that is this weird thing that we do as Americans in general, where we start arguing about, hey, we should have compromise in the middle. And so we end up compromising with ridiculous ideas like Bill Maher and his racism, that is completely obvious.

0:03:58 Thomas: Yeah. Well, okay, that'll be a good thing to talk about. First off, I think this radical middle kind of ideology that the right answer is in the middle, I think that's a really big theme these days. And I think you're right to call that out. I have to say, I'm curious to hear, because I might come to Bill Maher's defense, because I'm a fan of Bill Maher. I think he has some problematic views, but overall, I think he does more good than harm when it comes to race. So I'm curious to hear your take on that if you want.

0:04:28 Michael: Yeah, sure. So here's my general take on Bill Maher: is about complete context, not taking the things in the snippets. I think the defenders of Maher take it in snippets and say, "Look, he just said the N-word." But he didn't just say the N word. Put it in the the full context where he was talking about being a house Negro and about being somebody that is somebody who is the neoliberal of, of racism, of slavery. That is actually, yeah,

0:04:57 Thomas: Well, but but the full context of the joke, though, was the guy, the Republican on the show said a weird fucking thing like and in the a weird, creepy Republican thing that almost tried to reclaim the because I think the thrust of the joke was, dude, you just said, come work in the fields with me as a white guy, like almost as though he was trying to whitewash slavery in a way the Republican was. So I guess I took the joke a different way. Do you think I'm I'm missing something?

0:05:24 Michael: I do think you're missing something where I think you're messing. And I don't mean that like I'm some authority figure on this Is that in order to come up with that joke, I think you have to have some really prejudiced undertones underlying your racism to then men think that you can say that in front of the world like it's OK, whether that's conscious or not. I think you're looking at the people who or who were in slavery or who are the descendants of that. I think you're looking them in a completely like less than yourself way, because you wouldn't say that about a Jewish person in the Holocaust. So, like, see slavery was the genocide of African-Americans, and the effect that we haven't even begun to acknowledge in our society, society. So it's like, let alone, we haven't even began to mend this.

And his entire, like his platform, his way of getting through life, his advantages to life, to prominence, they have all come at the cost of those human beings who he's at the butt of the joke of. If somebody says a racist joke, you don't return with racism. You return with a shunning.

0:05:28 Thomas: No, that's okay. I don't mind.

0:05:41 Thomas: Right, right, right.

0:06:29 Thomas: I don't think the guy did a racist joke. I think he said just a weird thing. But to fight back a tiny bit on that, and then I think we should probably move on to more interesting territory. But when it comes to Mar, I would say, and maybe, let me see if you would agree with this. For one, he apologized and he had, I don't know if he saw the show after, but he invited, actually a couple black guests.

0:06:51 Michael: He had Ice Cube and he had? I think

0:06:53 Thomas: Yeah, uh, yeah, yeah, no. But he had a few and he allowed them to, you know, essentially scold him. And I think that, I think that he showed real tone deafness. I think that he should not have made that joke. The funny thing was, I had Ishmael Brown, a friend of mine, on, who does Angry Black Rant, the podcast, and he actually thought the joke was fine, which is kind of weird. But because I thought it's, it's not, I think it's just not worth the baggage of using that word. And also, it's very curious that that word would be, like, so on the forefront of his mind. And I agree that that's problematic, but would, you could I get you to at least agree that, I, I definitely think he harbors some implicit biases at times. I think explicitly he's fighting for the right causes, like he's, he's, he's on the side of trying to fight against like pretty shitty Republican policies, fight against Republican ideology.

0:07:44 Thomas: Like, I think he's trying, he's at least trying to do good if maybe we could argue his implicit bias might be something. What do you think about that?

0:07:53 Michael: Then what you're trying, you are, that is the neoliberal mentality, where you end up fighting for a right because you're in some weird compromise. Malcolm X goes through and explains this with great detail. And we see it happening in front of us to this day. And even the, like when you say he had other people on to scold him, he had Ice Cube. Now, I understand there are some people that will be offended when I say this, but Ice Cube is a member of the the oligarchy. He does not represent Black America. He represents blending into the system and colonialism like everybody else. He's a product of capitalism. Just because he has a Black face and did some revolutionary rap a long time ago does not put him in some authority to speak for the people who truly would have been offended by what Maher said.

0:08:40 Thomas: Well, but you can look at what he said.

0:08:41 Michael: Hold on, hold on.

0:08:42 Thomas: How is what?

0:08:42 Michael: Let me tell you what I, let me write down my exact note. I said, and I know you will say, But he apologized. Well, the thing is, we can't distinguish between his being sorry that he said it or sorry that he got caught and it reflected poorly on his brand. So I see nothing in that.

0:08:43 Thomas: Okay, sure. Sure. Well, that's just a 50-50 thing. I mean, like...

0:09:00 Michael: Sure. So if it's 50-50, there's nothing to gain or lose.

0:09:03 Thomas: No, no, I'm saying just because we don't know the answer to that question, it doesn't mean like I can't assume the positive answer no more than you could assume the negative answer. Like, well, but so but he still did the thing he was supposed to do, though, like he still was supposed to apologize. He still invite. I think it's better. I mean. Here's what I want to say. Like, I don't, by all means, I'm not going to defend Bill Maher as a perfect person or anything, but there's degrees of shittiness that we can see in people today. There's all the way alt-right shittiness. There's all the way Republican, you know, congressmen doing shitty things in the war on drugs and like all that. There's that level of shittiness. There's a level that elects Donald Trump, and then there's Bill Maher, who, yeah, sure, flawed, but at least he apologized and he had some people on who disagreed with him and called him out. I mean, we have to at least acknowledge a spectrum of positions on this, right?

0:09:14 Michael: Exactly. So that's the point that he apologized for.

0:10:02 Michael: Sure. I feel like I'm kind of butting up against you in the same, and I'd hate to say it, like, white liberal kind of male privilege, where you're not seeing what I'm talking about. And that's because it's the outcomes that that mentality gets. So that's the crime bill. That's the super predator. That's neoliberal ideas that actually end up doing more harm to these communities because there's this ignorance and white saviorism about how you can say and about how you know about what is actually going on. And we're not listening to those communities still that have that objection. Ice Cube is not the person to to have on that stage to push back on it. Would be somebody from the streets who is a revolutionary who comes in with the background to explain this and understand why that that negatively affects a community that's been traumatized and continue to paint that image like they would do that Ice Cube's not the first person to do that, no,

0:10:56 Thomas: What would they say that's different than what Ice Cube said? Because it sounds like you're really putting a lot of emphasis on the face behind the words, but I want to know, like, what would the words be that they would be saying that's different?

0:11:09 Michael: That's, that's, that's the point. So the words that they would say, again, I'm, oh, I'm not going to to espouse for that community. But you've got to have somebody on from there that's actually pushing back on you, not the moderate that you do in the middle. That's pulling like, "Look, I have a Black friend, so this thing is OK that I did." It's justifying it. It's not actually facing a critic.

0:11:32 Thomas: Oh, he was very critical and he didn't position himself as Bill Maher's friend. The other guy did. The first guy that he had on, if he had only had that guy on, I can't remember his name, but that would have been problematic because he painted a pretty like... Positive spin on Bill Maher and what he did. But he had Ice Cube and he also had a woman on who I didn't know before, so I can't remember her name. I was trying to look it up. But she also gave him quite a bit of criticism for that. I'm curious if you're, would your criticism apply to that too? Like, do you think she's not a good name for, or a good thing?

0:12:04 Michael: No, I don't know the detail of it, but these are all people that have brands. It's like media arguing with media. It's not the people that are actually involved in these battles and And in these situations, like Ice Cube may have some effects of colonialism affecting him. He's still a black male, but he's not the person that's subjected to these ideas and is coming from the outcomes of these ideas. Like I'm saying, the crime bill. So when you say people who aren't complete enemies, but they see some of our ideas, will they do things like continue to push for the crime Bill because they want to use the police?

0:12:39 Thomas: I don't think he pushes for the crime bill.

0:12:40 Michael: No, but it's those kind of, that's the kind of ideas that we don't see until 20 years later. Even the black community at the time of Bill Clinton for the large part was saying, yeah, we have to do something. And we're not looking at the big systems of how those thoughts and outputs come into actual actions. For instance, when Milo is trying to push an agenda, that shit is not going to get accomplished. OK, when Trump's trying to put an agenda that's not going to get accomplished, what's really dangerous is when we have people that aren't thinking about the entire systems and about how that really affects communities and not listening, that they will end up doing ideas out of even good intent that come from from saviorism that do actual damage in the end. And I think that's a big danger in thinking that it's OK to be to compromise on a lot of very important issues.

0:13:32 Thomas: Yeah, I guess I don't know what to respond to there, because I'm not sure who's compromising and where that is. But yeah, just to get the record straight, Symone Sanders was the other person on, and I feel like you'd be hard-pressed to paint her with the same criticism that you're saying for Ice Cube there, and she was very critical of him as well. I just don't, I don't know, I think you're being a little unfair on that.

0:13:55 Michael: I know. I mean, I get that from a lot, but I don't think I shouldn't be the one to speak for this. But I think you would get a lot better of an articulate position about how this affects people on a personal level about images, is if we talk to somebody like D. Watkins, the author from Baltimore, somebody like that that actually understands these systemic issues and how it affects communities that are marginalized and are the subject of these kind of things that we brush under the rug.

0:14:21 Thomas: Yeah, okay, well, I think we should move, I think we've kind of spun our wheels on that. I don't think we brushed it under the rug exactly, but anyway, okay, so where else should we go? In terms of sort of leaving or, I guess, not being very like aware of the atheist movement and then coming back, I'm really curious about that because, I mean, you're not, you're going to find, I think, mostly agreement from me on this because I've been talking about a lot of the major leaders and why I think they've sort of lost touch with skepticism. But I'd be curious. So admittedly, this could be a friendly audience for you, but what are the kinds of things you're seeing if you want to go more into depth on that?

0:14:23 Michael: Yeah, totally.

0:15:02 Michael: Yeah, I mean, we can. Like, for instance, so we can just leave the white male privilege thing behind and get it out one last time, it's that all of these heroes are these white males or people in that system. And there's this overall feeling of using intellect to kind of justify their privileges instead of being introspective on all of our ideas and getting them now down. But like, I heard Shermer say this and it blew my mind. He said he was concerned with lines of thought in students, which puts them in a mindset to look for which, what may or may or not be there.

And I was like, what? He was talking about safe spaces and how colleges are blocking ideas. But there's this big mix up between what what free speech is and the way the word is being used often. There is this of critical thought, like if the critical thought challenges their position of something like safe spaces, then the retort that comes out is something like, well, this puts students in a mindset to look for which may or may not be there. That is what the skeptic is fundamentally doing,

0:15:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:13 Michael: Is looking for what may or May not be There.

0:16:16 Thomas: Yeah, I have found Michael Shermer's positions on this to be a bit bewildering, to be honest. I had him on a couple times and he'll say stuff and then most of the time it's something that it just happened to be when he came on, like something that I had researched pretty thoroughly and he just hadn't looked into these things. Like there's such a knee-jerk reaction, in a lot of skeptics now, to just look for, you know, it's confirmation bias. Like, oh yeah, this person was blocked. Like, I think just today, as we're recording, a Berkeley group disinvited, you know, Richard Dawkins. And like, I haven't had a chance to look much into this, but already I saw someone pointing out the fact like, okay, it wasn't the school itself. It was the group. And they, they constantly in the past with the Milo stuff and with the Ann Coulter stuff, they blend together like what the school's doing.

0:17:03 Thomas: They blend together what the group is doing. They blend, you know, like they're just not looking skeptically into these things. And it's really, it's really frustrating to see. A group that I I might have hoped was more skeptical than your average group, but I just am finding that to not always be the case.

0:17:20 Michael: I think even the general arrogance of our positions, of being these experts that search for logical fallacies and laugh at others for their logical fallacy, But don't see them within ourselves. I feel like that's the big next step, if there is a unifying atheism thing, is to turn that skepticism into ourselves in a bit of self-reflection to see what we're actually using our atheism community for. You know what I mean?

0:17:50 Thomas: Yeah, and I think when it comes, there's all these narratives about, and it's something I wrote a blog post in response to David Smalley's blog post on this. There's all this like, you know, who's ruining the movement, who's doing this and that. Let me know what you think about this. I think that the atheist movement. Really can only be about like one or two things. It can be about there's no God and it can be about, you know, maybe secularism.

But the funny thing is that even if your goal is secularism, which that is my goal, I do think, and I'm sure you would agree, like getting religion out of government has got to be a good thing and stopping some of these religiously motivated laws and bills. And but the thing about that is you could even have like Christians agreeing with you on that. There's no reason you have to even be an atheist to think that. It tends to correlate. So already you've like adulterated your movement in a way and it's not even purely an atheist thing. So I found the atheist movement.

To kind of be a, in some ways, a meaningless thing lately, like I don't really care about it as a movement other than, yes, I want to donate to Freedom From Religion Foundation. I want to donate to any good secular causes, sure. But like we don't, as a group, we're going to disagree about all this stuff. And it's important to me, like the issues that are important to me lately are social justice related or at the very least. To point out the flaws and skepticism of the wildly anti-social justice people. So what do you think about those ideas?

0:18:37 Michael: Totally.

0:19:20 Michael: No, I think you're right. And it's just weird. I don't know why I felt differently about this. But like a few years ago, it seemed like this was such a big issue and we all needed to unite and maybe like we largely won the argument that there isn't a lot of solid pushback on atheist ideas or there's no like new ground to cover because it's not like we're coming up with new religions and new arguments. So, yeah, it's just I felt like that unifying thread would have, would have led us to something more productive and giving back to society more than feeling like elitist.

0:19:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:20:00 Michael: That's what I'm fighting back on. And I can't clearly even articulate it because I don't, I feel like I got lost somewhere, like what happened to this thing that I was looking at, like I heard another thing with Sharma, I heard him say that if you call him racist then he's not listening anymore in the middle of a podcast that was all about listening, and how, how, how are we still having these lines of thought come into us as a community when we were so united, yeah.

0:20:29 Thomas: Yeah, that's the, there's, there's a lot, I believe, it's my belief there's a ton of just white privilege that a lot of atheist leaders are oblivious to. And, and I'm sure that I, you know, I fall short on that all the time, but I want to do my best to try to acknowledge it where I can and learn from it where I can. But like one place where I've noticed the, the white privilege come come into, I guess, importance. In this debate is the idea that the burden is all on people of color to demonstrate exactly correctly, to protest exactly correctly, to come at you with like the perfect language to make you like change your mind perfectly. Like somehow the burden is all put on the group that's historically been oppressed and has historically I'm actually right now I'm in the middle of the book The New Jim Crow. I'm really hooked on it right now. I can't wait to get through it. But like just hearing some of the history that, you know, we like Like the minute.

0:21:53 Thomas: There's a few troublemakers in a Black Lives Matter protest that delegitimizes the whole cause. That's ridiculous.

0:22:01 Michael: I see the same thing and if I don't want to like back and forth agreeing with one another on what we see in the movement, but I want to like, what is it that makes us go forward that we can unite for that isn't going to lead us down this path where we're being like, I, we have to be willfully ignorant at this point as a group to not be recognizing those things and to be continually pushing down, if we are so focused on logical fallacies and skepticism, it's it's either you're choosing to not go down that path on purpose to protect all your privilege and your ego, or you're just so dumb we shouldn't be listening to you at all. I don't understand how, what is happening to us. Yeah.

0:22:07 Thomas: Yeah, I know.

0:22:48 Thomas: Yeah. What do you think? Maybe this is where, and feel free to get critical if you want, but what do you think I can do and anyone with a bit of an audience can do to try to do atheism but in a way that is more inclusive and constructive in your view?

0:23:05 Michael: So that is one of the common threads that you're hitting on, is that we, we are, and I like to say we, the way I can to absorb some of the blame. But we as atheists or people who like to debate these issues on any subject, really get into these ideas with ourselves and in our circles. And we're not actually arguing with our critics. When we have real critics, they aren't letting them on the shows or giving them platforms for that. So instead of saying, well, your idea and your your argument may make me look bad, so I'm not going to have you on my show, I think we should be looking for the people who will have the arguments that will make us look bad. To have an actual, that's what peer reviewing is, is to be challenged on a real level, not to isolate ourselves while we talk about safe spaces and free speech. And

0:23:58 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly. I think it is a little tough. I know you and I, I'm sure, can find disagreement somewhere, but it does seem like we're largely agreeing on this. And just to go along with you more, I think it's a big challenge because atheism does skew white male pretty heavily, just demographically. A lot of people want to try to put that on like, well, that's because, you know, atheists are being non-inclusive and are being racist. And actually, I don't think it's quite fair to say that explains it because I think a lot of it is just a demographic thing. Like a lot of it has to do with the demographics of our society and the demographics of who tends to be more religious and not.

0:24:44 Thomas: And without trying to put any blame on that. Once you realize we're in a position of being heavily skewed toward one demographic, which is white and male, I do feel like we have a responsibility to try to keep that in check and we have a responsibility to try to do our best to promote those voices that aren't going to get heard and to facilitate those kind of voices in a community where they're just outnumbered most of the time.

0:25:14 Michael: I would even argue the reverse of that. There's a common thread that in order to hear ideas and be reasonable, we should let these people come on and give them a platform to be heard. But that is always going towards these people like Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager and these people that have dangerous ideas or just have things that they throw out and we don't challenge. And if those ideas aren't challenged in a really critical way, then you can be giving a platform to really radical ideas, meaning a compromise, and then falling into that neoliberalism where your idea of the middle is actually quite right. So I'll say that with some people and it's taken offensive. But if you're arguing like on a light spectrum,

0:25:32 Thomas: Yeah, feel free if you want to go into that more, like why you think neoliberalism, like can you define that and then talk about why you think it's maybe more like a right-wing kind of view?

0:26:10 Michael: Right. So if we think about like the light spectral, maybe as, or any kind of spectrum, where we have something in the middle, where we do have a left and a right, and then the ideas of compromise are in the middle somewhere, and that's a moderate. What I mean by neoliberal is, what you have, people with good intentions on the left side of the spectrum, and they want to say, let's be fair, let's compromise, and then so they will listen to a far right idea. And we've just done this as a general principle, as a trend. And then, then when you end up listening to a far right idea and then compromising, which, here's a great example of this, Obamacare. OK, so Obamacaire, the ACA, is a Republican program. It is precisely what Mitt Romney proposed. And then even before then, it came from some Republican think tank. So you end up compromising to a neoliberal idea, which was a right-leaning idea of like example of health care and the crime bill.

0:26:49 Thomas: Right.

0:27:06 Thomas: Well, I would put it, I don't know if I would say it's right-leaning, but at least had right-wing backers, like I see it as kind of a neutral, do you see it as an ideologically neutral idea or like, yeah, what is right-wing?

0:27:18 Michael: Obamacare? No way. Hey, it funnels the profits of taxpayers into the hands of private industries. It's I mean, it's it is because it's capitalism disguised as as as freedom.

0:27:29 Thomas: Well, if you're going to define capitalism as right wing, I don't know, man, we might have a, maybe that's where we're going to have a big breakdown because I do still think capitalism is ultimately the best system. It just needs a lot of regulation, but I don't know, maybe it's, sure, yeah, I'm not, yeah.

0:27:42 Michael: Well, then that wouldn't that that would be just that wouldn't be pure capitalism. You would be talking about some level of. So, yeah,

0:27:48 Thomas: So if you, but yeah, okay. So if you're going to say like the unadulterated free market fixes everything crowd, then yeah, okay. I agree with that. That is a right wing kind of idea.

0:27:48 Michael: It's a balance left and right. Yeah. So capitalism is a right wing concept, just like socialism is a left wing concept.

0:28:01 Thomas: Right. Well, I consider myself firmly left wing, but I don't consider myself social. I think socialism, I guess I'm sort of on the Bernie Sanders side, which is capitalism is great for a lot of things, but when it comes to healthcare, I suppose I would be more socialistic when it comes to healthcare. So you're saying that Obamacare... Well, don't you see Obamacare as kind of, that's why I said neutral. I think it's kind of a mix. It's like it is kind of a middle position between, you don't think so?

0:28:08 Michael: Sure.

0:28:29 Michael: No, no, no. No, it was the Republican plan in the 90s. So through all the compromise, they ended up getting exactly what they want. And now you're in a fight to keep their plan. That is neoliberalism that I'm talking about.

0:28:42 Thomas: Right, right, right. So they've stepped further right because the right wing is like, because the reason I guess maybe I'm confused is like now Obamacare is to the left of a bunch of people in Congress.

0:28:53 Michael: Of course.

0:28:53 Thomas: But you're saying they've kind of, it's like the Overton window stuff or whatever. Like that's the biggest, because it sounds like you're talking about this horseshoe theory BS, which it's so funny to me because it is this radical middle stuff where like you think you take, let me know if I have this right. It sounds like what you're saying is when you have two positions and then you keep taking the middle of it. It gives you like an unrealistic idea of what compromise is because when you look at the rest of the world, our left and right is way right. Like if you look at a lot of these other countries, you what we think of is, oh, this is a moderate position and this is a right position, this is a left position, is actually would all be on the right wing of some other industrialized countries in the world.

0:28:55 Michael: Yeah, sure. So that's what I'm saying is we keep moving to the right. There's two good analogies here. So the first one is men and women differences and divorces. So women are always fighting to win. Of course, I'm being generalizing. But women fight to win and men fight for fair. So who wins?

0:29:58 Thomas: I don't know what you're, what?

0:29:59 Michael: Women always win, historically, because they fight to win. And then you'll see ideas in religion that do the same thing. So we seem to be very good at pointing them out in religion and saying, look, the main problem with the moderate Christian or the moderate Muslim is that you enable the extremists. But we don't turn that to ourselves and realize that atheism as this mass movement of the the Shermers, of the Dawkins, of the Harris's. This has become a right wing movement. If you guys would stand back and look at.

0:30:20 Thomas: Hmm.

0:30:30 Thomas: Yeah, I think if you do, it depends on how you define it. I think relative to, yeah, this new middle stuff I think is embarrassing. Like I just listened to the Scott Adams episode of Sam Harris. I wasn't even going to bother because I hate that guy and he's just not, I can't, it's unpleasant to listen to. And by the way, I never miss a Sam Harris. Like I am a Sam Harris fan even though I disagree with him all the time. I like his show. There's a lot of cool science and philosophy on it. Love it. But I almost never skip it except for this time I was going to and then everybody emailed me saying, oh, are you going to talk about this? And so I was like, all right, fine. And in it early on, I appreciate that Sam Harris fought back against Scott Adams the entire time. He's a dumbass Dilbert creator who thinks Trump is a genius in case you weren't familiar with him.

0:31:15 Michael: No.

0:31:15 Thomas: He thinks everything Trump does is actually some secret genius persuasion technique. I would rather argue with someone who thinks the world is flat, like it's legitimately that level of stupid. But anyway, in the beginning, I appreciated Sam Harris fighting back the whole time because this guy has a big following. But in the beginning, Scott Adams asked him a question, which was, would you rather have the far left move to the center or the far right move to the center? Sam Harris said, well, lately with how crazy the left has gotten, that's a legitimate question, which is insane to me. Insane.

0:31:51 Michael: Insane. I heard Pete Boghossian say the same thing. He said there is a new center and that it's to the left. I mean, it's patently insane. I mean we could write it down and explain it and they wouldn't do that damn thing. And we keep seeing ideas like that. One Pergosan notes about him where He gave this bullshit Asian privilege argument. So he was fighting against privilege, or saying that you couldn't, nobody, we were talking about white privilege. How come nobody else is talking about Asian privilege, which was a complete ignorance of the entire situation. Yes, empirically, Asians have more college admission. They have more demographics in certain areas of wealth. But that is because of our immigration policy, which filters only the rich and elite from those cultures. So they already came here with all the privileged resources and advantages that they got from the same type of corrupt system where they came from. So that has to be willful ignorance for you to come out and pretend to know about what you do not know. Yeah,

0:31:57 Thomas: It's insane to me.

0:32:08 Thomas: Right.

0:32:52 Thomas: Right. Yeah. And the idea that the... Here's the problem with the News Center, because I think there is... A sensible spectrum when it comes to maybe certain free speech ideals. Let me explain what I mean. Like, I think there is a point where there are people on either side who are anti-discussion of ideas. So like, there are people on the far left who want to shut down ideas, but there are also people all over the right who want to shut down ideas. And in that very limited sense. I personally come down on the side of I want to discuss ideas like that. I just do like I always want to discuss stuff. I want to have you on to discuss stuff. I want to have I'll have a Trump supporter on for the most part, although it's it's not worth it because they don't there's no real ideas there.

0:33:37 Thomas: But I want to discuss ideas in that sense. That's sort of a middle position in that there are people on left and right who are anti freedom of expression. But I think the fundamental error is that then. What happens is Bogosian and others translate that into, okay, so therefore the middle position between left and right politically is also where you want to be, which is just not true. So like I'm far left when it comes to, or I consider myself firmly on the left. When it comes to political, like, idea, like, what bills do I want passed? You know, what, I want single-payer health care. I want, you know, progressive taxes. Like, what do I want passed? I'm firmly on the left. Just because I might be in between two groups when it comes to specifically the ideas of freedom of expression, that does not mean politically we have to abandon the left and go into some middle position. Does that make sense?

0:34:30 Michael: Totally. They're separate things. We have our cultural ideas and we have our systems of how we do things. And they're definitely distinctly different.

0:34:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's what and I that's why I have to always say to these new center people like, okay, new center people who are creating like this new political movement. Who do you vote for? Like, which candidates are you going to vote for? Are you going to vote for Trump? Are you going to vote for Hillary? Well, I would have voted for Hillary. I'll join your new center. Do you want health care? Do you want? The Republican plan on healthcare or do you want the Democrats plan? Well, I would suspect we want the Democrats plan. It's like they're trying to smuggle in. I don't know if they're actually just right wing maybe because if I were to ask all these questions of these new center people, I would assume they would support the Democratic plan on almost all of this stuff because the Republicans have no plan. Like the Republicans plan is nuts.

0:35:19 Michael: Wait, wait, that's the argument. They agree with us on 98 percent of issues. Right. That's what they say. So they would be left.

0:35:23 Thomas: Yeah. So if you want to, yeah. I know that's, and so I will accept it when it comes to freedom of expression because yeah, there's, there are people on the left who don't, who won't, don't want to listen, don't want to have discussion. I don't like that. Personally, I like, I think discussing things is better. You have to acknowledge that's all over the right. Have you tried talking to a Trump supporter? Like they don't, they're not want to entertain your ideas. It's not like we're somehow like the left is worse on free speech than the right. That's an absurd notion.

0:35:51 Michael: Right, and I think that that is that is still that same fundamental underlying of how even with good intentions, we can think compromise is a good thing. But then its outcome is actually bad. And so as somebody that all my scholarly work is in management and systems. So I'm constantly trying to not look at individuals and look at what the system will bring us. So that's what I'm talking about when I say something like neoliberalism, if we would have gotten Hillary, which is neoliberal, then we would've possibly had a lot more harm done to black communities than we will with Trump, because Trump is

0:36:30 Thomas: No, I disagree with that. We can debate this, but go ahead. I'll let you finish the argument.

0:36:32 Michael: A wolf, and we know he's a wolf. So we fight against it. But neoliberalism, even if well-intended, not thinking through the results of the action, you can end up being a wolf in sheep's clothing. And then we usher you through with everybody else. And then the outcome ends up being worse, like the crime bill. I

0:36:56 Thomas: See, I don't think, well, okay, she disavowed the crime, but well, here's what I think about that. I think that it's fine to say that Hillary Clinton is not perfect. It's fine, and we can even get off the topic of that election. Let's say, let's fast forward to 2020, and let's say we have somewhat of a similar situation where we're looking at someone who you would label as a neoliberal and Trump. We still have to just vote the neoliberal. Because Jeff Sessions is a nightmare.

0:37:02 Michael: Know. She said sorry.

0:37:29 Thomas: The Supreme Court... No, no, hold on.

0:37:28 Michael: OK, so stop right there. Wait, wait, wait.

0:37:31 Thomas: Let me finish this.

0:37:33 Michael: I'm a cop. This is my field right now. OK.

0:37:34 Thomas: Okay. Okay, okay. Go ahead.

0:37:37 Michael: So here's a good reminder about how neoliberalism hurts us and thinking that those things can be the solutions or are better. So my entire chain of command, I was a white officer in a Black Democratic city with a Black mayor, with a Black police commissioner, with a Black attorney, with a Black Democrat attorney general and a Black Democratic president. My entire chain of command was Black Democrats. And that entire time I spent 11 years occupying and terrorizing Black communities because that's the system that they set up for me to do.

0:38:14 Thomas: Okay, what does that have to do with... You still think that means Jeff Sessions is... Oh,

0:38:16 Michael: That is that is not happening at any any difference then than it is now.

0:38:22 Thomas: I think it is getting much worse under Jeff Sessions. I mean, I think this is one issue that maybe you and I might have.

0:38:28 Michael: Empirically, no, law enforcement is not listening to Sessions, that a lot of the things aren't worse, you're not going to find something that's worse, it's not like police are arresting more people, it is the same exact pattern and trends as we've always had.

0:38:43 Thomas: I just don't know how you could say that. I mean, I think it's one thing to say that things were not perfect and were indeed even bad, but it's another to say that therefore no amount of an actual overt racist trying to make things worse is the same. Like, that's just a really hard claim to make. Like, you have an actual racist trying to make things worse.

0:39:04 Michael: It's about effectiveness, effectiveness and outcome, outcome.

0:39:07 Thomas: What?

0:39:08 Michael: I'm talking about actual outcomes. So that is the actual outcome.

0:39:11 Thomas: But you haven't had enough...

0:39:13 Michael: More equal or more perfectly innocent Black men will go to prison under Obama and an entire regime of exactly what you want than will go into prison under Trump. What

0:39:26 Thomas: But no, that's just an extreme claim. Obama pardoned so many drug offenders that were nonviolent. That's different than having someone who is not going to do that. You can say it's not enough. That's fine. It's still not the same. Having a president who pardoned thousands of nonviolent drug offenders is different than having a president who hired Jeff Sessions who wants to lock these people away forever. It's different. I mean, it's just, you can argue that it's not enough. That's fine. But like to say that we're going to look in 2020 at the options between someone, let's say it is someone like Obama who has those views on nonviolent drug offenders, and then Trump, I mean, you cannot tell me that that's the same.

0:40:10 Michael: I need you to do, or anybody listening to us to do is to go look at the actual stats and how it ends up. I'm telling you that morally those people are wrong, but because of the way our systems work, we push back against the ideas of a Jeff Sessions, but we let the ideas in of a Hillary Clinton in the crime bill. And then what outcomes that actually happen are end up being worse because of what are we allowed to slip in. It's just patently true. It'S just true by the outcomes, by the numbers,

0:40:42 Thomas: Okay, well, I can just say it's just not true by the outcomes. Like, we'd have to discuss actual evidence. For one, this is also a future claim. Like, Jeff Sessions has only had a few months. You can't evaluate that yet, right? I mean, could we agree on that?

0:40:55 Michael: What I'm trying to say is four years or eight years of anything is not enough to change that system in any which way, and patently what we see is that when somebody does the extreme, like a Jeff Sessions, then people push back and you actually end up with less on the outcomes. I'm not trying to make a moral argument with you

0:41:13 Thomas: So then we should always elect the worst guy, it sounds like. Okay, so what would be your argument against electing the worst guy?

0:41:14 Michael: No No, no, I'm saying we have to be extremely careful about this, because what does happen throughout history is that we end up making these compromises that we're talking about here. And then they come through in things like votes, where we say, oh, what will Hillary do? She could have easily had us in a war with Russia right now. So what are these outside things?

0:41:41 Thomas: I don't think that's true. I

0:41:43 Michael: That's what I mean. Dude, she had a no-fly zone in Syria.

0:41:43 Thomas: Don't think that's true, but okay. I mean, I think that the case against, she had, oh my God, are we going to argue about the no flies? Are you kidding me? You think that's going to, Trump literally did a strike on Syria, on Russian, like bases that Russians were in, and it didn't start a war. And you're going to tell me that Hillary would have started a war against Russia? I mean, there's no way. She would have negotiated it.

0:42:07 Michael: I'm pretty sure they told the Russian authorities before they did the strike. Because

0:42:11 Thomas: Right. Okay, then you could just use that same logic with Hillary. She would have told the Russian authorities before. There's no way she was going to be more irresponsible on Russia than Trump. That's all I'm saying. But you have to look at part of Hillary's, you know, and again, we'll apply this to 2020. When we have a candidate, inevitably, I'm sure we'll have a Democratic candidate that a bunch of people don't like because the far left very, I think, counterproductively eats its own. When we have a candidate who has these same policies, who says, I want to reform the criminal justice system. This is part of Hillary's agenda. She said, I want to reform these sentencing laws. I want to do this. I don't get how you're saying that's the same as Trump. How am I to know when the next candidate comes along? I guess this is the question I can ask. How am I going to know if... if your theory is like they end up being the same, how will I know that going into it? Because their stated agenda sounds good.

0:43:05 Michael: We have to be fighting to break up and disrupt power, we're not choosing which team we're going to be in. We're in a situation right now where our country is patently an oligarchy or a plutocracy. We know this. So we have to fight against these systems, not against these individuals. These individuals are bullshit. That's the whole point is that this system is a colonial system that is built upon a mass separation and disparity of the rich and the poor. And it continues on with legalized slavery, like you're reading about right now. We literally still have slavery in this country. I don't know why people won't recognize that and address it as it is. So it's those kinds of things. We have to disrupt the system. This is the system,

0:43:46 Thomas: Yeah, okay, I agree with that. So, but, okay.

0:43:48 Michael: So whether You can pick what we do is we end up, okay, for instance, the Women's March, if Trump wasn't a one, well, we have had all these marches and everything else. I think so. If Hillary would have won, everyone would have been home. And that's the exact point is that we accept this complacency on those kind of issues and we end up doing more harm because we buy into the system when we have a friendly face On the Fast

0:44:11 Thomas: So then is it fair to say then the optimal solution, since we're again trying to come up with what we can do, the optimal solution is vote Hillary in but still remain just as vigilant on these issues. Would that be the optimal? When we were given a choice between Hillary and Trump, would that have been the optimal outcome?

0:44:12 Michael: Right No I think that is the problem. I think we have to go for who we are voting for, not what we are voting against, but

0:44:37 Thomas: But there's only two people, like you only get a choice between two people. If you want to say, oh

0:44:41 Michael: That's not true. You could have voted for Jim Jill Stein or somebody else. The system keeps telling you that that's the thing and see, the system will keep telling you you can't do that, and you'll say, no, you can't do that. But a lot of of these cities, a lot of these issues don't take the effort that we think they take. We're told by power that you can't do this. We are told it's impossible. You have to accept pragmatic change. This is not a time for pragmatic change, right?

0:44:43 Thomas: God.

0:45:04 Thomas: But there's, like, even if we 100% agree on what we want to accomplish, which I don't know if we do, but let's say we do for the sake of argument, there's still the reality of the system you're in. Like, you can't, a third-party candidate is not going to win. It's not even close. Like, it's just, they'll okay, give me something I can do. Like, what's the, what can we do here? Because I'm hearing a lot of, like,

0:45:21 Michael: Solutions to your systemic problem will not come from the system, bro. They won't, So we can vote for interest. We can push people for things.

0:45:37 Thomas: Jill Stein was a shit candidate. She just wasn't a good candidate. Her positions aren't even that great. She had these crazy views on science. I'm not going to vote for her over somebody who actually has a realistic chance of winning and doing less harm than Trump.

0:45:55 Michael: Well, and I'm not going to push back on that logic, but what I'm going to tell you is, is that logic will get us this exact same system over and over and over again. So you're not doing anything. If you're afraid of being too radical, well, then that's, you're not going to get anywhere. This country was formed on a revolution that was extremely radical. Well,

0:46:14 Thomas: Yeah, I agree, but I just don't think we're going to do that again. I mean, like, so maybe it's just, I don't, maybe I'm more cynical or maybe I don't know what it is, but I think we are very, I mean, we got what, 300 something million people in this country. If you want to sit here and say what we have to do is get like half of them to do something radical. Or I guess half the voters. I don't know. I don't know how you're going to do that. So like you can say that that's what needs to be done. But if you're saying like, like from my point of view and from, I think the perspective of what the system we're in, that's like saying, okay, we need to fly. Like we need like 50 people to just float in midair. And it's like, okay, that's not going to happen.

0:47:00 Thomas: So what can we do? Like, well, maybe we could build a ladder and try to like get up in midair. Nope. Sorry. That's the system. You can't do that. You know, like I just am not seeing any hope in what you're suggesting.

0:47:11 Michael: I think the trend lines say that there is hope just from the youth movement and what the youth learns from having the age of information at their fingertips from their entire lives. It's not that I'm saying, not that there's no solutions. I'm telling you, I think these solutions are extremely easy, that we stop buying into it and start educating people. So instead of saying, making the argument that it will be less harmful for Hillary, start making the arguments for what we're for and breaking down that system.

0:47:42 Thomas: Well, look at Hillary's platform and tell me that that wasn't good things to be for. Now, if you want to tell me that, oh, she's lying.

0:47:50 Michael: I'm going to tell you she's not going to do those things.

0:47:51 Thomas: Oh, okay. Well, then how do I know in 2020? How do I know when a candidate is just because you've decided she's not going to do the things she's promising? How do I know that? Like, and how do you know that?

0:48:03 Michael: You can't get to those positions without already being compromised. You are bought into the system full hook, line, and sinker to even get to that platform. That's the point. The answers are not in that platform, they're in us fighting, whether it's a local level or it's through education or it is through whatever skill we have, fighting for what we want and what we demand instead of fighting against what we're afraid of.

0:48:28 Thomas: Can you give me a firm example? Like, what do you mean? Like, what's an actual policy?

0:48:29 Michael: Okay. Right. So instead of everybody rallying for Bernie Sanders at a rally and not actually accomplishing something, go to your local community, find those issues and fight for it at home. For instance, I

0:48:46 Thomas: But that's what I said earlier. Isn't the optimal solution to not have a moron who surrounds himself with white supremacists in the White House but still do the things you're saying? Isn't the optimal solution to have someone who is trying to make incremental change versus trying to ruin our entire country and then still doing the things you're saying?

0:49:07 Michael: Would say, yes, if the caveat has to be that you're saying, look, we are swallowing a fucked up pill here. But we so we have to keep fighting the other thing and constantly challenging that. What I'm telling you is, is that the vast majority of the country who is standing up right now, if that face was doing the exact same policies was Hillary Clinton, they would be at home twiddling their thumbs.

0:49:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:30 Thomas: Well, I mean, you can say that, but I mean, that's not true. If Hillary comes in and institutes a Muslim ban, that's just not true. First off, it wouldn't happen. She's not doing the exact same policies. She's not doing a Muslim ban.

0:49:47 Michael: No, I said, if she did, I think we do things like, look, Obama locked up a ton of people for doing an exact offense that he admits to doing his entire life. But isn't he good that he released some of them right before he left eight years later? Well, he's in charge of it. He can easily order the rescheduling of cannabis for nonviolent drug offenders. He can't easily order those things to be stopped. But he chose instead to let everybody that did the exact same offense that he did, because they weren't as privileged as he was, to continue to rot in jails and have bail. He can change a lot of these things with the stroke of a pen. That's what I'm saying. Is that the exact same system? He deported more people on average than Trump has, like those kind of things. He killed half

0:50:01 Thomas: Yeah, the deportation thing is

0:50:43 Michael: As many people, civilians in Syria, on average per month. I mean, those are the kind of arguments we're having. Those are disgusting arguments. Okay.

0:50:43 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah.

0:50:53 Thomas: I guess I just disagree with that because there's a sense in which, yes, I want to be doing everything we can so that we're not in that position. But once you are in the position of you're at the fucking trolley problem, man, like once you were at that trolley and you've got five guys on one track and one guy in the other, you got to choose the one guy. Like, I mean, you're in that position. You can say all you want. Boy, I wish I wasn't in this position. Boy, our society should get rid of these trolleys. You know, like I agree and I will 100% agree with you, but you've got a trolley coming down the track. You're an asshole if you don't pick the one guy because you've just killed four unnecessary people.

0:51:31 Michael: Yeah, I understand that as a moral decision and you're taking it in isolation. We're dealing with a big system for an entire nation. So let me ask you this. Do you want less people to be killed by police officers in our country? Okay. So what reason would we have to believe that putting in Hillary Clinton would do more to kill less people than Barack Obama's administration?

0:51:46 Thomas: Absolutely.

0:51:59 Thomas: Then Barack Obama? I don't know. I think it wouldn't... No, I think I would put her as... I looked at Hillary as essentially continuing Obama's agenda, and some people disagree with me on that, but I think she would have essentially continued it.

0:52:12 Michael: Okay. Okay, so should we think then that that's a possible solution for police killing civilians?

0:52:18 Thomas: No, no, I agree. I don't think she would have been a solution for that. However, when you get Jeff Sessions in there, Jeff Sessions disbanded a bunch of these federal programs that were trying to investigate and actually count up the numbers of police killings. It is unequivocally true that electing Trump did more harm for police killings. It's not going to be perfect.

0:52:21 Michael: Right.

0:52:44 Thomas: Yeah, you're at that trolley, man. Yes.

0:52:42 Michael: No, negative. No, no, no. No, you're wrong. There have been 24 DOJ consent decrees that have done absolutely nothing to reform any of those cities. In fact, they've made most of them worse because they took the funds away and wasted them on neoliberal policies that will not work, that we will have the same, hold on, we will the same amount of people killed by the police under Trump as we do under Obama as we would under Hillary. It is this system, so if we were to fight for things that we care about, like police killing less people, then we have to go and fight for those things. That's all I'm saying.

0:52:48 Thomas: Okay.

0:53:24 Thomas: I agree. You're at the trolley, though. And first off, I have a different version of that. So I want, if you can give me some links, I would appreciate it or something so I can look into this. But from my understanding of it is, Obama, again, I don't think he was perfect on these issues, but he, at least with Eric Holder and what they were trying to do was, we don't even have an accurate count of how many people the police are killing. Like, would you agree with that? Like, we didn't even have an accurate picture of all these altercations.

0:53:52 Michael: No, that's a patent fact, but we do now because two newspapers have gone and done it and tracked it all out. But hold on.

0:53:56 Thomas: Well, But wouldn't you say it's unequivocally true that the federal programs that they instituted to try to actually track this are better than not doing that?

0:54:08 Michael: No, no, here's, you just, I'm telling you, you're being sold a line. These, the ID, he could have written with a stroke of a pen that all police departments had to have mandatory reporting to NCIC. It is a stroke. Of a pen, that he could've done those things for. He chose not to do them because all you're gonna get is rhetoric. You're not gonna get actual action. There's no committee that needs to be put together to order police departments to report how many people they kill. There isn't.

0:54:37 Thomas: Okay, I need to look into that more because I just don't know why he wouldn't have done that.

0:54:40 Michael: Executive orders are a stroke of a pen, bro. The same thing that makes Trump able to do all this.

0:54:44 Thomas: No, but executive orders have a limit. No, but executive orders have limited scope. You can't order anything as a president.

0:54:50 Michael: Yeah, because, yeah, you can. It's a policy change. All that is, is that police departments don't have mandatory requiring for police shootings to NCISC, but they have mandatory police requirements for anyone else that gets killed. It's policy change, it's four letters in a policy, I promise you. This is my field of expertise. Expertise.

0:55:07 Thomas: Well, that's fine. No, no, send me the information on this. Like, I want to look into this, but I was just disagreeing with the fact that you can't do whatever you want with an executive order. They have a limited scope. There's separation of powers. Like, you can't legislate from executive orders. That's just how it works.

0:55:20 Michael: Sure. That's what I'm saying. These are policies. These aren't laws. So these are things that are super easy.

0:55:23 Thomas: Okay, okay, okay. Okay, I see what you're saying. I might have misunderstood what you said. Okay. So, place where you and I disagree, and believe me, I take on a lot of what you're saying, and I hope you realize that. Like, I do want these changes that you're talking about. But I think that there's a very key part of it that you've even said is more local, is more being activists at our local level and fighting for these changes. I think the only place where we really differ is by saying that somehow we can't do both that and not have fucking Trump in the White House hiring Jeff Sessions to institute these racist policies. It just seems... That's obviously the optimal solution. But I do also think there's a lot of validity to what you're saying, which is when we've got someone we think is, you know, like on our side in the White House, then we think everything's fine.

0:56:18 Thomas: And then we think like, oh, okay, everything's being solved. And I think that's a very important message. And you're right about that.

0:56:23 Michael: It's the ally thing, and we should even start to address that word in a little bit. I think when we say to ourselves that we're allies with the LGBT community, that means we do things like we speak up on their behalf when we're around our family members, or we, we donate to one of their nonprofits. That isn't like really going to do anything. And you have to look at yourself as being somebody more of a comrade, somebody that's going to get on there, put risk, something of yourself to actually stand up for people instead of doing that like cookie cutter, weird saviorism thing. Actually go out there and fight for those issues and put yourself at risk. Don't just argue with your family members to stand for LGBT rights. Go out with with LGBT people that want you to help them and figure out what can you do to help them and serve whatever they they need.

0:57:15 Michael: That is true activism at a local level, not this idea of just handing out something or being the ally, like the ally is so dangerous. And that's what I see in the neoliberalism ideas. We accept that as allies. And I want to just be like allies are really dangerous concept.

0:57:52 Thomas: This behavior where you... Kind of do whatever you think is right and then say you're an ally, like, well, maybe you just did something that isn't actually helping that group, and you're kind of blinded by this motivation to to look like an ally when really it's not up to you to decide that, you know.

0:58:12 Michael: Yeah, that's one of those things that I'm seeing. So like the ego of the individual makes you kind of do those ideas for the myopic gratification of feeling good. But that doesn't actually serve that community, if that makes sense.

0:58:26 Thomas: Right, right. I think we, this is normally about when I come to a close on our podcast. I would say the last thing I would try out on you, because again, taking on board that I think you're totally right, and I think it is a big dangerous thing that when we have someone in the White House that we like, we think everything's fine. Taking that on board, I do think the biggest harm that can be done, some of the greatest, backwards momentum on a lot of these issues, that's really like permanent too, is in the Supreme Court. And I think that alone is a reason that we really needed to have a Democrat in the White House, because once we get one more justice going the other way, so one more retires, and flips, we're so fucked. Like we're just so screwed on a level that no amount of activism can fix.

0:59:16 Thomas: It's an irreversible thing for the most part without years of somehow turning the Supreme Court the other way, which takes decades, you know, if you get a bunch of young conservative justices in there like Trump will do. That is such a harm that I think you would need to factor into your calculus of like what does more harm or good.

0:59:37 Michael: Yeah, I mean, I do not have a hard position against you. It's just that it's super dangerous. And we have to be aware of that at all times, that the solutions are not in the system. System. There may be some band-aids in the system, but there are no solutions. So even if you've got the Democrat in there, that is only that temporary fix that you're arguing for with the president. It's still just that temporary thing. And we can, at a local level, my policing model is civilianledpolicing.org. So I'll throw that in there real quick. And Somebody can go in there and look at civilian-led policing, which is a way to circumvent all those things on a local level by taking control of your own police departments and using them as your army instead instead of the army of your mayor and your city council. But I think it would be great if maybe your listeners could find these arguments, and if they wanna dig into them specifically later on, I got no problem doing that.

1:00:08 Thomas: Sure, yeah. Sure.

1:00:32 Michael: And I love talking to you and pushing these issues. I really wanna talk about these things, and I feel like our community left us in a place where there's only a few of us that are willing to talk about things.

1:00:43 Thomas: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I really think the Supreme Court was a huge thing. And there's a difference. I take on your point, and I think you're right. And I certainly, I don't want to fight back against this. I take your point that getting a Democrat in there doesn't solve everything. And by no means am I making that claim. And I think you've pulled me a bit toward your side on that claim. You're

1:01:05 Michael: You pulled me towards just a little bit somewhere.

1:01:08 Thomas: Well, we're finding that middle position that's right by definition. No, I'm just kidding. But, I have to say that there... There's a difference between saying, okay, this won't solve anything, but there's also so much new future harm that having a Democrat in there keeps us from. I know you might not be making progress, but once you look at the downward trend that the Supreme Court could take us on and that Jeff Sessions and all these other people could take us on, maintaining that line starts to look a whole lot better than not. So that's why I think the optimum solution is... When you're given that trolley problem of Hillary or Trump or whoever the next candidate is, of taking the one that's going to do less harm, but then still being an activist on the local level. It seems like the optimal solution to me.

1:01:55 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Let's get this last thing in because I think this is important, maybe. So this is about lanes, right? So maybe we're at this.

1:01:59 Thomas: Go ahead, yeah. This is about what? Sorry, I didn't understand that word. What?

1:02:06 Michael: It's about the lanes of our activism. So maybe what we really need is we have somebody like me that's like, let's burn this bitch down and restart it. No, we must do it. And that allows people to say, I think we should probably listen to Thomas to listen to anybody. And then we win.

1:02:08 Thomas: Lanes. Oh, okay, sure, yeah.

1:02:21 Thomas: Oh, I see. We got to get somebody. You're like, yeah, get somebody over there, like the far, far side to kind of divert people. I get it.

1:02:30 Michael: Yeah, we'll play that game the other way. We'll move the center to the left by being like, oh, no, this would do was to burn shit down. I think I think Thomas's idea of pragmatic compromise would be a little bit better.

1:02:35 Thomas: Ooh, oh man, I'm sick and I'm coughing. Sorry, but that's funny. All right, man. Hey, and you pointed people to, what was it? Civilian policing or citizen? What was it?

1:02:51 Michael: Well, I call it is civilian led policing and their Twitter handle is at civilian led PD. And the website is civilianledpolicing.org. That's the model of my scholarly work to fix policing. And I really think it will work. It's just a matter of getting people to fight for it and actually installing it in their local area.

1:03:06 Thomas: And Right. And anything else you want to plug, feel free, man. I have no, you came and gave me an hour of your time. I'm happy to do it.

1:03:14 Michael: Well, the other main thing I do is Veterans Stand. And coming back from the Standing Rock movement in December, our big lesson there has been that it's a lot easier to mobilize than it is to organize. And we think that going forward, we need to focus a lot more on the ability to organize on a local level for veterans to give them something to do. And we noticed a tremendous amount of post-traumatic stress that I had underestimated the frequency of. And so now we're making a big movement to go ahead and try and address some of these PTSD issues with some doctors and counseling. And so if people are interested in helping us get that accomplished, we have a lot of puzzle pieces in place. We really just probably need money at this point in time. That's veterans-stand.org.

1:04:02 Thomas: Excellent. Thanks so much for coming on, man. I think it was a great discussion, and I'm always down for discussing the ideas. I think it's really important. Sorry, it just reminds me of more of the rant that we could have done against the stupid new centers. They're always like, oh yeah, freedom of expression, freedom of expression, and then they only have one side on the... They're in their biggest safe space. They are such...

1:04:24 Michael: Yeah, I know. Everyone that says something about a safe space is just begging and dying and crying to stay in their own safe space.

1:04:30 Thomas: Are absolutely in a safe space. It's a joke. All right, man. We'll get started on and do another half hour rant. No, Michael A. Wood Jr. Thanks so much for coming on and hope to talk to you again soon.

1:04:33 Michael: All right, brother. Thanks, Thomas.

1:05:07 Thomas: All right, interesting stuff. A lot to cover there. I think overall, I really do stand firm in that we need to be voting in the Democrat candidate in 2020, despite taking on a lot of the flaws of the Democratic Party and a lot of what Michael said about us being kind of too relaxed when someone we agree with is in the White House. I agree with that, I think that's good to point out, but the Supreme Court is really so vital. It is just so the harm that can be done is just so difficult to reverse that. I think any of those arguments that both sides are the same. Therefore, let's try to vote for third party. I mean, that just flies out the window for me because we cannot let more horrible Scalia molded justices be appointed that are like 25 years old.

1:05:57 Thomas: I mean, it's just it's going to create so much harm for so long. I'm also interested in some of the claims about what Obama could have done about police violence, that's very interesting to me, I'm going to try to talk to Andrew Torrez about that a little bit, maybe get his view, see if we want to do some sort of follow-up, interesting stuff there, it seems surprising to me that Obama wouldn't have done these things that would have been so easy for him to do, I just want to look into it and see what was the reality and the political reality of that situation.

Situation, uh, but really fun, so I think that was a really good conversation. I hope you guys agree. I really, uh, I'd love to hear your take on it, maybe give me some voicemails, call that number in the episode description, and if you give me a good voicemail, keep it short, you know, around a minute is ideal, don't try to cover too much, try to cut, you know, just make one point if you can and focus on it, uh, if you could do that, and and I can cover some of them on Thursday, I would love to get some some voicemails going on this topic. So thank you as always for listening. I will see you guys on Thursday.