SIO259: Hunter's Damned Emails

Transcript

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

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 259, I'm Thomas Smith, I think probably coming at you a little early, that's because I have some opinions about some things that I want to share, and that turns into a show, often times, okay, so, just me today, I wanted to talk about a couple things, I had this kind of, I don't know what to call it, this conundrum, this contradiction that I just couldn't, I didn't understand, and I kind of went through some research and I want to share it with you guys in case you're anything like me. So I'd seen this stupid Joe Biden email, Hunter Biden thingy. And obviously in the grand scheme, I don't give a shit. Obviously, you know, obviously it is not changing any, my vote shouldn't change any of your votes.

0:01:20 Thomas: You all should be voting for Joe Biden. I strongly, strongly, strongly urge people to do the right thing and vote for Joe Biden. No matter what, he's the better candidate. He's, there's so many, even today as we, especially today, rather, as we just get the headline that I saw here that we can't find like 595 of the parents of separated children. Just can't find them. Just whoopsie daisy mix up. Yeah, I still remember that. So remember that we separated children from their parents as a form of punishment, which is different than what Obama did, which was build facilities to house unaccompanied minors that came across the border. We can argue about how that went.

0:02:06 Thomas: We can definitely criticize the last administration. Fundamentally different to adopt a premeditated torture policy to separate children, infants from their parents as a way to punish them to scare other migrants from coming across the border. Fundamentally different. If you cannot see that that's fundamentally different, I don't know what to say. I mean, it's just staggeringly evil. It's awful. And that's just one of two billion things that we have to try to keep in our minds at all times. It really is staggering. I never would have known this coming into 2016 through today. I wouldn't have quite understood just what it feels like. I'm sure a lot of people didn't.

0:02:53 Thomas: Just what it feels like to be hammered with day after day, story after story that is just so horrifying that you can't keep it. Humans are not able to do that. We can't keep that all in our heads. We cannot properly keep all of the injustices that are going on and all the ways that this administration has made things worse. They didn't invent injustice. I'm not saying they're responsible for everything. A lot lot of things are just bad and we need, we need to get leaders in that are going to help fix things that are bad, independent of, of the whole Trump administration. Not to say that they have a monopoly on injustice or something, but the, the number of ways that they have made things worse and costs real human lives. It's just so hard.

0:03:39 Thomas: Even, even somebody like me, I've said it before, who is constantly reading, consuming all this stuff. It is hard to even put them into context. For example, I just read an article, I shared it, on Facebook, about Eugene Scalia, a really in-depth New Yorker article showing how much Eugene Scalia, who is maybe even worse than his dumb dad, who was really harmful, harmful, is just screwing over workers all over the place. Again, it's another example of what Republicans do. And this is more of a mainstream Republican. So this would be regardless of Trump. This would have been somebody who could have ruined lives under Mitt Romney or something going in there.

Apparently, Eugene Scalia's passion, is his reason for living, is to dismantle regulation that helps protect workers. And uh, so Trump put that guy in charge of things that should be protecting workers, which, which you would, it's about right. I mean, it's you, you would put, like, Trump would put the badgers in charge of protecting garbage cans or something, you know, like possums, whatever. I mean, that's that's what the administration has done. If there's a department that's meant to protect somebody, he puts in somebody whose life goal has been to destroy that department, the EPA, every single one, almost, just about.

I mean, the few that he put in that actually wanted to do good, according to how they saw it, by the way, not how I would see it, but people who actually care, Department of Defense and some other people, Mattis and those, they wanted to to do in their minds how they thought they're gone.

0:05:17 Thomas: The only people left over is very, very competent evil people who stayed around and negotiated having to kiss Trump's ass so that they could also dismantle the departments they've been put in charge of. Anyway, Eugene Scalia is one of those. Countless workers losing their lives because of him. OSHA not protecting who work in meat plants, anybody who might have died of COVID. If there's any time when we need to be be protecting workers, it would be when there's a pandemic and corporations are still trying to profit and to try to keep their bottom line exactly the same by sacrificing wave after wave of workers by working them in unsafe conditions. That would be the last time you'd want to dismantle protections for workers. But anyway, that's just yet another, yet another in the long, long list of reasons that obviously we need, we just need to put an end to this.

0:06:10 Thomas: Obviously we need to vote Trump out. Obviously we need to win the Senate so we can actually make change. If we fail to do either of those things, we are fucked. Nothing, nothing happens. We are fucked. There's a message. I've started every show with a message of how we have to do that. And we're fucked if we don't do that vote, please go out and vote. If you, if you're, you know, if you forgot to go to actually make the arrangements to vote, vote. Please form a plan to vote. We need to end this. Okay. So now that I've said that, I've been very curious about a contradiction of this story. Like at first I wasn't going to pay attention, you know, like whatever, Biden email, Burisma, yeah, whatever. You know, just making a jack off motion as I, because obviously it's nonsense. Giuliani is a rambling lunatic full of shit. But what kept happening was, and I honestly, I just don't, I don't care.

0:06:59 Thomas: I don't know why I pay attention. I don't care. What happened was I keep seeing these things where, where people are sharing the texts between Joe Biden and Hunter, you know, that are really heartfelt and Joe Biden being a good dad for his son who had an addiction problem, that kind of thing. And it just struck me. I was sitting there thinking, like, wait a minute, hold on.

I've been seeing these memes shared about how dumb the story is of how Rudy Giuliani got ahold of this laptop. Actually, maybe I should do that first. In case you haven't heard it, this is, is this is incredible, I, I cannot even, most of the time I don't know, some, some good percentage of the time when you see the ownage meme on Twitter, Facebook, whatever, that's like, oh, can you believe that Republicans are saying this, and da da da, usually there's some artistic license taken, you know, like maybe it exaggerates a little bit for the sake of pointing out the, for the, for, for the sake of the slam dunk, for the sake of pointing out the hypocrisy, I am staggered in that every single thing you have likely seen or heard about this idiotic fucking story of how Giuliani got this laptop, every fact that you've seen, from my research, is accurate. Like, it's all, and it's not disputed, like, it's just their story that they're telling. So, I'm staggered by this.

So, the story of how Rudy Giuliani gets a hold of a a Hunter Biden laptop, if you haven't heard this, buckle up, I'm even gonna read it from the, from the horse's mouth, from the shitty New York Post, corrupt as fuck news organization that ran this bullshit story. I, but I'll even, it's so bad that I can just read their words, I don't even have to, there's no spin on it, look at this, okay, here's the computer, the blockbuster correspondence, they call it.

0:08:48 Thomas: Uh, the computer is quote from the New York post shitty article, uh, you know, from now six days ago about how they found this smoking gun of a laptop. The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden's home state of Delaware in April, 2019, April, 20, 19, not 2020, 20. I mean, this is what a year and a half ago. Now that's actually when Arlo was born. I should know that. So that's how old Arlo was. So right around that time, year and a half, that guy is. Anyway, dropped off. That all wasn't in the article. I added some of those words. Okay, back to the article, so Homestead, Delaware in April, 2019, according to the store's owner, other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy 12 minute video that appears to show Hunter, who's admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaging in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other explicit images.

0:09:42 Thomas: Footage. So, side note, we haven't seen that, that hasn't been released, that's just according to the New York Post, you from their source, which is surprise, surprise, probably just Giuliani himself, horribly sourced article, irresponsible, never should have been published. I feel like if they had that footage, they probably would have released it, but maybe not, who knows, it's not impossible. Anyway, okay, back to the article, here we go, this gets great. "The customer who brought in the water damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client. The shop owner couldn't positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter's late brother and former Delaware Attorney General."

0:10:39 Thomas: "Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to the Post show that both the computer and the hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop's owner says he alerted the feds to their existence." Oh, here's a little bit more. "But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, Robert Costello." Okay, I think that's enough. Yeah, so this is the story. Everything you've seen about, like, how dumb this story is, we are to believe that Hunter Biden went and dropped off a laptop with all this personal, like, incriminating information, dropped it off at a computer repair shop, and presumably left some contact info, you know, to like, or would have had to, under this theory, would have had to leave some contact, contact info, a name or whatever, a phone number, email.

0:11:35 Thomas: But then still the shopkeep says he can't identify Beau Biden. And this is absolutely true, I know you've seen this. And in case you were wondering if there's any hyperbole, the shop owner is legally blind. So, like, but swears it was Hunter Biden, and also the, you know, the laptop has a Beau Biden sticker on it. So, yeah, I mean, gotta be, gotta be true, there it's only one explanation for that. And so Hunter left it there, just never came back. Okay, how could you possibly believe that to be a true story? And then, but furthermore, the shop owner, I guess, he must have been, uh, I'll say this about the shop owner, apparently could fix the water damage that allegedly was there, so must have done that, and then just go surfing through all the private things? Like, would that, do you, would that not be password protected?

0:12:29 Thomas: You know, like if I drop off my laptop somewhere, you know, I assume I'm a pretty knowledgeable computer guy, but I'm not I'm not a boomer, but I'm also not like a person who's going to hack any mainframes or anything like that. So I guess I don't know everything but like if I drop off my laptop tomorrow for water damage, they, they can fix the water damage without having my login, you know, and then they can know that they fixed it by just not, or, you know, or if I drop it off at the Mac store probably, and then they would want to like, usually they have you log in while you're there or something. But this, this part where he's going to fix the water damage and then, you know, also hack into the computer, like, or either it was somehow left without a password protection with Hunter knowing there was like explicit images on there.

0:13:21 Thomas: Like how, how, how there's, there's just no way. I mean, there there's no way that that's true story. It's not possible. No, no smart person would believe that. No dumb person should believe that only people who are politically motivated to believe it would believe it. And so here's the, here's The Quandary. I kept seeing that. I keep seeing that story shared. And was like, well, well, that is obviously absurd. There's no, there's no way that's true. That can't possibly be true. And furthermore, you know, there is all this stuff about like Twitter has blocked the sharing of that article. I think temporarily, I think they later might have gone back on that, but that struck me as, okay, so this is totally made up. Like this is so made up and stupid that even Twitter, who is run by somebody who's kind of right wing adjacent, thought it a good idea to block it.

0:14:10 Thomas: But then we also get the part where they're sharing the texts that are, you know, this heartfelt exchange between Hunter and Joe Biden. And that's being shared by people on the left as, like, oh, Giuliani did a thingy, and all they got to show for it was that Hunter Biden's, or Joe Biden's, a good dad. Geez, I went through all three names. I'm truly becoming a dad where I have to go through every name in the household before I get the one that I'm trying to think of, uh, that Joe Biden's a good dad. And so I'm sitting here thinking, like, wait a minute, I thought this was all fake. And I don't know, it's not clear to me that people were alleging these were fake, you know, like, these seem to be real. And furthermore, reading them, I, I could not possibly believe that these were faked by Giuliani, or, you know, like, or Russians or something.

0:15:02 Thomas: I don't, it's, they're too real. I don't really, I mean, maybe, maybe they could be fake, but also why, why, why would they be faked if they were going to fake something, fake something worse? It just, it just struck me that these couldn't be fake texts. And you know, and people are sharing them as, "It look what a good dad Joe Biden is." Uh, they're sharing them as though they're real. And so what's happening? How could they both be a total bullshit story but also had real stuff? And so I posted about this on Facebook and I was just like, all right, I don't want to. I still was resistant to even researching this because I just don't care. But eventually I had to. So I was just too curious. And I was just saying like, hey, if anybody already knows the answer to this, how could we both these things be true?

0:15:48 Thomas: How could we Both say this story is nonsense of how they got this laptop that makes no sense. And also here's these real texts and a bunch of unhelpful people. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be too insulting about this. Hundreds of unhelpul people said, ah, you see, they always put in real stuff with the fake stuff just to make it seem real. Like, okay, that is not helpful. The question is, how did they get the real stuff? Like, where did they Get these, these real texts? And if the story about how they got this laptop is so bullshit, where do they also then get real texts, intimate texts between Hunter and Joe Biden? And, you know, like, so what, what gives there? And I think people are so resistant to this and I get it because I was too. I just don't want It's so dumb and it's obviously bullshit that I haven't really looked into it.

0:16:38 Thomas: But people are also I think they're really paranoid and they're really I don't know what the right word is. I think there are a lot of people who are very understandably trying to minimize this as much as they can, which I would be, too. But I'm you know, I'm sitting here talking to you. I know we're not we're not voting for Trump. I'm not a I'm not the New York Times like having to present an unbiased thingy. I know this is bullshit.

I know we're voting for Biden. I just want to know how did they get real text like that strikes me as huge story. What is this? Did they get hacked? Did somebody get hacked. I don't know. I asked this and someone suggested that there was some sort of hack. So I guess that's the answer. And the answer to all of this, must be, there is a news story I found about, yeah, January 2020 here, that says Russians hacked Ukrainian gas company at center of impeachment. Impeachment, and this is just a guess, but it must be that somewhere along the line, there was a real hack here, and it could be this one, could be that, you know, because nobody disputes, Hunter did work for Burisma for, you know, in 2014 or whatever, I mean, that's real, seems stupid, I'm not a huge fan of that, like, he probably shouldn't have done that, seems like he, he was utilizing his name to get paid way too much, but like, Like, you know, Trump literally employs all his children to jobs they're not legally able to do, like breaking the law.

Clear as Kushner. That's why we have that saying on Opening Arguments is clear as Kushner, that Kushner should not be in there doing anything. It's illegal. We made it illegal, but they're just, they ignore it.

0:18:20 Thomas: So again, context, uh, or rather perspective, I guess is the word I want, to like, this doesn't, this doesn't matter in the election. The the end result is Biden needs to be elected, Trump needs to be walked out of the fucking White House, that's that's clear. But I'm still curious as to what's going on here. It sounds like I maybe that hack, but still, how would they've gotten hold of a laptop? I'm really curious. It seems as though the way the facts are that somebody must have gotten a hold of Hunter Biden laptop. So maybe it got stolen, maybe it gets stolen and hacked and I, I just, I can't find anything about this. Like I, again, the closest I found was this New York Times article saying Russians hacked Burisma. Maybe that would be a way they'd get ahold of these files.

0:19:06 Thomas: I feel like even if, you know, Hunter did work for Burisma, how would they get, well, how would a hack result in them having these files of his? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. They seem to clearly be based on a laptop because they are emails and they are like iMessage, you knows, backups or whatever. That's how some of them are texts and some of them are emails. Those are both things that you would get off of someone's laptop. I guess if you were able to crack into it or get the password or something, you'd be able to access those things. I guess I want to know, are these texts fake? There's only two explanations. The texts are fake and therefore everything's fake.

0:19:48 Thomas: Or there is some real source of information and we fucking know it is not the Giuliani story. We know that is bullshit. There's no way that that is how he actually got the laptop. That's fucking stupid. But it seems as though maybe he did get his hands on a laptop that was Hunter Biden's. I can't get to the bottom of that. I'm curious if anybody knows. That should be a bigger deal, I would think, because, you know, and I know some people are asking Giuliani if he's working with a Russian spy and he's like, oh, it's 50-50. Who knows? Can you keep track anymore more of who's a Russian spy and who I'm working with and who I'm not. But yeah, so anyway, that was the conundrum. The answer seems to be that, you know, Giuliani is in all likelihood working with Russians.

0:20:33 Thomas: That's the only way unless someone else stole a laptop and, gave it to Giuliani who then crafted this idiotic story of how he got a hold of it. That part I think is true. I think we can be relatively certain that however Giuliani got ahold of this laptop, which it seems like, maybe he did get a hold of a real Hunter Biden laptop. However he got a hold of it, this story is bullshit. So, I guess that's part we don't know. Was he probably working with Russians to get it? Boy, don't I sound like a crazy person? But what is the other possibility? Is it, you know, like, either it's all fake or he has a source of some of the real stuff and that source is probably from Russian hackers, I would imagine. So, anyway, that was the process and I'm still befuddled by it. I'm so confused. I still don't get it.

0:21:20 Thomas: I don't know why we don't know this. But further note on the alleged email. This is fantastic. So this is another level of bullshit that we can be quite certain of. As much as, you know, maybe Giuliani got a hold of some real stuff here, like a handful of real things, this alleged email is so good. The alleged email that's supposed to be the smoking gun of emails. It is fantastic. Here, I'll read it to you. Ready? It just says, from Vadim Pazarsky, subject meeting for coffee, April 17th, 2015, to Hunter Biden. Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together. It's really an honor and pleasure. As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for quick coffee.

0:22:09 Thomas: What do you think? I could come to your office somewhere around noon or so before on my way to airport. Best V.

0:22:19 Thomas: That's the alleged email. It's only one side. When you think like, oh, there's alleged emails between Hunter and some Russian guy in Burisma or whatever the hell it's supposed to be. Burisma's number three exec, allegedly. You would think that would mean something like, I don't know, Don Jr. saying if it's in November or October or whatever it was, I love it. You know, like something like that, like an actual smoking gun, which is Don Jr. saying, yes, please, let's collude. Let's conspire to win this election for my dad. Something like that. This is just an email that, by the way, has no metadata, no header information, nothing that can be verified by anyone else, which is why this is obviously a stupid fucking fake story. At least, you know, especially this email.

0:23:06 Thomas: It's just a picture of a one-sided email. It might as well say, from bad guys to Hunter Biden, hey Hunter, how's your summer, mine was good, but we really need your dad to do some bad guy things, so thanks for introducing us to your dad and making him do all those bad guy thing, that was great coffee, thank you, best, bad guy. Like you might as well say that. It doesn't, you can type anything and and put it in this format that makes it look, look like in the email, 200 bytes. They couldn't even fake a hundred byte an email back. You know, that's like, yeah, if it's, if it's, what'd you say, I love it, especially later in the summer, that's the quote, I had to look it up. Now that's a smoking gun, but no, they didn't even fake that.

0:23:54 Thomas: And just one last time for the record here, in case you aren't familiar, the whole Burisma thing. Again, I do think there's, you know, the ordinary level of nepotism or, you profiting based on one's name or whatever with Hunter Biden. I don't think that was good. But there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong.

0:24:15 Thomas: He, like all of the Western hemisphere, essentially, pressured Ukraine to get rid of this prosecutor because he wasn't prosecuting the founder of Burisma. It's the opposite of what they say. It's it's so obvious, I mean isn't it always the opposite of what they say with these things, they, they were, they were, they wanted to fire the prosecutor because he wasn't prosecuting enough, he wasn't going after this founder of Burisma named Zlochevsky enough. That's why the whole administration and a bunch of our allies all wanted this prosecutor gone, because he wasn't doing enough. It wasn't, there's no scandal here, makes no sense, anyway, okay, so we've covered that. Um, so that's a weird story.

0:25:01 Thomas: I still, I still don't get it. Um, but, but I just want to take a moment to share again. I know I've, I've harped on it on the show a little bit. Um. But in case I didn't drive home the message of how big a piece of shit Glenn Greenwald is, uh, he's gotten worse. I didn't know it was possible, but he actually has gotten worse here. Let me play a clip. Take a guess what show this would be on, you know, like just before I play it for you. I mean, let's see, could it be 60 Minutes, Meet the Press, just some CNN segment, you know, Don Lemon? Oh, no, that's right, it's Tucker Carlson's Racist White Power Hour, uh, as always. And let's take a listen to Glenn Greenwald on this particular story. I

0:25:43 Clip: The response by the media and particularly by the so-called Intel community strikes me as much more threatening to America than anything on this laptop. Do you think that's an appropriate response to what we're watching? I couldn't agree more, Tucker. First of all, Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I have seen in all of my time covering politics and journalism. He just fabricates and accusations at the drop of a hat the way that other people change underwear, where he's simply lying when he just asserts over and over that the Russians or the Kremlin are behind this story. He has no idea whether or not that's true. There's no evidence to support it. And what makes it so much worse is that the reason the Bidens aren't answering basic questions about this story, basic questions like, did Hunter Biden drop that laptop off at that repair shop?

0:26:36 Clip: Are the emails authentic? Do you deny that they are? Do you claim any have been altered or any of them fabricated. Did you, in fact, meet with Burisma executives? Yes. The reason that they don't answer any questions is because the media has signaled that they don't have to, that journalists will be attacked and vilified simply for asking.

0:26:57 Thomas: Mean, what, what, what, in the age of Donald fucking Trump, you're really going to make a statement that Adam Schiff is the most pathological. This is a quote. "Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I've seen in all my time covering politics and journalism." You're going to make that statement in 2020? Are you out of your fucking mind?

0:27:27 Thomas: This is a joke. What is wrong? Also, like, you know, I don't spend a lot of time listening to Glenn Greenwald. Does he always sound like this? Is there something wrong with him? Like, what's the explanation for this? I guess I did a whole part of an episode on that. I'm still confused. This whole episode can just be, I'm confused, what's happening, why, what, you go on Tucker Carlson with this bullshit. Yeah.

Oh, I really need to know, did Hunter Biden drop off a laptop at a repair shop of apparently a, like, a good friend of Rudy Giuliani's, who would take his laptop and turn it over and copy the hard drive, give it to Giuliani and the FBI, and also never tried to pick up the laptop. Yeah, yeah, that's a hard-hitting question the journalists need to be asking. Did you do that? No, he didn't fucking do that. That's stupid. There's no chance he did that. So anyway, Greenwald's piece of shit, um, he's awful, he's a fascist enabler, he's a racist enabler, and that's just a fact, and maybe he did some good work in the 2000s or something, but he fucking sucks. I cannot even believe that clip. I don't even believe how bad he's gotten. It's, it's, wow. I mean, Tucker Carlson with that nonsense in 2020. Gosh, unreal. So, okay, other story I want to talk about. This is a tough one.

Um, I guess, you know, content note, you knows, there was a brutal attack in France I'm going to talk to about. Just have a lot of questions about, well, we'll see. I mean, I just, I don't know what to think, but I know a few things I want to not think anyway. So there was an attack by, you know, I, I dunno what the best way to describe this is, a Muslim with radical views.

0:29:10 Thomas: And it's not just one person, this was apparently planned and carried out by at least nine people who have been arrested. Uh, this was an attack on somebody, a teacher in France who had shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class, and this person was, again, content note, uh, for violence, if you, if you want to skip here, but this person was actually beheaded on the street.

I don't want to know the details, I don't, how that's even possible, I can only assume, I, when I first saw it was a beheading, I would assume they'd have to be like abducted or something, but apparently not, was just, was beheaded in this, in the street, I don't even know how you do that, I don't want to know, but anyway, it's horrifying, definitely horrifying, horrifying.

Um, they showed, you know, cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in class, and you know, not that it matters, but I think it's worth at least saying this. Wasn't somebody who, like, was on a quest to offend people and showed some cartoons. Um, from the accounts I'm seeing, this teacher was teaching about free speech and and gave a heads up to any Muslims in the class that they could leave for this part if they wanted to, and then showed cartoons. I believe it might've been teaching about the Charlie Hebdo attack, that, gosh, can you believe that was five years ago?

And then, so what happened was one of the students was, you know, very unhappy about this, and they're, I think the student's parent was trying, trying to like rile up other Muslims about this, posted a video about how angry they were about it. And one way or the other, it led to like a number of people being involved in this plot to like kill this teacher, which an 18 year old was the killer.

0:31:01 Thomas: And so I saw that the other day, and first thing I wanted to say is like right before this, I just tweeted, and I was, I meant to mention this on the show. I just kind of had the realization about, I don't know, two weeks ago or something.

I was just thinking, like, you know, you don't hear the, you know, atheist assholes and intellectual dark web assholes, and people like Sam Harris, and Dawkins, and all, and the only people left, you know, still, still saying stuff out of that movement, you don't really hear them talk about radical Islam much anymore, not that they never talk about, but they're, like, they shifted, they, it's, it's almost like they shifted villains, you know, a lot of their reactionary stuff back in 2016 and before, around that time, like when Sam Harris first started really saying problematic stuff, oh, I guess it goes back longer than that, but anyway, the, the target was always Islam, and that, there, there was this stupid idiotic theory that it's almost justifiable. Now, again, I'll accurately represent Sam Harris. He didn't vote for Trump. I don't know what he plans to do this time. I think he still plans to not vote for Trump, last I heard, but I don't spend much time listening to him anymore, so I don't know.

But anyway, I listened to him in 2016, he didn' vote for him, he, he came out pretty strong against Trump, but he, and then some other people took it further, would leave this door open to, how, well, you know, when the left is just totally out of their minds about this issue, then it leaves the right with, with an opening, you know, because the theory was, if you don't say the magical words, radical Islamic terror, as Trump said, then that, that somehow, like, once you say those words, it solves the problem.

0:32:43 Thomas: And if you do not say them, then you are just enabling terrorism or something. I mean, it is such a simplistic, stupid way. Now, are there, you reasonable criticisms sometimes of people on the left excusing things they shouldn't because of religion? Yes, I will answer my rhetorical. I think that does happen. I think people often do give too much leeway to bigotry or really sexist attitudes or stuff like that because the people who have them, you know, have some sort of religion or are otherwise in like a marginalized group. So sometimes they get excused a little bit. Yeah, that can happen a little bit. It's a, not a good thing. It's something we should push back against to a certain extent. There's also a fine line between wanting to push back against that and engaging in outright racism and bigotry and stuff that Sam Harris eventually started doing regarding Islam and also scaremongering.

0:33:42 Thomas: And this is why I'm bringing this up. The scaremonering about Islam. I remember reading this in his book and I'm glad that I was reading other people with better information, but Sam Harris made some insane claim in his book about how, like, France would be taken over by Muslims in 50 years. Just this obviously wrong statistic about population growth and how, you know, something that found its source was just this deeply racist book. And his apology was like, oh, yeah, bad source. Sorry. Like, what?

Anyway, so while so they changed one bad guy, which was, uh, radical Islam, they sort of substituted that out and then changed in critical race theory, and then that's their new bad guy, that's our new, like, villain, and what's funny, and by funny I mean in a depressing way, is they didn't really change a whole lot, like, that still, oh, you know, who's ruining the enlightenment values, you know, is coming for your enlightened values, you're anti-free speech, they're, they're hordes of critical race theorists are coming to take away your enlightenment values, they pretty much just stenciled it in, you know, just like, just substituted critical race theory or the woke or the, you know, name whatever, but antifa, like, they, it, I just realized the other week, like, wow, that was a, a smooth transition, and that's all they talk about now, pretty much, that's just 24/7, James Lindsey, I'll talk about it with

0:35:13 Thomas: With my friend Aaron, uh, coming up hopefully next episode, assuming scheduling works out, um, you know, James, let's see, yeah, I'm not gonna talk about here, we'll talk about it, but but yeah, but people like him are just full-on, then I'll just, every day, oh, look at this critical race theorist and what they did, so they scaremonger about that and enlightenment values. And that as a reason to somehow, like, voting for Trump or Republicans is somehow going to fix all that. Because what we've seen is Trump doesn't fix any of that. He says the magic words, radical Islamic terror, and then nothing's fixed. So everything's the same. But we just, like, what became undeniable was the fact that right wing terrorists are such a huge, much bigger threat in this country. And that, I think that, you know, to the point where you don't, I don't remember the last time we've had anything in this country, any attack, any anything that's at all related to Islam.

0:36:05 Thomas: So I think, this is a better villain for them to have for their purposes, to be able to just harp on the students who are, you know, the young people who are doing doing Antifa Antifa things and coming for the suburbs and all this bullshit. So I noticed that and I thought it was kind of interesting. I tweeted about it. And then I see this story, you Know, that that happened now, I guess, four days ago. This teacher in Paris. And, um, I instantly was worried again know, that this is going to open, open the doors for more anti-Muslim bigotry kind of thing. But here's, here's what I want to say. I mean, I, I I'm struggling to find the correct way to deal with this in my own mind. Now, part of the problem is this happened in Paris, I don't know anything about, I can't I've been to Paris.

0:36:52 Thomas: It was amazing. I loved it. But I don't know anything about France. I don't know anything about much, you know, much more than a couple things I've read about the current situation. I remember Marine Le Pen losing last time and that she was the big right wing kind of threat to Macron.

You know, I remember I have a surface level knowledge of that, but I couldn't tell you much about France, but I wanted to talk about it as though like if this had happened in the United States, because I think when you see an attack like this, my God, a high school teacher killed, murdered in a gruesome way for merely teaching about free speech. That's obviously horrible. One million percent horrible.

But a process of letting go of some of people like Sam Harris and those people who I think are just in the business of scaremongering about Islam. As I look at Twitter right now on this topic, you've got the usual suspects, scaremongering, fearmongering. Are those both acceptable? Either way. Claire Lehman, Richard Dawkins, Andy Ngo, Fox News. I'm just looking down at the top tweets regarding this. They're all, oh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That's just a big one.

0:38:08 Thomas: They are all using this to fearmonger about Islam and about, you know, and here's another thing I should have said. The person who killed the teacher was, was the child of refugees, entered France as a refugee. And so, you know, this is something to contend with in 2021. If we if I have my way and I assume Biden will will do this, I want to open our doors to lots and lots of refugees. And also from places that we've made worse, by the way. But, but not just that, just anywhere. You know, I, I want us to be the country of refugees. I want us to actually live the values of bring me your hungry, you're tired or whatever. I would, that, that sounds awesome. I, that I want, I wish we could go back to being that and having, you know, people who want to make a better life for themselves coming here, that kind of thing.

0:39:03 Thomas: We deal pretend, assume this happened in the United States, which, you know, it could, I'd, hopefully, will never, but, like, yeah, I mean, there have been, there have been a few attacks here by Muslims, uh, obviously 9/11, but I mean, even after that, like, they're, they're attacks by people who lived here, they're shootings and stuff, so, like, how do we deal with this, how do we contend with the fact that, like, yeah, occasionally there's going to be a high profile horrible gruesome thing in the name of a religion, but then also not turn into fear-mongering anti-Muslim bigots. And wonder, so France has started to just, they're saying they're going to expel a bunch of people because of this. They're going expel, like, hundreds of, it says, France moves to expel 231 allegedly radicalized foreigners.

0:39:50 Thomas: Oh, that's a Fox News headline. So, hence the bad, bad wording, but, after brutal murder. And I, you know, I, I'm a little, I, I'm a little worried about this. I don't want it to go the other way. And then all of a sudden, you, people are getting attacked for just the color of their skin, or looking like they're, by the way, largely Sikhs who get attacked for people thinking they're Muslims. You know, that kind of thing. It's horrible.

You look at the backlash, you look at what happened with the Iraq War. Like, what happened to Muslims was far, far worse by orders of magnitude than what happened to Americans on 9/11. You know, it's just pure math. Um, so many more Muslims lost their lives because of what we did after that than than Americans were ever threatened by terrorism, but at the same time, I want to come out strongly and say free speech is important, and not in the stupid free speech way that conservatives say, that this is terrible, no, we, we should be able to do things like show cartoons in an educational context to teach about something and then not worry that we're going to be murdered for it, like, yeah, doy, of course that's awful, and it, I would go so far as to say, like, if we're, you know, screening refugees for who we want to allow in, there could be some views that are not, not compatible with being allowed in the country.

Like, if you believe that someone should, like, seriously, if you believe someone should be killed for showing a picture of a person, then, yeah, like, no, you can't come here.

0:41:31 Thomas: That doesn't make sense. But then, do, am I, wait am I turning into Trump? This is why I'm very confused. I'm trying to figure out where to, where to exist in this and how to think about it. Because I, on the other hand, I think there are Christian nationalist views that are in the higher ups and the, you know, places of power that, that people have right now in government that are not compatible with our society, I don't think they should be here, you know, there are people who seem to think that, you know, you shouldn't be able to get an abortion or even birth control or any of that, you're like, that's not compatible with our, but then I guess because there's more of them, then that's looked at as like, well, okay, OK, but, you know, we got to sort that out politically, you know, whereas when it's people who are like a different skin tone, then it's very easy, I think, for humans to be like, well, now, keep them away.

0:42:20 Thomas: It's, I just wonder if fundamentally humans are not able to contend with things like this, like terrorist attacks like this. Which, when, don't want to sound callous, when you get down to it, this is a murder, murder, this is a murder, and especially in our country, murders happen every day, all the, all day every day, and so on one hand you're like, well, this is, uh, murder, or how do you have a proper reaction to a murder, how do you put that in the proper, but on the other hand, like, it's so hard as humans, human beings, to take something like this and look at all it means, you know, oh, this means these people want to kill us, and the, that kind of thing, you know, it's like, where do you, you find the, the, the right approach to that, to where, like, no, I, I want to make absolutely clear that you stand for, that we can't stand for the idea that there's any possibility that a teacher who showed a cartoon was in any way wrong or should get murdered, you know, like, I want to leave zero room for that.

But at the same time, I just did a Google search, folks, it's not something I want to have to search, but just for an example of like how bad we are at perspective, I just searched just for fun. Not fun exactly, but just to see. I was like, well, I'm going to search United States and decapitation just to, you know, it's big country, I imagine something.

And wouldn't you know it, first result is exactly what I'm talking about. Exactly the problem here, which is perspective. Because here's what, here's the first thing that came out, 2019, April, oh, right around the time Hunter Biden was dropping off his laptop at the repair pear shop. April 2019, partially decapitated woman lay on an apartment floor.

0:44:00 Thomas: Police have arrested a man who knew her. Now you'll forgive that this is a partial decapitation. I, you know, I don't think that should matter, but I was just curious, like many, what other things happen that are just in the background noise that we don't know? And then we only about these things. When we see a big headline about a teacher being decapitated by a Muslim, then, then our brain does all these things, you know, like, oh, my God, we have these people we got to get. And France is displaying that right now, like they're expelling people. And and by the way, maybe there are radicals that absolutely should not be, you know, in that country. I don't know where they're going. Like, I don't where they can exist and be OK. I feel like the attitude of I'm going to murder someone is a problem anywhere. But whatever. Set that aside. You know, maybe it's correct that they are expelling some people, anyone who was like involved in this plot or knew about it or all that stuff, they should be arrested.

0:44:52 Thomas: Of course, they're involved in a plot to murder. But I wanted to highlight like what things go unnoticed and what things do we give incredible attention to? And here it is. I mean, I just search it. This is not even that long ago, a year and a half ago, woman is decapitated by a man here, partially decapitated and killed by a man in a domestic, quote unquote, domestic violence. And that's a perfect illustration because domestic violence is something that is just in the background noise of the country. Like nobody's talking about expelling men, you know, like, well, clearly we can't have men in this country. That doesn't, no one, you know? Like I just read a book on domestic violence recently and it's really horrifying.

0:45:41 Thomas: Let me grab that title for you. Oh yeah. No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder. A read. I'd recommend it, but, you know, it's also hard to read, obviously. But, you yeah, men are a huge problem. I don't know what else to do but chuckle. But that's the whole point here. Like, by the way, we just stopped a terrorist plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. You know, like, and we don't have the reaction. And again, I guess it's because enough of these people are in power in our country. And they are of the demographic that is a majority demographic, men wouldn't be, but white. And I know that's changing every day. And eventually white people won't be a majority. But like, I guess that's the answer. Like when it's people of a majority demographic, then they have the privilege of just being looked at like, ah, jeez, look at these crackpots planning to kidnap the governor.

0:46:32 Thomas: You know, and it's not like a casual plot, like they had guns, training videos, you know, like, and there isn't a reaction of like, dear God, we got to expel these, everybody they talk to, you know, everybody in their circles, everybody who remotely would have enabled this, we got to get them out of this country, send them somewhere else. That doesn't happen. You, woman decapitated by man, because, don't know what do you say, there's no, because, because of toxic masculinity, all the worst things you know about men in this country, like we don't look at that as like, or society, I say we, I mean, like, society doesn't look at that is like, holy shit, let's, what are we doing here, how do we fix all this? That's looked at as like background noise, but a high-profile terrorist attack.

0:47:19 Thomas: So I, I, and I just worry, like, are we just unable as humans to properly put things in the right context and the right priority level? So I don't, I know that was, I'm sorry if that was a weird, um, haphazard thought process, but that's a reflection of how I feel. Like, I don't, I don't know what the answer is here. Cause in France there's, you know, people are marching like everybody. This is a huge thing.

0:47:46 Thomas: And maybe it should. Should it be? Maybe, I guess. But then, then I worry. Then I just flash back to after 9-11, when it's like, all of this uniting around a common enemy and maybe losing track of, OK, in the end, what are we talking about here? Now, 9-11 was a big deal, but it did not justify going to war against an unrelated country and killing millions of people. You know, like, I'm just worried. So that's my disjointed thought process about this. I'm curious for your thoughts, if you have any. Um, doing my, I want to do my best to keep things in perspective while still standing up for secular values and and and get free speech values and things like that and finding that balance. I, I, I can't turn to Sam Harris for that. I can't turn to Ayaan Hirsi Ali for that, because we know what they're going to do, fear monger.

0:48:40 Thomas: Um, sell reactionary bullshit, fear, all that kind of, and, and I, I don't stand for that. So what's the actual right answer? And it's tough, it's hard, maybe you don't think it's hard. I don't. All right, let me know your thoughts, I'm curious, email, voicemail, whatever, you know, Patreon comments, whatever it is, I'm, I'm curious what you think about all this. Thanks so much for listening, hope you got something out of this. Hey, please support the show on Patreon. Patreon.com slash SeriousPod. Please do so, if you like it, help it continue to happen. Thanks so much to my patrons, and thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.

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