 May 40 here I was just reading the Atlantic magazine this morning and had an article on Christianity that grabbed my attention. So it talks about a less religious America is a more polarized America. So in some times and places and circumstances right more Christianity will lead to a more polarized situation other times and circumstances and places less Christianity will lead to a more polarized situation but this particular professor Daniel Williams writes in the Atlantic today that a less religious America a less Christian America will be a more polarized America and that declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and even more stridently Christian nationalist. So about half a Christian nationalist according to this article which will never go to church. The wave of states bending during their affirming care this year the adoption of proud Christian nationalists and identity by politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Green even markets t-shirts with that slogan. It's not what many people might have expected at a time when church attendance is declining. So for many people Christianity is simply a way of expressing their identity. It says you know who I am where my loyalties lie it doesn't actually mean church attendance. So with people like Nick Fuentes and a lot of other people on the distant right Christianity is a much more attractive marker for the type of politics that they want to pursue than something that is more explicit say a racial nationalism going on. So people hold on to their politics when they stop attending church liberal Christians in the northeast they stay liberal when they drop off their churches membership roles conservative Christians in Alabama and Indiana stay conservative even when they're no longer part of a congregation. In fact people become even more entrenched in their political views when they stop attending church services. So churches have a reputation in some circles as promoting hyper politicization but they can also be depolarizing institutions because being part of a religious community it forces you to get along with other people including those with different political views and it will often channel your efforts into charitable work or forms of leadership or volunteering within the church that have little to do with politics when you leave the church community that removes often those moderating forces and it opens the door to more extreme forms of politics and nationalism. So Christian nationalism attracts at least 50 percent of the adherence to Christian nationalism almost never go to church themselves and so without church community which in many cases is acted as a moderating effect on people's politics politics has become much more extreme. Okay we've got a clip here from Gavin McGinnis and Anthony Camilla what the left doesn't understand about race relations. You would understand about racism the whole like one drop thing yeah which is that it's the basis for American racism and it's why we're talking about it every day in America it's based on the one drop theory which is Kamala Harris, Salman Rushdie, Ben Carson, ghetto blacks like Kay what's his name in the South Bronx Kay Flock who just killed someone in the rival housing. They're all the same two racists yeah right right so the reason Kamala Harris is a black VP even though her formative years were spent in Montreal and her mother's Indian her black dad was around and even her black dad was a plantation owner his family owned slaves reason those people can all pretend to be fucking young Wayne whatever his name is Lil Wayne is because died in the world racist followed the one drop theory yeah but the problem with that theory is and it's a theory yeah and it's it's the backbone of American discourse today uh no one thinks that no one really I mean 17 people 17 people in Mobile Amabama there might be an old 90 year old man yeah well you bring over Kamala Harris and he's in his chair and he looks like he's from Tales from the Crypt yeah yeah well look here and you're like dad she's a lawyer or sorry great-granddad she's a lawyer she she went to school in Montreal she's the vice president of the United States I don't care what the fuck I'm gonna get back even when he talks black right right I don't understand I think it's the southern accent you know they have a lot in common so we've all been lumped in with that dude in the chair yeah it's like that's illogical just trying to have racial discussions right and point out things that are happening and you know uh some things are very bad and they need to be pointed out but uh yeah we're not like see Kamala Harris and or Neil deGrasse Tyson and be like well looky here looky here someone thinks he's an astrophysicist you got us one of them highfalutin well well look at you with your stalls in the sky tell you what I'd like to put you in a rocket and send you the fuck off the Mars boy so we've all been lumped into this thing and all these black aristocrats can say like yes I know that I'm with you I went to Eaton but uh I'm treated by the masses like uh common every day thug you like no you're not you're not that's a lie you're really not I got I got off the train today walking up from Penn Station and then 7th Avenue which is a fucking nightmare that block is getting worse and worse I have to dodge stick and move I'm going they're that one in the wheelchair to crack right here oh yeah yeah right here and then there's drug dealers there's people that are just this one woman she's disgusting and she's eating something out of one of those cardboard things like you get french fries in but it was some form of not french fries no and then she goes it's like ham she found and spits this bone with meat on it dude I'm like I'm going over solvents I don't think I can eat I think she just fucked my old leading up I can't so I'm just looking at and then there was this gentleman a black dude oh after a minute tie nice uh short hair his own it wasn't fun and you said you're just as bad as her exactly you got the same drop motherfucker one drop motherfucker I don't you think you're special you any special motherfucker he's got like uh uh not a briefcase but like a portfolio thing yeah he's walking full of crack walking and I thought that I just thought like there you go it's that easy it's that easy just and I'm not talking everyone has to have the suit and tie and the thing but don't be that there's a lot in between right that and that yeah just try to be more than halfway I guarantee you that if there was a young a young liberal like a 28 year old liberal at NYU and he sat down with you me and a 66 year old black man from Harlem oh it would be us three oh yeah what the fuck did you just say yeah yeah we listen motherfucker yeah this is the way it goes yeah there's the old black dude would be just as uh upset with the way you're going yeah that's a great synonym for racism yeah yeah just as upset not racist I'm upset that's a t-shirt I'm not racist I'm upset oh no your genie has already got it up on his side shit like this guy he's always no when I was coming here this white woman uh liberals should be happy to hear um last show last week I was coming up the stairs and this is on my getter because I'm not on twitter and there was a woman who had just been vomiting all over the stairs so she's lying there her tits are hanging out she's piercing sewer tit holy shit and she's just she's got a dollar bill in her hand did she make Chrissy make her show that day because she was supposed to and she's just like she's leaned up over the stairs and just been like oh yeah you got to and then she's like I gotta hit the hey boys this is this is heroin is strong oh shit she just lay there with her crumpled up one dollar bill and her fucking cornmeal with her little tits hanging out with piercing through them whoa it's like this is her pussy tasted so disgusting I got a heroin buzz off of it was urine the urine had soaked into the pubes as I'm eating her out my nose is in the right right and I'm sensing the the just urine it's soaked it up uric acid yes it just soaked it up hailing that oh like a sponge like a big willy for low after about half an hour I was like I'm done I'm done I'm out of here I can't do that I don't care if you don't wake up I can't do this a minute longer and then 15 minutes after that I then I left yeah then I left and the police were like finally and I'm like mind your own fucking business you know okay some uh street talk there from Gavin Gavin and Andy okay so how did we get to this state where people decide you know meaning in life and and their morality just from what happens between their ears like how did we get to this referential moral state where there's just so much lack of meaning lack of purpose in people's lives they feel so disconnected from other people they've you know reduced sense of right and wrong and perhaps the best explanation comes from a philosopher Charles Taylor a man of the left he wrote a 2007 book called a secular age he talks about the contrast between the the modern the modern bounded self protected the buffered self and the poorest self of the earlier more enchanted world so a poorer sense self means that you know I feel affected by everything that's going on around me whether from you know evil spirits to angels to sexual perversity to other forms of perversity and moral degeneration that that affects me the modern liberal sense is that we're buffered that we can create meaning and purpose and decide right and wrong from within our own minds and so the traditional sense of self right the vulnerable self right the source of our most powerful and important emotions the source of meaning in life and morality is outside of us right it's outside of our mind there is a clear boundary right for the modern right there's a clear boundary between us on the inside what's going on outside so I can see that boundary is a buffer I see that things don't need to get to me right there's a sense that I am a master of meanings for me but in the traditional sense of life meaning out this outside of one you can construct a good life only by conforming to the hero system of your community so for christian nationalist all right and for all sorts of other people for for trads in general meaning is not something that you just decide between your two ears reality it's not just something you decide between your two ears it's something outside of you you strive towards and uh david brooks the Atlantic article decries our morally in articulate world but what world is he thinking of we don't we don't lack for moral articulation we have all sorts of smart people articulating right and wrong all the time what we primarily lack is social cohesion and social trust so here's some very smart people articulating right and wrong on the trump indictment so the idea to somehow be silenced is a fantasy i'm howard curts and this is media buzz we're the federal judge setting a march fourth trial date for the justice department's indictment on election interference charges that's a day before super tuesday the commentators have very mixed views joe biden isn't even committing to debating donald trump this isn't a battle of ideas there's no effort at persuasion this is the removal of a political opponent through brute force through handcuffs and ballot gimmickry i think don donald trump is going to be the nominee because i haven't seen the willingness the fortitude among the other uh candidates to really take him on and make a thing out of this unprecedented um turn of events these four indictments the fact that he was probably going to be in prison prosecutors are attempting to throw trump in prison for interfering with an election well looks like they themselves are looking to have an impact on an election unless of course you believe these dates are just simply by accident and a and a mere coincidence i mean if donald trump doesn't want to have his trial start the day before super tuesday the simple solution is don't commit crimes um so that you're facing a criminal trial the day before super tuesday joining us now to analyze the coverage molly hemmingway editor-in-chief of the federalist and a fox news contributor and in san diego laura fink head of rebel communications molly do you agree that donald trump being tied up in courtrooms for weeks well hardly a great situation is not going to slow his march to the nomination yeah well clearly it seems to be helping him not just in the republican primary but also with the general election votes you had the wall street journal poll showing that just yesterday and so it's not just republicans who are more inclined to favor him but independence moderates as well and the reason why is because people do not view these as legitimate prosecutions if you're not a democrat partisan you tend to view this as a political prosecution that is scarier than any kind of election contest and so it does seem to be helping laura the general election may well be a different story you've got obviously much okay so i agree with that analysis i think that most of these indictments are bogus i think some of them stand up but i saw a comment on on twitter that grabbed my attention all right it's by someone named fisher king he says i'm using on the fact that no major figure went to prison following the 2008 financial crisis authorities took literal interpretations of statutes said no case could be made but to indict trump we are using ancient statutes we're using rico law designed for the mafia when they want you they can get very creative they can bend the law any way they want when they want to protect you they say the law just isn't there their hands are tied well yeah even objective law is always enforced and prosecuted by human beings who are subjective but the 2008 global financial crisis was not primarily caused by illegal behavior right it was primarily caused by the united states government mandating that banks lend to people who are manifestly unqualified to receive mortgage loans and then when those people started defaulting on their loans the whole system went bankrupt and the global financial system that used to make bets on American mortgage back securities they were very stable until the effect of government constantly promoting loans to people with protected minority status who were manifestly not qualified to be able to pay back such loans that's what trash the global financial system so all sorts of bad things can happen with the consent of the law we have a rabbinic commentator knock monities he says you can be disgusting with with the consent of the Torah and you can be disgusting with the consent of civil law so in fact our civil law has constrained police from doing their jobs we're allowing murderers out we're allowing you know bad people out of prison we're not prosecuting people and so through legal means we are trashing our country right when terrible things happen right it's not necessarily because laws are being broken right you can do horrible things with the consent of the law and with the consent of the law donald trump is being prosecuted in many cases on bogus bases on some cases i think some of the indictments are solid so the third one the one for mishandling classified documents i think there's there's a solid basis for that but the other indictments seem overly political and it's amusing the new york times runs this big article lamenting what's going on in bangladesh quietly crushing a democracy from within millions on trial in bangladesh most active rivals to the country's ruling party face dozens even hundreds of court cases each paralyzing the opposition as a crucial election approaches not a word in here about how some similar things are going on in the united states right where donald trump is being distracted by all these indictments he has to spend a great deal of money to fight these indictments right the most likely nominee from the opposition party is being crushed by more fair right so some similar things going on in bangladesh but no sense of irony on the part of the the new york times let's get a little bit more here from media bars six months to the voting or so uh let me play for both of you uh what the former president said in an interview with glenn beck and if you're president again will you lock people up the answers you have no choice because they're doing it to us and i never hit biden as hard as i could have and then i heard he was trying to indict me and it was him that was doing it these are sick people these are evil people molly donald trump and his loyalists believe these indictments are a result of the weaponization of law enforcement and i know you agree but when he says he has no choice if he wins back the white house but to prosecute his political opponents are we in for an endless cycle of payback well the interesting thing to do is look back at 2016 where the republican base wanted hillary clinton held accountable for clear crime crimes she had set up a private server she destroyed tens of thousands of emails in the middle of an investigation but when trump won election he explicitly said we don't you know we just have to let people handle things at the ballot box we're not going to prosecute my primary political opponent the response was the russia collusion hoax two impeachments now 91 indictments from democrat prosecutors up and down the eastern seaboard the question isn't whether republicans will be responding in some way it'll be it's going to be what else will they be doing to try to preserve the country and not be a place where politicized prosecutions are the order of the day for how to handle political disagreements well i do have to point out that when donald trump says anything okay question from the chat will the trump saga end in a bang or a whimper well think about how most of our lives will end most of our lives will not end in a bang they'll end in a whimper so i suspect that the trump saga will end with a whimper i put the odds at 10 to 1 right the odds are more than 90 percent in my estimation that the trump saga will end with a whimper rather than with a bang that's just the nature of humanity we're just incredibly vulnerable people i would bet the odds are more than 90 percent that the joe biden era will end with a whimper rather than a bang very few eras and as the jfk era ends with a with a bang rather than than a whimper lucros says i thought the trump saga would be snuffed out in 2020 then january 6 happened yeah there is a substantial portion the american population who feels that donald trump is on their side the donald trump will will fight for them that donald trump might even win for them and even people on the left such as simon cooper in the financial times column this this weekend he says if trump is re-elected he will be a far more consequential president than he was the first time around so conservatives have assembled about 50 000 names to take over top civil service jobs and and bend the civil service much more in a trumpian direction so the first time around trump was largely hamstrung by one his own lack of abilities as a leader two very effective opposition springing largely from the civil service the media and the democratic party joe bigs got 17 years in the big house i bet you my left nut trump will not pardon him i don't think i even know who joe bigs is oh is he one of the proud boy leaders so i i don't shed any tears for people who've gone to prison for committing crimes on january 6 i would like all all rioters to to be punished because i believe so much in the rule of law back to molly hemmingway media largely ignoring these posts because they don't like what he's saying yeah the media are continuing their operation as co-partisans with the democrat party so being able to use social media is an important aspect but just to some of these points the department of justice is also something that a lot of americans view is compromised not just because of the way that they're going against the primary republican politician in the country but also the way that they are protecting the biden family this is a major issue and actually joe biden did use the new york times on april 2nd 2022 to funnel a message to marrick garland that he did want donald trump prosecuted he had more than enough opportunity to claim that that was an inaccurate telling of his viewpoint said by of course anonymous sources within the white house and he didn't do that and so he said that he wanted his primary political opponent to be handled he wanted him to be prosecuted for uh and he's actually said a lot of stuff to that end he said it before he was inaugurated he said it right after he was inaugurated publicly that he did want this to be done it is being done it's being done by his department of justice which has is embroiled in a horrific scandal for covering up the biden family corruption now most of donald trump's problems are caused by donald trump all right the way that donald trump behaved after he clearly lost the 2020 election was irresponsible was unconscionable was bad for the country i think these indictments are similarly bad for the country because they'll encourage republicans now to retaliate and try to hamstrung and take out democratic nominees using similar tactics but trump brought these troubles on himself he was you know reckless he was childish he was so centered he conducted himself with you know little regard for the for the greater good but also democrat prosecutors in new york and atlanta and so this is a real problem i mean totally apart from people's personal feelings about donald trump this weaponization of the department of justice and other law enforcement and and and other aspects of our judicial system is a real crisis for a lot of americans regardless of their political they don't they don't want to be in a country that handles disputes this way i haven't seen it outside of deep red republicans make that one of their top three issues molly but i do understand there's two parents at school board meetings it is true that these courtrooms are going to be a scene of major campaigning but that is because it appears that this is the main campaign strategy of biden and the democrats to focus on these things instead of how the economy is going how the country is being run how the war in ukraine is being handled what the border is like it's clear that it is a campaign strategy laura but i would disagree about whether that so will uh joe biden survive presuming he wins reelection will he survive until 2029 in as president of the united states in seeming like he's has some some of his faculties i'd say the odds are probably 50 percent i i would think that uh the democrats would encourage someone like gavin newson to run i mean biden is not a particularly strong or appealing prospect right back to this david brux article and he talks about we live in this morally inarticulate world but i mean that's not the world i see i mean progressives are telling you at every turn what you may or may not do what you shouldn't shouldn't eat what you shouldn't shouldn't smoke where you should put your trash your recyclables your grass clippings off your own good and this is from ronnie goodman's terrific work in progress conservative claims of cultural oppression on the nature and origins of conservophobia so liberals the drop of a rolodex and come at you with a rotating hit squad of well-placed academics ready to pounce and opine just about anything having to do with you the liberals are people trained practically from birth as an instant response team the weaklings and the physical cowards who sought the safety of a sinecure meaning tenure instead of the mortal combat of life but is to get the still get the thrill of shooting inarticulate fish in a barrel i think that's a pretty good description of the world that we're in right now so we don't lack for moral articulation right so if conservatives are somehow primitive as liberals accuse if we're meat evil it's because our hero systems are less subtle they may be tied around blood maybe tied around soil they may be tied around traditional understandings of the relationship of the human being to other people to the tribe to the nation to to the universe and to god so left-wing hero systems tend to be a little more disguised but this disguising is precisely the ethos of the disengaged self-control self-reflexivity you can find all the meaning of purpose right and wrong morality that you need between your own two ears from the modern liberal perspective so liberals essentially spiritual eyes or the impulses that they would prefer to associate with conservatives and thereby they get to indulge in them under a veneer of sophistication so you've got affirmative action which serves as absolution ritual whereby white liberals beseech militant blacks to expiate america's original sin of racism right so in the area of race americans have been conditioned by the news media and our elites into a rigid and unforgiving propriety i mean is there any area where we are more restrained tight-lipped careful about what we say particularly in public you know careful that anything that that we say that gets out of a very narrow band of acceptable opinion when it comes to race can absolutely blow up in our face so yes since the 1950s race has replaced sex as the primary focus of america's moral seriousness so we don't lack the moral seriousness it's just from a traditional point of view the moral seriousness is completely misplaced right there's nothing inherently immoral about racism sexism islamophobia and the like these are usually reflections of a healthy sense of bondedness with your in-group rather than something immoral so moral seriousness right is kind of the mirror image of what liberals oppose with conservatives and their moral seriousness about sex so liberals have all sorts of hangouts not so much with sex but with any words about race that go off the sanctioned path right so we've got social justice is a secularized morality of sin and redemption any opinion that might so much as resonate with races such as opposition to affirmative action is treated as violation of a sacred taboo even when it's entirely defensible on non-racist grounds so liberalism is its own hero system its own sanctioned path and what many people who identify with christian nationalism are doing is they're simply revolting revolting against this dominance of the liberal left of all our major institutions so liberals have these vague premonitions of erosion unraveling by the slightest perceived softening of anti-racist inhibitions so they think that ah people will just you know turn to bloodlust and civil war if we let up on political correctness in any way so conservatives and people on the right refuse to accept liberal race discourse at face value because they sense that this is just a sophisticated pretense it's it's an opportunity to indulge in ecstasies of intellectualized liberal shame it's an invitation to bask in all sorts of primitive emotions that would be decried as insophisticated and retrograde if expressed in less intellectual context on behalf of other causes now as part of the growing rule by experts that we have in this country we have all sorts of normal human emotions such as preference for ones in group and say preference for male only spaces or preferences for a heterosexual identification of a marriage for a heterosexual military all sorts of normal human emotions primitive primal emotions preferences for particular blood and soil they have been turned into pathologies and one normal human emotion sadness has also been turned into a pathology by outreining elites particularly in the psychiatric profession and there was a terrific book published about this in 2007 the loss of sadness how psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder so whenever you experience a substantial loss it would make sense that you would feel sad you lose a friend right you lose an opportunity you lose a dream right you lose a relationship you lose a community you lose a way of life right you lose say physical abilities you're you're reduced to bed by back pain it would be completely normal for you to feel sad about that but after several weeks of this psychiatrists will diagnose you with a disorder with with depression thoughts on elon musk possibly banning the adl well the anti-deformation league is in large parts a left-wing ethnic lobby and it wants to regulate and has been very successful at regulating what is acceptable speech on social media platforms and in public spaces around the world so elon musk bought twitter primarily for the basis of restoring freedom of speech on twitter it seems to me he's done a pretty good job overall and so it's understandable that anyone who supports free speech in public spaces is going to be opposed to the anti-deformation league right here's a little bit more on rule by experts it can start grading on people and for some it has yes and we know we're aware talking that's uh denise prager julia hotman talking about how it grades on people when they talk about how much they love each other well for those of you who don't know that this is actually preoccupied me so very recently and i'm sure all of you certainly in the united states are aware of the once in 80 something years in other words not since 1939 was there a tropical storm in southern california or maybe california we don't get that i mean florida gets at the east coast gets it other places so people namely the national weather service the state of california the county of los angeles it was like covid schools were shut down government offices were shut down people were warned constantly stay home unless it is an emergency this is life threatening i have i have a picture of the notice on my phone well i attended a wedding that weekend the mornings were for a sunday night that sunday night i was to attend a wedding which i did the groom told me and he was great credit he was not you know engaged in self-pity he's just noted 40 people and i would say the entire number of people there was 100 so there would have been 140 40 didn't didn't come because of this hurricane right so now what everybody listening and watching needs to understand is sunday night it rained in southern california that's all it did there were no winds not lightning okay so rain is not equal in its effects everywhere in the united states southern california is not designed for large amounts of rain so this rainfall is trivial compared to other areas of the country that are much more equipped for dealing with heavy rainfall so i'm ambivalent about this story did what was there too many warnings were the warnings too severe with regard to this tropical storm i stayed in i stayed in all sunday i saw enough video of people driving around and getting stuck and uh you know people having you know horrific results on the roads i stayed in uh sometimes your own common sense is superior to that what the expert meteorologists and the experts in you know public safety tell you and sometimes it's not meaning from from what my part that's an interesting point right and regularly in southern california there are heavier rain storms it was just raining that was the entirety now there were parts outside of l.a county where people were knee-deep in water that's also very common every when there's a heavy rain there's some flooding that's part of life it's particularly part of life in southern california because southern california architecture and streets and communities are not designed for handling large amounts of rain okay so this tropical storm brought about 30 times the amount of rainfall that had been previously recorded on this date as the highest amount of rainfall so this was an extraordinary event these warnings it doesn't seem to me entirely delusional or misplaced to have issued them so i was thinking i was very angry at the 40 people who didn't come to their wedding so sad for the bride and i mean god bless them for enjoying their day even if zero people show up you're getting married it's a it's a okay when you have rain for the first time in an area not designed for rain right streets are particularly slick right it's particularly dangerous driving so who knows how many lives were saved because of these expert warnings stay home sacred beautiful thing but that must have been difficult for them i would be i would be sad and upset if 40 people a large percentage and i gotta tell you i would pay any one of them money good money to come on my show and explain why they didn't go to the wedding we're most well in fairness to some maybe they were flying their their flights were canceled or something but was do you think no no no they were in LA no no no and some had already arrived the day earlier nobody flew in that day right and the flights were not okay there was no reason to cancel the flight nothing not everybody is equally comfortable driving in the rain particularly in southern california where it's rare and where you haven't had rain for six months right roads are particularly slick and perilous you get flush flooding because when the ground is especially dry water travels across the surface notes the chat instead of being easily absorbed you also get mudslides liquefaction you get all sorts of troubles so Dennis Prager is doing what you need to do to be interesting as a pundit like to make a very strong point and i guess i'm not such a great pundit because i didn't have a strong point here i have i have equal sympathy for both perspectives happened that's true i was i actually was going to visit my sister on sunday she lives near lax and i was watching planes take off and land in the in the rain flights were resumed resuming they're they're not even right where they were going on resuming is fine they were never paused oh yeah that's correct so it's not the correct work okay let's try to bill you out i know thank you i appreciate it i know you do uh they close the schools i know that's absurd how many parents will complain well you said on your radio show one percent i would agree but i actually think a lot more would write emails if they didn't think that they or their children would be penalized for doing so i think that a lot so in the past uh Dennis has marked you know various places that are shut down in advance of possible hurricanes but then you and usually usually the marker is going to turn out to be right because the people who issued the warnings right they do it i would expect on the basis that if they just write 10 percent of the time all right it they would do more good than harm with these kind of warnings then sometimes you get things like hurricane Katrina right which which cause you know substantial loss of life and he can't still perfectly accurately predict the weather and its effects on people so warnings you know be alert be on guard don't seem entirely misplaced parents would fear the day would be labeled as climate change deniers complainers not trusting of you know the government and its supreme wisdom and brandy says what's important about this is the government won't allow people to take risks well the government is not stopping people from driving right the government is not usually going door to door and and forcing people to leave their homes so in this case with regard to the tropical storm hitting los angeles the government took no punitive measures with the rarest of exceptions i mean you are perfectly free to drive around and authority you know these parents would be seen as being hard on teachers who may not have access to transportation to get to schools i mean that's honestly what i think would prevent the parent more than anything else from sending an email to the school and glib medley says best angelina self-combust at the first drop of rain well for good reason because rain is more rare here it's a more hazardous condition because southern california is not built for handling significant amounts of rainfall significant amounts of rainfall are far more dangerous here than they are in other parts of the country and because people are not used to driving in rain and in driving in slippery oily hazardous conditions right it's going to have much more of a negative effect we all tend to be anxious about things that we have less familiarity with compared to people who have a great deal of familiarity and that's that's a whole problem unto its own yes that is so my very very dark conclusion is one i wrote about i actually read it on my radio show you read my book think a second time my book of essays of course yes i've read all your books yeah you did okay except you were on me but except you were on me yeah yeah so i i have an essay in there i mean i'm very proud of this fact because i wrote this in the late 1990s a long time ago and i wrote an essay about a an experience i had in a nutshell i i was to give a speech in cherry hill new jersey which is on a suburb of philadelphia and i so i arrived the day before in new york city stayed overnight at a hotel in manhattan had a rental car all night and when i woke up do not drive blizzard storm conditions unless it is an emergency do not drive i looked out the window of my hotel room i remember this so vividly and it looked to me like there was about one inch of snow on the ground so i remember thinking because i still had not yet realized what i now realize people are so influenced by media that it is more influential than their own experience yes this is critical this is why it's so dark so i thought oh well i guess it's in new jersey it's horrible of course it was a stupid comment because how far is manhattan from new jersey in one of the tunnels or the george watkinson bridge so i left three hours early and i got there three hours there was no traffic everybody listened to the radio and tv and that awakened me to the ease with which people can be brainwashed yes you are experiencing the opposite of what we're saying and you believe us well that well sometimes what you don't see but the experts do see as a possible hazard right sometimes what you don't see is a hazard right it's not like your own intuitions or just 95 percent of the time superior to that of those with expertise in the area right i'd say it's about 50 50 that's the comment that i made i remember on denison julie while i was still in college it's i remember one day walking in harvard yard and this hit me like a lightning bolt um a real one not a government fake one that may or may not have occurred during a fake hurricane anyway i remember walking in the yard and going what people are fighting against what occupies so much of their time the money that goes to grants and research projects and and and theses at this university doesn't exist race i mean not that i shouldn't say doesn't exist obviously right small amounts of racism in the united states exist climate change does exist is it the existential but but think about that this whole complex of of thought and money and energy and time and it is given to these bookie mens that aren't real the the average student at the american college or university who says that they are fighting against racism has never seen it before a day in their life well for someone who's not a believer it's not real all right if you're not a christian all right many of the things that christian sands around them right the presence of evil spirits or the presence of the lord all right it's not going to be real to you you don't believe in the left wing value system then yeah the presence of racism is going to seem bogus lives isn't that amazing and so you're right people can be brainwashed so easily against what they see against what they see or i mean in the case of racism don't see racism is totally rampant i've never seen it wouldn't you think if the united states were as systemically racist a place as the left makes it out to be don't you think we would have met one racist in our lifetime i have never met a racist in my entire life well i've lived a lot longer than you the only one i knew was my grandpa i know you told that on the air which was somewhat of a joke right because he treated you said he treated black people beautifully right i have okay back to this david brooks essay on you know what's going on with with america and part of what's going on with america is that uh a great deal of ordinary healthy primal primitive meat evil emotions and responses such as the blood and the soil loyalty to a particular people the desire for a heterosexual understanding of marriage and of the military all right freedom of association rights to private property the original understandings of the us constitution prior to the civil rights industrial complex launched in the 1960s right many of these things have become pathologized and so there's a terrific book about one aspect of this the loss of sadness right how psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into a depressive disorder right grief is a normal natural and often healthy reaction to loss the end of a love affair finding out the espouse has been unfaithful the dissolution of a marriage the failure to achieve your cherished life goals the loss of financial resources the loss of illusions right you may go to work thinking you have excellent relations with people and then you may find out they've been stabbing you in the back loss of social supports and relationships the diagnosis of a serious illness in yourself or a loved one the death of a love pet the death of a celebrity who you do not personally know all these things can create periods of low mood low initiative and pessimism this is normal healthy natural reaction to loss my father is devastated with Ingmar is it Ingmar not the director the the actress yet not not ingrid but is it ingrid bergman ingrid yes my father's devastated with ingrid bergman died he took that very hard he just absolutely adored her so the DSM diagnostic statistical manual for psychiatry they have a definition of a mental disorder that excludes all expected and culturally sanctioned responses to a particular event for example the death of a loved one so they exclude that from its definition of a mental disorder but emotionally painful responses to other loss such as losses of illusions losses of opportunities marital romantic health or financial losses can be just as expected and culturally sanctioned responses as those of bereavement and should therefore fall under the definitions exclusion as well so marital dissolution is probably the most common trigger of intense normal sadness that could meet the DSM's symptomatic criteria for a depressive disorder right the intense sadness that follows the loss of romantic attachments is a long literary theme so severe losses of an intimate nature inevitably lead to a sadness response this is not necessarily a depressive disorder that needs to be treated with medication so we all live in evolutionary mismatch all right we are largely shaped by genes that develop as an adaptation to previous environments all right we are prehistoric creatures living in medieval institutions with godlike technology i love that summary and alan hallwitz wrote another terrific book from 2016 what's normal reconciling biology and culture so contemporary societies are the safest the healthiest the most prosperous that have ever existed so you would expect their citizens would have low levels of fear and anxiety i mean is this not one of the most central accomplishments of modern civilization the overall reduction of a rational basis for fear because we have nighttime electrical lighting we have insurance policies we have police forces we have standing armies we have the destruction of predatory animals we have lightning rods on churches we have solid locked doors on buildings right we have thousands of other small designs making life much safer rates of violence around the lowest they've been in recorded history lifespans of unprecedented longevity mean that few of us need to fear dying before old age we have greater economic security than previous eras and yet our own current age reveals extraordinary high rates of anxiety so why is this and why is it called a disorder so perhaps the best reason is evolutionary mismatch just like our preferences for high calorie foods right our current fears do not correspond to actual dangers in present situations but they are better understandable as reactions that were passed down to us as part of our biological inheritance of fears that made more sense in the prehistoric past where we evolved infants display a great deal of social anxiety fear of strangers is virtually universal seems to be biologically primed the temptation to see anyone who's different from us as hostile and subhuman is always present in us right maybe deeply buried maybe deeply repressed it may be disdained it may be put down maybe pathologized you may have whole armies of social workers and mental health professionals and liberal elites condemning any manifestation of this but it's in all of us right all of us have this temptation to see anyone who's different from us as hostile and subhuman it is always present in us no matter how deeply buried we do not tend to be promiscuous because people are naturally jealous where their relationship is threatened by a partner's additional sexual involvement so jealousy functions to protect monogamy to deter infidelity and to signal a potentially adulterous partner that he should refrain from entering a relationship so jealousy has acted as the glue that holds the sexes together for the benefit of the family and the survival of the species this is a primitive emotion this is a primal emotion there's a medieval emotion one that are more modern elites may think they can transcend but jealousy is innate the human condition so we have emotions because they are adaptive right no more grief no more sadness has three essential components usually arises in a specific context after the death of an intimate or some substantial loss its intensity should be roughly proportionate to the importance and centrality to one's life of the loss and it should gradually subside over time people adjust to their new circumstances return to psychological and social equilibrium now grief can be pathological just like a risk can be pathological when it can't do the things you expect a risk to do so grief processes become pathological when they emerge in inappropriate circumstances when you have extreme symptoms that do not match circumstance you have functional impairment where you have morbid preoccupations suicidal ideation psychotic symptoms that persist for an extraordinary long period of time and another bedrock evolutionary principle that Darwin never mentions he just takes it for granted is heterosexuality Darwin Darwin never mentioned same-sex erotic behavior so I was listening to this decoding the essays decoding the guru's episode on nom chomsky and I was thinking Dom Chomsky here sounds so much like Donald Trump after the 2020 election nom chomsky here talking about how labor hit reasonably close to winning right fell about 18 votes 18 parliament members short of taking power in 2017 and nom chomsky in this interview just talks about it as a great victory it sounds very much like how donald trump would talk countries like britain and america break away from the as you put it western party line at germy corbin i think just agreed with you on lots of things actually in in politics he he went to the country twice and he lost twice it turns out the country did not want germy corbin to be prime minister well you know perfectly well that that's not what happened germy corbin won an enormous victory in 2017 jeremy corbin right his labor leader of britain's labor party in 2017 on a tremendous victory in 2017 now he went enough of a victory in the sense that he got more seats and was able to form a government and take power but i mean this is what happens when you operate with partisan blinders and it's just as true of donald trump and his supporters as it is true of people on the left like dom chomsky 17 no he didn't yes the biggest victory that labor had won in a generation no he lost he didn't become prime minister then what happened is the british establishment including your newspaper came down on him with a ton of bricks with false deceitful propaganda about anti-semitism all exposed as lies totally that's just not true i'm afraid that's just not true uh fact check this forest chris what happened with this election why is chomsky saying that um corbin won it so objectively corbin lost labor has not been in power for quite a long time in the uk so what he's referring to is that compared to their performance in 2015 they won a large amount of seats there was like a positive swing under ed milliband they won 232 seats in 2015 right so ed milliband lost as well but then when jeremy corbin was leader two years later labor won 30 extra seats at 12.9 percent increase from their previous seats which was quite large however that was not large enough to stop the conservatives from winning the majority so tony blair in comparison in 1997 won 418 seats right or in 2001 415 in 2005 355 all of which put labor into power so tony blair's performance objectively better than jeremy corbin's from 1990 election onwards corbin's was the four best performance after tony blair but what chomsky is talking about is one not swing because people expected corbin to do worse and there was a positive swing but the other aspect is that the population of the uk has increased from the 90s so if you count it by the amount of people that voted for it it's more right but this feels to mention that two years later i mean this is the exact type of argument that trump supporters were making that trump received more votes than any other incumbent president akam he wasn't lawfully re-elected well receiving more votes than any other incumbent president does not get you elected what happens is you have to receive more electoral votes from the electoral college than the person and party that you're running against which trump failed to do but norm chomsky here's just echoing the same sort of rhetoric used by donald trump near supporters in 2019 labor lost 60 seats under jeremy corbin and field to win election again so all right so you're being a stickler of facts and that's helpful that's good that's useful thank you chris but it's getting back to the question the question that was asked is basically if you're also right norm chomsky if all the working people in the uk are horribly exploited and desperately want this sort of change then how come they aren't voting for it and i think chomsky's answer would be that's because they're being tricked well first of all he kind of avoids the question by misrepresenting the facts as you describe them but i think if he was pushed he would say that they were being seduced and deceived by the mainstream media complex which is tricking them to vote against their interests yeah right and that's what many people on the right complain oh the democrats control the media which they do they control almost all our major institutions which they do so people are being tracked tracked against voting in their self-interest and this doesn't hold up because we are not evolutionarily adapted to being gullible all right so even though the democrats control almost all our major institutions republicans still stand a very solid chance of winning even the presidential election because people don't just take cues from elites or from their education and from the media and just allow that to overwhelm all their own imperatives right then the democratic control of all our major institutions may account for say up to one percent of uh you know voting patterns but uh even that i think is considerably exaggerated right back to norm chomsky echoing trump's type rhetoric yes and he was asked by different more sympathetic interviewer about that question like why did you say that and you can hear his response to and why he described it and it is basically what you're saying oh you recently claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had a historic victory in 2017 why do you think it's important to recognize that results and describe it in those terms but Jeremy Corbyn is a very decent alia blatt says the burning man flood is the feel good story of 2023 why why does that feel good like what do you have against burning man why are you taking joy and other people's suffering alia blatt is it because you weren't invited why i mean this is like the time i i went to an engagement party and showed up in therapy the next day and i talked about these two two women who squealed in delight when they saw each other and they ran into each other's and arms and then they jumped up and down and i was talking about how silly that was my therapist said well don't you wish that someone would squeal with the light when they see you and run across the the room and embrace you and i thought oh yeah i i i guess i do in person i tried to create a labor party that would be a participatory party not just run by elites and then the parliament and it would furthermore work for the interest of its constituents i mean this sounds exactly like donald trump and his supporters all right finally you've got someone who bypasses the elites and is trying to organize and run the government in the interests of the people rather than the elites i mean this is a real meeting of the left and right uh and was very successful 2017 vote to increase the labor vote by huge amounts more than in about 50 years and that set of alarm bells through the whole establishment can't allow this we can't have a political party that's a participatory part right this is how trump has talked that uh donald trump sets off alarm bells among the establishment or immigration restrictionists they set off alarm bells among the establishment and the elites inside we simply can't have this kind of talk right this is an exact match for right wing dissident rhetoric but it's coming from a left wing dissident but it's the same type of partisan thinking party and that represents its constituents it's not the way politics works politics works run by small elites who tell everyone you should decode anti gentilism yes well anyone with a strong in-group identity is very likely to harbor negative feelings about our groups like we all have within us a propensity to regard people who are different from us as subhuman as i mentioned earlier this may be very deep it may be strongly repressed it may be something you only offer in the most private of circumstances but it's there within us it's there just as much within jews as among non-jews right we all have a tendency deep within us to have great suspicion appropriate and disgust and revulsion towards people who are different from us anyone else what to do then came the establishment attack on uh you should do a decoding of jewish hate for christianity well it would be weird if two groups who had so much tension conflict between them who have exchanged so much violent rhetoric right who have persecuted each other though christians have obviously had far more state power than jews over the past two thousand years it would be very weird if there wasn't some negative feelings flowing in both directions so christianity emerged out of Judaism right it would be weird if christians didn't have some negative feelings about jews for not accepting christian claims for christ and it would be very weird if jews didn't have negative feelings about christians after all when christians were in power right they persecuted jews at times uh at times they possibly converted jews at times they killed jews now it's very easy for jews to be self-righteous about this because they very rarely had state power over christians but both groups it's easy for them to find reasons to have disdain even hatred for the other in addition to more complicated emotions and positive emotions so until the 18th century jewish fortunes and christian fortunes were running generally speaking in opposite directions so the stronger christianity was the weaker jews were after the 18th century with the rise of secularism jewish and christian forces have largely run in tandem as we increasingly live in a secular world religious christians religious jews increasingly find more in common but back to norm tromsky on korban which was impressive on cocking all kinds of tales about anti-semitism all exploded even in the early days uh at the beginning of this campaign so why would people use accusations of anti-semitism to take down someone like Jeremy Corbyn if it's effective people reach for whatever's effective they'll use someone of plagiarism right that's probably the most damaging accusation you can ever make against a writer you accuse them of plagiarism that's like the death knell for a writer's career but if if anti-semitism will get the job done then you'll use anti-semitism if racism will get the job done or homophobia i mean we all have an instinctive feel for which accusations will be most damaging right if you're a woman at work and you have some negative feelings about the workplace right you can destroy a man's career you can get him fired by making accusations against the man that may not be entirely fair and accurate right so we all tend to reach for for whichever attack is going to be most effective of the elites stealing the legitimate outcome of the election but it does remind me of Trump's talk about stolen elections and illegitimate election outcomes it's it's kind of like the left-wing version of it isn't it like the right-wing version of these sorts of slightly conspiratorial things is very concrete they bring the ballot boxes they stole the election that kind of thing the left-wing version is always a bit more abstract right and not so concrete not always abstract like in left-wing socialist countries they very much just openly say you know the ballot boxes have been tampered with or whatever if they're in power and able to do so if the result goes against them so i don't think it's always the case that it's caught so non concretely shall we say but in in this case yes i agree first of all you know you could hear that right because he said the biggest increase in 50 years so it's trying to present it in that relative way which again it's completely wrong because there was an increase of 147 seats in 1997 a 54 increase so it's just actually wrong but but even setting that aside there's the notion that the will of the people would elect the leader that chumsky wants if the people were allowed to express and obviously the objection to corbin any of the kind of reasons given are fundamentally dishonest it because of the threat he poses to capital yeah and forming a properly inclusive labor movement that's the that's the real yeah it corbin is a decent man who wants to create a utopian society and the evil neoliberal capitalists cannot allow that so they have to determine and trump supporters would say much of the same thing about either evil neoliberal you know capitalists who won't allow you know an america first regime to get the job done like looking back to this david brooks essay in the atlantic about moral formations so david brooks writes that we live in a society that's terrible at moral formation well what is your starting point for understanding moral formation right for the liberal people are primarily individuals with certain inalienable rights who can decide meaning and right and wrong by their own brains conservatives people are primarily members of families tribes and nations with at least as many responsibilities as rights so which perspective do you think would be more effective at moral formation now jonathan height wrote a book called the righteous mind he says that our understanding of fear fairness and justice developed from evolution from a long history of alliance formation and cooperation among unrelated individuals in many primate species and that led to the evolution of a whole series of emotions that motivate altruism including anger guilt and gratitude these all promote the reciprocity and non-zero some alliances that social primates need to survive liberty and oppression is also an evolutionary solution to the problem of social cooperation so we have all certain responses to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would if given the chance dominate bully and constrain others so aggressive domineering behavior by an alpha male or female can trigger this foundation listening righteous anger necessary to mobilize the group against would be bully so donald trump has many of these characteristics of the bully right he can be aggressive domineering and he has triggered a response that is probably rooted in our evolutionary instincts so another major difference between the left and the right between say christian nationalist on the right and anti christian nationalist on the left the people on the left place far more faith in experts the phd's who know better who plan who exhorted badger and scored us right they idealize the action intellectuals who have that special knowledge on how to fix society's problems so the conservative intellectual disavows those ambitions he uses his powers not to badger and scold the american people but to expose the liberal badgering and scouting for what it is for a form of liberal elitism one more arena in which the anointed can mock scored and intimidated the benighted under the deceptive of the near of enlightenment progress and liberation so all this all purpose benevolence that the nurturing parent liberal morality invites is just resulting in endless manipulation and intrusiveness but it's all cloaked in the mantle of respect for the individual's highest potential but this respect is merely another tool with which the liberal left elite badger and scored those people on the right who they regard as benighted it's a cudgel used to underscore the deficiencies of those who have not attained liberalism's self understanding of having a higher consciousness so when will somewhat display a moderately adequate level of curiosity how broad minded must be be well anyone who's found lacking on these fronts for short so the high stand is that liberals in their optimism urge upon us so the acumenical open mindedness of liberal values really means that they can be implemented to fit their own parochial partisan imperatives right they disguise their policies with lofty abstraction such as awareness and sensitivities because they can ever openly announce their hero system that david brux defines moral formation as comprised of three things helping people learn to restrain their selfishness teaching basic social and ethical skills and helping people find a purpose in life well where do people normally get these skills you get them from within the family the extended family the community the tribe the church the synagogue right where do we get our cues from what is good and noble and whether you're pursuing in life right so liberals particularly among the elites they they believe they stand above you know this primitive retrograde medieval conservatism because they believe that their enlightenment ideals belief in the power of rationality belief in the innate human goodness liberate them from the primitive in their eyes hero systems to which people on the right remain beholden hero systems that revolve around loyalty to family to blood to soil right to a particular religion to a particular nation right so a hero system is a social teleology teleology means ultimate ends it's a system of collective meaning production and liberals see conservatives as compromised by a primitive attraction to these relics of a benighted medieval worldview so one way of understanding differences between people on the right and the left is that people on the right are more medieval than people on the left who regard themselves as much more modern the left-wing hero system tends to be disguised it's concealed behind a secular facade of enlightenment pragmatism and utilitarianism the liberals see themselves as promoting ordinary human fulfillment shorn of any higher religious metaphysical aspirations but people on the right see that this liberalism unbeknownst to itself it's motivated by a religious impulse and spiritual ideal that's become secularized and it plays itself out through the medium of the sensibly secular goals such as stopping global warming ending racism ending poverty so liberalism is a hero system that disguises itself as the transcendence of all hero systems on the other hand it is the case that there of course there are right-wing smear campaigns against a liberal leader in the run-up the election the right-wing tablets are obviously going to portray a left-wing leader in the least favorable like they can so yeah there are a lot of parallels that i think people won't want to have emphasized but the underlying logic is the semen and i i have more clips which illustrate that and so maybe i can move on to another one let's go back to the facts 2017 he won the big he lost he lost sorry there was the biggest labor in history then came the it wasn't no it wasn't he lost that it was the biggest labor gain in history then what ground i want now it wasn't on what basis was it then came the enormous establishment attack cross the board right to left what's called left guardian with deceitful lies all since exposed about charges of anti-semitism no that's not true i'm sorry the the equality in human rights commission in the uk the watchdog set up by the labor party found the labor party guilty of not protecting jews in the party less anti-semitism in the labor party than among the Tories this has all been exposed in detail by the labor files yeah that's interesting yeah he does seem to have a very clear narrative there about Jeremy Corbyn winning winning the capital w but not the thing is he's not in seeing like he knows that he didn't actually win like so it's just the technical definition of winning that he wants to insert but it's quite impressive how hard it is to knock him off track yes it's like a steamroller the interjections and disagreements just bouncing off him uh yeah so i guess but what's the theme there the theme there is that for him for his worldview it has to be the case that grassroots working class movement as exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn can basically do no wrong and if they don't win general elections then it's because of lies media manipulation false class consciousness or something like that right i mean this is the same sort of rhetoric that's used by Trump supporters and people all over the political spectrum right in the United Kingdom a major tv news presenter has been socially ostracized because what he was uh paying off and having sexual relationships with the young men who worked for him to see what Douglas Murray has to say getting clogged up by these sorts of you know cake gate speed gate everything's a damn gate you know and everyone thinks it's so original when they put gate after anything and we know what would the government be concentrating on what might it be achieving if the answer is not much more then there's even more trouble that we're in that i thought but but my belief is is that we just are horribly misdirecting our energies and yes there's there's doubtless scandals going on there always are and there are scandals that are of significance i mean you've mentioned northern Ireland the steak knife controversies come back up again i don't think that outside of northern Ireland one in a thousand households don't think about that maybe they don't need to but it would probably be a more intelligent scandal to look at than the Gordon the gopher's former sofa mate scandal um i i think that but as i say that the main thing isn't isn't you know where are the scandals that it's a very post-watergate thing that the journalists think that their job is to find all the scandals that exist expose them and then win all of the awards it's a very it's a very sort of post-watergate way of doing journalism sometimes there are scandals then they should be exposed but the whole politics the whole country isn't just a set of scandals waiting to be uncovered right the biggest problems we face are not scandals the biggest problems we face are the results of laws and directions given by elites such as to not have police do their jobs such as to pull people over for reckless driving and for not punishing violent criminals all right this has all been done with the full consent of the law there is some fundamental failure of the media in this but the fundamental failure of the media is a fundamental failure of government it's a reflection of that which is the the fact that government seems not to be able to do in britain any of the things that we need it to do there is some fundamental failure of the media in this okay that we we are risking throwing phillips gofield under the bus now i do think what he did was wrong he knows what he did was wrong he was clearly in a position of power he and i i think the biggest issue is the his connections in getting this young runner his job at itv because it was clearly that's what got him to that position so we we know this was a young person who was enamored by phillips gofield and that power dynamic was very toxic however we have to remember that you know at some point this going to be a situation of you know vultures circling the prey here he has come out he has said he he he was wrong and he lied and all of that i think we have to remember that he's still a human being and it's this kind of bullying that took took out caroline flak now he his mental health must be under enormous amounts of strain because while he was wrong you know he's lost so much he's lost you know the his the credibility that he's built over a 30-year career he's no longer hosting that wardrobe which then escaped me