 So, I did a debate, kind of a debate discussion with Toby Young of the Free Speech Union in the UK the other day, and he is a supporter of not exactly clear what, but some kind of government intervention with big tech with regard to free speech, and he considers what they do, censorship, and he also talked about other laws he'd like to see passed and regulations and laws that he would like to see passed, and we're having this discussion, and as we talked about this, and he was articulating why he held that position, I had this thought about tribalism that I think is important and I think explains a lot of what I'm seeing in the world that I didn't really understand until now, and that is Toby's perspective was that that pretty much anything was okay, that he was willing to compromise if you will on principles, if it stopped a left, if his team would win as a consequence, and it just the way he said it and the way he expressed himself, I found really intriguing, so I'd always thought, I'd always thought, naïve me, right, I'd always thought that people who are conservatives have a certain set of beliefs, and they believe in those things, and that they, yeah they sometimes compromise on those things, and they sometimes don't get everything they want, and sometimes they don't understand the implications of everything that they hold, and so on, but fundamentally I thought they have a set of beliefs, and that is what motivates them, that set of belief, and they won't purposefully go against that set of beliefs, right, that the core was this belief set, even if it's ambiguous and not well-defined, and you know not very solid, but they wouldn't explicitly go against it, and the same on the left, that people on the left have a certain set of beliefs, a certain set of ideas, and that's what motivates them, that's what motivates them to be of the left, that's what motivates them to support certain pieces of legislature, and reject other pieces of legislature, it's basically this orientation around ideas, I guess because that's how I am, and I project that, right, so I have a certain set of ideas that's what I want to get achieved, and that's what I fight for, and you know if I was in politics I'd be willing to compromise on the way there in order to get where I want to go, but generally it'd be the signpost, the direction will all be driven by these ideas, by these principles, by these ideals that I'm going for, and my assumption was implicitly that that's what people on the left and on the right also do, and that even though they're inconsistent and even though their ideas, again, are not well-formed, that their motivation is all driven by ideas, and what hit me until we were saying was that, yeah, that there's certain set of ideas very vaguely represented that identify somebody as left and right, but it seems that more and more people today, in how they apply to the specifics, are not so much using the ideas as a reference point, but they're using the impact on the other guys as the reference point, and of course this has been obvious over the last few years where I've seen more, and this has been shocking to me, and I haven't, I still don't quite understand it, but it's taking me a long, long time to understand it. People would say things like, yeah that's bad, but it'll stop the left, so I'm for it. So the standard becomes what will stop the other team, the other group, the other tribe in this case, not what is consistent with their ideas, not what will get me to where I want to go, but purely it will hurt the other guys. That's the motivation, that's the incentive, and that is really hard for me to grasp, truly hard for me to grasp, but it's obviously true, and you can see that in many people who support Trump. It's not about this will get me a positive, it's this will slow them down, or this will hurt them, or this will, so for example, on the issue of Big Tech, on the issue of Facebook and Twitter and all of those, there is no free speech argument to regulate speech on Twitter, Facebook, because they are private companies, private platforms, and regulating them would be a violation of free speech. Their speech, their ability to discriminate, so it's not about that, it's not about defending speech, it's not about issues of speech, it's about power, it's about power to estrange what people are afraid of, which is the advance of the left, it's about power to hold the left back, to control the left, it's about power over these companies, to be able to use them to promote your ideas over other ideas, it has nothing to do with the principle, which is the right supposedly stands for free speech against the left, it stands against free speech, and indeed the left, when the left argues, right, that I mean what the left wants is power to control speech, what the left wants is power to control your speech, they're not, but they can't say that they're against free speech because explicitly they're the party historically that has been pro-free speech, so I have to invent an excuse to justify the power grab, and the excuses we don't want to offend and people have a right not to be offended and people have a right not to feel bad because of your speech and speech can hurt, so speech is violence, they know this is crap, this is self-evidently the opposite of free speech, but they can't admit probably even to themselves that they're actually anti-free speech and they want power over speech, they want a control speech, so they need to create these excuses, so all of this is about power and about the other guys, and of course that's what power is, which power is power over people and power to hold back the other tribe, it's my tribe over your tribe, my tribe controlling having power or your tribe controlling having power, and it's, you know, it's the same as, you know, we're for free trade until power demands that we have tariffs, if in order to maintain power we have to protect steel workers and we have to pretend to protect their working class and we have to pretend to protect all these other play, then the principles go out, power dominates, power and holding back the other team, power and restraining, restraining the opposition, the primary is my group having power, my group being in control, my group dominating over your group, over the other group, so I think in my mind now it's clear that for so many people out there in the culture, they picked a team and they're willing to do anything for that team, you know, and you can see it right now, where, you know, people who I think normally are basic decent okay people, you know, willing to abandon reason, abandon evidence, abandon standards of evidence so that their team can win, so that their team can win, so Maradona when he played soccer, you know, Maradona died last week, maybe one of the top five soccer players in all of history, just a phenomenal soccer player, you know, what he could do with the ball, it was just stunning and amazing, but if he needed to use his hand, as he called it the hand of God, in order to score a goal, then he used the hand and none of his fans, none of his team, nobody who supported Argentina in the World Cup bemoaned the fact that he used his hand to score a goal, even though the evidence is quite clear, I mean, there's video evidence, so if it's your team cheating, then it's okay, so if we have to pretend there was election for it so that we can win and we can maintain power and we can control, then so be it, you know, generally, I don't believe in cheating, generally, I don't believe in lying, generally, I believe in an American political system and a very pro-constitution, but because my team lost, to hell with all that, I mean, I don't know if you saw General Flynn, the other day, his tweet about Donald Trump should suspend the constitution and declare martial law, this is Flynn, this is the guy who was supposed to be the national security advisor to Trump, he was for a very short period of time, actually met Flynn a few months before the election in 2016 and a smart guy, he had good proper views on Iran, I mean, I didn't like him completely, but he was good, normal, pro-constitution, pro-American, but the tribalism over the last, I don't know, maybe it's 10 years, particularly over the last four, is such that truth doesn't matter, reality doesn't matter, principles don't matter, what is matters is that the team, the you're backing wins and they'll do anything, just like, in a sense, just like the soccer, soccer hood, you know, some of those soccer, crazy soccer fans, they go into stands and yell and scream and fight and, I mean, I'm sure in their normal lives are pretty normal and nice guys and everything, but once they've picked the team, once they've chosen which team is theirs, reason is complete out the window, rationality is completely out and they become these, you know, little monsters who are willing to commit violence for the team and the same is true on the left, it doesn't matter what Obama did or didn't do, I mean, doesn't matter what AOC says or what ANTIFA, ANTIFA is just a myth and it doesn't matter how much evidence because they know that if ANTIFA is real, it's harder for them to get elected, it's not that they like ANTIFA, it's that ANTIFA hoots the team, so they're anti-ANTIFA because it hoots the team, I mean, they deny that ANTIFA exists because it hoots the team if they do exist, if they are doing what they're doing and to hell with the evidence, these are people who in their day-to-day lives and their jobs are very dedicated to evidence, but when it comes to politics, it's like team sports, but with much more emotion and with much more commitment and the stakes are gazillion times higher if the stakes in sports are non-existent, really, other than your emotional state at the time, in politics, the stakes are massive, the lives of people, the livelihood of people, as we can see right now with COVID, is at stake. So, I mean, I should have known this and I did know it at some level, but it's, it really is completely, it really is completely rationed, it really is all about, all about their team, their tribe. It really is tribalism. I mean, it still doesn't quite compute. It doesn't quite quite grasp it because, I mean, to me, it's so irrational that it just doesn't sit right. But, you know, when Toby said, and I like Toby and he's a smart guy and he does some really good work, but when he said something like, we want to pass a law that does XYZ and, yes, I know it's not purist and, you know, if you're a purist, you'd be attended by, but he said, but it all slowed down the left. And it was like, whoa, wait a minute, that's the standard? Not what is good, what is right, what is true, but it'll slow down the left, even if it's a violation of your principles. And, you know, and maybe, maybe the perception is it's life or death. And if we don't slow down the left, we all die. So we have to slow down the left and we'll deal with principles later. But no, I don't think it's that. I really do think it's because I think this was, this is not this left. And I wonder, so this is the question I have and I don't have an answer to it. Has this always been the case? Have politics always been this tribal? Do Republicans always support their president? No matter what, the Democrats always support their party? No matter what, no matter what they did, what they said, what was happening? I don't know. Some people tell me it's always been like this. I never saw it. I mean, to me, it's a new phenomenon. So it's a phenomenon that became real during the Trump era. But looking back was there during Obama. But I don't remember it before that. I remember people being very loyal to Bush, but it wasn't the same thing. There was more credibility to the idea that they were making a mistake rather than this blind, this blind loyalty. That I think so many out there have towards their political party, towards their political leadership. And again, both parties. Anyway, just just a thought on tribalism and remember what tribalism really means is in the context of politics, specifically, is power. It's about me having power over the rest of you. It's about my group having power. It's not about even me having power, but my group having power and preventing you from having power. It's my group versus your group, my team versus your team. And anything goes because it's politics. Anything goes because, again, politics is about force. Politics is about coercion. Politics is all power. So if I have to use force, coercion, then so be it. Even if I know deep down that it goes against my principles, even if I know deep down that it doesn't, it isn't, you know, I say I'm for free speech, but it really isn't for free speech. It's really undercut free speech, but it slows you down. So it's OK. Slows them down, their team down, their tribe down. So it really is unprincipled tribalism. So I think that Toby, like somebody like Toby wants to be principled. He has an idea of principles, but the principles don't seem to get him where he wants to go, which is the defeat of the left is the primary. And that's what he becomes a pragmatist. He abandons the principles in the name of defeating them in the name of my tribe over their tribe. And I think that's true of a lot of people. I think that's true of the Tea Party. The Tea Party seemed to have principles in the early 2000s. They seem to stand in the early 20 teens and they seem to stand for something and they seem to have certain beliefs, but they didn't quote work. It didn't get them the result they wanted. They couldn't defeat Obama. That was the big thing with the Tea Party. They defeated Obama in 2010 and in 2014 in the House in the Senate, but they couldn't defeat him as president in 2012. And they were sure they would win the 2012 election. He was so unpopular because of Obamacare that it seemed like it would be a slam dunk. And they had principle quote on their side. Now, they elected a nominee who was very unprincipled, which is which is. Romney, but, you know, of the choices they had, they were all pretty unprincipled. And. But they lost. And what they did when they lost was they gave up on the principle. And they said, OK, well, principles don't work. Well, we really need, you know, we need to stop these Obama people. We need to stop the Democrats. We need to hold this. We need it. And I think since then they become more and more and more tribal, more and more focused on being against the left than for anything. And I think they've abandoned all the principles and they're not for anything. They're for a vague notion of America. And that's why Trump's was brilliant in coming up with it. Make America great again, because he identified that what what unified these people was a certain sense of patriotism without a real fundamental principle, substance behind it and that patriotism drove them and he captured that with make America great again. There was also a sense with all these people with the Tea Party of nostalgia, so make America great again, taps into America and taps into nostalgia and drives you forward. All right. So a thought about tribalism, lack of principle and power, power. Remember, that's what it's all about in the end of the day, because in politics, your team, meaning winning means your team has power. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, women or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist growth. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least a hundred. I figure at least a hundred of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to a hundred. All it takes is a click of a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. 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