Shownotes Transcript
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We know when it comes to finding balance, the more choices, the better. What's up? What's up, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. Rob is off today. I am running solo, but looking forward to today's show. I think we've got an interesting topic to get into.
Before we get the show started, I should remind you good folks that I will be back out on the road again soon enough. My lower back is dreading it, but I will be in San Diego back at the American Comedy Company May 1st through 3rd. This is one of my favorite clubs in the freaking country. So really looking forward to the shows out there. Not so much the plane ride, but
the shows I'm very much looking forward to. And then after that, I will be for the first time ever at the Skyline Comedy Club in Appleton, Wisconsin. It's my first time I'm ever going to Appleton. So really looking forward to that. Comic Dave Smith is
uh dot com is the website if you want to go grab tickets please head over there and then next up after that is the big one is uh comedy works in denver really looking forward to that one as well it's got a bunch of dates for the rest of the year uh robbie the fire bernstein will be with me on all of those shows so if you want to come see the two of us please do um
It's really a lot of fun. And I love, uh, I, I really love going on the road with Rob and, and meeting a lot of the, you guys, uh, who listened to the show. Okay. So I wanted to, um, on today's episode, and maybe if we have time, I'll, I'll get into a couple other things. Um, but I wanted to talk about this. Um, so Jordan Peterson, uh, did the Joe Rogan experience yesterday, uh,
And, um, or it came out yesterday. Maybe they did it two days ago, but there was, um, a point that, or, or like, uh, um,
A little mini rant that he went on that kind of was hitting on a lot of the topics that we've been talking about. Of course, you know, like it hit on specifically hit on the debate I had with Douglas Murray. It also just, you know, became a comment on this broader theme of like.
you know, the, the collapse of the legacy media and the rise of the podcast scene and, you know, all, all of these things. And I, I thought it was kind of interesting and I wanted to, to kind of respond to it and go over some of the ideas that he put forward. And I should say at the beginning of this, I posted a tweet earlier today on this topic, but I should say that, um,
So I am a, I do have a immense respect for Jordan Peterson. And I think he is,
absolutely brilliant like an incredibly an incredibly intelligent individual and I always thought that he was Particularly during his rise. I thought that he was One of if not the most important cultural intellectual figures and his his stuff
His book, Maps of Meaning, was phenomenal. I thought his whole rise to fame around, I guess it was around 2017-ish, where he was kind of standing up to the most insane excesses of woke college insanity was, I mean...
Like to say it was important would be a huge understatement. It was crucial. He was like a critical voice. I would not want to replay the last 10 years and run an experiment with no Jordan Peterson there. I think things turn out much worse if it wasn't for this guy. And while I've often...
disagreed with him on political issues. And if I'm being quite frank, I always felt that he was a much more powerful force as a Jungian psychologist who was commenting on culture and meaning in life. I always felt that when he got...
When he got into politics, it was where he always stumbled and where it unfortunately at times I think took away from his legacy. And that's not to say that he's always wrong when he's talking about politics. I mean there's been things that I think he's really nailed.
Um, and, and he's done podcasts on economics and on cryptocurrency and on Misesian economics. And I thought were really phenomenal, but it is where the political realm is where he ended up getting a lot of things wrong. Like, you know, fallen for the, uh, the, you know, COVID nonsense for a bit or, um, you know, foreign policy, things like that.
And it's just, it's a shame in a way to me. Like I wish he had never gone to the daily wire and I wish he had stayed there, but okay, whatever. That's just me anyway.
Because I do have enormous respect for Jordan Peterson and because I know his views on Israel and I know that he works at the Daily Wire right now, I was and also just knowing what's been going on over the last few weeks. When I saw he was on, I was like, well, there's no way this didn't come up. So let me buckle myself, you know, for what?
Dr. Peterson's going to throw at me. So I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that that was not how it went and that he just gave, you know, he gave me a compliment in passing and then talked about the other stuff he was going to say. So anyway, I was a little bit just full disclosure here, as I like to be honest with my audience. I was a little bit relieved about that. But then he went on to make a point that I did. Um,
I found a bit concerning. And so I wanted to play this clip and kind of give my thoughts on it. Because I think it's, I think there's something important that Jordan is missing here. And I think it's important for people to be aware of it. And so, you know, with the audience I got, I'm going to do my best to try to make that happen. So let's start the clip. And then I'll jump in when I feel it necessary. And so this is like,
I can really see this starting to happen on the right. Like I've been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right for probably four years, something like that, especially on the anti-Semitic side, because that's really where it reared its head first. And there's nothing more annoying than a successful minority.
Right. Now that's part of it. I'm going to hear, I might as well get myself in trouble right away too. Yeah, for sure. Well, this is a real subject. Yeah. It's a real, it's a real terrible subject. It's interesting because if you don't criticize it enough, you're compromised. If you, if you criticize, you know, it's like when it comes to antisemitism, like it's one of those things where you can't separate a, it's,
It's a religion, and it's also a race, and it's also a government. That's where things get weird. Right, right. And then there's also the concept of intelligence agencies and compromise that also gets attached to it, the manipulation of world markets and money, and there's a lot to unpack.
And then there's regular Jewish people. Nothing to do. Well, the Jews too are, they're very successful. And so what you would expect from a purely statistical point of view is you'd expect them to be overrepresented at the extreme. They're also a walled garden, right? Meaning? Meaning it's very difficult to join. They don't,
proselytize. They don't try to get you to join. And they're all very tightly knit. They call themselves the Klan. They're all locked in. The Jewish Klan. Not KKK. The problem with that term has been compromised by the Ku Klux Klan. But I mean it as terms of tribe. Community. Yeah, community. They're very tight-knit. Obviously, if Nazi Germany was in Eastern Europe, yeah, you had to... Can you pause it for a second, Natalie? Of course. Is it all choppy for you? All these complex things are multiple.
Okay, so just like a couple thoughts on what was said so far. So, you know, and maybe I'll hold off on this second point until a little bit later in the clip. Okay, let me say this. So there's, you know, Jordan Peterson is talking about paying attention to, you know, psychotic behavior on the right.
And that's fair, you know, fair enough. I mean, there's I certainly see a lot of this all over the place. We can kind of get back into that in a second. I do think that like if you're going to attempt to do this, to like tackle the idea of anti-Semitism on.
on the internet, I suppose, is what we're talking about here. I'm not sure really where else people are claiming it's happening, college protests or something like that, at least that's where people claim it happens. There's
I think it's important to like, if you want to get into this and you want to come on Joe Rogan show and start like kind of pushing back against this. And I've said this for many years now. And again, you know, for whatever it's worth, not that it matters, but like I'm Jewish and I don't like Jew hatred. And so, okay, it's fine to, to bring this up and try to smack it down. I think there's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but I do think you're going to be coming from a very weak position and
Like, again, this is kind of, it's kind of true for any group. If you really want to take them down, I think what you're going to have to do is address what their issues are. And I don't, I think, I feel like sometimes people are afraid to do this. This has always come very natural to me. And I've never bought into the argument that you can't do this because it could, you know, create fertile ground for some type of hatred or something. But almost every, like, um,
dissident group, every radical group, they almost always have, like they have a list of grievances, almost always some of them are reasonable, almost always some of them are not. It's a fairly simple statement, but it's almost always the case. Now, I suppose there could be exceptions where that's not the case. But if you're going to like take them on, then I think the way to do that is to like
admit the legitimate grievances that they have, and then point out the error of their ways. I think Joe gets much closer to this here than Jordan does. And there's, you know, to say like that Jews are highly successful,
I mean, that is true, but, you know, that's also true for other minority groups where you don't see this rise in distrust or hatred or whatever you want to call it. There's, you know, Asian Americans are killing it.
Um, and there's lots of subgroups within Asian Americans who are just doing really great, far better than the native population, far better than like American white people. And in fact, this was, uh, this was always one of the go-to talking points against people who were arguing with woke leftists back years ago when that used to happen. Um,
Before they were totally discredited, but they would say, hey, we live in a white supremacist society. And then some right wing or some conservative would say, well, if we live in a white supremacist society, why? You know, what's the evidence of that? And they'd say, well, white people make more money. They have higher net net worths. They have higher, you know, whatever, higher education, all these things. And they'd say, OK, but like Indians beat white people. So then aren't we an Indian supremacist country like this would always be that. But yet, yet.
Over this last 18 months or so, nobody is really claiming that we've seen a dramatic rise in anti-Asian hate. And there's even like other there's other subgroups in America that are doing very, very well. And so to just look at that, like isolating that one cause doesn't seem to really tell us much of anything. And then like at the same time over these last 18 months, we're
You've seen this horrific military onslaught in Gaza that is being completely funded and armed and propped up by our country. This is something that crosses both political parties, right? Joe Biden initiated the policy. Donald Trump is continuing the policy. It's not a Democrat or Republican issue. And it is like a third rail issue.
that you are, you know, I know people like to nitpick, right? I'm going to say you're not allowed to talk about it. I shouldn't say you're not allowed to talk about it, but let's just say there is a, a steep penalty to talking about it. And for many, many years before the rise of the podcast scene, he was just simply like, nobody was just going to talk about it. It was just like, you're gone. You're not allowed to do that anymore. Um,
I don't know how anyone could look at this and not think that that's at the heart of the matter here, or at least a major, major contributing factor to what's going on. And so I'm just saying, if you want to take on people for being anti-Semitic, I don't really think you're actually even engaging in that conversation if you just say, oh, they're successful and everybody's jealous of them. I mean, even within...
Like the people, even within the community of people who like you would put into that category, there is, you know, there's you would hear all the time if you listen to them talking about how overrepresented Jewish people are in banking and media. You hear a lot made of pornography, these different areas. I've never once heard any of the Jew haters make a big deal about how Jews are overrepresented in dentistry.
They also are overwhelmingly overrepresented, overwhelmingly overrepresented in dentistry. Um, and you make pretty good living being a good dentist. You're probably going to make, I, I guess like five times the, you know, median household income. Um, okay. So why don't we hear a lot of complaints about that? Because it's, it's,
you know, dentistry is not hurting our society. They're just kind of fixing people's cracked tooth and then they're happy that they got their tooth fixed. And so they go like, I'm just making the point that like there is some other element to this here now. And if you're going to be, you know, disproportionately involved in banking, disproportionately involved in media, disproportionately involved in war making,
you can see where that's going to lead to more of a hatred of your group. Now, I still think that hatred is irrational, and for the exact reasons that Joe laid out. It's like, well, what are we talking about when we talk about Jews? Are you talking about a religion or a people or a government or figures that are very powerful within our government? And then as Joe correctly says, and then there's just regular people.
There's just regular people have nothing to do with any of that. Now, of course, on some level, like this is the logical conclusion of this is just like that individualism should win out the day. People are innocent or guilty as individuals based on their actions, not based on their collective group. However, when you're talking about these things, you do tend to understand that, unfortunately, that's not the way that most human beings interact with the world.
Now, it's by our very nature that we're pattern-recognizing creatures, and that can be good, and that also can be bad. And it's very dangerous, and I think that a lot of the people who fall into this camp
do have a tendency to start with their conclusion. And that's the problem with pattern recognition. You know, it's, you can't just, you know, it's like feminists could sit there and say like, uh, you know, we live in a, you know, patriarchal sexist society that oppresses women. And then they go, well, look, as evidence of this, 90% of the fortune 500 CEOs are men.
And it's like, okay, but you're starting with your conclusion and then working backward because that doesn't really prove anything about how our society is male dominated. It certainly doesn't. It's the fortune 500 CEOs is not a comment on what life is like for men. It's a comment on what life is like for 500 men, the top 500 men. Like this is your average guy has absolutely nothing to do with
And so I think there's a similar thing there. There's a similar argument that you can make with Jewish people. And there's like, whatever you think about the government of Israel or the, uh, the Israel lobbies influence on the American government, whatever you think about what's happening to the people, uh, uh, of in Gaza, like that really does have nothing to do with Barry, the accountant who lives down the street. And like, it's insane to hold him responsible in some way for that.
Okay, like I do think that is the correct answer. But at the same time, if you lived in a neighborhood and like a large black population moved in and they started committing like rapes and assaults and murders at wildly disproportionate rates,
And then you saw a rise in anti-black racism. I don't think I would look at that and say like, geez, I cannot put together what's going on here. Like, I do not see one thing as being a major factor in the other. Now, obviously it's still in that situation, very unfair to just blame some black dude who moved in, who didn't kill or rape or rob anybody like, okay, we could be against that too. But if we're going to have a conversation about why there's this rise in racism here,
you're probably going to have to address the elephant in the room. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, a brand new sponsor who I'm absolutely thrilled to have on board, and that is Blackout Coffee. Stop drinking garbage coffee and get yourself some Blackout today. This stuff is delicious. I'm a bit of a coffee snob, and I will tell you I love this stuff.
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One of the things I was trying to figure out when I was watching that is certainly didn't walk away from it with that idea in mind. But then underneath all that, I thought there's really a, there's a really unbelievably tricky problem here. And I think that's why it's made it, it, it poked up into while you also set that conversation up, but it's,
manifest in that conversation. The psychopathic pretenders, and it's even worse now, and then make a barrier, right? Now, the right was calling for the left to do that for decades, and they didn't, and they couldn't, and the left is not good at drawing barriers, partly temperamentally. The right is somewhat better, but there's no shortage of monstrosity there. And so then the question is, how do you draw the line? And that's kind of what I was
Because I've been watching these right-wing, they're not right-wing, these psychopathic types manifesting
manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that's cloaked in anti-Semitic guys. There's plenty of anti-Semitism on the left, too, by the way. So it's not unique to the right. Well, particularly now. Yes, particularly now. And so, you know, you've let your curiosity guide you, your curiosity and your desire for knowledge, this quest. You've let that guide you as a podcaster. By the way, I'm trying to work through exactly. All right, so...
All right, let me get my thoughts on this. So first of all, I do, as I kind of alluded to at the beginning of the show,
I did appreciate that. I thought it was like a nice gesture that he said that, that he went, you know, I watched your discussion. I thought all three of you guys did a very good job. I looked at it like, could I have done any better? And I didn't leave feeling like I could have. That was a that was a kind gesture of him. I appreciate that. As I said before, it was that is as good as I could possibly hope for from a Daily Wire employee to say about that specific debate. Now, leaving aside the fact that nobody in the world like thinks that.
There's just nobody. There's nobody who thinks that both me and Douglas did a really good job of this debate, but whatever. That's fine. It was nice enough that he said that. But I thought that this next kind of section that he goes to of saying like, you know, you guys were navigating very difficult water and that, yeah,
you know, there's this problem of keeping the psychopaths out. And then it's almost seems the way he's putting it, that that's like synonymous with antisemitism. Like, you know, prejudice against Jews and being a psychopath are the same thing or something like that. I'm not saying he exactly makes that claim, but it's like, that's the group he's concerned when it comes to psychopaths. And here, this is my issue that I've always had with this way of looking at things.
Um, as, uh, um, the Jeff dice responded to my tweet earlier today, the brilliant Jeff dice. And I thought he, uh, he said something along the lines, I'm probably going to butcher this and not say it as well as him, but he said something along the lines of, um, he goes, uh, gatekeepers have a tendency to, um, confuse the, the pushback for the push. And it was just kind of an interesting thought.
The way I look at this, and by the way, this is, as I've said many times before, and I will not stop saying, this is the reason why I hate the term whataboutism. Again, not that there's not ever a scenario where you're just interjecting something that's irrelevant and changing the subject and you want to stay on subject. But so often, the overwhelming majority of the time that I ever see the term whataboutism used, it is...
essentially to attempt to not allow someone to put something into context.
And so, you know, if you if you're giving a report to, you know, the cops and you go, yes, I saw this guy punch that guy in the face. And then someone points out like, yeah, but that guy punched him in the face first. And you go, what about is no, no, no, that's not what about is that's like we're talking about exactly what's going on in this conflict. And you kind of can't you can't just look at one side of it.
Like, I have no problem ever with anybody having a standard. I mean, I may not exactly agree with everybody's standard, but I certainly have no problem with having a standard. All I'm saying is that you have to apply that standard across the board equally or do your best to do that. And so what I've seen, and I've seen a lot of this over the last 18 months or so,
is that people who are very supportive of what Israel is doing, of Israel's destruction of Gaza, people who support that and who support Israel's government, are very quick to point out the kind of dehumanizing bigotry aimed at Jewish people. And again, I'm not saying that there's no...
You know, I don't like that. That's about me and my group. I'm not a fan of that, obviously. But I can also recognize that it's like, well, wait, hold on. What I'm seeing here is a massive attempt on both sides to dehumanize the other side.
Okay. So that's like the first starting point. It's like, um, there, like there is, it's on, I saw it today on my Twitter feed and it's just so funny to me. I just happen to see them and my Twitter has been blowing up so much. It's just like not even fun anymore. You can't follow anything. As I finally started to understand what it's like for these people who have like really big followings. It's not fun. Twitter. I've said this before. It was the most fun around 50,000, uh,
about 50,000 followers. That's when it's at its best. But so I saw today, I literally, I just happened to see it. It's like I saw one and then I hit refresh and then it scrolls up and then I saw another one. And they were like the exact same tweet.
and it but but one about muslims one about jews that it's just kind of like they're all bad you can't trust any of them we had to destroy them all there's like there's this effort made all around and the thing that i have just you know
I've just noticed this a lot. There is a different, in a weird sense, I think we all kind of have our priors and our biases, and I think there's just not nearly, not nearly the sensitivity to anti-Muslim bigotry or anti-Palestinian bigotry that there is to anti-Jewish bigotry.
I mean, I think this is just like undeniably the case. And the amount like, you know, with you again, Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, called Joe Biden and and Chuck Schumer Palestinians as an insult.
Like, as an attack. Like, you're... I mean, think about that for a second. Like, think about this is the worst thing you could accuse one of the groipers of doing, you know, like, is what the president of the United States did just on the other side of the coin. You know, like, it'd be like... It'd be the equivalent of getting up there and being like, this guy's a Jew. Like, to someone who's not Jewish, but meaning it as an insult. Don't even listen to anything else this guy says. Like, you would... I mean, you'd be...
quite surprised to see that. And even when I just say it like that, you just think about how beyond the realm of even comprehension, like beyond, like if I say that, I go, what would it have been like if in a presidential debate, one of the candidates just looked over at the other one and said, this guy's basically a Jew.
You can't even conceive of that being the case. And yet we literally just saw it happen when it was Palestinian and really wasn't even a big story.
It wasn't even like a thing. I made hay out of it, but I don't know how many other people did. I think Crystal and Sager over at Breaking Points did, but not too many more. It wasn't like a major news story or nothing. I mean, I see this type of language all over the place. And I think that Darrell Cooper in his prologue to the World War II series got it right.
He got it right when he was just like, this is like a spirit that animates people. And that's a very evil spirit. It's the, it's the spirit that leads to the worst atrocities in human history, where you can like find a way to tell yourself that this entire group of people is just dehumanized. And then once you do that, well, what really are our crimes against them?
There's not just one side to this. And, you know, it's so like because you think about it like this, like you're talking about gatekeeping and finding a way to how do we know, you know, who Joe Rogan is supposed to have on and who he's not supposed to have on. And, you know, there's psychopaths out there and you don't want to have any of them on. If we're having a conversation about psychopaths,
And Jordan Peterson, you know who I do? I think it's like, I got to say I'm a little, for somebody who's like a clinical psychologist, it's kind of throwing this diagnosis out there rather loosely. And I understand that's not technically a diagnosis, but you get my point. I think that
It's like, well, let's okay, let's be really specific. If we're going to do this, let's be really specific. And let's not only focus on one side of this issue. Let's look at like the entirety of it. And if we're talking about there being psychopaths who need to be gatekept, explain to me how the people who are advocating that we drop bombs on babies are not like the first candidate for that job.
They're not like the first ones we'd look at and be like, how about the people who have advocated for five disastrous wars in a row that they all said would go great and all turned into catastrophes and are now advocating for the next one with no sense of humility about the five disasters they just advocated for? Does that not rise to the level of being considered? Or is it only when people say mean stuff about Jews on Twitter? You know, like, listen,
like i said my bias is i don't like the mean stuff about jews but i'm just like i i can't just be i can't be a liar i can't just be inconsistent on this and and then it's actually much worse than that it's even much much worse than that because it's not just that like you have one side who's you know like advocating for bombing the crap out of people and
you're not considering them or you're not bringing up any of the deal, but it is so much more. Like, as I said, with the Donald Trump example, it is so much more, um, it's so much uglier and it's, there's so much more power behind it. You know, like when we're gonna, when we're looking for say these, um, these cluster B, uh, psychopathic tendencies, um,
And we're looking at, well, that is one thing to consider for sure. But also like there like means and power and ability to do the thing are a huge component to it as well. You know, like it is quite possible that there were more or as evil people as Adolf Hitler,
who just never rose to being the, you know, the Fuhrer of Germany was just some guy, just some poor guy. Maybe he would have killed a whole lot of people if he had had the opportunity, but he just never had the opportunity to. And history does not concern itself as much with that person. We're a bit more concerned with the one who actually became the Fuhrer. You know what I mean? And so there's like, that matters too. And I do just think that
When you're going to you're going to look at a target of like, who are the bad guys who must be kept out? And you're picking on the pushback, the reactionary movement. And fine, like you can look at their worst excesses and there's a lot to critique there. I'm not, you know, I'm not denying that. But like, compare to what?
And who's really got power behind them? Who's got like the force of government policy behind them? Sure as hell ain't them, you know? And like, as I've said before, I've at this point now, I've done many public debates on the topic of Israel and Palestine. And I've watched many other public debates. So too many to even remember how many. And I have...
In my experience, personally, I've had two people, at least two different people who I've debated. Well, three, okay, I think three people that I've debated have straight up with no qualifications or qualifiers, with no, you know,
They've just argued to me that these people have no rights. I mean, said that out loud, explicitly. That's their argument.
These Palestinian people have no rights. They're savages. They're less than human. They're I mean, maybe they wouldn't say the words less than human, but they would say savages. It's a clash of civilization. They're on the wrong. They forfeit all their rights. We have a right to do whatever we want to them. Prominent people have said that, you know, like we've got like I mean, you're talking about psychopathic behavior. Nikki Haley was signing the bombs, right?
signing the bombs that are about to be dropped on children. I am sorry. That ranks on a different level than a groiper on the internet talking shit to me. You know what I mean? Like, I'm sorry that they're talking shit to me, but I could still sit here and say like, yeah, this just isn't really that high on the level of concerns. And like, okay, if after we've dealt with all that other shit and like called out all of them, if you want to call out that groiper talking shit to me too, okay.
fine. I don't have a problem with that, you know, but like, it is a little bit wild to, to scope out the landscape here to survey the whole landscape and then come away with like, I know who the psychopaths are. It's these guys make it make sense to me.
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You know, like it's, I'm sorry, this is just a little bit too nutty for me. And like the, again, there's the, what's the guy's name? Randy, Randy Fine, I want to say, is a congressman down in Florida. And he tweeted somebody like, you know, I don't want to butcher exactly what it was, but it was something pretty close to being this bad. Like someone sent him something.
you know, like on Twitter, you know, because he's like a very pro-Israel guy and supports the destruction of Gaza, as if someone sent him like a picture of like a dead baby in Gaza. And he like responded by being like, great, let's see some more. Like, holy shit. You know, now, can you imagine? Can you imagine?
If someone had said that about like one of the dead people on October 7th, it was a sitting member of Congress. Can you imagine the shit storm? I mean, like if, if, uh, if, if Ilhan Omar utters the words from the river to the sea, that'll be national news. But looking at like looking at a dead child and being like, great. And then I got an endorsement from the president of the United States a couple of days after that. Talk about dehumanizing bigotry.
I mean, all right, there's some competition going around here. And again, like, you know, one of them are actually going, like, there's just, again, there's just something, if you were teleported, and I know people will say this is like, you know, idiots will say this is like a lefty argument or something like that, but it's really not. It's really not. It's just a human argument. And it's very, it's, yeah.
It's just obviously that power has something to do with this, has something to do with this equation. And who is being oppressed has something to do with this equation. And, you know, a lot of times, and this is one of the very unfortunate things in this kind of post woke world that we're living in, is that critical race theory, which is retarded.
Genuinely, it's just very, very stupid theory. Like, it's really, really dumb. You can't believe intellectuals ever, like, even allowed this to develop the way it did. But
Because the claim of critical race theory is that all of the world is seen through oppressor versus oppressed and that every human interaction must be an oppressor versus an oppressed. Now, that's very stupid because it's not true and it completely ignores win-win relationships, which happen all around us, all around us.
Romantic relationships are win-win relationships. Friendships are win, typically, unless they're toxic, but generally speaking, they certainly can be win-win relationships. Market transactions are
are tend to be win-win relationships. Literally had a, I always think about this because my dumb, you know, autistic libertarian brain, but I always think I love every thank you, thank you moment that you ever have. I literally had one with Natalie the other day when we were here. It's like we finished the show and whatever, we leave. She was like editing it together to get it ready. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna run upstairs, blah, blah, blah, you know? And I went, thank you. And she goes, thank you.
Because that's what a win-win relationship is. We're voluntarily in this relationship. Like, I need a good producer. She wants the job. We're both working together. There's not an oppressor or oppressed here. Like, that's just not... Okay, so critical race theory is stupid.
However, it's equally stupid to pretend that nobody's ever oppressed and nobody's ever the oppressor. And so like, you know, you get this a lot. If you ever say like, oh, this group is oppressed. Now people go, oh, you sound like you're a critical race theory. It's like, no, dummy, you don't know what you're talking about. And so like if you were to take a time machine and go back to, you know, 1820, right?
And you were sitting around a room with like a slave owner and him and his buddies who are all slave owners were just talking about how stupid black people are and how they're not human and how you could do whatever you want to them and all that. You might have a certain feeling about that and how disgusting that is.
And if you then went to the slave quarters and they were sitting around talking about how terrible white people are and how white people are garbage and blah, blah, blah. While you may not agree with it, you might have a slightly different feeling about their bigotry. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just it's a little bit different to like be the group who's being dumped on versus the one doing the dumping and also being racist. It's just different. And so I do. And this is just my own view on this. I do find it.
To be substantially more disturbing to be spreading this like dehumanization of the Palestinians while they are just getting fucked up. Like there's something more disturbing to me about that level of bigotry while they are just getting so goddamn slaughtered.
I just so for that reason like it's like what's actually going on who actually has the power and who actually is exhibiting the most psychotic behavior here You would think that would come into it to some degree although it doesn't All right, let's uh, let's let's keep playing from the clip and I'll probably have some more to respond to be the same sort of thing How do you know?
Given your radical increase in stature over the last 10 years, how do you know when your curiosity and even your skepticism about the fact that things aren't the way that people say they are, because that's certainly been demonstrated in the last 10 years. How do you how should anyone decide what guardrails to put up? Like, what do you look for?
Do you have a conceptual system worked out for that? What do you mean? In what way? Well,
How do I look for in terms of people to talk to? Yeah, because you have this insanely immense platform and you're inviting people onto it. And you said to Douglas, and I know this to be true, that you're not really thinking about the outcome exactly. You're thinking about this is an interesting person to talk to and I'd like to go on that quest. But then you have the additional conundrum. We're trying to work this out in the Daily Wire side of things too, not to say that that's exactly the same situation. It's like...
Once you gain in reach and authority, then how do you know that, how do you take great care that the people you're talking to aren't, what would you say, eliciting or feeding a subculture, yeah, that's right, that hasn't got the proper aims? I guess the legacy media probably worked that out by having people
mediators, right? And guests. And that was also back when we could rely on the structures of authority in some sense to filter. And now we're in this helter-skelter world where everything is up for grabs. The legacy media is the worst at that now. Yeah, I know. They're the worst at that, which is fascinating. You know, it really is. It's really fascinating when...
Yeah. The, um, okay. So one thing here that, um, I think at a, at a different section, um, Joe did kind of address, um, like he brought it up, but I don't think that the conversation really stayed there for that long, if I'm remembering correctly. But, you know, again, I just think like all of these, the kind of like assumptions that are built into some of the, you know, the, the worldview that Jordan is, is espousing here, I think are perhaps incorrect.
And one of them is that the legacy media used to have a system of doing this so that we could trust them. I think that a much more accurate way to look at it is that they were never trustworthy.
And I think part of like, don't get me wrong, because there are, as Jordan correctly said, there are many variables here. And part of what's happened is like there's like a whole bunch of things that have happened at once. Number one, there's been a tremendous atrophy amongst the American elites.
i they are we just do not i mean the the group of elites that have had large amounts of power over the last 15 to 20 years are a truly unimpressive group and we produced much more impressive elites in previous generations also at the same time and related to that the country has been spinning out of control in many different ways um what you can look at of course the debt and the uh um
the the prolonged Wars and the you know insane covid response and the debasing of the currency and there's just there's there's much more um I think there are many more existential uh problems uh not that there weren't some in in the past but
All of this happened with the rise of the technology that allowed for this massive decentralized kind of media movement. And so now people are almost at the point where they go like, all right, well, they've been lying about us about everything for the last decade. Maybe they've been lying about everything for the last 20 years, maybe the last 25 years.
But, you know, like in your mind somewhere, you're like 40 years ago, 50 years ago, that's when you could trust Edward R. Murrow and all these guys. But I don't actually think that's the case. I think that back then we just had slightly more impressive elites. They had the media elite.
apparatus locked down and the American people were much more gullible and we were less at risk. We were America, we're on top of the world. It's just, what are you gonna do? Complain about this? No, the economy is going pretty good. All right guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Tax Network USA. Tax day may have passed, but for millions of Americans, the real trouble is just beginning. If you missed the April 15th deadline or still owe back taxes,
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Let Tax Network USA help before the IRS makes their next move. Once again, TNUSA.com slash Smith. All right, let's get back into the show. But look, I mean, look, we were, and this is at this point, I mean, this isn't even controversial. This has all just been declassified and known. We were lied into World War I, okay? We were lied into the Vietnam War. Like, there were massive, massive, like, organized protests
propaganda campaigns to lie the American people into certain policies. And that these I'm just pulling out a few wars. And there are so many examples of just like crazy shit that the CIA was doing that people in the government were doing that got that went completely uncovered, completely uncovered by that old corporate media apparatus. And so I think that
That's not who I'd look to as like who figured out the example of how to gatekeep. But I will say that it's interesting to me to see a lot of the people, I want to try to say this as carefully as I can. Okay. A lot of the people who were the champions of free speech,
At least this is what they always said when they were arguing with the social justice warrior types. They were the champions of free speech. They opposed the gatekeepers. They opposed labeling people as bigots, certainly like in this collective manner. They, you know, they were fine at the end of COVID.
Not at the beginning, but at the end of COVID, they were fine with saying like to hell with the expert class, to hell with gatekeepers. They got everything wrong. You should be questioning all of this stuff. But again, I'm not trying to be a dick here, but none of them were actually good on COVID when it mattered. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think any of these guys were.
Joe was fucking heroic the whole goddamn time, but okay, leaving that aside. But now the ones telling him about how he's got a gatekeep, they actually get like, what have you gotten right? You know, that's not Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson got a lot of things right, particularly culturally, spiritually, in terms of the role of masculinity, a lot of that stuff. But like, I don't know. He's also gotten like a lot of the, you know, like a lot of political things wrong.
I mean, he got COVID wrong. He was saying that Kavanaugh should step down when the accusations first came out, and then he turned out to be complete bullshit. And like, maybe you're not in a position to dictate who should be gatekept out.
I certainly wouldn't like put myself in that position of being like, look, here's the, here's what you got to do, Joe. I've never in all of the conversations that me and Joe Rogan have ever had. I have never once even dreamt to have the nerve to be like, well, let's talk about who you're having on the show and who you're not having on the show. It's like, Jesus. Um,
It just kind of seems to me like the problem that the Daily Wire is having, as he says over there, it seems like the problem that all these guys are having is that, oh, shit, this whole thing we've been advocating for this whole time, this whole free speech and, you know, an end of censorship and whatever, all this stuff, oh, shit, it's resulted in some very compelling,
Critics of Israel getting big platforms. That seems to me what the beef is, because really, if we're talking about anti-Semitism or Jew hatred, or as Jordan Peterson specifically mentioned by name, I think not in this clip, but at a different portion, specifically mentioned the Groypers by name. Okay, well, Joe's never had any of them on. What are we actually talking about here?
joe's never had nick fuentes on he's never had a groiper on his show he's had these other guys on but you're kind of using them as an example to kind of have this struggle session with joe about what standards he has for having a guest on and this just to me seems like a very similar tactic to all of the stuff that jordan peterson so heroically stood against
And I'm not quite sure why we're even having this conversation right now. I mean, like, I think Joe's standard is working just fine. Granted, I'm a little biased in this department, but I think his standard is working just fine. He has people on who he thinks interesting and compelling and has interesting conversations with them. And by the way, he's had a lot of people who support Israel on the show. He's had a lot of people who support the effort in Ukraine on the show. He's also had some people who are very critical of both on the show. I don't know.
And I also don't think the ratio has to be one to one or anywhere near close to that. I think you get a lot more pro-Trump people than pro-Kamala people on the show. But who the fuck cares? Oh, and also none of these people care about that. None of them care about that because they agreed with the message. So it just seems, again, if we're going to say this, just make the standard objective and then hold it across the board.
I don't think that's too much to ask for. Now, the other point that I'll make, and I do not, just to be very clear, I'm not accusing Jordan Peterson of doing this.
Uh, I don't think he's doing this exactly. It does seem like some of the other ones are flirting with this. And, you know, I, I watched, uh, um, my, my buddy, uh, Clint Russell's podcast the other day. And, um, uh, Clint Russell is the host of Liberty lockdown, which is a phenomenal show. And I, I love Clint very, uh, dearly. He's a very good friend of mine. I mean, I think he's a very smart guy and he's, his show is excellent. Um, and,
So I watched his show and he was like covering the same stuff that I've covered over the last few episodes of the, um, the Douglas Murray, uh, article and the Constantine Cason article and his angle on it, which was a little bit different than mine was like, oh, this is a straight up cancellation attempt of Dave Smith. Like they're trying to cancel this guy. And while I, you know, while I didn't exactly say that in my responses to both, you know, like I get his point.
And essentially like what he was saying was like, well, look, and you know, go watch the episode for yourself. Maybe I'm butchering this a little bit, but I think the point was something like, he was like, well, look, when you're talking about these standards,
And these, you know, like the only the experts should be here. And, you know, all of this, it's like, well, what are you really saying? I mean, you're essentially saying, hey, Joe, don't have Daryl Cooper on anymore. Don't have Dave Smith on anymore. Don't have Ian Carroll on anymore. Now, this is in its purest sense, admonishing.
advocating censorship. Now, you could say that they're not advocating, at least explicitly, that the government intervene and decide who's going to be on these shows. And they're not advocating that the social media companies determine this. But you're still just going one level beneath that and advocating that the host of the show doesn't have these people on. And part of it is that
Even they know that they can't just turn around and advocate tech censorship because everyone will call them the biggest hypocrites in the world after spending so many years of not doing it. But I wish like I don't know if any of you guys notice this, but I certainly notice this even when Jordan Peterson saying it. It's like this is very vague. Like, what are you actually suggesting? Joe shouldn't just have conversations with people he finds interesting. What are what are you advocating that he do here?
And then the last thing, the final thing I'll say about this is that, you know, I think that Jordan, you know, the fact that he calls out the Groypers by name and picks them when, as I've demonstrated throughout this, again, I'm not exactly saying here, I'm not saying that there's nothing to criticize about the Groypers. And I've got a, a strange relationship with some of them. I, it's a little bit of a,
strange situation because some of them have very much appreciated some of the views that I've taken. I think some of them have appreciated some of the ideas that I've been helping to kind of mainstream a little bit. But then again, I'm a Jew. So a bunch of them hate my fucking guts. And their leader, Nick Fuentes, as at this point, I would say I can count on him to trash me anytime I start making waves.
in any way, which I think is shitty. And so I'm, so whatever.
My dog in the fight isn't like that. I'm trying to defend him and these people. I'm just really what it comes down to is that I just believe what's right is right. And what's the truth is the truth. And what's fair is fair. And also, like, I'm not as some other very prominent people seem to be. I'm not what we used to call back in my time, back in the 80s and 90s. I'm not a little bitch.
And by the way, that is like just not being a little bitch is like that divides all the people, you know, into like two even categories that one can kind of be dismissed. But I just like the fact that Nick Fuentes says some mean shit about me is just not as important as the fucking destruction of our country, the destruction of Gaza, the fucking seven wars that we've fought in the last 20 years. It's just not it's not on the level of any of this. So like who really fucking cares?
By the way, I know this triggers the fuck out of some of my Jewish friends But like that's how I feel about all this fucking anti-semitism on Twitter. It's like his comments on Twitter fucking cares It's just not that important. Um, you could try your best to spin it by the way You just sound like a woke leftist when you do yeah, but the history the legacy of slavery or something Yeah, what are we actually talking about? What are we actually talking about in the present right now? but I will say that like
If you're going to go out there and call them out, if that's your move, then...
I do think if you want to be effective with that, then maybe you're actually going to have to take on some of their arguments. And I'm not, I don't agree with a lot of their arguments, but they've got some, they've got some. And I think if you're going to call them out like that, maybe you should address them. Maybe that's the way to do this. I also think there's something particularly for me as somebody who's followed Jordan Peterson's work and again, really admired so much of it. You know, it would occur to me that
That wall, and again, I don't wish to strawman Jordan Peterson on this issue, but while he is kind of sloppily...
a little bit you know just throwing out these labels of like you know cluster b psychopaths narcissists all these things um i would argue that it is very very difficult to make any of these diagnoses um on
a group of people on the internet that you do not know you have not met. I mean, like in a professional capacity, Jordan Peterson would never diagnose any individual in this group until he had like had several sessions with them individually. But it does just occur to me that perhaps a lot of those people,
Are the exact disenfranchised young men who Jordan Peterson was supposed to be the champion of and for so many years put his neck out there and said, no, society is like leaving these people behind. They're people too.
You know, this was one area that like, you know, it's gotten me in, you know, a bit of trouble. I mean, I don't know, you know, like back to like when Clint was saying that there's like a cancellation attempt against me, I'm kind of in a position, at least right now, there was a time when I was more worried about that. Maybe I'm being naive. I'm not too worried about it right now. I don't think that's, it's like, yeah, we're in this new world and like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson love me. So I don't really think I'm getting canceled anytime soon. Maybe I'm wrong, but like, I'm not really that
concerned about that but so i don't want to like i'm just saying like i've gotten a lot of flack let's say over the years for having this attitude and i think this was one of the things that jordan peterson that was so great about him because of course he's a lot smarter than me so he could put this in a much more eloquent and profound way than i'll be able to but part of my
Attitude in dealing with all types of different people. I mean, I've done this with all types of different groups, leftist socialists, all types of different groups. But the one that's caught me flack has been with like the alt right, the groipers, the kind of the people who some might call anti-Semites or racists or whatever term. I try not to use these terms because I want to use like a term that they'd agree with. But maybe that just, you know, as a placeholder.
The one of the attitudes that I've always had is that these guys are people too. You know, I don't have to agree with them on everything. I could even think there's some really ugly implications to some of the things they believe. By the way, I feel that about socialists too.
And in fact, I think a lot of people would die if the socialists were to get some of the policies that they want. But I can still speak to socialists and recognize that's a human being. We have a difference of agreement here. Let's discuss it. Let's see what of your grievances, what I think is a reasonable one and what I think is an unreasonable one, what I think is misguided. And I just think for of all people, for Jordan Peterson to kind of like at least I'm not saying exactly he did this, but at least he gave the appearance of
of kind of casting this aspersion across this wide group of people who I think are, you know, like many of them are the people who grew up under the regime that you made your career fighting and ultimately defeating.
I don't think the correct move here is to now take on the tone of saying they're the deplorables. They must be kept out. They must be kept out of here on a show that's never had any of them on to begin with. It's like you're just taking shots at them while they're completely powerless.
They're okay. I mean, there's some, there's some of them who got some following on Twitter or whatever, but like really in the greater scheme of things, is that the issue? And is this the way, like, what are we, what are we trying to do here? Like you're the clinician, not me. What are we trying to do here? Are you trying to like bridge a gap here? Are you trying to like see if some of these people are redeemable? Are you trying to like give them something to think about that they haven't before? Or are you just trying to tell society to shun them, to shun them? You know?
As Jordan Peterson once said, you know, what's so bad about speaking up for the marginalized?
All right, I'm going to wrap on that. And I'm sure this, I'm sure that last part will earn me a fair bit of grief too. Okay, thank you guys very much for listening. We'll be back. Members only episode tomorrow. The members only. That means you got to join. You got to go to partoftheproblem.com and sign up. And then you get the members only episode every Thursday. And for the rest of you, we'll see you back here on Monday. Thank you very much. Have a good one.