Episode 86 - Portal to Hell in my Twitter Feed and Roseanne
Date: 2018-06-14 | Duration: 1:03:30
Topics
Quick, sincere apologies aren’t good enough? Stop asking for apologies, if you won’t accept them The portal demons…demon after demon Credit for economy, Trump, Obama or George Washington? People mocking lack of North Korea progress Trump increased our debt, but who benefited? Should a “fair” tax system be based on dollar amount or percentage? Kim Kardashian’s White House visit Obama’s unexplained change in policy for dispensaries Did Jeff Sessions change guidelines for minor drug offenses? Prison reform Crowdsourcing trust fund for the wall Crowdsourcing trust fund for Planned Parenthood
Transcript
[0:08] Boom bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bone. Hello everybody. If you’re like me—and why wouldn’t you be, really—you already have your beverage. Hello kitten, hello jack. If you have your beverage, you know what time it is: it’s time for Coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip. Yes, I did get a haircut. Not a good one, but I did get a haircut. Are you ready?
What do we want to talk about first? Roseanne or the portal to Hell that I opened up in my Twitter feed quite accidentally? Let’s start with Roseanne. Some of you know that I have supported various comedians who have gotten in trouble for things they said under the principle that…
[1:09] …comedians are comedians and jokes are jokes. I defended Kathy Griffin when she showed the severed head of President Trump. Offensive mistake? Yes. Funny? I didn’t think so. Was it meant to be a joke? Yes. Let’s get over it, move on. Likewise, was it Michelle Wolf who did the routine at the whatever dinner that was, the one who insulted Sarah Huckabee Sanders? The jokes were not funny to me, but other people laughed. They were in the form of jokes; they were told by a professional humorist. I got over it pretty quickly. So now we have Roseanne who is in deep trouble, and keep in mind that the people I just defended…
[2:10] …and have consistently defended were people on the left. So now Roseanne does something which we must all disavow for its offensiveness and its, as some people said, racial undertones. Let’s talk about it a little bit. Once we’ve started by disavowing it, then we’re all good people, right? You disavow it, I disavow it, we’re all just disavowers, and I’ll give you my thoughts on it.
The first thought is that I don’t like to be associated with the team whose approach is the way you look, etc. The whole notion of going after the person instead of the idea is just such a gigantic mistake. Before we even talk about the racial aspect…
[3:12] …of Roseanne’s joke, why are we doing this now? Why are we going after people individually instead of their ideas? It’s just not helpful. It doesn’t help the person who does it; it doesn’t help the people it’s done to. It’s nothing but angry. I disagree with everybody from Kathy Griffin to Roseanne for going after individuals without any regard to what’s the point, what’s the policy, what’s the real problem here. That’s my first problem.
The second problem is that in order for you to be mad at Roseanne—at least mad enough for her to lose her job and all that—you have to make a certain assumption. Do you know what that assumption is? Go ahead, what is it? What is the assumption you have to make that’s not in evidence?
[4:13] An assumption you have to make about Roseanne in order for you to be mad at her for this. It has nothing to do with the joke, actually. You have to assume she’s racist. Actually, that’s a pretty good answer; that’s not what I was going for. Here’s the assumption you have to make: you have to make the following assumption that when she was preparing that tweet, her mental state was something like this: “I’m going to send this tweet. People are going to certainly see this as racist. Ah, that’s okay.”
Do you think that’s a valid assumption? That Roseanne was thinking, “Yeah, this is clearly racist, that’s why I’m saying it. I don’t see anything wrong with it. I have a brand new TV show, what could go wrong saying an overt, obvious…”
[5:15] “…racist thing on Twitter?” In order to make that assumption, which is not in evidence—what’s in evidence is that she did something that was hugely offensive. I found it offensive; most people found it offensive. A hundred percent of people will agree it was offensive.
But the offensive part is objective, meaning that even if people subjectively are offended, we can observe them and say, “Oh, that guy, he’s offended. That person is offended.” The offensive part is in evidence, no doubt about that. But was she thinking of it? Also the fact that people are offended because of the racial element to it. These things are in evidence; they’re in fact. But the part that makes it the big problem is they have to read her mind. You have to…
[6:16] …read Roseanne’s mind and imagine something insanely unlikely happened in order for your mental model of this whole situation to even make sense. That has to be that she was actually sitting there saying, “Yes, I know this tweet is racial; I’m going to send it anyway.” It was racial in the sense that she mentioned—actually, she didn’t mention race at all, but everybody saw it that way.
Separating how people saw it, because we all saw it the same way. I think everybody who saw it said, “Uh-oh, there’s racial undertones to this. That’s bad.” But do you think she was thinking that when she sent it? How many of you think she was thinking of her tweet in racial terms when she sent it? Which doesn’t excuse it, by the way. It’s completely not excused. I disavow it, you disavow it, but in her mind…
[7:19] …how many of you think she was thinking, “Ah, this is racist, this will be funny—funny in a racist way”? Somebody said “probably not.” I would say a million to one against it. Nothing’s impossible, but it’s sort of like a million to one against it because not only would she not do that, but nobody would do that.
In order to have the view that is the common view of this situation, you have to assume something that’s not in evidence. It is nearly impossible—impossible is too strong—it’s so unlikely that anybody would make that set of decisions. Here’s the second part: Roseanne, once it was pointed out to her how people were accepting what she thought was a joke, she apologized publicly. In her apology she said that she…
[8:20] …understood it was offensive. She understood the problem, she apologized, she apologized to everybody who was offended. She apologized with what I took to be sincerity. Why do I think it was sincerity? Again, I can’t read her mind, but let me ask you if your impression is the same as mine. Do any of you have an impression of Roseanne that she ever shades her personal opinion? Whether you like or don’t like her, whether you like her message or don’t like it—do you feel she ever says something that she doesn’t mean?
She’s not really that person. She seems to be the person whose biggest problem is that she does say what’s on her mind. She doesn’t have a problem of not being straight with the public. Is that fair to say? She has a very long, credible history of not being full of crap, that she says things that she thinks even if…
[9:22] …you don’t agree with them. To me it looked sincere. It was public, it happened immediately, she shared an understanding of what the problem was. As apologies go, it was complete. Would you agree that the apology was complete? She apologized to the public, she apologized to the target, she did it quickly and publicly. I saw sincerity in it because of her credibility; she’s a straight shooter in that sense.
Here’s what she didn’t do: she did not do anything like I’m doing right now which is, “Yeah, but I was thinking this,” or “You shouldn’t have been offended.” You didn’t see any of that. It was a straight, timely, complete apology. Here’s my question to you: do you want to live in the world…
[10:23] …where a person who makes an honest mistake offends people, apologizes for it completely in exactly the form that everybody likes to see apologies—quickly, publicly, everything there? Do you want to live in the world where that person loses their job because—and here’s the key part—of something you imagined she was thinking when she wrote the tweet that is almost certainly not true?
I don’t. I would apply this to anybody. If somebody offended me as much as—and let’s be honest, the amount of offense that Roseanne caused I received probably a hundred times over just yesterday on Twitter, just a…
[11:25] …typical Tuesday on Twitter. On Twitter people are massively offending people all day long. That’s sort of what it is. Now, if somebody theoretically offended me—and it’s pretty hard for me to be offended—one of the downsides of being a professional humorist is that we don’t get offended, and so it’s harder for us to see other people getting offended. In other words, all people who work in humor, we tend to get more jaded and edgy because if you’re dealing with humor all the time, you need a bigger fix. You just need a little edgier stuff than the normal public does, and sometimes it’s easy to forget and overshoot.
That’s just me. The rest of the public can’t handle this level of edginess or offensiveness, depending on your point of view. It’s easy to make that mistake; I’ve made it a million times. But if somebody did this to me, would…
[12:27] …I want to live in a world where a sincere, quick, perfect apology isn’t good enough? I don’t want to live in that world. So ABC—I think I agree with pretty much everybody I’ve heard talk about this—I will not criticize their decision. They are a business and businesses make decisions based on how their public will respond. I can’t say that was a wrong decision from the shareholders’ point of view. I don’t know. But it’s their decision to make and I don’t second-guess it. But I don’t want to live in the world ABC just created.
Do you want to live in that world where an apology isn’t good enough? Again, I apply the same thing to Kathy Griffin. I don’t remember if she ever apologized or not. Now let me take…
[13:29] …this to the next level. How many times have people asked President Trump to apologize for being offensive, and how many times has he apologized? Well, depending on how you count, you might say there was that one time he almost apologized for that thing, but not quite. Basically, President Trump doesn’t apologize for offensive things that other people have cooked up in their head. He also doesn’t apologize for things he actually said, either.
People say to me, “Isn’t that crazy? You should apologize when you offend people.” I always remind them: if President Trump apologized for offending people, there wouldn’t be time to do anything else because somebody is always offended. You couldn’t make enough time in your schedule to apologize to all the people who demand it.
[14:30] I’ve suggested that President Trump’s strategy of never apologizing, first of all, keeps him looking like a stronger force, which is good for branding and how he deals with the rest of the world. He just looks stronger that way. Secondly, it’s just not practical because everybody would be asking for apologies all day.
What happens if you do apologize? What do people say if you do apologize? They say it wasn’t good enough and you’re still fired by ABC. What was the point? Don’t ask for an apology ever again if Roseanne can’t keep her job after that apology. Do you get it? Don’t ever talk to me again about anybody apologizing for anything ever again. Apologizing no longer works because both the left and the right…
[15:30] …are about equally guilty in different ways. Folks have created a world where a sincere apology to what is clearly an accidental offense—she knew what she was doing when she tweeted, and it was offensive in one way, but I can’t believe she intentionally sent it knowing it would be received the way it was. It didn’t help her a bit. Stop asking for apologies if you’re not going to accept them.
That’s my thing with Roseanne. Then let me take it to another level to get myself in trouble because I haven’t been in trouble lately—people said, “Hey, that wasn’t a joke.” Here again, I’m a professional humorist. Roseanne does jokes for a living. The basic setup of…
[16:30] …the joke is: person looks like the result of this marries this. It’s the most common joke you’ll ever see on Twitter. What is the thing you see all the time? How many times have I done it? I’ve said, for example, that Clapper and Brennan look like those two Muppets, the old guys.
Now, do Clapper and Brennan actually look like those Muppets? No, they don’t actually look like the Muppets. It’s just funny because—here’s what makes it funny for those of you who need your humor explained to you—the reason it’s funny to compare Clapper and Brennan to those two Muppets, the old man Muppets, is because simultaneously they remind you of each other but they don’t look like them. If they looked just like them, it wouldn’t be as funny. It’s because it…
[17:31] …doesn’t look like him but it still reminds you of them. It’s that incongruity that makes it funny. I’ll tell you another one: President Trump is not actually a “Cheeto Jesus.” If you looked at President Trump, you would see nothing that’s actually like a Cheeto except, in a vague way, the color of his hair. He’s not really very close to Jesus in terms of how he looks or acts. But when you say “Cheeto Jesus” about Trump, it’s immediately funny because you can see it is true even though there’s nothing like that that actually looks like him. That’s what makes it funny; it’s funny because he’s not that.
Let me give you another one: people have compared Mitch McConnell to a turtle. If you were to look at an actual picture of a turtle and a picture of Mitch McConnell, you go point by point and say…
[18:33] …there’s actually nothing about him that does look like a turtle, except the kind that does look like a turtle. The fact that he doesn’t really look like a turtle but you still see it is what makes it funny. It’s the incongruity there, that you’re trying to hold two thoughts that can’t both be true at the same time.
I joked before that the best insult I saw about myself on the internet was somebody said I looked like a “toilet brush with a mouth.” I think that was before I got my hair cut. If you imagine my silvery-gray hair being a little bushier, and then somebody says, “Hey, you look like a toilet brush with a mouth.” If you put me next to an actual toilet brush, even if you add in the mouth, you would say, “There’s nothing actually that looks like that,” but you still see it. That’s what makes it funny—that I don’t look like a toilet brush…
[19:34] …but you can still feel it, right? That’s the vibe. That style of joke is both hilarious and common, and the most ordinary thing you’d ever see on the internet. If you’re asking me, “Was this a joke?” Well, it’s a professional comedian telling something that’s in the format of a joke which indeed made some people laugh. That’s as close as you can get to a joke as anything. Was it also carrying a political message? Yes. Sometimes you can have two variables. It was a joke carrying a political message. Apparently, Roseanne has some problem with Valerie Jarrett; I don’t even know what it is.
Why can’t something be two things? It could be a joke that carried a message. It’s also offensive. It could be three things. Enough about Roseanne. I don’t want to live in a world…
[20:34] …where an apology for offense isn’t good enough. Do you? Do you want to live in the world where Roseanne can’t make an apology and still keep her job? I don’t.
I promised I would tell you about my portal to Hell that I opened up in Twitter. I mentioned this a little bit yesterday, but it just got worse and worse. I was responding to—and I’ve deleted all the tweets because I had to close the portal to Hell. I spend as much time as I can looking at both sides of the political spectrum. I make sure I’m sampling heavily from both sides. But look, CNN is still the cleaned-up version of that point of view where you actually see the actual demons coming through the portal. Here I’m…
[21:37] …talking about these citizens who came on Twitter to attack me. It’s a whole different level. I’m going to be careful with my language. From my worldview, the movie I’m in, they look like demons coming through a portal in Hell because they’re not rational and they’re just angry and evil. They don’t even register entirely as human, at least on Twitter, because you don’t see faces and stuff; you just see their ideas.
If it were true that there were actual demons in the world that lived among us, these would be them. They came after me hard. The thing they came after me for made it more frustrating, in that I had done a reply to somebody, but the way Twitter is organized, it looks like I was replying to the top comment in the thread…
[22:38] …instead of the commenter. I could have deleted the top person’s name from the thread, but I didn’t. I was lazy. That caused the top commenter to comment back to me, and as people said, and I quote, “Lol you got owned dude. Dude you got owned so hard hahaha.” That’s what it looks like. Demon after demon came through the portal. They were all the Dale demon type, and they all said, “Man, you got owned.”
I would have been owned had I been talking to the person they thought I was talking to, and had her response to me made any sense. But I wasn’t talking to her in the first place. If any of the things they thought happened had…
[23:40] …actually happened, then man, I certainly would have been owned. The demons that came through the portal were creating this movie in their mind in which I had done something that quite obviously didn’t happen and is easy to demonstrate. You just click on the tweet and you look at the first name and you can see who I was responding to. You can also see what that person said and you can see how my response to that person was completely in context. It wouldn’t make sense that I would have responded to that other person. Sorry to make that story so boring.
If you’re explaining, you’re losing; that is exactly right. I was in this no-win situation where I was completely, demonstrably correct, meaning that my case was right there on Twitter. You could actually just look at it. It was obvious that what I was saying was true, and the demons kept saying, after I pointed out that it…
[24:41] …was obvious that they were mistaken: how do demons from Hell respond when you show them, “Look, just click on the tweet and you can see that you’re wrong. I’m just replying to that other guy”? Did they say, “Oh, I see. I guess my comment didn’t make sense because now that I see that you were replying to somebody else”? Did they say that? No, they did not. They said something more like this: “Sure Scott. I was replying to the other person. Nice try. Owned. You got owned.”
That’s what I was dealing with much of yesterday. I ended up deleting those tweets just so I don’t have to look at them anymore. But do you know what happens when you delete your tweet in which everything you did was right and everything your critics did was actually talking about the wrong point? Do they say, “Oh, it’s smart to…
[25:43] …delete that so you didn’t have to deal with those demons coming through the portal”? No, they don’t. “He deleted this tweet! We’ll go to the Wayback Machine. We’ll take a picture. It’s coming back! It’s coming back!” That’s what happens when you delete your tweets. I’m expecting that later today.
Here’s the other thing that was sort of the two-movies-on-one-screen situation. The thing that kicked it off is I had noted some successes of the Trump administration, things like North Korea is going well, ISIS is beaten down, and the economy was raging. I thought—let me check this with you—I thought that those three items were not in question in the other movie. I don’t know how I missed this because I think I’ve been watching CNN, and even CNN says the economy is doing well.
[26:45] Yeah, I’m not wrong about that, right? Even MSNBC says the economy is doing well. I don’t think I’m imagining that. But if you talk to the demons who come through the portal, they say that my claim that the Trump economy is doing great is false because of two reasons.
Here’s why they say Trump does not get credit for the good economy. Reason number one: it’s not good. The economy right now is actually bad because the debt is high and it’s slowing down and five other reasons. Reason number two that Trump doesn’t get credit for the economy is that Obama gets the credit.
[27:49] Did you get that? Let me say it in the voice of Dale so it makes more sense: “Well, I got two problems with you Scotty. Look Scotty, I know you think this good economy has something to do with a president. Lol you’re owned! You’re owned! But two problems: the economy is actually terrible and Obama gets credit for it!”
Wait, that made sense, right? Because Obama was great with the economy and everything he did was really good, but the economy is bad now. I’m mad, but I’m no longer sure why. Anyway…
[28:51] …there’s no peace in North Korea. “Ha ha ha ha ha! I can’t believe you think that President Trump did something with North Korea. Do you see any peace? Where is peace? I don’t see the peace. You see peace? Owned! You got owned!”
Sure enough, the North Korea situation is far from solved. But can you really watch—somebody says “you did get owned.” Some of the demons have made it over onto the Periscope. Hello demons from Hell. By the way, I don’t mean to be dismissive of the demons because keep in mind, in their movie, you’re the demons. There are demons from the portal of Hell in both of our different movies…
[29:51] …except in their movie, I’m the demon and in my movie, they’re the demon and don’t even make sense. But can you really look at North Korea and see the pictures of Kim Jong-un hugging President Moon like they’re getting ready to kiss? Apparently there’s very clear indications that the summit is going forward because we must be at least close to a deal.
Have we ever been this close, and have we ever been talking in such a friendly, congenial manner? To say that there has been no progress or that we’re not… let me put it in more stark terms. I said that we already have peace with North Korea. Is that not fair? Wouldn’t you say, if you’re looking at it this month…
[30:52] …that we are literally at peace? Not technically in terms of the paperwork, but we’re not threatening them. We’re saying, “Let’s go to lunch.” Does that look like war? Was there ever a real point in any other war where we said to Saddam Hussein, “Hey Saddam, why don’t you come over for a hug? I know things have been bad in the past, but let’s just hug it out. Let’s have a meeting, talk about how we could work things out. And by the way, Saddam, we’d like to invest a lot of money in your country.”
Nothing like that ever happened because that was a freaking war. Whatever is happening with North Korea right now could turn into a war. It certainly was more war-like not long ago, just a few months ago. But right now, does that look like war or does that look like peace? I’ve never seen anything that looked more like peace in my life. How do you miss that?
[31:54] How does that look like bad news? It’s a strange world. Then the argument that ISIS is not defeated. If you have to take the point that ISIS has clearly been—I want to choose my word correctly—ISIS’s physical territory ambitions have been essentially obliterated. They exist as an ideology and they’ve got training camps in Yemen, so they’re not defeated as an ideology. But to say that nothing good happened in terms of the fight against ISIS is sort of crazy.
Now I’d like to back up to the question of who gets credit for a good economy during any president’s…
[32:57] …administration. People are saying that anything good that happened in the Trump administration is because President Obama did such a good job getting it there; it’s just a continuation of his success. To which I say: how far do you take that chain of cause and effect back? Doesn’t George Washington get the credit because he sort of got the ball rolling?
The economy has largely gone up since the founding of the Republic. If you don’t count the World Depression, which was an outlier, and a couple of pullbacks, basically the economy is just going up forever. At what point do you go back and say, “Without James K. Polk, none of this would happen”? The other thing that’s making me crazy is that the demons from the portal of Hell are now good at comparing things. I think I’m…
[33:58] …seeing somebody doing it in the comments. Let me explain some math. President Obama inherited an economy that was on the brink of destruction. It was beaten down like you rarely see an economy beaten down. When you’re on the bottom, the gains that you get are the big gains, the easy gains, because you’re coming off a base.
I give President Obama high grades for navigating a very tricky situation from the precipice, the edge, to a solid base that he handed off to President Trump. I give him full credit for that. I think history will be kind to him for that. But when you reach something closer to full employment, you don’t want to keep going at that same rate. In other words, if we…
[35:00] …had the same stock market increase, the same amount of economic activity as we had coming out of the bottom—if you had that same rate at the top, that would be bad because you would get overheated. Nobody could hire people. Where would you hire people? We’re already close to full employment in economic terms.
By the way, the term “full employment” doesn’t mean zero unemployment; it’s somewhere around where it is now, somewhere around four-ish percent. Economists say that’s full employment because there’s always a little bit of people in between jobs, but they can get jobs easily. If you’re an employer, you’re almost certainly going to have to pay more—higher wages—because it’s going to be hard to get employees. You’re going to have to bribe them to work for you. People said, “But there have been no increases in people’s real wages,” depending on what…
[36:02] …stats you look at or how you slice it, you could say that that’s true or it’s not true, or it was more under Obama. But the fact is that with employment this good and growth this strong, you almost have to get higher wages. If you don’t, I’m not sure that’s the problem of the president. If the mechanism of economics just stops working for some reason, that wouldn’t be any president’s problem.
The president’s job is to talk the economy up to a high growth rate, get employment as good as you can, and then try to enjoy the benefits. I’m also seeing complaints that all Trump did was drive up the national debt, and because he’s driving up the debt, that’s a…
[37:04] …failure. Whatever economic benefits we’re seeing are really just because he borrowed so much money to get it done. Here’s the thing: I asked, who was the beneficiary of the debt? Before we talk about who has to pay off the debt, which is a more complicated question than any of us can handle: who is the beneficiary of the debt? Where was the money spent? What do you think?
So we took on debt to create money that got spent on stuff. It seems to me that our money was spent on military. The big-ticket items: military, social programs, healthcare, the poor. It seems to me that the…
[38:06] …country borrowed to take care of the people who need it most and the military. You could argue about what’s the right amount of funding, but you can’t argue the fact that everybody is better off with a military that can keep us safe.
The first thing is, who got the benefit of the money in the first place? I would say that was pretty well distributed, and it probably was more concentrated with the lower class, I would think. Now you say to yourself, “But the tax breaks went to the rich.” Here’s a fun question to ask your next get-together. It doesn’t even matter if you’re talking to someone on the left or the right; I think this works either way. You say to somebody, “Do you think that taxes should be fair?” Of course, most people say…
[39:09] …it should be fair. That doesn’t mean you pay the same amount that I pay, because there are lots of different variables—you might want a progressive system, etc. But everybody wants a system that’s fair. Here’s the trick question—are you ready for it?
You say, “Yeah, I guess we all want a fair tax system. How do you measure fairness? Is it in the dollar amount or the percentage of your income that you pay?” Do you see the trick question there? Let’s see your answer. What do you think is a fair tax? Everybody pays the same percentage, or everybody pays the same dollar amount? I think if you asked, people on the right are probably a little more…
[40:11] …likely to say they’d like a flat tax. But is it fair that a billionaire pays 10% and a person who’s barely scraping by pays 10%? Because that 10% for the person who’s barely scraping by is all the money they had left. Is that fair? Some of you say yes.
I think I’m learning here by your answers that this would be funnier if you asked somebody on the left, because I guarantee you that they will pick one of those answers. They’ll either say dollar amount or percentage, and they’ll almost certainly say percentage because that just feels fair. The moment they say that, you can point out that’s not even their own preferred plan, because the idea is that rich people pay both a higher percentage and a higher dollar amount. That’s their own preferred plan. See how many people you can trap into…
[41:11] …saying that they agree fairness means the same percentage or the same dollar amount, because neither of them is what people on the left think is fair. If we talk about taxes, we’ll go down the rabbit hole too deeply.
I had that experience with opening the portal from Hell. We’re definitely in different movies, and there are some terrible, terrible people in the world. I don’t want to live in a world where offending people and then apologizing isn’t good enough. What else is happening? I understand that Kim Kardashian is going to be visiting the White House…
[42:11] …talking to President Trump, maybe today, and that she might ask for a pardon for a 62-year-old grandmother who went to jail for a long time on a drug offense. In the context of reading about that, I read an article—maybe you can confirm whether this is true or not, and for some reason I blame myself for not knowing this—can you confirm that this is true?
In this article I read, it said that Jeff Sessions changed the guidelines on sentencing for relatively minor drug crimes. My understanding is that Jeff Sessions made the charging for minor drug crimes more aggressive than under the Obama administration, which had guidelines that said “be easy on this stuff.” Is that true?
[43:13] Can somebody confirm that that’s actually true? One “yes” if it’s true, and those of you who seem to know are saying yes. Somebody said “about to flip… yes, Sessions has to go.” That reason alone is disqualifying.
I want to put this in context for you. Some of you remember that I’ve said consistently positive things about the Obama presidency in general while I criticize individual things. Same with President Trump: I can say it’s looking good in general, but I can criticize individual things. My biggest problem with Obama—and the reason that I briefly blogged back when he was running for re-election that Romney was a better…
[44:14] …choice—even if you didn’t know anything about Romney. In other words, I said, “Romney is the only person running.” That was my argument in my blog because Obama had flipped on what he wanted to do about cannabis selling places in California. He campaigned on “we’re going to leave them alone,” and then without explaining why, he said, “No, we’re going to go hard at these dispensaries in California” that are legal in California but not legal under federal law.
Which is why I said: you either have to explain why you changed your mind, or we must be left with the assumption that you’ve been bought by—who knows—the private prison lobby maybe, the alcohol lobby maybe, some big donor who doesn’t like cannabis. We don’t know. But under…
[45:15] …the situation where he made a major change in policy that had an impact on my state and didn’t explain it, and there’s no other rational way to explain it other than he got bought, I find that disqualifying. Likewise, if it’s true that Jeff Sessions changed the guidelines for minor drug claims to make them worse, he’s got to go.
If it’s true that President Trump is on the same side with that, I need to find out if this is really true, and I need to see how this fits in the context of the prison reform, which I understand does not include mandatory sentencing. I believe Jared’s argument is first you get the prison reform, and the…
[46:18] …idea with prison reform is that people would get credits for training themselves in jail for things that would allow them to get gainful employment after jail. It’s a way to ease people into a productive life after jail, and they can get less jail time for that. I believe Jared’s argument is that if you get that part right, it’s easier to make the argument that you should reduce the mandatory sentencing because this is a way to reduce it. It’s all part of the same package.
I’m not convinced. Somebody needs to make an argument that Sessions—and by definition, Trump—have made the right decision on sentencing for minor drug crimes. It looks disqualifying to me. Now, I don’t think there’s really, given…
[47:22] …that President Trump has a history of being very anti-drug, and given that Sessions has an even longer history of being a hard-ass on drugs, when those two people act hard on drugs, it may be that they think that’s the right thing to do. That’s a different situation from Obama, who clearly put a policy in place that was the opposite of his previous policy and was inconsistent with his own philosophy—which indeed he turned back to in his second term. He actually went back to his original stance of leaving the dispensaries alone.
I guess I would be a little less hard on someone who’s at least been philosophically consistent, even though they’re completely wrong in my view. Obama was not consistent with his own promises or his own philosophy and didn’t explain it. In that case you have…
[48:24] …to assume money was involved. If it wasn’t a simple explanation, it would have been fine. That’s all it would have taken to change my mind, something like: “I thought about it, and here’s my reason.” That’s it. I don’t even have to agree with the reason; I just have to say, “Yeah, that’s a reason.”
So the Trump administration is simply—somebody just said all they’re doing is saying, “If it’s a law, we’re going to enforce it.” So they’re just across the board: whatever the law is, we’ll just enforce it. That’s not good enough. It really isn’t. Laws are designed to be managed by people, and people can make reasonable decisions to say, “This law isn’t helping us as much as it should, so in these cases, we’ll go easy.”
[49:36] This is Congress’s job; it’s Congress’s job to make the laws. But I’ve made this argument before: a police officer has a lot of leeway about who to arrest. Maybe somebody’s an informant, maybe somebody did something that’s technically against the law but didn’t mean it or it was no big deal—you don’t want to ruin their whole life.
I think we’re happier when the police have a little bit of judgment involved, when the courts use a little bit of judgment, and when the Justice Department uses a little bit of judgment on things. I think that’s a healthier situation. Even though the law has to be obeyed, humans are involved. A little bit of wiggle room is okay. What’s your history with drug laws, friends or family? My history is I’ve…
[50:41] …seen people whose lives, even currently, are completely destroyed by drugs, but they’re usually opioid types. I haven’t seen anybody that I know go to jail for a drug charge. If I thought about it, I might be able to think of somebody, but I can’t think of any.
I know personally, of course, I know a number of addicts. “What happened to Zachary Stoner in Chicago last week?” I never heard that name. I don’t know that story. You don’t know any addicts? If somebody just said that they don’t know any addicts, do you think that’s true? Do you think there’s anybody in the United…
[51:41] …States who doesn’t know any addicts? You know what that means, right? Of course you know addicts; you just don’t know they’re addicts. If you’re me, people know they can tell me pretty much anything and I’m not going to judge them. I’m not going to turn them in, I’m not going to judge them, I’m not going to be talking about it.
So I get to hear things that other people aren’t hearing because they’re judgmental or whatever. In my world, people are addicts and have every problem in the world only because they’re willing to tell me, because they know I’m not going to judge them for it. Many are hiding their hidden addictions. I think that’s all I had for today. “What is your prediction for the IG report?” I don’t have one; I think that’s a wait and see. Here’s what I wanted to…
[52:43] …say. There’s a story about illegal immigrant children being separated from their parents, and people quite understandably are shocked and aghast that children can be separated from their parents. As a human being, I certainly get every part of that. You can hear that—parents separated from their children—and it reaches us at the depth. I’m not even a biological parent, but even I can feel it just as a human being. It’s like, “Oh my god, that’s the worst thing.”
But there’s something missing in the conversation: what was the alternative? I kept waiting for somebody to say, “Yes, it’s terrible that they’re separating children from parents. Here’s…
[53:46] …the good alternative.” Is there one? If there’s a good alternative, I’m all over it. If there’s a good alternative, what the hell are we doing? But I haven’t heard one, have you? But we don’t really send them all back together, right?
If somebody robs a bank and they bring their children along, doesn’t the parent go to jail and the children get separated because the children don’t go to jail? I don’t know what the alternative is. Somebody says, “not use a kennel.” I think the kennel pictures were from an entirely different situation. “Send them back together.” That’s not what we do, right? When we first catch them, do we…
[54:47] …if you catch a family, do you actually put them in a van and the van starts driving toward the border? How does that work? Do we have jails that are family jails? Should we build family jails that are like a little one-room apartment so you can put the whole family in there, including the kids? Should the kids go to jail? Temporarily, until you deport, I suppose.
I feel it when anybody says separating kids from the parents is bad. I have all the same feelings, but I’d like to see the alternative, and I don’t know—I haven’t heard it, because there must be an alternative. I saw a Stefan Molyneux tweet this morning; it’s somewhat related. He said there were twenty-six billion dollars in remittances—money paid by Mexican…
[55:49] …citizens, mostly who live legally or illegally in the United States. They’re paying back into Mexico to support their families, I suppose, mostly. There was twenty-six billion between whatever months he specified, but it was just a part of the year. Stefan’s point was it’s like Mexico is just begging us to tax it.
Is there a problem with that plan? Because it seems to me the President would have already suggested that specifically if that was a practical plan. It’s exactly the sort of thing that the President would say, even if it was just sort of spitballing: “I will do this” or “we’ll do that.” I don’t believe he’s ever mentioned it. Can anybody fact-check me on that? Has the President ever specifically mentioned taxing…
[56:50] …remittances? And if not, is there some good reason for that? Somebody’s saying “flip-flop” a hundred times, so I’m going to block you just for saying the same thing over and over. Some people saying he has and other people saying he has not.
If people are saying he has and other people are saying he has not, it seems more reasonable to say that he has, because the people saying he has not maybe just didn’t hear it. The people saying he has—there are enough of them that it makes me think probably he said something like that. Too controversial? It seems like that would be the least controversial tax of all time. Every tax is controversial; nobody wants to pay them. What’s wrong with Cruz’s idea? Somebody needs to…
[57:52] …remind me what Ted Cruz’s idea is for paying for the wall. Is it legal? Is it legal to tax anybody for anything? The fact that it happens tells you all you need to know: if they can, they tax it. Somebody’s tweeting me the answer, I guess.
Then, of course, there’s the crowdfunding effort that’s going on now, too, so the citizens can pay for the wall. Let me ask you: assuming that crowdfunding legislation goes through which would allow you to donate specifically to a trust fund in the government that would only go toward the wall, how many of you would donate? Just put in a dollar amount, let’s say per year.
[58:54] Give me a per-year amount you would donate for five years. I’m seeing 20 bucks, a hundred bucks—this is per year—5, 50, two hundred, thousand, hundred, two hundred, ten, twenty. If you had 10 million people who would give $100 a year, that’s a nice start on the wall. Look at all these people who are willing to give fairly substantial amounts.
I’m not totally opposed to crowdfunding the wall, but I think they should do the same thing with birth control. Planned Parenthood has the situation where it may be legal to…
[59:54] …get an abortion, but people who are opposed to abortion on moral grounds don’t want to fund it. I think that’s a fair argument. But as long as abortion is legal and the people who need them don’t have money, would it work if just private people fund them? Why isn’t there a crowdfund for that?
Then all the people who say, “Planned Parenthood should be funded,” there’s nothing that would stop them. In fact, Planned Parenthood might be funded more than the government would fund them, because the government is going to pay what the government pays, but if it’s private, there’s a fund that anybody can contribute to—couldn’t it be bigger? Couldn’t it be better? I don’t hate this model where the most controversial things, where the other side has a legitimate moral objection to it, they just don’t have to pay for it. You can’t do…
[1:00:55] …that for everything. You can’t do it for the military or healthcare. There are some things that, even though people object to them, it’s more that they object on practical or financial reasons. You can’t do that. But when people have a real serious moral problem with something—paying for abortion or building the wall—as long as they’re both legal and somebody’s willing to pay for it on their own, let’s just make that possible.
Somebody says their girlfriend donates to Planned Parenthood. How much do they need? If Planned Parenthood is not getting enough money, they should be saying that: “The government’s cutting our funding, but you can donate through this website.”
[1:02:01] That’s it for today, and I will talk to you tomorrow if all goes well. Tomorrow on my Periscope, I’m going to be talking to an expert in Korea. I’ll be talking to someone in South Korea to get a feel for the temperature over there, sort of an on-the-ground impression of what people are talking about, what they’re feeling. I think it’s going to be really interesting, and I’ll tell you more about that and introduce my special guest tomorrow, assuming all my technology works.
That’s probably going to happen tomorrow; don’t miss that. I can’t wait for that one, by the way. It’s somebody in South Korea right now that I’ll be talking to while they’re in South Korea…
[1:03:02] …and somebody who lives there, an expat. No, it’s a private citizen living in South Korea for a while who will give us the temperature. No, not Gordon Chang; Gordon Chang is awesome, but I’m going to talk to somebody who’s actually living in South Korea, which is a whole different perspective. I’ll talk to you later.