Episode 132 - The End of White Supremacists, WalkAway and Conspiracy Theories
Date: 2018-07-08 | Duration: 50:52
Topics
The fallacy of IQ confirming racial supremacy Brandon Straka WalkAway movement Conspiracy theories, mostly the right, mostly the left…or BOTH? Logic and facts don’t pierce the bubble of confirmation bias An engineered conspiracy theory might help the left pierce their TDS bubble Democrats are favoring illegal immigrants over black Americans Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is the best FUN candidate option Barrett would be 4th woman in the current court
Transcript
[0:06] Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. I’m a little bit late this morning. I overslept, but I had good reasons for oversleeping, and now I have good reasons for being here with you. It’s going to be the simultaneous sip. I gave you extra time; you should be ready by now. Are you ready? Raise a mug, a vessel, a container of your favorite liquid—coffee preferred, it makes you live longer, I hear. Time for the simultaneous sip.
Sublime. I don’t know about you, but I feel my life just was extended by 12 minutes. I’m going to buy myself another 12 minutes of life. You saw the recent studies, right?
[1:07] Studies are once again saying that coffee makes you live longer. Well, here’s another 12 minutes. I can feel the energy pouring through my body now. I’m not sure, but I think my muscles got a little bit bigger. I feel my telomeres just lengthened a little bit. Good stuff.
Let’s talk about one of my funniest topics. I know this isn’t supposed to be funny, so there’s some topics that are dead serious and still funny. It’s not my fault. Sometimes things can be completely serious and still kind of funny. Let me tell you my favorite one: Have you noticed that you’re not seeing a lot of people labeling themselves white supremacists? You do see people say that they are white nationalists, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but didn’t it—
[2:09] —seem to you as though people used to be saying “white supremacy”? Have you noticed that you don’t see those two words together very much? Is that a coincidence? I suggest to you that that is not a coincidence and that there’s a funny reason why. Here’s the funny reason why: if you were a white supremacist, your entire deal is that white people are superior. That’s what a white supremacist says. They also believe that that can be demonstrated on—wait for it—IQ tests. But there’s a problem: where do white people come out on IQ tests? Not the top. Not the top. I’m not going to give you an opinion on—
[3:10] —whether IQ tests are scientific or valid, whether they mean what people think they mean. That topic is not my topic. We’ll leave that to other people. I’m just saying that the tests that are out there that a white supremacist would look at—the studies the white supremacists would say, “Aha! Let’s look at some IQ tests to see how awesome we white people are”—well, we’re below Asians. So, not technically supreme. But we’re right up… wait a minute, we’re also below Jewish people. Now that’s going to be a problem for our branding.
Imagine if you are a white supremacist and then you looked at your own preferred measure of supremacy. That—
[4:12] —would be the white supremacist’s preferred measure: IQs. And then he looks at the IQ test and he says, “We’ve got a problem, Bob. Bob, we’ve got a problem here.” Not all white supremacists are named Bob, but it feels like a few of them might be. It feels like there’s a little bit of an embarrassing imbalance between their preferred source of data—IQ tests—and how they were seeing themselves as supreme. It just didn’t work anymore.
So they morphed to: “Well, we might not be so supreme, but wouldn’t it be great if we had our own country?” and then you became white nationalists. But even the white nationalists—I’m not sure that makes any sense when there are so many people who already live in the country and they’re productive and awesome people who are not white. What does it mean to be a white nationalist? Don’t you need your own country, because you’re already in the wrong country? So white nationalism—
[5:16] —I’m not sure what that even means. But here’s the funniest thing about white supremacists, racists, etc. Let’s just generalize this to racists. I’m not going to name names, but there was a certain prominent, accused racist person, someone who the Southern Poverty Law Center—who are themselves racists, as I understand it—have created a list of other racists. So it’s a racist group that creates lists of other racists.
One of the people—I’m not going to name names—was declaring the greatness of white people because white people had, in this person’s opinion (I’m not talking about myself, if you’re tuning in late, I’m talking about other people), but some white racists believe that white—
[6:18] —people were awesome because white people had invented so much. So white people had invented a lot of stuff and therefore the racist believes that white people were awesome. What’s wrong with that thinking? That racist didn’t invent anything. How can you claim credit for something an entirely different person did because you have some weird connection to them by coincidence? How in the world can you say that you personally are great because somebody you don’t know, who lived a hundred years ago, invented a light bulb? I’m pretty sure that the fact that someone who has my same skin tone invented a light bulb says absolutely freaking nothing about me. What does that say about me? It doesn’t mean I can invent a light bulb. Maybe I—
[7:20] —could have, but let’s say something harder. The entire basic premise that because a few freaks—and let’s face it, if you’re smart enough to be a genius, you’re kind of a freak; you’re almost a weird coincidence of genes coming together. The thing that makes somebody a genius, an inventor, somebody who changes the world—whether you’re Henry Ford or inventing light bulbs or whatever you’re inventing—the thing that makes you special is (wait for it) that you are not at all like other people. That’s the whole deal. The fact that you’re a genius is what makes you not like other people. And so the people who are not like you are claiming—
[8:24] —credit for being like you when the entire point is that you’re not like them. That is the whole point: you’re not like them. Most of us, 99.9% of us, have nothing in common with geniuses who have changed the world. Nothing, except that maybe if somebody was looking at you from a distance with binoculars and you saw a little smudge in the distance, they could say, “I don’t know, looks like a white person.” That’s about it. From a distance with binoculars, you could say we have Edison, Benjamin Franklin—both white. And there’s Scott. There’s Scott Adams over there. I see him through my binoculars. He’s also… yeah, I think he might be white. That’s it. That’s all you can say about me and Benjamin Franklin.
[9:28] Benjamin Franklin’s awesomeness did not affect me at all. I didn’t inherit it. I’m not really related. I’m not even related. It would be one thing if you claimed some greatness from an immediate relative. If you said, “My father was Thomas Edison,” I’d be impressed. I’m not sure that means necessarily you inherited all that goodness, but I’d be a little bit impressed. But the fact that someone who is not related to you except all the way back in Africa—see what I did there? If you follow our evolutionary chain all the way back to Africa, maybe I am related to Thomas Edison, but not in any important way. The idea of being a racist doesn’t even make the smallest bit of sense. It is similar to what I call the—
[10:31] —analogy problem. The logic problem of a bad analogy goes like this: if two things have something in common, you imagine that they have everything in common. That’s actually just a logic flaw. It’s the logic flaw you see when the Democrats call Republicans Nazis or Hitler because they say, “Wait a minute, there’s something you did that in some weird way reminds me of something a dictator did. Therefore, everything you do must be the same as Hitler.” That is just a brain problem. Likewise, when the racists say, “Hey, Benjamin Franklin and I have something in common—our skin pigmentation—therefore I bet I could invent a light bulb,” that’s not thinking. That’s a nothing.
I think I’ve said enough on that. Let’s—
[11:34] —talk about the WalkAway movement. Brandon Straka is the face and the symbol of that movement, an ex-Democrat who has walked away from the party for being ridiculous. I’m looking at an article today in which somebody is talking about the number of Russian bots that are supporting that, and the idea is that it’s a fake movement because it’s really being supported by bots and not people.
Now, I have been a little bit hesitant to say that this WalkAway thing was real. It’s certainly real on the small, meaning that there are real people—Brandon’s a real person, he really did walk away. I believe all that’s true. But the—
[12:34] —size of it and the potential of it strikes me as overstated. There’s a little bit of wishful thinking. There’s a little bit of people wanting to wish it into existence because if you treat it as if it’s real, other people will maybe treat it more seriously and it could become real. So what you’re seeing is people who would like it to be bigger than it is and trying to will it into existence.
But if I’ve taught you nothing, it’s that people don’t change their minds because the data changes. It’s very rare. Why are we even talking about Brandon Straka and WalkAway? The reason we’re talking about it is partly because he’s gay—that fits into the story really well. But it’s rare. The entire reason that we talk about Brandon, and why it’s so interesting, and why our attention is drawn to him—
[13:37] —and what he’s doing, is because it strikes us as very unusual. That’s not going to change. It’s very unusual. My guess is that the WalkAway movement might cause a little bit of a ripple, but I don’t see it as something that’s going to become a tear in the universe, because there’s sort of a confirmation bias prison that we’re all in. People just don’t get out of their prisons that easily. They certainly don’t do it because they got better information. Nobody walks away from their political party because they got smarter or they saw things a little bit better. Let me revise that: some people do, but it’s a very small number of people, not enough to change the equation probably.
Let’s talk about conspiracy theories. Have you noticed… well, let me ask you:
[14:39] Let me put this in the form of a question. How many of you believe that only the other side—and in the case of the people who are watching this Periscope, most of you are, I know from experience, Trump supporters—how many of you think conspiracy theories are something the other side has? How many of you think conspiracy theories are something that mostly are on your own side, the Republicans are conspiracy theory people? And how many people think it’s just both sides all the time?
Both sides. I’m so proud of you. I’m not entirely sure that two years ago you would have universally said “both.” If you’re looking at the messages coming across, people are saying—
[15:40] —unambiguously: both. Both sides. Conspiracy theories: both, both, both. It’s pretty much a hundred percent of the people answering, and there are a lot of people answering, all saying both. Does that feel like a big deal to you? Because it feels like a big deal to me. I swear, I’m not sure that two years ago you would have said both.
I feel as though you have collectively risen to some new and better level of awareness—and I mean that literally, as in a new higher level of awareness. Once you understand it’s both, you’re right on the cusp of seeing the world completely differently, and maybe many of you already are. This is really a big deal. I’m actually blown away. I didn’t think I would see this answer. I thought that most of you, honestly, I would have said two-thirds of you would say, “No, it’s the other side.” The other—
[16:41] —side has all the conspiracy theories, we’re pretty much right. But the fact that you’re on this page and you understand both sides are suffering from the same conspiracy theory problems… wow, that’s very impressive.
Let’s take that good news and take it to the next level. If you were going to move the needle—let’s say you wanted more people to be the WalkAway types, let’s say you thought that your side was a good side and you have the best policies, etc. Let’s say you really believe it, that you’re not trying to get one over on somebody, you’re not trying to take their stuff, you’re just trying to make a better world, and let’s say you think that your side is the side that can do it. I’ve said since the beginning of this political involvement for me, for the last two and a half years, I believed that a President Trump back—
[17:45] —when he was a candidate, had a set of skills that he could bring that other people just didn’t have, and that he could do with that set of skills things that other people could never get done. It was sort of a once-in-a-hundred-years or more opportunity to get done those things that are hard to get done. Now, it still remains to be seen whether all of that is true.
Of course, I also always imagined that there would be problems. It doesn’t come free. It’s a big, messy, expensive situation. But the benefits would so outweigh the costs that in the long run, the historians would look back and say, “Yeah, there were some rough edges there and society got pretty torqued up and it felt like it was going to be a civil war.” I don’t think that’s even a slight chance of happening, but we should—
[18:46] —have got a lot done. I think that’s how historians are going to see the Trump presidency. But in the context where people don’t use reason and logic to make decisions, if you wanted to get to this better world—this Golden Age, the Summer of Love—if you wanted to get there and you needed to convince the other side, the Trump haters, to get out of their corrosive bubble of bile (the bile bubble, where everything is awful and hateful and they’re hating their life for their own benefit), you want to get them out of there.
If there is any sense of compassion in you, you should understand that the people on the other side are not just “people on the other side,” they are suffering. I’m talking about people who don’t have real problems in the real world necessarily—not the biggest problems—but there are people who are healthy, most of—
[19:47] —them have jobs, they’ve got boyfriends and girlfriends, whatever spouses, but they’re actually in pain. They are suffering in our current system. You should have some compassion for that.
Now, let’s say you wanted to ease their suffering and you knew that you couldn’t talk them out of it because logic and facts are just bouncing off the bubble. They’re impervious. By the way, as many of you just noted, conspiracy theories work both ways. So there are people on your side who are also in their own different kinds of bubbles and believe things that aren’t true. You’ve got this bigger rash in the world. What’s the best way to make it better, working with what we have as opposed to working with what we wish we had? What we wish we had was good information and good arguments, and people who would change their minds when they heard those—
[20:48] —good arguments and good information. That’s what we wish we had, but we don’t. And we’re not going to get that because we’re not that kind of species. We’re a species who acts irrationally on these big questions of politics.
Well, so what do you do? I would suggest that the best way you can make the world a better place is with a well-designed conspiracy theory. If you are to design a conspiracy theory that didn’t happen organically—I think most conspiracy theories happen organically. People look at a set of information and they think, “Oh my God, those chemtrails. Why is it some airplanes don’t leave them and some do? It must be the government gassing us and turning us into something with their chemtrails.” So that’s sort—
[21:49] —of an organic way that conspiracy theories happen. But there are also the engineered conspiracy theories. I’m not sure which ones are engineered—you might have your own thoughts about that—but some of them are engineered. And the question is: could you engineer a conspiracy theory that would release the left from their Trump Derangement Syndrome and help them with their health? And I mean that literally: mental health, physical health, fiscal health, in every way. Could you help your fellow citizens out of their bubble, knowing the facts and reasons and good arguments and good policies will have no effect? But a conspiracy theory, well-designed, that has no logic to it whatsoever but just sort of feels right? It might. Let me—
[22:53] —give you a suggestion. I’m going to give you an example of a conspiracy theory that, as far as I know, I don’t think it’s true, but watch how true it sounds. Now, this might be a conspiracy theory that actually is more believable on your side than the other side, but this will just be a good example to give you the idea.
So let me ask you this: which political party would be better off, and which would be worse off, if African American citizens of the United States—I guess that’s what makes you African American, is you’re a citizen of the United States and you’re black—what if they had big economic gains? Big economic gains for black people. Which party would be—
[23:55] —better off and which party would be worse off? Please answer that question. Some say both, some are saying Republicans. Republicans, yes. If black citizens did better, Republicans would rise. Why is that? Partly because the Republican way to get equality is to make the economy work as well as possible, and then everybody’s got opportunities. So it would play very well into the Republican approach to life. If you get this economy working, then everybody’s got a better deal. Now ask yourself: what would happen to the Democratic Party if black people had a substantially better situation? They’d be out of business.
[24:57] They’d be out of business, would they not? I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. If the Democrats lost the black vote, or even just a big chunk of it, they’re out of business. They would be a minority party that would be fighting largely for—and this is weird—but the Democrats would largely be advocates for people who are not actually American citizens. They’re currently advocates—they’re bigger advocates for people who are not American citizens—but their brand includes anybody who’s marginalized.
Right now the Democrat brand is: “If you’re black and you’re not getting everything you need, you should be a Democrat. If you’re an illegal immigrant, or even if you’re a legal immigrant, you’re part of the marginalized people, you should be in our party. If you’re a woman and you think there’s a lot of issues, discrimination—”
[25:58] “—thereof,” and of course there is, “you want to be a Democrat.” So their party right now is of the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and those who would like to help in any way. But suppose any one of those groups started to do well? What if one of them just did really well now? I would say that African Americans are probably the ones you have to think about in that conversation because you’re seeing their unemployment levels reach the best level of all time, perhaps, and things could get a lot better.
So here’s the conspiracy theory that could help people exit their Trump Derangement Syndrome bubble, and it is this: Democrats have to keep—
[26:58] —black people poor to stay in power. In fact, the best way that the Democrats can help illegal immigrants and people who are not even in this country, who would like to come here legally or illegally—the best way Democrats can help people coming into the country—is by suppressing the people who are already there who happen to be black.
If black folks start doing well, and they feel they’re doing well—and there’s lots of room to go there, we’re not exactly close, there’s a lot of room to grow—if Republicans did something with, let’s say, prison reform, drug laws, drug sentencing… if they kept the economy buzzing along, the Democrats have—
[28:00] —to almost create situations where people are doing poorly in order to stay in power. So there’s your… it’s not quite a conspiracy theory until you get some things that aren’t true in there. Everything I’ve described to you so far is actually just true. Did I say anything that would not pass the fact-checking? It is true that if a good chunk of the black vote went Republican, Democrats would be out of business. I think that’s true. It is true that Democrats have more power if they have a larger disenfranchised group, because that’s who votes.
So if any big chunk of that went to the other side—given that the parties are so close right now—any big chunk that defects (and I’m not talking about the WalkAway hashtag necessarily, I’m just talking about anybody who just feels like, “Maybe I don’t want to be on the victim side anymore”), there’s sort of a victim side and—
[29:02] —a non-victim side. People might say, “I’m not sure I want to be on the victim’s side.” So right now, it seems to me that Democrats have created a situation where what they’re doing for the good of these nice people who are immigrants, who would like to come into this country… I have nothing against the immigrants. I actually have quite a… in terms of emotionally, I’m very much on the side of the immigrants. You probably don’t want to hear that.
But when I hear that somebody is risking their life to be an American, that’s tough for me to not like them just automatically. It’s easy for you to think, “Oh, they’re just coming here to take our stuff and cause some crimes,” and there’s always going to be those people. But if somebody is risking their life to adopt my way of thinking—which is to be an American and to actually get on my team—I realize that—
[30:05] —you can’t just let everybody in. You have to be a country of laws and all that. But emotionally, how do I feel about those people? Very positively. Yeah, if they are MS-13… but I have a very positive feeling about someone who likes me so much that they want to be on my team. I’m exaggerating a little bit—it’s not about me—but I like people who want to be on my team. Shouldn’t I? They’re risking their life to be on my team.
We have to have a rule of law and not let everybody in; that’s just common sense. But in terms of emotionally, I’m very connected with the immigrants because they’re exactly on my wavelength, if you will. And they should come legally, and we should have good rules to allow people in within limits. But here’s my—
[31:08] —point about the conspiracy theory: the Democratic Party has decided to prefer illegal immigrants. The Democratic Party has decided to favor illegal immigrants over black Americans. I feel like that’s the case. Is that too strong? Let me put it to you—and I know most of you are not unbiased—but would it be fair to say? Is it too strong to say that Democrats are favoring illegal immigrants over black Americans? That feels true to me. Let me tell you something else that I feel right now.
[32:08] I remember when it looked like North Korea was terrible, and I said you often can’t tell the difference between something that’s about ready to break and something that’s about ready to be completely fixed. Sometimes they look exactly the same. For example, when an alcoholic is getting worse and worse and worse, they have to hit bottom before they can improve. Sometimes hitting bottom is exactly the best place to be, because that means, boop, you’re going to have it back in the other direction.
And it feels to me that black voters—where you imagine that they’re just locked into this Democratic voting machine—it feels to me (I could easily be wrong) but it feels to me like they’re sort of bottoming out. Meaning, yeah, we’re—
[33:11] —gonna stay on the team for now, but why does my team keep taking things away from me and giving them to people who are not even legal citizens of the country? Now, it’s not directly taking away, but you know what I’m talking about. Any resources that go to non-Americans are resources that are coming away from Americans. And if you are occupying the lower half of the economic situation in this country, you might have more impact than other people.
So it does feel like Democrats are picking the pocket of black folks to give it to people who are citizens of other countries. I’m not sure that that qualifies as a conspiracy theory, because everything I said is actually demonstrably true.
[34:15] The weird thing about this is you almost have to add something that’s not true to what I just said to make it persuasive. I know you don’t like to think that’s true, and I’m not saying it’s ethical to do that or anything else, but in order to get half of the country out of their Trump Derangement Syndrome, what won’t work is good facts, good policies, doing a good job, having logical, reasonable arguments. None of that’s going to work. That doesn’t work. People don’t change their mind from that stuff.
So you’re going to need something irrational, probably, to irrational and designed ideally that can break their bubble. Something strong enough to break it; it’s going to have to be something irrational. How about that? Roe v. Wade will be overturned. Well, nobody knows how that’s going to go, but that doesn’t work in the—
[35:16] —direction that I was talking about. Let me tell you what doesn’t work. Somebody just said LBJ was in the KKK. I don’t know if that’s true. It doesn’t matter if it’s true, from my point. People don’t really care what happened in the past; they just don’t care that much. So I don’t care if John Kennedy was this or that, or LBJ was in this or that. There’s some dead Democrat who was this or that—that’s the past. It’s just not persuasive. It can be true, but not be persuasive. It just doesn’t have an immediacy to us.
“Secret meeting recorded where the Dems said they prefer illegals to Americans or African Americans.” Yes! So if there were a secret recording of top Democrats admitting their strategy, that would be a good—
[36:21] —example. Now, if the rumor happened and there were no actual recording like that, that would be a good example of a designed conspiracy theory, which could have a very positive impact on society if it breaks people out of their bubble.
We need a lot of cool celebrities and athletes to walk away. So here’s the problem: what would happen to anybody who is a celebrity who joined the WalkAway movement? Maybe the end of their career. So if you’re waiting for the WalkAway thing to start bringing in big names, you’re going to be waiting forever, I think, because Democrats have cleverly made it so hard to do that in public that you can’t really do it.
[37:23] Kanye couldn’t do it either, so Kanye played it exactly right. He said, “I don’t have to agree with his policies to like the person.” That’s the high ground. So he took the high ground where he’s invulnerable. And you saw that—Kanye did it the right way where he puts out an album and everybody buys it. It’s the number-one album in the world. It was also a great album, so that helps. So he did it the right way. But if he or anybody else just came out and said, “Hey, I’m just walking away and I’m actually going to vote Republican from now on,” that would be the end of his career. That’s why the polls were wrong. That’s one of the reasons the polls were wrong.
[38:24] There is a semi-secret Republican group in California. I can confirm that that is true. Let me tell you something that’s true because of the things that I talk about in public. As you know, I have F-you money, so I’ve made a conscious decision to give up an incredible amount of money—as a percentage and also in a dollar amount—in order to be able to talk without being edited or filtered or censored. I’ve made a conscious choice to leave a tremendous amount of potential income on the table so that I could talk to you without being filtered. Because of that, people who are like-minded but can’t go public are very likely to contact me and say, “I like what you’re doing. I could never do that because, financially, it would be a catastrophe.” So when somebody—
[39:27] —said there’s a secret group of California Republicans, I can confirm that there are a number of successful, famous people who are completely under the radar for all the right reasons. Many of them have contacted me to tell me that they were that kind of person.
Let’s talk about the questions about the next justice for the Supreme Court. Let me tell you what things are easy to predict and what things are not easy to predict. I thought that predicting Trump’s election was relatively easy, in the sense that the situation was a large group of people—the voters—who were being moved by the best persuader I’ve ever seen in—
[40:28] —public, who had 18 months or so to really work on persuading. In a situation like that, where there are lots of people, a big public, and you’re just trying to move the average a little bit and you’ve got all that time and all that attention, it’s pretty easy to predict that a person would be successful under those circumstances.
Now, if you say, “Now predict what that one person will do,” picking one person as a Supreme Court nominee… well, there’s a whole bunch of stuff there that you and I don’t know. You and I don’t know what they may have learned about these people, how the conversation went in the Oval Office when the president met them. There’s a lot we don’t know. In the election, we mostly knew all the important facts because it was all a public process. The president would say something, the news would report it, we’d all watch the same news, or at least versions of the same—
[41:30] —news. So it is very hard to predict a pick for the Supreme Court because there’s just too much we the public don’t know. That said, I think everybody’s saying the same thing: which one would be the fun pick? Which one would be the most fun? Amy Coney Barrett.
And here’s why: it puts the Democrats—which are sort of the female party. I’ve described this before; I don’t mean that all Democrats are females, but there is a female-centric bias in the Democrats that really is a defining characteristic. The Democratic Party is more of a woman’s kind of set of policies and approach to life. Now, I—
[42:31] —realize that’s a gigantic oversimplification. I’m not talking about every person. I’m not talking about the individual. I’m not saying they’re all actually women, nothing like that. I’m just saying that sort of a general vibe is very female, and that is part of their brand. Hillary Clinton, of course, and Nancy Pelosi are the biggest parts of that; Elizabeth Warren. Their brand—well, that’s the better way to say it. The better way to say this is that the Democratic Party as a brand is female.
Is that fair to say? Let me just check that with you: would it be fair to say that the Democrats have intentionally—and I’m not saying this is bad, I’m just observing—that their brand is intentionally female-centric? That’s true, yeah. And there are plenty of men who support that, but the brand is female-centric. The Republican brand is a little bit more—
[43:33] —male-leaning, and these are for irrational reasons. Nothing I’m saying here passes any logical filter. But when I say one party favors guns, that just feels more male—even though… Dana Loesch… how do you pronounce? Dana Loesch. I always have trouble with last names.
So there are plenty of women who have guns and love guns and use guns and are pro-guns. But generally, when you think of guns as a brand, you feel like that skews male more so than female. So the Republicans are sort of a male “let’s be tough on crime, let’s have a big military, let’s have our guns, you do your job, I’ll do my job, I won’t take your stuff, don’t take my stuff.” It’s sort of a male brand, and when you’ve got a president like President Trump, it becomes a little—
[44:33] —more accentuated in the maleness of it. When it was, let’s say, George Bush Senior, you didn’t really see him as the most manly man, so the brands kind of fluctuated over time. Reagan was more a manly man; Trump is more a manly man.
But anyway, so you have these two distinctions. And I went so far describing those distinctions as… Dana Loesch, is that how you pronounce your last name? I feel embarrassed that I can’t pronounce that correctly. I know I was going to make a point about that, but for now, the point is that the brands are largely female and male, with both male and female in both—
[45:34] —categories, but that’s the brand. The Supreme Court. Thank you for getting me back on the topic. So what would make it fun for the Republicans to support Amy Coney Barrett is that she is female. And while we would all like to live in a world where that doesn’t matter for jobs, I think there’s a hundred percent agreement that that shouldn’t matter in this case, but it does matter because we live in the real world.
And the Democrat brand is so pro-female that putting them in a position of opposing… would it be the third? I’m not a Supreme Court scholar. If Amy Coney Barrett got on the court, she would be the third or fourth? How many are on the court right—
[46:35] —now? Are there three on the court? So there are three on the court already. Which one am I forgetting? Sotomayor, Ginsburg… who’s the third one? Can somebody give me a name? Who is already on the court, and why am I missing…? So now it went from four to three. I guess you’re as bad about the Supreme Court as I am.
So there are three on the court now. Imagine this argument. Imagine a President Trump—I’m not, again, it’s hard to predict who he’ll pick because we don’t know enough about the details behind the scenes—but if the president says, “I think it’s time to have a fourth woman on the Supreme Court.” Just let that sink in. Imagine President—
[47:37] —Trump saying, “All the candidates that we looked at were totally qualified, but wouldn’t it be great to have a fourth woman on the Supreme Court?” That’s hard for the Democrats to vote against. Hard for them to vote against. So that’s what makes that, from a political observation standpoint, somewhat irresistible. It would just be hard for her not to be approved. They would say it’s the wrong woman; they would try that. But if they don’t approve this particular woman, what are they going to get? Second choice isn’t going to be a woman. Second choice is going to be one of the several guys on the list. So if they want a woman and—
[48:40] —they… let me put it another way: we’ve never had four women on the Supreme Court. It’s sort of a glass ceiling, isn’t it? There was sort of a glass ceiling at three women. Imagine if he had four. That would be breaking another glass ceiling.
I think that’s powerful imagery. If you said the Republican choice for Supreme Court would break a glass ceiling—and I think the argument would be fair—having four women on the court feels like a real movement, like a real step forward. A step forward in terms of balancing things out, etc. We don’t know if she’ll be the pick, but if she is, she’ll be the most interesting one. She’s the youngest, that of course makes a big deal. She’s attractive—that shouldn’t make any difference, but it does. We live in a world where people—
[49:42] —are more likely to get the job if they’re attractive. I’m not saying that’s good or bad; I’m just saying it’s a fact. So we’ll see. It reminds them of JFK and RFK; that is correct.
Every time the Democrats talk about Amy Coney Barrett’s religion, they’re doing what they don’t want anybody to do, which is use people’s religion as a litmus test for a job. Because imagine if this were a Muslim candidate—would the Republicans say, “No, you’re too Muslim to be on the Supreme Court”? That would be pretty much against their brand. Their brand is: religion doesn’t matter.
[50:43] That’s all for now. I think we’ve said enough, and I’ll say goodbye for now. Goodbye for now.