The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Bret Weinstein. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is an old friend, Bret Weinstein. Bret is an evolutionary theorist. He’s a professor in exile. He’s cohost along with Heather Heying of the Dark Horse podcast, which is damn interesting by the way. He’s co-founder of the Rescue the Republic Rally recently held in Washington, DC. And certainly not least, he’s one of the startup crew of the Game B movement. Welcome back, Bret.
Bret: Thanks, Jim. Glad to be here.
Jim: Yeah, we always have interesting conversations whichever way they go.
Bret: Never fails.
Jim: Remind my audience, even though I generally don’t do Team Red, Team Blue politics on The Jim Rutt Show. For reasons unknown other than it’s my show, goddamnit, I’ll do what the fuck I want, I have decided to do four episodes prior to the election with relatively heterodox thinkers, people who have generally made up their mind one way or the other in this election, but cannot be considered principal adherence of Team Red or Team Blue.
Our first person in that series was Cliff Maloney, which we recorded last week and was just recently published. So with that, Bret, what do you think of this goddamn 2024 election?
Bret: Holy moly. It’s quite the setup. I will just say ordinarily, except for Barack Obama in his first election, in general, I have voted against both major party candidates in every election of my adult life. Heather and I have a disagreement about who I voted for long ago. But anyway, in general, I vote by the following principle, if the candidate who you believe you should be voting for is not running in the present election vote in the future election, and that means doing something that is basically off-label. So in the last election, for example, I voted for Tulsi Gabbard, I wrote her in. I am going to argue that this election, we cannot do that and I believe that the reason that the principle I usually adhere to doesn’t apply is that if we do not regain control of the ship of state in this election, it’s not clear to me that we will have another meaningful election.
Jim: That’s pretty strong stuff.
Bret: Yeah.
Jim: Now of course it’s interesting that both sides make that claim about the other.
Bret: Of course.
Jim: And personal view is I think they’re a little overheated, but there is some truth to both sides arguments, I suspect.
Bret: Well, I would point out that we have rampant cheating across the board by one side. We have election interference. And I’m not arguing about what takes place with actual ballots, though I believe that is on the table. But my point would be the degree of illegitimate stagecraft around Kamala Harris is through the roof and it tells us something about the willingness of the blue team to break the values and rules surrounding consent of the governed in order to retain power. That’s why I think another four years of this team is likely to be fatal to our capacity to steer the ship at all.
I know that sounds overheated, but consider the fact that if we are to believe Seymour Hersh, Kamala Harris used the 25th Amendment as a threat to shove Joe Biden out of the presidential race, but not out of the office of President. In the aftermath of his leaving the race, we have had continued nuclear brinksmanship with Russia. So what that tells us is that at this moment we are living in a nation that is taking global risks without a commander-in-chief who is someone we can call onto the carpet and hold responsible if they’re to make an error in such things. In other words, we don’t know who the president is. And yet not only are we treading water, but we are acting in a belligerent way and Kamala Harris who has the ability to remove Joe Biden from the office, or at least to initiate that process, has refused to do it. So she’s complicit.
She now would like to become president. I believe she is unqualified. She has disqualified herself by wielding the 25th Amendment as a threat to get Joe Biden to leave the race and then not exercising it on behalf of the American people in the aftermath.
So we are already in exotic territory with respect to the state of the democracy and the consent of the governed. We don’t know who the president is. The blue team appears to be comfortable with that. They say all kinds of nonsensical things about, “Well, you’re really electing a team.” But the problem is, that’s not what it says in our Constitution and the checks and balances that were constructed by the founding fathers depend on the fact that we adhere to the letter of the Constitution such that it can be policed by the courts and we’re just somewhere off the script, and lots of people don’t seem to care.
Jim: So what do you think actually went down? I mean, there’s all kinds of theories. One of my favorites, I discount, but it’s still in my ensemble, is it, this was all figured out by Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s way smarter than we think. Four dimensional chess. He intentionally scheduled the debate early and then played the fool. Then he played the stubborn guy that wouldn’t leave so that it got so late that only Kamala could be the replacement, and then he did it. Now I put that as 3% probability.
Bret: Oh, I think 3% is way high for that one.
Jim: Well, that’s kind of a fun one. And I will say, as you know, I tend to be less attracted to complex scenarios than some people. I’ll leave it at that. My guess is the [inaudible 00:06:33] hypothesis is just a straightforward one. That Joe, in a moment of hubris, came up with the idea of doing the debate early to show people he wasn’t demented and degraded. Then, oops, he actually was demented and degraded, but he’s a hardheaded Irishman and so he refused to leave until all the powers in the Democratic Party basically brought their firepower to bear, and I would say particularly probably Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. And then he finally knuckled over. But by then it was too late, and so the Dems didn’t really have much of a choice other than to go with Kamala, and that’s how we got where we are. I would say that’s the centroid of probability. I’m sure you have a different take, but let’s hear your take.
Bret: Yeah, my take is the choice for him to do a debate was pretty clearly a setup, that keeping him on script has been obviously a full-time occupation with industrial strength smoke and mirrors for his entire presidency and ever more so the older he gets. So the people who managed Joe Biden knew full well that he wasn’t going to be able to deal with a contentious debate environment without a teleprompter for more than an hour. That was destined to fail, so signing up for it was something that no rational political strategist would’ve done.
So I think it was likely a setup and that it produced its natural consequence, which is the awakening of the rank and file on the blue team to the decrepitness of their president, of our president, which many of us had been aware of. I mean, I’ve been arguing that the man was mentally compromised since before he was elected. It was obvious and it has only grown more obvious. Somehow the blue team has become convinced that that is a right wing conspiracy theory and only the debate was able to wake them up to this fact. So the question really is, how did we end up with Kamala?
Jim: Let’s play Sherlock a little bit. Let’s look at the anomalies. Having a presidential debate in June is unheard of, right? There’s never been a final election debate until after the candidates are formally nominated in generally mid-September. What’s your scenario say about how we ended up with a debate in June, even though that violates every known precedent, et cetera? That’s a very interesting signal that may mean something.
Bret: Well, I suspect… I will tell you, I have not nailed down all of the rules that were in play, but there are a number of structures that those of us on the outside don’t tend to think about like what are the rules for what a party does if a candidate is eliminated pre-convention, post-convention, what happens to the money that their campaign held, et cetera. So my guess is there was a desire to kick the can down the road far enough to minimize the cost of swapping candidates and that Joe Biden was not okay with this plan. In other words, the blue Cabal had made a decision about how to switch candidates and Joe, and presumably Jill Biden and Hunter, were resisting. And so he was set up with the debate at a moment that it made sense to do it to some political strategist.
The question though really is, did those political strategists who likely set Biden up intend to seat Kamala? And I’m not convinced that they did. I’ve certainly heard, as you will have heard, that Joe Biden delivered a “fuck you” to these people by embracing Kamala and forcing that decision, which would make sense if he had been set up in this debate, if he had been forced out, that he would get payback in this form.
I don’t know what you make of the present moment, but as you and I are having this conversation in the last couple of days, there’s been an overwhelming chorus of voices saying that the Harris campaign is melting down over internal polling, which suggests that she’s 10 points behind in the popular vote and that swing statewide, she would have to win Michigan and Pennsylvania to gain the office. I don’t know what you make of those reports.
Jim: I suspect that that is either some error in their methodology or it’s counter programming by somebody because it seems to me… I would put long odds, I’ll give good odds. Anyone wants to contact me, I’ll give you live money bets that Trump does not win the popular vote by 10%. That would be a Four Sigma event probably based on what we think we know about how the world works.
On the other hand, I have heard from really knowledgeable insiders that the polling, the really accurate polling, the external polling and some of the internal polling, is certainly showing Kamala running down. And at this point right now, Trump would win a victory about like he did over Hillary, 306 electoral votes. Of course, the mainstream media is spinning the fuck out of that and explaining how wide, “Well, that’s not really true, blah, blah, blah.” But if I were to process the signals, it would be that Kamala would win the popular by 1.5%, which is not enough for a Democrat where they have overwhelming crazy majorities in California and New York .and Republican supermajority states have cut it to come down, like Texas is no longer a vast flood of excess Republican votes. So it takes more than 1.5%, probably it takes 2.5% for the Democrat to win. So that’s my take of where we actually are.
Bret: Well-
Jim: And that should be enough to scare people. I don’t believe 10% popular vote victory for Trump. I will bet serious money on that one.
Bret: I have no doubt that much of this is nonsense. It’s somebody’s spin or other, either designed to create complacency, to demoralize, who knows? Frankly, our system is so degraded with respect to our ability to know what the electorate thinks, that it could mean anything. The sense I have though is that you are seeing moves over on the blue side that suggest desperation, genuine desperation.
Jim: I agree. Putting a camel out on the Howard Stern show, there’s a Hail Mary if there ever was one, some kind of sex podcast or something too.
Bret: Yeah, that’s remarkable. I think actually Barack Obama coming out in the way he has in the last few days also seems like daddy’s home to put things back in order. So I do think the desperation looks real. Now, of course, who knows? Is this four dimensional chess and how can we take anything at face value? But obviously the popular vote doesn’t matter. It’s the electoral college vote that does matter with respect to who takes the office. And Kamala appears to have been a terrible, some would say, a predictably terrible stand-in for Joe Biden.
Jim: Well, she was always a lightweight. I mean, when I was watching the Biden unfolding, my strong position was the Democrats should run a mini competition of some sort, three debates back to back to back, and then speeches at the convention, let the delegates decide. And I would put pretty long odds that Kamala would not have been the winner of that process.
Bret: Well, I have to admire your dogged adherence to democratic principles when talking about the Democratic Party because that’s just not how that thing functions, Jim. The Democratic Party has become a racket, and the idea of letting the democratic rank and file choose their nominee is preposterous on its face. So no, they weren’t going to do that. But they could have picked a better candidate.
The problem though ultimately is they have driven all the likable, decent people out of the party. There isn’t a large slate to choose from. And so it’s sort of a pick your horror story sort of a scenario. There is something delightful about the fact that they’ve overestimated their ability to polish a turd like Kamala Harris. And I don’t say that to be inflammatory, but the fact is she has run, nobody likes her. She gives off a vibe that gives many of us the willies. Really what she’s got going for her is that she’s phenotypically attractive female and some version of not white. The idea that the most powerful nation on earth is going to elect somebody purely based on those identitarian characteristics is frightening, to say the least. So yeah, the Democrats have a problem of their own making.
Jim: The thing that makes me somewhat more skeptical, even the normal of the grand conspiracy theory, how he ended up with Kamala, who would have an incentive other than Kamala herself, I doubt, is capable of running a deep conspiracy of having Kamala as the nominee when you could have had someone like Whitmer or maybe Shapiro, somebody who would be a much stronger candidate. Is this a five dimensional chess where somebody’s infiltrated the Dems and set them up to lose? But in that case, why didn’t they just let Biden stay in? He was going to lose. I’m 100% convinced that if Biden had been the nominee, they would’ve lost by three points in the popular vote probably.
Bret: Well, this actually raises an interesting question for me. I think there’s something going on with sex and gender in this election that actually I was thinking about tweeting something to this effect a couple of days ago. And then a commercial that I just saw, I think the Democrats have just released, tells me I was on the right track. Have you seen this commercial that they’ve put out with a bunch of ostensibly manly men talking about what it is to be a man and that ultimately being a man is not being afraid of women and that means voting for Kamala? Have you seen this?
Jim: No, we don’t watch any TV with advertising [inaudible 00:17:43] help it.
Bret: Oh, I don’t either. It was rebroadcast.
Jim: Now, we do do our grandparenting thing in Pennsylvania. That’s what we were up for a week and we watched something on CNN. It was all Trump ads, all from Super PACs. So that’s about all I’ve seen of election ads.
Bret: Well, I haven’t watched any TV myself. This was rebroadcast on Twitter, which is where I saw it. But in any case, I do think there’s a very long trajectory, Involving feminism that now has everything to do with what’s happened to the Democratic Party. Now, feminism, to me, starts out with a noble root, the idea that civilization functions in modern times in a way that there’s no reason that the division of labor between men and women has to keep qualified women out of positions of power and that equal opportunity is a desirable goal. So first wave feminism makes sense to me.
Jim: And even second wave feminism. The way I describe it, my practical perspective is not too many women would like to be Marine Corps infantry officers, nor those that do are actually capable of being Marine Corps infantry officers. But if there’s a woman who would like to be and can meet the existing standards, then she should be welcome to be a Marine Corps infantry officer. But of course, the radical feminists today would say, “Well, should be 50/50. If it’s not 50 50, it’s some kind of institutional sexism” or some horseshit like that.
Bret: Right. So it’s the horseshit like that that I’m focused on. So yes, first wave, probably second wave feminism is noble and sensible, but it leads to an overthrow of masculinity, which is of course a mistake because masculinity is an important part of the puzzle of how civilizations function. It’s a fundamental part of humans. And to synonymize masculinity with toxic masculinity has resulted in an incoherently feminine quadrant of the electorate which lives in the Democratic Party.
Jim: Well, by the way, here’s a rhetorical trick that I use whenever I hear anyone use toxic masculinity, I play the woke stir and denounce them as using hate speech. It’s quite funny. It definitely flips them out and they usually just go away with their tail between their legs because it is hate speech.
Bret: Now, on the contrary, Jim, for you to equate it with hate speech is the height of hate speech. It’s the hideous speech.
Jim: Oh, yeah, no. No doubt there’s some screwballs that would say that, right?
Bret: Yes. Well, no doubt.
Jim: Of course they also don’t like the fact that I call DEI neo-tribal racism. They’re not to help on that either, but it’s true.
Bret: It is. I mean-
Jim: But it’s true.
Bret: At some point, you just have to call balls and strikes as they exist. But here’s the point, men who are voting for the blue team at this point, in my opinion, are falling down on their obligation as men. Like it or not, men historically have a role as protector and they have an obligation not to tell you what you want to hear, but to tell you what you need to know.
The problem is, I think many men over on the blue team are coming to understand that they’re actually not behaving in an honorable masculine way by subordinating themselves to a bunch of ideas that are just flat out wrong. And what that’s resulting in is defections, maybe quiet defections. Nobody knows what to do about your cocktail party, the one that you like to go to, deciding that you’re a terrible person because of your skepticism. But nonetheless, the real issue is to the extent that Americans still have a right to vote and that vote is secret, I believe the Democratic Party is detecting defections from men who have had enough and aren’t going to put up with the idea that all morally right men are going to vote for an apparently empty-headed candidate simply because that candidate is female and dark skinned.
Jim: Now of course, Obama recently put his oar in the water, warning Black men who the polling is showing are probably 25% at least for Team Red, and that would be unprecedented if it happens.
Bret: Yes. On the other hand, we’re in the middle of a massive political realignment. I think there was a moment at which Biden said something insane in the 2020 election. I forget who he was talking to, but he said something of the equivalent of, “If you’re not voting for me, then you’re not really Black.”
Jim: I remember that.
Bret: Right. Some obscene-
Jim: Stupid and insulting.
Bret: … distortion like this. And I think the point is, actually a strong person of integrity being told that in order to be a member of your own racial group, you have to behave in a particular way, that’s a red pill moment.
Jim: But they’ve been doing that since Clarence Thomas, who’s one of my heroes. They’ve been trying to say, “Oh, he is not really Black. He’s a traitor to the Black race.” I go, “Bullshit!”, you know? He’s who he is. And the way he was raised explains how he was. I read his memoirs, which are great, and that’s the first time I remember seeing that crap. But yeah, that’s certainly in the air over there in the Democratic Party. But I am going to put my cards on the table here, at least some of them, but at least I’m going to do the two up cards for first two on Texas. Well, first three on Texas hold’em. And that is, I’m a double hater. I hate both Team Red and Team Blue.
Bret: Of course.
Jim: And there are good reasons to hate both of them. And so that deciding which one to vote for because you hate them slightly less is not an easy test.
Let me go down my list. Why do I hate the Democrats? Number one, oikophobia. It’s a fancy word, but it means hatred of your culture. You just look what the kids are doing in college campuses today and some of the polling data, they hate our society, they hate America and they hate enlightenment values. That is bad.
Closely related to that is rising anti-Semitism. One of the things I pass off to Dems about what the hell’s wrong with their party is polling done by Harvard that showed that 65% of 18 to 25 year olds now say yes to the statement “Jews are oppressors, unqualified.” Well, 8% of boomers say that. How could have that have happened if it wasn’t indoctrination by the Blue Church? Wokeness and neo-tribal racism, unrealistic climate policies. You and I both agree there is something real about climate change and it is a important thing that needs to be dealt with, but that for instance, the Nutty Bernie policy in 2020, you’ll love this. It’s still up on the web. You can look this up. Bernie said that by 2030, and this was in the platform of a political candidate who had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of donors, and hence presumably a decent staff, he said, “By 2030, we will have all transportation and all electricity converted to renewables.” All.
Now, I used to joke about that and say, “Only Stalin could do that.” And a friend of mine who’s a professor of alternative energy, she corrected me and said, “No, Stalin couldn’t have do that. The only guy that could have done that was Pol Pot. Killed 25% of the people and reduced the GDP by 80%.” And that was the official platform of Bernie. That’s nuts, right? And there’s a lot, the Green New Deal.
On the other hand, we’ll get the Team Red. They got their own problems in that area. Of course, the Dems have long been the party of excessive government spending. They have an anti-Second amendment stance. They’re weak on free speech. And so in my mind, being the reactionary redneck that I am on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, I’d like to say the Second is there to protect the First, goddammit. We need to have both of them.
And most reprehensibly lately, tactically, are these Hamas lovers. Who the hell can love a medievalist bunch of pre-enlightenment thinkers? What I love is the fact that any of these Dem activists that went over there to Hamas land, they’d get their throats cut immediately. So right hate Dems, right? But now why do I dislike the Republicans? First, the quite relentless in growing all the time attempt to impose religion on the public, things like putting the 10 Commandments up at school, the growth of Christian nationalism, et cetera, which in a more detailed level you could think of as repudiation of the enlightenment around separation of church and state.
I often point to the Virginia Statute of religious freedom that was enacted in 1785 before the Constitution that laid out an amazingly principled argument for the separation of church and state. Who wrote that? Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. And there are many, many people in the Republican Party that are trying to overturn that, what I’d call a cultural control of individual behavior. For instance, stance on abortion, right to die, and the drug wars. What I would suggest is to religiously motivated mostly cultural imperialism.
They also have anti-free speech tendencies, banning books and libraries, mandating speech by medical practitioners, et cetera. Totally different than the Dems, but they’re both bad on it. And now, the Republicans on climate change, many in the Republican Party are flat out deniers of climate change. Vivek said it’s a hoax. He’s obviously a liar. He is a well-educated guy. He knows it’s not a hoax. It may be overhyped. But there are many people in the Republican Party who have very retrograde views on climate, a naive foreign policy, especially with respect to Ukraine and Taiwan. I suspect you and I disagree on that one a little bit. But handing over Ukraine to Putin, in my view, would be a world historical error with large bad consequences.
And if the Dems are the big spenders, the Republicans, are the big spenders and even more irresponsible because they cut taxes while they’re increasing spending. Start looking at the ascent of our deficits starting with the George Bush administration, who by the way, was handed a balanced budget by Bill Clinton, the first one in 50 years. So I end up as a double hater and it’s not a trivial decision for me to defect in either direction.
Bret: Now wait a minute. I think you’ve just made a simple logical error.
Jim: Okay.
Bret: You are failing to appreciate that the unity movement that is currently gathering under the red banner is not the Republican Party.
Jim: It’s worse.
Bret: No. Are you kidding? Are you kidding?
Jim: It’s a bunch of no, nothing. It’s the party of morons.
Bret: No, I don’t know. I don’t know where you get this idea.
Jim: Trump’s main innovation in politics was he decided to pitch his campaign in 2016 at IQ 90 voters. Historically, candidates have pitched their campaign at IQ 110 voters, which is actually too high. But Trump’s got the idiots on his side. And as Mark Twain said, “Get the fools behind you. That’s a big enough majority in any town.”
Bret: No. Frankly, I’m hearing a little Trump derangement syndrome from you. Donald Trump has accomplished something that you and I probably both would have thought impossible from any political candidate. He has defeated the duopoly.
Jim: With respect to Trump derangements. I do despise Donald Trump for I think very good reasons, but I’m also, quite objective. For instance, I do not believe January 6th was a coup-
Bret: Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Jim: … except perhaps in the minds of some idiots from the three percenters, right? But on the other hand, there’s a long list of really nasty bad things about Trump, which are true.
Bret: I would like you to address my point.
Jim: And so he has… And this is one of the… I just did it on Facebook yesterday. A friend of mine, I posted a sort of anti-Trump meme, and she said, “How could anybody imagine voting for Trump and Vance?” And I wrote a nice little mini essay and said, “Quite easy. Whether we want to call it the regime or the cathedral or the blue church, there is a status quo regime, which has included part of the Republican Party in the past and most of the Democratic Party. It is trying to overturn the cultural traditions that most Americans have lived by and treasure, that indoctrinate their children, that have allowed our economy to become a big winner for symbolic manipulators and financial parasites and a big loser for working people and people that live in rural areas. And so the principled reason to vote for Trump is to vote against the regime.”
Bret: I don’t know why that’s principle. It seems to me it is necessary and sufficient conditions. That regime is so fundamentally anti-American, both in terms of culture and in terms of its antipathy for the structure of checks and balances that was laid out by the founders and the values which those checks and balances were supposed to guard, that I believe every patriotic American is obligated to vote against the blue team. I can’t see an argument against that.
Now, I certainly agree with you about the historical faults of the Republican Party, and certainly the structure of the GOP maintains those faults. There has not been a wholesale turnover in the power structure in the GOP. But what there has been is a wholesale turnover in the constituency of the GOP. To my point about Donald Trump having effectively decapitated the GOP and taking it over, taking it over with a demographic that is actually, in my opinion, largely the labor movement which was cut loose by the Democrats and the Clinton administration. So you have all of these working class people who are politically homeless. And Donald Trump, in decapitating the Republican Party, brings these folks in large numbers.
Jim: There’s a huge demographic switch, right? Historically, until 2010 I think it was, Republicans always got a majority of people with four year college degrees, and that has dropped precipitously. The Dems had a strong advantage with people who were high school grads only, and they were about evenly divided on the some college crowd, maybe leading slightly to the Dems. The Republican share a vote amongst four year college grads or better has fallen precipitously. And that amongst high school grads or high school dropouts have risen tremendously. Hence, my cynical comment of the party of stupid. Not of course that all people didn’t go to college or stupid, I know many who didn’t and are excellent, smart people. But in the aggregate, would you deny that the average IQ of the Republican Party has gone down in the last 15 years?
Bret: I don’t know and don’t care. Honestly, I think this is a distraction and I think it’s unfair to generalize over a movement that is actually part of a major reorganization. In other words, I just think it’s uninteresting, Jim. You can say that, but I think it’s basically a rephrasing of deplorables and it’s what happens when the elites look down their nose at others. And the fact is people are angry. They have a right to be angry. Their country is under attack. That attack is largely coming from within the political structure. It’s looting the treasury, it’s taxing them into oblivion. It’s acting in authoritarian ways and targeting their freedoms. And I don’t think this is time to look at a large group of voters and say, “They look funny to me.”
Jim: Of course they don’t look funny to me. I live in a very rural area. And our county, 75% voted for Trump in 2020. In my electoral precinct, 83% voted for Trump. But I know these people, they’re fine people. They’re good people. I get along with them fine. Many people think I’m just like them, right? Like, my own redneck side, countryside, working-class side where I came from. So I don’t mean any disrespect. And I think the basket of deplorables was up there with Obama’s statement about hugging onto their religion and their guns. There is this cultural disparagement of rural people and working-class people by the blue coastal elites, no doubt about it and it’s bad.
Bret: Yeah, but they were also right about the guns, I believe. And I don’t believe that we can make a simple analysis about the religion, but I will say, having lived in the medical freedom movement, I have noticed that there is a bias in courage towards those who have a religious worldview, which I’m a person of a materialist mindset, I’m an evolutionary biologist, so you know what I think about where the universe came from and how it runs. But I will say from the point of view of an adaptive set of beliefs that allows you to have the features of character that allow you to confront a great evil, as I believe we currently see in the Democratic Party, those folks have an advantage, and I think it’s our obligation to notice it.
Jim: Yeah, I agree with you. And here’s the Rutt-Celia, Jim and Celia hypothesis. That’s my wife and I both have the Celia. Same [inaudible 00:35:51]. We’re both militant, materialists, humanists, have no belief in white haired guys with a beard throwing lightning bolts or anything like that. However, we have noticed that under the assault of crass, decadent, late stage financialized capitalism, the people who have resisted the temptations best, on average, have been religious people. I think that’s a true statement. I, fairly recently, a few months ago, went down and spent a weekend with our mutual friend, Jordan Hall, and I actually went to his church and met the people in his church community. Extremely impressive people.
Bret: Yep. Let’s just put it this way. I don’t think we have arrived at a stable place with respect to what to think about this. But I do think the embrace of atheism was always foolish in the sense that the atheists failed to understand that religion was an adaptation and a key to human flourishing. And that to the extent that it may be showing signs of its age, that does not mean that we are simply over this approach to the universe. And the fact that you and I are both as materialists saying that we have now encountered enough demonstration of the religious capacity to organize a community to face down evil, that’s nature’s way of telling us something. So I believe we have an obligation to pay attention to what it is that nature is telling us.
Jim: And that’s where we are today though, I would say the current Game B thinking is that John Vervaeke nailed it pretty well with his idea that the death of the Abrahamic God left a huge hole in the spirit of Western person and said it needs to be filled with something that accomplishes those same things with respect to fidelity, to virtue, group coherence, decency, wholesomeness, et cetera. And one can say, I suppose, that we have to live with the transition period. I’m still pissed off. The enlightenment was more than 300 years ago in some ways, and about 300 years ago in others, and yet we still have this legacy of revealed religion, which it’s really hard to get one’s hands around how anybody could actually believe that stuff, but they do.
Bret: Yeah, that’s a conversation for another time. I’d like to have it, but I want to get back to the political question here, because that’s the subject that you decided to have a podcast on.
Jim: Okay.
Bret: I don’t actually understand at this point how anybody who is informed about our governmental landscape, and I know you to be hyper informed, I don’t understand how anybody who is informed could possibly be contemplating support for the blue team. It seems to me that the blue team is, unless you’re an accelerationist, and I would make separate arguments against that, but unless you’re an accelerationist, the blue team is a threat to the fairest, safest, most productive system the world has ever known.
A system that you and I both know did never reached its completion. It was a prototype and it needs upgrading. It needs a constant process of upgrading, which in fact, the founders knew when they constructed it. But I just don’t see the argument. And what I hear in the case you make, which is that both red and blue are detestable, I don’t think is up-to-date. Yes, the GOP is detestable. In fact, they invented the game that the blue team has now mastered the corruption racket, the influence peddling racket. However, something new is gathering under the red banner, and it is not even defined yet, but it has major advantages over anything that might happen under the blue team’s banner.
And I would point, let me just give you one. Donald Trump, if he ascends to the office, is essentially certain to once again remove us from the World Health Organization. If that is the only thing he did during his tenure, literally the only thing, that would be a slam dunk sufficient argument to vote red and not blue in this election. I don’t think it’s the only thing on the table. In fact, I would point out, and this one’s complicated because Trump himself has been unable to admit his errors during the Covid period, but his partnering with Bobby Kennedy on Make America Healthy Again suggests the possibility that we might actually get to the bottom of what took place during Covid.
And in my opinion, we are not likely to ever have a better opportunity to understand what has overtaken our system than to get to the bottom of what happened during Covid.We know more about what went wrong. We know where to look, and all we need is the commitment of sufficiently informed people to dig in the right places for us to understand the failure of the governmental institutions, the non-governmental organizations, the academy, the scientific journals, journalism, and the censorship industrial complex.
If you want to understand that story, you have to get to the bottom of Covid, and that is not going to happen under a blue banner. Bobby Kennedy being on board with Trump suggested it will happen under the red banner. And again, independently sufficient argument on its own. And that’s before we get to questions about family sovereignty and the destruction of healthy kids under some sort of gender madness. I believe there is a strong likelihood that the fervor for cutting off the genitals and drugging healthy young people would radically be reduced under a Trump administration. You make the argument about Ukraine, and I agree that it falling into Putin’s hands would be a disaster, but don’t you have to put the danger of it falling into his hands at the blue doorstep? Didn’t they effectively invite this by acting in a belligerent way?
Jim: Truth, you can point blame all the way back to Obama, who should have kicked Putin’s ass in 2014 when we could have done it easily. All three presidents have some blame here. So I’m not really looking to the past, I’m looking to the future and I evaluate team Trump, not necessarily Republicans. Imagine it was Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley is very strong on Ukraine. In the case of Trump versus Harris, and when I say Harris, it actually means the Democratic internationalist Cabal is more likely to be sound on Ukraine than Trump would be my view.
Bret: I can’t imagine how you get there.
Jim: Trump is, I think there’s a good chance that he attempts his Trumpian magic negotiating. And if it doesn’t work, it basically cuts off Ukraine.
Bret: Okay, I see the risk.
Jim: That’s more or less what Vance advocates or has advocated in the recent past, that we know Vance will change his mind. He’ll be the chameleon to be whatever he needs to be at any given point in time.
Bret: On the other hand, obviously the blue, the regime is using Ukraine as some mechanism to loot the treasury and to funnel that money in some untraceable way to who knows what. Hints of this existed before Biden’s election. Obviously the fact of Hunter Biden being on the board of Burisma, the various malfeasance surrounding investigations in Ukraine all hinted to the idea that there was some international or supranational agreement to utilize Ukraine for purposes that have never been discussed with the public. But in any case, I can’t imagine how in light of recent history you arrive at the conclusion that the blue team is on balance better on the subject of Ukraine. I think the problem is, the nuclear belligerence towards Russia and the debacle in Ukraine both land squarely on the blue team’s doorstep. And I don’t know whether Donald Trump has the ability to fix that situation. Obviously it’s a difficult one, but I can’t see trusting the people who created the problem because they’re the better bet. They just simply aren’t.
Jim: Well, they seem like they’re willing to stay the course, right? When you talk about the money being spent, that’s not what’s looting the treasury. The total expenditures to Ukraine on the order of 50 billion a year, much less than we spent per year in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Bret: Hardly a defense.
Jim: Well, it’s only 5% of the defense budget. And it’s a hell of a deal to be degrading our number one opponent with 5% of our defense budget where somebody else is doing the bleeding. I think it’s a great deal at the geopolitical level.
The real looting of the treasury, and this is really important, is that both Team Red and Team Blue are grossly irresponsible spenders. But Team Red is even worse because it cuts taxes in the face of this and way beyond what the Laffer curve says is reasonable to get a positive gain.
If you look at the tax cuts of GW Bush and Trump, between them, they’re responsible for 60 or 70% of our deficit since those times. They are worse than the Dems on fiscal responsibility these days, which is quite the change from the days when I was a Goldwater Republican and the Republican Party was the party of smaller government and not going into infinite amounts of debt.
Bret: I see your argument, but I actually think if you put it in the context of Democratic energy policy, once again, the Democrats take the prize for the most fiscally irresponsible because what they are demanding be done with respect to our energy transition is simply impossible. And what it will do to our economic position is obviously profoundly negative.
Jim: I agree with you that if you take the left half of the Democratic Party and take their energy plans, even if they’re not as crazy as Bernie’s 2020 plan, they are spending way too much, way too fast. And I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve talked to the leading thinkers in the world about this at some of them on my podcast. My view is there is a trajectory which we follow, which is driven in a goodly part by the learning curves on the technology, right? There’s like the idiocy of the Germans investing vast amounts on solar.
Didn’t any German politician ever go outside and look in the sky in Germany? It’s always fucking gray over there, right? And it’s a high latitude. It’s the worst place you could possibly put solar damn close. And at the time, the solar price curve hadn’t actually broken so it requires a very thoughtful analysis and construction of a trajectory that’s informed heavily by the learning curves. And there’s a lot of study on learning curves. And the energy alternative energy methods are following about what you’d predict. The ones for solar is driven by a silicon learning curve. Wind is by a mechanical learning curve, which, surprising, learning. And you look at the horsepower of car engines and efficiencies of boilers, even relatively mundane technologies have learning curves. And our nuclear programs, probably the current form of light water fission will never pay, but maybe one of these new techs will.
And so this is a engineering problem to find the right trajectory to get to carbon neutrality by maybe 2065 or 2075. I don’t hear any sounds of anything sensible like that coming from the Republicans. I hear things from the Dems like, “Oh, we got to do it by 2050,” which is not going to happen. I’ll put long odds on that, barring a miracle occurs that we find some new energy source that’s unanticipated. But I don’t hear any quality thinking from anybody in the Republican Party about engineering this careful, well-thought-out trajectory to carbon neutrality late in this century. And I would say that’s my probably biggest problem with Team Red.
Bret: Yeah, I mean, you alluded in the beginning of the podcast to concerns about global warming being overblown. Now, as you know, I don’t find this story simple in any regard. We know we can effectively know for certain that our concerns are overblown in one regard in the sense that we have an academic discipline in which there is a conclusion that is sacred and anybody who finds that things are less serious than we thought is not going to survive. So we know that that discipline is telling us that things are as bad as can be, and that makes it impossible for us to know how bad they are.
The question though is, yes, what you get is something reactionary on the other side where there’s no interest in the question of whether or not altering atmospheric chemistry has a profound influence on the planet. However, both sides seem to be ignoring the issue of solar forcing, which arguably has an impact that dwarfs the capacity of humans to influence climate dynamics by altering the atmosphere. So from my perspective, it’s not a simple matter of the red team needing to become reasonable on atmospheric chemistry. It’s a question of, actually we need people who are empowered to navigate what are the greatest threats to humanity. Where do they come from and what might be done to mitigate them? Because at the moment, we have a rapidly weakening magnetic field on the earth, hence the auroras that were visible last night. And that weakening field paints a very dire picture that, in my opinion, dwarfs any threat from global warming. So I want that conversation right away. We are not going to get it from the blue team. Could we get it from the red team? That’s a question.
Jim: The other one you and I both know about and have talked about is both parties, what the noble exception of Newt Gingrich, of all people, have not paid attention to the Carrington effect and the massive, maybe total destruction of advanced technology. And the thing that’s so annoying about this, the defenses against the Carrington effect… By the way, just to remind people you talk about it from time to time, is a really massive solar flare that hits the earth head on and produces electric fields in all the wires equivalent to the event I think it was 1854 or thereabouts, where fortunately-
Bret: 1859.
Jim: Yep.
Bret: Everything happened in 1859, Jim.
Jim: That was a momentous year. It caused fires. It killed telegraph operators. It’s estimated by the astronomers to be about one in a 500 year chance, which means every year we have a 0.2% chance. And right now we have a higher probability because the sun is in an active mode. The thing that’s just drives fucking me nuts. Just for a hundred billion dollars we could defend the whole world against major problems around the Carrington effect, but neither party, because it requires thought, it requires intellectual depth, and neither party will take this on. Another double hater. Double hater.
Bret: All right. I of course agree with you about the size of this threat. It is getting worse. Our risk is going up because our magnetic field is decreasing, which is only going to grow stronger over time. Yes, we have an 11-year sunspot cycle. We’re in the middle of a peak. But every time that sunspot cycle returns, it’s going to be returning and facing an earth with less and less protection. So the risk of a Carrington event is going up spectacularly.
Jim: That’s a good point. I hadn’t actually connected the Carrington risk with the seeming coming flip of the poles, which we have no idea what the hell that’ll do.
Bret: Yeah. Well, and it’s underway, the migration of the poles.
Jim: Seems to be.
Bret: It seems to be.
Jim: Yeah, the velocity of the migration has increased considerably. The field has reduced a little. And whether that means that we’re heading towards a flip, which God knows what that will do, these things are chaotic systems driven by the internal flows inside the inner and outer core and the relationship between the inner and the outer core of the earth. So they’re not predictable. They’re statistically predictable, but they’re not trajectory [inaudible 00:52:28].
Bret: Well, but we have a geomagnetic excursion underway and accelerating. So this is a rabbit hole you might want to-
Jim: At the moment, we are. It’s funny, I hadn’t connected that to the Carrington risk, but you were right about that. I’m going to have to go back and do some new math.
Bret: Okay, now let’s connect these things to why you’d have to be insane to vote for the blue team.
So here’s the problem with the Carrington event. You and I are both deeply frustrated that we are not taking the very basic steps necessary to immunize the grids of the world because we know how much risk there is in those grids failing. Most people don’t. But if those grids go down and they don’t come back up, all kinds of things happen, including nuclear reactors blowing up for lack of the ability to circulate cooling water. So there are 400 nuclear reactors. Any nuclear reactor that’s in a zone in which the electricity goes out has to be run on diesel. And that means the supply has to be reliable until you get new transformers. Transformers take more than a year to get if you order them.
Jim: And guess where they all come from? China.
Bret: China, yes. Now, we had a stockpile of spare transformers. Guess where they are?
Jim: [inaudible 00:53:36].
Bret: We sent them to Ukraine.
Jim: Ukraine?
Bret: Yes. Can you imagine?
Jim: I can see the temptation. And the stockpile was way too small for $20 billion.
Bret: It was way too small. And now it’s in Ukraine.
Jim: That doesn’t surprise me. We need a $20 billion stockpile of major transformers,
Bret: But we’ve now sent these things to a war zone where we are now acting in a belligerent way towards our old nuclear foe from the Cold War. So this is the blue team acting in the most insane way possible relative to a risk that very few people know about, but you and I know is at the top of the list of threats to humanity.
Jim: Probably number one, other than our people driving ourselves crazy with social media. That might be number one.
Bret: I agree that this is probably number one. And my point is, at the point you discovered that the blue team sent our spare transformers to Ukraine, you don’t immediately think, “Oh my God, these people have to be ushered out of office yesterday.”
Jim: That’s interesting. I did not know that data point. That’s new data.
Bret: It’s frightening.
Jim: Yeah. So two things here I’ve learned. That data point, and this is one I should… I’ll smack myself. “Jim, you’re stupid. Why didn’t you connect the Carrington event risk with the current oscillations in the magnetic field?” Because clearly they’re related. So thank you very much for that bit of education.
Bret: You’re welcome. And I will thank Ben Davidson for upgrading my thinking on these topics radically.
Jim: Interesting. Yeah. So again, good thinking. Yeah, setting the stockpile of transformers to Ukraine would be nuts. Of course the other part that’s even more insane, and this goes back to the fundamentals of Game A late stage financialized capitalism is for $20 billion or so, you could put a bunch of air gaps in the grid. And the interesting thing about the Carrington effect is it requires hundreds of miles of wire that are continuously connected to build up electric field strong enough to do serious damage, mechanical Frankenstein switches with 5-feet of cable that can be removed at necessity. We’re talking about ridiculously simple technologies. If you broke the grid up into 50 mile segments with these physically removable, a guy with a glove, after the Frankenstein switches were thrown, you could reduce 95% of the risk from the Carrington event. But there’s no incentive for utility to do that.
Bret: Oh, there’s even worse. Can you imagine being in the predicament of having to decide when to trip the breakers?
Jim: We know that that would be a hellacious decision. But if you’re [inaudible 00:56:16] much of a pussy that you’re not willing to make that call, you should not be president of the United States.
Bret: Right. Well, we need to have a conversation about why we need to turn the power off sometimes, because the risk of this ever going bad on us is so great that we have to endure the inconvenience and we have to make people’s lives robust so that an interruption of power for short periods of time is not intolerable. All that’s doable, but not if we have clowns in the powerful positions, which is what we’ve got clowns, and worse, unfortunately.
Jim: That gets, of course, to my final point against Team Red. We have an absolute fucking ass clown running for president, a despicable human being, a pathological liar, except I’m not really sure he is a liar because I just think he doesn’t understand the concept of the truth. The only thing that comes out of his mouth is whatever misogynists, narcissism or he thinks would be convenient at the moment.
I mean, even watching the debate, I didn’t keep tight score, but again and again and again and again and again, he said things that were just flat out easily provably not true. And this guy’s just a ridiculous clown. And of course, the thing that makes that extra difficult is that I believe it’s driven fundamentally by narcissism, not by the way, by fascist power hunger. I think the Dems are completely wrong about that, but I think he’s just drawn by very deep psychological narcissism. I have used that lens. Everything Trumpian becomes easily understood. And this unfortunately is easily exploited by Trump whisperers like Putin or Kim Un Jong. Anyone who will kiss up the Trump in the right way is able to influence him tremendously. If the Republicans had nominated DeSantis, this would be a vastly easier decision. But the guy that John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton warned us about in the Federalist papers is just an extraordinarily heavy Black mark on the red side of the ledger, in my opinion.
Bret: No.
Jim: No? Okay, let’s hear the rebuttal.
Bret: Okay, here’s the rebuttal. First of all, I will give you two rebuttals. One, let’s say that your analysis is accurate and that this person is motivated by narcissism. That is not the worst motivation for somebody in the presidency. Somebody who desires adulation, who lives in perilous times and can get that adulation by serving the interests of the American people, might be a good steward in the same way that Peter Sellers was a narcissist, but an excellent comic, right? You’re talking about whether or not the defect that you’re imagining is there is actually inconsistent with good governance, and it is not. In fact, there are places where it departs. But overwhelmingly, the best thing that Trump can do if he wants to be remembered as a great man, as somebody who has shown up his critics, is to ascend to the office and govern brilliantly. So I don’t see it as invalidating even if it were true.
Jim: Well, let me interrupt there because this is something that you and I are very familiar with, which is that the current status quo operating system is way too short-term oriented. Unfortunately, a narcissist, by definition, is only short-term oriented to 100% degree. All they care about is the reaction of the mob. They don’t even have the four-year time horizon of the elected Congress critters and the normal presidents. This is a guy who has to get his narcissism fixed in near real time. And so it’s a horrendously bad operating system for making decisions that wait the future at anything higher than zero.
Bret: No, I don’t think you have this right. And I will point to a couple things.
Jim: All right.
Bret: One, if you think that Donald Trump is not interested in how history will record him, then I don’t think you’ve understood this person. I think he wants to be remembered as a great president who endured all of these terrible slanders and then did marvelous things. He’s an old man. I don’t think he’s trying to maximize his pleasure in the last years of his life. I believe he wants to go down in history as a great leader. So-
Jim: If I believe that, I would think much better of him, but I see no sign of it. I see him being mercurial, changing directions whenever it’s convenient, whenever the rhetoric works. Like abortion, for instance, right? He’s this way, he’s that way. He’s whatever he thinks is going to get him the net present value of narcissism.
Bret: Well, but hold on. Hold on, Jim. You sidestepped my point earlier in the conversation where I said that I believe Donald Trump single-handedly defeated the duopoly. He certainly decapitated the Republican Party and took it over, right? The things that you’re complaining about about the Republican Party are not Trumpian. They are legacy GOP stuff. And the Republican Party looks very different today because of the massive influx of rank-and-file working class people that he’s brought there.
I believe he’s in the process of defeating the blue team. And if he beats both of those, he is accomplishing something that is almost unthinkable, even before you ever get to the question of him ascending to any office. Defeating the duopoly is something you and I have thought a lot about. Game B was in large measure. How do you escape a corrupt system and get it to be replaced by something that functions towards the values that we claim from our founders?
So you’re complaining about what you see as personality defects, and I’m pointing out, well, you’ve got a mystery here. Just as our discussion about religion earlier in the conversation, right? You and I both find something troubling about a worldview that denies the material reality that the enlightenment allowed us to see. On the other hand, we are both coming to recognize that late in the game, there are many characteristics, personal characteristics, that seem to travel along with that belief system that are very much in need at this moment in history. So at the same level, you’re looking at defects in Trump’s character or things that you think are defects in his character, and yet he’s capable of doing something you and I would’ve both regarded as impossible 20 years ago. So I think those two things are related.
But the other point I would make is that when Donald Trump brought Bobby Kennedy on stage, and I guess it was Nevada after Bobby Kennedy stepped out of the presidential race, but when Donald Trump brought Bobby Kennedy out, you could see that this guy who you’re claiming is a narcissist who is only looking for adulation about himself and aggrandizement, you could see him sharing the stage with a charismatic, articulate, highly intelligent, famous liberal. And my point is that actually is a falsification of your model, that his willingness to share the spotlight with a man who creates that kind of aura is an indication that either Trump has grown in ways that you and I might not expect, or that he has characteristics that we don’t see because we are downstream of a propaganda campaign that has obscured them.
Jim: Or rather simplistic analysis is that Trump’s a pretty darn good player of the narcissism game, and he realized that he could collect some reflected glory by having Bobby on the stage in the same way he got a lot of reflected glory, probably the smartest movies he’s done, of getting Elon on the stage with him.
Bret: Right. But that’s exactly the point, Jim. Let’s suppose that Donald Trump has gotten that message and that what he does upon ascending to the office is he brings in all of the highly competent, courageous, patriotic people, seats them in these positions, and delights in the reflected glory of him being a great leader. Isn’t that exactly what you want him to do?
Jim: Except for, to my earlier point, that if he is indeed driven by narcissism… And in my business career, I was very fortunate I got to know at least a little bit, many of the baby boomer, generation tech CEOs, famous, famous names that you would recognize. And I think of two of them in particular who are famous for their narcissism. I mean, these guys are off the normal chart narcissism. None of them compare to Trump in terms… I call him the all-galaxy narcissist. And the problem is that this produces short-term thinking, unless you’re right, I could be wrong about this, that he is now in his dotage or near-dotage concerned about his reputation that post-mortem. It’s possible. If that were true, my views on Trump would change very considerably. But my current operational model, which could be wrong, is that he is a short loop narcissist and all he wants is adoration from his folk. And if that’s the case, I don’t care how many smart advisors he has, he’s not going to make the correct decisions for what you and I both know is a long game.
We have challenges over the next 70 years for the human race to solve or goodbye human race, or at least a fallback from advanced technological society. And a guy who’s playing the short-term narcissism loop as his main decision driver is not the guy that’s going to drive that trajectory appropriately over our 70-year time rise.
Bret: All right. Well, as you fill out your ballot, if you would do me one favor, just I want you to have this thought, Trump never sent our spare transformers to Ukraine.
Jim: That’s a worthwhile thought. And as you know, I’m a person that’s open. I have opinions strongly stated, but weakly held. And I will say this on the air, even though I’ve said that I’m most likely going to vote for Harris, I have also, and my wife and I have both agreed, we’re not going to cast our ballots early. We’re going to continue to think and we’re going to continue to watch, and we’re going to continue to talk to really smart motherfuckers like Bret Weinstein and who knows how it will come out. But my big two on Trump is climate and Ukraine and within them friends, Taiwan, and his gross personality defect. And not because he likes to grab people by the you know what, although that’s deplorable. I’m much more concerned on the impact that my model of his personality has on his ability to think and make decisions anywhere near optimally for the longterm.
Bret: Yeah, I hear you. To me, it’s not a compelling case. I mean, even just eliminating Mayorkas from the cabinet would be such an upgrade to the country that I would vote against Harris just simply for that.
Jim: Anyway, I think this was a wonderful conversation. You’ve said some very interesting things. You’re going to make me stop and take stock. And I still am not casting my ballot until about three days before the election. We’re going to be out of town on election day, but the Friday before, we’re going to go over to the registrar’s office and vote. So consider me, my Bayesian prior is weighted towards Team Blue with nose held with channel locks because there’s a whole lot of things I hate, but it’s not impossible.
Bret: All right, good.
Jim: Thank you, Bret.
Bret: Thanks, Jim. See you next time.