Andy Ngo and Jordan Peterson Unpack the Dark Psychology Behind Antifa Mob Violence and Political Radicalization

so what is it that they're celebrating as far as you can tell they think that a fascist or a racist got the violence against him that he deserved yeah but i don't believe that you know i don't believe that's what they're celebrating because i don't think i don't think they're that good i think they're celebrating watching some poor son of a [ __ ] get hurt and that that satisfies something unbelievably dark in their souls like the desire to burn the desire to burn down buildings the desire to melt cars the desire for the whole goddamn thing to go up in flames because they're resentful and bitter because we can't take these things at face value right it's like no no you don't understand you're smiling and laughing while someone just got his teeth kicked in no trial no jury no defense he's on the ground he's mobbed by by overwhelming force and you're celebrating that and you're telling me that's because of your virtues it's like i don't think so [Music] [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased today to have with me someone i've wanted to talk to for a long time mr andy no andy is a journalist best known for reporting on american antifa he's an editor at large at the post-millennial which has recently been under attack by left-wing radicals i would say who have uh sought to have the advertisers drop the post-millennial as a and deprive and depriving them of their source of revenue and consequence he's written reports for the new york post newsweek and other media major media outlets he drew national attention when he was beaten and hurt very badly by antifa thugs on the streets of portland in the summer of 2019 his february 2021 book unmasked inside antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy was a new york times bestseller and quite a gripping read i might add andy had to leave the us because of concerns for his safety and is currently residing in the uk hey andy so nice to see you we haven't met before i don't think having my memories a bit spotty and but i don't think we've ever met is that true correct actually no no no professor we have when you were on your tour and you were in portland on the door that was where there were some of the largest demonstrations against you and backstage uh i interviewed you for my podcast very very briefly ah sorry i'm sorry i've that hasn't managed to lodge itself in my memory unfortunately although i do remember that there were protests in portland that was pretty much it for protests you know on that whole tour so but of course you know they would be in portland and they weren't against me either they were against who people wished i was so that they could protest me really so all right so i've been going through distinction yes it is an important distinction because you know a lot a lot of our ire is reserved for our imaginary enemies and so that's certainly something that we could delve into a little bit with regards to antifa so let's go there right away so i was talking to a number of influential democrats this week about antifa and about january 6th okay and so so imagine that an outside observer like a canadian might look at the united states and think well you know the radical left has portland and minneapolis and that's pretty damn ugly and then the radical right has january 6 and that's pretty ugly and you know maybe you could draw some kind of equivalency between the two and maybe not but i think you could at least make a reasonable initial case for something like that january 6 had a lot of symbolic weight if nothing else and and certainly did frighten people very badly but when i was talking to these democrats about antifa and the riots you know their attitude is sort of well there's there's always been riots and race riots in the united states throughout its entire history so in some sense it's really nothing out of the ordinary and besides antifa doesn't really exist and so i'd like you to address if you would both of those points and i should point out too these are reasonable people making these points these aren't radical leftists these are people who are trying hard to pull the democratic party towards a moderate center and who are very suspicious of the radical leftists especially the grip they have on the education system so they're good faith players and still and oh the other thing they said to me was that they believed it was intellectually dishonest to draw a parallel between portland and minneapolis and january 6th uh making the case that what happened on january 6 was much much worse like in a in a category of its own and they justified that by referring to the fact that it was direct assault on the capitol building you know and and and and that there was presidential ambivalence about bringing that to a halt so that's a rat's nest so you know you want to wade in yes professor so i think uh let's say for good faith engagement from the left um i completely understand why there would be this perception that antifa is a myth or um doesn't really exist because that's the propaganda that the public said from the legacy media and broadcast and in print day in and day out certainly since trump was elected it's an entirely different story though when you are on the ground as i have been for years and you see that militancy face to face and when you see it the the organization or aspect of it is undeniable that's what initially sparked my curiosity because in portland where i'm from when the election results in 2016 november were announced tens of thousands of people took to the streets and within that there was a an organized element of people dressed in the same uniforms at that time it was unusual to cover your face and they had weapons in in a very strategic way uh smash and move on smash and move on cars businesses build buildings start fires run um so it was from there that sparked my interest in wanting to learn more about what looks like an organized militia or paramilitary so with that out of the way though um i think the press because of its compromise nature and generally being biased a lot they have turned a blind eye to the evidence that shows that there's in depending on where you are there's an organized organizational structure to antifa and um the statement that biden said infamously at one of the debates uh last year antifa is an idea that statement in itself is true um but it's not the it's not the complete statement you have i think one way to explain it that people can understand perhaps more easily is its analogous to the worldwide uh jihadist phenomenon in that you can have people who are actual members of organizations like boko haram or ayas or al-qaeda or any of these other jihadist groups but you have people as well who are sympathetic to the ideology and act on it and in that regard i think you can think of the contemporary manifestations of anti-fun in in the united states canada in western countries along the same lines you can have people who had self-identify in and simply all they do is go to these protests or riots based on flyers you see online then you have actual cells that operate such as rose city antifa which is an organized group you can go on their website and look at the q a and they actually have one of the questions is how do i join and they say that currently membership is closed so there's that and in my book i publish some of the primary documents of the curriculum from rose city antifa which is actually one of the cells that's part of a network called um the torch antifa network and they have cells in other cities so from you know it's kind of all of the above it's ideology it's um uh un horizontally organized it's disorganized it's also highly organized in some cases so it's because of that um lack of centralized hierarchical authority that makes it easy for those who want to obfuscate and confuse the public about it because they can point and say well you know there's no single leader who's the leadership show me the leadership because there is no single um person who's heading everything then the response is well that's evidence that they don't exist um you know yeah okay so this is this is a real problem conceptually right i mean and let's think about it to begin with as a problem that we all face instead of a political problem emanating either from the left or the right okay because i think there's a deeper problem here that isn't exactly partisan and we'll get into the partisan element of it later so imagine first of all okay so i i assume that the description you gave would be the one that you gave is that okay so what we have here is we have some actual organizations let's focus on rose city and antifa and but but it's a radically distributed organization and we don't even know how radically distributed and it's almost impossible to identify its core members or even to define what core membership might be now you you did point to rose city antifa but if i said for example how many other antifa groups are there that have an identifiable organizational strategy that's akin to rose city antifa how many do you do do you have any sense of that just like just a few dozen there aren't very many but the thing is many they they they close and then they spring up as new ad hoc groups under different names but that's really the same okay a few dozen so that's real interesting so that's like let's say 24. just let's let's make this concrete because i think it'll be interesting to do so so in that 24 how many people do you think are core involved in each group do you think it's like five is it three is it ten like real hardcore people who are devoting their time to this you know like like maybe they're unemployed that would be a real shock and it's their full-time job something like that how many people across the entirety of the united states uh base if most of them let's say we're averaging around the same size as rose city antifa then i would say in total we're looking at below a thousand people in in across the entire united states so hundreds which is you know in the scheme of things and for the scale that's a rel that's a very small number yeah well it's look it's so small that you could say that it's and i'm not saying this but it's so small that you could say that it's non-existent right because it's one in three hundred thousand if it's the us it's it's such a tiny minority of people that they barely exist but what that points to is something actually that minimizing it in that manner actually points to something far more sinister because what it means is that under a thousand committed people can radically destabilize whole cities and pose a threat to the integrity of entire culture not not not least by fostering polarization and and the degeneration of the political scheme that comes along with that and so that's a real danger for all of us particularly if it's the case that groups like that can multiply their power by pulling other you know semi-attached and maybe not so violent or even extremist people in on the basis of their empathy exactly uh concentric circles probably is a good way to explain it uh what you asked me the concrete number of how many people are actually core in terms of um involved in the organizing the planning attending meetings or trainings like as you said almost almost non-existent given the the population side of the u.s however um the the larger concentric circle is of their sympathizers and i think the role of the press since particularly i would say since the election of trump helped really to mainstream the so-called antifa ideology it put um day in and day out for the entire world that this belief that america had elected a fascist president under trump that we were experiencing a regime change that there would be people there would be genocide and on the face i mean these ideas are these accusations are so outrageous and i would say laughable but people genuinely believe that you know go back five years remember like this yeah i know they believe that yeah well they're feeling the same way about trump running again you know that fear is definitely there and i think it's probably even higher than it was at least it's higher than it was in some ways among the same people and so because they think well he didn't manage to establish an authoritarian state this time but you know just wait we're we'll see what happens if he gets power a second time it might be the last election the united states ever has but think about what this means so because i also i talk to people on the left a lot most of them are moderate um the you know the extreme left types they generally won't talk to me but um although i would talk to them if i had found someone who was credible and and interesting to talk to and who was willing to um what that means is think about the conceptual problem that we're faced with now so the people on the left can point to the right and say well what about your extremists and the people on the right can say well there's hardly any of them there's like they basically don't exist and and in some sense that's genuinely true and on the left it's the same thing it's like it's hardly anybody at all it's under a thousand people committed to this but they can cause a tremendous amount of trouble and so then the left can point to the people on the right who are extreme and say well look at your extremists and what they do and then the right can point to the people on the left and say look at your extremists and what they do and we don't know how dangerous they are and what happens if they get out of control and get the upper hand and how much protection do we have to you know uh uh wall ourselves in with in order to make sure that doesn't happen and then the fact of those extremists mean that each side can demonize the other by pointing to the worst and then everybody gets out of control and so and it's not obvious at all how to deal with that uh lying certainly lying about it certainly complicates the situation tremendously right if there's any deceit in the press coverage and so forth and so but okay so so that's a problem a conceptual problem and then why do you think that legacy media so to speak is so light-handed in its treatment of antifa given the tremendous damage and and loss of life and violence for that matter that the riots that antifa in some sense are central to has caused like if you had to play devil's advocate what's motivating them to minimize this um establishment journalists were entirely uniform and and committed to their goal in opposing trump and many of them felt that it was their duty and obligation to um violate some ethical standards because we were living in such unprecedented times with trump in the executive office that he needed to be resisted by any means necessary isn't that always the justification for ethical violations isn't that always the rationalization it's like well this isn't i wouldn't normally do this but this is an exceptional case and so not only is it justified for me to violate my ethical standards it's actually demanded of me and so that seems to me to be an argument i can understand the argument you know because well hey maybe we're faced with an emergency we're going to see a hell of a lot of that by the way with climate change like a lot so it's coming in a big way and so well if the emergency is large enough don't we get to violate our own principles and well you're a journalist let me ask you a question do you can you recall a time and this is a real serious question man can you recall a time where you thought the stakes were high enough so that you violated your journalistic integrity that's i appreciate the question so i've covered uh dozens of uh violent protests and riots where i witnessed people being assaulted i've always i don't intervene in those instances uh i try to record a photograph but when you see for example a mob of people beating somebody and it doesn't matter for me the political creation of who that mob is i feel sort of as a human as a citizen i should at least just intervene in some way um that's something that i've struggled with a lot okay so you okay so you said you said that you don't intervene now in your book there the account of your severe beating um i i looked up some press coverage of that and and i believe this was in your book as well that while you were being assaulted so badly there were press there and they did nothing to intervene they were just recording and and taking snapshots and video and so forth and and you know in the book that sounds like that they're derelict in their duties and maybe in particular because you're also a journalist and maybe that you know maybe there's a special category there but and then also as a journalist if you are recording it's like you're putting the whole above the part in some sense right because you think you're you're journalistic it's demanded of you because of your journalistic integrity to record and not to intervene but but you said you you feel the pull on your conscience about that so how do you how is it that you've learned to live without it what makes you think that you made the right decision doing what you've done and maybe you don't know maybe you know i'm not entirely sure if i made the right decision unfortunately i haven't been like right next to somebody who was on the nearly getting killed i think for that type of instance it's very clear that that that there's a demand for an obligation for an intimate intervention so that somebody's not murdered um for me i mean you're also not a police officer and and you're not armed and i don't imagine you're trained in in street fighting or that sort of thing so in some sense you know fools jump in where angels fear to tread and two people beat to death isn't really an improvement over one and so i'm not saying that like leonard cohen that canadian songwriter said there's no decent place to stand in a massacre you know sometimes you're in a situation where anything you do is bad because the situation is so terrible so okay so you've had moral qualms about how how apart from the action you should be under those situations what about like you're obviously not very happy with what's happening about antifa and you're on the ground also as opposed i would say to these journalists who are minimizing what antifa is doing they're much more up in the air in some sense right so you're down in the trenches to the point where you're getting beat up for it and then i would say the people who aren't doing that and reporting on it they've got one form of blinders on because they're not seeing what's actually happening but in some sense the risk for you and your integrity is that you you have the opposite problem you're so damn involved you're watching buildings burn you're watching cars melt you're watching people be assaulted and being assaulted yourself that how do you protect yourself against the possibility that you're exaggerating the threat because you you know your sample is up biased you're in the middle of the damn riots all the time yeah i think that's a fair question and it's a criticism i though the instances of ultra violence that i've seen and i've written about and recorded video for um those are anecdotes that are important um but they're not the full story and in my the purpose of writing unmasked my book was to shed light really on the ideology that i think is is ultimately much much more dangerous than these instances of violence that um lead to um people getting seriously injured or or killed in that um i think it's it's a theme and a subject that you've discussed before in your speeches and your writings professor it's about um this belief that for pursuing this justice racial justice anti-racism whatever name they want to give they believe that no no act that they can make can never go too far and that's sort of the oh isn't that a lovely thing wouldn't that be a lovely thing to have on your side so imagine that you're so virtuous in your pursuits that you are now entitled to do absolutely anything to anyone whenever you want i mean if you if you if you have that kind of cognitive structure i mean first of all you're not very self-reflective it's like do i really think that i'm so ethical that i can give myself a free hand to do anything and so i'm increasingly skeptical about large-scale ethical claims of that sort you know well this is so important that well that what exactly well it depends on how important it is and well we could climate change a good example of that well if it's the ultimate environmental catastrophe everywhere and it's going to happen within 20 years then well we should do everything well okay let's get detailed about this does that mean we get to beat up andy no if he's not that happy about climate change well he's just one guy you know and it's a planet we're talking about here you know and that's independent in some sense of whether there are warranted concerns on the environmental front i know there are like the oceans are overfished for example that's not a good thing it's stupid we should stop doing it but it's this moral license that goes along with this claim to virtue that really scares the hell out of me and it's also the fact that you can instantly demonize your enemies because if you're so virtuous that everything is justified then anyone who opposes you is virtually satan themselves yes i've seen this with my own eyes this demonization dehumanization one of the really shocking things i witnessed last year at the beginning of the riots i was undercover so again i couldn't i couldn't intervene because if i did it would potentially blow my cover and i could get seriously injured or killed but um this wasn't it anime days after george floyd had died and the writing had not at that point spread outside of minneapolis there was a man that was targeted by the mob he was accused of being right wing i whatever accusation is true or false i don't know but he was beaten up uh they got him on the ground and then one of them with glee uh rushed at his head and and kicked his teeth in and you you could actually see the teeth on the ground and what do you mean by with what do you mean by with glee why that phrase the crowd around him celebrated that act was calling this person a fascist and was happy that he was was he was crying and how and how could you tell the how could you tell they were happy what exactly were they doing they had smiles on their faces as they were looking at this bleeding person on the ground yeah well it's hard to see it's hard to see exactly what would you it's hard to see exactly what moral claim would justify that smile so what do you think's really going on there just out of curiosity you watched it right up close so what are those people celebrating like what it what is it in them that's responding to that well you said with glee you know that that that's a very specific word so what is it that they're celebrating as far as you can tell they think that a fascist or a racist got the violence against him that he deserved yeah but i don't believe that you know i don't believe that's what they're celebrating because i don't think i don't think they're that good i think they're celebrating watching some poor son of a [ __ ] get hurt and that that satisfies something unbelievably dark in their souls like the desire to burn the desire to burn down buildings the desire to melt cars the desire for the whole goddamn thing to go up in flames because they're resentful and bitter because we can't take these things at face value right it's like no no you don't understand you're smiling and laughing while someone just got his teeth kicked in no trial no jury no defense he's on the ground he's mobbed by by overwhelming force and you're celebrating that and you're telling me that's because of your virtues it's like i don't think so and this is the danger we're facing right with with this on the on in all these activist groups i've had people like that at my come and protest against me i can kind of spot them because i have some clinical training i can i can tell the guys it's almost always men and they're always almost always there to prey on unsuspecting women by being their ideological affiliates and those damn guys man the worse it goes the happier they are i i wanted to ask you about the based on your your your knowledge your background your clinical experience what what is the psychology of this mob violence when i see it it it like i i don't even recognize some of these it seems they seem animalistic is what i mean um no they're worse than animals they're worse than animals because animals they just kill to eat you know human beings they have a twist in them that makes them far worse than animals when they really get going well i think it's i think you really want to know what i think i think it's revenge against god for the crime of being that's really what i think it's kane and cain and abel it's like oh abel's your abel's your guy a god how about if i take him out in the field and beat him to death how do you feel about that all my sacrifices went unrewarded yeah it's like yeah that's what it is at the bottom of the hell of things and so you know these people they can light the whole world on fire and and that's partly what you're so i i didn't get your answer to one question sorry about the potential warping of your viewpoint because you're so much in the action like how do you you know what i mean if you're in that all the time that becomes your world in some sense and how do you know that you're not exaggerating the threat because you're in in it all the time because i describes um step by step what what what is happening in let's say this particular antidote of portland in the summer of 2020 but then i also followed that up with certain doubters uh the consequences the political consequences say in portland last year uh the city council did vote to defund a law enforcement based on the demands of the radical left activists those who carried out violence they defunded police they also abolished the gun violence reduction team and a part of my reporting is a crime it's the crime reporting particularly in the cities and areas i know what that's like northwestern united states and we've seen that we have the actual data the number of violent crimes that has shot up ever since the death of george floyd last year in portland and other major american cities uh portland this year 2021 has now surpassed its record all-time record for homicides and this is a direct consequence of the political decisions that were made by local politicians uh in response to their constituents as well as outsiders going in uh carrying out acts of political violence and carrying having certain demands over it okay so that's what you point to concretely so okay so let's take that apart a little bit so you have an ideology at the core of this i want to go through this really programmatically one of the things that so i'm going to kind of mangle a bunch of questions here together so these these core people it's not so obvious to me that they're simply left wing you know because well some of them are anarchists okay like what the hell's an anarchist exactly is he left wing or right wing it's like in some sense it doesn't matter i know i know ideas matter that is what i'm saying but in some sense it doesn't matter because that person who's decided to be violent is is working to burn the whole damn thing down for whatever reason you know and and they also describe them as paramilitary and organized militia and there's kind of a there's a rat there's a right-wing flavor to that right the uniforms because uniform is more an element of the right than the left all things considered and i know that things get hard conceptually when the when the opposites touch right and people debate about whether the national socialists were left-wing or right-wing and the answer was well they were a mixed complex mixture of both and the worst of both in some sense although you know maybe not worse than stalin or mao but so and so that also means that people on the left can point to antifa even the violent types and say well you know what makes you so sure they're left-wing and why should we bear the the mark of their disquiet you know as a stain on our political beliefs so then okay now so there's ambiguity about the real radicals and it's certainly to the degree that they're radical the degree to which they can sow confusion about their political ideologies all to their benefit right so if both the right wing moderates and the left-wing moderates point to them and say well your left-wing or your right-wing depending on what they're trying to justify and that screws the system up if they're hardcore anarchists great you know that's all the better they just play into their hands okay and then you you pat you you laid out a pathway from that violent interchange to policy decisions like defund the police for example and the pulling back of law enforcement and then you said well that's destabilizing cities that's actually what's happening that's that's data and so but it's not that easy to trace it's not so easy to trace that back to the radicals themselves except insofar as they want to destabilize right the ideological trail isn't isn't so clear so now is there a question in there well i guess one of the questions is is it reasonable to characterize the radical extremists as either left or right do you think that's actually helpful i characterize them as far left and i can understand that um there may be confusion about the ideology certainly i've very frequently come across people on the right who would describe antifa as uh radical democrats or radical liberals and that's incorrect um i think what makes me give gave a partisan label to the anti-fideologists because by their own emissions and their attacks and the philosophers that they look to it's this fusion of both anarchism as well as communism so they what makes them different from the traditional revolutionary communists of previous decades is that they're not looking for creating a tyrannical um top to bottom state communist regime in fact they feel that communism failed in part because it was implemented in that way in in china or the soviet union they believe in the abolishment state and this is where the anarchist side of the ideology comes out so that society could be organized into communist continues and so they've tried some of these experiments and many times last year in in the middle of the height of the riots that happened in seattle there was the capitol hill autonomous so otherwise known as chaz when i went up there and that was this experiment that these anarchist communists antifa uh actually put into practice they were able to uh force police to evacuate from a police department and then promptly took over six blocks of uh a neighborhood not that far from downtown and they established a hard border and in it they actually took attempts at state building in terms of uh this is where you go to get your food this is where you go to get your water we don't uh you don't have to pay for it this is mutual aid we're gonna do our gardening in the park um they actually try to grow fruits and vegetables um they're very that's actually pretty funny that's actually quite funny the garden in the park thing you know because really that's that's your solution you dimwits that's really what you're doing now okay so let me hammer you on that a bit so let's say because when i was reading your book i thought okay well one of the solutions is arrest people who break windows enough of this like when they break the law arrest them it doesn't matter what their political background is and then you think well you know well do you really wanna i remember in toronto when the uh the g7 came to downtown toronto they basically turned the whole damn city into an armed camp and i walked down there by the barbed wire and the cement borders and i thought god damn it you're turning the city into a prison and if you don't think you're going to have prison riots because you did that you're a fool and so so like i'm not a big fan of authoritarian states and so then i might say well is it okay in the u.s if the state is loose enough in some sense to allow these foolish experiments to take place because maybe by doing so by being that loose i mean i know the you have the riots that's not good but by being that loose it gives us a chance for these ideas to manifest themselves in a small scale prove their total lack of validity and their incoherence and then just sort of disappear now the alternative would be to crack down in some sense more police to stop the violence in the riots and and to arrest people who are clearly breaking the law and we can talk about why that isn't happening too but so what do you think about that like is it is is it a sign of a functioning democracy that it's loose enough to allow such things to happen um i think allowing the stuff to go on um under normal circumstances if if if the protesters or the people who were somehow discontent had the self-awareness to recognize when to give it up but the thing with the these extremists is that they they they never admit when they're wrong they can only they always interpret history and contemporary actions as when it fails it's because we didn't try hard enough so right last year the the democrat mayor of seattle jenny durkin um she took a hands-off approach to the autonomous and she thought okay it would look optically really bad to send in the national guard to get all the law enforcement across seattle county bad yeah yeah i know shut it down let's give them that space and she she went on cnn in this infamous clip and she was asked about it she said hey it could be a summer of love and in some ways on the outside we know what happened hey we know bloody well what happened after the summer of love that was the rolling stones concert and the hell's angels and so forth it's like the summer of love deteriorated into anarchy hell pretty much instantly so that's a fairly foolish metaphor let's say okay so she let it go it's fine so during the day it did look like a street party and that was when the journalists were there that's when you would see the videos and the photos giving out people giving out free food um people supporting one another providing everything that you would need with creative costs and families could go in and out freely but at night is where the true side of that autonomism came out which is that when you have no rule of law true anarchy then how do you bring order to a place when there are people who are violent extreme and willing to kill or rape and so the course of what happened over the three weeks is that in these tents where some of these women were one woman was uh nearly raped uh people started fires in the streets and this was a really densely this is a really densely packed neighborhood high high-rise buildings so people lived there the buildings were stuck on fire um and shootings occurred almost every night and there were six shootings so why do you think okay that's that's really okay so that's real let's let's take that apart too okay so look we understand pretty well as as actual social scientists what happens when it's a summer of love okay so imagine you put a group together of people who are only agreeable so they're just compassionate and so and temperamentally so and maybe let's say let's make them like ethically so as well so not only are they compassionate temperamentally but they've built an ethic around that so all they do is cooperate like mad well you let one psychopath in there and all hell breaks loose because there's no defenses against the psychopaths and that's the free rider problem now i talked to robert trivers who's one of the world's great evolutionary biologists about a week and a half ago about the free rider problem the cheating detection problem so and that's the problem i just outlined it's like if everyone's cooperating and then there's no enforcement the stage is set for the absolute uh exploitation of that cooperating group by anyone who doesn't share that ethic and so here's imagine this so women are more agreeable than men so more empathic and so that's kind of rough on women because because the men are less empathic they're they're harsher and rougher and tougher and meaner and more blunt and so women put up with a lot because of that because a really disagreeable man can be quite brutal now that can be hand homed hemmed in by other traits like conscientiousness and etc but we'll just keep it simple for now so then why do women want less agreeable men that's beauty and the beast by the way that's the conundrum there right well because you need someone who's not that agreeable to keep you safe from someone who's really not that agreeable and so men exist and this is part of sexual selection men exist on this weird line eh where they have to be disagreeable enough to keep the real criminal psychopaths at bay those are the guys who come out at night right and then but they have to be agreeable enough to be empathic enough to be generous and share that's a really tight line and it's one that women are negotiating all the time and trevor said that no it was i talked to david buss too bus said that young women are really attracted to dark triad guys they're machiavellian and manipulative but they're confident and so they kind of look successful and they're the risk takers they kind of have the uh the persona of daring success but they're they're they're dark they're they're they they border on psychopathic but as the women get more mature they're less likely to be taken in by that so anyway anyways so this summer of love the summer of love problem is well what happens at night okay so why do you think it happens at night and not during the day just out of curiosity you've been there like what are you watching who's who's coming out at night exactly uh there were gang members who were there and there they were armed uh i think they took advantage of the little literal anarchy and that they could go to a place where there was no police because there was a hard there were hard borders that was surrounded this um zone so in law enforcement kept away and so that was just a perfect opportunity for criminals to go into and what what and what did they want to do what what is it that it gave them free reign to do shootings okay so that's that's kind of odd so who are they shooting i mean look if it's gang warfare you know why they're shooting each other it's usually guys who are looking for status who've been challenged in some way who are out to prove themselves like there's a good sociology of that kind of shooting it's like well why are these guys going into this free zone summer love thing and shooting who are they shooting and why i don't know the name but they were untrained and they ended up murdering a 16 year old as far as i know nobody no suspect has ever been identified in that case and how how was that handled by the mainstream media that particular event because that's quite the event yeah that was then the second murder that happened at the top of the zone so then by then the press started to be a bit more critical because that was uh nearing three weeks at that point a lot of the residents were feeling a bit more emboldened to speak out anonymously to the not anonymously but unnamed to the press about what they're witnessing what they're hearing at night um i was there one of the nights that i was there a burglar broke until a um a car repair business and allegedly tried to start a fire inside but the owner was there and he had security so he detained this individual the news went out and they had a speaker system set up in autonomous on with the microphone somebody went up to the stage and said that a black person was being held by some racist whites an entire mob sprinted to this business broke down the uh barrier at the business got in and got there and got the guy out um the business owner said he told press later on that he had called police about a dozen times and he just wouldn't respond what'd they do with them uh the person that got away oh he got away i see i see yeah it's amazing they didn't lynch him oh so yeah you're talking about the business owner you're right yeah yeah it could have become deadly at that point again this is one of those things like i'm watching and i you know i feel so helpless in a way that i'm observing and i if they start to kill this business owner that there was nothing i could do uh police weren't responding they had already received uh many many phone calls about that that incident and they didn't respond um but i i bring up the case of the child it's just sort of like just one example of what like a real life manifestation of this antifa ideology is there's certain parts that are you could argue are nice like um this aspect of community building that i witnessed during the day was um it reminded it seemed like a like a religious community and that they recognized okay but let's let's let's take that apart a bit here too okay so first of all let's not forget that this daytime utopia existed in the middle of the richest country in the world's ever produced it's like so we're giving things away for free they have no cost it's like no no someone else bore the cost that food didn't magically appear out of nowhere nothing that satiates hunger comes without a cost nothing that provides shelter comes without a cost and so this is an artificial utopia set up by clueless juveniles who have no sense whatsoever of how privileged they are they're so privileged they think food is free and you know they're the reason they're that privileged is because food is damn near free and the reason for that is that we live in a miraculous society that's made food free and it isn't because it has no cost man you think of all the blood that's been spilled over the centuries to pay for the terrible struggle that it took us all to figure out how to do that that's not free you know and it's an appalling indictment of our education system that anybody can come out of it thinking that way so even during the day so you have and it's the same with the san francisco summer of love in some sense you know that could have never come about at all even to the degree that it did without there being this unbelievable largesse and and plenitude that characterizes modern western societies so i mean when we see people on the street even and and i'm not saying that being on the street is not a terrible thing but it's a complicated thing we don't see people who are skeletal we see people who have enough to eat and so it's just rubbish right from top to bottom and and to think of to have a politician say well you know maybe it could be a summer of love it's like what the hell does that mean exactly our system is so broke that violent clueless radical juveniles can arbitrarily occupy a part of a city and in two weeks make something better really like what the hell i don't get it now you talked about optics so let's so i've been talking to these democrats for example about how to conduct yourself ethically in the political domain and i've been talking to republicans as well and one of the things we sort of zeroed in on is this idea of instrumentality you know if you're doing something for a particular goal maybe almost regardless of what that goal is then you tend to use people for your end and you might say well we have to stop trump so it's okay to use this person for that end but i don't buy that at all i think there's something deeply wrong about it you know and so when i do these podcasts for example i'm what i'm really trying to do is just to find out some things i don't know i don't really have a plan like my did i have a plan to talk to you i'll tell you what my plan was it was like well i'm going to read as much of andy's book as i can manage in in the time i have to do it i'm going to do my background research to the degree that i can then i'm going to ask him a bunch of questions about things i don't understand that's the whole damn plan and this instrumentality we've got to get rid of this idea that we can use people for an end i don't care what the damn end is and you know if you and i are doing this right we're having an honest conversation that's all we're doing and that's a hard thing to do so okay so back to okay your answer to whether or not you're exaggerating this was to point to the consequences like the defund the police that sort of consequence and the destabilization of cities like minneapolis and portland and how destabilized do you think they have become because of this well they're in the sense that the the people who are dying uh are mostly black and brown people so the um elite liberal class of the cities don't really they don't experience that loss of life if if you know what i mean they may hear the gunshots more frequently in the streets they may see distances shuttered or damaged because of bullet wounds but it's not it's not people in their families and their friends circles who are dying so i in some in some ways they're kind of always um protected from the consequences of their political decision-making or political demands um i think one other thing about yeah so if you look at hierarchies if you look at the way hierarchies work in the animal kingdom for example so even let's say birds that really don't live in flocks they still have a hierarchy and the hierarchy is some birds have better nesting sites and so they're closer to food they don't get exposed to wind and rain so much and they're birds that are generally in better physical health they're like sort of they're birds that are in better physical health let's let's leave it at that they sing louder songs the males they attract higher quality healthier female mates they have the good nests okay now a flu comes through that area an avian flu the birds die from the bottom of the hierarchy up and so that's very much in keeping with what you're describing right is that as we move up our hierarchies whether they're based on competence or power we shield ourselves from stress that's partly why we actually want to move up the damn hierarchies and so then when things get destabilized people die from the bottom up that's what's the old saying when the when the upper class catches a cold the lower class dies of pneumonia and so that's the luxury belief problem too isn't it is we can have these adult-painted utopian schemes that we use to pat ourselves on the back for our ethical superiority we can fund their implementation because you talk about that interestingly in your book right these left-wing organizations funneling money into these more violent extremist groups we can pat ourselves on the back for standing up for the oppressed and when things go sideways well it's just the oppressed that die so i can't figure out why the left stands for this you know that's the thing i can't get is that i thought you guys were for the working class i think how this was demonstrated in one way very clearly was last year uh in minneapolis when some of the worst rioting broke out there was a the minnesota freedom fund which was set up to provide jail support uh in legal support for those who were arrested and charges crimes related to the riots um the public raised 35 million us dollars for that bill fund so everybody was bailed out and there was millions more to spare um kamala here you called them far left you specifically called minnesota the minnesota freedom sorry it was mff minnesota freedom fund fund you called i went and looked up the board members there to see who they were and you know they're professional types most of them community activists some of them lawyers etc i mean it looks like a perfectly legitimate site so why did you call them far left and why do you think they're not legitimate because that's a pretty that's a pretty deadly epithet coming from your tongue given what you've seen and and heard so is that was that justifiable that epithet and if so why i think so because the the the belief system that's undergirding that that whole project of the freedom fund is that the criminal justice system should be abolished that is okay that's a strong claim you're okay so so i want to push you on that because i like to talk about specifics and i noticed that you called them far left and so now you just made a pretty radical claim so i'm going to read a criticism about you that i found on wikipedia if you don't mind because this is a good time to introduce it yes noes coverage of antifa and muslims has been controversial okay that's true and the accuracy and credibility of his reporting have been disputed by other journalists yeah well so what right because of course he has been frequently accused of sharing misleading or selective material that's a little more pointed a criticism described as a provocateur and accused of having links with militant right-wing and far-right groups in portland okay so now you talk about the minnesota freedom fund you say far left and someone skeptical watching this is going to think yeah well of course that's what andy noah thinks because he's linked with militant right-wing and far-right groups in portland and is a provocateur and then you're also a disciple of james o'keefe the founder of project veritas which is labeled in wikipedia as a right-wing activist group okay so so given all that why should we believe your characterization of the minnesota freedom fund and you know this isn't me attempting to hook you i but but i want to know because this is the concentric circle problem right we identified the activists they just want everything to burn and so they're nobody's friends if their sense if they're sensible but now we're talking about a circle outside that that's the minnesota freedom fund and from there you move into let's say the democratic the left wing of the democratic party as a whole so this is a crucial issue so you said they want to abolish the criminal justice system how do you know that why do you think that's a reasonable claim well you can look at those who are involved in running that freedom that bail fund it's part of this what was the fringe belief on the left that america so from its founding to today so it's just racism is built into every single institution that it's not simply you cannot reform it that what needs to be done is to uh they say burn it down abolish this abolish that completely get rid of it all because it's irredeemable and unfixable and i think that that radical type of belief that drives bail funds like the minnesota freedom fund like the pdx how does that believe how does that belief drive their bail fund and what are they doing wrong by bailing these people out and how do you know that's linked to an ideology like the one you just described because they they believe that the criminal justice system targets leftists black and brown people and so anybody who's charges the crime uh that's not a it's not legitimate within the system because the entire institution policing the courts um judges all of that top to bargain is white supremacists and whether or not the individuals involved in it actually are racist it doesn't matter to them they say the system is racist and therefore it needs to be abolished um yeah yeah you know so one of the markers for this might be that real proclivity to use low resolution characterizations you know like i've been watching the cop 26 debacle let's say and one of the things that really struck me was target zero and i'm thinking target zero way zero zero is an interesting number zero means none no pollution well that means you don't get to go to the bathroom anymore zero you know like everything has a mess and how about how about some how about some incremental improvement in a positive direction you know you're it seems to me that thinking gets sloppy and self-congratulatory as we move towards statements like the system is broken it's like well the system has a lot of parts a lot and they're not all broken you can tell that because you can plug your toaster in in the morning and hey you put some bread in which you can also get by the way and then you have toast that's that's not broken and so it's this injudicious critique and that speaks of carelessness failure to be on the ground and moral self congratulation and it's extreme and then also interestingly enough it also speaks to that leftist preoccupation in some sense with unearned privilege right because the only time that you can get away with thinking that sloppy is if you're so protected from the consequences of your own failure to grasp the essentials of life that having that mistake doesn't actually cost you anything you know the people on cnn who are viewing the the portland riots from afar they're not having their house burned down they're not getting beat up in the street so it doesn't really matter that they have this low resolution view of it and so let okay so let's go into the criminal justice system for a minute because the americans do lock up a lot of people right for a western democracy they've got quite the damn prison system going now along with a rapid acceleration in that prison system there was a quite a rapid decline in violent crime from say especially from the 80s till a couple of years ago and i don't know what the causal links are there and i'm not i'm not making a case for a link between the prison system and the decline in criminality because it's complicated but they do lock up a lot of people you guys lock up a lot of people you yankees and a disproportionate number of them are black and so that's that's a problem that's a big problem it's like the incarceration rate's a big problem and the racial disparity is a big problem and it does beg the question well to what degree is the system corrupt it begs the question of to what degree the corrupt system serves those the people in power who are let's say disproportionately less likely to be black particularly and so and then you can see how that the guilt about that which is felt really broadly especially among empathic liberal types increases the probability that they're going to turn a blind eye to any manifestation of what seems to be associated and even a vague way against that and i don't exactly know what we should do about it you know it it's really a co so sorry i'd like to have your thoughts on those matters so i think the vagaries of uh things that they oppose such as using terms as like this system um burn it down abolish systemic racism uh these things are not defined really because uh i think by intention they never want their goals to be reached they need they exist almost um they being the radical fallout the revolutionary problems whatever as um they need to exist in opposition to something so over and over like let's say last year all these mayors all these city councils were giving in to essentially all the demands you want to defund the police fight we'll we'll slash in the budget you want to abolish this uh gun violence reduction team fine we'll do that um you want police to evacuate from this police department will give you that and it was never never ever enough in fact in every time that these uh let's say in portland the portland mayor or the mayor in seattle every time that they capitulated what happened was demand for more extreme actions was stronger from these extremists and when they didn't get that um important for example the rioters went to the home of the portland mayor ted wheeler and actually set the building on fire and he ended up having to move out of his condo he apologized to his neighbors and he's essentially in hiding in a way we don't know where he lives now in seattle they the robbers so did that not did that did that not change his viewpoint in some important manner or did he feel that the protesters were so justified that it's no bloody wonder they tried to burn down his house like what's the psychology there as far as you can tell um i think after that experience and after the the mayor of seattle experienced something similar in terms of people showing up at her at her door um uh they they gave fewer concessions after that you know were in in the language moving forward that i've seen in some of the decision making pulled back on sort of the um the left the radicalism that they had embraced in the early months of the writing they didn't pull back completely but pull back enough that you know there were subtle things for example um like um the uh the mayor much more being willing to speak critically uh violent riots that were happening in his city whereas before it was okay so it had some effect yes there was always there's criticism before but then there was always you know this is taking place in the context of historic racial justice protests and we can make something great out of it he he went he didn't he didn't always qualify his statements moving forward which i think were were meaningful uh important in that regard and but before i forget i wanted to go back to one thing you know you wrote from the wikipedia articles yes yes and the the freedom fund i know we're that's still hanging because you called them far left and now i just called you far right so who the hell can trust you so like how do we wade through this um so the i've been one of the ways that um antifa and their sympathizers and some publications in the press have tried to de-legitimize my work and my voice is to pause it or put out this idea that um because i'm against antifa uh by default then that must mean that i'm pro-fascism so they try now for years to throw any type of accusation at me and hoping knowing that it's false but hoping that even if it doesn't stick completely that i'm never left in the same state as before but it's always that i'm always dirtied in a way and the benefit yeah that works i mean i was nervous about talking to you it works man it works and believe me i've experienced the same thing and it doesn't take much to stay in someone's reputation right especially because look there's seven billion people in the world there's no way i'm going to talk to all of them and so you'll kind of need hardly any excuse at all not to talk to someone so you know a little stain will do the trick and so this this james o'keefe thing you're described by your critics as a disciple of james o'keefe okay the founder of project veritas a right-wing activist group so what's the story with that exactly well a disciple would that was tend to imply that like i've been mentored or for a long time by project veritas or james o'keefe which i haven't but for the record i i am very supportive of the work that they do i think they do great investiga they invest the resources money and time getting people to be undercover journalists to record things like otherwise you would never um get on record um i understand there's a lot of criticisms uh against and are they are they reasonably conceptualized as a right wing activist group what exactly does that phrase mean in this context do you think uh well that's meant to be disparaging i think me it's probably fair to describe them as conservative um in the journalists there are conservative but the what they do is important for example they i thank them in my book because they provided to me some of the primary documents of when one of their journalists found undercover in toronto city and and that's something that today nobody else in anywhere in the united states has been able to do to actually get somebody who is completely unknown located to portland build a whole new identity persona and get this person infiltrate the group in terms of the membership process as much as possible that type of work deserves praise not condemnation um and uh i guess the fact that i've been um you know on record supportive of project veritas people are trying to use that just near me i think the more serious accusations i've been leveled against me spurious ones are accusing me of um being like in bed with violent extremists yeah yeah yeah millet and right wing and far right groups in portland okay so what what's the story there what why and you know because you carl jung said every projection has to have a hook you know like there's going to be ways you're going to be smeared that will work and they're going to be ways that you're going to be smeared that won't work and the ones that work there's a hook right there's something about you that makes that stick a little better right and so we all have to examine our consciences when we get smeared because you think well you know do i have a weak spot that i'm unaware of that makes me much more susceptible to that particular accusation and so you know you said well you're you're a critic of antifa and that's enough for you to be labeled as right wing and fair enough but like anything else lurking around there that makes you an easy target of that sort of accusation i'm glad you asked so this really started um so after i was beaten by anti-fun in the summer of 2019 that was when my profile rose a lot before that i was just a regional small figure i was occasionally interviewed on fox news but otherwise really unknown i think what i noticed after that was um so what happened was a few months after that a local left-wing alternative publication in portland called the portland mercury did what they said was this explosive story to um expose me they had to interviewed a person uh given this uh individual uh a pseudonym uh today i still don't know who this individual is like the real identity but the accused with and provided no evidence they thought that i was uh in the presence of when a right-wing riot was being planned against antifa and i i had an agreement against the right wing brawlers for mutual protection that was a word this individual the pseudonymous person said i was never reached for comment for the story and then it was printed uh on a local blog and then picked up by journalists on the left who sought to discredit me such i think there was daily beasts slay the same places that have gone after you uh professor and so they repeated this claim and um i had my legal um counsel senator season's assist letter to the publication and then they they just ignored it and the thing in the us is you know to to actually win defamation when you're a public figure particularly against the newspapers it's so it's near impossible so i felt really helpless and to this day i'm still really furious about it that this person who just levied a serious accusation against me i have no idea who it is and i have no way to encounter like to confront my way well you do have one you do have one way the one way is to just tell the truth yes right i mean yeah that does counter your accuser and every time that something like that's been happened happened to me at least so far ultimately it backfired now i mean i'm knocking on wood you know and i know that you know maybe my days are numbered in all sorts of different ways but so far it hasn't worked sometimes it's taken a long time for the for the tide to turn but it's always turned and so i would say if you're still feeling rage about that like one thing you can take solace in is that to the degree that you're capable of representing the truth that is the best protection you have against anything and i don't think there is any better protection against anything than that they're like the courts anything like that it's like no that's when you're playing a deep game the only real defense you have is truth and like truth is reality itself man you have that on your side it's it's walking softly walking carefully speaking softly sorry and carrying a big stick so you know and that that it's interesting too that you're still angry about that because that's a hell of a thing to carry along and around with you you know it corrodes you over time that that kind of anger and and so it you're doing pretty good given all thing all the things have been stacked up against you so i feel angry because i've always i've gone through my life like i have no i i don't have it i don't have a criminal record and i've been arrested i always i do things right you know i follow the rules um i don't support any political violence and then this persona um identity that others have made this made up person of who andy now is and has gotten many to believe it you know they presented this person who's somebody who you know it's a made up person too eh because they're pseudonymous you know that's so interesting they had to fabricate a person to fabricate you yeah um so it's just you know it feels i i've been wronged in that regard and um the evidence i was put out to try to support it they said there was undercover video the video they provided was me uh documenting the violent brawl that happened in everything before and they said that because i was in presence in the presence and in proximity to people on the right that i was with them or part of them which is completely untrue and that type of standard would never be applied to other journalists um it's a backhanded compliment you know is t