Best of the Week - August 2, 2020

It doesn't mean just because you don't like Trump as an individual that suddenly you're okay with hard left policies. But I think the Democrats make that mistake. They think that that's the solution to Trump. Go as far away from him as possible. Yeah. And then you can't find a center. I think exactly. That's the solution. I think the solution is somewhere in the center. And when you see shit like what's happening in Portland and Seattle, I think people are more aware than ever now that civil unrest is like it's very strange. It's very strange to watch them try to break into that. What was the building in Portland they were trying to break into? The Hatfield Courthouse. Yeah. The Federal Courthouse. Yeah. That was insane. Yeah. Watching that was insane. I don't understand the motivation. Connecting that to how do you connect that in Portland, the most liberal city in the country? How do you, arguably right, probably the most liberal? Yeah. Seattle. Portland. Right there. How do you connect that to Black Lives Matter? I mean, how do you connect that to George Floyd's death? How do you connect that to, why? I just don't understand. Why would you try to break into the courthouse? They're trying to recreate what went wrong, what didn't work in Seattle, right? That whole zone, autonomous zone. Yeah. Yeah. That didn't work. I mean, that was nonsense. It was crazy. You made a worse version of America in six blocks. It's like one of those little tiny little, if you took a glass dome and you put little animals in there and you let them eat each other alive. That was like, we're going to create utopian glass. They made a worse version of the United States. They put up borders immediately. They stopped people from coming in. They had armed guards. They wind up using police, they didn't have cops, but they have people that act like cops and beat the fuck out of people for filming. The whole thing was madness. They had murders. It was crazy. It was quick. I mean, look, Portland, I know Portland extremely well. My parents lived in Portland for a couple of decades. It's a beautiful place. It used to be a hell of a place, but over the years, and I know Republicans and Democrats who feel the same way who were in Portland and the surrounding area, and they all feel like this place is slowly circling down a toilet because of local and state management. What happened in Portland? Not really a surprise. It's the same ... The people that do this sort of activity, right, that have been referred to as Antifa or anarchists or whatever, they're the same sort of trust of fairy and bottom feeding folks in really any city in the world who engage in a WTO protest because it's cool to get out there and protest. I don't understand the mentality, but if you try to figure out a motivation for them, you'll lose your mind because they really don't have one. You could take 10 of those people out of Portland who are engaged in the violent activity and ask them, well, why are you doing this? You'll get 10 different answers. I do think a lot of this is coming from empathy, which is a good thing. I have to say, with regard to the issue of transitioning children, I do support transitioning in adults. I think it can help adults who are transgender. I think if you were an adult, it's your decision, it's your body, it's no one's place to tell you what to do. But I think a lot of this is coming from ... So I grew up in the gay community and I remember seeing how homophobic people could be toward my friends. I think things have changed, things have gotten better. In some ways, I think homophobia still exists and we can talk about that because I do talk about how that affects a lot of what we're seeing in the book. But I think for a lot of people, they look at that and they say, okay, we were wrong about that. We were wrong to treat gay people differently. We were wrong to say that being gay is something you can change. So now they've gone completely in the opposite direction saying, okay, no matter what anyone says with regard to their identity, with regard to their gender, this is something that we should not challenge, we should fully support. And if you question it in any way, even in the most nuanced or sensitive way, as I tried to and as I think you do, that's still not acceptable. Yeah, that's what's strange. It's an ideology. It's rigid. It's religion. It is, it is. I think I find people who are middle of the road, they're not sure what to think. If they read my work or they talk to me, they say, oh, wow, I never, I never realized that I didn't know the science said that. And they changed their perspective. But I think for some people, if they are very much invested in the identity or very, very invested in activism, or for whatever reason, this ideology means something to them. It's you cannot, you just cannot reason with them. It doesn't matter what the science says, they will find something to pick at. And especially with desistance, which is that that the research I was mentioning where it shows that most kids will not feel gender dysphoric anymore when they reach puberty. They just people, some people cannot accept it and they will call you transphobic, they'll call you bigoted. And I don't think I'm any of those things. I'm really just trying to help prevent these children from making potentially a very bad decision that they're going to regret. And especially now we're seeing in the UK that this is happening where more detransitioners are saying, this was something I regret. This was a mistake. Why did the adults not challenge me? I really think so right now we're in August 2020. I think within the next five years or maybe a little bit longer, we're going to be seeing an explosion of children coming out and saying, I did not want to transition. This was a mistake. And it's really going to be awful. Well, we're already seeing that there's a lawsuit that was very prominent in the UK recently about a young girl who transitioned to be. You know the lawsuit I'm talking about? I do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's heartbreaking because they, she's essentially ruined her body to the point where she's not going to be able to have children. She's she'll, you know, she, and in many cases, a lot of these girls can't have orgasms ever again. No, exactly. Yeah. And, but I think in North America, we are still very much in denial about this. If, if, I mean, whenever I am on a show, if I'm on TV and I talk about this, the backlash after is just crazy. And I'm thinking people need to wake up. I'm trying to stop this from happening, right? The whole point of writing this book and saying these things is trying to prevent what's about to happen. It's important. You know, I can't help talking about the death penalty when we talk about short eclamatory because in this country, a lot of people still believe in death penalty and I don't. And what I say to people who believe in the death penalty is I respect your view, but what percentage of innocent people are you okay with executing? Right? Because the system is fundamentally flawed. And even if the system was reformed in all the ways that we could sit here and think of right now, I have some ideas on that. There's still going to be errors. There's always going to be, there are always going to be errors made. And so you have to accept that they're going to be mistakes. We know that like in Florida where Josh represents James Daly, and again, we did a podcast episode about his case as well. James is either going to be the hundredth guy executed by the state of Florida or the 30th guy exonerated from death. Clemente was the 29th and I'm representing who should be the 30th. So they're not, even if all the people they executed were guilty and we know they weren't, right? We know certain people like Jesse Tiferro, who was absolutely innocent executed by the state of Florida in that gruesome execution where the electric chair, quote unquote malfunction and his head caught on fire and they had to electrocute him three times. But even if they got those right, they aren't even batting 700. And then in Louisiana, to your point before Joe, a guy named John Thompson, rest in peace, was a good friend of mine. He came within a month of being executed by the state of Louisiana when an attorney, an investigator staring into a microscope and saw the DNA evidence that proved that he was not guilty of this murder and he was ultimately exonerated. And he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times where he said, I don't understand why the prosecutor who prosecuted, because he proved that they knew he was innocent before they prosecuted him, right? He knew it and it was absolutely proven that was not in question. So he said, I don't understand why that prosecutor is not being charged with attempted murder. They tried to kill me and they knew I was innocent and I've proven that. But what happens to the prosecutor? Nothing. I've been saying this for a long time, that there's a real problem with human beings when it comes to anything where there's a game. And the problem with policing and prosecuting people and convicting people, it's a game. And meaning that there's winners and losers. And when there's winners and losers, people cheat. There's a lot of people with poor character and they just want to win and they get caught up in this game. I mean, you can call it a game, you can call it a pursuit, whatever you want to call it. There's an end that you want to achieve if you're successful. And if you don't achieve that end, you're unsuccessful. So when people are trying to achieve this end, they will do all kinds of things. You know, the thing about Farley was he and Spade used to fight over me like I was the girl. Probably because, let's face it, I kind of look like a girl in certain lighting. And they'd be like, I heard you were in the jacuzzi of the Rob last night. Yeah. Oh, you didn't call me. Well, and they would like fight. It was very funny and sweet. One night I took the gang out to Barbarian Steakhouse in Toronto. Great steak. I don't know if they're still there. Chris ordered two bone-in, two bone-in steak, porterhouse steaks, eight both of them. But on top of each bite, he put a cube of butter. And when I looked at him like, what the fuck are you doing? He was like, it needs a hat. So if you want to put a hat on your steak, some people just genuinely don't give a fuck. No fucks given. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, he's a wild man. I met him once on the set of News Radio. He's partying with Andy Dick. Oh boy. He showed up gray like wet cardboard. He looked gray. And I'm like, hey man. He's like, hey. It was just, he was gone. It was sad. It was weird. He had gray skin. And I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, Chris Farley has gray skin. Like what's going on? Like he was sweaty and just all fucked up. Yeah, he had major, major demons. And a lot of us really worked, you know, worked out for, you know, but you know, it's, some people can't, they can't make that leap, man. The thing about him though is, the fucking, I always wonder about guys like that that are so powerful. Like, is it the demons that made him so good? He was so good. So good. When he would go ape shit. I mean, he had the fucking horsepower he had. It was so stunning. Like when you have these scenes where he would just go fucking crazy, it was so fun. And you would wonder like, what is that same thing? What makes him? I mean, because it was so real. Is that what made him just go crazy with Coke and go crazy with everything else? I mean, I think like normal people, like I don't see a lot of normal people drawn. Why would any normal person want to be in entertainment? Right. Right. Why would they? So I think just by default, damaged people or people with more, more, more articulately, people with a hole to fill are drawn to entertainment to fill the hole.