“I am trying to get America back” Eric Weinstein On US Election (YouTube Content)

“I am trying to get America back” Eric Weinstein On US Election
Information
Host(s)	Piers Morgan
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	01:09:57
Release Date	1 November 2024
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“I am trying to get America back” Eric Weinstein On US Election was a discussion with Eric Weinstein hosted by Piers Morgan on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show.

Description

With just one week left until the US presidential election, tensions are running extremely high. There have been accusations of fascism, burnings of mail-in ballots and people screaming in the faces of children. The issues that could decide the race are as divisive as you can get. While Donald Trump displays an obvious confidence, the poll figures remain within the margin of error, and Kamala Harris certainly hasn’t given up. Piers Morgan is joined today by comedian and podcaster Steven Crowder, libertarian political commentator Tim Miller, host of the ‘No Lies with BTC’ podcast Brian Tyler Cohen, host of the ‘Sage Steele Show’ Sage Steele and American investor and financial executive Dr Eric Weinstein.

00:00 Teaser 00:50 Introduction 03:52 Steven Crowder vs Tim Miller 12:25 Is Joe Biden trying to sabotage Kamala Harris? 18:20 Steve Bannon’s prison release 24:46 Battle of the sexes: Sage Steele vs Brian Taylor Cohen 39:50 Should Harris appear on Joe Rogan? 49:41 Eric Weinstein joins Uncensored: “I am trying to get America back.”

Transcript

00:00:00

Piers Morgan: Well this week, doctor Eric Weinstein, the mathematician many credit with founding the intellectual dark web, wrote a despairing post on X summed up his feelings on America's Big decision day. It read, I'm failing this election. I try, but I simply failed. I cannot work within these concepts. My world, my country, my America is not on the ballot. Well, that post has been viewed over 7 million times already, with many echoing his lament.

00:00:22

Piers Morgan: But many commentators have accused Weinstein of sitting on the fence of squandering his significant influence at a critical moment for the country. And he joins me now. Eric, great to have you back on uncensored. You decided in the end to say what you said, and you saw the extraordinary reaction to that good, bad and ugly. A lot of people saying, you've been a bit cowardly here.

00:00:43

Piers Morgan: What do you say to them?

00:00:47

Eric Weinstein: Well, I find that, somewhat funny because, standing up to one political party alone is bad enough standing up to two, just makes things worse. In general. To me, cowards lead mobs. They incite mobs, and they fight from within. Mods, mobs, particularly behind the veil of anonymity. So, it has nothing to do with that.

00:01:11

Eric Weinstein: And I also think that the post was widely misinterpreted.

00:01:16

Piers Morgan: So let's just clarify what you meant. So tell me what you really meant by that post.

00:01:24

Eric Weinstein: Sure. Imagine that you have two restaurants and that both of them are failing. The health grade. One of them may be failing the health grade by much more than the other, because it has problems with fecal matter in the food, let's say. You may say I can tolerate the risk of going to the one that's less dangerous, but you can't recommend the restaurants to somebody else.

00:01:49

Eric Weinstein: Because, quite frankly, they're both super dangerous. Now, in my opinion, the Democratic Party has become something completely un understandable, unrecognizable. And, its leadership appears in my mind to be evil. And that is my party, the Republic and party is far more chaotic. But both parties have chosen a strategy where instead of courting, common sense, people, someone in the middle, although I don't think it's, you know, it's a linear spectrum anymore at all.

00:02:18

Eric Weinstein: They've decided to hang on to their extremes and pretend that they aren't there or not incredibly, toxic and violent and in part, you know, my frustration is that, in order for me to recommend a party. And I was hoping to recommend a ticket, this election cycle, I don't think Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz have given me any possibility of recommending them.

00:02:39

Eric Weinstein: So unless somebody can make that argument, to me directly in the last few days, I just see it as an impossibility. I was very disappointed, in some sense, because I have, three friends in the big six, on the Republican side. Which would be RFK Jr. Tulsi and JD Vance. And, you know, my feeling about this is that we have a situation by which, the Republican Party is just completely incautious.

00:03:07

Eric Weinstein: And if you see the reaction, just search on my name and the word Jew, you'll see exactly how much toxicity is hiding, amongst the good people of MAGA. And too few of them, by the way, have the courage to stand up, when somebody is being attacked. And so it's, I think it's a bit rich that the cowards who privately message me and say we support you.

00:03:31

Eric Weinstein: Don’t say something in public when they’re watching a mob descend on an individual. And quite honestly, I wasn’t hoping to take on MAGA, but if if that’s what it takes to stand up and say you cannot brutalize people like this in inciting mobs against individuals is what I thought you were accusing the Democrats of doing. And now you’ve stared into the abyss and it stares back.

00:03:56

Piers Morgan: I mean, Chris Rufo said, this is narcissism marked as idealism. It’s absurd to expect politics to conform to one’s individual preferences and idiosyncrasies. The essence of politics is decision under imperfect conditions. If you can’t figure out how to rank Trump and Harris, you’re just navel gazing in response. Chris, who?

00:04:20

Eric Weinstein: I mean, it’s sort of my response. I mean, in other words, this is an individual who’s been very successful, arousing passions, and he’s been very effective in being very aggressive. I think he is. It actually an excellent point that in many ways the Republicans have been too passive. And so in order to compensate for that flaccid, aspect of, Republicans rolling over in the past, he’s decided to go, red meat as to whether it’s narcissism or navel gazing or cowardice or fence sitting or any of the other epithets.

00:04:55

Eric Weinstein: I was hoping he would dig a little bit deeper into the source, but it’s offensive, and I’m just not going to get particularly exercised. People have heard me ad nauseum about the problems with the Democratic Party. If I was to join MAGA, I would start criticizing MAGA in particular for blinding itself to the real problems of January 6th.

00:05:16

Eric Weinstein: Just the way I point out that in on the Democratic side, I don’t believe it was a free and fair election in, in 2020 because of the interference through the tech companies. And, a problem with the news media that I would call a rhizome, a rhizome is a, you know, like quaking aspen. You you think you see a bunch of different trees, but it’s actually one organism.

00:05:39

Eric Weinstein: And all you’re seeing is it breaking through, the ground in different places. For some reason, the Democratic machine, seems to control all sorts of different newspapers that basically, engage in something which I’ve called journo painting, which is campaigning while pretending that you have immunity, under the guise of journalism and journal painting is the scourge.

00:06:05

Eric Weinstein: Of these elections. So I’ve called the 2020 election not free and fair, and I’ve called the January 6th and the Georgia interference. A serious question. And everyone I know who’s chosen one side or the other will blind themselves to one of these two facts. And that’s, you know, I’m trying to get America back in my to my friends in the Republican Party.

00:06:26

Eric Weinstein: I understand that you understand that there are winners and losers, and that’s how you think, and that’s how you talk. But it matters how you win. And if you don’t believe me, try to think about how many people have a poster of Lance Armstrong on their wall.

00:06:39

Piers Morgan: Right. That’s a very good point. What you did came at a time when there’s a lot of attention around some of the major newspapers in America, from the Washington Post to the LA times, USA today, all deciding not to endorse anybody. This election, which is called Fury with journalists, because historically they voted Democrat. So and in a way, it’s exposed the very liberal leanings of many of these newsrooms, that there’s fury amongst journalists that they have once again said, Vote Democrat.

00:07:11

Piers Morgan: But Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, said this. He said most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose presidential endorsements. Do nothing. To tip the scales in election or presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception, a bias, a perception of non independence.

00:07:32

Piers Morgan: Ending them is a principled decision and it’s the right one. Obviously it’s a different circumstance to you. And the pressure that you came under to endorse either side. But what did you make of Bezos, his argument for not allowing the Washington Post to endorse?

00:07:48

Eric Weinstein: Mr. Bezos, you have far larger problems than the endorsement issue. You have a problem of journalism. May I, just point out you went after me because I was the supposed far right podcast host who had J.D. Vance on his program. And when I did that, I talked to him about something called the Grandmother hypothesis, which is a scientific theory, put forward by, effectively, George C Williams and his and his, students.

00:08:16

Eric Weinstein: You covered that, I think, in 2015. And you wrote in your paper, not you personally, but the journalist. Since having children is what drives evolution, there’s no good evolutionary reason for women to live past their ability to reproduce. And instead, what you did is you took my far more careful statement, talking about evolutionary females, and you tried to tar JD Vance with it as if we were both, opting to enslave older women only for the care of the young.

00:08:49

Eric Weinstein: Quite honestly, what you have is you have a paper that is effectively lobbying for the right to be hypocritical. You’re an anti-science organization. If you want me to explain to you how you violated journalistic ethics, as by the Society of Professional Journalists Code of ethics, which has undergone many revisions, any version of it, you’re not bending over backwards to do objective journalism.

00:09:13

Eric Weinstein: You have a printed code of ethics. All you need to do is follow it. I, I applaud the fact that you were starting to bring the paper back to being an actual newspaper. But right now, what you have, is an anti-scientific wing of the Democratic Party of the United States, and that’s not a Partizan position. That is my party.

00:09:31

Eric Weinstein: And I would previously have regarded the Washington Post as one of the three finest newspapers in the United States of America. What’s going on? You better fix it. You’re rich enough to do it. Stop! Stop dragging your feet. And it’s time to make, reparations to the people that your paper has wronged in. But if you choose, to start with me, I would be delighted.

00:09:51

Piers Morgan: Should newspapers of that stature endorse anyway? I mean, is is Bezos some notwithstanding the criticisms you’ve just outlined, it’s Bezos. Right. And the principle that the post didn’t historically used to endorse until, I think, several decades ago. And then they began to endorse is it something a newspaper should do or is he right? The instinctive. If you want to avoid a suggestion of bias, you just shouldn’t get in to the endorsement business.

00:10:21

Eric Weinstein: Traditionally, there’s a Chinese wall between the news division and the opinion and editorial, pages of a paper. And if that Chinese wall is strong, then both of them give us some insight, because, in effect, the editors are sitting over the news and this is their opportunity to say we are biased by what we see. And we wish to give normative judgments rather than merely descriptive judgments of the news as as we see it in the current era, there should be no endorsement.

00:10:48

Eric Weinstein: The most important thing is for news organizations to go back to being journalistic organizations. The reporters simply flagrantly violate the printed code of ethics. And this isn’t difficult. It’s just that everybody’s been having a bacchanal, rather than, following the rules of journalism. This has been an orgy, of partizanship and journo painting. And we don’t know what to do about it.

00:11:14

Eric Weinstein: And quite honestly, you’re rich enough to clean it up.

00:11:17

Piers Morgan: The, big furor that blew up at the weekend. I was at the rally at Madison Square Garden, the first one I’ve been to of Trump’s, and it sparked garbage age in all its guises and everything. Let’s take a little mash up, look at the rally itself, and I’ll come to you with a question.

00:11:34

Speaker 3: This is Donald Trump’s house brother. She’s a fake, a fraud. She’s a pretender. Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country. I’m not going to do conspiracy, but I’m not. Not going to do conspiracy. But it’s kind of funny that they tried everything else, and now they’re trying to kill him. They better not. I don’t see no stinking Nazis in here.

00:12:03

Speaker 3: Homeless and veterans. Americans. Americans sleeping in their own feces on a bench in Central Park. But the illegals, they got whatever they want. Okay, the only thing I see in here are a bunch of hardworking men and women that are real Americans, rather.

00:12:32

Piers Morgan: Not. It was interesting to me. We’ll get to garbage guy in a moment. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have gone on a similar kind of journey as you’ve done about questioning who he should be endorsing. Ultimately, he did come down, excuse me, but he came down on the side of Kamala Harris and explained, we need to close the door on this chapter of American history.

00:12:52

Piers Morgan: I know that former President Trump won’t do that. He will divide, he will insult. He will find new ways to be more un-American than he already has been. We the people will get nothing but more anger. He said. I’ll always be an American before I’m a Republican. That’s why I’m voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Wolfe’s. What is it?

00:13:11

Piers Morgan: What did you make of his explanation for why he’d be voting against his historic party, and in relation to what we saw at Madison Square Garden, were you concerned about the rhetoric that came off the stage there or not?

00:13:28

Eric Weinstein: It’s a bunch of different questions. So let me do my best. First of all, I can’t I can’t possibly figure out how he imagines that the Democratic Party, can put the country back together again. My guess is, is that only Donald Trump can further divide it or put it back together. And if it’s Kamala Harris, we’re going to be waiting, probably a period of four years.

00:13:50

Eric Weinstein: Given that she won no primaries and she’s the her party has pulled off the mask as to, how it chooses to operate, Donald Trump could further divide us, or he could choose to unite us. And in fact, if he’d decided to go with the super ticket idea and say, look, you don’t have to vote for me, vote for any of the six.

00:14:09

Eric Weinstein: That’s an ingenious political move. It will change American politics forever because it will give people the ability, to see that he’s put his own ego aside. He didn’t choose to do that. I think that Donald Trump could, he has an ability to be very presidential when he likes. And he has an ability to be, hell on wheels when when he feels, it’s warranted.

00:14:33

Eric Weinstein: I think if you look at the second potential shooter of Donald Trump, you have to be really, unwilling to consider conspiracies before you start worrying about what a single bullet could do to the entire country. It would be a tragic occurrence if it were to end the life of Donald Trump. But I’m not really sure people have an idea of what would happen in a heavily armed country.

00:15:06

Eric Weinstein: Had that second shooter got off a shot that found its mark. I think we are teetering. We are on a time. I don’t know what the right analogy is. We are in a very precarious situation. My decision to stay out, in part, is to take a hit during the election, because there have to be voices for afterwards.

00:15:27

Eric Weinstein: If you recall, you know you need people when when tensions are high who have not gone Partizan. And so I’m just going to take a bunch of lumps and say that right now we’ve had two, two and a half shooters. Towards Donald Trump. I worry that there is an amendment to the Constitution, maybe the 14th section three, that could provide for a challenge saying that an insurrection, if, January 6th was called that way, could not assume office.

00:15:59

Eric Weinstein: I’m not sure where we are. Where we are is extremely precarious. And as I said before on Chris Williamson’s, program, I’m not sure that Donald Trump will be allowed to become president. I definitely believe that if it’s a landslide, he stands a far better chance. But I believe that the foreign policy machinery of the United States is sufficiently worried about what he would do in Ukraine, what he would do with NATO, how he would handle, the attempted permanent alliances and agreements that the United States while in office, that it feels incredibly threatened.

00:16:34

Eric Weinstein: And I really do think that grown up, responsible people need to pay far more attention to the second shooter than the first.

00:16:42

Piers Morgan: When you say Trump won’t be allowed to be president, what do you actually mean by that?

00:16:47

Eric Weinstein: I don’t know, I’m trying to say that I think that there are elements who view potentially the release of information around Jeffrey Epstein, who view information around, potentially the JFK assassination, who worry about, covert operations in Ukraine becoming exposed or compromised. I think that there are a great number of things that are quiet, that are assumed to be, respected by both political candidates.

00:17:21

Eric Weinstein: And I think what’s happened is, is that you’ve got a populist who has signaled that he is not going to play by the rules of the permanent class in Washington, DC and beyond. And I believe that that is Donald Trump’s best quality. It is the thing for which he is most beloved. And I think is is the thing that is the thing that within the Beltway, he for is his most feared and and hated for.

00:17:43

Eric Weinstein: And I just don’t think people understand the depths to which certain operatives will go to potentially frustrate his campaign and frustrate you is a word that I choose to leave ambiguous.

00:17:56

Piers Morgan: Another conservative commentator, Mike Cernovich, he said of your decision, not to make a decision said or to not to choose a party. So this is pathetic. Every word you write to you, he said, oozes moral cowardice in a pivotal moment in American history. This is self-imposed horseshit best suited for the therapist chair. Do you have a response to that?

00:18:16

Piers Morgan: I mean, that’s the more visceral end of the rage that your decision seems to ensure in some conservative circles?

00:18:25

Eric Weinstein: You know, as somebody who stands up to mobs regularly, I’m not really worried about somebody trying to fit me with a pink tutu in front of the world. I know Mike. Mike’s a very, very smart guy. I’ve, found him a long time ago, even when he was radioactive. I think he’s a guy who really believes in what he calls the guerrilla mindset.

00:18:45

Eric Weinstein: And the idea is that there are winners and losers. There are real men, and they’re pussies. And so in that snap to grid universe, that’s what I am. He knows better why he chose to do that in public. I have no idea. But, I’m not going to go after Mike Cernovich in public right now. And I’ll just say, this, boy, the MAGA people are bad strategists.

00:19:08

Eric Weinstein: The idea of trying to figure out whether you can incite me to say a bunch of really negative things about MAGA, right before an election, or the idea that you want me to move out of the Democratic Party towards the Republicans, where I’m far more important, being a critic of my own party, these guys just don’t seem to understand, in some sense, how to win properly, how to have allies.

00:19:32

Eric Weinstein: And if you wanted to ask me to answer the question about Madison Square Garden, I’d be happy to.

00:19:38

Piers Morgan: Yeah, yeah. Please do.

00:19:39

Eric Weinstein: So I think that basically, the left of center people don’t understand the amount of love and positivity and hope and energy, that that party has, which is not dead from the neck down. I think that there was a huge coming together of people, brown, blue, green, yellow, white doesn’t matter. Jews, Muslims, etc., etc.. That said, I think it was very heavily tilted towards red meat.

00:20:09

Eric Weinstein: It was very heavily tilted towards men over women. The edgy comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, I’m going to just stand up for him and say he’s absolutely brilliant. I know I’m a little personally, in person. He’s the nicest, sweetest human being. He was talking not about humans is garbage. He was talking about a garbage problem on an island that has landfills.

00:20:30

Eric Weinstein: Nevertheless, very dangerous to do. You know, that kind of insult, comedy in a Madison Square Garden. There was an attempt to tie it to the 1939 rally. I can promise you, I’ve gone to Eric Clapton concerts at Madison Square Garden. Nobody made a, you know, comparison, of Eric Clapton to Nazis. These people are fighting in just a horrific smear campaign where the Democratic Party’s chief tool is personal destruction, and they’re trying to destroy people who went and tarred them with the brush of Nazis.

00:21:03

Eric Weinstein: Now that said, there are absolutely bigots, anti-Semites, really horrible people inside of MAGA that MAGA will not clear out just the way. I’ll tell you. Told you this way. The Democratic Party will not clear out the people, who were celebrating October 7th as an act of resistance by the great humanitarian sinwar. And the Republicans will not clear out all of those people shouting at me that I should go back to Israel.

00:21:31

Eric Weinstein: Because what have Jews ever done for America? We’re basically a fifth column in the United States. Check your nuclear weapons and see who made you the absolute strongest country as Americans. I’m sick to death of people being quiet. I’m talking not about the bad people in MAGA. I’m talking about the really good people. The people I love whose back I have in MAGA.

00:21:53

Eric Weinstein: You don’t have my back. That’s your problem. Your problem is, is that you contact me privately rather than publicly, and you know that this is dangerous talk. It’s not just a question of, quote, those mean tweets. You’ve got that wrong. This is the precursor to really bad things happen. Look at what happened in Bulu in Istanbul during the 50s.

00:22:12

Eric Weinstein: Look at what happened in Germany in the 30s when you allow people to start talking recklessly like this. This is this is the appetizer. It’s the prelude. It’s the precursor to violence. And quite honestly, you should both of these parties should have thrown the bad apples out and competed for the middle and the moderates and the reasonable people, and instead they were pussies, and they clung to their extremists in order to win an election.

00:22:38

Eric Weinstein: And that’s going to be up to those of us who have to stand up to both of these parties to put this country back together. And, you know, I’m not going to use my French on this podcast, but I’m sick to death of men with masculinity issues, yelling coward at people who stand up to mobs. If you want to incite a mob or you want to hide within one, or you want to hide behind anonymity, you’ve given us your calling card.

00:23:02

Piers Morgan: Every game you said you’re not going to endorse, but does that mean necessarily that you’re not going to cast a vote? Could it be that you may vote privately without saying who you voted for?

00:23:14

Eric Weinstein: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. In other words, either party could have looked at itself and said, you know what? We have a huge problem, and we’re willing to look at ourselves in order to win the people who who want a home. I don’t want to be homeless. And I’m, by the way, Chris Rufo and Mike Saunders, they just don’t get it.

00:23:35

Eric Weinstein: I can look past all sorts of things. The threshold for me, endorsing a party means that that party isn’t going to corrode me. In order to keep my membership card right. In other words, I intend to talk about the problems of Georgia on January 6th and the fact that the election of 2020 was not free and fair. If you require me to to blind myself to one set of those things, I can’t join you and I can’t recommend you to others.

00:24:03

Eric Weinstein: Now, does that mean that I’m not willing to take the risk when I go to the ballot box and cast a vote? No, I’m willing to do it. I have four choices. I can vote for Kamala Harris. I can vote for Donald Trump in the super ticket. I can vote for a third party or a write in candidate and thereby avoid the choice.

00:24:20

Eric Weinstein: Or I can not vote at all. The only thing that I’m really thinking is not going to happen is I probably cannot find anywhere path to voting for Kamala Harris. But what I choose to do privately is not a question of wimping out. You also had the opportunity to win me over what I said in the next tweet, which we haven’t mentioned, is all work with anyone who wants to put the country back together.

00:24:42

Eric Weinstein: But if the idea is, you know, show us how tough you are, put on a Maga hat or show us, you know, that you’re true blue and you’ll sing from the blue hymnal. You got to be kidding. Boy, do you have a wrong number.

00:24:57

Piers Morgan: And Eric, finally, who do you think is going to win this election?

00:25:02

Eric Weinstein: I think it’s going to be Donald Trump. If it’s counted accurately.

00:25:07

Piers Morgan: Yeah. And I’m not going to say.

00:25:08

Eric Weinstein: The the theory of.

00:25:11

Piers Morgan: No.

00:25:11

Eric Weinstein: Please finish after you, sir. It’s in part due to the theory of teamwork. Karen. I have, I think in eight years, I have never seen a human being wearing a Maga hat. And I’ve traveled all over the country. I don’t know how that’s possible. People hide their support for Donald Trump because Donald Trump makes life hard.

00:25:33

Eric Weinstein: He makes it ugly. If you have, let’s say a male female divide in your family, or you have a family that is dependent on a blue employer or whatever, Donald Trump is quite honestly, completely inconsiderate about the problems that he’s causing inside of your world. You know, he’s just he’s boorish and he’s a brute. On the other hand, you can easily make the case.

00:25:56

Eric Weinstein: As Dave Rubin has said, artfully said, you can’t dream about a panther in a China shop. You’re getting a bull whether you like it or not. If you want some of the China knocked over, all of it’s going to get knocked over. Now, what my opinion is, is, is that you may want to risk a brute to break out of this incredible stranglehold that the Democratic Party, rhizome, the Journal of Painting, the academic institutions, all of these things that are so supposedly neutral that always seem to go in one direction, they have to figure out how to break that stranglehold.

00:26:32

Eric Weinstein: Now, what you’re seeing is, is that these newspapers are choosing not to endorse because Kamala didn’t win any primaries, and she’s a horrible, horrible candidate as a result of that. We don’t know which who’s running the country. We Biden’s, declining mental condition, if you’ll check my old tweets. I’ve been talking about this for four years. What we have is we have a national mass delusion, that in some sense, the Democratic Party is playing by the rules when it isn’t.

00:26:59

Eric Weinstein: And, you know, in this situation, we’re in unprecedented territory. The question is, do you want a brute who might actually be a greater danger? Or he might be the thing, like, you know, radiation or chemotherapy that you need to kill the cancer? If it doesn’t kill you first.

00:27:17

Piers Morgan: I want to say, as always, fascinating to get your perspective. I really appreciate it, piers.

00:27:24

Eric Weinstein: Thanks very much for having me on.