https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OyxCTDCaE6s
So, I’m going to try something new today. I hope this works out. I don’t know if it’s going to work out. What I want to do is I’m going to go from memory, and this is a story I’ve told before so it’s not like I’m going from an old memory, of a set of events that happened in the real world and I’m going to show you how I was reasoning about them at the time. Now, there’s going to be a number of problems with this video. I’m going to make a bunch of statements, right? Clear, concise, absolute statements about events that happened. They are historical events. You can look them up. I don’t know how easy they’ll be to verify or validate in terms of the things I’m saying for reasons who will become clear during the story. I’m also not sure I’ll remember all the parts, but I’m going to try and I’m going to try to do them in order and I think I can do them in order, but I’m not sure if I can do them in order and remember every single part. I’m not sure that matters. The reason why I’m doing this is to highlight how I think about things and what things I notice. Now, the purpose of this is not to show off. That may happen anyway and I apologize in advance, but the purpose of this is to show you how I reason about things and what things I pick up on and find salient in the moment so that you can get an idea of what I’m doing. Now, I’m not claiming you can do this or anyone else can do this. I have no idea, right? But what I’m doing that highlights my sense making, right? So this is how I make sense of things in the moment. So that’s the setup. I’m going to make lots of statements. Might not be verifiable or easily verifiable. I’m sure they’re all verifiable, right? It would just take maybe forever to get some of this information because some of its local knowledge on the ground from the place that it happened at the time that it happened, right? Some of it just requires a knowledge on the ground of certain places and demographics. I’m going to make a bunch of claims and maybe those claims are actually wrong, but I don’t think so. Otherwise, I wouldn’t make them. So those are the caveats out of the way. We’re going to try this. I’m going to see how it works. So comments are always helpful on all of my videos, especially this one, because if you want to see more of this, I need to know. I have to come up with examples in advance. This isn’t necessarily easy to do. So I need to prepare a little bit for it. And so if you tell me, I’ll try to do more. And if you don’t like it, tell me that so I won’t do it anymore. I don’t want to waste my time. If something’s not helpful, I don’t want to spend too much time on it. So yeah, let’s let’s try this out and see if I can pull it off and if it’s helpful to you. So the set of events I want to talk about now, you can do all sorts of complaining. I get that. I don’t care. I’m using historical events for a reason. If you’re unhappy with the time period I’m using, the characters involved, the framing, any of it, there’s nothing I can do about that. Like at some point you just have to call out what you see. So I’m trying to exemplify here problems in the media, which were there before this event happened. Right. And maybe someday I’ll tell that story or go into that, but that’s a much longer story. I’m going to highlight problems with political framing and I’m going to highlight problems with with bad actors, like known bad actors. I’m going to make that claim up front. People are going to be very unhappy about that. Or at least some people. Some people are going to be a little shocked by it maybe, even if they agree. But I’m going to do this anyway. OK, here’s the story. I used to live in Massachusetts. I do Massachusetts most of my life. I used to live in Boston. I lived on the streets of Boston for a while. I was homeless in Cambridge and Boston. I lived in Brookline. I used to walk to Harvard Square. Very familiar with Cambridge. I kind of grew up in that area to some extent in my later teen years. I know a lot about this area. There was an incident when Obama was president and this is now called the Beer Summit. I think you can still look up Beer Summit in Wikipedia. Last time I checked, it was still there. What basically happened in real time as I remember it, and I’m pretty good with this because I told the story from the beginning because I was in the middle of telling people, no, no, no, you weren’t paying attention to the news. You weren’t actually watching what the news was saying and what the news was reporting because those are two different things. What happened was there was an incident near Harvard University. Now, the Harvard campus is roughly in the middle-ish of Cambridge. It’s not near MIT, for example. It is near the river, but that’s the Alston Brighton side. There’s a nice section of Cambridge and the north side of campus, roughly speaking, bleeds into the nicer side of Cambridge before it gets to the less nice side of Arlington, south side of Arlington. That area is mostly owned by Harvard University. The incident is as follows. A professor had returned from being away, vacationed something. I don’t remember exactly what, not really important. He had gotten driven, I believe, from the airport to the place that he was staying and he didn’t have his keys. So he and the driver broke into the property. Now this was the property where he was legally allowed to stay. In so far as where you live is your home, it was his home. It was not his property. It was the property of Harvard University. This turns out to be very important, by the way. Somebody saw this who was walking by. I forget if she was walking her dog or what, but she was walking by. She saw two men trying to break into a property that she almost certainly knew was owned by the school, or at least reasonably suspect everything in that area is owned by the school. Almost all the properties are owned by the school over there in that particular section. She called 911 and said, looks like there’s a couple people trying to break into this property. 911 dispatched the police. The police went out and two police were there. There is footage. There was newspaper footage of the two police. One of the police officers is white and one of the police officers happens to be black. Now the professor did not want to provide an ID to the police officer who asked and was belligerent towards him. Basically because he was a black professor, made a racial incident out of this. Now there are basically there’s one white person and two black people minimum here. I think the driver was also, if he wasn’t black, he wasn’t white. I think he was a minority at least. I don’t remember. It doesn’t really matter. The way this unfolded is very interesting. The first thing they did was they said this is a racial incident. They have pictures of the black cop standing there. Not next to, but within earshot of the white cop just doing his duty. The professor actually hosted a show on public broadcasting which was basically, I don’t remember the name of it, but it was basically what he would do is he would do celebrity genealogies and trace them back to their slave roots in America. I don’t agree with what he was doing. I asked people because I lived in Massachusetts for a large part of my life. I knew a bunch of people who went to Harvard. I regularly prowled the campus and talked to many Harvard people. I never ran into Jordan Peterson, oddly enough. Unfortunately, I probably was around the campus at one point when he was there, but I never met him or saw him or anything to the best of my recollection, which is too bad because would have been a fascinating meet. Those people reported to me that that particular professor is very well known for being troublesome. All but one of the people used a very bad word to describe the guy, just as behavioral. He’s always this type of person and not a jerk, but much worse, which I found very interesting because those people did not know each other. They did not go to school at the same time. They had no reason to say this other than it must have been true. They must have had interactions with him or heard about interactions with him and heard that they were bad universally. She’s a well-known troublemaker. The story was picked up in the local media. The local media was at the time, to my eyes, obviously misreporting it because they were making a racial issue when clearly there was a black cop there. I’m like, well, if there’s a black cop and it’s Harvard University and it’s Cambridge, I don’t know what to tell you. Few things about Massachusetts. Massachusetts at the time, I think, was six or seven percent black population. It’s mostly white state. Where the black people are are very specific neighborhoods in Massachusetts. There are neighborhoods south of the city, very nice areas, like physically beautiful best parts of the city. There’s a historical reason for that. Maybe I’ll do a video on that someday. You can look it up, like what happened in the late 1800s, early 1900s with the great experiments on populations. Those areas are heavily black populated. Most of the cities and towns in Massachusetts do not have very many black people in them, if any at all. Cambridge is an exception to this. Cambridge has a fairly robust black population. They are all in the same place, except for the ones that are in the schools. The schools are an exception because the schools have races from all over the place, people from all over the place. In Cambridge, they have a whole area. It actually moved at one point, I forget which year, where almost their entire black population that is not upper middle class exists. The upper middle class blacks are all over Cambridge, but there aren’t that many of them. Most of the blacks in Cambridge are in the poor neighborhood that is basically housing. Because of this, the Cambridge police has a special set of training to racially train the police. They were back when Obama was president. They always had this because they are very liberal and progressive in Cambridge. Cambridge is far more like California than it is like anything else in New England. It’s literally a time portal or a space portal or a time tunnel or something to California. It is not anything like Boston, it is not anything like Arlington, it is not anything like Watertown or any of the surrounding towns or cities. Nothing. It is a completely different universe, and I do mean a different universe. You can just go there and see this. Now, Cambridge is very diverse. If you’re over by MIT, it’s very different than if you’re over by Harvard, even though they’re about a mile apart. The different sections are very different. They have a black section, very different, high crime. For whatever reason, poor people have high crime rates. It doesn’t matter what color they are. There are white people in the poor section of Cambridge. There are just fewer of them. There are other sections of Cambridge that are very wealthy. They get better police support. Cambridge is a very diverse city, despite its small geographical area. It’s very dense, but a lot of Cambridge, especially around the schools and the businesses between the schools, for example, that are there because of the schools, they’re very progressive. They’re very Californian. These guys swing heavily Democrat. For years, I think they did away with this law after several decades, or at least two decades that I’m aware of. If you owned a condo in Cambridge, you couldn’t live in it legally. The logic behind this boggles me. But Cambridge is a very strange place in Massachusetts, very strange. But because of this, they have training for racial issues, basically. They have specific police training. The police are trained to handle different races, specifically Black people. The officer that responded in this particular case was the lead training officer for this program. This went under-reported, not not reported, but you had to listen really, really carefully to get that fact, because they would slip it in very sneakily. What happened as the story unfolded is as more facts became evident and unignorable by the local reprehensible Boston media, because it was already corrupt and destroyed by that point in time and nobody really noticed, but I did, they couldn’t cover it up, right? Because the Boston media market was very competitive and there were still a few hangers on about actual media. I’ve had interactions with people who run media in Boston in the past, usually anonymously, sometimes not anonymously. Some of them were very good people, some of them were trying to do a very good job of media, and many of them just didn’t care and told me flat out, yeah, we know that’s true, but we don’t care, we’re going to lie anyway. Told me. I have emails. I can show you the goods. I’m not going to. I’m just going to state that and you’ll have to accept it or reject it. So that was going on at this time. Quite a bit before that actually too. So there were a lot of new media companies coming online for TV news media and stuff. And basically as the story unfolded, they kept changing what was going on. Now this was picked up by the, first of all, the governor, Deval Patrick, who was a good friend of Barack Obama. They swapped, a lot of people call it plagiarized, that would be the correct technical term, each other’s speeches, but it was okay because they were buddies, I guess. He picked it up as the governor, which is inappropriate. It’s a small break-in incident that wasn’t a break-in. It didn’t make it to the police record, as I recall, because it was just a call and somebody was concerned. It was a concern call. Somebody’s doing something bad and it was just, oh, I saw this and I don’t know what it means. Can you send the police? So this was blown way out of proportion. The president picked it up. He called it a racial incident. He said that the cops should have been fired and horrible things. On national TV, I watched him live. I watched him say it. It’s odd. I watched it when it happened live. A lot of his press conferences were live about this issue. He deliberately inserted it into the narrative, into a national narrative for a city that overwhelmingly supported and voted for him. Seems a little crazy. Massachusetts voted for him anyway, so I don’t know why he’s demonizing the people that vote for him at this point, but I made a big deal about it at the time. As the story changed and unfolded, as the police union, as for once the police union did something decent, I guess once is enough, defended their cops, which they should have done. There were two cops on site, by the way. They only ever talked about the white cop. They never talked about the black cop. As they defended the two police officers on site, said no misconduct. They did everything correctly. Nobody was arrested. Nothing bad happened. All of which is true. It became untenable for the media, which again is highly competitive, to continue the racial narrative. Eventually, it got out that this is the head trainer for the racial sensitivity or whatever they were calling it. I don’t remember the name of it. And training. Then of course Obama had to back off because the Boston media is pretty powerful at the time. I don’t know how powerful it is now. That made it up the chain. The national media had to report this stuff. And there’s the old battle between Fox and everybody else. Fox had slightly more accurate reporting, at least according to the University of Michigan, than the other news media outlets. Because they were in a shrinking market, vying for market share in a shrinking market, they had to respond to Fox. And Fox was picking up on any bad narrative. Anytime any media did anything wrong, Fox would pick it up because that was part of their business plan. Every time you make a mistake, we’re going to correct you. Fair enough. It’s a good business plan. Keeps the market fresh, by the way. Irrespective of what you think of the reporting on Fox. So that’s why Fox seemed contentious too. Because they were deliberately picking up mistaken narratives or flaws in the narrative or bad reporting and blowing that up to get their ratings up. And it worked, by the way. So you can criticize it if you want, but it worked. So what happened was, eventually, the media got down to blaming the caller. Now there’s a few quirks, and I hope they’re quirks. I hope they’re only true in Massachusetts. When you call 911, those calls are not public. They are private and they are supposed to be sealed. That is the law in Massachusetts. It may have changed. It was the law back then. I double checked. I knew people worked for 911. I talked to them on a regular basis. They’re not supposed to record calls or at least those recordings aren’t supposed to be available. So they have the recordings, but the recordings are the property of the state. This is very unusual that the state owns something that is paid for by taxpayer dollars that is not taxpayer accessible. Now they blamed the caller for saying it was a black man breaking into a house. That’s what they said. The problem with this is that there’s no way that the media should have known that. That information should not have been available to them. If it was made available to them, whatever source they got it from was breaking the law Period, full stop, end of statement. End of statement. The woman who called it in said, I most certainly did not make any statement about the race of the people breaking into the house. That’s what she said. She went to get the record and she was the caller. The other person on the phone is a taxpayer employee who is not entitled to privacy in my opinion and certainly is in Massachusetts for some odd reason. She had to hire Gloria Allred to sue the city of Cambridge to release the 911 tape to clear her name because the 911 tape, unlike what the media reported, which was reprehensible, they never should have reported it because they could not have had a good source on it because any source would have been breaking the law. So credibility guys. Gloria Allred sued and they won. I don’t know, I’m sure she did it for free, whatever, the kudos. I’m sure also the woman could afford it because she was in the rich part of Cambridge and those people ain’t poor. That’s what happened. It turns out she didn’t mention the race of the people. The full tape was released, transcript, the whole thing. It went right up the close. Gloria Allred’s, I’m not saying anything bad about her. She’s a national person, or was at the time, a national personality in the legal scene. That was what she did. She took these very contentious cases. This is a great case to take. How the hell do I not have access to the things I said as a public taxpayer on a taxpayer paid for system? That’s insane. She got that released. The media didn’t want it released because then it showed they were all liars and they weren’t sourcing their material correctly, clearly. Every bit of the media narrative from day one was slanted in a certain bad direction. It was all completely debunked. That’s how the Beer Summit happened. Obama had to have the guy over to the White House to apologize for slandering him. I would have preferred that the President of the United States be held responsible for treason for slandering an individual because I think that’s appropriate. Maybe that’s a little over the top or hyperbolic or however you want to frame it, but that is actually how I feel about it. That’s how I felt about it at the time. I thought it was completely inappropriate for the President of the United States to comment on a local issue that didn’t result in an arrest and no one cared about or should have cared about. No one should have even known about it. There are a few other interesting facts that came out during this. One of them is, and Obama kept using this term, it’s his home. It was not his home. The property was owned by Harvard University. The other interesting fact is that three months prior, that property, that building, had been burglarized. The cops had been called, I forget if it was a burglary in progress, but the property had been burglarized three months prior. Precedent. Like, of course the cops are going to go there when they’re called. A, it’s in the rich section of town. B, it’s owned by Harvard University. C, they had a prior incident. Not in the neighborhood, at the property. At that address. Okay? Like, of course they went. Of course they took a two guys trying to break in in the middle of the day’s call seriously. And they should have. And there’s nothing wrong with what they did. So you know, they didn’t do anything wrong. The situation could have been diffused easily had the professor just provided them an ID. That’s all they had to do. That’s all they asked for. They didn’t force him to. Wasn’t a big deal. But he made a big deal out of it. It turns out also, Obama knew that professor. He had that professor. He mentioned this. I think it unlikely that Obama did not know that that professor, just based on the TV show he was doing for PBS, but also based on the fact that he had him, is a bit of a deliberate instigator. Okay? He is. It’s his reputation around town. Literally. He just is. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m just saying that’s what it is. He’s a difficult person. He makes a big deal out of things. He’s got a TV show he’s trying to promote to some extent. Fair enough. But Obama knew all this. He knew all of that. So why he went with this narrative, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess he thought he could get away with it. But he should have figured he couldn’t. And he didn’t. Which is good. I will mention that that, as I recall, was a pattern that would be played out at least two more times. Where a local, small local issue was played out on the national stage because the president mentioned it. I don’t agree with these tactics. If it’s a big issue that affects a lot of people, maybe. When it’s a small issue of a daylight robbery on a property that’s been burglarized before, I don’t think that’s a big national issue. I suppose if burglaries are up and you need to make a point, but it certainly was never a racial issue and it should never have been treated as such. And that’s the tragedy here. Is that that was the beginning of a very bad trend that has continued. And that’s part of the reason why I wanted to do the video. But the other part was to show you the things you’re paying attention to matter. I was paying attention to the photograph and the paper. I was paying attention to that. There was some video footage of the incident where you could see the black cop and the white cop together responding to the incident. I was paying attention to the fact of who this guy was and how the story unfolded over time and how it was reported and how they kept backing off on previous statements made. OK, well, maybe you shouldn’t have made the statements if you couldn’t have known. And it was clear they could not have known the contents of that 911 call and that if somebody told them that somebody credible told them that, then that person should be fired. And the people that believed him should be under investigation. Why did you report this from a source who had no legal right to the information and certainly no legal right to leak it to the press, especially when it was a lie? It’s a good question. It’s a good set of questions. Nothing was ever handled about this correctly that I recall. Now, I don’t know. Did the police do something right? Were there other charges? I don’t think so. I don’t recall any being reported. That doesn’t mean much because not reporting things is also a way to manipulate you. There was a lot of manipulation in this case. I wasn’t fooled by any of it for four seconds. Not at any point did I have the delusion that a Cambridge cop of all of the cops in all of the cities and towns of Massachusetts would be racist. That is the most absurd thing that I could think of back then. I’ve since learned absurdity goes a lot further down than you think because now we live in a completely absurd world. But back then, I didn’t think we did. And maybe that was the beginning of the end with respect to absurdity. Who knows? That all happened. It was all disturbing to me at the time. I remember railing against it at the time to many people and explaining, no, this story is completely misreported. The media is completely corrupt. They shouldn’t be doing any of this. This is total garbage. They’re contradicting themselves in their own reporting. That’s a bad sign. Right. And then years later, what do we do? We have people on YouTube who make millions and millions of dollars pointing out contradictions in news reporting. That’s how they became famous. Good for them. Good for them. Should have happened sooner. Right. Should have happened sooner. Maybe the news media could have self corrected had they been called out sooner or had they been called out more seriously. Like, had you taken Fox more seriously and realized most of their business plan was point out inconsistencies in reporting and contradictions of bad reporting? Yeah, that’s a very healthy thing for any industry to point out the mistakes of the industry by its own standards. That wasn’t done. And now we have a bigger mess than we can fix. And I mean that literally. Like, I don’t think the news media in this country, print or video, can be fixed. I felt that way for years. Someday maybe I’ll do a video on it. But I wanted to show you the chain of events and why your specific knowledge is important and how you can use that to understand something. But also keep in mind, if I didn’t know Massachusetts as well as I did, and I didn’t know Cambridge in particular as well as I did, and I didn’t understand certain aspects, I’m not claiming to be some expert, of the racial makeup and problems in Massachusetts, there’s no way there’s no way that I could have made the assessments that I made as quickly as I did. I would have seen the unfolding over time and the bad media reporting because that’s what I was doing back. I was basically paying really close attention to news media back then. And I would have seen all that. But that was all post facto. I saw it all before it unfolded and said, no, no, no, I know this report is bullshit. I know it is. I knew Cambridge and I knew the situation and I understood the area like I understood physically those streets. And that was really important. So what I’m highlighting here is the fact that if you hear reporting from an area you know nothing about, given how poorly the news media will lie and report, I wouldn’t believe any of it. I wouldn’t believe any of it because it’s really easy to ask a local in this day and age, you can get online, you can talk to a local. They can tell you these things. This happened in a number of incidents where I just reached out to somebody that knew somebody that lived in the area. And they knew the area, they could tell you things. No, no, no, that guy’s this, these people are untrustworthy, this is normal behavior, this is not normal behavior. They would say stuff like that. Oh, this person came here, this person didn’t, all kinds of things. So you can learn a lot from locals. But if you don’t have local knowledge, the odds that you can know what’s going on with a resolution that will tell you whether or not people are lying is probably zero. And I’m sorry for that and I can’t fix that. But you can at least realize that it’s easy for people to manipulate you when you can’t have access to those facts or don’t have access to them in the moment. So that’s what I’m trying to highlight, not, oh, look at me. I knew all this stuff about Cambridge for all kinds of wacky reasons, right? Growing up there, not least among them, prowling around the area because there’s lots of good schools and smart people that I could talk to and like audit classes for free and crazy things, almost all of which I did. It’s to point out that without that knowledge, without having that level of detail, which is an absurd level of detail for anybody to have, including me, I don’t have that level of detail anymore. I’m getting better. Right. There’s no way to know. This reporting sounds plausible. And when you don’t track reporting through time, you don’t catch the change in the reporting. And if you don’t update and say, oh, I was mad back then, but actually all the facts I thought were true were not true and they were the opposite of what I thought. And so I shouldn’t have been mad unless you do that step. That trauma from hearing that bad thing happened that maybe didn’t happen at all is still in you and you need to deal with that. And that is not an easy thing to do. It’s not easy to find. It’s not easy to fix. Just trying to highlight it, because these are issues that we have today. We’re dealing with a lot of trauma because you’ve been lied to about a bunch of things. We’ve been told things are happening that are not happening. We’ve been not told about things that are happening and are really important for us to know that affect us. Both of those things are going on lies by omission and lies by commission. They’re both here. So that’s how I reasoned through it. That’s why I was able to reason through it is an unreasonable high expectation. Right. We’re talking about a really high bar. Not expecting anybody else to be able to do anything like that. I couldn’t do it again today for the place I live now, because I basically stay in my house and hide for reasons which which may become clear in future videos as I unfold some of these other stories, provided that’s what you want to hear. If you don’t want to hear it, this will be the last video on the subject or at least the last video of its type. So I just wanted to go through that sense making and you can see how narratives don’t make sense and you can spot bad narratives and bad storytelling. And if you add the time component where you see things change over time, you can go back and readjust your attitude, your perspective in the moment about something so that it’s not harming you in the future. And then your head is clear because that’s really what this is all about. It’s having a clear head and not letting people manipulate you by leaving out information or adding information or changing the story after you’ve already reacted to it. Because once you have a visceral angry reaction, that carries through and it’s very hard to get rid of even when the story is completely changed. And I’ve seen a lot of people fall into this. So I hope you’ll take care with this and that this is helpful to you. And I can totally understand if it’s not helpful to you. This is just an experiment for me. So, again, comment, let me know if you think this is helpful. If you liked it, if you want to see more, I can try to do more. I can’t promise anything. If this is unintelligible, please let me know. I’ll either try to make it more intelligible if you’re interested or just drop it. And I’m happy that you’ve stuck with me this far. And I want to let you know that I, you know, I’m really grateful that you’re watching the videos and I hope you’re getting something out of them. I get a lot out of them trying to explain them. And I hope that shows. I’m trying to go on an exploration with you, as mentioned in a previous video. I’m trying to explore these topics and help you to understand them the way I understand them, or at least get my perspective on them so that you have more than your own perspective on them to add a little depth so that you can do better discernment. So there’s more contrast. And I just want to thank you as always, because I’m very grateful that anybody watches my channel at all and, you know, I’m glad that you’re giving your valuable time and attention to me.