Comment Section Chaos: Your Takes on Women's Suffrage, LA Fires, and More

0:00 if you take the logic of this seriously it leads to totalitarianism because what you're saying is not we shouldn't let women vote you're saying we shouldn't let people that are more emotional vote hey there friends fans and foes of dad Saves America John paa here and I thought I'd take this Friday to dive in to some of the comments from recent videos because there's always a lot of great stuff in the comment section here at dad Saves America and I ch you guys

0:30 that you even show up is is an honor and a blessing and so why not mix it up let's get right in shall we okay first up this is from one of our videos on um the LA fires what a disaster it would be refreshing to hear what you think exactly what Nome should have done here's what I'll say about that I had Michael shellenberger come on the show who was is way more knowledgeable about all of this than me he spent his entire

0:59 life being being a environmental activist so he was deeply engaged in the issues of Environmental Protection he's become a sane person not a lunatic and so he had a lot to say about it and I encourage you to check that out we'll put a link to the uh shellenberger interview down below was from a couple weeks ago I will defer to people that know more than me all I'll say is this if you are Gavin Nome and you make the

1:25 claims about reordering the society and solving climate change from California and all the other equity and and perfect utopian visions that you offer your voters you should be able to protect them from known environmental risks like that's on Gavin Nome to figure out that's I I didn't I didn't put myself forward to run California so it's not up to me to know how to solve the problems it is up to the people like Gavin Nome who say they're going to do it so those

1:56 of us criticizing these people have every right to do so and it's on them to prove they can do it so take it up with Gavin here's another one on the LA fires from uh snarl Buckle Nome is the perfect politician the absolute Pinnacle he makes things worse and demands more money to fix it Peak this earned 600 likes because you were spoton this is Robert higs ratchet effect crisis and Leviathan through and through I break

2:25 things I complain that they're broken I say I'm going to fix them and the things I put forward to fix them make them worse I complain that things are still worse and also acknowledge that they're worse and that we should do better we the Royal we always always we that's Gavin Nome in a nutshell guy's been in California at the high levels of power from being the mayor of San Francisco to the lieutenant governor to the governor

2:50 for 20 years The Babylon B comic Gavin Nome asks who's in charge here that sums it up that's his emo and that's classic that problem is that is most of politics because the accountability mechanisms are really low resolution and weak which again is why we shouldn't trust these people with anything important but in this case they screwed up the things that they actually are you you know not the worst at doing in theory like the fire

3:19 department I remember Michael Moore did this uh this movie capitalism a love story if I remember this correctly towards the end of the movie he's got this with um this Soviet Anthem talking about how we already have socialism it's called the fire department and isn't it great everyone loves the fire department well I think Los angelinos could watch that movie and Come Away with a very different opinion these days this is not to say all fire departments necessarily

3:49 must fail but it just goes to show you when you push government to the Outer Limits it breaks and it fails at best it can only do a couple of things well and that's it at best SLE SLE 2899 this is from my uh a clip of my interview from Adam Corolla talking about Gavin Nome and Co lockdowns and various and sunry totalitarianism we've all been put under under the past 5 years never leave them

4:23 alone never forget what they said and what they did this is talking about when uh Adam was was saying how you know people ask him like oh leave these celebrities alone that told us uh told us we're all racist or whatever I'll say this I will play both sides of this number one politicians absolutely run them out of town they claim they're there to get a job done that involves helping all of us when they lie and when

4:50 they lock things down and when they abuse their power and authority to make life worse for us and better for them we should never leave them alone we should never vote them back into office that would also be good and in some cases I don't think they should be allowed to can keep walking freely there's seems to be a fair amount of criminal activity that just goes unpunished among our politicians and I know that can be a um

5:19 a dicey road to take as we saw with the attacks on President Trump but sometimes it's warranted I think we've got to really ask ourselves when is that the case I think the covid lockdowns border on being criminal offenses personally I'm kind of with you on this one never leave them alone um for private citizens though we should give people some Grace if they keep acting like no you have to earn the grace but there are

5:50 people who you know an interesting example recently is up Tim Robbins the actor famously sort of political activist left of center actor he's sort of had a May Culp saying I dehumanized people because of Co and I regret it and I think being merciful is a good virtue it's a Christian virtue I don't think we should collapse into hatred and and uh resentment it's not good for us like even just selfishly it's bad for you that's the best I think we can do I

6:18 think we should try to move on but don't forget you know what did George W bush say you know fool me once shame on you fool me twice uh you know you don't want to you're not going to not going to fool me again or however he screwed that one up oh here's a long one Cara Coen Ren this is uh from our video about Dei and the cultural shifts that have taken place on college campuses partly because

6:43 of being increasingly female and and the differing values that on average we see between men and women as was expressed in some surveys that made clear that women prefer feelings and feeling safe and comfortable at the expense of say free speech that might make you uncomfortable and pursuit of Truth wherever that may lead again on average the weakness comes from allowing women to vote oh boy here we go all right let's see what do we got it

7:15 was at that point that you introduce a population base with a higher degree of emotion emotional over logical thinking this is poison to the tenants of the Enlightenment capital T capital E which began the West downfall from the day women were granted suffrage I'm uh maybe this is nervous laughter because it is an uncomfortable take um but I'll keep going of course it took a while to manifest because for a long time women followed their husband's voting

7:45 preferences around only 6% if I recall correctly of married couples are split Republican Democrat but as women have been encouraged to become more and more independent of men and living apart from them by remaining single so too has their ability to think themselves and this is where the problems start oh boy oh boy my producers really were like let's with you that's what this is I saw this comment actually when it happened and and there's been other

8:13 comments like this and I don't know who this person is I'm going to guess they're not a woman but maybe they are a woman first off I I'm I am for women suffrage full stop I think that was a step in the right direction I think there are a lot of other institutional changes we could make that could help reduce the scope for irrational idiocy in our politics without stripping women of the right to vote okay let's take this seriously shall we

8:43 let's assume for a minute and that that the basic assumptions of this comment are on average true that women on average are more emotional and more emotionally oriented and less logically oriented on average let's just say that that's true for the sake of argument I actually think it broadly is true I don't think it's as Extreme as that sounds I think there are obviously plenty of functional women that are able to be logical and navigate the world

9:14 using cognitive capacity but in general men are more interested in things women are more interested in people women are more interested in social fields that involve social interaction human interaction being nurturing being loving being emotional men are more interested in stuff fields building things stem business finance we see those patterns across all of human society that's a fact men and women are different on average in ways that are important we aren't from Mars and Venus we're more

9:45 similar than we are different we're humans and in any given population you can find people who aren't exactly on the average and just because of how close the shift is there's plenty of very logical women there's plenty of logical women that are that are more logical than men you might find but let's just say again on average fine if you take this the logic of this seriously it leads to totalitarianism because what you're saying is not we

10:12 shouldn't let women vote you're saying we shouldn't let people that are more emotional vote it happens to be that we've got an easy shorthand with women let's say does that mean we shouldn't allow someone that is a left- Winger to vote because they express that they are left wing and are are focused on compassion you know Jonathan Height's work in the Righteous Mind lays out that left wiers um liberals let's say but I really it's more Progressive left

10:39 because I consider myself a liberal in the classical sense they're more concerned with care as a moral Foundation he has this moral foundations Theory how are we going to do that because if what we're what you're saying below the surface here is that there are certain on average personality traits that should bar you from voting that way lies Madness that way lies what personality tests to determine whether you should vote how reliable are they how would that work a political litmus

11:09 test which feels like a tautology so how do we arrive at the world where the laws are built to exclude the people whose politics we don't like and who are who is we I think this is one of these things where this type of argument which gets made in reactionary right-wing circles and gets made in you know sort of manosphere stuff is either dismissed out of hand as being misogynist or it's not actually taken quite seriously

11:39 enough I'm trying to take it seriously for a moment and what I'm telling you is you should really think real hard about what the underlying mechanism would be here because it would just not really function once you take it truly seriously the founding fathers tried to create a structure for this country that more or less accounted for stupidity and irrational voting the way they did it was they said look the masses in general believe all kinds of

12:09 nonsense and are prone to fads and craziness and stupidity and and irrationality and politicians and people that seek higher office are prone to self-interest and Corruption so they try to divide the government and create internal incentives such that okay we got the House of Representatives every two years these people get need to get re elected so if a wave of some stupid fad happens and brings in a bunch of let's say wack job progressives The Winds of Change will come and they'll

12:38 get swept out the Senate was not supposed to be elected by the people it was supposed to be appointed by the state legislator so that the Senate would actually represent the views of the states that was better so rather than repealing women's rights to vote we should absolutely Ely repeal the popular election of senators we should reduce the amount of popular democracy in our system I am for that but not stripping

13:10 women of suffrage that's a half-ass thought that hasn't been thought through seriously and isn't a serious position to occupy and we can get oh well you know the long sweep of history and what about history that's all well and good but I'm just telling you right now this is institutional failure to not think through the implications of this this that that's my take sort of off the cuff um maybe I'd rethink it if I dug a lot

13:34 deeper but I don't think so I I don't think we can psychographically segment things I think we should shrink the role politics has in all of our lives so that when we have irrational emotional psychosis it can't destroy all of us and let's be honest here there's plenty of Psychopathic emotional thinking going on across the board men and women alike wokeism wasn't exclusively female so we we really need to do better than this this is low resolution thinking here's a

14:06 comment from uh Ben Thomas this is my conversation with a bunch of tech investors and entrepreneurs at Mar Lago the only thing cringe was those at the table fawning over AI but you did great I'm not a trump fan but I can only imagine the energy in the room when he walked in I could see it pulsing through you I appreciate that especially since you said you're not a trump fan you know last Friday we talked about sort of

14:32 power and went a little deeper into the weirdness of that experience and meeting people like Trump so I appreciate you kind of you know voicing a little uh moral support there on the AI front I don't know I don't know what to think it's the first time that technology has scared me a bit I'm usually Mr progress is great people will reallocate I can make all the arguments oh they're used to be most people used to farm and now only 2% of the

15:02 population farms and all the jobs that people get today most of them didn't even exist 50 years ago that's all true but then you say okay so now you're going to start to have robots and AIS capable of doing lower and midlevel work for people so that they don't need assistance which means you don't have apprenticeship for a lot of tasks you can train these things in ways that cut out the entry level well how do you get

15:27 past entry level like you need an entry level it might be a failure of my own imagination and maybe yours as well to not see that as difficult or maybe you are maybe that's what you're saying is that you do think it is difficult and kind of scary I don't know I I'm the jury's out for me I think my bias is towards people being pretty adaptable and getting more done with less being good I think we Face new challenges in

15:51 every new age and AI is going to be a really interesting one and maybe it's oversold and it won't be anywhere near as disruptive as people like Sam mman and the folks at that table are saying it will maybe the the errors it has are insurmountable technologically but the rate of progress so far has been pretty shocking I think for all of us and I guess we'll just have to wait and see when when does it start to run into a

16:16 wall these things follow like an S curve like they start off slow and then they accelerate like crazy and then eventually they mature and get a little slow again I don't know where we are on the S curve I'm not sure if anybody really does okay leming 573 I'm a Libertarian but I'm not deluded enough to think that libertarianism leads to a Utopia it I just like Freedom well here here I agree I just like Freedom too I

16:42 think as I've aged and spent more time reading and thinking about things and especially as a father what I've come to understand and actually being a dad has played a big role in this for me is that freedom isn't enough it's necessary but not sufficient to have flourishing I think we Face some real challenges in the West in particular when it comes to maturity and a culture that sets you up to make good use of your freedom because

17:12 Freedom can lead you to just tunnel into self-destructive time- wasting nonsense we're sort of uh in a position where too many Americans I think get sucked into that and especially young people you know young men in particular get trapped in a Vortex so so I think freedom is great I think the bias should always be towards individual liberty but I don't think it's enough and I think Super doctrinaire Libertarians that narrowly focus on freedom alone as the only value

17:42 that matters I think end up only being able to appeal to fellow autistic Libertarians and I think uh there's more to life than that it's more complicated than that but you know what it takes all kinds and someone needs to appeal to the uh to the rest of the autistic libertarian out there so more power and freedom to them Jean Collins I think I just heard a free college credit course on economics 101 a freebie for me this

18:10 was my conversation with George sgen monetary Economist and historian and you are correct in fact that conversation covered so much ground I encourage everyone that's interested in money and macroeconomics to check it out George is incredibly dead pan and it gets pretty wonky it is deep it is deep and dense but it is absolutely a full College course in fact the thing that's so tragic is you can get through a whole PhD in economics and not learn some of

18:40 the essential truths I think that George was talking about and laying out in that conversation so please check it out all right let's see what else we got this was on a clip from uh an interview we did with Michael shellenberger well about Gen X about some self- congratulatory Gen X promotion Robo Nick 61 78 I'm a Gen X I love I'm a Gen X is it a gen xer I'm a gen xer I'm not sure

19:06 I don't know we're the Forgotten generation Gen X it's like everybody we're we're like lumped in with the Boomers but we're not Boomers I'm a Gen X who has been so saddened by the changes to the environmental movement growing up it was about preservation of wild habitats reforestation and what we can do to clean up our air and local waterways and even to stop littering now it's carbon carbon carbon carbon not a pollutant correct and what we all need

19:31 to give up to keep the Earth from boiling in scare quotes except for the elite who don't need to give up anything because they are exempt it's so sad how this movement has been ruined I mean here here I had uh Michael back on the show and we talked about this some more in the context of the wildfires which are of course being used by propagandists as the latest example of how the world is about to end I did the

19:55 math and according to aoc's statement that the world is going to end in 12 years when Donald Trump leaves office we will only have 2 years left before the end of the world and I think everyone knows that's false in fact across the board I think the hyperbolic crisis talk and manipulation and outright forgeries like the hockey stick of history have done irreparable harm to the environmental movement and set us up to be incapable of dealing with some of the

20:25 environmental challenges that we still have the ocean being probably the most important example because we don't have property rights in the oceans they're are commons and so we need to figure out how to create structures of governance that encourage good behavior and conservation one quick example in the wild multiple countries including Zimbabwe actually have enabled private ownership of elephants and doing so has caused elephant populations in those countries including Zimbabwe to rebound

20:57 human beings have the capacity to be incredible stewards of the environment we have in general as we've gotten richer gotten cleaner environments for it because as we stop worrying about our kids dying we start worrying about the environment they live in that is just the sequence of human concerns there's an economist named kusit who actually was the one that came up with GDP which so he gets dinged for that but he had a curve the kits curve and one of the

21:25 applications of it is that as incomes rise we you cross a threshold where it becomes an important value to have a cleaner environment so Rising incomes actually leads ultimately to a cleaner environment unless I guess you're going to have some utopian totalitarian technocratic state where the Public's concerns are irrelevant and somehow the dictator isn't yet another mustache twirling murderer but somehow knows how to solve all the problems in the world I think we've gotten as close as we can to

21:54 that in America on while still being Democratic it's called California and we've seen how well that works I think you are completely right we need to get back to environmentalism being about actual ecosystems not about socializing responsibility in the name of watermelon politics to usher in global communism because that's all the climate movement fundamentally is and it's the reason why every one of them also has every other flag of every this is the most important issue thing it's why Greta thunberg also

22:26 hops on the Gaza train you name it it's all just sort of the the mega movement left wi blob of nonsense not concerned for the environment really it's all kind of a scam yeah but tell me what you really think again from uh the shellenberger clip clamor 23 I turned 50 on June 2025 and I miss riding my bike from morning until sundown and my parents had zero clue where I was I was a latchkey kid at 9

22:54 years old if the youth today only knew the freedom and happiness being outside brought me every summer before I got my driver's license Michael Speaks 100% truth you're very right about this we were the latchkey generation I had the same thing my parents were my mom was home so I wasn't technically a latch key kid but I would come home from school and get immediately kicked out of the house and basically run around the neighborhood like a lunatic with no

23:19 tracking device on me even though my mom is a super worry wart neurotic who still to this day worries about my every waking move and I was fine and in fact I am fine today because I did that there is a book named akung baby about an American mother who went to live in Germany and had her kids and when she came back to the States and not to California but to Idaho was shocked by the culture of control and helicoptering

23:47 and how much Freer she felt in Germany this is one of the weird things about American culture that's gone terribly terribly wrong and that some places including Germany and Japan and actually Scandinavia actually have way more right than we do the Japanese kick their kids out at literally at 3 years old they have a ritual where you see three-year-olds going out to the grocery store and taking the subway we could learn a lot from that and from our own

24:15 past keep the comments coming I'm grateful that you care to engage here at dad Saves America and if you want to go even deeper please head to Dad saves america.com become a subscriber the substack it's a great way to support the work and if you want to support us even more because you're like this is the greatest thing ever why don't you have commercials it's because we're actually a nonprofit organization and so the way we produce this show is by raising funds

24:42 from supporters like you we're kind of like a private PBS that actually loves America so keep them coming and uh have a great weekend