Racism: Vegan Gains, Jon Venus & Brian Turner.

again brian should you be friends with
someone who thinks it is acceptable to commit a holocaust what does it say about you as a person when you're friends with someone who supports a holocaust many of you will come to this video just expecting me to point the finger and laugh at how ridiculous richard's reasoning here and maybe to reflect a little bit on what it would mean to have a more reasonable a more rational argument on this topic what many of you may not know [Music] is that richard has been in this position himself richard has been friends with neo-nazis richard has been friends with racist white nationalist activists here on the internet and he has made youtube videos justifying or excusing this strange situation again and again for years and i was personally involved with the effort to present the evidence to richard that these people he was supporting these people he was friends with really were racist with a capital r and not racist in the sense of having a latent hostility not racist in the sense of passive bigotry you know you may have a grandfather an aunt or an uncle who's just just kind of lazy and ignorant and they say racist things in passing no no no no you may have seen a youtube video of someone who's angry that his girlfriend broke up with him and says racist things on the phone when freaking out at his ex no we're talking about people who were deeply committed to being activists for neo-nazi organizations activists for white nationalist white supremacist agendas and in one case one of these people he was friends with one of these people he supported um tara mccarthy who had what was then a very popular quote-unquote radio show it was a podcast and a youtube channel so both video and audio but whatever she called it like a radio call-in show it was her format you know she got a question from the audience asking her if she would support exiling richard himself kicking richard out of canada not allowing him to live in the united states or canada because he is you know he is considered black in fact his family background is that you know his mother is white and his father is black as you know african-canadian what do you want to say she was directly asked about this saying hey look you're friends with this guy this is your political position their political position was they wanted to exile everyone non-white from this continent the united appeared on st youtube channel and her answer was that yes she would apply this to him too and long story short she gave a bit of a meandering answer but yes her policy of exiling all non-white people that would apply to richard also i was the one who sent that clip to him i said richard what are you doing don't you you know wake up this is what's going on you know it's possible someone else sent in the clip and it got to him first but as i recall based in his reply it seemed like that was the first time he'd really seen that faced up to that i shared first the clips with him and then though he he specifically requested to see the whole video unedited of a long long racist rant with tara mccarthy and cory mccarthy sitting next to it was both racist and genocidal i can i can honestly say that many ways these people richard was friends with uh they were worse than adolf hitler i know that's hard to believe but in principle what these people believe what they preached it was actually worse than hitler's doctrine and whether or not it would be worse in practice i mean it's hard it's hard to be worse than adolf hitler but these people were really in that ballpark all right this is not just latent bigotry whatever this is really serious neo-nazi racist activism and richard was publicly promoting these people publicly friends with these people and promoting their business or their businesses plural which included you know one of them offering vegan diet and fitness advice so what could be more absurd than richard coming on and condemning someone for being friends with a meat eater and saying would you be willing to be friends with someone who was a a nazi or a neo-nazi you know life life is full of contradictions richard here you are a black canadian vegan activist and you yourself have a long history of friendship with people this is not a complete list it's not you have a long history of friendship with people who were vocal racists vocal white supremacists why don't you have a little bit of humility in looking in the mirror and answering that same question why and john and brian are friends now brian i want to ask you why do you even want to be friends with human trash would you be friends with a nazi i don't really see a big difference between john venus and a nazi i mean they both support unjustifiable discrimination and they want to commit a holocaust against the group they're discriminating against so why do you want to be friends with nazis brian most of these arguments we engage in on the person-to-person intimate scale of choosing who you're going to be friends with who you're going to fall in love with you're going to get married to on that most intimate scale of your private life and your family life okay most of those arguments don't rest on evidence they won't be decided by evidence i think it's a little bit interesting to point out in this case how paradoxical or nonsensical it would be to demand of richard where's your evidence to support this argument how could evidence possibly support one side of this argument or the other i don't know evidence seems to be irrelevant to it i think that should direct us to reconsider even more profoundly what it means to be reasonable what it means to reason things through in the absence of evidence okay if there is some kind of reasonable case to be made that there's a valid comparison between john venus eating meat and someone joining like a neo-nazi racist political movement if there's some kind of allegory there some kind of parallelism right richard has completely failed to present it right and if that argument were valid to some limited extent i think there's an onus on you as the person presenting the case to talk through the limits of that argument okay there were a lot of reasons why you'd be friends with someone who's who's racist right and the one that comes to my mind first and foremost is because you thought they were going to get better because you thought they were going to improve you know and a lot of us have an uncle or a cousin or something someone we didn't really choose to be friends with and you know they're racist you know they're messed up about this issue or that issue and you stay in touch with them and you keep encouraging them and you know you want them to get better you want them to improve and that may not be the only reason maybe you know maybe also you're both watching the mandalorian and you want to talk about you know you have other things in common that your your friends about but you know i think there are three ex-vegans i've stayed in touch with uh and they're all people i met because of this youtube after they went yeah after they stopped being vegan and returned to eating meat of those three one of them today is now vegan again and sincerely so you know ethically not just for health reasons or or weight loss or something now you know if you asked me why did i remain friends with people or why did i try to remain i think with all three i think i still am trying um you know my fundamental answer is because i can like because i have it in me to give and i'll be honest i don't think what they need i don't i i didn't think any of them would would go back to me vegan one of them has two of them haven't i i didn't expect any of them to go back to being vegan and the two were eating me today i still don't i don't expect them to to go back and yeah you know every so often when i talk to those people i mean they watch my youtube channel they know i'm still vegan they're you know they still see some value in in the message i'm presenting uh whatever it may be but you know yeah you're saying to them look this door is still open for you this option is still here if you'd have a more meaningful life a more morally responsible life all those things you used to preach about veganism you know i'm still out here living living by those principles and you're not so sure you know i'm aware that by staying in their lives i'm at least making them aware there's there's a door open there now i can argue against my own position in terms of richard's relationship with cory mccarthy and tara mccarthy and you know richard and ask yourself together i think if you look at them as a unit they were connected to a whole bunch of other crazy right-wing racist figures which is very strange you know if if richard had gone on to tara mccarthy's show or gone on to cory mcgregor's show to really challenge them to really say hey you're a hypocrite hey you're living a lie you're you're sleepwalking through a dream here if he had gone there in this sort of self-confident way to represent a contrasting opinion and if in his personal friendship with them he had done that also if his position was he was trying to drag them out of the quagmire of racist and neo-nazi views they'd you know gotten and snared in of course that'd be very different and we all know that's that's not true i mean yes i have the strange privilege and the kind of emotional burden of being someone who knew richard personally during those years and you had a lot of messages back and forth on this particular issue i really did talk to him in depth and over a long period of time we all know that's not true richard is a weak person richard is a follower richard has all his life lacked a father figure and he looked up to cory mccarthy i mean he hung on that guy's every word and cory mccarthy presented him with the most laughable set of excuses for why he allegedly wasn't racist and i got to see you ask yourself isaac also jump on that bandwagon like well you know if you define the term racism so narrowly that not even adolf hitler qualifies as a racist anymore then you know by that definition this guy's not racist and i mean very very simple and obvious questions like hey you know you know what the indigenous people of canada the united states are not white very very simple questions like hey you know you know richard you are not white and these people you're in bed with they openly say they want to kick you out of the country remember screenshotting the front page of their website that website's long gone they used to have a red website preaching their their values preaching their crazy neo-nazi master plan and i sent him the screenshot i said richard how can you say to me that these people are not racist just read what this is setting out here um you know richard was not someone who engaged in those friendships with racists in order to speak truth to power he was someone who got into those friendships out of his own profound childlike weakness and you know any friendship that's based on assumptions about that person's potential to be a better person in the future that's fundamentally a friendship built on a lie because what you're really saying is i'm not friends with this person for who they are but for an idea that i have in my own head of who they could be who they should be who they might become it's very very hard to have a friendship that's built on a lie even if it is in this sense an optimistic encouraging in some sense a loving lie