The reason people were really unhappy is that Kanye West and I would just agree on something. And it feels racial. I don't know if it is, but it just feels racial. That the fact that we would both have just a reasonable, well-explained reason for believing that the past should not influence our decisions so much in the present — perfectly reasonable thing to think. But somehow it's not okay if Kanye has that very ordinary thought at the same time that I do. Or at the same time somehow the world is not okay with that.

So as I predicted, the night of the long knives would come out for me and that the fake news stories would be rampant. So I was right, of course. So the internet is now full of stories about me which are largely false. Now you may have seen the BuzzFeed — I think BuzzFeed was calling me a far-right men's rights advocate. As you know, neither of those are true. Both fake news. I think Mediaite did spin. Did the A.V. Club? I think they were about several other publications came after me. And I don't know if they just Googled the other publications, whoever went first, but they all had the same bad set of stories.

So one of them, this guy Caleb Ecarma at Mediaite I think, who Dave Rubin refers to as, quote, "an embarrassment to journalism." I love Dave, and he definitely captured it right. So Caleb Ecarma, whose forever name is "embarrassment to journalism" or ETJ — we could just call him ETJ from now on, embarrassment to journalism — he printed several specific criticisms of me and he challenged me on Twitter to deny that any of these were true. Now Twitter is not a really good platform for a long conversation, so I just said that I would take it to Periscope, or as I like to call it, the home-field advantage, so that when I talk about it there's nobody interrupting me and I can give you the full explanation.

So I'm going to give you the full list of criticisms about me that are alleged to be true from Caleb Ecarma and Mediaite, who Dave Rubin quite correctly calls an embarrassment to journalism. Now you could decide for yourself if he's an embarrassment to journalism by seeing my response to his criticisms. When I'm done you'll either say, my God, Scott, he certainly is right, you're an embarrassment to Periscope, or I think you might say ETJ is an embarrassment to journalism.

Here's the number one thing which he says as a criticism to me. Number one: regularly appeared on the conspiracy site Infowars. Technically correct. I have appeared on Infowars several times. Also technically correct, but left out is that my stated policy is to go on any platform. So I've been on CNN a number of times. I've been on MSNBC. I've been on pretty much every liberal platform. I was booked on one this morning. This morning I was supposed to be on Yahoo News but they had a scheduling problem.

So is it true that I've regularly appeared on the conspiracy site Infowars? Now "conspiracy site" is his word. I'm not gonna argue whether that's correct. But I have appeared on Infowars. If you only knew that, it would sound like, well, there's proof he's a far-right guy. But if you knew what I say publicly fairly often, and I demonstrate as obviously as possible, that I appear on any major platform, why would I appear on Infowars unless I agree with every single thing they've ever said? Here's why. And I know this is not obvious to Caleb Ecarma because he's an embarrassment to journalism, but here's why I would appear on their platform. They invite me on Infowars to give my opinion to their followers and to them. Infowars does not invite me on the show to tell me what they're thinking. They bring me on to tell them what I'm thinking.

And to the extent that you think I'm a good influence, even if you thought Infowars was a horrible blight on humanity, wouldn't you want them to be subject to better influences such as myself, who describes himself as far left? All right, so does Infowars have other people on the show who describe themselves as far left? Maybe not. But that would be exactly what you'd want to see. Wouldn't Caleb want to see people from another opinion on Infowars?

Let me clarify what I say that I'm left of Bernie. Here's what I mean by that. I would like to see universal health care. I think we can't be a great country without it. I'd like to see free education and training for a lifetime. But I don't think we can get there through taxes. So where I differ from Bernie and socialists is I don't want to take it from the rich. I don't want to tax. I think technology and better management and being smarter can get us to those places even if it takes a while. So those are the two examples where I'm far left of Bernie but without the impractical stuff.

Now some of you are saying libertarian, but it is certainly not libertarian to have the government helping us get to universal health care and free education and training. All right, but that's another topic. Just to tell you where I stand on the spectrum.

Number two from Caleb Ecarma, the embarrassment to journalism, is defended Holocaust deniers. So he's saying this is a very clear criticism. He's saying that I defended Holocaust deniers. Never. Not once. Nothing slightly like that. Never. Here's an actual journalist in public saying that I personally have, quote, "defended Holocaust deniers." I've never done anything like that.

Now the article that he's referring to, I say in clear language, you know, no serious person denies the Holocaust. I can't get more clear than that. Now in that same article I talked about — this was before I was using the word persuasion in a lot of my blogging, but this was related to the topic before I had sort of branded it that way — and what I was questioning was one very narrow thing, which is how exact is the count of the number of people who died in the Holocaust? And the point of it was we act like it's exact, but what are the odds that something that would be that hard to measure you'd have a really good number for? But it doesn't really matter, does it?

When we talk about World War II itself, people say we don't know how many people died in World War II. It might be somewhere between like 50 and 60 million, maybe somewhere in that range. But knowing that it's somewhere in that range doesn't make anybody a World War II denier because they don't know the exact number. Somebody's saying please stop because I think you know that it's impossible to talk about this topic without sounding like a Holocaust denier. But I'll say as clearly as possible I'm not one, would not support anybody who was one. It's clearly a fact. But it is also a fact that when you see a large organization or group trying to get an exact count of something that is that hard to count, it's probably an exaggeration, which doesn't change anything.

All right, number three. My critic says that I believe the Seth Rich conspiracy. Well that's a vague statement because what is the conspiracy? Is it a conspiracy? Well let me tell you what I do believe. So just to be clear on this. So if you're talking about the Seth Rich conspiracy, you're talking about everything from he took the data, gave it to WikiLeaks, and then Hillary Clinton put a hit on him and had him murdered. I do not believe Hillary Clinton put a hit on Seth Rich. All right? I haven't seen any evidence of that.

I do believe — here's the part I do believe — that the two competing stories for what happened, what is sort of the Russia did it, Guccifer, etc., is one set of explanations. And the Seth Rich had a thumb drive and he got the data and gave it to WikiLeaks is another story that's out there. So what I believe is that one of those stories fits the facts which we have been given much better than the other. And the Russia did it story unfortunately requires us to believe our intelligence agencies were unbiased and honest and accurate, and they're not really credible at the moment. So the sources that say it was Guccifer and they did it are by their nature no longer credible. Now that's different from being wrong. They could be right, but they're not credible because there are too many things in the news at the moment that would question their credibility.

WikiLeaks, however, has a long record of being credible. You could hate it or love them, but at least they've been credible. And Assange has made it very clear — he's hinted in a way that makes it clear he wants you to believe it — that Seth was a source for WikiLeaks. That doesn't make it true. All right? So we can know what really happened, nor could we ever know. We can only know what other people told us happened, and we have questionable credibility in a lot of cases.

So if you compare Assange's clear indication that Seth Rich was a source, and WikiLeaks has a long record of not being wrong, that's one source that supports one story, that it was Seth Rich. The other version is that Russia did it, and all the people involved with that are low credibility. So we have two stories. One has tremendously low credibility. One has so far A-plus credibility.

My position on Seth Rich is at least on just the narrow question of whether he was the source for the data is that we could talk all day about the other details, but there's just a stronger case for Seth Rich being involved there. Murder part? There's no evidence that Hillary was behind the murder. It's just the timing is questionable, but there are a lot of things that would be questionable timing if you looked at them from a distance. So that doesn't mean anything.

All right, so where my critic says he believes the Seth Rich conspiracy, that makes it sound like I'm buying all the parts of it. And it also presumes the answer by calling it a conspiracy. You've dismissed it without regard to the evidence. I could have as easily said, well Caleb, are you buying the Russia did it conspiracy? So you know, if you label it a conspiracy in your statement, you're sort of assuming the answer there.

All right. Now, before, claimed Hillary was, quote — now he's quoting me from maybe a blog post or something — was quote "likely to trigger a race war and cause the uptick in domestic racial violence to win the election." Well I've talked about that at length and of course that's true. But it's also something I believe he would agree with if he were not dishonest.

When Hillary Clinton started describing Trump as a racist, people believed it. And when she took all of the confirmation bias of, there's his time he awkwardly said this, there's the dog whistle that I can hear that you can't, there's the time he did something thirty years ago — when she put it all together she created this ultra scary vision of Trump being a dangerous racist. And it did cause an immense amount of racial unrest.

Now I too have criticized candidate Trump and now President Trump for not handling race relations well. But let's be honest. The challenge for him is much higher than for other people because the quality of the opposition was first-rate. I wrote in my book "Win Bigly" that when the Clinton team started using the word "dark" — which I believe came from a cognitive scientist who said dark is a great word, it captures all of these bad racist dangerous things — when he started doing that, Hillary was intentionally whipping up racial feelings. The natural risk of that is that the bad racial feeling was turned into violence. And I think we did see violence.

So his criticism is that I made a prediction that is unambiguously true. Would he disagree that there have been more racial tensions lately? The part he would disagree with is that Hillary Clinton was behind them. Now this is what I call the one-variable thinker. Anybody who thinks that there's only one variable behind anything that happens is not really a serious thinker. You need all the variables to happen for anything really important to happen.

In this case the variable was President Trump had to handle race relations stuff not as well as he could, and that happened. But the second thing that had to happen is that somebody had to package that as, my God, it's the biggest problem in the world. He's a huge racist. He's going to do terrible things. So Hillary did the heavy lifting of packaging that as a big major problem. What Trump did was make mistakes that allowed that to happen.

But if Trump had simply done what Trump did and the news media — this is an important point — if the news media and the Clinton campaign had simply noted what the president said without comment, in other words without adding the persuasion to it, the public would say, well that sounded like a weird way to say that. That bothers me a little bit. Yeah, I'll think about something else.

So what President Trump does in terms of the way he couches race relations and everything else, the way he speaks about race, all of those things might have bothered us a little bit if other people hadn't told us how bothered we should be. So the part that Caleb doesn't understand is the effectiveness of the criticism. The critics are very effective and they have created a package that is quite persuasive. You don't get, oh my God, Trump's a huge racist, just by what he's doing. You need other people to package it, explain it, and put a bow on it. And without that stuff you don't get the racial unrest or the violence.

And then he said — so here's another quote. Before I read this one let me give you some context. There was a time early in my blogging career when I used to try to intentionally say things that were provocative and would get people really wound up, but I would say them in a way, if I crafted them right, that they would be really wound up about something they agreed with. And it's a hard thing to do. So I was trying to say something that people would completely agree with all the parts of it and even the larger thought, but even while they're agreeing with it they would get really mad at it because I thought that would be frankly entertaining. But I didn't know that it would haunt me forever. So I'm gonna classify this as a rookie mistake.

And here's how it was expressed years later. Here's how this is expressed. So this is Caleb Ecarma again, the embarrassment to journalism, who says he's quoting me. Well let me give this to you without the controversial wording and see if you agree with the thoughts. Right? Then I'll tell you how I worded it and watch how you go from, well I agreed with everything you just said, to my God you're offensive. All right, watch it. Watch this. Watch how I do this.

So here are the things he's quoting. I'll just reword them into a way that I think you'll agree with. Adults do not treat children the way they treat other adults. That's not controversial, is it? The way you are going to treat, let's say, a six-year-old should be probably different than you would treat an adult. Wouldn't you say that would be true? Okay, so that's the first thing that he's saying is horrible, that an adult would treat a child differently than an adult.

The second thing he finds quite horrible — and I'll tell you how these are related. These are separate thoughts but I'll show you how they're related in a minute. I said that a normal nice human being would not treat someone who had a serious mental problem the way they would treat someone who didn't. So somebody who was suffering from a very major mental disability, you would not get in an argument with them, for example, because there's nothing to be gained from that. Now you would agree with that, right? If you're a nice regular human being you're not going to get in an argument with somebody who is mentally incapable and you know it. There's no debate there at all.

Third thing I said is that men will hesitate to argue with women with the same enthusiasm that they would argue with other men. Now the thinking behind this is that men typically will argue with each other almost like a sport. And you see this on Twitter every day. When men are debating men we see it almost like a sport. And then people will join my team on Twitter and like, yeah, here comes one of my teammates to make a good point, and we're making a good point over here, and look what that other team is doing. So we tend to see that as almost a sport.

However, when it goes across gender sometimes it changes. So my statement which became the controversial part is that men will hesitate to get in the same kind of an argument about anything substantive with women because the penalty is higher. So here's the controversial statement. The men on average believe that the penalty for arguing with a woman about anything important is higher than the penalty for arguing with another man. Now probably all men would agree with that. It would be hard to find a man who would disagree with that. Yeah, there's always somebody who will disagree with a thing. But as a generality, right? Now lots of people will say, well we shouldn't be like that, or I know somebody who isn't, or I'm not like that, or I try not to be like that. That's all true. I'm talking generalities.

As a generality men will pull their punches. That's a terrible phrase. Let me rephrase. Men, when they're arguing with women, will hold back. And if you talk to men and just ask them they will agree. But the trick is he probably has to be a man asking another man because if a woman asks a man if he holds back when arguing with a woman, do you know what he's going to say? Whatever you want. He's probably not going to give an honest answer.

So those are three things I said which I believe everyone would agree with. You don't talk to a child the way you talk to an adult. You don't deal with someone who has a severe mental handicap the way you would deal with somebody else. And men are hesitant to argue with full force against women because there's a bigger penalty they feel.

Now those things you don't disagree with. But here's — remember the background here was I tried to say things back then because I thought it was entertaining, maybe just for me, to say things that people would agree with but say it in a way that would make them angry at it at the same time. So now I'm going to take those three things you just agreed with and I'm going to put it in the offensive form.

So here's the offensive form. I took those three things I just said — how men treat children, mentally handicapped, and women — and then I provocatively put them in the same sentence to make everybody angry. And I said, women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone.

Now think about how offensive that is. Now people take offensiveness and they say, okay if you're offensive then you're also a misogynist, you're also a bigot. Those are really different things. I'm definitely offensive, but in this case I was offensive intentionally and I thought it was obvious why. When I wrote it I thought, okay everybody's gonna know that I'm putting these three things that don't belong together in the same sentence because when you read it it's gonna be really offensive. But you won't disagree with any of it. And you didn't, because I just went through it. You agreed with all the points. It's just that when you put it together it slightly makes you think that somehow I've conflated children and handicapped people and women even though I clearly didn't.

All right, so this was Caleb's other point. So his question was how do you possibly defend these things? And of course that's what I just did.

Now having heard these, let's run through the list for those of you who were nice enough to stay for the whole thing. Is number one: I regularly appear on Infowars. True, but out of context. I regularly appear on all the shows, CNN, etc., because I like talking to audiences especially that don't agree with me. So the first one is fake news by leaving out the context.

Second one: defended Holocaust deniers. Just 100% false. So that was just fake news. So the first two are just fake news.

Believes in the Seth Rich conspiracy. Not true, because the Seth Rich conspiracy implies I think a clear implicatio