licious.

All right, here's your question of the day. I want to see your answer in the comments. There is a startling rise in white supremacist, white nationalist violence in this country. How many people died from white supremacists in 2017? I don't have the 2018 number. But how many total people in the United States were killed by white supremacists? You can't look it up. Yeah, actually it's more fun if you just give me what you imagine the number is, your best guess. The total number of people who were killed by white supremacists in 2017. Go.

I see zero. I see 42. Neither of those are right. Now remember I'm talking about 2017. 2018 might have been 42, I don't know. The number is 18. Eighteen people. Eighteen people were killed by white supremacists in 2017. Now I don't know if 2018 and 2019 are looking worse, but let's say they are. Let's say they are. But if you're going to size it roughly, 18 for the full year of 2017.

Now let's determine how much of a problem that is. Okay, let's put it in context. So there were a total of 18 people killed by white supremacists. How many people died from just accidents, just all kinds of accidents put together in the United States in one year? A hundred and sixty-one thousand. But there were 18 people killed by white supremacists. I'm not minimizing that. We should drive that to zero. And if it's doubling or something every year, well you've got to worry about it, right? But I want to put it in context because context matters. You can never be wrong with context.

How many people died from opioids last year? 72,000. How many died from white supremacist violence? 18 in 2017. How many people died from suicide in this country in one year? 27,000. How many people died from shark attacks in one year in the, let's say in the United States, just Americans? How many Americans were attacked by sharks, not dead but attacked by sharks? About the same as the number of people killed by white supremacists. So roughly speaking, shark attacks and white supremacist violence, about the same size.

How many people died on bicycles? Bicycle deaths in the United States. I only have a 2012 figure but it's probably not that different from 2019. Not much has changed in the world of bicycles. But in 2012, total number of bicycle deaths in the United States was 722. That means that the bicycle in your garage, if I've done my math right, is 42 times more likely to kill you than a white supremacist. Let me say that again. The bicycle in your garage is 42 times more likely to kill you than a white supremacist. I know I'm playing loose with the numbers but you get the idea in terms of the scope of things.

How many people were killed by their pets in the year in the United States? How many people get killed by their own pet, typically a dog? So this is mostly dog maulings. The number of people in the United States killed by their pet per year is 20 to 30. That's just dog deaths. You can probably add in a few others for other animals. But there are more people killed by their pets every year in the United States than are killed by white supremacists.

Now let's say you're the President of the United States and people are blaming you for the rise in white nationalist, racist violence. And a reporter asks you in public, "Hey, is there a big uptick in white nationalist violence?" Should the president say it's a big, big deal or should he downplay it? That's what he did. He downplayed it.

Well, if you say it's a big deal you've just allowed the illegitimate press to say that you're the cause of massive white supremacist death because you said it's going up. Because they're the ones who have said it's your fault. So if you say it's going up and you let stand the idea that it's your fault, you've just admitted, inadvertently, you're the cause of an uptick of terrorism. Would it be smart for a president to admit something that is not true, to admit that he is the cause of terrorism? Probably not. Probably not a good play.

Have you noticed a trend in when the president talks about groups or organizations or countries? Have you noticed a trend about the way he talks about them in public, whether it's white supremacists, whether it's ISIS, whether it's any other group? Have you noticed a trend? The trend is, here's the pattern: the president minimizes. The president minimizes. The president minimizes any group he doesn't want to have more recruits.

So when the president says ISIS is, you know, they're on their way out, they're defeated, let's say that's not a hundred percent true, is it good for the president to say ISIS is basically beaten even if it's only ninety percent true? Yes, it's exactly what you want your leader to say even if it's not a hundred percent true. Because ISIS depends on some sense of success to support their recruiting. You can't do recruiting if you're a shrinking group that's being destroyed every day. You can only recruit if you're this spunky little group that the United States can't even beat.

So the president talks about ISIS, he minimizes them because that's what's good for our side. When the president talks about white nationalists and those terrorists, he minimizes them, right? Because you don't want them to have recruits.

Now what about when he talks about the crime that's coming across the border? The criminals coming across the border are not recruiting. They simply are criminals. There is no organization which is the organization of illegal immigrant criminals. There's no sense of recruiting that is important to that story. So when he says a lot of crime coming across the border, he uses hyperbole. He exaggerates the amount of crime because that's how you focus on it. That's how you take it seriously. That's how it gets funding. That's how it gets a priority.

So if you look at the president's pattern, when he's talking about MS-13, he's not improving recruiting for MS-13 by saying that he's destroying them every day. And ISIS is getting picked apart and they're being deported. But when you're talking about crime in general, he is exaggerating it because that's what gets resources to fight it. When he's talking about the white supremacists or ISIS he treats them largely the same by minimizing them because you don't want to make it look like that's something that's growing. That doesn't help you.

Now, should the president give a speech in which he speaks out against white supremacy? Should the president do that? Well I have mixed feelings. Somebody's saying no, he should not do it. The problem is that the press has sort of ruined that option. The reason the press has ruined that option is that they've set him up so it looked like he was forced to do it. If it looks like you're forced to do it, it doesn't come across as sincere. Likewise, no matter what the president said on that topic they would say, "Why did it take so long and why did you say it wrong?"

So there's probably no winning path there because they're just gonna say you should have said it earlier and you said it wrong when you finally did say it. No matter what he says they're gonna say it. And they're going to say we forced you to do it so it's not sincere.

Now between now and 2020 it might be a good idea for him to let the current situation get a little bit of distance so that it does not look like he's being forced into it. In other words, wait until the headlines have changed from white supremacist violence because you know they will change. There will be something else in the news for a while. I would give it a few months and then if I did it, so I'm gonna put it this way: if I were the president and if I wanted to come out with a strong statement against any discrimination against Muslims, if I wanted to do that I would do it as sort of a surprise. I would just wait a couple months and then when there's nothing pushing it in the news and everybody thinks that the news is no longer pushing the president, and only then when it just looks like a good idea, he would be free to do it.

Now he probably could write it so that they at least say he said the right things. That could probably be done. You know if it's a written speech you've got lots of people looking at it. You could make sure that it was the right stuff to say. But I noticed that there are people criticizing him for not being able to say nice things unless it's on the teleprompter. So you're still open to, sure he can read a speech but unless we hear it from his own words, you know, extemporaneously and feel the emotion in it, they just think he's reading the words. So he would have to match anything he read from a teleprompter. He would have to match it with a good dollop of his own off-teleprompter comments. So he'd have to say it like a human being in front of the world for anybody to buy it.

So should he do it? I think there's a path there but not right away. The sooner he does it the worse probably. But if he wants to do it before it becomes a bigger campaign theme he's got lots of time to do it.

All right, so you notice that the news will often take whichever side is the bad side for the president. So in the case of the white supremacist movement and whether it's growing or shrinking, if you say that it's doubling from last year that's very misleading because that could just be one terror attack. All it would take is one highly effective horrible terror attack and suddenly the number of white supremacist deaths, you know, people that they've killed, would double or triple. So you have to be careful when you're starting from such a tiny base.

So I think it would be fair for the president to say in terms of all of our other problems it's one of the smallest, but we're not going to treat it like the smallest because it could grow. And problems that could grow are different than problems that are static, right? So you could treat the white supremacist increase, if assuming that there is an increase, you could treat it as a high priority.

You know what else you could do? You could declare an emergency. What if the president declared an emergency? I just thought of this at the moment. I'm not sure this is a good idea. But suppose you declared an emergency to get resources to combat the rise of white supremacy. How many heads would explode if he declared an emergency? Because the other side would have to either argue that it's not a big deal or they'd have to say he did the right thing.

We know it's not obvious to me why you couldn't do that. Yes, if the country cares, if they want more resources on it. And I've heard it said, and I don't know if this is true, but I've heard it said that maybe there are not enough resources on dealing with the rise of white supremacy and that might be true. There might not be enough resources on that. So why not declare a national emergency to look into it?

Okay, all right, new topic. My understanding is that the New Jersey city of Newark is looking to do a trial, I guess it would be a test baby, of universal basic income. So one city, Newark, is looking at giving, just giving money to people who don't have an income or are below some income and just to see how it goes. What is your feeling about that?

Most of you will say, my God that's a terrible idea, giving money to people for nothing. And it's a slippery slope and pretty soon we'll be giving all of our money to everybody. That would be the worst way to look at it. All right, here's the right way to look at it. If you can test it small you should do it. That's the smartest position for just about anything. It doesn't matter if you're in corporate America. It doesn't matter if it's your personal life. It doesn't matter if it's a government. This statement is true across all realms. If you can test it small, do it.

If you're saying don't try that because it's dumb, you are the dumbest person in the conversation. Right? If you say that testing something small is dumb, you're the dumbest person in the conversation. Testing things small is pretty much always a good idea because you're limiting what could go wrong. You're testing it small. So when you see somebody testing something that you think is a terrible idea, your first impression should be good. There are only two things that could come out of this. Either I'm wrong, which would be good news because we found a new t