Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - A Friendly Chat with Michael Malice

All Episodes

Previous Next

June 22, 2021 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:12:10

A Friendly Chat with Michael Malice

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi folks, I'm joined by Michael Malice, author, podcaster, notorious internet anarchist and troublemaker, but in the best way possible.
	Michael, thanks for joining me so much.
	Well, also in the worst way possible.
	I run the gamut.
	Well, yeah, but you know, I've spoken to all sorts of people and you're by far not the worst.
	So that's fair.
	So anyway, right.
	So let's talk about your new book, which I understand is a handbook of curated essays for anarchists.
	Yeah.
	Well, no, it's for non-anarchists.
	The whole point is the anarchist handbook, it's anarchisthandbook.com.
	If people want the short link, you could get it in the UK and everywhere.
	People have been bugging me for a long time about, you know, what's the anarchist answer to this?
	What's the anarchist answer to that?
	I've been probably the main voice legitimizing anarchists.
	The other half's about children and how we can make them into drug mules legally.
	So people always been asking you questions and for a long time it was kind of frustrating to me.
	And then one of my supporters, Marla, said, look, you know, there was this book written in the 60s called Patterns of Anarchy.
	And she said, why don't you do the audio book of that?
	And I go, well, hold on a second.
	Why don't I just do it from scratch?
	And for people interested in this worldview, this is everything you would pretty much need to know as a starting kit, including all the historical anarchist people like Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Kropotkin, Proudhon, but also the more contemporary anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman.
	And which sphere of anarchy would you say more attracts you?
	I like it all.
	I call myself an anarchist without adjectives.
	I think it's very foolish for people in any political persuasion to think that they can't learn things from their erstwhile political opponents.
	At the very least, you can learn strategies or what not to do.
	A lot of these essays are, some of them are explicit calls for violence, something I think is a horrible mistake, just simply from a strategic point of view, let alone the immoral perspective.
	So it runs the gamut.
	And, you know, these are real, real heavy hitters.
	And I think it also speaks to something you and I are very concerned about, which is what is presented in corporate media as our political choices are often very strictly delineated.
	And anything that is outside this kind of set of what is acceptable ideas, you know, which is popularly called the Overton window, are pretty much trained.
	People are trained from early age in school to pretty much be able to dismiss them out of hand.
	And no one thinks this, so it's not worth experimenting or exploring further.
	And that leads to A, a great mechanism for social control and a democracy.
	But B, it's very, very limiting when you're talking about ideas to say that these entire schools of thought are completely off the table, when in fact, in my view, they are the ones that most explain and predict the reality.
	Yeah, I mean, I've struggled to try and explain to people why I read radical left-wing authors.
	And I mean, not just from a strategic point of view, which obviously know your enemy as well as you know yourself and you'll never lose the thousand battles, whatever Sun Tzu said.
	But it's also, I do think there is an aspect of the human existence that each particular political persuasion is actually capturing a slither of, you know, it's a slice of.
	And so if you want the sort of a more rounded view of what a person is, then you've got to read around.
	You've got to know what they think.
	But I think that what you're saying recently, though, is resonating with people more than more than, say, a few years ago, because of the overwhelming statism that we're seeing at the moment.
	And I've never, you know, I'm not an anarchist.
	I do think that there probably should be a state for a number of reasons, et cetera, et cetera.
	But I'm not someone I'd call like a status as in.
	I'm very limited government over there kind of guy.
	Yeah, it's got to exist.
	Theoretically, not near me and leave me alone, you know, and I'll pay as few taxes as possible, please, because I am starting to come around to the idea that maybe it is a form of theft.
	But that's because they keep going up.
	But like, what's going on from the anarchist point of view?
	Because this looks pretty terrible, doesn't it?
	Well, it's, you know, there's things like costs and benefits.
	Thomas Soule is very good on this when he talks about when someone proposes an idea, like at what cost and what are the alternatives, right?
	So, you know, speaking earlier about you reading far-left people, I think there is such a desire or a tendency in our political discourse to have binary political thinking to the point of, you know, let's put in UK terms, in order to get someone to vote for the Tories, all I effectively have to do is to make labor be radioactive or vice versa.
	And then it's a binary choice.
	Well, if you're not going to pick one, then by default, you have the other.
	So to reject that entirely, and I think I've seen this in many people, I was on Christopher Williamson's podcast, Modern Wisdom, and I was talking about how the Tories, Boris Johnson, are winning very heavily in the UK, especially in historical terms.
	And a lot of people were attacking, like, oh, blah, blah, blah, they're not conservatives.
	They're not winning.
	And it's just like, I'm not saying that they're good or bad.
	I'm just saying in terms of numbers, they're reaching and labor is doing unprecedentedly poor.
	But the point is, to those people, it's like, wait, wait, you're not being represented, and I take you at your word by the center-right party.
	You certainly aren't represented by the center-left party in the UK.
	Am I supposed to say that, well, you're SOL, just because a lot of people don't happen to agree with you, you have to live their life on their terms?
	Maybe that is true in terms of might makes right.
	You know, if you have the numbers, you can certainly impose your will on a smaller population.
	But in terms of a moral perspective, the idea that morally, now that it is somehow incumbent on you to accept the will of the majority as read through the tea leaves by Boris Johnson, the Tories, or Gordon Brown, or any of these people, that from an anarchist perspective is nonsensical.
	And if, and not just incorrect, but literally nonsensical.
	How can someone represent me and then tell me what I think?
	It doesn't follow.
	And it could be just reduced the anarchist worldview in one sentence.
	You do not speak for me.
	And everything else is just an application of that.
	Because, yeah, I mean, so I totally agree.
	So I can extrapolate all of the sort of anarchist positions that are very much similar to the sort of constitutionalist positions when it comes to things like lockdowns and property rights and things like that.
	As in what has happened has been an absolute catastrophe for the idea of limited government, hasn't it?
	Oh, I mean, the idea of limited government to me is a utopian fantasy that can never come true.
	We in this state, we have had you guys have a kind of an oral constitution that's a history of British traditions.
	It's not really codified, which is very confusing for Americans because the big kind of innovation we had in 1789 was instead of the Constitution being kind of ambiguous and just historical, to have it codified in writing.
	Well, there are many things in the Constitution that are as clear-cut as possible.
	And still, when you have lawyers who are all politicians and you have lawyers who are Supreme Court justice and you have lawyers who are presidents, with the exception of Trump to some extent, they're going to be able to, the job of a lawyer is to look at what's written in black and white and tell you that it's red.
	So then when they say there shall be no law, they'll be like, well, they don't mean no law.
	It's just, well, they do mean no law means low law.
	And this isn't a recent phenomenon.
	In 1790s, I mean, when George Washington was still alive, they were passing laws, the sedition acts in the states to make it a felony for journalists to criticize the government and people were imprisoned over this.
	So this claim that America's doctors for doctors to teach birth control in the late 1800s was a felony as well to their own patients.
	So this claim that America has had this historic love of free speech is a complete ahistorical fallacy.
	It's something that is promulgated by corporate media to kind of have this rah-rah Americanism.
	And in Britain, there's not even, I don't think, a pretense that free speech as an absolute is held as a high value.
	I mean, the attacks on free speech absolute.
	I mean, we don't even have moderate amounts of free speech.
	Right.
	But so, I mean, from an absolute perspective, as you say that, yeah, America isn't either a free speech absolute paradise.
	But I mean, it's light years ahead of the rest of the world, isn't it, at least?
	Well, right.
	But, but if you're pointing out that, right.
	So that's my whole point.
	This is why limited government versus anarchism.
	Anarchism is much more coherent.
	Because if you're saying nowhere on earth under state edicts is free speech anywhere close to an absolute America comes close.
	It's like, well, I could think of a place that comes closer.
	Now, the question is, all right, this is nonsensical.
	You're not going to ever persuade a majority of your countrymen to agree with you.
	You and I both and everyone else watching this had a lot of data over the last couple of years.
	And a lot of very bad people have a lot of useful data about how much people are willing to put up with and how submissive they are.
	And what we found unambiguously is H.L. Mencken, the great newspaper man in the early 20th century, his quote has been demonstrated to be beyond true, which is the average man does not want to be free.
	He simply wants to be safe.
	Anarchism is not in certain schools of anarchism, at least the schools that I most agree with, is not a pro-democracy position.
	It is not the idea that my rights are up for discussion, let alone a vote.
	So the question is, what mechanisms can you put in place in order to make sure the majority, either via the state or any large number of people, either via the state or through private action, can impose their will on you?
	And if you push comes to shove, my answer, besides education, is technology, because technology allows for asymmetry.
	And of course, technology can be used in nefarious ways, but it is a very good mechanism to, for example, if I have some kind of, if my house was made out of diamonds, right, that makes it impossible for someone to break in.
	If I have technology that protects speech, that I can't be censored in a practical sense, that is a far better argument for free speech than me sitting down with my neighbor and telling them why it's important that I read books that they find abhorrent.
	Yeah, please don't oppress me.
	Well, or how.
	Right, yeah, yeah.
	How about I just make it so you can't oppress me?
	Right.
	That's a much more reliable position.
	But I agree with you.
	And it's not even out of any kind of animus against anarchy or anything like that.
	It's like we, like the libertarian side of politics, just are total fringe lunatics now.
	I mean, look at, I just can't get over just how essentially any vestige of a British constitution has been abolished by Boris saying, sorry, you've all got to shut up shop now because I say so.
	I mean, that's terrible.
	Lockdowns in America as well.
	It's even more absurd.
	And the entire world followed the Chinese Communist Party's idea.
	Why did they do that, Michael?
	Why?
	If push comes to shove, I would say that we have been trained since kindergarten to, and the whole point of especially government schooling is to project the message to children and later by adults, therefore by default and inertia, that the person in the front of the room is who should be obeyed and listened to, that that person is correctly there to judge how smart you are and how much you understand things, that they are superior to you, and that everyone else is kind of equally and subordinate to them.
	If you extrapolate that to adulthood, and you and I and everyone listening has seen this repeatedly over the last year and a half, you will have a population who take orders from the person on the screen and they will smile and nod and repeat it.
	And they will tell you with a straight face they're doing this because of science, which they're not capable of understanding.
	And if they were, they have no interest in learning about.
	So what corporate media does, which is far more nefarious than the state, is simultaneously, it will tell the audience, these are the issues you should be concerned about today.
	And, well, you just learned about it five seconds ago.
	Am I supposed to do about it?
	Here's how you should think about it.
	So, very quickly, it gives the person who is often marginally intelligent both the concerns of the day, just kind of like a fashion issue, but also the answers that not only do they look sympathetic and empathetic, they also simultaneously seem informed.
	And as you and I and other people have noticed, if you go kind of to offices, to restaurants, you know, to movie theaters, when that happens again, and you hear how these people talk, you realize they are parroting, and I'm using that word advisedly, almost verbatim, if not verbatim, the people that they saw on their own screens, whether it be computer monitors, their phone, or their televisions.
	And when you have that epiphany, you realize this kind of conservative model that we're just going to teach the population to respect people's rights and in 100 years we're going to be free is really not a tenable one.
	I think that's a really good way of summarizing, actually.
	Even if you just change the inputs, the fact that they're programmed remains, doesn't it?
	The thing is, though, right, this puts me in mind of certain Californian terrorists, in fact, who basically said that this was the problem with industrial society.
	And so it seems that the only solution would be rather radical to this problem.
	And one that I think the general population would reject on the basis of it being too radical.
	So we obviously don't want to go, you know, like down that sort of road.
	So what can we do to start, I suppose, trying to at least make them be critical of the things that are happening to them?
	Like, how do you best sort of, you know, get into a sort of person's worldview and open it up?
	Oh, I have no interest in reaching the general population.
	The general population are the people who would have been Nazis in the 40s and they would have been, you know, jihadis or sympathetic in some of these other countries 20 years ago.
	So they will always follow the ruling class.
	And Emma Goldman, who was a hardcore leftist, she was deported from the United States for her radical views.
	Their essay in here by her called Majorities, Minorities, which is from 1910, I believe, her quote is, the majority cannot reason.
	And I completely agree with her.
	If you realize that there's no getting through these people, but that's neither a plus nor a minus.
	It just means that since they're going to follow the lead, you need to be the leaders.
	And enough of them are just going to jump on that bandwagon.
	And you see this, you know, in politics.
	Like one year, Obama is the guy we want to be president.
	The other year, Donald Trump is the one that we want to be president.
	These are such huge variances in terms of what people want.
	It's not a very coherent ideology at best.
	That's fair.
	So, and just one more thing.
	I think the story of history is very often the story of elites.
	And the elites kind of define what is acceptable discourse and what is not.
	So, and I think this is one of the issues why they despised Trump so much over here and Farage over there, because Naja Farage said, all right, we're going to start talking about leaving the EU.
	Now, this is, that's not even on the table.
	We had this discussion in the 70s.
	We're going to be part of the European community.
	This is some kind of, we're not going backwards, you know, Neanderthal.
	And come on, no right-thinking person thinks this is something even worth discussing.
	And they're right.
	In their definition of right-thinking, no right-thinking person would have thought Brexit's even worthy considering as a hypothesis.
	So, what you have when you with the beauty of radicalism of any kind, you see in America with left-wing radicalism, they are having everyone in America now have an opinion about defunding the police.
	So, the left is very good at even if they don't get what they want, now they're forcing everyone to think about and discuss things on their terms.
	So, I'm saying there's no reason other types of radicals, whether left or right, can't also force the issues in that way.
	And even if you're not necessarily getting what it is that you want, you're at least framing the discourse and putting it in a positive direction.
	And there's lots of examples like this.
	My current, I have a couple of things that I think people should be pushing forward.
	One is a bill to expel California from the Union from the United States.
	Right.
	Two, let's.
	We want to do the same with Scotland here, in fact.
	I like Nicola.
	I like her weird haircut.
	She's a communist.
	I know, but I think she's a badass.
	I mean, she's a tough lady.
	You have to give her credit, don't you?
	I don't think I am obligated to, actually.
	Okay.
	Artists crossing and it has to buy language.
	Educate me.
	I'm being serious.
	Am I wrong to get the impression that she's actually a very effective leader for her cause?
	Yeah, because they aren't getting independence and it's not going to happen anytime soon, in my opinion.
	So I think.
	Yeah, but that's what they would have said about Brexit.
	Well, the thing is, in 2014, we had the vote and the vote was no.
	So the fact that she just keeps pushing for it constantly, it was agreed at the time to be a once-in-a-generation thing.
	So we know it's not going to happen for a long time.
	So really, she's just making a lot of political hay out of, you know, oh, England is oppressing us.
	We can leave.
	We should leave.
	It's not really going to happen, though, I don't think.
	Yeah, but Carl, this is my point.
	It's very useful to have people be making political hay because even if she's not getting independence, now she's in a position to demand increased evolution and all sorts of other things.
	So this is my point.
	It's like, yeah, she lost the vote.
	And look, the SNP got all the seats in Scotland at one point.
	She's now forcing meetings with Boris Johnson and forcing the agenda.
	That's how you win is even if you're losing that one vote is to still keep pushing the envelope.
	And I think there's a lot of people who really have an issue.
	And I don't, I'm not saying this about you at all, where they are kind of averse to learning the tactics of those who they would regard as their opponents.
	And it's like, look at the tactics that win.
	And if even if they don't apply to you, ask yourself, well, why is this person winning?
	Why is this person picking up seats?
	And how can I apply this?
	Or is this just too beyond the pale and I would never act in this way?
	But I think that's the way to approach politics.
	No, I think you're exactly right.
	It all comes down to the framing and the language used for the conversation.
	And this is something you've noticed yourself, obviously, and talk about regularly, because it's how they win.
	I mean, how have we come to the point where we're defining what woman means as a political statement?
	You know, that can only be because the left has dominated the conversation this far, right?
	Well, sure.
	And also that's a function of, again, schooling is because you're just kind of taught to be submissive and receive orders in terms of how to communicate, how to use language and so on and so forth.
	There's something even more useful that, you know, what you're talking about, the trans issue, which is the left is very, very good at constantly changing language.
	And this frustrates conservatives who take it at face value.
	But what that does is it very quickly identifies whether the speaker is part of the team or whether they're not.
	So if you're constantly sending out new updates in terms of discourse and the terms you use, on site, you will be able to know pronouns in the bio is a good example.
	On site, you're going to be able to know, is this person part of my tribe or are they hostile to my tribe?
	And then once you have, once it becomes normalized within that one tribe, then they are in a position to flip that switch and make it mandatory for everyone.
	And you and I both know perfectly well that within 18 months, pronouns in the bio are going to be mandatory.
	They're going to have a field that you're going to have to fill out.
	And this kind of creeping model, whether right or left, is something that people should study and figure out and reverse engineer.
	So what can conservatives do then to change the framing of the conversation that the left wants to have about certain subjects?
	Like, what do you think they should do to combat this?
	Because I'm sick of watching the conservative lose.
	I mean, I never like consider myself like a doctrinaire conservative or anything, but I feel myself much more inclined to support them because it seems that they're not saying crazy things, whereas the left are obviously saying crazy things.
	I think by definition, I can't speak to the British conservatives.
	I don't know them as well as the American Conservatives.
	I think conservatives are not capable of winning simply because of their strategy.
	American conservatism historically has been reacting to whatever the left is doing at the moment, right?
	So the left will tell you, let's take the transgender issue, right?
	Not only was it that everyone needs to be caring about transgender people right now.
	Okay, fine.
	I can wrap my head around that very easily.
	This is a fringe group that hasn't been receiving recognition, but specifically it's transgender bathrooms was the issue.
	So unless you are, as of five minutes ago, concerned about transgender rights, specifically in regard to transgender bathrooms, you could be read out of polite society.
	And then you have conservatives screaming, well, you know, let them pee in the bushes, or I don't care what bathroom they use.
	But immediately, your entire discourse is a function of what they're positing as not only the issue, but the specific angle of what that issue is.
	It's not about birth certificates.
	It's not about your will, your driver's license where you want to change your gender.
	These are all issues that transgender people are concerned about.
	No, it specifically has to be about bathrooms.
	And this kind of playing on the left's field is something conservatives have done for decades.
	And this is why I'm an anarchist and not a conservative because I think there's no possibility of conservative victory because they wouldn't even know what that looks like.
	That's a great point.
	I always find that it's frustrating watching conservatives.
	I can literally hear the leftist language coming out of their mouth.
	What does this mean to you as a conservative?
	I mean, what do conservative metaphysics look like?
	I keep asking like conservative thinkers.
	So how do you see the world?
	What is the proper place of X, Y, and Z?
	You know, whatever issue it is.
	And none of them can give me like the effervescence of conservatism, the thing that the upward motion that pushes out and creates, you know.
	And so it's no wonder they've literally just been resisting the left for the last 50 years and losing ground the whole time.
	But the thing is, who else is there?
	Like, who else is going to resist them?
	Like, what else is there?
	Well, I can give you, hold on a second.
	We've got this right here.
	There you go.
	I mean, I mean, is a large voting block.
	It doesn't need to be a large voting block because if you look at how many people there are who advocate defunding the police, it's always going to be a small number.
	It's who has the ear of those in power, number one.
	Number two is, I think if you read my previous, people read my previous book, The New Right, here in the States, conservatism was revived by William F. Buckley in the page of the National Review, which is my favorite paleontology magazine.
	The National Review's slogan is standing athwart history, yelling, stop.
	So by your own motto, that's their slogan.
	It's been their slogan for decades.
	Well, I'm about to change that.
	So by their own admission, their own chosen, this is how I want you to look at me, you're going to have like Jeremy Corbyn-style Stalinism parading down, you know, Leicester Square or wherever you guys have parades.
	I'm sorry.
	And you have Buckley yelling, stop, stop.
	And Jeremy Corbin and Diane Abbott are like, oh, cool, cool.
	And they just keep, and it's a scream of impotence.
	And to me, as someone who does admire the anarchists, even the real radical revolutionaries, if you're starting off with, we're just going to stand here yelling, you're like a housewife.
	Like, what you are not in a position to actually stop anything by your own admission.
	It's unconscionable.
	No, no, I totally agree with you.
	And one of the points that I keep making about the conservatives in the UK is that they literally did nothing.
	They just stood still and their vote share just ballooned because the left started going wild and everyone's like, okay, enough of that.
	So here, let me just jump in quickly.
	The whole thing with the red wall with the recent UK by-elections, those were people who went to the Tories because they had been Labor constituents who had voted for Brexit.
	Brexit wasn't a Tory victory.
	The Tory party was at the very least split.
	So not only have they done nothing, now they're reaping the benefits of a policy they themselves opposed.
	That's how bad they are.
	The only way they can win votes is even in their own doing.
	If you went back in time and told Teresa May, right?
	Just if you guys, I had this tweet and I stand by.
	I stand by it.
	No matter how bad of a day you're having right now, realize that somewhere at this very moment, Theresa May is miserable.
	Horrible, horrible woman.
	The point being, the data shows that if the Tories had supported Brexit, they would have been able to make major labor gains in these areas that have been historically pro-labor councils.
	And yet that still won't get through them.
	Like there's no hope with these people.
	I just, I can't understand how they keep winning and how they don't understand why they're winning.
	It's the most bizarre thing in the world.
	Like they didn't make any decisions.
	They haven't made any movements.
	Actually, they've made a couple, but they've always been unpopular in the press.
	And so the Tories never promote their own motions against the left, even though these are radically popular policies.
	Like they don't seem to understand.
	Do some polling.
	I don't know what the hell's wrong with you.
	You know, win for once for the love of God.
	Like you've been given everything.
	Unlike in America, for example.
	Yeah.
	So in fact, let's since since we're here, how's uh what's it like living under the most popular president of all time?
	I know I'm a fan.
	I'll tell you, I'll tell you why.
	I'll tell you what it's like.
	As someone who is a fan of Camus and his philosophy of the absurd, for four years, you had the Republicans saying, waking up, people in power wondering what the F did the president say now, right?
	They just got to cringe and, you know, what's his latest nuke that he fired off.
	But we're having that kind of now.
	I mean, Joe Biden, like, he can't even talk.
	He was clowned at the G7.
	It's going to get much, much worse.
	And let me remind the audience, because this is something that maybe the BBC doesn't like talking about that much.
	Hunter Biden hooked up with his dead brother's widow.
	Like the level of craziness in that Biden family that's going to come out over the next couple of years.
	And here's the thing.
	He's completely a product of the Democratic machine.
	More power to him.
	He's been a party operator for many years.
	And I really think right now, just happened as we record this morning.
	They have a 50-50 split in the Senate.
	When you have that, you're completely deadlocked.
	And they were just having the Voting Rights Act, which is, come on, this is the big Democratic issue.
	We're going to massively increase voting.
	We're never going to lose an election again.
	That just got shot down this morning.
	And now they're kind of just like in a circular firing squad being like, well, let's go back and change the filibuster, even though some of the Democratic sender says they're not going to change the filibuster.
	So it's a really hilarious status quo because they had promised their base.
	Once we get rid of Trump, we can continue our progressive agenda and restore things to normality or normalcy, whichever you prefer.
	And having got rid of him, they don't have the numbers.
	And it's like, wait, guys, it's June.
	Like, what do we have to show for it?
	It's like, well, we got some more kids in these cages that we hated about seven months ago.
	So it's really funny stuff.
	The price of petrols tripled, if that helps.
	I mean, so like, just honestly, from the perspective of an outsider looking in, like, if gas prices here tripled in a matter of a month or so, there'd probably be hell to pay because people, this is something that actually really affects people.
	And I saw in California the day, well, over $7 or something like this.
	And I'm just like from $2 under Trump.
	And I'm just like, okay, like at what point is there going to be some sort of, I don't know, at least public uprising, like unrest, outcry?
	Aren't people bothered?
	Aren't the poor people in America bothered by this?
	There's two things.
	First of all, not only is it going to affect your pocketbook on a day-to-day level, it's also going to extrapolate because now the costs of producing everything become much more expensive.
	So you're going to have increases of prices across the board because those factories have to run, those trucks have to deliver the goods.
	All that's cost gasoline.
	And a tripling of the cost of one of the factors of production is not a minor issue, especially when gasoline is so integral to so much of industry.
	However, there is a little bit of hope because, you know, this is going to be something I discussed in my forthcoming book.
	This happened with you guys in the Winter Hour Discontent in the 70s, where there was no gas, electricity was being rationed.
	And Thatcher very brilliantly teamed up with Saatchi and Saatchi.
	And in 78, the slogan was labor isn't working.
	So when you do have that kind of binary system, if one party really drops the ball, it's to the benefit of the other party.
	But the anarchist perspective is, as you just pointed out, okay, now it's going to be to the benefit of the Tories or the Republicans.
	What are they going to do with it?
	Absolutely nothing.
	Yeah.
	And it's really frustrating because, I mean, like, even from an anarchist position, I would think that the Republicans are a much more tolerable alternative to the Democrats, right?
	Because I mean, the Democrats.
	Not necessarily.
	But the Democrats are full-on socialists at this point.
	The Republicans have the NSA.
	The Republicans were backing up.
	I mean, there's lots of the position of what it would be best for an anarchist.
	But what I mean is just as, you know, if you've got a scale, the Democrats must be far off on the scale, though, right?
	No, because here I'll give you one, I'll give you an answer that you're going to agree with as well.
	The best measure of how oppressive a government is, you know, because a lot of this is subjective, is the size of the budget.
	As budgets increase, as government power increases, as budgets shrink, government power decreases.
	This is not a particularly controversial statement.
	If you look at how budgets went under the Republicans, they had two years with the Republican House and Senate and President Trump.
	They didn't lower their idea of shrinking the government one cent never even entered their heads.
	And nowadays in America, a conservative will tell you, a conservative is someone who will tell you that we need to return to Barack Obama's budgets.
	I mean, but this is their mindset.
	And it's just kind of insane that what you were kicking and screaming about in 2010, now you regard as a utopian idea that fantasy that we can never return to.
	And this is why you are all useless.
	No, you're completely right.
	The conservatives over here are no better either.
	Like Rishi Sunak was on TV recently claiming I'm a fiscal conservative.
	And even though he's been spending like Joe Biden, and when asked on how he was a fiscal conservative, essentially the distinction was, I at least recognize it isn't my money.
	Oh, oh, that's brilliant.
	I'm just going to, you're going to spend it like there's no tomorrow, but at least it's not your money.
	It's okay, brilliant, amazing.
	But okay, like, so how long do you think that Biden is going to end up reigning for?
	Well, I mean, his dog just recently passed away.
	And we know for a fact that any dog he gets now, according to the actual actuarial tables, will have a longer projected lifespan than the current president.
	So I think we're going to see President Kamal Harris in the very near future.
	And I would encourage everyone to point out to their Facebook friend that for the first time in history, we have a female vice president in America, and already she's an international screw-up.
	So, and then just turn off the notifications and watch the hilarity ensue.
	The woman just leave.
	Just leave.
	All right, deuces.
	I'm off to Mexico.
	The woman is a complete calamity.
	Couldn't even get votes as a mixed race female within her own party during the primaries, which her sister was running her presidential campaign.
	It's going to be absolutely gloriously hilarious.
	As, for example, I'm just imagining this: there's a Veterans Day, and there's some memorial to commemorate those who've lost their lives in terms of service.
	And for some bizarre reason, she just starts cracking herself up on the dais.
	This is going to, it's going to happen.
	As much as people cringed at Theresa May dancing in Africa and she kind of tried to make a joke about it, but you wanted to kill yourself even more.
	Watching her as president just crack up in her bizarre, when they asked her, Oh, have you gone to the border?
	She said, Well, I haven't gone to Europe either.
	It's like, this is not a nimble mind.
	But the weird laughter is kind of jokerish, though, isn't it?
	It's like it just makes her look hollow and there's just a facade.
	She's like a special needs Harley Quinn.
	It's like, why are you laughing?
	That's a really good question.
	It's like, what are you?
	And it's not just laughing.
	It's cackling as well.
	It's a weird cackler.
	It's like, what are you doing?
	You know, at least, at least Mike Pence, he wasn't interesting, but at least he would reel off a boring politician answer that deliberately designed to essentially turn your brain off.
	So you just think and you go, yeah, okay, he said something Republican.
	Okay.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But she can't even do that for the Democrats.
	It's wild.
	She's going to be a great president.
	I can't wait.
	I mean, she's just going to look so legitimate, isn't she?
	That's the thing.
	But we probably can't talk about that area of things.
	It's going to be wonderful.
	All I'm saying is hundreds of thousands of ballots dumped at 4 a.m. is what democracies do.
	It's exactly correct.
	If you read the last essay in my book, The Anarchist Handbook, which is why I say why I won't vote this year, I wrote it.
	The point I make, and this is the anarchist perspective, is politicians are going to do what they want regardless of what the voters want.
	We see it time and time again.
	There were how many calls over there to just basically overthrow Brexit, even though that had been the it was a referendum.
	This wasn't ambiguous.
	Campaigns, active campaigns.
	And you Gina Miller, there was the Independent, there was the just all of the Liberal Democrats, and of course the Labour Party as well, even though the spirit of the Labour Party wasn't really against Brexit.
	It was embarrassing to watch, frankly.
	And yeah.
	And this is where I had my fun at it.
	I tweeted at Joe Swindon, who was the leader of the Lib Dems, who lost her seat.
	I go, given the calamities of Teresa May, who was Corbin's number two, Angela something who they fired?
	No, no, that was Stalmas, Angela Rayner.
	It was the last.
	It was some girl who they were running.
	She was competing with Sir Kir and she lost.
	I forget her name.
	She was a hardcore leftist.
	Oh, no, it might have been Angela Rayna.
	I'd have to change it.
	It was Angela.
	Yeah.
	So I said, given the disastrous leadership of Theresa May, Angela Rayner, and you within your own party, aren't you scared you're giving a bad message to all the young women who are trying to get into politics?
	So one of the things that I enjoy doing is to make it as emotionally expensive for these wretched people to try to impose their will and to put forth their agenda.
	And I think that is happening on an increasing level.
	Trump did a great job in teaching people that these should be the subject of disgust, ridicule, and contempt as opposed to rarefied individuals who are worthy of our respect and a conversation.
	And I think that breakdown of political discourse, especially an increasing contempt, hostility, and rage towards the political class, is something that's going to be very effective in the short term.
	Tell me why.
	Well, because sure, it's a lot harder to impose your vision, whether it's through healthcare policy, war, education, when a significant percentage of the population regards your views and you personally as a laughingstock and as a joke and as just basically a clown.
	And when you try to kind of force your agenda, then you're going to have issues with non-compliance.
	All these things, you know, Thatcher very famously said the problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other people's money.
	All these things add up in terms of the psychological and emotional and also literal cost of having these government edicts.
	And at a certain point, things are going to be like, all right, we can't do this anymore.
	That's what happened with prohibition here in the States in the 1920s.
	Selling alcohol was illegal, but there was so little compliance and it got very, very violent.
	At a certain point, they're like, okay, we can't just do this.
	And I think that is the model, as opposed to trying to tell people to vote themselves free, which is a nonsensical concept.
	So I hate to be that guy.
	I guess I would be, I would be remiss if I didn't point out at the beginning that you said there was no point talking to the wider audience for sure.
	Right.
	Because so that I, right.
	So the vast majority of people are useless.
	I'm talking about the people who are the weaponized autists, which make up the vast majority of our audiences.
	The internet vanguard.
	Yes.
	But Carl, what we were just talking about before we started is because of them, my book was the top non-selling book on Amazon for a full day.
	This wasn't just some random spike.
	So the fact as well, people don't realize just how big a like that has a huge impact in the left-wing ecosphere when like a dissident voice is number one.
	And it happens every time, like Lauren Southern or whoever else, you know, write their books.
	It drives them wild.
	They hate it.
	Right.
	Because the only way they can put forth their chicanery is if they have close to monopoly over the microphone.
	So if there are different schools of thought that are part of political discourse, it becomes that much harder to cobble together any kind of ruling majority.
	And you're seeing it in Europe, country after country.
	You saw it in Italy.
	You saw it in the Swedish elections.
	You saw it in Belgium, where I think they took over a year to form a coalition.
	Czech right now has like 12 parties or 10 in their parliament.
	So this and the Germans, for the first time, the two major parties aren't going to be able to get a majority between them, according to the latest polls.
	And you might have a three-party German government for the first time in history.
	So things like this, you know, you go to the store and you could buy Coke or Diet Coke or caffeine-free Diet Coke, and then you have Pepsi and all these other things.
	You have all these choices at the supermarket, and then you go to government, which is far more important than what brand of soda you drink, and you're told it's got to be Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn.
	The hell with that.
	I want my views and I want to live my life.
	And you setting up this false alternative is completely unacceptable.
	I'm not playing this game.
	Especially when it turns into obvious staged theater as well.
	Yes.
	Like it's even more like if it was a genuine thing and we were actually kind of genuinely involved in some way, I would be okay, well, that's fine.
	You know, I might not like it, but I can deal with it.
	But when it's so obviously like Plato's Cave, you know, the shadows on the wall, I'm genuinely sick of it.
	But right.
	So I suppose we should talk about the left because they're everywhere.
	And it drives me nuts that they're everywhere.
	They're in everything.
	What can be done?
	What do you think anyone can do?
	Because to resist the march of NGOs and experts shutting down our societies and banning tobacco or booze or whatever it is tomorrow.
	Like what can be done?
	Well, I think there's several things that can be done.
	One is to increase this kind of concept because even a small population can enormously punch above their weights if they're playing defense.
	I mean, the most extreme examples are things like Vietnam and Afghanistan, right?
	When you have a small, uneducated, barely armed minority, they can still do a great job of holding their own.
	So the more people regard these views as illegitimate, the more these people are, as people are taught they're illegitimate, the more people are willing to kind of put monkey wrenches, even in terms of just trolling and just being antagonistic, the harder it is to put forth these agendas.
	And it's just, it's just a function of cost and price.
	It's the same thing as like if you have a thing of milk, if it's a dollar, you know, everyone's going to buy it, then it becomes $1.50.
	Fewer people are going to buy it at $100.
	No one's buying milk.
	They're like, all right, let's look for alternatives.
	So as it becomes more and more costly, both in terms of psychology, emotion, technology, and finances to put forth these ideas, at a certain point, they're just going to not be able to be able, they're not going to be in a position to do it.
	And that is kind of my medium-term strategy.
	Okay.
	Is it worth trying to deprogram leftist activists?
	Worth is a very weird word in this context.
	There are lots of people on the left who are very red-pilled, who understand.
	I mean, if you talk to the hardcore leftists about Hillary Clinton, they hate her more than you and I do.
	Oh, yeah.
	And people on the right don't appreciate this.
	No, they really, really, really hate her.
	They view her as someone who took their vision, their movement, and co-opted it and they're right into this corporate warmonger machine, which is precisely what they're supposed to be against.
	Yeah.
	Rainbow bombs with a Black Lives Matter fish.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Stunning and brave.
	There is, I'm not going to tell anyone how to use their time, but if you're going for a lot of people just to write off the left, I think that's complete nonsensical.
	Historically, the many people on the left have been much more effective at defeating other aspects of the left than the right has been.
	That's fair.
	But I think that there are a lot of people who actually have problems, real problems with their sort of interpersonal relationships now, which is true, because of the way that the left has simply polarized society.
	So like, have you got any advice to people about talking to, you know, the left-wing cousin or something that's just got back from university and is now spouting all the nonsense at them?
	Like, what is there anything they can do?
	I have no advice.
	I think I'll tell you what.
	That person's lost.
	Just don't worry about it.
	They are lost.
	Because if you have someone who, let's use a kind of more tongue-in-cheek example.
	If you have your cousin who discovered CrossFit, I don't know if you guys have CrossFit over there.
	It's a fitness.
	It's this gay kind of fitness cult.
	And now they're talking about CrossFit every five minutes.
	You're not going to be able to get them to not talk about CrossFit because this is for these people that you're talking about who went to university and came back as a swamp walrus.
	This is now their identity.
	Right.
	So it's not just something that they have a hobby and are interested.
	Like if you're into football, whatever, I'm an American.
	You start talking about Ronaldo or whoever these people are.
	I don't care.
	You're fine with it.
	You're like, okay, he doesn't care about football.
	But if this is something that you were taught at university is the most important thing.
	And the contemporary progressivism in many ways, like historical progressivism, is a totalitarian ideology which regards everything within its purview, including what you do in the bedroom, including video games, including science fiction.
	All these places you go to escape the mundanity of regular life.
	40,000 communities are suddenly talking about female space marines.
	Yeah, right.
	But that's the thing.
	It has to spread its tentacles everywhere.
	It has to be comprehensive because that is how that ideology works.
	I don't know what I would tell that person to.
	It depends on how much you like.
	I mean, there's certainly going to be easy to get them to be upset.
	Well, yeah.
	That's something that gives you pleasure, more power to you.
	I mean, try and talk them back into being human.
	This is the advice I'd give.
	Come at that conversation appreciating that this, what they're spouting now, has become their identity and also has become their status.
	So you're asking them to give up something both that matters to them on an emotional and values level, but also from an evolutionary psychology level.
	So unless you appreciate that's the framework you're working in, you're going to be beating your head up against the wall.
	Now, if you do understand that's your framework, you can approach the situation a little bit differently and maybe you'll be able to reach some of them.
	But at the same time, it's like when you're dating, right?
	Those first few months of that honeymoon period, you're all excited.
	It's really going to be hard to talk them out.
	But after they've been in a while and wait until they themselves have been targeted and they've been marginalized, then you could be like, you know, you don't have to live like this.
	And then they're going to be a little bit more receptive to a lifeboat from some other worldview, in my opinion.
	That's a great point, actually.
	I never thought about telling people to wait.
	Yes.
	You are absolutely right.
	Wait till they've been targeted.
	Because, I mean, who on the left has not been at some point through the ringer of left-wing Twitter politics?
	You know, who hasn't?
	So that's a great point.
	Do you know what they did to Jenk Uyghur?
	Do you remember this?
	The New York Times did this.
	This is why this is the New York Times I'm talking about.
	So he's the head of the Young Turks, you know, hardcore major progressive outlet for those who don't know.
	And he had David Duke on his show.
	For those who don't know, David Duke was a former Klansman, hardcore anti-Semite.
	This was in the last, look it up in the last 10 years.
	Right, right.
	Oh, it's a while ago.
	Yeah.
	They've been going for years.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	But he was very hostile to David Duke, understandably, and he's calling him out and just being very coherent and denunciatory.
	And at one point, David Duke, author of Jewish Supremacy, says, I'm not an anti-Semite.
	And Jenk goes, you know, no, of course you're not.
	The New York Times, in reporting this article, said, David Duke said, I'm not anti-Semite.
	And Jenk Uger said, no, of course you're not.
	So that is not something that is done accidentally or stupidly.
	You can't watch this video clip.
	This wasn't a transcription and think this was anything other than sarcasm.
	Even if you know anything about him, you know perfectly well the head of the Young Turks isn't telling David Duke he's not an anti-Semite.
	But this is the games that they play.
	Now, this would be one example.
	He has a lot invested in his identity.
	So it's his job.
	It's the third factor.
	But if this had been like your cousin and you sat down with him, like, do you see how dangerous it is when you have these outlets defining who's racist and who's anti-Semitic?
	And this is a clear case of someone fighting anti-Semitism.
	And now they're being branded.
	Don't you think there might be another better way?
	That kind of question, I think, if someone is capable of being reached, will at least let them have a conversation with you because they don't feel that they have to be defensive and attacked.
	Now you're coming off as sympathetic and empathetic with them.
	So I'm glad you brought up the failing New York Times because I honestly, I'm in awe of the power of the media.
	People forget just how powerful an institution this is.
	And the people who don't forget that are the journalists and they know they've got this influence.
	So what should people do to be prepared for being on the receiving end of this?
	Because this could happen to anyone at any time, couldn't it?
	Yes, most certainly.
	I would say try to record every interview that you're being taking part of.
	Be very reticent to talk to the corporate press.
	You know, there's a little more subterfuge that we can get into that, you know, maybe off air in terms of like, you know, like when you had Megan Kelly was interviewing Alex Jones, and from his perspective, she completely did a hit piece.
	So what he had done is he had recorded the whole interview and he released it before she had a chance to.
	So the one thing people can compete on is those who work in social media are going to be much faster to market than, say, a journalist who has to go through channels.
	So that's one competitive advantage.
	There's plenty of journalists who are going to try to present an honest perspective.
	But we also forget that for any of us, when you're encountering a worldview that is alien to your own, it's going to be very hard for the human mind to comprehend it because it's thinking like a Martian to them.
	So that is something that people who are not, you know, kind of on the left have to be up against and appreciate when you're.
	And here's one example I would give.
	If you're dealing with journalists who you perceive as being engaged in good faith, and there's plenty of them, when you explain yourself, a particularly view that you know is outside their worldview, ask them to explain it back to you to see that they got what you meant.
	And if you have that on tape and they try to mischaracterize you, so much the better.
	Now you have evidence that this was done maliciously.
	Yeah, but that's on the rare occasion you get when acting in good faith, isn't it?
	Sure.
	Because I mean, the advice I mostly give is: look, if you think you're being targeted for a hit piece or something like this, just don't.
	Just don't talk to them.
	You know, let them do their worst without your input because they'll just twist whatever you're saying.
	Did you see what Tim Dylan did to the Times?
	No, what did he do?
	It was great.
	So the New York Times, Tim Dylan's a prominent podcaster.
	He's been on Joe Rogan several times.
	Joe Rogan is someone who's in their target, their sites, of course, as everyone knows because he's not playing by their rules.
	And they emailed him.
	You can look at Tim's Twitter.
	And they said, hey, this is Jeff Smith from the New York Times.
	We're doing a piece on Rogan.
	I just want to talk to you about what he's like as a host and what reactions you have.
	It's pretty transparent if you know what to look for.
	And Tim just wrote back, hey, Joe, respectfully, go fuck yourself.
	And he put that on.
	So that kind of you're not fooling anyone thing.
	I don't know that I would be that hostile, but you saw this Elon Musk.
	Didn't he say, like, you know, tell your corporate overlords I said hi.
	Yes.
	This kind of understanding that journalists, and I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing where I don't blame them, have an agenda.
	Once you, you know, one of my quotes is the battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive.
	Once you realize that's what you're dealing with, that's good.
	Right.
	But everything else falls into place.
	Like, okay, this guy wants to sell me cancer.
	He makes money selling me cancer.
	He knows he's selling me cancer.
	I'm not going to get him to say Marlborough's or cancer.
	But now I can proceed accordingly, knowing that this is going to be about promoting Marlboroughs or parliaments or whatever it is.
	Yeah.
	And that's a really great way of looking at it.
	And I love the framing you say, corporate press, because that automatically frames them in exactly the right light for the regular person to consider them.
	You know, because you know what the corporate agenda is and it's not in your favor.
	And to call them mainstream is so demented.
	They are so like I had a poll on my Twitter.
	I said, who would you, if you had to have nine Supreme Court justices at random, who would you rather have nine Democratic senators or nine people from the New York Times boardroom?
	And my audience voted for the senders correctly because the senators still have to shake hands with everybody, but the New York Times editorial board hates you.
	They will perfectly happy to have you dead.
	So when people understand how much worse the corporate journalists are than the politicians who are just sociopaths who are power hungry, as opposed to like radicals with a real agenda and a worldview, a lot of things fall into place.
	So I suppose we should move on then to the second establishment pillar of leftism after the press, social media.
	How do you feel that social media as a social experiment has gone?
	Wonderfully well.
	I think social media is what's going to be saving our countries.
	Oh, okay.
	Because here's why.
	20 years ago, if I came to you and I talked to someone who's a Harvard law professor, you would think, regardless of this guy's political views, this is a world-class or Cambridge or one of these places.
	This is a world-class mind, second to none.
	This person is going to be erudite, well-spoken, maybe a little out of touch in their ivory tower, but you can take what they're saying to the bank.
	This is a whole other level of human being.
	Now you see Lawrence Tribe on Twitter and he tweets.
	Not only does he look like a menopausal lesbian, but he tweets exactly like everyone you went to high school with in the same stupid anti-Trump words.
	You realize, okay, this guy is not an impressive mind.
	And you see that over and over with people who are senators, obviously, you know, MPs.
	Many of these tweets are written by their staff.
	But even if you agree or disagree, these are not the remarks of equality.
	I should sit down and listen to this person mind.
	These are just, you know, idiots often or just marginally intelligent.
	So having that kind of mask fall away is very healthy.
	Social media is also a great equalizer to a point because you know, my tweets are just this look the same, just like Boris Johnson's tweets, they look just the same as other person.
	So, the words don't really discriminate now.
	Now, you've said that, you know, that they're going to give like gold borders to certain people now.
	You now you've put that out into the ether, and now Joe Biden's tweets are going to be shiny and glittering in gold.
	And whenever you click on it, you'll get a dopamine rush as a rainbow pops out of the light button.
	Look what you've done, Michael.
	No, you get free, you get it, you get free diapers.
	That's a surprisingly large constituency that needs who said need, it's just convenient.
	But what, what, like, what about the centralization of social media, though?
	Because obviously, Silicon Valley is essentially still a giant monopoly and they're acting as a cartel.
	So, this is the hardest thing I think for people on the right to grasp because I think this is a long-term game.
	They're seeing the short-term problems, which are not nothing.
	The short-term problems are enormous short-term problems.
	But I think there's an enormous amount of people who are, for lack of a better term, activists who work in this space who realize that the state and the collusion between the state and corporate America and corporate Britain, you know, this kind of corporatism, which is the worst of all worlds in many ways, is something that isn't going to necessarily change.
	It's always going to be a threat.
	And we have to engineer solutions to work around this.
	So, any and you don't have to have any political perspective at all.
	Let me give you one example.
	As everyone knows, YouTube and Facebook banned and were blocking people who were putting forth the hypothesis that the Wuhan lab had some kind of man-made Wuhan virus had some kind of man-made origin, right?
	Now, even if that's completely false, it is of enormous value to all of us to know: okay, in the future, if something like this did happen and it was man-made, how would it play out?
	Would there be any mechanisms in place by state and non-state actors to keep it from spreading?
	So on and so forth.
	Now, the fact that you know, these are many people who are highly educated doctors, these weren't just Rando's, David Icky, whatever, you know, talking about whatever his view would be.
	When you have this kind of loss of reputation, it's something that is very hard to regain.
	When people realize that you are manipulating things to force an agenda, whereas I'm looking for information, this isn't a controversial, this isn't Nazi stuff, this isn't homophobic stuff or racist stuff.
	This is like, let's talk about, let's, you know, when you have a brainstorming session, everyone who's been in office knows you just throw out ideas, and some of them are going to be really, really bad in the hopes of getting the good ones.
	If you're preemptively throwing out ideas and then later it turns out there's a possibility they were true, that is a huge market opportunity for competitors.
	And I think that back in the day, there used to be one dating app, right?
	And now you have Tinder, you have Christian Mingle, you have the farmer one, you have the BDSM ones, you have the chaste ones, whatever.
	Too old and too married to know anything about dating apps.
	But you know, that there's no shortage of them.
	Yeah.
	So the claim that we all have to be on Twitter or on YouTube is something that I think is going to fall away.
	I think we're going to see much more intellectual self-segregation.
	And I think that's very healthy because as an anarchist, I'm interested in the elimination of political discourse.
	Just the elimination of political discourse end of stuff.
	Yeah, because my rights are enough for discussion.
	Like, if you have a perspective on me and protecting my family, my home, you're perfectly entitled to it.
	I'm not hearing it.
	I'm going to do what I need to protect my home.
	And that is the only legitimate answer here as long as I'm doing it peacefully.
	So I think having that mindset of you are not going to tell me when I can run my store and who I can sell it to, it's a complete non-starter.
	The more people who think in those terms, the better off we're all going to be.
	So do you think it was significant when Facebook walked back the sort of unpersoning of the Wuhan lab theory?
	Was that important?
	I don't think it could be more important, because that is an admission that they not only were they very, because this was a huge line for them to cross this, this Rubicon, because we were all kind of shocked how heavy-handed they were being, because there was a lot of misinformation.
	No one knew what's going on.
	This pandemic was, in many ways, largely unprecedented, and now the again highly credentialed uh, you know intelligent doctors, and maybe these intelligent doctors are also, you know, kind of ignorant of the facts about something.
	But the point is this isn't just some random on their computer speculating the fact that they weren't comfortable, you know, silencing entire class of people and now that they were wrong tells you that their agenda isn't free discourse.
	Their agenda is to very clearly frame the topic of conversation, and if that's the case with Corona, it's certainly going to be the case with pretty much every other issue.
	And once you have that honest understanding of this is a corporate actor with an agenda that is a space for people to create uh, competitions.
	Now the argument is, oh yeah, create your own twitter.
	Okay, good luck with that.
	The point is, 10 years ago you and I are old men we remembered or maybe 20 in this case, the idea of like yeah, just make your own website.
	Yeah, now making your own.
	But now making your own website takes five minutes.
	Yeah, just to have something.
	So I do think absolutely, there's a lot of people in this space especially last year and you and I are probably friends with some of them who are like, all right, what steps do I have to take to make sure they can't pull this stuff again?
	I I, I found that the, I think the, the point you make about the, the coronavirus being essentially a sort of politically neutral topic right yeah that, I think that's that's the most salient one, that really drills down to exactly the problem.
	Because like, exactly you say so, they've got a Wuhan Institute OF Virology that specifically studies coronaviruses and now we know, do gain of function research to make them highly transmissible and what's that?
	Sorry uh, an unknown coronavirus has just sprung up in Wuhan.
	Oh yeah, there couldn't be any connection and you're a conspiracy theorist lunatic for suggesting there might have been right and, and you're actually right the um the, the repersoning of this conspiracy theory uh is, is a wonderful way of showing that they're not nearly as omnipotent as they're implying when they take these actions, aren't they?
	And also they're not omniscient.
	That's the key.
	The people who are blue pilled think the guys in the screens, the experts we gotta listen to.
	Experts know what they're doing, know what they're talking about.
	If they had, and the thing is, you have to present yourself as certain.
	If you're telling someone you need to be locked in your house for a month, like I can't be, like you know what, I think there's a 75 chance this is a good idea.
	Cool, i'm gonna play those odds.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But if you're going to insist on entire nations being locked in their home Australia, they couldn't even walk their dogs.
	That's, if you're, if if you're going to be insisting on this, you could only do it from an area of very high certainty.
	So now we know, not only were they not certain, they might not have even been right.
	And I think the diff.
	There's a huge difference between left-wing and right-wing.
	Uh uh, civil discontent.
	Uh, left wing is more lively and and kind of rowdy, but when the right gets worked up, things get really ugly really fast.
	Yeah the the, the things actually change, don't they?
	That's the thing.
	Yeah right yeah, like you know, and not in a not not, not in a pleasant way.
	So you, you know keep keep, keep.
	I mean i'd rather both sides just remain democratic, just for this, just for the sake of my insanity, to be honest.
	But I I, I watched some of the stuff that's happening in America and it's visions of hell man, like visions of absolute hell, with just communists shooting people in the streets and then oh yeah yeah okay sorry yeah yeah, black lives matter in in, like Chicago the the, the Puerto Rican guy just gets dragged out of his car and executed in the street and i'm like holy crap, man like the, the total.
	No wonder you're like, look, i'm going to protect me and my family, and you know that's not up for discussion.
	I, if I lived in a country that these things happen on daily basis, that would be my opinion too, you know, without a doubt.
	Did you see?
	San Francisco has effectively decriminalized small theft.
	So the DA has said, my wife and I, so Bristol is basically the sort of San Francisco of Britain.
	It's insufferable.
	But my sister lives there.
	She's a radical leftist, which is insufferable.
	But we don't talk about politics because she doesn't like it.
	But my wife and I were driving in there and I didn't have time to take a picture of the thing on the wall.
	But it was literally graffiti that said, some crime is okay.
	And it's like, no.
	Small crime or something like that.
	And it was just, oh my God.
	So sorry, what have they done in Bristol's twin city?
	Wait, wait, wait, hold on.
	But some crime is okay.
	You think that.
	Sorry, no, I meant small crime.
	So the implication being petty theft, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So sorry, not some crime, but yeah, you are right.
	Some crime is fine, obviously.
	So the district attorney who's in charge of prosecutions here in the States basically said he's not going to prosecute people who do petty theft because that's a crime of poverty.
	So there's videos, people can look them up, don't take my word for it, of guys going into Walmart, which is like kind of like Tesco and getting their shopping bin, filling it up and just walking out the door.
	Well, why wouldn't you?
	Why wouldn't and why wouldn't you?
	Why wouldn't I?
	You know, I mean, I have more for enough money, but like if they're just going to let me take it for free.
	Yeah.
	And they, if they, and here's not only would they let you, if they tried to stop you, they're the ones who would go to jail with feeling the might of the law behind them.
	So this is another reason why I'm an anarchist.
	The concept of objective law has never existed and can never exist because any law has to be implemented by human beings and they are always going to bring their ideology to the table.
	The second to last essay in this book is by John Hasnes, who's a law professor from Georgetown Law.
	And he talked, it's called the myth of objective law.
	And he talks about this, it's a complete fallacy to think that you could have something in writing, which are laws, and then it's just going to be implemented as written because everyone is going to still read those words through their own personal perspective.
	And you can, with a straight face, I can make the case for one interpretation honestly.
	And you with a straight face can make your interpretation for the other side honestly.
	So this claim that it just kind of executes itself doesn't make sense even for five seconds if you think about it.
	I mean, in the strictest sense, I would agree with that.
	But the thing is, in a more sort of practical day-to-day sense, I would say, well, it's mostly fine.
	It works most of the time.
	It doesn't.
	And I can prove to you that you're wrong.
	Lawsuits are never practical to get into involved in a lawsuit.
	So I'm not necessarily talking about civil law as in me suing you.
	I'm talking about someone breaking criminal law.
	So someone steaming.
	I agree.
	That's different.
	That's different.
	Yeah.
	So I, that, okay, well, that's that argument over then.
	Yeah.
	Easily settled.
	Yeah.
	But I've got to say, as someone who recently won a lawsuit, I'm not too bothered by them, actually.
	You know, they got me lots of leftist money, so I'm not going to complain.
	Yeah, but you were, I mean, I'm going to put on my leftist hat.
	You were in a position to do that, right?
	So if you're some schlub who's who's up against Tesco or up against the ADL, you're SOL because you got to find that money for that lawyer.
	They have no problem finding that money for the lawyer.
	So having even a minarchist vision as you would like, the wealthy, whether this is good or bad, are still going to have better access to legal services than the poor.
	Yeah.
	And that's been a long-standing complaint, in fact, in English legal, English jurisprudence, I think, generally.
	Access to the law has always been a problem, especially, and you are absolutely right, especially in civil laws, because a giant, powerful company or person can simply keep bogging you down and bankrupt you with the lawsuits.
	And even if they lose every single one, they can still get you.
	I assume in the US, they call it lawfare specifically, in fact, don't they?
	Yeah.
	And also that their lawyers are probably going to have established relationships with those judges.
	They're certainly going to have a reputation of heft and respectability.
	So that is another enormous advantage on their behalf.
	Look, if you and I were in a lawsuit together and you have to bring in your sister and I can hire Barack Obama, we do not have an equal chance of winning this lawsuit.
	That's fair.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So let's wrap up with me asking you what we should be talking about.
	Where do you think the current discourse generally is most lacking and what should we be focused on?
	I hate that word should.
	Should you should.
	Because I do not feel comfortable telling a stranger how they should be spending their time.
	Why?
	It depends on the person's values.
	For a lot of people, they shouldn't be talking about politics at all because they have other concerns on their plate.
	In terms of where I would want the conversation to go in the next few years, it is toward the police and their loyalties.
	It's to the legitimacy of the state.
	It's to personal consequences for politicians for their malfeasance.
	I was thinking something a little bit more narrow, maybe.
	Oh, like, what do you mean?
	Well, just like, you know, what sort of, you know, is it going, is the transition to Biden to Kamala going to be difficult or significant?
	Or, you know, something of a more sort of immediate nature, I was thinking.
	I think the more immediate nature here is the collapse of the cities.
	What we're seeing in America is for the first time, the two states that everyone is moving to, just in terms of population migration, are Texas and Florida.
	These are both red Republican states.
	It is a complete, I think, historically unprecedented for people to be moving away from cities.
	This is both UK and the US.
	People have been urbanizing, but also toward right of center areas.
	For a long time, the left has won the culture war because the big cities are draws of all the creative types.
	Creative types by definitions are the ones who make culture.
	So they're in these leftist enclaves.
	They're just by osmosis.
	I'm an artist.
	I'm a painter.
	I don't care about politics.
	Literally everyone around me is just going to take doctrinal leftism as their default.
	I don't want headaches.
	I don't care about this stuff.
	I'm just going to repeat what they say.
	Whereas now, those creatives are moving to Texas and Florida.
	Sure, there's like Austin and Miami, which are comparatively left of center cities within red states, but this is still a historical anomaly.
	I don't know what's going to come of this, but I'm very, very hopeful.
	I don't see how New York and LA recover because there's a city here called Detroit, which has now become a complete wasteland.
	It used to be the, well, I mean, the audience might not be because of the British people.
	There's a lot of people who are, there was the automobile capital of the America.
	It was also Motown, the music capital of America.
	Detroit is now a wasteland and will never recover.
	And I think as well, just in case for anyone who doesn't know, seriously Google pictures of Detroit.
	Like actual post-apocalyptic wasteland is a genuinely accurate description.
	Isn't it?
	I think like Birmingham and Hull are similar to that, aren't they?
	They're not nearly as bad as Detroit.
	Nowhere near.
	I mean, they're not quite.
	I mean, I've not been to Hull actually, but Birmingham, it's prosperous still.
	It just looks horrible because of all the brutalist architecture.
	So the whole thing looks like it's just drab anyway.
	But like, it's not the same as Detroit.
	You know what I mean?
	Like actual collapsed factories and things like that.
	Yeah.
	So it's, but the thing is, it's not going to ever recover, right?
	So in my view, Hollywood, oh, Hollywood, you know, movie city, everyone has an idea about Hollywood.
	Now that it's, you can make your own movie with a computer anywhere you want, I don't see how they regain that monopoly of being the place where filmmaking happens, especially because anyone can just go on YouTube and pop their own movie on there.
	Now, they might be the monopoly in terms of the big blockbusters, which is even falling away a little bit with Parasite from South Korea and all these other places.
	But in terms of their kind of hegemony, I don't see how they recover that.
	Yeah, it's watching the Hollowing Out of Hollywood has been really interesting because, I mean, go back 20 years when we were young men, right?
	All of the movies coming out of Hollywood were thrilling.
	They were fantastic.
	You have really innovative stuff, the Matrix Fight Club, Sixth Sense, you know, like all of these sort of like 12 monkeys, actual stories, you know, new things that you hadn't seen before.
	But now it's just reboot and remake and sequel.
	Surely that's the sign of a dead culture in Hollywood, you know?
	Well, it's also the sign of a population who doesn't want originality and innovation.
	And that's both a plus and a minus.
	Once you realize what we talked about earlier, that this vast majority is not interested in new ideas, you can stop being frustrated when they're not interested in hearing your new ideas.
	That's a good way of looking.
	Look at it.
	So, okay, so I think that you're absolutely right to bring the people fleeing the cities up as a really important issue in the next couple of years because I'm seeing it here.
	Like we, where I live is about an hour out of London.
	So it's not far, but it's very conservative, you know, like just not even like actually conservative, conservative, but just doesn't want to culturally, yeah.
	Culturally just doesn't want leftism, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And yet we like a burst boil.
	There are Londoners fleeing here all the time because obviously London is going much the same way as Democrat-run cities in America because it's run by Labor.
	And so I'm genuinely worried about this changing the voting patterns of the towns and cities that these people are moving to, especially in America.
	We've got, I mean, you hear it's such a stereotype.
	But I went to Texas a year or two ago, just for the coronavirus pandemic, and I literally had Texans making jokes to me saying, oh, thank God, I thought you were from California.
	Is it that bad?
	You know, it's that bad because the issue is what happened is the argument is, I don't know, I just said it like that.
	Different states have different policies.
	They compete and they can learn from each other, right?
	So you had some of the states which were opening up earlier.
	Governor Abbott of Texas removed some mandate and Governor Newsom of California was like, oh, this is unconscionable.
	I forget what he said on Twitter, something casting aspersions.
	And then their death rates and contagion rates went down and it was never addressed again by the media.
	So what they happened is you're having these different models of how to handle the coronavirus.
	All the people from the places where it's going badly are fleeing, but not only they're bringing the virus, they're bringing their tainted ideology and they're spreading it there.
	Sorry.
	Well, it's both.
	And now it's like, wait a minute, I got here.
	I'm trying to live differently from you.
	You want to live your crazy life?
	Go live it in New York.
	And now you're bringing it over here.
	And this is going to cause a lot of headaches.
	And as an anarchist, I am happy because the more that there is this kind of social political conflict, the less hope people have of reaching a consensus and working together.
	Because when people work together politically, it always means oppression.
	I think that's a very factual statement.
	Cynical statement.
	It's not cynical at all.
	I think it's the opposite of cynical.
	I argue that it is.
	Cynical means people are acting in accordance, like they're being dishonest.
	I think these people very earnestly have their worldview and they're not open to change.
	It is absolutely insufferable watching Texan cities turn blue.
	Like I am just embarrassed.
	And I like Texans, don't be afraid to, if you see a leftist in Texas who they literally, you hear them saying, oh, I've just got here from California.
	Don't be afraid of telling them, don't vote Democrat because that's what you flee.
	Like literally, face to face, you tell them, you know, make them feel social pressure to try and conform, you know, like make them remember that they're not, you know, in California and that you don't want your home state to turn into what they've fled.
	Yeah, but then at the same time, you can see them being proudly defiant and thinking that they're, you know, marching in the civil rights era because like, oh, someone told me not to vote Democrat.
	I'm going to, you know, I'm so brave and defiant.
	Otherwise, they might just carry on anyway.
	So they're going to carry on anyway.
	So you need to have workarounds.
	This is just like the cousin at dinner.
	You honestly tell me if a Democrat moved to Texas and someone went up to them and said, Don't vote Democrat, they're going to be like, Oh, I should reconsider my decisions.
	That's not going to work.
	Of course, I'm just big on social shaming of the left at the moment.
	But that's you're not in a position to shame them.
	Your aspersions are a source of pride for them.
	If you look at Twitter's another example, I keep going back to there were so many people who were boasting that Donald Trump blocked them, that it was the progressive journalist Purple Heart.
	It was their big achievement in the crusher war, that this was their highest honor.
	But then they even went to the courts and made it so you could kill people.
	How absurd.
	I mean, yes.
	Like, talk about fragility.
	So, once again, having one monopoly on the law via the state is a mistake.
	And this is a good example of that.
	It is.
	All right.
	Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining me.
	If people want to see more from you, where can they go?
	Anarchisthandbook.com and Twitter, Michael Malice, and youtube.com, Michael MaliceOfficial.
	And I'm very glad this has finally happened.
	And I hope everyone in the audience, I'm sure, has been actually kind of giddy at this conversation.
	I certainly enjoyed it.
	Me too.
	Well, we'll definitely do it again sometime.
	I mean, yes, sir.
	One day, if our government actually allows me to come to the United States, I'll probably meet you on Timcast or something like that.
	Oh my God, we would break the internet.
	That would be so fun.
	Yes, I agreed.
	Right.

▲