Joshua Smith from Break The Cycle | How Can Libertarians Win Against The Deep State? | OAP #29
Chase Geiser is joined by Joshua Smith from Break The Cycle.
Joshua Smith is a political commentator, podcaster, at large Representative of the Libertarian National Committee, and blue collar working class person who is trying to break the cycle of two party politics.
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Joshua's Links: https://linktr.ee/breakthecyclejs
PODCAST LINKS:
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/oneamerican
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IAmOneAmerican
How long have you been doing your own content podcast stuff?
Well, I just started doing the show like four months ago.
So I think we started in March.
Congratulations.
I think March 3rd was the first show.
But I did, I started doing Break the Cycles, an audio podcast like last year, like January of 2020.
And I was like recording it with my phone on Anchor.
Yeah, I use Anchor myself, but I obviously don't use my phone.
Yeah, I use Anchor now still to publish to my RSS feed, but I just rip the audio from the live show and then split it up in the middle, drop a couple of sponsors and then stick it to the RSS feed.
I don't edit it almost at all.
Yeah, I'm kind of the same way.
When I first started doing this podcast, I would do all the calls on Zoom and record them.
And it was like a nightmare in terms of editing them, adding in an intro and then exporting them from Final Cut and then uploading them to YouTube.
And the time that it took was hours and hours and hours.
So I was like, you know what?
I'm just going to start live streaming it.
And if I need to touch anything up, I can later.
But it's where I am too.
The live stream, it really kind of amped up my content.
You know what I mean?
Like if I hadn't, if I hadn't done a live show, I don't think it would be half as good as it is.
Yeah.
And the nice thing about the video is that you just get to put your content on more platforms.
Like the YouTube exposures is a great asset that if you just stick with the audio stuff, it's hard to kind of get.
Yeah, we'll see.
I have Ryan Dawson coming on tonight.
We'll see if they keep me on YouTube after that or not.
Man, I can't believe after a couple of the people that I've had on, I can't believe that they kept it.
I had Tony Schaefer on and he was talking about how Bill Barr called him and told him to stop looking into election fraud.
And I was like, oh, get banned.
Oh, geez.
Yeah, I've been pretty good so far.
And we've talked about, you know, conspiracies and all kinds of stuff.
So hopefully Ryan and I can navigate a conversation that's not so bad for YouTube.
But we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
And all things considered, if we lose YouTube, we got Odyssey.
Yeah, absolutely.
So at what point in your podcast growth did you get to a place where people started having interest in being sponsors?
I'm just curious.
It was pretty quick within the first couple of shows.
I already had Top Lobsta.
Lauren Zotty Coffee hit me up probably within the first couple of shows.
And then Anthem Planning became executive producers within the first month or so.
And, you know, financially, it helps these businesses, which are all libertarian-owned.
Very, you know, at least libertarian or pretty close to libertarian as far as topics.
Closer to libertarian than what's going on.
Yeah, exactly.
And so they've been great.
And I love to promote their businesses and stuff like that.
So I haven't had any issues doing it.
I think I'm going to get another sponsor, a CBD sponsor.
That's, of course, because every podcast needs a CBD sponsor, you know?
Yeah.
Well, they can't advertise anywhere else.
So they have to do the influencer sponsorships.
I own an advertising business and I've had so many CBD companies reach out like, hey, can we do Facebook and Instagram ads?
And I'm like, no, not really.
Yeah.
So North Spokane CBD, it's a good friend of mine, also libertarian-owned.
Michael Pickens, C. Michael Pickens from Washington is a good guy.
And then my daughter starting an Etsy account.
Oh, cool.
Congratulations.
She takes old shirts and makes cool stuff and she's 16.
And I was like, you know, we'll help you try and promote some stuff.
Are the shirts cool?
Yeah.
I mean, she takes like my old t-shirts and other people's old t-shirts and she does all these cuts and ties and like turns them into fashion accessories.
So hopefully.
When I was coming up, you had to have like every band.
Right.
Like there was the kids with the Sabbath shirts and the kids.
I had the Doors shirts.
I had the one shirt that had Jim Morrison on the stage, the black and white picture and just laying down on the stage.
It's like everybody had that shirt.
If anybody else had the same shirt as you, it was like, oh.
Yeah, it was funny.
I even had some shirts of bands that I never really particularly cared for very much, like the Misfits.
Like there was a couple of Misfit songs I really liked, but he had to have Misfit shirts, you know, when I was came, I came up in the punk rock scene playing punk rock music and stuff.
So you're a musician?
Yeah, yeah.
I play bass and drums and I've sung and sang, sang, singed in a bunch of bands.
So yeah.
Yeah.
You've been on any musical projects now?
No, no.
I got focused on the libertarians.
Yeah, seven kids.
I got seven kids, you know?
Wow, seven?
Are you like, are you Mormon or something?
No, I wish that was the case.
No, I, so when I met my now fiancé, she had two daughters, eight and three.
She was two at the time, seven and two at the time, but they're eight and three now.
And then she got pregnant in April with our son that was born New Year's Eve.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
And I had a 16-year-old daughter that didn't live with me that I got custody of back in October.
And she had two small siblings that were nine and six.
And they're my ex-wife's, not mine biologically, but they were going to go to foster care, basically, or into the system somewhere.
And so we were able to get custody.
And then on the way down there to pick up my daughter, we found out that my 15-year-old daughter at the time was pregnant.
And so are you grandpa yet?
Yeah, she gave birth to my granddaughter, Scarla, on March 14th, the day after my birthday.
Congratulations, man.
Seven kids, two babies, four school-aged.
It's wild, man.
So what do you do as a libertarian with seven kids in terms of schooling?
So here's the thing.
So one of Julia's daughters, my fiancé, goes to a really cool, kind of crunchy, organic, hippie.
I like the word crunchy.
Yeah, like a private school that she goes to out in the kind of the country.
And it's very homeschool-based, but they have like, you know, cool things, but they have like their own cow and like all this cool stuff that she gets to do.
But my two, my daughter goes to an alternative school.
She's 16.
She just wants to get her, she wants to try and get her diploma, but she hadn't been to school since the eighth grade.
And then the two littles, the six-year-old had never been to school.
And so, and then the nine-year-old had only gone to one day of first grade and no other school since he was supposed to be in the fourth grade.
So we moved into, we live in Iowa now.
And, you know, Iowa's got a pretty decent public school system as far as states go.
They're, they're, they, they're not pushing politics here in their schools, which is nice.
They're, they're, uh, CRT is banned in the public schools here, um, stuff like that.
And so we moved into the nicest school district in the state.
Uh, and I, I way overpay for a house so that we could get them into, you know, we, we couldn't homeschool them.
They needed, they had too many needs.
Um, and we didn't really have the money to send them all to private school.
And, uh, so we found the best elementary school we could find that had, you know, they don't wear, they don't have to wear masks.
There's, uh, there's religious exemptions for vaccines.
They, they're banned CRT.
I mean, it's, it's a good school.
And so we put them there because they needed the help that they needed, the two that really need it.
And then my daughter's going to a continuation school type thing to try and get her diploma.
But if not, she'll probably end up getting her GD.
She's already worked.
She spent some time working at Wendy's and babysitting.
And now she's trying to start the Setsy.
So I hope you.
She's got that entrepreneurial spirit.
Yeah.
That's my hope.
All you need is hustle, man.
Yeah, yeah.
And she's got the hustle.
She's got to stick a little more with the follow through.
And I try to push her in that direction.
Like, look, if you're going to do something, do it because that's how you, you know, I wish I was 16 talking about starting my own business, man.
My life would be infinitely different at 38, you know, because I believe in the entrepreneurial spirit.
I think it's an amazing thing.
I don't think there's a better way to make a life for yourself than becoming an entrepreneur.
And I have Purb Island coming on at the end of the month.
And we're just going to talk about entrepreneurial spirit the whole time.
You know, and the thing is, it's, it's really, it used to, I had a really smart guy that was sort of a mentor to me tell me one time.
And it, it holds true to a certain extent today, but it was certainly true a generation ago.
He's like, listen, he's an Italian guy, big guy.
And he's like, there are three ways you make money.
He's like, you either be a politician, you get high up in the military, or you start your own business.
It's like, those are the only three ways you can make money.
I'm like, all right, I don't know about the military.
I guess if you're high up in the military, you can make money.
But he's like, he's like, don't work in politics.
He's like, but if you are the politician, you can make the money, right?
Of course, which is just blows by your mind, right?
If you think about it.
Right.
But yeah, of course, it's problematic.
But it's so true, though.
Like, if you, if you really want to make money, there's really only a few ways to do it other than being a business owner.
It's the only way that you can sort of not get locked into a salary or get stuck at a certain mid-level position.
I mean, if you, if, if you really need a sort of work environment where the sky is the limit, you have to do your own thing.
Well, side hustle of your day job.
Yeah, as far as the sky is the limit.
And then if you don't have what it takes to start a business, get into the trades, man.
You know, especially as a male, you know, I was lucky enough to start in the trades when I was 15.
I dropped out of high school beginning of sophomore year.
I started digging trenches for a multi-billion dollar, a multi-million dollar construction company that built huge custom homes.
We actually built one for Dave Dornsif, who owns a monopoly on the steel girder business in this country.
And it was a 16,000 square foot home with glass Y-ways to the master suite and the maids quarters.
And that's where I cut my teeth.
And now that I'm in my late 30s, I'm so advanced in a lot of trades.
I've worked in so many different trades.
I can work with HVAC.
I can work with electrical.
I can do building.
I can grade.
I mean, basically.
It's the same thing, though.
You're basically a contractor.
I mean, you are your own business.
Yeah, well, and the cool thing is, is, you know, whenever I need extra money or anything like that, I can take $5, post on Craigslist.
These are my skills.
And random people call me all day.
Hey, I need this fixed.
I got a bathroom vent that's going bad.
I got this.
And I can go over on a weekend and make an extra 500 bucks.
You know what I mean?
And so that's been the benefit of learning trades is it's a skill that's highly needed.
And you can start your own business or do, you know, even just do a bunch of side work to make more money.
But you can make a lot of money working for other companies in the trades too, if you, if you're skilled.
You know, it all depends on your skill level in the trades.
And you can make, you know, you can become a superintendent, you know, even if you're union or not union, making over $100,000 a year easily.
You know what I mean?
And so I've been really lucky in that aspect, but now I'm doing the show too, which has become another revenue stream for my family.
And now the goal is to make the show the full-time job.
And that is our own business, you know.
And I have a small team of people who work with me or do stuff for the show like social media that get paid.
People are actually, I'm actually creating jobs now.
It's not a lot of money, but I am creating a job.
I mean, if you need any help with that, I own a small advertising business.
I know.
I saw that.
And it's funny because I just had this really great advertisement made for the show.
And I tried to put it on Google ads for YouTube.
And they kicked it back for election.
It was like, I said it was some kind of election advertising.
And I was like, there's no elections in this whatsoever.
Nothing.
Did you appeal?
I did twice.
Twice.
Yeah.
They denied you?
Both times.
Yeah.
So I don't know what's going on there.
I'd pump it on Instagram if I were you.
Yeah, that's what we're trying to do.
And truth be told, my fiancé actually runs the Instagram and the Facebook.
And so she's put them both up there.
Finally, Facebook just let me have a Facebook again after being kicked off since October.
Your personal profile was restricted?
Yeah, I had a personal profile for 11 years.
I mean, I had pictures, final pictures of my grandfather on there, pictures of my daughter when she was a baby and very young with me, pictures of my son when he was very young and a baby with me that I'll never get back because they're from old cell phones.
And I was like, oh, well, they're on Facebook.
I'll always have them.
And then they kicked me off after 11 years during the election.
I was stumping for, you know, I sit on the Libertarian National Committee.
I'm an at-large rep. And of course, I'm going to stump for my candidate.
I thought, you know, if I had to, if I had to think about a candidate that I wanted to win the election, it was Joe Jorgensen.
And, you know, I get a lot of shit for that, but I still believe that she would have been better than definitely better than Biden.
There's no doubt about that.
And she did go a little woke.
I wasn't super happy about that, but it was my job to work for the campaign.
And so I stumped for Joe a little bit.
And within a couple of weeks, I was kicked off YouTube or off Facebook.
But I also dared to make the statement that maybe this virus had come from a lab in China.
And that's why they pulled you?
I think that's why they initially, that's why they eventually pulled me, which is funny because now that's the approved narrative and everyone's talking about it.
It's totally fine.
So here they have let me back on, but not my old profile.
It's gone.
It's completely gone.
Everything's gone.
11 years down the drain.
Man, you know, man, it might be too late, but I think within the first 30 days, you can have them send all your data.
Right.
And I tried.
Well, you can actually download your own data and I tried and they wouldn't let me into the account to even do that.
Wow.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I've got some contacts at Facebook after this.
I'd be happy to reach out on your behalf, see if they can pull some strings.
Yeah, that'd be great, man.
I'd love to.
I'll see what I can do.
But wow.
So how did you get involved with the Libertarian Party and movement just as a whole?
Oh, man.
Well, so, you know, I was on the USS Constellation during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
We were in the middle of the Persian Gulf when George Bush declared war on Iraq.
And I was really jaded on the military industrial complex.
I saw the wasteful actions that the military uses.
We dropped hundreds of millions of tons of ordinance on Baghdad, in my opinion, for almost no reason whatsoever, other than macroeconomics issue over the petro dollar.
I didn't know that at the time, but I knew that we were dropping weapons on homes.
And there's family pets there and kids with dreams and goals and aspirations that would love to start their own business and do the kind of because the same kind of things that I wanted to do, you know.
And so it was kind of a bummer for me and definitely jaded me on the political parties because when I got out in 2005, I didn't see a party that really represented my anti-war ideals, especially.
I don't know that I'm necessarily against national defense completely, but I am against these forever wars that we've been experiencing in the Middle East for a long time.
And so I was really jaded and just really didn't find myself in the Republican Party.
I was still a Republican, so a registered Republican voter.
And then in 2007, I found Papa Ron Paul, you know, and that just absolutely changed my life.
You know, he was calling Congress a bunch of psychopaths.
He was talking about blowback and he was essentially speaking to how I felt completely with even the Republican Party.
I mean, he was even going off on the Republican Party.
And so I decided to get involved with the Ron Paul campaign.
I worked on the Ron Paul campaign in 2008 in California.
And then again, it was brutal, dude.
Very brutal.
He did all right.
Are you knocking in and walking?
I did.
Yeah, I did that.
And I did a lot of events and stuff like that as well.
Yeah.
A lot of slam doors in my face.
Take your friend to get off my property.
Exactly.
California is rough.
If you go to the outskirts, you're all right.
But when you're, you know, I'm from, I'm from Oakland, California, you know, and it's got to go to the Inland Empire if you want to get any love.
Yeah, or the Central Valley or like way up north by Mount Shasta and weed and Waireka and all that stuff.
And so it was rough.
And then I watched how the Republican Party treated Ron Paul.
I watched how the media treated Ron Paul.
It was disgusting.
And in fact, they actually had delegates getting arrested trying to get into the caucuses and in New Orleans and all kinds of, it was just, it was wild.
They changed the rules at conventions to screw Ron Paul and his delegates.
I mean, it was just, I was like, there's no way I can support the Republican Party after this anymore.
They've made it very, very clear to me that they do not support my ideals.
So in 2010, I joined the Libertarian Party.
I said, you know, here's a party that supports mostly what I want.
I think the platform's pretty great as far as personal freedoms, economic freedoms, stuff like that.
I said, we'll see what happens.
It's still a new party.
It's only 40 years old.
And so I started reaching out.
The party was founded in 1776, bro.
Yeah, well, yeah, the real Libertarian Party, right?
But the actual National Libertarian Party, it was 1970.
You guys should start saying founded in 1776 as part of the winning move.
We should.
It would be awesome.
And there's a big push to make the Libertarian Party more libertarian right now, which has been nice with the Mises Cox and stuff like that.
So I joined the party and I started reaching out to the national committee.
I sent them a bunch of emails.
I was like, you know, I'm this hyped up activist.
Tell me what to do.
I'm ready to go.
I'm done with the Republican Party.
Show me how to do this.
And it was a wall of silence, dude.
I mean, I didn't get a single email, nothing.
And I was like, well, this sucks.
And so I dropped my party.
I'm not sure if there's any problem with libertarians, man.
There's no cult leader.
The cult leader would be all over that.
Like, all right, we got it.
We have to believe it.
Oh, here we go.
Yeah.
I dropped my donations after like three months and just kind of did my own thing.
I helped found a couple of publications, including Think Liberty, which is pretty successful now.
And then in 2012, of course, I stumped for Ron Paul again, even though I was a registered Republican or a registered libertarian voter at this point in California.
And then in 2012, when they just dashed right over Ron Paul again, I supported Gary Johnson.
You know, and it was.
It was Aleppo.
Yeah, but this was the first Gary Johnson campaign, which was much, much better than the second Gary Johnson campaign.
I don't have a problem with Gary Johnson.
I think he's a little bit of a dweeb, but I don't know.
Yeah, he's a total teaser.
He's a total dweeb.
But the 2012 campaign was different.
And I talked about this on my show the other night.
2012, Gary, was sturdy.
He knew what he was doing.
He did pretty well.
It was in 2016.
He smoked way too much weed during the campaign.
I mean, just it was, and I know people.
Is that really what he was doing?
Yeah, absolutely.
A lot.
A lot of weed.
100% a lot of weed.
And I just talked about this, how he showed up to endorse Larry Sharp for governor in New York.
And he was basically like Towley at this point.
He was like, this is Gary Larry Sharp.
And Larry Sharp used to be the next governor of New York.
And I'm like, God, shut up, Gary.
But I like to free libertarians to stop doing whatever you want.
You could actually earn the right to do whatever you want.
Yeah.
And Gary said Gary's a nice guy.
He's pretty smart.
He did really well as the governor of New Mexico two-term governor.
He cut taxes 13 times.
He really made that state a lot much more inhabitable for people who like personal freedoms.
But he just, he wasn't a good candidate for president.
And in 2016, I supported him again.
Obviously, I couldn't support the reality TV star or the lady who has people murdered for her own political game.
And so I joined, I joined the party and I joined the Libertarian Party.
I became a regional rep for the state party of Washington.
I started building county affiliates there.
And then in 2017, Nick Sarwark stepped way, way out of line and started talking shit about Tom Woods and Eric July and all these great libertarian people, including Ron Paul.
And so I was like, you know what?
I'm going to find someone to run against this guy for chair.
And I started calling all these big name libertarians that I knew and everyone's like, you're crazy, man.
This guy is the most popular chair the party's had.
He's running for a third term.
Like, no way.
He's a trial lawyer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, I don't care.
Someone's got to do it.
No one would do it.
Well, I had Think Liberty at the time.
We had about 16,000 daily followers and readers.
And I was like, I'm going to do it.
So I put out an intent to run statement.
I ran.
I traveled to 25 states.
I spoke behind Ron Paul at the Roads to Freedom Unconvention.
All shit I had never done before.
And I didn't do well.
I mean, I took like 24% or 22% of the vote at national convention.
That's not bad, man.
For a guy that no one knew.
It's not to be bootstrapping it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No one knew.
And then in 2020, I ran again against his little henchman, Joe Bishop Henchman, who just resigned actually as our chair, national chair, after I'd served two years on the board as an at-large.
And I decided I was going to run one more time.
And I lost by like 100 votes, unfortunately, at national convention.
Yeah, but now there's some, you know, there's some people who think that they cheated and they want to, you know, they want to stop the steal, but I'm not, I'd never pushed the stop the steal thing.
I just, I ended up back on the board again anyways.
I have a crazy life right now, seven kids and the show.
And it's like, I'm kind of glad I'm not chair right now, you know?
Yeah.
But I can do it.
Life has slowed down a little bit for us now.
So now that Joe Bishop Henchman has resigned, I have been nominated to chair the committee until the next national convention of next year.
But I haven't, I mean, we'll see what happens.
The votes are going out now.
You know, it's interesting how the party structure is in the United States because obviously every party has leverage over how it operates to a certain extent, but there are federal and state level requirements for how the districting is supposed to be set up and how the leadership is supposed to be established.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Because I don't think people realize how difficult the existing parties have made it for any new parties to form.
Well, yeah.
And so for the Libertarian Party, our biggest hurdle always is ballot access.
You know, just never, it never, it's a war that we will always fight until we're a major party nationally.
And we get close.
I mean, in 2016, we were about 700,000 votes away from getting debate access and becoming a major party in the country and all this stuff.
And then, you know, Joe really kind of took a step backwards as far as presidential votes go.
But yeah, I mean, we have states like Tennessee where we just can't get ballot access no matter how hard we try.
They want, you know, an inordinate amount of signatures that are impossible to get in the timeframe allotted.
Illinois has been really bad.
Alabama has been really bad.
And it's a state-by-state case.
You know, there's some states where you have to run a gubernatorial candidate or a state rep candidate that gets a certain amount of votes.
And it's been really easy in those places for us to get the required amount of votes for a good candidate, like in New Hampshire or something.
And then there's states like Tennessee where we haven't had ballot access for like the last three election cycles or something.
And so it's just different.
That's the problem is they've made the states, really, it's up to the states for most things.
Ballot access for presidential campaign is different than the federal campaigns different.
That depends on what we got in the last presidential election.
That depends on some states we just have to petition.
But some states, as far as statewide races go for state ledge and governor and stuff like that, or any partisan race, just to get an L next to your name is almost impossible.
And it's our biggest hurdle.
And they do it on population.
You see a lot of libertarians that run as Republicans.
And then it kind of waters down the movement.
And that's what the Republicans are supposed to do.
That's why they fight.
That's why they fight.
That's why they fight the ballot access stuff.
It's like they want it to be harder on other parties because they've already got, you know, they've already got their foot in the door and can do whatever they want.
And so if another party came around, we start threatening their positions.
And now that the Libertarian Party is actually becoming this united front with the Mises caucus kind of taking over, we've taken over over 25 state boards in the last year.
And there's still a whole nother year of state convention season before the national convention.
It's ours.
The party's ours now.
And that was what I set out to do in 2017.
And it's coming up.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Never had to win chair to do it, man.
You know, that was the thing.
It's funny how much leadership you can have without a formal authority position.
Like, you know, MLK wasn't elected at all, but he was a hell of a leader.
Started a movement, right?
And I kept telling people, I'm trying to start a movement.
Like, I want, I'm running for chair because it afforded me the opportunity to travel around the country and get people hyped on taking the Libertarian Party away from these loser brigade types who only want to focus on the culturally woke issues instead of the serious issues like ending the wars, ending the drug war, ending the Federal Reserve, these kind of things, or at least even just once in your life, Libertarian Party, just at mention at least audit.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know, it's what made people like Ron Paul and Thomas Massey and Rand Paul.
It's what made them popular was they used this rhetoric that resonates with people all over the political spectrum, all over the country.
And the Libertarian Party, we have the principles.
We have the principles.
We just don't have the mouthpiece.
And so it's nice to see people like Dave Smith and Tom Woods.
And, you know, the funniest thing about Ron Paul and me is he got on a rant about fractional reserve banking and inflation.
It like a brilliant rant about the whole problem with the Federal Reserve.
And then the only response would be, so what you're saying is everyone should be allowed to use heroin.
Of course.
He's like, he's like, you know, but his response to that is even great.
He's like, so you're telling me that if we legalized heroin, everyone would use heroin?
Because that's not how it was.
Yeah, that was, yeah, that was that was a good response.
But it's just, it's just so funny how they can totally like straw man and pivot the uh the narrative.
And I, I just wish that, you know, both libertarians and Republicans, I wish that there was more thought put into, and this is one thing that Trump was really talented at as an individual.
There's more thought put into how you can manipulate the media rather than just trying to win the argument because logic doesn't win votes.
It's good policy and it has it is very important to have the best logical argument, but you don't get somebody to vote for you by convincing them intellectually until you've convinced them emotionally.
Sure.
You know, and it's I'm in marketing, so that's that's how I think in terms of advertising is concerned.
It's like you have to emotionally appeal to the consumer with your advertising before you logically convince them about the product.
So if I ran an ad for a computer and all I did was list the specs, nobody would fucking buy it.
But if the ad for the computer is like showing like somebody making, you know, an album in a recording studio and then it cuts to them editing a video in another studio and then it cuts to them gaming with like all you know what I mean?
It's like providing for their child and like exactly.
And so, you know, and that the problem I have with the Democrats is that they only do the emotional and they have no logical, they have no good reason behind the policies.
It's actually trash, especially in terms of economic policy.
And then with the Republicans, you know, they're not, they're not perfect logically either, but they are better in terms of, hey, maybe lower taxes are a good idea.
Like that's a pretty reasonable position, but they get branded as greedy for saying low taxes because people just assume that low taxes means rich bailouts.
Well, of course, but it's so funny because like I was just talking about this today.
The Democrats were running.
So the Democrats were pushing to defund the police.
Right.
The Republicans have actually ran on defunding the police.
You know what I mean?
Not defunding the police in the sense that the Democrats talk about.
But the Democrats get into the office and say, no way in hell actually we're going to pump up the funding for the police.
And these Democrats are still acting like this is what this is what they're actually defunding the police.
They're not doing any of the things that the Democrats wanted them to do.
The Republicans actually cut taxes in some places, cut regulations in some places, cut funding for some programs.
That's what they do.
That's what a conservative does, right?
And that's what libertarians would do if we could ever get the fucking office.
But the Democrats don't do any of that shit.
They run on that stuff.
They campaign on that stuff.
They make an emotional appeal to all these people and say, yes, you're right.
George Floyd is a savior and this is how we're going to do it.
And then they get in there and they're like, ha ha, you know, and they don't, you know, they don't deschedule marijuana.
They don't do any police or prison reform.
They don't do any anti-war.
They don't slow down the wars at all.
Joe Biden's taken this credit for ending the Afghanistan war, but does anybody really think that it's going to end?
Does anybody really, he's already, he's already pushed out.
He's already pushed out the leave date past the time that he was told he needed to leave by.
So he knows that's going to be on September 11th for PR purposes.
Which is going to cause, if we go past that date, it's going to cause more, it's going to cause more problems in the way of, did I turn my mic all the way down?
No.
I can hear you.
Okay.
Going to cause more problems, more tension, and it's just going to continue this war that's been going on for 21 years.
You know what I mean?
The longest military intervention in the history of the United States.
And we were lied into it.
I mean, rosy pronouncements lied into it.
The government knew we couldn't win the war.
They lied to the American public and said that we were going to go and get all the terrorists and round them up and it was going to be over.
And here we are, 20 almost 22 years later, still fighting in Afghanistan.
Does anyone really think that Joe Biden, who has been in national politics for 40 years, is actually going to do this?
No, absolutely not.
And the Democrats are always championing criminal justice reform, which is a good thing to champion because there's a hell of a lot of people spending years and years of their lives in prison for nonviolent crimes.
So, yeah.
I saw a tweet.
The tweet yesterday was: listen, when weed stores are looking like Apple stores, it's time to release a lot of people from prison.
A lot of lot.
Yeah.
Well, and that's what I was going to say.
It's like, when was the last time you heard of mass pardons from a governor or from a president?
It's like if you really want to, yeah, if you really want to, like, for example, this might kill me later if I ever, if I ever run for any office, but if I were president of the United States, I would be very tempted to instantly pardon everyone in jail for nonviolent crimes.
Sure, sure.
And that's a libertarian thing.
With some with some exclusions, like, you know, if you were selling drugs to kids, like, I don't know.
I don't know what I would do.
There might be some.
I'm shooting from the hip, but that would be a priority to me.
Sure.
Well, and here's the thing.
Here's the thing that really upset me about Trump.
And in fact, you know, I actually enjoyed a lot of the things that Trump did.
I think the regulation cuts were really great.
I think not starting any new wars for the first time in I don't know how long was really important.
He could have rolled a lot of those wars back.
I wasn't happy that he didn't do that.
That's not something I'm going to praise him for.
But the thing that on the way out of office, he knew he was out.
He knew he was leaving.
He had the opportunity to show or to keep to his principles that the corporate media is the enemy of the people and release Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and maybe Ross Ulbricht too.
And he didn't even entertain the idea of releasing Julian Assange, who was who is like one of one of the last great media or press people left.
Do you think he knew something that we don't know about?
I'm like, he wanted to do it.
I don't understand how you pardon Rod Blugojevich, but not Julian Assange.
I mean, he was literally stealing money from the kids or something.
Yeah, I think he was.
Well, I think there's just too many.
The swamp is still full in the Republican Party, and Trump knew that.
And that's his people now.
The Republican Party is his people now.
And so if he wants to run again in 2024, if he wants to have any kind of say in the Republican Party anymore, then he's got to do their bidding still.
And I think that unfortunately, when he had the chance to be brave on the way out the door, he chickened out and cowered out.
And that hurt me as somebody who was like, ah, you know, I like when he triggers people.
It's kind of cool.
I was like, oh, that's fucked up.
You know, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to ever see a president talk about how the corporate press isn't any of the people and then not free somebody who's literally in jail for being an honest journalist.
So I don't know.
It's pretty hard.
It's pretty hard for me.
Why Assange is actually being held?
Because, you know, at first there were allegations of like sexual assault, and I thought those got dropped.
Well, they did that same thing to this guy here, you know, the guy who started putting out the ghost gun blueprints.
You know, they did.
That's what they do.
If you go against the government, dude, they are looking for, they will do anything that they can.
They will try to pin you on other shit.
They did this to Ross Ulbricht, who started, you know, Ross is, for me, the free Ross movement's one of the biggest things for me because this man started guy.
Yeah, he started a commerce business.
Was he hiring hitmen or is that just made up?
So, so here's the thing: the guy who had the hits taken out on him literally said 100% that Ross did not take that hit out of him.
There was several admins for Silk Road.
They just took an admin account and said that there was some people trying to send Bitcoin to have this one guy murdered who could have been a test, a witness.
And they put it all over the media, all over the media.
And then when they went to court, federal court, they dropped it entirely.
Yeah, and with prejudice.
So it can't even ever be brought up again.
Right.
So they was dropped with prejudice so that he could never be charged with that crime again.
He could never be charged with that crime.
They knew that they had no proof that it was him, but they dragged it through the media to crucify him before he got to court.
Then when they got to court, they just did all kinds of the judge, you know, I did a whole episode on this on my show.
The judge did so much underhanded bullshit that they couldn't even present their case.
Like they literally kept the Ulbricht case from being presented in court.
And so they crucified the man in public, court of public opinion.
He's hiring people to kill people.
Ross would never have done this.
I mean, anybody who knows Ross knows Ross, not personally, but anybody that you talk to that's known Ross, even the person who had the hit taken out on him, right, said that he did, there's no way in hell that Ross would do this or did this.
He even tested, he tried to testify they wouldn't bring that testimony in the court because they dropped the case.
So they dropped the murder for hire charges, right?
Completely.
So they couldn't even defend against those charges that had been dragged out for over a year before court, you know?
And so the whole thing was just a farce.
They tried to make a, they tried to make an example of Ross Ulbricht because he was working in commerce outside of the federal government.
And, you know, I tend to have a libertarian perspective in terms of whether or not people should be allowed to use drugs or do whatever they want with their own body.
I'm not like a traditional Republican in that sense where I'm like, just say, I'm not just say no guy.
Okay.
But federally speaking, it has to be against the law to get earn kickback on trade that's illegal trade.
Right.
So if he was an admin of Silk Road, wasn't he earning like a percentage of every single time an eight ball got mailed from Maine to New Mexico?
It's possible.
I don't know.
I have to look more into that.
But here's the thing.
To even find him, they essentially had to violate Fourth Amendment, right?
To even find the guy.
They hacked a server and completely violated civil rights.
But here's the thing.
This is what they did.
And I didn't ever think about this until I started diving into the Ross Ulbrich story.
I watched the really good documentary called The Deep Web that was put out actually by the guys from Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, Keanu Reeves and the other guy who played Bill.
But so they actually, this is what this was.
Strange things they're put at the Circle K. No, they really did good.
They really did good.
I think I might have seen it.
Was it 10 years ago?
It was around that.
Yeah.
Seven years ago, maybe.
It was a really well-done documentary that showed all of the facts.
And so, but here's the thing.
This is what the American government can do.
They can't use these tools to spy on you, supposedly.
But what they can do is they can send these tools to Europe or the UK, where they can use these tools to spy on you.
And then they can give them back the information that they've taken legally.
Right.
And so that's actually how that's actually how they found, that's actually how they found the servers and then how they used that to hack the servers, violating Ross's Fourth Amendment and tracking them down to San Francisco where they found some fake IDs coming across the border from Canada, intercepted them and showed up at his door.
Well, the government's pro at outsourcing rights violations.
And yeah, I think that I think they're essentially outsourcing the First Amendment violation to big tech right now.
It's like, we can't censor you, but we can certainly leverage our relationships with these three companies that you rely on.
Yeah.
Acting like the big tech companies are not part of the cathedral at this point is pure ignorance, in my opinion.
You know, when Curtis Arvin talked about the cathedral consisting of academia, the corporate news media and the government, he was working in big tech.
And so I think there might have been a reason why he purposely left big tech out there, but you cannot at this point say that these are private industries.
I mean, these are monopolies on the digital town square.
They've taken all kinds of government money that's our tax funds, you know, and now they're completely pushing a political bias and narrative by kicking people off.
Now, is it a 1A violation?
I don't know.
I see Ron Coleman's in your chat.
That's kind of cool.
Oh, yes.
I love that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's coming on the show on the 19th, man.
And I'm like, I'm like, he's a great guest.
Yeah.
He's a badass.
Yeah, he's a badass.
I'm nervous about the money.
Last night, I was awake in bed and I actually tweeted.
I didn't post it.
But I was like, I wrote it out and I saved it as a draft.
I was like, it's 3.30 a.m. and Ron Coleman's a badass.
And I was like, yeah, I'm not going to post it right now.
I had the thought.
I should have.
I should have.
Yeah, that's.
I just didn't want to come off weird.
You know, like he's thinking about Ron Coleman at 3.30 in the morning.
Yeah, those literally.
I get nervous about a few guests here and there.
I'm not a big, you know, I'm not a huge platform and my YouTube videos have been doing really good.
My audio streams from the videos are doing really well.
I mean, everybody's getting over a thousand listens now, which is great.
In four months, it's great.
It's really good.
But there's some guests that I get really nervous about.
And Ron's definitely one of those ones.
I'm like, man, this guy's very knowledgeable.
It's going to be.
Yeah, well, I'll make it easy.
All you got to do is let him talk.
You got to let the pros do what the pros do.
Well, it's cool.
I learned something from everybody.
And I have like really great people on that have written books and they always send me the book first.
So I get to read the books.
Carol Roth just sent me her new book, The War on Small Business.
And I got it before it came out.
She'll be on the show.
Yeah, before it came out.
Oh, yeah.
She's a great guest.
I had her on a couple of days ago.
Yeah, she's great.
Yeah.
She's doing the rounds right now because the new book just dropped.
But yeah, I got the book.
I got the book like two weeks ago before it came out on the sixth or something or two days ago.
And so she sent me the book and I've been at work reading it because I've worked these 12-hour shifts with a lot of downtime at work.
So I'm like reading, reading, reading, reading.
And it's a very good book.
And so it's great.
It's really cool getting to know these people.
And I learned something from everybody that I have on, which is really nice.
And the show is doing well.
Yeah, that's great.
Did you read Papadopoulos' book, The Deep State?
I have not.
No.
Are you familiar with that story at all?
No.
You mean The Deep State?
Am I familiar?
We could do a whole show on The Deep State.
Well, Papadopoulos was basically convicted of lying to the FBI about Russian involvement with the Trump campaign.
And he was coerced into a plea deal, basically.
So convicted at sort of the wrong implication, I think, of what happened there.
And he wrote, he got pardoned by Trump.
So he's sort of famous for that.
And he wrote this book about his whole story, what happened.
And it was basically a setup.
It's a really good book.
He came out a couple of years ago, but I had him on the podcast.
And so I read that, but that's another good one to read.
I'll have to check it out for sure.
His DMs are open too.
So if you hit him up, he might be interested in coming on.
Nice.
I hit up a lot of people through DMs and most people don't get back to me.
Ron Coleman was one of the ones that got back to me from a Twitter DM.
And I was like, yeah, you rule, man.
Thank you so much.
Me too.
That's how I booked all my guests, man.
Yeah.
Well, Eric July started following me recently.
Yeah, absolutely.
But Eric July started following me a couple weeks ago and then has not responded to my DMs.
I'm like, why are you following me?
You're not going to respond to my DMs, man.
Come on.
You got to come on the show.
Just show up at his house, dude.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
But I've had some great guests on.
I had Zuby on.
He's cool.
Oh, he's amazing.
I had Scott Horton on twice.
Actually, my most watched episode is Scott Orton 2, where we actually talked about Waco, which was a lot of fun because Scott is very, Scott's very knowledgeable on the Middle East stuff, but he knows a lot about domestic issues and the Waco stuff.
He could talk.
I mean, it was like an hour and a half long episode, man.
It was great.
Yeah, I made some controversial tweet about what was the guy's name?
David Krishna.
David, yeah, yeah.
I made some controversy.
Oh, David Koresh.
Defending him.
David Koresh, defending him, and people were just like lit up my replies, you know, talking about, oh, you know, he's a statutory rapist, pedophile.
I'm like, I looked into it.
Not true.
It's like technically you could marry somebody who was 16 if they had the existential parents.
And he did.
Well, here's the thing.
There was several local agents.
I actually did a whole episode on Waco by myself, too.
And there's a really good documentary there, too, called The Waco Siege, the Rules of Engagement that Scott actually knows a lot about.
But there were several local agencies that had investigated these claims that he was a pedophile.
And there was zero, zero evidence to back that up.
But they used that against him.
And then, you know, the scary guns thing, right?
They were licensed gun dealers.
They were FFAs, right?
They were licensed to do gun shows.
And that's how they made a lot of their money.
And it's Texas in the 90s.
I mean, it was fine.
Now it's still fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everyone was selling guns in Texas at the time and now still.
And so that's how they were making money for their commune.
And, you know, they sell vegetables at farmers markets.
I mean, they did everything that communes do.
They just were FFAs and selling big time guns.
And they use that in the media to disgrace.
They had all these weapons of war.
And it's like they were selling AR-15s at gun shows, dude.
They had one guy that took a trailer to gun shows and sold guns at gun shows.
Like this was totally legal.
And they vilified him through that.
And so they got this during Waco, they got this whole, what do they call it?
The sinful messiah imagery put up for David Koresh.
And it was like they dragged him through the mud, but there was PhDs there.
There were Harvard graduates there.
I mean, it was, you know, there was like really great people there.
They made it all seem like they were all on drugs.
There were no drugs at the commune.
It's just like, this is what the media does to people that they don't want doing the things they are legal.
These are legal things.
And so that was a great episode with Scott, man.
If you get an opportunity to watch.
I'll have to listen to that.
It's Scott Horton again on my on my YouTube or my podcast.
I definitely listen to that.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
It's it's scary too, because every time this happens and the media gets caught in the act or the government gets caught in the act, there's no accountability.
So it's like, all right, yeah, you caught us, we lied.
And, but it's, you know, nobody reads the retractions.
And there's no check, there are no checks and balances on these law enforcement agents.
Like, like, whenever the FBI gets in trouble, they do an internal investigation.
It's like, I made this quip the other day.
It's like, would you hire Jeffrey Epstein to investigate Epstein's Island?
It's like, why would you rely on the FBI to investigate itself?
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
And it's the same, you know, there's a reason.
There's a reason why there's this mass movement of pushing back on journalism now too, and calling journalists are the enemy of the people.
They no longer report the truth.
And who was that that I just had on the show?
Anyways, we were talking about how these DC reporters and publications, the CIA and the FBI and these people are actually getting their narrative from the journalists, like the publications now.
They're like getting this and bringing it into briefs and stuff.
Like, that's not right.
That's not how this works.
You know, that's, that's, you know, that's really, really bad shit.
And, and so it's like the journalists and the law enforcement agencies.
It's like this, this country needs a mass, mass overhaul in all these areas.
And how do we get, how do we go about that?
You know what I mean?
How do we, how do we do that other than just wake everybody up to these to these things that we can't you have to establish financial independence and you have to establish um information independence so i'm really hopeful though i don't i don't know that it's going to be the case but i'm really hopeful about blockchain tech and crypto because if we can have decentralized hosting uh information then we don't have to worry about amazon web services shutting down websites that are controversial we don't have to worry about um you know inflation if we can just get a if
we can get an economy going.
Got to look in the library, man.
Library and Odyssey.
They're, you know, library is essentially a decentralized file storage.
I mean, that's what it is, you know, and it's used.
Yeah, it's a crypto that has its own blockchain and they're actually storing this information on the blockchain, right?
And so my shows get stored on the blockchain.
They're decentralized.
No one can take them.
No one, you know, nobody can, you know, take them down.
And Odyssey has some moderation, but not very much.
And I had the founder of both of these things on my show, Jeremy Kaufman.
He's actually a free stater in New Hampshire.
And they even have a protocol on the blockchain.
So if somebody puts like illegal content on the blockchain, right?
So like we're talking, you know, lolly stuff or whatever, yeah, CP.
The nodes or whatever can like surround it and keep it from getting back out, which is kind of cool, but it has to be like illegal content.
They have like a whole protocol for it and everything.
It's like a smart contract thing.
So nobody has to make a judgment call.
It just happens.
Right.
And then it tells you not to go, don't go to this part of the blockchain or whatever, which is kind of cool to think about, you know, and he doesn't know.
I don't remember if we talked about a way for that to be reported, you know, but in my opinion, I think they got a pretty good, like digital wood chipper protocol on there already.
You know what I mean?
So that's pretty neat.
But yeah, you know, nobody can take that down.
Nobody can take the stuff down from library.
So there were, that's, that's what's coming.
You know, at the end of the day, that is what's coming.
When Silk Road got shut down, hundreds of Silk Roads, and they're all decentralized now.
That's, that was the difference.
You know, Silk Road wasn't decentralized.
Ross was running Silk Road with 11 other people or whatever.
Right.
So when it got shut down, all the smart people were like, oh, okay, let's do this, not decentralized.
And no one can do shit to us.
And that's what they did.
They created a bigger market for it by taking down the actual good market that was there.
So now you got this black market, decentralized thing that, that no government can stop, you know?
Yeah.
And they have to innovate faster than they can regulate.
And we should, we should keep doing it.
That's a trick.
We need the smart people.
Yeah.
They're out, they're out there somewhere.
Not here.
Not me.
Not me either.
So where can people find you?
Oh.
yeah, man.
Well, you can follow me on Twitter.
That's where I lead the war against the blue checks.
That's at Joshua at large.
That's a fun place if you want to follow me there.
I'm always at war with somebody there.
It's a good time.
And then, of course, the show, you can check out.
I'm all on every single podcast app, Catcher, except for like a few, very small amount.
I'm on YouTube at youtube.com slash fight the desk spots.
You can find me there or Odyssey.
Just look up Joshua's break cycle, Joshua Smith.
You'll find me all over the place.
And check out the show.
It's a good show.
I put a lot of time and effort and blood, sweat, and tears into building a good set, bringing on great guests.
I'm doing five shows a week now, Monday through Friday, on top of working a more than full-time 12-hour a day job.
So much appreciated, man.
Or join the Patreon and subscribe star.
I've got all kinds of cool tiers there.
You guys get all kinds of cool shit and extra gear.
And what else do they get?
Oh, yeah, the exclusive content.
I do an after-hour stream for at least 20 minutes after every guest that all exclusive members get.
So it's good.
It's a good thing.
I'm happy to have it.
I hope more people will check it out.
And thank you for talking about Liberty shit, Jason.
We really appreciate you, man.
Absolutely, man.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate you taking the time to help support this show, too.
